It’s the spooky season and along with a glut of scary stories, I decided to apply an EIGHTIES WEREWOLVES THEME to this October. I don’t know what was in the water during that decade, but films in the eighties were rather obsessed with that subject. In 1981 alone, there were no less than three werewolf films.
I’m a big fan of themed viewing/reading, though it often bites me in the ass when I end up getting tired of whatever subject I’ve decided to focus on. And as it happens, werewolf movies can be strikingly similar in the major narrative beats they hit, and they’re often a metaphor for an individual losing their inhibitions.
There are some plot-points that reappear in nearly every film: the fateful bite or wolf attack, a gradual heightening of senses in the recipient of the bite, a few brutal killings, the horrific (and prolonged) transformation sequence, and an opportunity to either reject or embrace the curse.
But in almost every case, turning into a werewolf grants a character a level of freedom and confidence they’ve never experienced before, from the light-hearted Teen Wolf (Michael J. Fox suddenly gets popular) to the much darker Wolf (Jack Nicolson gains stamina, ruthlessness, and the inexplicable ability to be attractive to Michelle Pfieffer).
But of course, there’s always a price; a reason that werewolfry is referred to as “a curse.” Many of the transformations are painful and grotesque to behold – particularly in The Howling, The Company of Wolves and An American Werewolf in London, and actually being a wolf leads one to massacring innocent people before waking up naked in a strange place with no memory of what you were up to the night before. In such cases any transformation will be framed as a tragedy, in which the protagonist’s identity is at risk of being lost to the wolf persona.
Yet although the protagonist is usually desperate to stop the transformation in order to save lives (Brigette in Ginger Snaps: Unleashed, Karen in The Howling), they can just as often find a new lease on life with their new condition (Wolf, The Company of Wolves, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning). On that note, sometimes becoming a werewolf is an extended metaphor for puberty. Scott’s hair-growth and sex drive in Teen Wolf is a very blatant example of this, but The Company of Wolves is filled with symbols and motifs that signify Rosaleen’s sexual awakening through an overtly feminine lens.
But if the film’s protagonist is not the werewolf and instead the character trying to hunt the werewolf (as The Howling, Silver Bullet and Wolfen) then any wolf will be portrayed as terrifyingly animalistic and brutal; creatures which simply must be stopped by any means necessary.
And interestingly enough, the idea of a silver bullet being the only thing that can kill a werewolf is seldom used. In fact, Silver Bullet (obviously) is the only film that has this be the case. In everything else, normal bullets will suffice.
In any case, this pelthora of werewolf films were interesting to view in quick succession, though I simply don’t have the time to delve deeper into the implications and meaning of the werewolf as a symbol. Mostly it was just fun to revisit the eighties, as the multitude of shows/films that are made today in tribute to that decade don’t really compare to anything actually made in that decade.
I suspect that the surprising amount of werewolf stories made around this time was due to the advances in practical effects that made the transformations so intense and visceral. These days, you’d just run it all through a computer.
The Skull: A Tyrolean Folktale by Jon Klassen
The first scary story I ever read was the one about the teeny-tiny woman who finds a bone in the cemetery and takes it home with her. That night she hears a voice whispering: “give me back my bone,” a refrain that grows louder and louder as the voice gets closer and closer until she yells: “take it!” and the story ends.
What was the bone? Who did it belong to? We never find out.
It’s a bizarre story and one that deliberately leaves things unanswered, and I suspect The Skull will have the same effect on children as The Teeny-Tiny Woman did on me. Matched with the deeply sardonic energy of Jon Klassen, who brought us I Want My Hat Back and Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, this is quite a macabre story with a warm beating heart.
It begins with Otilla running away – no, finally running away, which suggests an escape from abuse. She runs, she falls, she weeps, she keeps going. She eventually reaches a house where a talking skull in the window says it will let her in on one condition: she carries it around so it no longer has to roll everywhere. She agrees, but does better – she feeds it though it cannot taste, dances with it though it cannot move.
The skull eventually tells her that a skeleton chases it each night, and strangely (though this whole story is strange) it doesn’t want to be caught. So Otilla comes up with a plan...
A lot of the story isn’t in the text at all, but Klassen’s distinct illustrations make their own point. One room in the house has a wall covered in masks that the skull says aren’t to be worn – on the very next page, Otilla is wearing one. Another room holds a portrait of a man the skull identifies as himself in life, but we only see his boots. It’s unclear what the skeleton wants or why the skull doesn’t want to be taken (as it’s easy to presume the skeleton is the skull’s actual body) or why and how there’s a bottomless pit in the dungeons.
And that’s part of the story’s charm: it’s so utterly opaque in its details, caring only about two oddballs finding a place of safety and belonging with each other.
Also of note is the author’s afterword, in which he mentions reading the story in a library before making a presentation in Alaska, and rediscovering it a year or so later, only to realize he had mentally rewritten the original tale significantly in the interim. This is his version, as befits the mutability of folktales and Klassen’s quirky imagination.
Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn, Scott Peterson, Meredith Laxton and Russ Badgett
Mary Downing Hahn, along with Betty Ren Wright, was one of the seminal children’s ghost story writers of the eighties/nineties – though she’s still going strong today! This is her most famous title, which I never read as a child, but managed to absorb through pop-culture osmosis, even in the days before the internet.
Hahn and Wright were masters of mingling family drama with supernatural occurrences (the ghost is always a metaphor for troubled family dynamics), with one wound so tightly around the other that when the ghost story is resolved, the family unit can heal or make peace with itself. It’s thanks to these writers that I became genre savvy about ghost stories even as a kid, and so I had feelings of nostalgia for this title even though I’d never actually read it. It was simply THE ghost story of that era.
Alas, it isn’t available in the library catalogue, but there’s been a resurgence in graphic novel adaptations lately (I think we have the success of The Babysitters Club comics to thank for this, and I’ve noticed Sweet Valley Twins is getting the treatment as well) and so finally I can at least read a version of the original text.
Molly and her younger brother Michael became part of a blended family when their mother married Dave, who is already a father to a little girl called Heather. His wife died in a housefire a few years ago, and Heather isn’t coping well, especially when the adults decide to abruptly leave Baltimore to go and live in a restored church.
It’s pretty much the start of every single pre-teen ghost story out there: being uprooted from your home, tension within a new family dynamic, a spooky and unfamiliar new setting. Expect a trip to the library to find clues, spooky nighttime occurrences, and absolutely useless parents. That last one is a staple part of the genre; obviously you can’t have responsible adults resolving the situation too quickly!
The family rather uncomfortably settle into their new environment, but Molly and Michael find themselves in constant trouble over Heather, who tells lies about them to get them into trouble, and is soon sneaking out of the house to speak with an imaginary friend called Helen. Only, as I’m sure you’ve surmised, Helen is not imaginary at all.
Amusingly, I did start reading with one misconception. I had assumed that “wait till Helen comes” was a shortened take on something like: “we can’t do this yet, we have to wait till Helen comes,” as if something important couldn’t happen without her presence. In fact, it’s more of an explicit threat (which makes far more sense for a ghost story): “wait till Helen comes and then you’ll be sorry.”
When it comes to the transition into a visual medium, the artists do pretty well. The colours are atmospheric and the artwork is realistic rather than stylized. The setting has been updated from the eighties – no overt use of cell-phones or anything, but at one point a character mentions they’re living “in the twenty-first century.” A particular challenge would have been threading the needle with the character of Heather, who has to be cute and vulnerable, but also a complete brat (honestly, Molly was a bigger person than me – if I was stuck with this monster of a stepsister, I’d be begging the ghost to drown her in the pond).
The story also deals with some incredibly heavy stuff, as when Molly ponders mortality in the graveyard near her new home: “it was horrible to die, horrible. Just to think of myself ending, being gone from the earth forever, terrified me. I wondered if it might not be better to live on as a ghost; at least some part of Helen remained. I was anxious to get away from the bones buried under my feet but knew I couldn’t get away from the bones under my skin. No matter how fast I ran, they would always be there, always – even when I would no longer be alive to feel them.”
Hello, existential crisis! Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t read this as a child.
A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll
Emily Carroll is one of my favourite writers/illustrators, so this was on hold at the library the moment it appeared on the catalogue. It’s also wonderfully long – a graphic novel in the real sense of the word, with a meaty story to devour over a number of sittings. I didn’t want to rush anything, and ultimately it demands two reads – the first to soak it all in, and the second to better grasp the twist and to parse through what exactly was happening in real life as opposed to what was just in the protagonist’s head.
Abby is a young woman who is recently married to a widowed dentist, a stepmother to his daughter Crystal, lives with them in a house by the lake, and works shifts at the local Valu-Save. She floats through life, acting fairly diffident towards everything around her, which is matched by the novel’s colour scheme: everything is rendered in black and white except for her fantasies, which are in garish colour.
Said fantasies are of herself as a knight in shining armour, with a closed visor and no flesh to be seen: constrained, protected, one might even say – closeted? Like the second Miss de Winter in Rebecca, she lives in her predecessor’s shadow, and after seeing some disturbing pictures drawn by her stepdaughter (also in colour), her husband’s first wife Sheila begins appearing to her – though as a dream or as a ghost is difficult to discern.
The clues as to what is going on are strewn throughout, though every page demands your close attention. What really happened to the first wife of Abby’s husband? Was there really a housefire that destroyed all of her possessions? Why is her husband so weird about the lake? What does Crystal know about the whole thing? How do the counterfeit bills mentioned at the Valu-Save fit in? Or do they at all?
Naturally any genre savvy reader will have their eye on Abby’s husband, who looks exactly like a guy in this type of story should look (the bushy moustache is practically its own character) and who behaves in much the same way: not overtly cruel, but relentlessly overbearing and condescending. In many ways it’s a bit like What Lies Beneath, that bad Harrison Ford/Michelle Pfieffer vehicle, though it takes an unexpected turn towards the end.
Abby of course, is not your typical heroine. She’s a little overweight, almost painfully introverted, and her mannerisms and body language convey a life of quiet desperation. She’s also an unreliable narrator: she tends to conflate certain things, misremembers a children’s book that her stepdaughter is currently reading, and clearly prefers her imagination to anything going on in the real world. Fantasies like the fairy tale of Rapunzel, a photograph of her dead sister, and Sheila’s painting of a lighthouse all get churn together in the landscape of her mind.
In fact, she’s so wrapped up in her own imaginings that she doesn’t notice what sharp-eyed readers should: that her husband is absent-minded (if he can muddle up the names of his wife and daughter, presumably he can also lose track of the stories he’s told to different people about what happened to his first wife) and the idiosyncrasies of a nosy neighbour (why would she care where a painting is hung, and why does she leap straight to calling Abby’s husband “Dave”?)
It all leads to the question: who exactly is the titular guest of the title? You don’t find out until the book’s final pages, and even though I would have killed for a bit more clarity, I also can’t deny that the last image takes the story out on an unforgettable note.
Kristy and the Secret of Susan by Anne M. Martin
This is one of those Very Special Episodes of The Babysitters Club, in which Kristy babysits an autistic girl called Susan Felder. Now, I concede that Anne Martin (who worked with autistic children before becoming a writer) has her heart firmly in the right place and wrote this story with the very best of intentions, but so many things have changed regarding our understanding of people on the spectrum since 1990.
In one of those truly amazing coincidences that sets up the plot from the very first chapter, the babysitters are at a meeting when they a. notice a new family moving into Mary Anne’s old house, and b. simultaneously see a woman and her daughter walking down the street, identified as Mrs Felder and her daughter Susan, who have apparently been living in the neighbourhood this whole time without ever being mentioned before. And what do you know? At that very meeting Kristy gets a call from Mrs Felder to book a regular babysitting job with Susan!
Kristy is enthusiastic about meeting a new client with special needs, though is somewhat taken aback at how Susan functions. Martin gives her almost every single autistic trait on record: she doesn’t talk, she stims, she clicks her tongue, she’s doesn’t like to be touched or make eye contact, and she’s a savant when it comes to remembering dates and playing the piano. According to Kristy: “I understood what Mrs Felder wasn’t saying: Susan’s future looked bleak.”
Um, yikes. Kristy being Kristy, she decides to help Susan make friends and hopefully convince the Felders not to send her off to a special school, which involves her roping neighbourhood kids into spending time with her, which absolutely nobody – especially Susan herself – wants to do. Eventually some bullies start exploiting Susan’s musical talents by charging money to have other kids go to the Felder house and test her abilities, something Kristy is stupidly slow to catch onto.
The somewhat-connected subplot is the arrival of the Hobarts, a family of Australians that move into Mary Anne’s old house and are bullied for their accents. It’s rather bizarre how the babysitters deal with this, as at one point the bullies are described as “sauntering into the yard”. Um, why are they allowed to walk onto private property with the express purpose of harassing the children that live there? Later, they randomly become friends with their victims when one of the Hobarts demonstrates how well he can karate-chop a crate. What.
Basically, none of the children in this book exhibit anything that actually resembles realistic childlike behaviour.
In short, I spent this entire book wincing, from the repeated use of the word “retard” (though I give Martin a pass for this, as it was the accepted term back then) to the description of children with Down’s syndrome as having “sort of slanted eyes and flattish faces, who are usually docile, affectionate and friendly” (what are they, a breed of dog??) to the fact that at the end of the story, Susan is shipped off to a special school and never seen or heard from again. Oh, and her parents are expecting another child which they plan to call “Hope.” As in, they hope this one isn’t autistic? They mention having several prenatal tests done, which implies they’d rather abort than end up with another autistic child. Yikes.
It does end on a rather sweet note, with Kristy deciding that when she’s grown up she’ll devote her life to helping children like Susan, but I can’t help but wonder what the reissue of this book is going to look like (if they ever get that far). It would have to involve significant rewriting.
(Also: Mary Anne and her father moved out of their house and into the Schafer residence because their home would have been too small for four people. But the Hobart family is comprised of two adults and four boys... Just admit it Martin, you didn’t want to give up the house with the secret passage).
Claudia and the Great Search by Anne M. Martin
This story is profoundly stupid, but in an immensely understandable way. Basically, Claudia comes to the conclusion that she’s adopted due to the fact that she’s nothing like her parents or genius sister, and there are very few baby photos of her in the family album. It’s ludicrous, but what else would you expect from the girl who reads nothing but Nancy Drew novels? Besides, what kid hasn’t pondered the scenario of discovering you were swapped at birth or adopted out as an infant or otherwise don’t belong to the family you were raised in?
I think Claudia is my favourite babysitter partly because her voice is the most distinct of all the other girls, and the funniest. This book opens with her simultaneously looking forward to getting out of science class early and dreading the reason why: she’s attending an awards ceremony at the high school where her sister is getting a special award.
Having to deal with gushing teachers, hearing about the troubles of Emily Michelle (Kristy’s adopted Vietnamese sister) at a Babysitters Club meeting, enduring a celebratory dinner in Janine’s honour, and feeling utterly alienated by her parents, all puts her in the right frame of mind to consider the possibility she was adopted. Why doesn’t she appear as an infant in the family albums? Why doesn’t she look or act anything like the rest of her family? Why was there no birth announcement in the local newspaper? What’s in the locked strongbox in the study? (She assumes adoption papers).
Her subsequent search defies all logic, but hey – it’s a book for thirteen-year-olds starring a thirteen-year-old. I’m not going to criticize the plot too much since it’s a masterclass in confirmation bias. After a fairly ludicrous investigation involving leaps of logic that could cripple an Olympian long-jumper, Claudia simply asks her parents for the truth and realizes she is not adopted, with all her questions having perfectly logical explanations.
In the book’s B-plot, we learn that Emily Michelle isn’t coping very well. She has limited vocabulary, isn’t toilet trained and doesn’t know the basics like shapes or colours. She’s also only two years old, making this the second book in a row that seems to have a minimal understanding of children and their development process. (My nephew is two-and-a-half, is not an adopted child from Vietnam, and also cannot do any of the stuff that the Brewer parents are so worried about – including answering the phone).
In any case, Claudia is called in to be a tutor for Emily Michelle after she impresses Kristy’s mother and stepfather with some of the learning games she played with her while babysitting (weirdly, it doesn’t occur to anyone that Emily Michelle might also benefit from having another Asian-American in her life).
I mentioned before that Claudia is the funniest of the babysitters, and it’s true, as when she’s forced to eat a cake bought in Janine’s honour (“the best part about the cake was that someone had spelt my sister’s name wrong”) or looking through the multitude of photos of her sister as a baby, including one in which she’s holding a magazine (“she was probably reading it”).
This is one of the Babysitters Club books that I actually own, and there’s one passage that always stuck with me, when Claudia is trying to teach Emily Michelle colours: “I realized something. I wasn’t teaching Emily colours, I was teaching her how to match. Was this what being a teacher was all about? Guiding someone toward something, step by step? It wasn’t easy. I began to have a little more respect for the teachers at SMS, especially my teachers, who probably had to work harder with me than they did with most other kids.” This is what I mean by Claudia having such a distinct voice, as none of the other girls could have had this insight.
Finally, this is the first book that features Claudia’s Aunt Peaches and Uncle Russ, though I think they’ve been mentioned before (and they’ll figure into more stories later on in the series). Oh, and both this book and Kristy and the Secret of Susan draw attention to the fact that Stacey isn’t looking or feeling well. Is there a diabetes-related book coming up in the queue?
The Complete Making of Indiana Jones by J.W. Rinzler
As part of my ongoing run-through of the entire Indiana Jones franchise (including its best computer game) I ended up browsing through this tome of a book, which covers the making of the first four films. There’s not much to say: it’s filled with lots of colour photographs of movie stills, promotional material and behind-the-scenes footage, with the occasional two-page spread that features the scripts and transcribed conversations between Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan on what each film would actually involve, including the famous story conference for Raiders.
It's pretty straightforward, though I can offer some of my favourite tidbits from each film. That aforementioned story conference had each man contribute something significant (obviously Lucas had the premise, but Spielberg pitched Indy’s fear of snakes, while Kasdan named Marion Ravenwood after his wife’s grandmother and a street in California) and plenty of the ideas thrown about in that meeting were used in later films: an action sequence in Shanghai and a mine cart race with the Ark, for example.
Kasdan’s original script was so dark that it implied Marion was prostituting herself to survive, and for a while he toyed with the idea of “fake out” final credits: the film would end with the Ark obliterating the Nazis and presumably Indy and Marion as well, followed by the credits starting to roll over an empty bay, and then – gotcha! Our heroes emerge safely from the water. This was perhaps a bit too meta for 1981.
There were also a lot of other characters that were eventually removed or streamlined, and amusingly, the script was allowed to refer to “Marcus Brody” or “Marcus,” but never just “Brody” due to a real museum administrator of that name working at the time. Of course, there’s mention of the fact that Lucas envisioned Marion as being only eleven years old when she and Indy started a sexual relationship, and with that in mind, it’s merciful that the film cut a scene in which Indy “entertains” a student in his private apartments.
It's interesting to note that Spielberg deliberately tried to tamp down on his own perfectionist inclinations during the filming of Raiders, allowing shots to be “good enough” before moving on, while still taking especially care with what he considered the main production-value scenes: the Peruvian jungle opening, the Well of Souls, and the opening of the Ark. This is probably just as well considering they filmed during Tunisia’s hottest summer in twenty-nine years in which everyone got sick.
Ever wonder how Sallah escaped the Nazis at Tanis? Apparently, a real-life German teenager who was vacationing at the time was roped into filming a scene in which he was ordered to execute Sallah, and instead let him go. It’s a pity the footage has never turned up, though there are some stills featured in the book.
Another cut scene (or at least snippet of dialogue) revealed the fact that the Hovitos kept their idol and Belloq was lucky to get away with his life – and given this franchise’s unfortunate implications when it comes to their portrayal of indigenous cultures, it’s a shame that was deleted. Another fun fact is that the sound of the Ark closing is actually... wait for it... a toilet tank cover clanging shut.
When it comes to the quirky of shooting scenes out of order, it turns out that the last sequence shot was the opening one in Peru, which actually worked in Harrison Ford’s favour since by this point he had a handle on the character and could go into the introductory scenes all guns-a-blazing. Likewise, Temple of Doom shot the village’s celebratory parent/child reunions first since it was easier to defoliate the place than beautify it.
Temple also had a few deleted scenes, the most important being one in which Short Round realizes that pain wakes the cultists from their mind-control, and the most poignant being that Mola Ram was meant to “wake up” in the moments before his death. Due to the documentaries of a while back, I already knew that the bridge collapse had to be taken in one shot (and therefore had to be perfect) though I was unaware that Spielberg attempted to make sure every sequence had at least two more activities happening simultaneously: for example, the grotesque dinner is juxtaposed with Indy sharing exposition with the Prime Minister, while Indy and Shortie in the collapsing room is naturally intercut with Willie grappling through the bugs.
Speaking of, Kate Capshaw had real trouble with all the wildlife in this film, to the point where she took a relaxant to get through the bug scene, while another involving her getting a python wrapped around her was scrapped entirely (in compensation, she grit her teeth and did the whole “Willie grabs a snake thinking it’s an elephant trunk” in one take).
Also, she spent weeks practicing the steps of the dance in the opening number, only for the dress to be too tight for her to participate!
I was completely unaware that Harrison Ford took seven weeks off due to back trouble, and I’m impressed that his absence doesn’t register at all in the finished film (the magic of editing, I suppose). I always found myself impressed all over again by the ingenuity of practical effects: when Mola Ram holds the heart up in his hand, you can see it beating thanks to a small electric motor concealed inside, and when it catches on fire the actor doesn’t wince due to the fact it’s a fake arm. These days all this would be done on a computer, and yet the effect is completely seamless.
There was surprisingly little that I found memorable about the making of The Last Crusade, beyond the fact that Spielberg always wanted Sean Connery for the role of Henry Jones Senior due to his disappointment he never got the chance to direct a James Bond film, but there was a lot more to say about The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
It was George Lucas who pushed for the sci-fi angle, while Spielberg uneasily described it as “genre-mixing,” which I thought was quite interesting given the aliens were a point of major contention among the fans. (Though we can be profoundly grateful they didn’t go with their first title: Indiana Jones and the Saucermen from Mars).
I had a bit of a d’oh moment when the book points out Mutt was called as such because it was a clue to his true identity as Indy’s son (the pair of them having been named after a dog) though a little disappointed that he was originally going to be Indy’s daughter, as per the canon of the Young Indiana Jones television show. Spielberg vetoed that because he had only recently worked on The Lost World, which heavily featured a father/daughter relationship.
The producer Frank Marshall notes his embarrassment with the fact that they had called Indy’s university Marshall College on a whim back in Raiders, only for this movie to shoot extensively on its campus – which meant all manner of fake signs and slogans had to go up with Marshall’s name on them.
There was also a funny anecdote about the logistics of the infamous “nuking the fridge” sequence: “I don’t think people know how much time goes into selecting something as simple as a fridge. You need one that’s going to work in terms of Harrison being able to climb inside it, but it can’t be anything too weird, and stylistically it has to be perfect. Then for legal purposes, we had to invent a new company for the chrome plaque on the refrigerator. Plus, the back had to come off, and extensions were made so Harrison could go through the back and come out the front. It was actually quite a big character piece.”
It's an insightful read, though approximately half the page-count is given over to Raiders, which is clearly where most of Rinzler’s interest lies. Amusingly, the book also makes mention of the fact that the franchise was originally conceived as part of a five-picture deal – now that this vision has finally come to fruition, will there be an updated edition of this book that includes The Dial of Destiny?
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
My sister lent me this after I accidentally locked myself out of my house (long story) and I devoured most of it while waiting for a spare key to arrive. Knowing that a Martin Scorsese film was in development certainly piqued my interest, though I found out afterwards that David Grann was also the author of The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, a book of non-fiction articles/essays that I also really enjoyed reading a few years ago.
You probably know the gist of this by now – after oil is found on the land where the Osage tribe was forcibly settled, they unexpectedly become some of the wealthiest people per capita in the world. (In one of those fascinating bits of historical connectivity, these were the very people Laura Ingalls witnessed as a child taking their enforced journey in Little House on the Prairie). Astounding fortune was certainly not the American government’s plan when the Osage were sent there, and unsurprisingly, great wealth did very little to protect them when the vultures started circling, who had no qualms whatsoever about laying claim to their wealth by whatever means necessary.
It's a difficult read for obvious reasons, as page after page details the Osage being killed in order to bring the headrights under white control (the scheme was to take advantage of the legal system of inheritance by getting a family member to marry an Osage woman, then pick off her family so that all the headrights came to her – at which point they could dispatch of her as well). This meant a staggering number of people were found dead, either in “tragic accidents” or obvious execution-style killings.
I can’t even imagine how terrifying this would have been for surviving family members, and the first part of the book captures this atmosphere of horror and fear, from the death of Mollie Burkhart’s sister to the disappearance of an attorney who was thrown from a train in the dead of night, on his way to present evidence of conspiracy to the Osage county sheriff.
The second half of the book deal with the government response to the killings once they became too widespread and notorious to ignore. J. Edgar Hoover, wanting to create a law enforcement bureau and justify its existence to the country, sent in Tom White, a former Texas Ranger, to investigate the murders and bring the culprits to justice, which – as the book’s subtitle says – formed the genesis of the FBI. In due course, the mastermind behind the killings is found (I won’t give it away, though if you’ve seen the movie trailers, you probably already know).
But the audacity and corruption and sheer self-justification is staggering. I still can’t quite believe it.
It ends with David Grann interviewing the descendants of those that were killed, and the terrible history they carry with them (it’s also eye-opening to realize just how recent all this was. Some of the major players in the drama died in the seventies). It’s clear that even though some of the killers were brought to justice, the exploitation of the Osage people was practically a cottage industry. Everyone was aware of the monetary gain in marrying an Osage woman and reaping the benefits of the headright system, and there’s no way of truly knowing just who was responsible for what deaths.
I’ve already seen some of the reactions to the film (especially regarding whose perspectives are favoured) but I’m going to have to watch it regardless. It’s just too compelling a history.
Cruel as the Grave by Sharon Penman
This is the second of Sharon Penman’s Justin de Quincey novels, foregoing her usual historical tomes in favour of focusing on an entirely original character solving mysteries against the backdrop of King Richard’s imprisonment in Austria and his mother Queen Eleanor’s attempts to free him – while also trying to get a handle on the mercurial nature of her younger son Prince John.
The bastard-born Justin has only recently discovered that the man he considered his patron is actually his father, and the first book detailed the twist of fate that led him into the employ of the Queen Mother. Now he works as her messenger and spy, navigating the fraught politics at court while solving mysteries for the commonfolk on the side. It’s a somewhat uneven combination of plots, as one subject has very little to do with the other, but Penman is a solid writer who thankfully doesn’t get bogged down in the minutia of what it was like to live in the Middle Ages (some feel the need to include every scrap of their research in the text, no matter how irrelevant). These are quick, entertaining reads.
While Queen Eleanor attempts to forge an understanding with her youngest son, whom she suspects of plotting against her eldest, Justin is called in to assist a friend whose nephews are suspects in a murder case. A pretty Welsh peddler called Melangell has been found dead in a graveyard, her wounds and torn clothing suggesting a rape gone wrong.
The sons of a local merchant, Geoffrey and Daniel, are the most obvious culprits, as both were romantically entangled with the girl and had reason to do away with her – Geoffrey to protect his engagement to a girl of higher standing, and Daniel out of jealousy that she loved his brother. Justin begins to ask questions of the family, only to be called away with a missive from the Queen: to break into the siege of Windsor Castle and deliver a message to Prince John in the hopes of bringing the stalemate to a close.
As stated, the two plots have very little to do with each other, and it’s clear that Penman is constructing a longer narrative involving Justin’s entanglements with regular characters like Prince John, the courtier Claudine, and the Queen’s spy Durand, within the format of standalone mysteries. It makes for almost episodic reading, like a television show that has a “case of the week” merged with a seasonal story-arc.
But the prose is good, the mysteries intriguing, and the historical backdrop imminently fascinating. Penman says in her afterword that she likes nothing more than to write about Queen Eleanor and her brood, and you can tell in the way she delves into the complexities of the royal family’s relationship with each other. In this case, Eleanor wants to protect her youngest son from harm while raising funds for her eldest, knowing one brother deeply resents the other and any attempt to prevent him from usurping the throne might well be pointless if Richard doesn’t survive his imprisonment. What a family.
In comparison, Justin’s difficulties with his father are much simpler, but he makes for a worthy protagonist in his determination to seek out justice for those who are otherwise ignored by the law (in this case, a Welsh peddler’s daughter). I’m looking forward to the next two books.
By Rowan and Yew by Melissa Harrison
This was a holdover from last month’s reading list, the sequel to By Ash, Oak and Thorn, in which the Hidden Folk are forced to leave their home after the toppling of their tree in a storm, to seek out their own kind and hopefully discover the reason why some of them are turning invisible.
Having found house-dwelling Hobs at the end of the last book, they now concentrate on getting home again, with a plan to save themselves and their communities by sharing their existence with children and fostering in them a love for nature. It’s fine for what it is, but so many other books have captured that “cottagecore” vibe so much better, and it’s entirely missing the spiritual awe that should always be present when deities like Pan are invoked.
The main characters, who are meant to be thousands upon thousands of years old, act more like children with all the hand-holding and hugging they engage in, and the wordplay of the title is just *cringe*. It’s part of an ancient prophecy that says things will be restored “by rowan and yew,” which turns out to mean Rowan, the little girl the Hidden Folk befriend who is referred to as “Ro”, and you. Yes, YOU. By helping the wildlife in your neighbourhood, you can stop the Hidden Folk from permanently becoming invisible (also, you can bring Tinkerbell back to life by clapping your hands).
Look, I feel a bit mean for criticizing such a harmless book, but at the end of the day it’s been done before and much better elsewhere.
Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough
I feel like I didn’t do this book justice, as I ended up speed-reading it at times – not because I wasn’t enjoying it, but because I kept getting distracted by other stuff going on. So I’m going to have to read it again sometime, as it was an intriguing and atmospheric story, apparently based on a read ballad/folktale, which is totally my jam. Tonally, it reminded me a lot of Joseph Delaney’s Spook’s Apprentice series (in that it doesn’t hold back on the horror) and Anne Pilling’s range of ghost stories (in regards to the sheer levels of oppressive foreboding that permeates every page).
In a post-war England, Cora and her little sister Mimi are sent to stay with their great-aunt Ida in the village of Bryers Guerdon. Their welcome is not a warm one, as Aunt Ida is inexplicably horrified at the thought of two little girls staying in her home, claiming it’s because she lives so near the marshlands, but obviously holding something back. And yet, she has little choice but to let them in.
As is the way in ghost stories, Cora begins to gather clues from the house and surrounding grounds: a grim painting of an autocratic-looking man, the strains of a lullaby sung in an upstairs bedroom, the mutterings of an elderly neighbour, strange words scrawled in Latin throughout an abandoned chapel, the distant figure of a man lurking in the graveyard...
Befriending a local village boy called Roger and his little brother Pete, the children attempt to figure out what exactly is going on at Bryers Guerdon, and what it has to do with an old song that begins: “Said my lord to my lady, as he mounted his horse: ‘Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the moss.’”
The format is unusual in that it’s not divided into chapters, but shortish segments told from the points-of-view of either Cora, Roger, or Aunt Ida. In a clever move, each one of these characters is privy to information or perspectives that the others aren’t, and it’s up to the reader to connect all the dots – though the constant switching between the three of them can get a little discombobulating at times. Sometimes their segments only last a couple of paragraphs before the story switches to someone else.
But it beautifully creates an atmosphere: the post-WWII era, the ancient buildings, the dangerous marshlands, the heavy sense of dread that lies over Bryers Guerdon – and when the blinkers come off and the monster makes itself known, it’s genuinely terrifying. I should have savoured it more.
Scarecrow by Danny Weston
This book features what is quite possibly the most misleading cover and blurb I’ve ever come across in a book. Obviously with cover art like that, you’re going to safely assume that the living scarecrow is the monster of the book, when in fact the exact opposite is true – and that’s not even a reveal left to the end of the story. He makes friends with the protagonist almost straight away, and there’s very little doubt over whether or not he’s a good ‘un.
Jack’s father comes to him one evening and inexplicably tells him to pack his things – they’re going on a holiday. He’s bewildered, especially since it’s a school night and they end up driving into Scotland, hiding out at a friend’s lodge in the remote highlands. It’s only once they’re there that his father confesses what’s going on: he’s exposed the names of several inside traders at work, making him a whistleblower. Now he’s afraid that they’re coming for him.
The father/son duo aren’t very good at staying undercover, and Jack is concerned about running out of his medication – even more so when he sees a scarecrow in a nearby paddock grab a crow and stuff it in his mouth. Going out to prove himself it was just his imagination, he’s stunned to strike up a conversation with the scarecrow, who calls himself Philbert.
There is only a little ambiguity around whether it’s all in Jack’s mind or not, especially when no one else is around to see Philbert move or speak. But then things take dark turn when it becomes apparent that the men sent after Jack’s father have found them, leading to a variation of Die Hard in the Scottish Highlands when he’s taken hostage. Jack is left following the instructions of a talking scarecrow to take out the rest of the men and free his father.
It's not bad, just so completely not what you’d expect, or what the blurb describes. There are a few puzzling aspects strewn throughout – for instance, everyone seems to know Philbert’s name automatically, almost magically, suggesting it has some added significance... but nope, it’s just a name. There’s also a little bit of insight given into how Philbert was made and why, though it’s odd that he appears to Jack and not the person he was actually constructed to protect.
It’s a quick, fun read but not remotely scary, as aside from chomping down on a few birds, Philbert is less off-putting than Worzel Gummidge. “Humans are the real monsters” and all that.
The Haunting of Jessop Rise by Danny Weston
This was probably my favourite of the three Weston books I read this month, though the ending is rather dire. It starts out pretty well: it’s 1853 and after the death of his father in a factory accident, William learns of his uncle Seth who lives in a remote mansion in Wales. With no other way to get there, he walks. On the night of his arrival, he briefly speaks with a cloaked and shrouded woman who watches the house of Jessop Rise.
Getting a cold reception from his uncle and his step-cousin Toby (that is, his uncle’s stepson) William starts to work in the house as a servant – Toby’s valet in fact. This seems somewhat inappropriate, and yet he has no other recourse. Making friends with Mrs Craddock the housekeeper, Idris the stablehand and Rhiannon the scullery maid (like Rhona in Scarecrow, she’s another redhead – it seems Weston has a type) he gradually starts to settle in.
But he can’t shake the fact that something is wrong here: his possessions keep moving, he hears whispers when he’s alone at night, and is haunted by the lingering mystery of Toby’s mother, Seth’s wife, who simply disappeared one day and was never seen again.
It's all very atmospheric and unsettling, at least until the final pages when things fall to pieces. Essentially, William confronts his uncle with his suspicions, who then goes on a detailed chapter-length confession/rant, and eventually starts laughing maniacally while telling his nephew he’s going to kill him for knowing too much. Why would William confront him in this way? Why would Seth confess all? Apparently because we’ve reached the end of the book and Weston can’t think of a more organic way of wrapping it all up.
And it’s a pity since the story was great before that, and finishes on a strong note with the dead coming to take their vengeance on the living via the use of a carefully-seeded ring of standing stones. It’s just a shame about that awkward, detailed, too-long and completely absurd confrontation/confession scene.
Inchtinn: Island of Shadows by Danny Weston
Another period drama, this one set just after World War II, during which Noah’s father was killed in action. His mother, a children’s book writer, has suffered writer’s block in the wake of her husband’s death, and in an attempt to get her creative juices flowing again, has hired out a cabin on a small island called Inchtinn off the coast of Scotland, which used to be a leper colony. The name of the place translates to “Island of the Sick.”
Naturally, Noah isn’t very keen, especially since he’s terrified of the water. Not helping are all the salty seadogs who insist the island is a strange and haunted place, where one of the previous inhabitants killed himself from leaping off a cliff.
It’s a very atmospheric book, but one that’s made up of a lot of moving parts that never quite mesh together properly. There’s Noah’s recurring nightmare about a terrible sea monster in the bay, and the history of the old leper hospital, and a strange girl living in a cave, and the ornithologist/hermit somewhere on the island, and the diary of the man who killed himself.
It turns out that the ghost haunting the place is the descendant of the man who originally ran the leper hospital, who was basically a Jeremiah Springfield: remembered as a great, noble man, but actually a liar and a fraud. For some reason, this caused his descendant to kill himself (why? It’s not his fault!) and become an angry ghost who attacks Noah’s mother. Again, why? Even stranger, his ghost is never laid to rest – it’s still floating around somewhere by the end of the book.
The girl in the cave ends up being... a selkie? Or a ghost that can possess seals? It’s unclear. Likewise is the fact that Noah is adopted, a detail that’s unnecessary to the story and never figures into it in any way. I suppose there are plenty of adopted kids out there whose biological parentage isn’t an issue, but it was odd for the story to bring it up so regularly without it having any relevance.
Altogether it’s just a very strange, piecemeal sort of story. My favourite bit was the fact that Noah’s mother Millicent is clearly an expy of Enid Blyton, who writes children’s books called “The Adventurers” that feature young siblings who catch smugglers and drink lashings of ginger beer and say “jolly good” a lot. Noah hates them, and finds himself in a strange competition with Douglas (the Julian expy) who he despises for being his mother’s perfect “dream son.”
At one point he has a dream about these fictional characters coming into his bedroom and chiding him, and I honestly wish the story had involved more material like this. It reminded me a little of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians and that odd reality of the Chatwin children.
The Howling (1981)
So begins my October viewing of werewolf movies from the eighties (and one from the nineties, see below). I didn’t watch this one first, but I went in considering The Howling to be the Big Kahuna, knowing that it was a cult classic, that it spawned a million sequels, and that it was considered good – not So Bad It’s Good, but actually good.
So I wasn’t totally prepared for the strangeness of this movie, though the plot hangs together surprisingly well, as does its overt themes of repression and the way television has desensitized us to pretty much everything.
Dee Wallace (the mum from E.T.!) is a news anchor called Karen White who has been stalked for some time by Eddie Quist, a serial killer known as the Mangler. The screenplay does a great job in the opening act of conveying the situation: she’s going to meet him in person while retaining contact with her colleagues at the station and the police. The necessary exposition is woven into the conversations and actions taken by the characters, and it’s a fairly riveting sequence as a result.
After that, it gets a bit silly. The confrontation ends with Eddie shot dead and Karen traumatized, being unable to remember anything that happened in the porn booth where the meeting took place. Finding it impossible to bounce back into her news-reading role, she’s advised by her therapist George Waggner to attend counselling in an isolated commune called the Colony with her husband, while her friends/co-workers Terry and Chris continue to investigate Eddie, whose body has disappeared from the morgue.
This is naturally only the start of their ordeal, and things devolve into terror and panic as the characters uncover the secrets at the Colony. Spoiler alert: it involves werewolves, and though Eddie’s big practical-effects transformation into a werewolf is the film’s highlight, it also asks us to believe that Karen just stands there for three minutes watching it happen.
The movie toes the line between dark comedy and overt horror, though I’m not sure what tone its final scene (in which Karen deliberately turns into a werewolf on live television as a warning to viewers before being shot) is trying to hit, especially with the montage of viewers reacting with nothing more than bemusement.
An American Werewolf in London (1981)
This was absolutely not what I expected. I knew it was a dark comedy and that it was safe to assume it involved a. an American who b. goes to London and c. becomes a werewolf, but this was... I’m not really sure what to make of it.
David and Jack are two friends backpacking across the Northern English countryside, stopping at a pub and getting weirded out by the vaguely hostile demeanour of the locals. Opting to leave, they’re warned not to go out on the moors – so of course, that’s where they end up, where one is killed by a terrifying beast and the other bitten.
David wakes up in the hospital three weeks later, haunted by violent dreams and visions, but somewhat distracted by a beautiful nurse who (like so many women in these movies) finds him attractive despite the multitude of red flags that are being frantically waved all around him.
Urged to kill himself by the increasingly terrifying visions of his dead friend, who claims he’s been infected by the werewolf curse, it’s only a matter of time before the full moon rises...
It’s a reasonably fun, albeit random movie (what was up with the child in hospital who kept saying “no” to everything? Or the congratulatory message to Prince Charles and Diana Spencer on the occasion of their wedding at the end of the credits?) though there’s a lot of emphasis on the dark part of the comedy. Like a lot of these movies, I’m a little bamboozled by its popularity, but that’s the thing about cult classics – you really had to be there.
Nobody acts like a rational person (Londoners keep running toward disturbances involving armed policemen) and some of the funniest bits have nothing whatsoever to do with the story itself (at one point the characters are watching a porn movie, which involves a guy interrupting the lovers and accusing the woman of cheating on him, after which he apologies and leaves after she points out she’s never seen him before in her life). I also give points to Doctor Hirsch, played by John Woodvine, who retains po-faced seriousness throughout the lunacy of the events he’s wandered into.
And then it just ends. It just ends so hard.
The special effects are impressive though (special-effects artist Rick Baker also worked on The Howling) and damn was Jenny Agutter a beautiful woman in her youth.
Wolfen (1981)
Of the three werewolf movies released in 1981, this is definitely the least-known, though it’s also become something of a cult classic in the intervening years, and is especially notable for its extensive use of thermographic vision to depict the point-of-view of the wolves hunting their prey. Six years later, The Predator would make it really popular, but Wolfen definitely got there first.
It’s also fairly impressive (for its day) in its inclusion of various Black and First Nation characters. Granted, a lot of them are stereotypes or killed off, but there’s certainly a lot more diversity here than in any of the other movies I watched this month, and its sole female character is a respected criminal psychologist.
It starts with the deaths of two millionaire socialites and their chauffeur, leading to the NYPD bringing Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) out of retirement to solve the case. He’s bewildered by the means and motive of the killings, which don’t seem to fit with any of the usual suspects, and follows clues to large tracts of city blocks filled with demolished buildings (which allows for some incredible cinematography, in which characters pick their way across vast acres of rubble that stretch across the entire screen).
This is the film that most differs from the other two werewolf flicks of 1981: there is no singular werewolf character, no transformation sequences (instead using what look like actual wolves) and no mention of any “curse” that can be passed from one individual to the next. It’s a strange, almost dreamy kind of story, with an ambiguous ending and no clear answers given as to what exactly was going on the whole time – but it earns that abstruseness through its tone and atmosphere. Whereas The Howling and An American Werewolf in London were both dark comedies, Wolfen takes itself completely seriously.
The Company of Wolves (1984)
I LOVE this movie. I JUST LOVE IT SO MUCH. Not to sound old, but they don’t make ‘em like this anymore (and never will again). I’m not just talking about its experimental plotless structure in which stories are nestled within stories within a framework of a young girl’s dreamscape, but the practical effects and the way the budget is stretched within an inch of its life to create a totally immersive, folkloric ambience.
Rosaleen is a girl on the cusp of adolescence, who falls into a dream/nightmare in which she dwells within a medieval village with her mother and father. Her sister Alice has just died, and she’s temporarily taken into the care of her Grandmother, who fills her head with all sorts of tales involving the wolves of the forest.
And um... that’s it really. There’s no real semblance of a plot here, at least not until the last ten or so minutes when a variation of Little Red Riding Hood plays out. Perhaps it’s better described as a series of vignettes (which makes sense, as it’s inspired by The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter’s book of retold fairy tales) in which Rosalee navigates the obstacles and pitfalls of prepubescence.
A lot of the content is just plain surreal, as when Rosaleen climbs a tree and discovers a nest filled with eggs that crack open to reveal tiny porcelain babies, or when her hapless village boy paramour is visited by the devil (played by a cameoing Terence Stamp) who pulls up in a white Rolls Royce in the middle of the forest to give him a potion that puts hair on his chest. Just go with it.
Then there are the nesting stories, in which various characters in Rosaleen’s dream tell each other tales, which are themselves dramatized by a whole new set of actors (and contain some familiar faces, including Stephen Rea and Jim Carter!) They too exist solely for their own sake, and I suppose to enrich the overarching theme of love, pain and adulthood being inextricable.
I mean, I guess. It’s very hard to discern what exactly this film is trying to say about its own subject matter, as the story of Rosaleen in the medieval village ends on a very different note than the one afforded to the “real” Rosaleen when she wakes up from her dream, and a lot of it depends on what you think the wolves represent. A girl’s sexual awakening? The predatory nature of men? The wilderness impinging on the comforts of home?
Freud would have a field day trying to parse through all the motifs and symbolism rife throughout this: the colour red, stolen lipstick, porcelain heads, rampaging wolves, apples with worms inside... There are blatant allusions to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (especially at the very start and very end), some intensely bloody/gory transformation sequences, and an ambiguous ending that’ll leave you wondering: “what just happened?” And hey, here’s Angela Lansbury as the Grandmother, along with David Warner as Rosaleen’s father!
To be honest, the framing device of the modern-day Rosaleen isn’t entirely necessary, and the narrative conclusion of her dream-self is a more satisfying (and logical) ending for her character – but then, would I really want to trade-in any of this film’s weirdness? No.
I can’t promise you’ll love or even like this film. It’s completely batshit on a number of levels. But it’s fascinating and I never get tired of watching it. Thanks be to the English teacher who originally showed the first five minutes of it to me and my baffled classroom, which led me to purchase it without hesitation when I found it on DVD all those years ago...
Teen Wolf (1985)
This ended up being the last werewolf-themed movie I watched this month, and it’s a strange one. Though let’s be real, they’re all pretty strange in one way or another.
This one sets itself apart by being considerably lighter in tone. Heck, it’s the only one that’s a full-blown comedy, though it’s interesting to note that it also follows the trend of not being remotely interested in the origins of the werewolf curse. When protagonist Scott (Michael J. Fox) discovers that he’s changing into a Wolf-Man, he opens the bathroom door to expose his transformation to his father – and discovers that he’s one too. According to him, it runs in the family, no other explanation given.
Furthermore, this more than any other werewolf film I watched this month (except maybe The Company of Wolves, though that had a profoundly different tone) makes it clear that werewolfry is a stand-in for puberty and coming-of-age. I mean, it’s so unsubtle that I’m not even going to bother pointing out the details.
Suffice to say that by the time the end credits role, Scott is happier in his own skin, is willing to share the victory of a basketball game with the rest of his team, and even choses the right girl to date. Yes, this involves a classic Betty and Veronica love triangle which is quite literally between the girl-next-door/childhood friend (bewilderingly called “Bouff”) and the blonde drama student who is just using Scott to make her boyfriend jealous. And is implicitly slut-shamed by the movie for having sex with Scott in the school’s dressing-room.
There’s not a lot to say here. The clothes, soundtrack and casual sexism makes it an Unintentional Period Piece, and it’s rather bittersweet to watch Michael J. Fox in his prime. The transformation sequences are the most understated of all the movies featured here, obviously because this was a light-hearted teen comedy, and Fox's physical appearance as a werewolf is... well, just a guy who looks like he has hypertrichosis. He’s also almost-completely in control of himself as a wolf, with no blackouts or murderous rampages at all.
There’s not much more to say, except that comparing this to my vague memories of watching the first season of MTV’s Teen Wolf is rather amusing, as it’s obvious they carried absolutely nothing across from this film except a. a guy called Scott turns into a werewolf, and b. his best friend is called Stiles.
Silver Bullet (1985)
Sometimes movies are fun not because they’re good but because they’re a perfect time capsule of a particular time and place. I’ll admit to not ever having read a Stephen King novel (except speed reading/flicking through Rose Madder on a summer holiday when I was far too young to have been doing so) but I’ve seen plenty of the eighties film/miniseries adaptations of his books, and there is a very distinct aesthetic to them all: small town Americana, sordid secrets brewing under the surface, hot summer days that stretch on forever, dodgy practical effects, plucky children facing down horrific supernatural forces, and a distinct sense of unease that permeates everything. Oh, and Maine of course.
Even without a huge amount of familiarity with King’s work, the aesthetic he inspires is so strong I can almost instantly tell whether a story is based on his work or not.
So despite never having seen Silver Bullet before, it felt instantly recognizable to me. The past really is another country, but the eighties is one that I grew up in, and so everything about this very odd little story that has no pressing reason to exist felt familiar. (Nostalgia goes in thirty-year cycles, which is why everything from Stranger Things to this newest influx of Stephen King remakes have capitalized on that decade, though none of them can really capture the vibe of things that were actually MADE in the eighties).
And this is a strange little film, not in the sense that it’s outlandish or bizarre (though it is) but because the plot is so straightforward, the characters so simplistic, the themes and subtext so non-existent that you really find yourself wondering: “why’d they do this? What was the driving force behind making it?”
The answer is that it was based on a Stephen King novella and he was at the height of his fame and popularity back then, but you still come out the other side of this film thinking: “huh.” And these days, its main source of interest is in showing us what a low-budget werewolf movie made in the mid-eighties looks like. Why settle for shows that recapture the decade when you can just watch something FROM that decade?
A small town in Maine is being plagued by a series of mysterious and gruesome deaths, though Jane and Marty Coslaw are more wrapped up in their sibling rivalry with each other. In truth, Marty isn’t a bad kid – but because he’s paraplegic, Jane is under the impression that he sucks up all the world’s attention for himself. However, after a run-in with a terrifying creature that Marty believes is a werewolf, the siblings have to work together (along with their reprobate uncle Red) to identify the beast in its human form.
A fun detail is that the “silver bullet” of the title is actually Marty’s modified wheelchair, and of course, this is packed to the rafters with familiar faces: Megan Follows, Gary Busey, and (most surprising, to me at least) Terry O’Quinn in his youth. I almost didn’t recognize him!
Wolf (1994)
I’m finding that the most ludicrous aspect of all these werewolf movies isn’t the transformation of a man into a wolf, but the behaviour of the women who interact with them. Nurse Alex decides to take a man ranting about becoming a werewolf into her home and sleep with him in An American Werewolf in London. Diane Venora decides to do the same with Albert Finney, a man she’s barely interacted with, in Wolfen (though I suppose in that case, he wasn’t the werewolf).
Here, we are asked to believe that Michelle Pfeiffer in her prime finds Jack Nicholson attractive. In no world does this ever happen, for any reason.
By this point, the werewolf formula is very much in play. Nicolson is driving down a deserted road, stops when he hits a wolf, goes to drag it out of the way, and is bitten by the not-yet-dead creature. He gets a rabies shot the next day, but soon finds himself changing: feeling younger and stronger, more ruthless at work, more sexually voracious with his wife, and experiencing heightened senses, especially sound and smell. He gets back the job he lost to a younger employee, realizes his wife has been cheating on him, and starts a relationship with the boss’s daughter.
But all this comes at a price: by the light of the full moon he transforms into a rampaging wolf. And... that’s kind of it? Towards the end they introduce a secondary threat in which the aforementioned younger employee (played by James Spader!) also gets the curse and ends up hunting down Nicholson and Pfeiffer, but it feels a bit tagged-on. (Plus, even though I give them credit for letting Pfeiffer ultimately shoot and kill this guy, it only comes after a slow-motion attempted rape).
I’ll be fair to this movie – by this point I was just a bit wrung-out with werewolves, and a lot of what was presented here had already been done many times before in the deluge of eighties films on the subject. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if it had been the first one I watched this month.
And if it hadn’t asked me to believe that Michelle Pfeiffer was hot for Jack Nicolson.
Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004)
Back in November 2020, I watched Ginger Snaps, the cult classic that equates a teenage girl’s period with becoming a werewolf. That analogy checks out, and I loved the low-budget, self-contained nature of the whole thing, from the fact we never find out who the original werewolf was, to the devastating final scene in which Brigette is forced to confront the tragedy of her “dead before sixteen” mantra.
There was no fat in any of it, just pure story that needed no elaboration; a one-and-done that was pretty much perfect. So, I was a little leery about the existence of two more films in the franchise (one sequel, one prequel, filmed back-to-back and both released in 2004) – though really, they themselves are so disconnected from the original that it hardly matters.
Technically Unleashed is about the aftermath of Giner’s death and Brigette attempting to stave off the transformation in herself within the confines of a mental institution, but truly, you could watch any of these three films in any order (or even just one and not the other two) and you’d get a complete story. Not seeing the others wouldn’t make a difference to your understanding of any one of them.
Like I said, Brigette has been institutionalized, and desperate to get her hands on confiscated wolfsbane, the only thing stopping her from becoming a werewolf. In there with her is Tyler, a slimy orderly who smuggles drugs to the girls in exchange for sexual favours, and Ghost, the grand-daughter of a burn victim who has nobody else to care for her (hilariously, these characters are played by Eric Johnson and little baby Tatiana Maslany, who will eventually have sex with each other in the back of a car in Orphan Black).
Making matters worse, another werewolf knows where Brigette is, and is trying to get to her by whatever means necessary. So she has to escape the institution, fight the curse, and be careful about who she can trust – not to mention enduring visions of her dead sister, who spends most of her time mocking Brigette’s lack of choices.
It’s a good story, though it ends on a fairly grim note. SPOILERS. Turns out Tatiana Maslany’s character is a budding sociopath, who successfully tricks Brigette into becoming a werewolf before locking her in the basement, with the intent of siccing her on anyone she doesn’t like.
It’s a very different type of story than the original, and if not for the presence of the lead character, wouldn’t even feel like a continuation of the first. (And where on earth are Brigette’s parents during all this?)
Also, it tries to eke out some sympathy for Tyler by making him a big brother figure to Ghost, and eventually revealing he's not guilty of one particularly horrific crime. But the guy has spent the first two-thirds of the film exploiting drug addicts and sexually harassing Brigette, so excuse me for not caring when she tears him apart.
Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004)
This film is Something Completely Different – a prequel in which actresses Emily Perkins and Katherine Isabelle play ancestors of themselves (or so I assume, it’s not really explained) who are somehow still called Brigette and Ginger. They’re essentially the exact same characters they were in the original, only now in a period setting.
It’s a little weird, to be honest, and the ending (in which the girls share the werewolf curse with each other) doesn’t really jive with the original film. Is it all meant to be the genesis of the wolf that bites Ginger in the first movie? Because that’s pretty tenuous, and completely at odds with that film’s complete lack of interest in who this random werewolf actually was.
I suppose it has a slightly more upbeat ending in regards to the emphasis on sisterhood, but again, if you look at it within the chronology of the trilogy as a whole, the story still ends with Ginger dead and Brigette stuck in a basement.
In any case, this movie starts with a variation of Brigette and Ginger in 1815, lost in the Canadian wilderness in search of shelter. They’re attacked by a wolf but manage to stumble upon a degree of safety when they reach an outpost where nerves are already frayed among the Dwindling Party of men, who are fending off wolf attacks each night. Naturally, there is a different kind of danger at work within the fort, and various archetypes to check off the list: the Native American hunter who knows a prophecy, the racist soldier gunning for a fight, the religious fanatic who thinks all women are witches, the reasonable military leader hiding a dark secret...
It's all well put-together and interesting enough, though I couldn’t help but feel a little bemused by the whole thing. It’s an odd duck to be sure. If nothing else, you certainly can’t accuse this trilogy of repeating itself – in fact it’s best described as three singular films that just happen to involve the same two actresses and a few werewolves. Though I don’t regret watching them, I doubt I ever will again.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
I approached this film with some trepidation, knowing its reputation as a big disappointment. And yet, probably because I’ve heard it so criticized over the years, I ended up enjoying it more than expected – though the final act was a bit of a letdown, and I didn’t feel as invested in Indy or his relationships as I wanted to be.
The strength and weakness of the Indiana Jones franchise is that all the movies are standalone adventures. This means there’s very little connective tissue between instalments, which means that anything not on the screen, that which is significant to whatever adventure Indiana happens to be on at the time, is irrelevant.
For twenty-seven years, what happened to Marion after the conclusion of Raiders was a complete mystery. Short Round’s whereabouts after Temple of Doom are STILL unexplained. As said, this is largely because of the franchise’s design, in which each instalment is its own singular story – though in these days of heightened continuity and interconnected universes, that creative decision feels almost bizarre.
So on the one hand, you can enjoy any of these movies in any order, without any baggage. On the other, the format sometimes leaves its protagonist feeling oddly untethered. We jump into his life at its most exciting stages and learn very little about him or his day-to-day existence. Supporting characters appear and disappear from one story to another, and there’s nothing remotely resembling a long-term arc between films. Like I said, there are pros and cons to this.
Crystal Skull is most like Temple of Doom in regards to the appearance of characters that have never been seen before, and never will again. Ray Winstone’s Mac and John Hurt’s Oxley are introduced as long-term acquaintances of Indy, though we’ve never heard of them before. Ditto Jim Broadbent as the new Dean of Marshall College, who I’m pretty sure doesn’t return for Dial of Destiny. And of course, for obvious reasons neither Marcus Brody or Henry Jones Senior appear in this film – it’s a shame Sean Connery didn’t turn up for a brief cameo, but I suspect he was sicker than anyone realized by this point.
Still, Crystal Skull marks the grand return of Karen Allen as Marion, though (once again) I wasn’t much impressed by the material they give her. She’s certainly got the same spunk, but she doesn’t turn up until the halfway mark, and – as in Raiders – doesn’t get much to do besides just tag along.
Sure, she steers the boat down the rapids, but her plan to drive it off the side of a cliff into a tree which then lowers it and its passengers safely down into the river is just as absurd as the fridge stunt at the start of the film. And as nice as it was to see her and Indy finally tie the knot at the end, their reconciliation fell flat for me – they just argue and bicker until it’s time to embrace, without any discussion about the fact that he left her at the altar and she neglected to tell him he had a son. Why do movies continue to treat these types of betrayal as no big deal?
And then of course, there’s Mutt. First of all, I didn’t dislike him as much as I thought I would. He’s a reasonably good character with an important part to play, and the inciting incident of him coming to Indy for help in rescuing his mother is a good hook.
But the concept of him is a strange addition to the story on several levels, form the fact that he turns out to be Indy’s biological son (they’re given absolutely NO ROOM to process this information, so I wonder if it wouldn’t have worked better if he’d just become the kid’s stepfather after they win each other’s respect before Marion turns up) to the obvious problem that he’s nowhere to be seen in Dial of Destiny (yes, I know what happens to him, which makes the setup of passing the baton on to him all the more excruciating).
There’s even an anecdote I read in The Complete Making of Indiana Jones that tells of Harrison Ford giving Shia LaBeouf one of Indy’s hats with the words “it’s all yours, kid” written inside the brim, and – oof. Just OOF. Not until David Benioff confidently predicted that the Snake Snakes would become fan-favourites in Game of Thrones would there be such a staggering misconception of how well a fictional character would be received by audiences.
The fact that he was played by LaBeouf, whose fifteen minutes of fame are long over, dates this film even more than Harrison Ford’s advanced age. I’m not sure why they cast such an obvious flash-in-the-pan for such an ostensibly important (as in, taking over as the star of the franchise) role.
But enough complaining; here’s the stuff I liked. Given that this was set in the fifties to match Indy’s advancing age, I didn’t mind the fact it dealt with aliens and crystal skulls and mind control. It matched the backdrop of the Cold War and the Soviet threat pretty nicely, and naturally Cate Blanchett is in top form as the franchise’s only female Big Bad. On that note, I also liked the film leaning into the fifties setting, from the greasers to the diners to the motorcycles, and the implication that Indy was involved in the Roswell landings (and how that led into the larger plot).
I didn’t even really mind the “nuking the fridge” or the “swinging with the monkeys” scenes, as I’d been warned about them in advance, thereby making them less terrible than I’d anticipated. In fact, the first two acts of this I sincerely enjoyed, until it devolved into CGI glurge and weightless action sequences in the third.
And of course, it was at least NICE to see Karen Allen as Marion again, even if they underuse her.
But it feels odd to watch this over a decade after its release, knowing it was badly received by fans who no doubt overhyped the return of Indiana Jones in their imaginations and were disappointed as a result. Because I waited so long, it still feels brand-new! From what little I know about Dial of Destiny, the franchise once more tries to cleave more to the precedents set in Raiders and Crusade, but by the time of its release audiences were simply wrung out on big blockbuster franchises (see Mission Impossible and The Flash, which also underperformed).
In all, Crystal Skull was something of a curiosity piece for me: a big-budget movie tacked onto the end of a franchise that had already reached a satisfying conclusion, and which will be undone by the next instalment in its turn (RIP Mutt).
Red Riding Hood (2011)
I unironically love this very terrible movie. Usually, I’d expect myself to feel disappointed at the fact a movie with a fairy tale premise ended up being fairly shite, but in this case, the perfect blend of YA dramatics and love triangle nonsense and deeply confused aesthetic makes it what it is: a glorious mess.
Besides, if I wanted a decent movie retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, I’d just watch The Company of Wolves. That this was directed by Catherine Hardwicke (of Twilight fame) who centres the story on love triangle involving a werewolf, even bringing Billy Burke (Bella’s father) along for the ride as this protagonist’s dad, is truly the recipe for glorious trash.
Valerie is living in a little medieval village that’s plagued by wolf attacks, to the point where they call in assistance from Father Solomon, a famed hunter (played by Gary Oldman, who I can only assume was being blackmailed or held hostage) to put an end to the beast. His presence heightens tension in the community, especially when he announces that one of them might well be the werewolf. How will Valerie figure out which boy she likes amidst such turmoil??
The visuals of this film are all over the place. At times it looks like modern teenagers (with glossy hair and sparkling teeth) are cosplaying on an obvious set, other times it manages a genuinely lovely fairy tale ambience (I liked the massive, albeit inexplicable, thorns on the trees in the forest). Valerie acts nothing like the docile village girl she’s ostensibly supposed to be, especially when it comes to black leather-clad Peter, who was apparently on the shortlist to play Edward Cullen (doesn’t surprise me).
It's like three different movies shoved into one – marvellous!
It’s also amazing who actually turns up: Micheal Shanks (from Stargate), Virginia Madsen (Irulan in the original Dune), Adrian Holmes (Frank Pike from Arrow), Michael Hogan (Colonel Tigh in Battlestar Galactica) and Julie Christie as Valerie’s Grandmother. And some of them are barely walk-on roles!
And for what it’s worth, the identity of the werewolf not only comes as a genuine surprise, but makes logical sense within the context of the clues that have been strewn throughout the film (I watched with a friend who was really trying to figure it out and still got caught off-guard). So, we have to give the movie credit for that, even if absolutely nothing else makes sense.
Elementary: Season 1 (2012 – 2013)
Words can’t describe how nice it was to settle back down into this show. Like the first sip of hot chocolate on a stormy night while you’re wrapped in a big fluffy blanket. The ultimate in comfort viewing – especially these days. It kinda blew my mind that this only ended in 2019, as that doesn’t feel like that long ago, and yet the show premiered last decade. Such was the case in those halcyon days of television, when shows went on for more than five or six seasons, and had over twenty episodes apiece.
It doesn’t feel real that I’m about to enjoy so much screentime with these two characters, and yet here I am: at the beginning of a journey that I know isn’t going to get immediately cancelled.
I also well-remember the truly insane reaction to news of this show’s imminent existence. It came about at the height of Sherlock’s popularity, and when that fandom found out that the Americans were adapting their own version of the material, set in New York with a gender-flipped Watson (now Joan Watson, as played by Lucy Liu) the histrionics were something to behold.
Sure, there was something a little eye-roll-worthy about such an obvious Follow the Leader variation on a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, but the hand-wringing and boo-hooing was just beyond the pale. Recall that this was the fandom that coined that whole “write strong women, write weak women, write depressed women, write women who are happily single, write women who are desperate for a man” (or however it went) meme. Write women as anything, it seems, except an important lead character.
But Elementary certainly got the last laugh. While Sherlock floundered in outdated tropes and racist/sexist stereotypes, eventually disappearing somewhere up its own ass with its increasingly absurd plot-twists that culminated in a last season so bad the fandom gaslit itself into believing there was going to be a secret fourth episode that would make Sherlock and Waston gay and thereby salvage the whole project in retrospect (because that’s the only thing that mattered to them at that point), Elementary sailed through its consistently good seven seasons, providing commentary on substance abuse, domestic violence, the importance of second chances, and how to cope with upheavals in one’s life.
The setup for this iteration of the famous partnership is that Joan has recently left behind a career as a surgeon after a botched operation left a patient dead, working instead as a sober companion and hired by Sherlock’s father to keep an eye on his son’s recovery. Sherlock is obviously an eccentric, but unlike Benedict Cumberbatch’s colder take on the character, there is a great reservoir of compassion within him. An ongoing theme of the show is that he and Watson prioritize the cases of those that would otherwise be ignored by the system.
The chemistry between Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu is impeccable. They manage to forge a deep bond between their characters that is nevertheless devoid of any sexual tension, and watching their relationship deepen in trust and understanding is the highlight of the show. Rounding out the cast is the always-reliable Aidan Quinn as Captain Thomas Gregson, and Jon Michael Hill as Detective Marcus Bell, Sherlock and Watson’s allies on the NYPD.
It is an entirely modern show, but in many ways it updates Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories better than the BBC did. Gatkiss and Moffat simply transposed the cases into a contemporary setting, whereas this show takes their conceits – the transcendent friendship, Sherlock’s habitual drug-taking, his powers of observation and deduction, Moriarty’s mind games – and explores them through modern eyes. In other words: Sherlock updates the setting, but Elementary updates the themes and their context.
The show is clearly familiar with Doyle’s original stories, sometimes quoting straight from the books themselves (Sherlock’s distaste of blackmail, his moniker of Irene as “The Woman”) but isn’t afraid to play around with them, leading to a bounty of riches. Watson is an equal partner, not just an awed tagalong! Mrs Hudson is a transgender woman! Irene Adler, initially introduced as a fridged woman whose death triggered Sherlock’s downward drug spiral, turns out to be Moriarty! I’m still not over how they telegraphed this twist in the opening credits right from the start, which featured a Rube Goldberg machine that eventually smashes the bust of a marble woman, nor how they subvert her exceptionalism by having Watson be the one who ultimately takes her down.
It's also funny to see who’s going to turn up as a guest star, especially those that have since found greater fame elsewhere. Detective Bell’s brother is played by Malcolm Goodwin, who I watched for five seasons as Clive Babineaux in iZombie, while none other than David Harbour appears as a corrupt surgeon for an episode, just a couple of years before he catapulted to fame in Stranger Things. John Hannah, Anika Noni Rose (the voice of Princess Tiana) and Roger Rees (the Sheriff of Rottingham!) also turn up as one-shot guest stars.
There are a few wobbles along the way – the premiere episode features a character called Javier Abreu who operates as Captain Gregson’s righthand man, who then disappears entirely after he’s replaced in the second episode by Bell. I wonder what happened there. Likewise, Joan is given a range of friends, ex-colleagues and family members who stick around for a single episode before vanishing entirely (though I suppose some might reappear in subsequent seasons – we’ll see).
I ended up losing track of this show during its initial run, dropping out at some point during season three. But I’ve always planned to do a giant rewatch at some point, and knowing that it sustained its quality for the duration of its run-time and went out on its own terms is thrilling. After the odyssey of watching all ten seasons of Spooks, I’m ready for another long-term commitment.
Puffin Rock: Season 1 (2015)
This has been on the backburner of my watch list for a while now, but given my love for Cartoon Saloon animation and my need for something featherlight to watch, I was very grateful to absorb what it had to offer.
Basically, two puffins – a sister and little brother called Oona and Baba – have adventures on Puffin Rock, the island where they live with their parents and a host of other birds and animals. That’s it, that’s the premise. It’s delightful. I think the highest stakes they face is finding shelter just before an impending storm, and trying to get away from some greedy seagulls. Bliss.
Narrated by Chris O'Dowd (you know, from The IT Crowd) the show also takes the opportunity to fill the viewer in on some educational nature facts regarding puffins, seals, shrews, crabs, and the multitude of wildlife you might find on islands off the coast of Ireland, as well as concepts like nocturnal and diurnal and so on.
Actually, the narrator’s role in this show is quite interesting – often these voiceovers become characters in their own right, breaking the fourth wall and interacting with the on-screen characters, but this one stays firmly “behind-the-scenes,” commenting on events as though he’s watching along with the viewer.
I also found myself pondering the depiction of anthropomorphic animals in shows such as this, and just how human they’re allowed to be. Here, the puffins talk and interact with each other, but – well, compare this to Bluey. The animals in that show are essentially human beings – driving cars, living in houses – with a few doggie traits. The animals in this show are living in their natural environment, living as their real-life counterparts would do.
I bring up Bluey because I also wouldn’t be surprised if Puffin Rock directly inspired that show, what with its animal families and gentle life-lessons. But it has a distinct feel of its own: the Glockenspiel music, the stylistic Cartoon Saloon animation, the easy pace – honestly, the fact that there’s a show about animated puffins who just hang out on a little island every day fills me with a very specific type of joy.
The White Princess (2017)
Having rewatched The White Queen last month, I was compelled to continue with its sequel series. And it was a little strange seeing this for a second time, as Jodie Cormer has since become a megastar. The White Princess wasn’t exactly her Breakout Role (that was obviously Villanelle) but it was clearly an important stepping stone on her way to fame and fortune. It’s almost funny to realize that she was an unknown quality at the time of its release.
Since then, I’ve also seen Patrick Gibson (Richard of York) and Amy Manson (Cathy Gordon) in Shadow and Bone and The Nevers respectively, and of course, Joanne Whalley in Willow and Carnival Row. There are some actors that just seem to follow me around.
Rewatching The White Queen, I was struck by how abruptly it ended: not with the logical endpoint of Princess Elizabeth meeting Henry Tudor and bringing an end to the War of the Roses, but with Elizabeth Woodville and her oldest daughter quietly pondering the fate that’s in store for her. This is in accordance to the book, but watching The White Princess, it’s also clear that the showrunners were saving that meeting for any potential follow-up.
Though it’s also odd that they replace almost the entire original cast. Caroline Goodall is the only returning face, which somehow ends up being more distracting than if they’d simply replaced everyone – there’s a lack of consistency in their lack of continuity. Granted, they probably wanted to age-up the characters of Elizabeth Woodville and Margaret Beauford, which might in turn have necessitated changes in the rest of the cast, and of course a few might have simply wanted to move onto other projects.
But it does seem odd that the likes of Freya Mavor and Michael Marcus (the original Elizabeth and Henry) would have passed on leading roles in the sequel to a fairly popular minidrama. We can only assume they weren’t given the opportunity to reprise them, though at this point I suppose we’ll never know for certain.
And not only do we get a complete cast overhaul, but plenty of personality transplants as well. Elizabeth Woodville, whose former self was motivated primarily by love and self-protection, is now a full-blown schemer. Cecily was a nice enough girl in The White Queen, now she’s a spoiled brat. Lord Stanley damn near stole the show when he was played by Rupert Graves, now the character barely registers. Cecily Neville was an embittered old harriden, now she's a kindly grandmother.
Another problem emerges: there’s simply not as much story this time around. There were ten episodes of The White Queen, and the Cousins War could have quite easily accommodated ten more. The White Princess is clearly struggling for material to fill eight episodes, and what it does dramatize is clearly preposterous. Yes, there was a Perkin Warbeck who claimed to be one of the lost York princes, but how that plays out here leads to the downright hilarious disclaimer at the end of each episode: “some historical events and characters have been altered in the film for dramatic purposes.”
Yeah, no shit.
The problem is that we know (relatively speaking) very little about Princess/Queen Elizabeth – after so many years of war and suffering, she was seemingly content to simply keep her head down and do her duty in becoming Queen of England. To infuse her with agency and the story itself with some drama, the show – and presumably Philippa Gregory’s novel – take very drastic liberties.
I can’t really hold that against them, but it still pales in comparison to what I’ll call the “broad strokes accuracy” of its predecessor, even if it hurts to apply that word to The White Queen. And like that prior show, this one ends very abruptly, with important characters simply falling out of the plot, never to be seen again. We hear what happens to the likes of Cathy Gordon and Margaret of Burgundy, though it’s odd that we never see them in any wrap-up after the substantial parts they played.
That’s the problem with history, it doesn’t arrange itself into neat narrative arcs.
Ahsoka: Season 1 (2023)
Well, Andor has officially ruined Star Wars. Nothing is ever going to be that good again. Perhaps if Ahsoka had come out before that series dropped it would not have looked so clunky in comparison, but it did, and does, and there are some choices made that are just inexplicable.
So yeah, I’ve put my Star Wars hiatus on hiatus because Andor was excellent and I couldn’t say no to my girl Ahsoka. I even went back and watched the episodes of The Mandalorian in which she appeared, just to get a grasp of Rosario Dawson’s take on the character. (That show also introduced Diana Lee Inosanto’s Morgan Elsbeth, who features heavily here).
And I suppose it wasn’t too bad, though it sure as heck wasn’t good either. A plodding pace, excruciating dialogue, bland acting – I’m kind of baffled at how a premise that looks so good on paper ended up being so blah on-screen. Ahsoka is essentially a sequel to Star Wars Rebels, the animated show that dramatized the adventures of the Ghost during the fight against the Empire, and which ended with its lead character – Ezra Bridger – sacrificing himself to take Grand Admiral Thrawn off the field.
Only neither of them actually died, Ezra just called on some hyperspace-jumping space whales to wrap their tentacles around the two of them and transport them to an unknown destination outside the known galaxy. It sounds absurd, but it was actually quite a moving scene. The whole thing ended with Sabine Wren, a young Mandalorian, vowing to track down her quasi-foster brother in the wake of the Galactic Empire’s defeat, and joining forces with Ahsoka (who was a regular guest star on the show) in order to do it.
That’s a rock-solid premise for a Star Wars story, though what actually unfolds on-screen can be best summed up in the many shot-by-shot comparisons between the final moments of Star Wars Rebels and the episode of Ahsoka that recreates it: the former is a tight, poignant sequence in which Sabine silently looks at a mural of Ezra and then turns to join Ahsoka, while the latter drags out this scene to an almost ludicrous extent: they stop, they stare, they turn and walk slowly. The show doesn’t even get the continuity of Ahsoka’s outfit right.
The green makeup on Mary Elizabeth Winstead looks ghastly, they completely waste Ray Stevenson in his last performance, and of course, the entire show is stuffed full of fanservice. I officially despise fanservice.
That said, there’s plenty of stuff to enjoy as well. It’s gorgeous to look at, and when a solid 70% of “Star Wars magic” comes from its aesthetic, that’s enough for me. I especially liked the alien wolfhounds that are ridden like horses by various characters, and the turtle-like community that Ezra has been living with. As with The Wheel of Time, there’s a surplus of female characters of differing races and ages who pass the Bechdel Test with flying colours. And I even felt a little feeling when Ezra and Sabine were finally reunited (even if it was bizarrely muted).
Hayden Christensen returns for a long-awaited reunion with Ahsoka (played as her younger self by Ariana Greenblatt, who was also young Gamora in the MCU – imagine having that on your CV) and I’m always intrigued by anything involving the World Between Worlds, the Mortis Gods and the Morai – it’s just a shame most of this was tied up with Ray Stevenson’s character, which suggests a recasting or heavy rewrites are on the way.
I also enjoyed Ivanna Sakhno’s Shin Hati, the surprisingly excellent depiction of the Purrgil (space whales) and David Tennant refusing to phone it in as Huyang (it was an easy gig, but he does some excellent voicework). Looking at what I’ve written, there’s a lot of good stuff on display throughout the show, but between the sluggish pacing, the tedious dialogue, the rote action sequences, and the fact that all the good stuff has clearly been saved for later seasons – it’s more of a disappointment than a success.
And as ever, it’s fascinating watching people go from idolizing Dave Filoni as the saviour of Star Wars to pushing him off the pedestal. As with Joss Whedon, Russo Brothers, Taika Waititi – fandom adulation turns so quickly to scorn and sarcasm. It’s not necessarily without reason, but honestly, who would want to be in this business? Everyone is so fickle and quick to turn on you.
But the fact remains that there’s been a string of bad Star Wars offerings of late, and far more misses than hits: The Rise of Skywalker, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi Wan Kenobi, the third season of The Mandalorian, and now Ahsoka. None of it has been very good and – as with the MCU – it’s obvious that audiences are just wrung-out by this sort of storytelling. I wonder if any viewer not clued in on the events of The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels could even follow this show at all.
The Wheel of Time: Season 2 (2023)
I still haven’t read a single word of Robert Jordan’s magnum opus (and have no plans to) but for my money season two of this television adaptation is considerably better than the first. I found that my memories of season one were a little fuzzy, and a couple of names/faces took a while to place (and I don’t just mean Mat, now played by a new actor who brings a very different energy to the role) but for the most part this was a consistently entertaining ride through a world filled with likeable and/or intriguing characters.
The highlight is still Rosamund Pike as Moiraine, who sets the tone for the entire piece by elevating what might otherwise be very silly material. By following her lead everyone else manages to up their game, and other highlights include Sophie Okonedo returning for a couple of episodes (though honestly, they need to stop filling up her dialogue with so many fishing analogies) and Lindsay Duncan for an extended run as Moiraine’s younger sister.
The first season ended with one of the Dark Ones being released from his prison (I refuse to look any of this up, if I get any of the names or terminology wrong, sorry not sorry) and effortlessly severing Moiraine’s link to her power. Her dramatic loss of magic has also destroyed her bond with Lan, and for the first time in years they’re on the outs, which is fairly heart-rending for both of them.
Meanwhile, Rand has disappeared, and the other four friends from Two Rivers have been separated: Perrin has taken to the wilds, Nynaeve and Egwene are acolytes of the White Tower, and Mat is being secretly held prisoner by Kate Fleetwood and her incredible cheekbones (I watched this with a friend who couldn’t stop commenting on them).
The basic arc of this season is to give each of these characters their fair share of development by putting them through the physical, mental and emotional wringer, which culminates in their reunion atop a tower in a city under siege. Given the lengthy run-time of the episodes (some are over ninety minutes long!) and the fact that they were released on a weekly basis, the story feels suitably vast and epic. It was actually nice to be forced to experience the story at a slower, more leisurely pace, as it gave me a chance to properly absorb what was unfolding. Hopefully I’ll retain more of this season than I did the first, and now that it’s over, I actually miss it!
Unfortunately, I still find Rand to be the show’s least interesting character (which is ironic since he’s ostensibly the lead) though his newfound relationship with an older woman called Selene certainly spices up his narrative a little. Nynaeve gets an incredible showcase when she’s put through one of the Tower’s initiation rituals, which involves her reliving traumatic experiences from her past and negotiating a “fake future” in which she’s a happy wife and mother... for a little while.
I have to admit to not fully warming up to this new Mat, simply because the actor (who I feel for, as it can’t be easy coming into a role knowing you were the second choice) has such a different vibe from the first. Meanwhile, Perrin finds a wolf companion and ends up on the set of Dune with some very cool warrior women who communicate in sign language. More of them please!
But it’s Egwene who really steals the show, even as her storyline is the most harrowing. Taken prisoner by a group of conquerors, she’s forced to go through training that magically bonds her to another young woman who will command when and how she uses her magic. The saddest thing about the whole affair is that this woman, Renna, is totally on-board with the belief system she’s trying to sell to Egwene.
When she lets Egwene keep her name, she obviously feels it’s a true act of kindness. She’s genuinely enthusiastic about their potential relationship with each other and takes no sadistic pleasure in her prescribed training methods. She’s truly saddened whenever Egwene defies her. It’s a fantastic performance from the actress because you can feel the sincerity in her eyes and voice, and are fully aware that Renna herself is just a brainwashed victim in her turn.
I always find it easier to feel sorry for villains when the writers don’t demand that I sympathize with them, and though Egwene does what’s necessary to free herself from Renna’s monstrous control, it’s a credit to the show that it doesn’t feel triumphant – just really, really sad.
A couple more things: at times there is a disappointing lack of ambiguity when it comes to the characters and their allegiance to either good or evil. Sure, there are a few awful characters who truly believe that the atrocities they commit is in service of saving the world from a greater evil, but much of the time anyone who shows the slightest bit of amorality or self-interest will inevitably be revealed as a Darkfriend working against our heroes. I found none of these reveals particularly interesting or surprising, and as motivation goes, it’s rather dull.
I’m also a bit on the fence when it comes to the Dark Ones themselves. They very much operate as old school witches and devils: they make promises and deals and are certainly a lot of fun to watch... it’s hard to articulate, but I guess I don’t find their tactics very interesting, nor their relationships with those they’re manipulating. Not yet anyway. There are certainly some attempts to get the audience to grasp their point of view, and what it is they’re actually trying to achieve, but it’s not quite in focus yet.
Finally, it still very much looks like characters are wearing costumes and walking around on sets. I don’t need everything to be dirty and gritty, but at the same time everything is rather too clean and shiny to feel truly real.
But one thing I find truly remarkable about this show is the sheer number of women that are involved. As I said in my review for season one, every time you think they’ve reached their surplus, they add ten more. And women of so many ages and ethnicities and alignments. It’s incredible! And it’s so unapologetic! Nobody expects applause or congratulations on including them – they just do it and get on with the story! With that in mind, Natasha O'Keeffe was clearly having the time of her life as Selene (like I said, the bad guys aren’t always very nuanced, but they’re great fun to watch) and I nearly spat out my drink when I recognized Hayley Mills. THAT Hayley Mills of The Parent Trap!
And there’s Ragga Ragnars from Vikings, and Katie Leung from Harry Potter! I squealed when they turned up. There’s just so many women it’s dizzying...
I’m profoundly glad season three is already locked in – but are we going to make it all the way to the end of this extremely long story? I don’t want to get my hopes up, but I’m officially invested now.
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