The Jim Henson Hour #2b: Lighthouse Island

(Click here to watch the original version, with Jim's opening narration)

Lighthouse Island is an old leftover pilot script, from the usually reliable genius Jerry Juhl, with a few hints of the energy and whimsy that made Jim's film experiments so consistently watchable. Unfortunately, it has more of the nonsensical dreamlike quality that frequently made those experiments hard to love. (Obviously, your mileage may vary, but I can't imagine ever watching Timepiece all the way through more than once. I love the energy and spirit, but it feels so undisciplined as a whole.)

Before we start properly discussing it, I'd like to talk about that opening narration. This special has seen several airings and releases since 1989, and apparently they all remove Jim's opening comments. In a show which desperately needs humor, I really like the juxtaposition of Jim saying "It's an ordinary little town" over that shot of a little girl taming a polar bear. And, without the narration, the opening scenic shots are picturesque (I totally want to visit this little town in Nova Scotia now), but maybe a little boring, polar bear or no.

And while he's here with us, let's discuss that bear. Look at that puppet. Standing still, it's perfectly believable. I feel a little churlish pointing out that its movements are distractingly imperfect, since the performer, Gord Robertson, is clearly a gifted mime. (He played Pa Gorg, among other Henson parts, and [along with the other two main Gorg body performers] even puppeteered Johnny 5 for Short Circuit 2! I can't help but wonder -- was he on set playing with Gerry "Doc" Parkes' priest?) I know a little bit about how those full-body costumes are performed, and can imagine the short time available for filming. I picture Robertson inside the bear, sweating and struggling to smooth out his motion. The problem is, I shouldn't be picturing that -- I should be seeing a polar bear.

The townspeople on Lighthouse Island are distracting in that same way, too. Each one seems to have several distinguishing quirks (this one's the bartender with the frog brooch and the parrot on his arm -- that one's the guy whom light never touches, with Jerry Nelson's voice) but it all feels prefabricated, deliberately whimsical for whimsy's sake. If the series had been made, I assume each character would've had more depth and development, and then maybe I could be drawn into human stories. Instead, we get this:

I'll say this: it's a great image. But, at the risk of hammering this nail too hard, it encapsulates what's wrong with the episode. Like the show's hero, we've just completed a tiring task (in our case, watching a grueling unfunny allegory about pollution), and we'd love refreshment (say, a charming, funny fairy tale). Instead, we get something both weird and unpotable.

The story is about a young man (Chris Makepeace, who was in Meatballs and My Bodyguard a decade earlier) trying to find a wedding present for his penpal/fiancee. Zeb Norman is headed to the shop of a mysterious woman, whom the townspeople seem to think is some kind of hexing witch, to get a pair of silver slippers.

Clara, the witch (played by, hey, Chris Langham's mother!), sets Zeb a task -- a different mysterious person has something she wants, something she has a dubious claim to, and Zeb must help her retrieve it if he wants those shoes. So they take a journey to Hog Island, and along the way they're attacked by a sea monster.

It just so happens that the sea monster is the man with that thing, which just so happens to be a magical transformation pearl. As a huge eagle and a tentacled beastie, Fred the shape-shifter (also Jerry Nelson) continues to attack Zeb and Clara, until they find and retrieve the pearl. They eventually return to Lighthouse Island as dawn breaks, and Zeb's fiancee finally arrives.

When we first see Rosalie, Zeb's fiancee, this is how she looks. She promises to tell him stories of the sea. His fortune included only a fish.

If you've never seen a fantasy movie, or heard a fairy tale, it may surprise you that Rosalie turns out to be a mermaid.

It didn't surprise me. But the second twist, revealed just seconds later, DID manage to surprise me, and feels like a satisfying conclusion to Zeb and Rosalie's story. Plus, Clara's transformation pearl, which we can assume she would put to some nasty use, is conveniently etched out of existence.

My enjoyment of the second twist almost makes me feel guilty for disliking the special as a whole. Almost. Perhaps it's my lack of enthusiasm for fantasy in general, but I can't help wondering practical things. Do mermaids and mermen wear a lot of sweaters? Can they swim well in them?

And even more practically: If I had a transformation pearl, and wanted only one thing in life, to become a merman, why would I trade that pearl, with a lifetime of magic, to a petty villain-in-training? The silver slippers only have one trick, but Zeb has seen firsthand just how powerful the pearl is. Maybe I just don't belong in a fairytale universe, where a handshake with even the most morally dubious person must be honored, no matter the cost. Maybe I'm just too jaded as a media consumer.

It's entirely possible that, with a heavy rewrite, this could've been a charming early 70's fantasy TV series. After all, Juhl and Henson were nearing the peak of their imaginative powers then. But, like a fish in a glass of cider, I just can't swallow it.

A Spoopy Month #15: The last of the leftovers, warmed over and with some kinda weird sauce on top. What IS that?

It's time for the last batch of movie reviews from last year, and it's a weird mix indeed.

October 31, 2014:

(big inhale) Okay. So, yes, Tower of Terror isn't very good. And yes, the nominal star of this made-for-TV movie is Steve Guttenberg. But, again, I'll try to be positive:
A lot of this, like a LOT of it, was filmed at the attraction in Orlando. It's great to see close-ups of that setting, from angles we can't get to as guests.
Melora Hardin gets to sing in this, which she never got around to as Jan Levenson.
It's always nice to see Mike McShane in anything, even if his '97 appearance in this can't make up for his complete lack in involvement in the US Whose Line.
Um... well, it starts with "Sing, Sing, Sing (With A Swing)" which is a great song.
It's great that this film, while not officially related to the Twilight Zone in any way, adapts every other thing about the attraction, including dropping our heroes in a modern-day freefalling elevator, and even the random assortment of 1939 victims, who are all major characters in this.

Okay, enough positivity. I've been rewatching the first season of Twilight Zone this month, in between movies, and the writing on that is so damned adult. I just wish this had been written so adults, ones with full attention spans and active intellects, could enjoy this movie as much as their children would.

Well, it could be worse. It could be The Country Bears.

(And just in case you don't click through to that Wikipedia link, here's a neat piece of trivia. The writer/director of this is now a YA author, and he's written the bellboy from this film into his series as a very minor character. That's pretty cool.)

October 31, 2014:

The Astro Zombies: Whoo boy, now THIS is a bad one. I've only seen one other Ted V. Mikels film (Girl in the Gold Boots, on MST3K), and it was just as bad, but much more depressing. This one isn't depressing, just boring.
What's that you say? How can a film with reanimated solar-powered, radio-controlled corpses be boring?
Well, John Carradine can explain the process to us (and his greasy assistant) in minute detail. The film was written by Wayne Rogers, later to become TV's Trapper John, who is apparently the world's biggest electronics nerd (he's on the board of a company that makes semiconductors). I'm not smart enough to know why the technology in the film doesn't work in real life, but the film really really really wants us to believe it has scientific credibility. (The scientific equipment in the film was apparently scrounged from a dump. At one point, a body is stored in a freezer which is clearly a grocery-store frozen-food bunker.)
Not only is the mad scientist really boring, this movie has the world's worst spy. We see Tura Satana (Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill!) interrogate two people. The first one, she only asks him "Who are you?" (and her henchman has JUST read his ID from his wallet) and shoots him before he can answer. The second time, she's trying to recruit Carradine to reanimate corpses for her country's army, and shoots him less than two minutes into the process, after he's agreed to do so.
Starting in 2008, Mikels made three, count 'em, three sequels to this!
I have two more films (good ones, at least) to talk about tomorrow.
Happy Halloween, everyone!

November 1, 2014:

Eyes Without A Face, on the other hand, is really good. It's poetic and gorgeous, and the emotions in it are heartfelt. After the constant explanations of Astro Zombies, the almost underwritten script of this film (at least, the translated subtitles were pretty spare) is a relief. With that said, the director called it a movie of "anguish," rather than a horror film, and there's a surgery scene which is pretty hard to watch (at the Edinburgh Film Festival showing, reportedly seven people fainted).
Remember in my review of Shadow of the Vampire, which I compared to Night Tide, when I said I love genre films made by fine artists? This is another one of those, I think.
And, oddly enough, the plot for this is so obvious and horror-movie-like: a mad scientist, spurned by his colleagues, operating on humans, just like in The Atomic Brain and Astro Zombies, and several hundred other films (most better than those two examples).
We have one more spooky movie to talk about, and it's a pure delight. See ya tonight, folks.

November 1, 2014:

I Married A Witch: Here's a delightful piece of fluff to round out my month of spooky movies. It's a screwball romantic farce that begins with the eponymous witch being burned. She puts a curse on her accuser, and condemns his descendants to marry the wrong women, for all time.
Okay, so it's a little sexist -- the "wrong" women are pretty much all shrewish and controlling, as we see in a quick montage of 270 years, bringing us to the 1940s.
When the witch and her father are released from their eternal imprisonment by an errant bolt of lightning, she almost immediately decides to continue tormenting the latest descendant of the pilgrim who had her burnt, but her plan goes awry.
In the end, everything turns out for the best, despite the witch's vengeful father (played by Cecil Calloway, who I'd just seen that same day in a Twilight Zone episode, "Elegy," in which he plays a creepy caretaker and host to three astronauts millions of miles from Earth).
I think Veronica Lake is maybe a little too kittenish, even in the first part of this movie, to be truly believable as a vengeance-bound bride of evil. But those were different times, and it's hard to completely switch tones in a movie only 73 minutes long. Overall, good fun, even though I never cared for Bewitched (which, for legal reasons, was not based on this film.)
[So these last two movies I watched in conjunction with Greg Proops' other podcast, The Greg Proops Film Club. You can find those episodes here and here. He's been promising the Young Frankenstein episode, which I'm really looking forward to.]

Thanks for reading these old capsule reviews. All new stuff coming up, including some Halloweenish TV episodes and more movies and even more candy!

A Spoopy Month #5: What We Do in the Shadows

Here's my first new movie review of the year! First off, watch that trailer there. If you're not interested in a satirical mockumentary about vampires trying to share a small flat and make it in the modern world, you might as well not bother reading the rest of the review.

So back in 2006, Jemaine "Conchord" Clement and his friend and comedy partner Taika Waititi made a short film named "What We Do In The Shadows," which served as the template for this feature-length version. 

Somehow, when this one came out back in February, I managed to read two bad reviews running and decided I didn't need to see it right away. The odds against that seem fairly high, since it's currently sitting at 96% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Luckily, a good friend (the one who got me watching "Flight of the Conchords" in the first place) gave me a positive review, so I finally got around to it.

I loved an awful lot of things about this. First, I watch a fair amount of mockumentary stuff (have I told you personally yet how much I'm enjoying the new Muppets show?) and I can't imagine a wholly new mockumentary joke that hasn't been done yet. This movie has one I can't remember seeing before, where a character spends nearly a full minute onscreen brushing his shirt and making a huge noise with his clip-on microphone.

Second, this has a great low-budget indie feel to it, and sometimes that genre can be my favorite in the world (I love, for example, Fido with all my heart.) It lets the characters breathe and be, for lack of a more precise term, human.

And of course, it's pretty funny. So, to sum up: vampire mockumentary. Roommate tension, werewolves and humans (and witches and zombies) all trying to coexist. Well worth your time.