Indiana Jones And The Really Bad Movie

I wasn't going to do this, really I wasn't. But I'm sorry. Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull is a really bad movie. It doesn't work as nostalgia, it fails as an action movie, the sets are fakey, the effects are weak, the humor is painful, the script doesn't make a lick of sense, and I think "phoning in" is too generous a term to describe the performances. 

You can just quit reading now. I really didn't like it, and if you liked it this will just make you mad, and if you didn't like it you already know everything I'm going to say. 

There are about two minutes when Indy and Mutt are in Peru and Indy is talking about riding with Pancho Villa and he mentions Huerta and spits, and that's a great little scene, and you're thinking the movie might turn out okay. And then those two minutes are over. 

And okay, I did like the killer ants. Kudos to the filmmakers for, I'll be generous, ten minutes of entertainment.

The entire film takes place in Happy Days 1950s - even though it's 1957 and Joseph McCarthy and his anticommunist witch hunt had at that point been relegated to the dustbin of history, it's still enough to get Indy fired from his job teaching because he was kidnapped by an entire platoon of Russian spies who broke into Area 51 which is where the government keeps all its top secret stuff - just stacked into boxes without identifying marks or labels or sections - which is next door to where they test atom bombs on top of fake neighborhoods full of mannequins, cars, rugs, food, Crisco, and televisions. Televisions that are turned on, so the mannequins won't be bored. By the way, did we mention it's the 50s? Because the TV's showing Howdy Doody! Because it's the 50s! Except we have LED digital clocks counting down our rocket sled countdowns. Hey, I'll even give you leaving the rocket sled fueled, powered, and ready for a run down the rails at midnight when everybody's gone home. It's Friday, just leave the rocket fuel in there, it'll be fine! But the LED clock... why not just stop the movie and put up a big title card that says WE'RE NOT EVEN TRYING ANY MORE.

There's no 50s in this movie. There's no atom bomb paranoia, no clean shaven ad-men in charcoal suits and narrow ties and drinking problems, no Hungarian swim teams sticking it to the Russians while wearing Speedos. Just fakey sets and dank caverns full of dead Spaniards.

Apparently space aliens with crystal skeletons that are sometimes magnetic except when they're not have a giant temple filled with historical treasures they've somehow managed to steal from every civilization in every time period of the history of Earth without anybody noticing, and even though they can travel through the interdimensional spaces in their flying saucers and melt Natasha's brain with an angry look, they need a fired professor to deliver their skull to them. You know, Indiana Jones could have just stayed home, let the Russians take the skull to the space aliens and get their brains melted, and the movie would have turned out exactly the same. 

I don't even know why the Russians were looking for the magnetic alien body in Area 51 anyway - later in the film the evil Russian woman explains they have two alien bodies already. But they needed to send a platoon of killer Russian agents to kidnap Indiana Jones to find the alien body in Area 51, because even though they already have two highly magnetic alien corpses, the Russians can't figure out how to find this other one that they don't need because they already have two. 

Oh, did I spoil the movie for you? No I did not. This film comes pre-spoiled.

This is an adventure film where you can get yourself out of just about any predicament by falling. About to go over three giant waterfalls? Just go with it! Giant stone steps disappearing into the wall? Just fall down into the water! Hell, you won't even be wet in the very next scene! Just relax and let the movie take you where the movie needs you to be. Keep your head and arms inside the car at all times, and do NOT touch any of the displays.

I know it's nit-picky to say this, but a brigade of uniformed, armed Russian soldiers anywhere in South America in 1957... you know South America in the 50s, where they dealt with the Red Menace by executing anyone suspected of even knowing what socialism was? Yeah, just park that giant Russian tree-cutting-and-chipping machine right next to your brigade of armed Russian soldiers, nobody cares. Welcome to our rightwing dictatorship, comrade.

Giant Russian tree-cutting-and-chipping machine. Because they need those in the Ukraine. Helps with the harvest. Boy, you'd think a giant Russian tree-cutting-and-chipping machine would be a great place for a freewheeling up-and-down-the-chipper fistfight, huh? Yeah, you'd think so. Not in this movie. 

I swear to God the more I think about this movie the angrier I get. YES Mutt finds a platoon of monkeys with DAs who teach him to swing from vines. YES there are repeated strikes to the nuts while fencing with Evil Russian Woman jeep-to-jeep. YES Evil Psychic Russian Woman, who never really does anything evil to anybody, and in fact never demonstrates her psychic powers, and is in fact a really lame villian, mainly because of a complete failure to do anything nasty to anybody, is described as "Stalin's favorite." In 1957 being Stalin's favorite would get you assigned to somewhere a LOT less tropical than Brazil. YES Indiana Jones survives an atom bomb test inside a refrigerator. YES every single punch in this film has the SAME EXACT SOUND EFFECT. Remember that punch sound effect? Do you like it? That sound effect that produces a Pavlovian response in the pleasure centers of your brain, just like lousy comedies that replace jokes with pop culture references? Do you like that? Well, do I have a movie for you! 

I am still trying to figure out who the skull-faced blowgun firing guys were that attack Indy and Mutt in the graveyard in Peru. What are they, junkies or what? The graveyard with the sign that says "grave robbers will be shot". I guess they mean shot with blowguns, and not shot with regular guns. Can I hire skull-masked blowgun guys to hang around MY cemetery on the off-chance some gringos will show up?

Oh, and they get caught in quicksand - yes, I know the film claims it's not quicksand, but this film can SUCK IT - and they pull Indy out with a snake. And he's scared of snakes! So it's funny! So let's drag this scene out! Because he's scared of snakes! Remember? Remember those other Indiana Jones films you saw and liked? Hey, here we are in the giant warehouse where the Ark got stuck in the end of Raiders! Wow, wouldn't it be cool if we showed the Ark? Well HERE IT IS! You wanted to see it right? Aren't you happy now? Awwww, come on, you liked those OTHER movies!

Honestly, I saw the whole movie, and I still do not know who was doing what to whom, and why I should care. After seeing this film I believe a re-evaluation of both Temple of Doom and Last Crusade are in order - those films have suddenly gotten a LOT better. 

We saw this film in the drive-in, and when the movie's late starting everybody honks their horns. Listening to everybody honk was more entertaining than this film. 

Honk, honk. Honk honk-honk honk honk, honk honk.

the gospel of the farting preacher

(originally published on the Anime Hell blog, May 2007)

Robert Tilton is the once and future king of the post-Jim & Tammy Implosion era of slick TV evangelists; hounded and humiliated huckster of holy water, prayer cloths, and inspirational books; and flatulent, fraudulent star of what may be the original "viral video".

As host of the long-running "Success-N-Life" television program, Tilton preaches a "prosperity" gospel that promises to enrich its flock with God-ordained good fortune with Jesus as sugar daddy/investment counselor/loanshark/bookie. Since the key part of this gospel - 'sowing the seed'- means sending Tilton one thousand dollars, the only person this gospel has ever made wealthy is Robert Tilton himself. His sermons aren't about sin, death, or salvation - they're about making a vow (to send Tilton cash) and keeping your promise (to send Tilton cash), interrupted only by frequent, Tourettes-style bursts of "speaking in tongues". After being investigated by ABC's Prime Time Live, the Texas Attorney General's office, and the FBI, Tilton vanished from the airwaves, but after a few years of laying low he returned- tanned, rested and ready- shooting a new series of inspirational infomercials from a classy new studio in Florida, which you can catch late at night on places like BET.

Where did this slick-talking holy-oil salesman come from? Texas, of course. A college dropout and real estate salesman, in the early 70s Tilton latched onto both Jesus and the teachings of Tulsa evangelist Billy James Hargis. Hargis was the first to combine the fire of holy-rollering with the technosavvy of mail order marketing, and his mailings went out to three million homes at their peak. Tilton's TV show "Success-N-Life" began in 1984 and at its peak reached more than 200 stations - a one-hour informercial designed to get people to phone in pledges and mail him checks. In return Tilton would bless coins, pray over napkins, place prayer cords into a miracle wall of prayer, and generally use every pagan voodoo trick at his disposal to convince Jesus and God that little old you needs $1500 for a new transmission. Trouble for Tilton came when word got out that prayer requests sent to "Success-N-Life" were winding up in the garbage, when dead people were recieving letters promising Tilton's healing hand in exchange for cold cash, when a Tilton anti-Semitic rant was secretly caught on tape... when the level of disgusting excess and outright fraud became too much for even the strong stomach of the Dallas evangelical community.



But it's as an ironic touchstone for disaffected youth that Tilton may have his greatest success. The hopped-up, gibbering spectacle of Brother Bob pounding his desk, ranting in "otoyo basoya" tongues, and, quick as a wink, shifting gears to a dewy-eyed patriarch deeply moved by the suffering of humanity - well, if that isn't good television I don't know what is. Hipsters, pop culture junkies, kitsch connossieurs and po-mo pontificators all found "Success-N-Life" a terrific late-night watch, funnier than that OTHER "SNL" by far. Daniel "Art School Confidential" Clowes devoted a whole page of his groundbreaking "Eightball" comic to highlight Tilton. There was even a "Love That Bob" night at Club Dada in Dallas, sponsored by the Robert Tilton Fan Club, and a fanzine entitled "The Beast Of Robert Tilton". But it was through home video that Tilton would reach his greatest non-sucker audience.

The "Farting Tilton" tape, also known as "Joyful Noise", "Farting Evangelist", "Fart Preacher", etc., is mentioned in the press clipping for the "Love That Bob" Club Dada night (Jan 9, 1992), but it had been shown previously, passed from hand to Christian hand among the video trading network that existed in the days before Bittorrnet. My own copy came via my involvement with Phenomicon, a UFO/hacker/conspiracy convention that was held in Atlanta in 1990 and 1991. We ran "Fart Tilton" on the big screen before the Sub-Genius devival.

Who made the tape? A collection of Tilton's more inspired moments of Jesus fervor and glossalia, highlighted with the addition of fart noises, it's a, lets's face it, juvenile concept that could have been created by anyone with rudimentary video editing equipment. Slightly more professional-quality copies of the original and a color sequel were included on the "Mondo Tilton" compliation videotape released by Russell Media Underground in Dallas in the late 1990s. A staple of "Anime Hell" performances for many years, the clip has since reached an unimaginable audience courtesy filesharing and the Internet.

One wonders what Tilton thinks of his gastrointestinal success. Older and more jowly, his recent programs (retitled "Success In Life") feature a toned down Tilton, soft-pedalling his sucker pitches for an audience that might not respond to the firey schizophrenia of his earlier performances. Or maybe he's just, you know, holding it in.

more artworks 1998-2006

sympathy for the castlegate

Sure, it was a dump.

http://atlantafantasyfair.blogspot.com/2008/09/castlegate.html

star wars: the japan connection

(published at the Anime Jump blog in February 2007)

Ah, the late '70's. Disco, custom vans, gasoline lines, and STAR WARS. And STAR WARS ripoffs. Sure, our own Roger Corman got into the act two or three or four times, and even such powerhouses as Disney and Universal were tempted into jumping on the bandwagon, not to mention the Italians with their cinematic masterwork, the aptly named STAR CRASH (cough cough). However, I maintain that for sheer entertainment value, you can't beat Japan. Long known as the home of violent giant robot cartoons and rubber-suit monster epics, this island nation turned its energies towards SF-action films and proved they can make the most original ripoffs around.

I was lucky enough to see Toei's MESSAGE FROM SPACE in a theater, and young enough to enjoy it. Anyone older than 10 would have immediately dismissed it as a pathetic STAR WARS imitation. Years later I was able to appreciate the fact that it was one of Vic Morrow's last roles, that Philip Casnoff would go on to play Frank Sinatra, and that the script was by one of Japan's foremost comics legends, Shotaro Ishinomori. However, at the time, all I knew was that this movie had it all. Space hot-rodders, evil silver-painted aliens, the destruction of the moon, a funny robot, laser guns, swordfights, the works.

The script is actually a SF reworking of a tale from feudal Japan known as the 'Legend Of The Eight Samurai', in which a desperate monarch sends eight magic seeds out into the world. Whoever finds one of the seeds is chosen as a holy warrior and charged with saving the kingdom. Add some spaceships and explosions, and you've got MESSAGE FROM SPACE, as the peaceful planet Tulusia is conquered by the evil Govannis. The Tulusians send out the magic seeds along with the requisite beautiful young space princess, played by Sue Shiomi, fresh from the starring role in Toei's SISTER STREETFIGHTER. Chosen by the seeds are two Earth space-delinquents, a spoiled young rich girl, a sleazy grifter, a retired alcholic space general (dialogue when meeting the remaining heroes: "I must have gotten drunk, wandered in here, and fallen asleep."), his robot comedy-relief sidekick, the true heir to the Govannis throne who was deposed and left to die on a desolate planet, and lastly, the Tulusian who... well, I don't want to spoil it. Let's just say that the mixture of American and Japanese acting talent works fairly well.

The dialog is naturally goofy-sounding. When discussing combining her spaceship with the two hot-rods, our spoiled rich girl Maya says "Oh GAWD what a machine it would be!" The Western actors are pretty much left to their own devices, to over-or-under-act as they see fit. Speaking of under-acting, Vic Morrow wears a sucession of costumes, each more embarrassing than the last.

The film climaxes with a combination trench / fly-into-the-interior-of-the-enemy-base-and destroy-the-energy-core scene that will leave you wondering who ripped off who. The special effects are actually pretty good. When destroying the huge enemy space battleship at the end of the movie, they take the 10-or 12-foot model, douse it with gasoline, and set the thing on fire, and it looks great. Earlier in the film an asteroid belt scene is shot not by costly and then-ineffectual bluescreen, but by making thousands of model asteroids and having the ship (and the camera) weave in and out amongst them. There are exploding planets, space cruisers that fire giant missiles from their noses, anachronistic space-going sailing ships, and enough other flashy stuff to entertain the 7-year olds in the audience (namely me). I swear, there aren't five minutes in this movie that don't feature a laser gunfight, space combat, silver-painted aliens, or explosions.

Sonny Chiba, voted the Japanese most likely to kick your ass, plays the deposed rightful Govannis ruler, and his martial arts skill is immediately evident as he proceeds to wipe out half the Govannis base by himself during the climactic final battle. Sure, there are glowing special effects all over the place to try and compete with STAR WARS' lightsabers, but for honest-to-God swordfighting action, this movie can't be beat. Oh, and it was also directed by Kinji Fukasaku, who directed THE GREEN SLIME in 1969 and would go on to helm BATTLE ROYALE in 2000. Go Kinji!!

Toei would go on to make a TV series out of MESSAGE FROM SPACE, retaining all the models and the name "Govannis" but dumping everything else in favor of POWER RANGERS-style martial arts action and a talking gorilla sidekick. Yeah, a talking gorilla. This was around the same time they made their SPIDERMAN TV show in which Spiderman got a giant robot and a car with machine guns on it. No kidding.

THE WAR IN SPACE, on the other hand, is a tiresome and lackluster Toho production that can't decide whether it wants to rip off STAR WARS, SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO, or its own precursor ATRAGON (a.k.a. Kaitei Gunkan, or Undersea Battleship). Here's the plot: evil alien light fixtures bombard the Earth as shown in special effects scenes lifted from other Toho monster movies. The Earth retaliates with its secret super space battleship, the Gohten, which resembles a battleship with fancy crap stuck all over it (like the Yamato) and a big drill in the nose (like the Atragon).

Our multinational (OK, one Caucasian) crew takes off to destroy the alien base on Venus. Along the way they launch space fighters out of an arrangement that resembles nothing more than the cylinder out of a .357 Magnum revolver. The Captain's daughter (played by cute Japanese model Yuko Asano) is captured, taken to Venus, and made to dress slutty, so before they can destroy the base, a special team of hand-picked commandos infiltrates the base, rescues the daughter from the lamest Chewbacca ripoff ever, and escapes just in time for the Captain to activate the drill in the prow of the ship and send it right into the enemy.

This destroys the entire planet Venus.

In its defense, WAR IN SPACE manages to be faintly amusing whenever the alien (you only see one) shows up. Hehas green skin, is dressed in Roman garb, and is dubbed with incredibly incoherent dialog. The effects scenes are adequate when they're not stock footage, and the scene with the axe-wielding, horned Wookiee reject is priceless. However, the exciting parts are seperated by long stretches of attempted storyline involving really boring subplots, and the movie itself is such a obviously slapped-together pastiche of other, vastly superior SF films that viewing becomes a challenge rather than a pleasure. Even the dubbed-in voices seem bored with the whole thing (as perhaps they were). After this disaster, Toho wouldn't make another SF movie for seven years. It's one of the few films I'm glad never made it to American theaters.

Discotek Media recently released a DVD version of WAR IN SPACE that looks great. Unfortunately you can't shine crap. Movie still stinks on ice.

But enough about that turkey. MESSAGE FROM SPACE has yet to be officially released on home video over here, so your best bet is to catch it on TNT (they're running the uncut version from time to time) or shell out for the letterboxed Japanese DVD. Even though at first glance it's just another STAR WARS ripoff, I think everybody will agree that, ripoff or not, it's one darned entertaining film.

Dave Merrill

(this article first appeared in the Star Wars fanzine BLUE HARVEST and thereafter at the fine website ANIME JUMP.)

artworks: 1998-2006

marjoe

 popular television and screen star Marjoe Gortner.