Movies and Graphic Novels

To cap off my run of Universal’s Frankenstein films, what better than YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974), in which Frankenstein descendant Gene Wilder returns to the family castle and like so many precursors,succumbs to the temptation to reanimate the monster (Peter Boyle here). Rewatching in the wake of the originals, I pick up lots of things I didn’t when I last saw this: A darts game with the local one-armed cop directly parodying a scene in Son of Frankenstein, and the significance of Victor Frankenstein’s journal (a McGuffin in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman and the two House of films); I also appreciate this makes better use of the creature having a defective brain than any of the canonical movies. With Madeline Kahn as Wilder’s fiancee, Teri Garr as a sexy serving wench, Cloris Leachman as a creepy housekeeper, Marty Feldman as Ygor and Gene Wilder as the blind hermit, this is an outstanding piece of work. This special edition DVD has,regrettably, no commentary track, just a Making of featurette and some lost scenes (the best is one where Garr and Wilder discuss philosophy). “You see how Heaven plans? Me, a poor blind man, and you a mute … an incredibly large mute.”
HEARTBREAKERS (2001) is the Big Con comedy in which ace grifter Sigourney Weaver ropes daughter Jennifer Love Hewitt into pulling one more badger game (targeting repellent tobacco millionaire Gene Hackman) despite the complications of Hewitt falling for straight-arrow batender Jason Lee and a previous victim of Weaver’s out to settle the score. Fun, but it could have used a more manic pace at the climax, rather than going warm-and-fuzzy. Anne Bancroft (I mistakenly wrote Jessica Walter originally) plays another schemer. “Spare me your Bolshevik bullshit!”
ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (2008) is director Werner Herzog’s documentary of life at the South Pole, where he interviews the assorted researchers, films life under water, wanders the ice and learns how you train for being caught in a whiteout. Good, but not any better than I think PBS’s Nova or Discovery Channel could have done, so I don’t see that using Herzog added anything “They might be a bit perturbed at having a bag over their head, but when we take it off, they just lie right down.”

Although I’m a fan of Christopher Moore’s novels, THE GRIFF, by Moore, Ian Corson and Jennyson Rosero didn’t work for me at all: The story of Earth’s invasion by legions of alien griffins (“Our defenses were geared to metallic, heat-seeking objects, not living predators.”), as seen through a handful of survivors, is generic, much more so than Resurrection, and the twist on the Griffs’ motives is one Strange Adventures did more than once.
In PLASTIC MAN: On the Lam, writer/artist Kyle Baker follows in the footsteps of countless comic-book creators who tried and failed to capture the charm and humor of Jack Cole’s Plastic Man after Cole’s death. Unlike the previous DC attempts (the series was originally produced by Quality Comics), Baker’s take is actually funny, as Plas’s secret past as a mysterious enemy exposes Plas’s past as gangster Eel O’Brien to the FBI, forcing him to go on the run from his own agency, not to mention his trusted (albeit inept) sidekick Woozy Winks (whose done better here than any of the previous DC books). Part of Baker’s success, I think, is that while the stories are absurd, Plas himself (as in Jack Cole’s stories) plays things perfectly straight—efforts to make him a wacky humorist never work for me.