Usually, on-screen E.T.s are presented as either nurturing, evolved beings from another planet, sent here to help mankind, or vicious world domination types, intent on colonizing or destroying Earth. But movies often encounter a third kind of movie alien, the goofy intergalactic visitor.
In this weekend’s Paul, nerd superstars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost play Brit sci-fi geeks on a pilgrimage to some of America’s UFO hot spots. Along the way they help Paul (voice of Seth Rogen), an irreverent alien with a taste for silly gags and Bob Dylan jokes, get back to his home planet. Think of it as E.T. for frat boys and you get the idea.
In the world the movie creates, the idea of a wisecracking alien makes perfect sense, but adding an E.T. doesn’t always fit so well. Take Meatballs Part 2, for instance. The addition of Meathead, a grey, rubber-skinned alien sent to Camp Sasquash to earn an Earth merit badge, hardly improves on the original Bill Murray classic.
The fun -loving aliens of Earth Girls Are Easy are put to better use. The movie’s plot is best summed up by manicurist Valerie (Geena Davis) as she enlists her friend Candy (Julie Brown) to give the aliens a makeover: “A UFO landed in my pool and they captured me but we made friends and I fed them Pop-Tarts and… we’ve got to cut their hair.”
Once shaved, the former red, blue and yellow-furred wookies look a lot like Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans and are ready to hit the L.A. clubs in search for love. They may be aliens, Candy says, “but they can still be dates!”
In Phil the Alien, Rob Stefaniuk plays a stranded space-shape-shifter who hides in plain sight on Earth as the singer of a Christian rock band. Best line? “I’m staying with a beaver,” says Phil, “down by the brook.”
One of the most memorable movie aliens is Mathesar, the haute-contre voiced Thermian leader played by Enrico Colantoni in Galaxy Quest. Learning everything he knows about Earth from television transmissions, he turns to the cast of a cancelled sci fi show to help save his planet.
Favourite scene? When one of the actors, Gwen DeMarco (Sigourney Weaver), explains that TV shows are not “historical documents” she says, “Surely, you don’t think Gilligan’s Island is a…”
“Those poor people,” Mathesar interrupts, moaning in despair.
Superstar astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears.”
For more than a hundred years, the idea that life could exist on the fourth planet from the Sun has been a sci-fi staple. In 1898 H. G. Wells wrote the most influential Martian invasion novel of all, The War of the Worlds, later adapted by Orson Welles into the most famous radio show ever. In a less serious vein, Marvin the Martian, a cartoon character voiced by Mel Blanc, gave us the catchphrase, “This makes me very angry. Very angry, indeed.” Years after Marvin’s 1948 debut he made another appearance as the mascot on the Spirit rover sent to Mars.
This weekend, Martians invade movie theaters in Mars Needs Moms, the story of little green marauders who kidnap human moms, joining a long list of Mars movies.
The 40-foot tall Martian in The Angry Red Planet, a low budget 1959 flick, was actually a 15-inch tall puppet made from elements of a rat, bat, spider, and crab. The campy creature was later featured on the cover of the Misfits’ album, Walk Among Us.
A few years later, Robinson Crusoe on Mars used Death Valley as a substitute for the barren terrain of Mars and was so low budget it recycled props from other movies. The aliens are seen dressed in the spacesuits from Destination Moon and Martian spacecraft were borrowed from The War of the Worlds.
The year 2000 was a big one for Martian movies. Red Planet, starring Val Kilmer, Carrie-Ann Moss, and Benjamin Bratt as astronauts sent to Mars when Earth’s efforts to colonize the planet are disrupted, features cinema’s first computer voice to be completely computer generated.
Also released that year was Mission to Mars, the Brian De Palma film about the first manned mission to Mars. The movie flopped domestically—it only has a 25 per cent Rotten Tomatoes rating—but was chosen as one of the top pictures of 2000 by Les Cahiers du cinema.
Not all Mars movies are actually set on Mars, however. Despite its title, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, the comedy duo never actually makes it to the red planet. First their rocket lands in New Orleans, then Venus, where the Venusian women are all played by Miss Universe contestants.
For someone who once famously said, “You would have to kill me and prop me up in the seat of my car with a smile painted on my face to get me to go near Hollywood,” writer Phillip K. Dick certainly has a good Tinsel Town track record. Films based on his novels and short stories have made more than $1 billion, a figure that is bound to increase with the release of this weekend’s The Adjustment Bureau.
Based on Dick’s short story Adjustment Team, the film stars John Slattery as a mysterious Adjustment Bureau agent who must keep star-crossed lovers Matt Damon and Emily Blunt apart. It follows along with at least one tradition typical of Dick’s Hollywood adaptations—a title change.
Blade Runner was based on the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale became Total Recall and Next, the Nicolas Cage movie, was loosely based on the short story The Golden Man.
“Phil often commented that he couldn’t write good titles,” said Dick’s ex-wife, Tessa. “If he could, he would have been an advertising writer instead of a novelist.”
Blade Runner is arguably Dick’s most famous film, but an early draft of the script so displeased Dick he went on the offensive, deriding it as “Phillip Marlowe meets The Stepford Wives.”
Later, however, when shown 20 minutes of special effects shots, the author came on board, saying the footage of Los Angeles in 2019 looked “exactly as how I’d imagined it.” Ironically, director Ridley Scott later let it slip that he had never even read Dick’s book.
Total Recall also had a similar rocky development from page to stage. Early on, David Cronenberg was attached to write and direct but walked from the project when producers told him they wanted to change the story into something akin to “Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars.” Eventually it was made as an incredibly violent Arnold Schwarzenegger film Roger Ebert called “one of the most complex and visually interesting science fiction movies in a long time.”
Despite the fact that Dick died in 1982 of a heart attack, interest in his work remains unabated. Disney is planning an animated adaptation of King of the Elves and Ridley Scott is reported to be producing a mini-series based on The Man in the High Castle for the BBC.
Type in “visitor from hell” on Google and you get about 12,900,000 results in 0.17 seconds. There are ghost stories, a site for a traditional Irish band called Visitor from Hell and stories about unpleasant house guests. But I was more interested in actual visitors from hell. Celluloid demons, tortured souls and devilish characters that somehow manage to slink back from the depths of movie hell to visit us here on Earth.
Nicolas Cage, who emerged from hell in 2004’s Ghost Rider, comes back from the depths for the second time this weekend in a movie called Drive Angry, playing a dearly departed father back on this mortal coil to avenge the death of his daughter. According to that movie, hellions rarely escape and return to Earth, but a quick look at other hellhound films reveals a different truth.
Lots of actors have played Earthbound versions of Satan. In The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, Mickey Rooney played Old Scratch as a piano-playing jokester in red long johns and a straw hat with horns. Tim Curry played the Devil on TV in an episode of Dinosaurs called “Life in the Faust Lane,” and years before he became an Academy Award-winning composer, Danny Elfman did a strange Cab Calloway impression of Satan in the very odd film Forbidden Zone
But the most diabolically playful Devil to hit the big screen has to be Jack Nicholson as Daryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick. As a mysterious character who grants wishes to three excitement-hungry widows, Nicholson made the wicked character unforgettable, but he wasn’t the first choice for the role. Bill Murray was.
Probably the most famous representation of hell on Earth came in the form of one of the devil’s underlings, Pazuzu, who inhabited the body of poor little Regan (Linda Blair) in The Exorcist. The images of Blair spitting pea soup and doing a 360 head spin have become the film standard for possession.
Not all of hell’s citizens are out to do us harm, however. Director Guillermo Del Toro turned his favourite comic book into two fiendishly fun action movies—Hellboy and Hellboy 2: The Golden Army—starring Ron Perlman as the World’s Greatest Paranormal Investigator, a red skinned demon named Hellboy who helps mankind by bumping back against the things that go bump in the night.
A couple of years ago, Liam Neeson reintroduced North American audiences to the joys of the Euro-trashy-thriller. In Taken he played a retired undercover agent who rips Paris apart searching for his kidnapped daughter. “I’ll tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to,” he said.
The French tourist attraction was left standing, but he laid waste to the rest of the city in the movie’s wild action scenes.
Neeson is back this weekend in Unknown, another Euro-thriller that sees him cut a swath through Berlin while trying to get to the bottom of a deadly mystery involving identity theft, shadowy assassins and, of course, European carnage.
Euro-thrillers are characterized not just by their exotic locations, beautiful stars and international intrigue but by an attitude. They are about glamour, style and over-the-top stories.
A catchy title is also important. The 1967 Euro-heist flick 28 Minutes for 3 Million Dollars wasn’t much of a movie, but the name was a grabber. Ditto Agent for H.AR.M., an outlandish Eurospy movie with a bad guy who bears an uncanny resemblance to Pee Wee Herman. More fun is an Italian sci-fi comedy caper called Kiss the Girls and Make them Die starring Mike Connors (later famous as detective Mannix on TV) in a James Bond rip-off that’s almost as good as the real thing.
Then, what’s a great Euro movie without a cool score? Movies like 1967’s spy parody Kiss Kiss… Bang Bang featured a playful, loungetastic Bruno Nicolai score that sets the scene perfectly, and Ann Margaret’s songs in Appointment in Beirut can only be described as kitschy-cool.
The next ingredient is a wild premise. It doesn’t get much stranger than Bandaged, a German film about a deranged man who transplants the face of his late wife on his deformed daughter. Or how about LSD Inferno? In it the bad guy—an inventively named Mister X—wants to dose everyone in the world with acid.
After that, all that’s needed is a great villain—like Adolfo Celi and his criminal organisation T.H.A.N.A.T.O.S. in OK Connery—and some gadgets—like Mission Bloody Mary’s rooms that double as microwave ovens. Then top with hot leads like Matchless’s Patrick O’Neal, who plays a secret agent who can turn invisible or Daniela Bianchi, the former Miss Rome who va-va-voomed her way through 15 films, including From Russia with Love, and you get a unique and fun night at the movies.
People have a love for garden gnomes that is gnot gnormal. The colourful terra cotta lawn decorations pop up in everything from Travelocity commercials to R.L. Stine’s Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes to Coronation Street to the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets videogame and, of course, in tacky garden displays. Since ceramic gnomes were first manufactured in rural Germany by Phillip Griebel in 1847, these strange little creatures have carved out a pointy-hatted niche in popular culture.
This weekend, they take over movie theatres playing the leads in a reimagining of Shakespeare’s most romantic play. In Gnomeo & Juliet, two star crossed gnomes, voiced by James McAvoy and Emily Blunt, must overcome prejudice for their love to bloom.
This is probably the most gnometastic movie to ever hit theatres, but it isn’t the only one. Gnomes have had supporting roles on screen for years.
The most famous movie gnome is the hapless travelling gnome from Amélie. In the film, Audrey Tautou tricks her father into following his dream of touring the world by stealing his garden gnome and having a flight attendant friend send pictures of it posing with landmarks from all over the world.
The worldwide popularity of the film kicked off a resurgence of gnome love, and in 2002 International Gnome Day was instituted and is now celebrated on June 21 in a dozen countries. The travelling gnome also became a popular motif and was featured in the Matthew Good Band video for Anti-Pop, the videogames Half-Life 2: Episode Two and The Sims 3, and on the soap opera Neighbours.
The garden decorations of Gomeo & Juliet aren’t the first animated big screen gnomes. In Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Wallace the inventor installs gnomes in all the gardens in his town to guard against pests. Each garden gnome is equipped with a swivelling head and fire engine red eyes that light up when it senses rabbits or other garden invaders.
Gnomes are used to tragicomic effect in The Full Monty when Gerald (Tom Wilkinson) is distracted by some gnarly dancing gnomes during an all important job interview.
Also amusing are the airborne gnomes of Teenage Space Vampires, but the little creatures take a sinister turn in Slumming, a nasty horror film that is definitely not Better Gnomes and Gardens approved.
In the new 3-D film Sanctum, a group of cave divers get their spelunk on in the least accessible cave system on Earth. Down deep they encounter problems and end up in a fight for their lives.
If that synopsis sounds familiar, it should. Most cave movies—and yes, that is a bona fide genre—have very similar plots.
Here’s the typical rundown: A group of people jump into a giant hole and then really bad things happen. Usually at least one of the characters says, “It’s so deep… you can’t even see the bottom” just before they disappear forever.
Why do we keep coming back for more—and why do people like Sanctum producer James Cameron keep making these movies? I think it’s because they’re about the most basic primal feelings of all— claustrophobia, fear of the dark and the unknown. What could be scarier than a giant hole with who-knows-what living in it?
The most frightening giant cave movie has to be The Descent, a 2005 scary spelunker that features the second most used line in cave diving flicks: “No one’s ever been down here before.” The film focuses on six women trapped in an Appalachian Mountains cave system. That’s scary. Even scarier are the pasty humanoid creatures that start hunting them. Horror website Bloody Disgusting ranked it as one of the top horror films of the decade and Roger Ebert gave it four out of four stars.
A sequel, imaginatively titled The Descent: Part 2, came four years later. Although it was advertised as being “deeper and darker” than the original, it isn’t nearly as bloodcurdling.
2005 was a big year for creepy cave movies. The Cave, starring Piper Perabo and Cole Hauser as cavers who are stalked by bloodthirsty creatures, may have a plot about original as the movie’s name, but it does offer some genuinely terrifying moments.
If the subterranean creepy crawlers of The Cave (or others like What Waits Below or WithIn) aren’t for you, then perhaps the 3-D thrills of Cave of Forgotten Dreams will appeal. In this breathtaking documentary, director Werner Herzog explores the Chauvet caves of Southern France, literally a 33,000-year-old art gallery containing 400 Palaeolithic cave paintings. The legendarily loopy German filmmaker studies the drawings, made to replicate the movement of animals, and asks, “Is it a kind of proto-cinema?” It’s a wild, gripping look at life beneath the surface.
Everyone loves new and original characters in movies. One of the great pleasures of last year was watching Natalie Portman transform a stock ballerina character into something we’ve never seen before. Beautiful.
But where would the movies be without straight-ahead stock characters like the arrogant pilot or the rebellious teen? This week, The Factory, starring John Cusack, revisits one of the most frequently exploited big screen stereotypes, the obsessed cop.
The cop-on-a-mission character is nothing new. Film Noir is jam packed with police with something prove. Check out The Big Combo, a little-seen but worthwhile movie from 1955, which sees Cornel Wilde as a cop so fanatical about arresting a crime boss he funds the investigation out of his own pocket. Good gritty stuff.
More recently, Matt Dillon was the best thing in Takers as a detective who relentlessly tracked an elite band of bank robbers. He’s played cops before—a racist one in Crash for instance—and been in trouble with real policemen—he was busted doing almost twice the speed limit in 2008—but this is the first time he’s played one straight out of Central Casting.
Russell Crowe, however, has taken on the stock character more than once. Most famously he played Richie Roberts based on the real life detective who doggedly tracked one of the biggest heroin kingpins of the 1970s, Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington. In a strange twist to the story, the real Richie Roberts later became a lawyer and served as Frank Lucas’s defense attorney and, to add an even more bizarre twist, became godfather to Lucas’s son.
In Tenderness, Russell plays Lt. Cristofuoro a Buffalo detective who takes a “special interest”—read: “becomes obsessed”—with Eric Komenko, a teen who murdered his parents. Cristofuoro was the cop who originally arrested Eric and is convinced he’ll kill again. Crowe was originally meant to be a supporting player but was convinced to sign on when his part was expanded and he was given the voice-over narration.
Perhaps the greatest obsessed cop in the movies is Gene Hackman as ‘Popeye’ Doyle in The French Connection. Not only does this movie have one of the all time great chase scenes, but Hackman, who won a Best Actor Oscar for the part, has great hardboiled lines like, “What is this, a [blankety-blank] hospital here?” when he confiscating drugs from a guy in a bar.
Casual sex seems to be making a comeback at the movies.
Recently Love and Other Drugs showcased the informal liaisons of Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal. “We decided it was going to be two characters that both really couldn’t be intimate,” says Jake, “and so we both went to sex as a way of avoiding things.”
This week in No Strings Attached Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher become the latest Hollywood a-listers to try and keep their relationship strictly physical in this Ivan Reitman comedy.
Other films to ask “What’s love got to do with it?” include 9 Songs, the erotic Michael Winterbottom movie about Matt, an English scientist, and Lisa, an American on vacation in London. They meet, jump into the sack and go to Primal Scream and Franz Ferdinand concerts and soon learn, as Roger Ebert noted in his review, “sex is easy but love is hard.”
Another movie couple learned that lesson, with much happier results in Knocked Up, the 2007 comedy about a one night stand, an unplanned pregnancy and enforced maturity. The Guardian called it “a new genre of romantic comedy in which an unappealing hero gets together with a gorgeous, successful woman.” Star Katherine Heigl had a different take, suggesting the film “paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys.” In response the film’s director Judd Apatow said “I’m just shocked she [Heigl] used the word shrew. I mean, what is this, the sixteen-hundreds?”
The reviews for Casual Sex?, a 1988 comedy starring Lea Thompson and Victoria Jackson as two women who look for love at an upscale spa—“It was the early eighties,” says Thompson’s character, “and sex was still a good way to meet new people.”—sum up the way many people feel about the sex without commitment. The movie,” wrote Hal Hinson in the Washington Post, “is exactly like the real thing—kinda empty, kinda unfulfilling, and you feel just awful afterward.”
On the other hand James Bond, possibly the screen’s biggest proponent of casual sex, never seemed to have a problem with a quick fling. Not willing to limit himself to earth-bound trysts in Moonraker he even has a rendezvous on a spaceship careening back through earth’s atmosphere. “My God, what is Bond doing?!” asks his boss Sir Frederick Gray. “I think he’s attempting re-entry sir,” replies Q.
Usually, on-screen E.T.s are presented as either nurturing, evolved beings from another planet, sent here to help mankind, or vicious world domination types, intent on colonizing or destroying Earth. But movies often encounter a third kind of movie alien, the goofy intergalactic visitor.
