The folks over at DoubleViking.com, a sort of on-line variation of magazines like Maxim, have published an article announcing something that I’ve known for the past 23 years-

Real Men Love The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!

To be sure, some of the reasons the writer gives are a bit tongue in cheek. But he is correct in stating “If you haven’t watched it, then you are seriously missing out on a cinematic gem.”

I first saw Buckaroo Banzai during its incredibly short theatrical release in the fall of 1984. It was on my first date ever and though my love affair with Sheri P. went the way of most high school romances, my love affair with the movie has continued to this date. As a high school sophmore with no idea of what he wanted to do with his future, it was a revelation to see a character, as personified by Peter Weller, who didn’t choose one path in life, but walked many- musician, scientist, surgeon, adventurer. Definitely a reassuring message to a kid stuck in the middle of taking all sorts of college and career apptitude tests and being told by guidence counsellors, teachers and the like that everything you do now is going to HAUNT YOU FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!!!!!!!

It was also one of the first movies that inspired me to pick up a pen and try my hand at writing. I wound up getting a couple of Buckaroo fan fiction short stories published, one of which netted me a letter from Peter Weller himself!

If you haven’t checked out Buckaroo Banzai, drop it into your NetFlix/Blockbuster rental queue or head out to your local DVD rental establishment and pick it up. It’s a film that, despite being firmly cemented in the mid-80s New Wave esthetic, holds up well today.

And remember, “No matter where you go… there you are.”

Many sleuths have made the translation from print to movie screen. Many of them have been hardboiled detectives, gentlemen criminologists and sweet little old ladies who have a flair for solving murders. But there was only one cinematic sleuth who managed to fit her detecting in between getting her homework done- Nancy Drew.

And for four films released over a 10 month span in 1938 and `39, Nancy, as embodied but teen actress Bonita Granville, alternately thrilled audiences and had them laughing with her comic adventures.

Teen-sleuth Nancy was created in 1930 by Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate and creator of such other long running literary series as the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift and The Bobbsey Twins. As was the case with the series put out by the Syndicate, Stratemeyer outlined the books for hired ghostwriters, who had to adhere to certain format restrictions. Contractually, the ghostwriters were sworn to silence, each series’ pseudonymous author being an important part of the books’ brand. For this new series writer Mildred Wirt Benson was chosen. Stratemeyer outlined the first four Nancy Drew installments before dying on May 10, 1930. He never saw the publication of any of the books. Inheriting the business from her father, Harriet Stratemeyer would continue to provide the outlines for the series for the next several decades.

In just a few short years, the Nancy Drew books had become exceedingly popular and it was only natural the Hollywood would come calling. Although initially skeptical of Nancy’s prospects on the big screen, Harriet Stratemeyer sold the movie rights to Warner Brothers studio for $6,000. Stratemeyer also used the sale to restructure her writers’ contracts, cutting them out of any profit sharing from any potential further use and resale of their stories. Wirt Benson was asked to, and did, sign a special letter to Warner Brothers giving up any right to royalties from the Nancy Drew film series.

The resultant film series was overseen by producer Bryan Foy, head of Warner Brothers’ B-movie unit. Known on the lot as “Keeper of the Bs”, Foy had a full plate, overseeing 20 films that were to be released in 1938 for the studio. Among those films were entries in the studio’s Torch Blaine series, comic b-movie mysteries which were solved by a fast talking woman reporter who often outsmarted her police detective boyfriend. Perhaps hoping to strike a similar light-hearted tone, William Clemens, who had already helmed a handful of installments in the studio’s Perry Mason series as well as Torchy Blaine In Panama (1936), was tapped by Foy to direct the new Nancy Drew series. Although relatively new to the studio, screenwriter Kenneth Gamet also had a Torchy Blaine film – 1937’s Smart Blonde – to his credit and was assigned to scripting Nancy’s big screen adventures.

For the role of Nancy, the studio turned to spunky fifteen year old actress Bonita Granville. Born into a show business family in 1923, Granville was already a seasoned screen professional with 21 films under her belt at first RKO Pictures and then Warners. Only two years earlier, she had received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role as a school girl who spread scandalous lies about her teachers in These Three. Frankie Thomas, who had already headlined A Dog Of Flanders (1935) and the serial Tim Tyler’s Luck (1937), was cast as Nancy’s long suffering boyfriend – who underwent an inexplicable name change from Ned – Ted Nickerson. Rounding out the cast were John Litel as Nancy’s attorney father Carson Drew, Renie Riano as Effie, the Drews’ housekeeper and Frank Orth as River Height’s chief of police, Captain Tweedy. Filming on the first film in the series, Nancy Drew – Detective, began in February 1938.

Released on November 19, 1938 and based loosely on the book The Password To Lockspur Lane, Gamet’s screenplay has Nancy trying to solve the mysterious disappearance of Mrs. Eldredge (Helena Phillips Evans), a rich widow who was set to endow Nancy’s private school when she vanished. The trail ultimately leads to a secluded house near Sylvan Lake. But will Nancy and Ted be in time to prevent Mrs. Eldredge being murdered for her fortune?

Convinced they had a winning new series on their hands before the first installment had even been released, Warners ordered a second film, Nancy Drew… Reporter, into production almost immediately. Released almost three months to the day later on February 18, 1939, the second film finds Nancy working at the local newspaper. While covering a murder inquest, she becomes convinced that the accused (Betty Amann) is not guilty, despite the amount of evidence to the contrary. With Ned in tow, she sets off to uncover the real murderer.

Nancy returned to Sylvan Lake in the series’ third entry, Nancy Drew… Trouble Shooter, released on June 17, 1939. Taken there by her father for a vacation, Nancy soon discovers that Carson is there to try and clear the name of his old friend Matt (Aldrich Bowler) of a murder charge. When Nancy isn’t sticking her nose into her father’s investigation, she’s turning it up at her father’s sudden interest in the lovely Edna Gregory (Charlotte Wynters). Probably the jokiest film of the series, slapstick is played up to the detriment of the mystery storyline.

After the previous two studio-generated plot lines, the fourth installment of the series went back to the original book series for Nancy Drew And The Hidden Staircase released on September 9, 1939. In what would be the series final installments, Nancy investigates a murder at the mansion of two old women who want to donate their home to a children’s hospital.

Warner Brothers’ Nancy Drew turned out to be much different than her literary counterpart. The cinematic Nancy was very much in the mold of other movie heroines of the day- a slightly ditzy, high-strung gal who often found herself in trouble over head. Granville’s Nancy relied more on blind luck and her “woman’s intuition” than in any real sleuthing or deduction skills. She’s willfully disobedient of her father at times, to the point where she sends her father a fake telegram in Hidden Staircase to get him out of town.

Poor Ned/Ted doesn’t fare much better, often baring the brunt of Nancy’s harebrained schemes. In Reporter, Nancy has Ted disguise himself as boxer in order to get some information in a gym, but some how finds himself in the ring with a real champ. In Trouble Shooter, he risks his life charging into a burning building to try and save some important evidence, though he’s foiled by one of the film’s villains. In both Detective and Hidden Staircase, Ted finds himself in drag. Furthermore in Hidden Staircase, Nancy constantly drags Ted away from his summer job delivering ice to help with her investigation and then when he balks at her request, she threatens to tell his employer that he’s been goofing around on the job. The last shot of the whole series is Ned being drug off to jail by Captain Tweedy for obstruction of justice for going along with one of Nancy’s schemes.

If Harriet Stratemeyer had thought that having Nancy Drew on the screen would help boast sales of the books, she would be disappointed. In a letter dated August 3, 1939 to Mildred Wirt she wrote, “Up to date we have not found that having Nancy Drew on the screen has increased the sales of the book any, but perhaps it takes a while to get these things started.”

But whether the films helped boast book sales or not, the series ended in 1939 as Granville’s contract with Warners did. The actress left for greener pastures, and better roles, at Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Although Hidden Staircase received the best reviews of the series, it was decided to not recast the role and any plans for further films were abandoned.

Granville’s career flourished as she moved into more adult roles in films including Now Voyager (1942) and two installments of the studios long running Andy Hardy series with Mickey Rooney, though she would still appear in some lower budget features, such as the luridly-titled propaganda piece Hitler’s Children (1943). In 1947, Granville married oil millionaire-turned-producer Jack Wrather, whom she met while starring in The Guilty for Monogram Pictures. Although she retired from acting in the mid-1950s, she served as a producer on Wrather’s Lassie television series.

Frankie Thomas’ career also headed towards the emerging medium of television. After serving in both the Coast Guard and the Navy during World War II, Thomas headed to New York City to act in the burgeoning live television field, first in the first soap opera A Woman To Remember and then more famously as the star of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. John Litel continued his busy career as a character actor, including a stretch as another famous patriarch in the long running Henry Aldrich series at Paramount.

Despite her popularity with readers, Nancy Drew remained conspicuously absent from movies and then television for nearly the next four decades, until the premier of the Pamela Sue Martin television series in 1977. Perhaps Stratemeyer was unhappy with the ditzier, bubblier version of Nancy as depicted in the Warners pictures or maybe she was convinced that such translations wouldn’t boast book sales.

But whether or not the Nancy Drew that hit the screen in 1938 and 1939 was entirely faithful to the her literary progenitor, the four installments of her big screen adventures have entertained audiences for far longer than a series of disposable b-pictures were ever expected to.

A young woman hangs upside down, naked and gagged, above an ornately tiled tub surrounded by candles. An older woman enters, disrobes and lies down in the tub. Reaching beside her, the older woman brings up a long, sharp scythe and begins cutting into the younger woman’s flesh. As the younger woman’s blood pours down, the older woman writhes in ecstasy.

A strong and disturbing scene which combines the two most basic and elemental of human experiences- death and sex. Even though the French refer to orgasm as “le petite mort,” or “the little death,” these are two things that people usually risk combining in their entertainment. While low in the outright gore factor, it probably rates as one of the most disturbing sequences in Hostel II, a film that, like its 2005 progenitor, has audiences squirming in their chairs and some critics having self-righteous spasms over their computers.

Whereas the first Hostel focused on a trio of males backpacking across Europe who arrive at a Slovakian youth hostel only to discover that it is a trap that supplies victims for a nearby facility where the sadistic rich pay to torture and eventually kill innocents, this second installment follows three young female art students, Lauren German, Bijou Phillips and Heather Matarazzo, a very long way from her Welcome To The Dollhouse feature debut, who accidentally make their way into the hostel’s clutches.

Although this new installment’s structure basically echoes the first film’s, writer/director/franchise creator Eli Roth is canny enough to use the audience’s knowledge of what is happening around his unknowing characters in two ways- to build suspense and to illuminate how the Slovakian hostel and torture factory work. This second objective is accomplished through the eyes of Todd (Richard Burgi), who wins the chance to kill one of the girls in an online auction (where one of the bidders looks disturbingly like an older Dick Van Dyke) for his friend Stuart (Roger Bart). Todd is of the opinion that people can sense if someone is dangerous, so that if he actually kills someone, his future business contacts will sense that he is a man to be reckoned with. Stuart is a bit more reluctant about the whole process. Surprisingly, the two men’s story becomes one of the most interesting aspects of the sequel.

Still, despite its strengths, there are a few nagging weak spots, but nothing fatal, excuse the pun, to the storyline. While Roth does reveal some of the workings of how the people behind the Hostel connect killers with their victims, it doesn’t explain how new customers, as personified by Burgi and Bart’s characters, come to hear about the place to begin with. The film opens with the previous film’s only survivor being silenced by the organization to keep him from telling anyone what he knows. Obviously, they are very intent on keeping their operation secret. How do they attract their clients then?

Even before Hostel 2’s release, or even before it was screened for critics, some entertainment commentators were already decrying the film, dismissing it as “disgusting trash” that “glorifies violence” while “degrading women.” But such criticisms, even if one had bothered to see the film in question before uttering them, would constitute only a bare surface reading of the film, with the reviewers’ own prejudices towards genre material being revealed than any real analysis of the material in question.

If one were to argue that the slasher film cycle of the 70s and 80s as being a cinematic manifestation of the remnants of Cold War paranoia – dark forces made impersonal by visages hidden beneath hockey masks or under battered fedoras who invade our lives to randomly destroy them – than perhaps an argument could be made that Roth’s Hostel films are a reaction to the 21st century’s geo-political clime. In both installments, young Americans are out in a bigger world, having a grand adventure blundering their way through another country’s culture (one character in this new installment knowingly refers to himself as an “Ugly American,” a literary reference that will probably sail over the heads of most of the film’s primarily teen to early 20s audience) that is interrupted by the randomness of them being ensnared by the machinations of the films’ torture factory, a fairly obvious though still workable metaphor for terrorism. Of course, although Roth has stated he has no desire to make a third Hostel, if this geo-political subtext were to be pursued in a further installment, it would almost demand that some survivor of the torture factory lead a group of soldiers or mercenaries back to the place to destroy it, though things would not go to plan. Think the difference in tone and style between Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and the James Cameron helmed 1986 sequel Aliens.

Admittedly, Roth might not have such grand intentions here. He may just see himself as someone who knows that there is a certain segment of the movie-going public that enjoys the kind of thrills and scares that he is offering. The box office figures for the first Hostel and the fact that we now have a sequel would certainly backup that claim. But much like in the aforementioned bathtub scene – in which he seems to be challenging some critics’ ascertains that horror films are often misogynistic for their depiction of women as victims by showing that the sex of the tormentor and the tortured doesn’t matter, all humans have the capacity to commit such horrors – Roth confronts his critics while possibly in the act of absolving himself, at least in his own eyes, through the management of the torture factory itself. They know that any desire, no matter how base and depraved, will need someone to cater to, and make a profit from, it. As the film tells us, “It’s just business.”

Any film franchise that wants to achieve any amount of longevity is going to have to strike a balance between preserving the elements that have captured the public’s imagination and making sure that the series remains relevant with the passage of time. For better or worse, the James Bond franchise has managed to keep evolving for almost 45 years, striving to keep itself germane to the ever-changing geo-political climate.

Born in the heart of the Cold War, both the original literary incarnation of the character and his filmic equivalent found themselves battling the machinations of communist agents and Soviet assassins. But as the Cold War gave way to glasnost and the eventual fall of the Soviet Union, the Bond series found itself dealing with new concerns including drug dealers, terrorism and third-world possession of weapons of mass destruction. And as these times have changed so has the tenor of the series from the seriousness of the early films starring Sean Connery to the tongue-in-cheek tone of the Roger Moore-starring films to the grand adventure of the films starring Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan.

But now, the Bond franchise has taken advantage of their most recent recasting of the role of James Bond, in the form of actor Daniel Craig, to reinvigorate itself by going back to its beginnings and exploring the circumstances that made him a cold-blooded killer. The result is Casino Royale, a taut script which should make for an exciting and gritty re-visioning of the franchise come the film’s release this coming November.

Continue reading review…

With all the hype surrounding the live action adaptation of the popular Transformers 1980s cartoon sure to make the film a hit at least over its opening weekend, it’s not surprising that we’re starting to hear rumblings and announcements for similar big-budget projects.

G. I. Joe

Cinematical is reporting that, after years of wallowing in development hell, Paramount is putting their adaptation of the G. I. Joe cartoon on the fast track. They also report that there appears to be two scripts that the studio is looking at- one by Swordfish (2001) scribe Skip Woods which has received some negative online reviews and one originally developed a few years back for the studio by David Elliot and Paul Lovett (Four Brothers, 2005). If the studio will then choose one over the other or combine elements from each into a Frankenstein-like third script is anyone’s guess at this point.

Thundercats

Variety reported on Tuesday that Warner Brothers has optioned a screenplay from first time writer Paul Sopocy for an “origin story” of how a group of human-cat hybrids lead by the appropriately named Lion-O came together to oppose the evil sorcerer Mumm-Ra. Paula Weinstein (Blood Diamond, 2006) is set to produce.

He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe

This is one project that has been undergoing a lot of speculation and rumor over the past few years with the likes of John Woo and M. Night Shyamalan attached at various points. More recently scripter Adam Rifkin (Zoom, 2006) had been working on a screenplay, but it appears that he is off the project as Aint It Cool News is reporting (and Variety has confirmed) that producer Joel Silver has given Justin Marks the assignment now. This makes the third project for newbie Marks, who is also working on David Goyer’s Green Arrow-goes-to-prison movie Supermax as well as a live-action adaptation of the Japanese animated series Voltron.

Speed Racer

And speaking of Japanese animated series that found fan bases in the States, the live action adaptation of the popular 1970s series Speed Racer is moving along briskly. Writer/directors Andy and Larry Wachowski have announced most of the film’s major cast members. Emile Hirsch will star as Speed with Matthew Fox as his mysterious rival Racer X, Christina Ricci as Speed’s girlfriend Trixie, Susan Sarandon as Mom Racer, Dan Goodman as Pops Racer and Scott Porter, who will appear in flashbacks as Speed’s older brother Rex. The Brothers Wachowski have also released a picture of Speed’s car, the Mach 5. The film is scheduled to go in front of the cameras later this year and is scheduled for release next May 9th.