Category Archives: TV

October 18, 2025 · 5:15 am

Jekyll and Hyde cast Dark Shadows

I can thank my brother for reminding me that DARK SHADOWS included a Jekyll and Hyde plotline though my research reading would have tipped me off to it anyway.

The legendary supernatural soap concerns Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid), a vampire from the 1700s released in the present where he winds up protecting his modern-day kin from assorted supernatural threats. Other characters included Quentin Collins (David Selby), immortal werewolf; Willie Loomis (John Karlen), Barnabas’ sniveling, perpetually frustrated Renfield; Elizabeth Stoddard, the family matriarch (Joan Bennett); Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall), a doctor and haematologist helping Barnabas; Angelique (Lara Parker), Barnabas’ witch wife and tormentor; and Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott), the reincarnation of Barnabas’ lost love Josette.

The story takes place in 1970 as one of the plot strands in the “parallel time” era. After Barnabas and his kin defeat the Lovecraftian Leviathans, Barnabas wanders into Collinswood’s east wing and discovers a gateway into another timeline. Watching, he discovers that in that timeline he married Josette, lived a happy mortal life and rose not from his grave. He stumbles across the time boundary only for Willie’s counterpart — author Will Loomis — to trap Barnabas in his coffin and force him to recount the truth about his life, which Loomis will turn into a book. This kept Barnabas offstage while filming House of Dark Shadows, the theatrical spinoff movie (I believe Maggie’s absent from a chunk of this plotline for the same evening).

The Jekyll figure is Cyrus Longworth (Christopher Pennock), BFF to Quentin Collins, here the head of the clan and newly married to Maggie. The opening of the story has Cyrus making the usual research into dividing our good and evil natures. As in the Jack Palance adaptation Curtis produced a couple of years earlier, Cyrus wakes up the morning after testing his drug with no memory of where he’s been; there’s a bottle in his pocket, though, and other evidence he’s been having a very wild night.

Initially Cyrus’ new life as John Yaeger follows the movie’s plot arc but not entirely. For one thing he has a fiancee, Sabrina (Lisa Richards), which Palance’s Jekyll didn’t. For another, Cyrus is caught up in the other plotlines swirling around Quentin — is his late first wife Angelique really dead (yes, but she gets better)? Can Maggie step into Angelique’s shoes (a plotline borrowing heavily from Rebecca)? While Yaeger takes the usual mistress (as Palance’s Hyde did), she doesn’t die, she simply vanishes from the story once Cyrus falls in love with Maggie (maybe she was just a placeholder until Scott got through with the movie?).

Once Cyrus meets Maggie, realizes she’s having trouble with her marriage (Angelique’s ghost is undermining it) and falls for her, things get creepy. Cyrus is too inhibited to make a move (his love for Sabrina doesn’t figure in at all) but if he becomes Yaeger again …and he does, and winds up kidnapping Maggie and eventually murdering Sabrina.

While Cyrus’ addiction to his free, daring life as John Yaeger is normal enough for a Jekyll, he’s carrying a great deal of self-loathing. Yaeger laughs at Sabrina “Don’t you have any idea how much he hated being himself?” I think he’s quite sincere.

Overall it’s an interesting take, well-performed by Pennock.

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October 11, 2025 · 5:15 am

Wednesday’s child is full of woe, but I watched her anyway

When WEDNESDAY debuted on Netflix three years back, I caught the first episode. Perfectly competent, didn’t really interest me … though it’s interesting that it exists at all.

Charles Addams’ cartoons in the New Yorker about a ghoulish, creepy family came to the small screen as The Addams Family in 1964 (first season review here, second here). 90 percent of what we associate with the Addams came from TV: names, characterizations, the searing passion of Gomez and Morticia. The premise of the show was that the Addams see themselves as a perfectly nice suburban family like anyone else, always friendly, helpful and considerate; half the time they don’t even notice everyone around them is freaking out. Lynn Spigel argues that like most 1960s paranormal sitcoms the characters stand in for “what if Irish or Italians moved in next door?” which was no longer an acceptable premise, and also subvert and twist the standard family sitcom tropes.

After a Saturday morning cartoon a few years later, the Addams vanished except in syndication (syndicated network reruns on local TV stations used to keep old series running for years) and the occasional special (Screen Rant has a good list) but then the 1990s gave us the movies Addams Family and Addams Family Values. Impeccably cast (Raul Julia as Gomez, Anjelica Huston as Morticia, Christopher Lloyd as Fester) it kept the characters but made them much closer in tone to the original cartoons. This family really did seem ghoulish and creepy. The movies are fun but my heart will always be with the original TV show.

The breakout star of the movies was a young Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams, here ghoulish and slightly murderous to boot, all delivered in a deliciously deadpan tone. Her star turn elevated Wednesday from the kid of the original series to a central character … which is how we wound up with Wednesday.

Jenna Ortega delivers a great deadpan performance as Wednesday, shipped off to the Nevermore boarding school where her parents met; retaliating against the jocks bullying her brother Pugsley (they were swim team, she put piranhas in the pool) has convinced them leaving her to mingle with “normies” isn’t wise. Nevermore is home to Outcasts — witches, werewolves, sirens, gorgons, making it feel a lot like Monster High (here’s a more detailed breakdown). Inevitably the dour, tart-tongued Wednesday is paired with sunny werewolf Enid (Emma Myers) as her roommate, the perfect dioscuri for her (unsurprisingly Enidsday gets shipped a lot).

Where the original TV series was intrusion fantasy — the Addams were one weird paranormal thing in an otherwise normal world — Wednesday is much more urban fantasy, where our world is host to lots of different supernaturals, even if the normies don’t see it. Part of my lack of interest after watching E1 (“Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe” — all episodes have “woe” in the title somewhere) was that while it was well done it wasn’t “my” Addams Family.

And probably that teenage drama interests me less at my age than it did a few decades back, even when it’s well-executed. Plus the producers are Gough and Millar of Smallville and that never worked for me either.

Also I’ve always preferred Thing reaching out of the box in the original show to the detached hand running around. Yes, classic Thing was cheap special effects but that hand was definitely attached to Something we never saw; that’s creepier.

But regardless, when I learned there’s a type of Outcast called a “hyde” — a seeming ordinary human who mutates into a grotesque monster under stress — I binged S1 this week. It’s not a major entry in Jekyll and Hyde, but I like to catch even the little ones.

At the end of S1, Wednesday spots a monster murdering a student. In the best tradition the body disappears and nobody, not even perky Enid, likes Wednesday enough to believe her. Naturally she starts investigating, with occasional support from friendly teacher Thornhill (Christina Ricci). It soon becomes obvious something bad is going down … but what? The mystery makes this even more Monster High: we have a Hyde as villain, and its handler plans to destroy the school the way Eddie Hyde did in the Monster High movie.

As there’s more Hyde stuff in S2 I may give that a watch, if I have time. If not, I think I’ll be fine as is. “Dead people are notoriously bad at returning calls.”

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October 4, 2025 · 5:15 am

A kid’s show and a picture gallery: Jekyll and Hyde on TV

JULIA JEKYLL AND HARRIET HYDE was a 1990s BBC kidcom in which Julia (Olivia Hallinan) is an 11 year old science nerd and a perfect angel, always happy to make life easier for everyone from parents to schoolteachers (it’s to Hallinan’s credit she’s able to make Julia likable to the audience). Then a school bully tampers with Julia’s new elixir and the result is her randomly turning into seven foot tall Harriet Hyde.

The idea of sweet little Julia having a troublemaker hidden inside her could have been fun. Instead the show treats it like a personal embarrassment, nothing more — if Julia broke out in unsightly zits, the plot wouldn’t change much. Still, it lasted for three seasons on the Beeb. “Now drink up and I’ll put that door back on its hinges.”

NIGHT GALLERY was Rod Serling’s 1970s follow up to The Twilight Zone. It was a frustrating experience for Sterling, who discovered the network (NBC) wanted his name but not the distinctive touch he’d brought to his earlier classic. This episode has Alex Cord desperately trying to find a beautiful woman (Keep In Touch … We’ll Think of Something), a woman apparently walling her husband up alive (The Merciful) and in With Apologies to Mr. Hyde, Adam West quaffing a certain potion …nothing unwatchable, nothing that stands out, either. “I keep telling you, go easy on the vermouth!”

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September 9, 2025 · 5:15 am

Jekyll and Hyde stuff: a movie, a book, a TV show

MADAME HYDE (2017) is a French film I’d never heard of before I stumbled across it last week: a freak electrical accident renders frustrated science teacher Madame Gequil (Isabelle Huppert) — pronounces JeeKUL — happier and peppier but also turns her into a living lightning bolt after dark, a power she’s happy to exploit dealing with people who piss her off. A dull one, good only for the In Name Only appendix. “You think you can acquire great power by a magic, miracle or accident.”

VICTORIAN DEMONS: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin-de-Siecle by Andrew Smith argues that by the end of the 19th century, the English upper classes were seriously concerned that the English Male had lost his mojo, becoming too degenerate to stand against such outside threats as syphilis and Dracula’s vampirism. Smith sees Dr. Jekyll and his friends (hence my interest in this book) as degenerates too — wealthy and upper-middle class but without the moral fiber for Jekyll to resist temptation or for his friends to take any real action against Hyde. He also argues the “invisible deformity” that makes people recoil from Hyde is that Hyde presents as a gentleman but the presentation is just enough “off” that it doesn’t work. I’m not sure how much value this hs to my book, but it was an interesting read.

JEKYLL (2007) was a six-episode BBC modern take on Stevenson, and every bit as good as I remembered it. In some ways better as I appreciate the ways it stands out. Irish actor James Nesbitt is a creepy maniacal fiend as Hyde, grinning in sadistic glee whenever he goes wild (I’d have loved to see him as the Joker).

As the series starts, Tom Jackman (Nesbitt) has learned he has a dangerously violent, immoral second personality, which is why he’s separated from his baffled wife Claire (Gina Bellman) and their kids. He’s worked out a rough relationship with his alter ego, communicating back and forth by a pocket recorder: “Hyde” (not named that until later) knows if he kills anyone, Jekyll will turn himself in for the crime; Jekyll knows if he tries to cure himself, Hyde will commit suicide.

That’s bad enough, obviously, but now a mysterious organization has begun hunting the duo. It turns out that Doctor Jekyll was a real person whose experiments triggered a superhuman mutation into Hyde (the series incorrectly states humans haven’t evolved in millennia); his friend Robert Louis Stevenson fictionalized the story, partly to cloud the truth and make it harder for anyone to exploit Jekyll’s research). Tom is his last living relative and therefore the object of the organization’s schemes.

The actors are excellent and Steven Moffat does a great job on the script. I like a number of the details such as Tom suffering from Hyde’s wild nights — Hyde stays up d rinking, Tom gets the hangover and the exhaustion the next day. It does have a few flaws such as several characters insisting Jekyll can’t be Tom’s ancestor — he had no children! The possibility of a bastard child kept from the limelight or a child of Hyde’s doesn’t come up (it’s the latter). Still, this is definitely one of the better modernizations.“The truth is, if I’m being honest, I don’t get a lot of pleasure out of killing children — but I get enough.”

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September 6, 2025 · 5:21 am

Thunderbolts strike Macbeth — send in the French police! Movies and TV viewed

THUNDERBOLTS: The New Avengers (2025) arrived on Disney + last weekend so I finally caught it. And with one glaring weakness, it deserves the enthusiasm that greeted it.

Yelena the Black Widow (Florence Pugh), the Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and US Agent (Wyatt Russell) all wind up at the same secret lab on missions for shady CEO Valentina di Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss). Her shadiness has her under Congressional investigation; now she plans to blow up the secret lab and also eliminate three people who know too much. Of course, this doesn’t work; they escape the lab with Bob (Lewis Pullman), the only survivor of something called the Sentry project (if you know Marvel’s Sentry, you know this is Not Good).

This was a fun, action-packed film with good characters mostly performed by good actors (Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes eventually joins in). I found Russell bland as US Agent and I could barely stand Louis-Dreyfuss — she’s annoying in the role and seems to think she’s still working in sitcoms. And given the amount of blood she has on her hands by the end, keeping her out of jail didn’t satisfy me either. Still, thumbs up for this one despite her. “Anyone else have any pointless childhood stories to tell?”

THE SCOTTISH PLAY (2019) has a director gathering a cast for a production of Macbeth, assuring them all the theater legends about a curse on the show are just legends. Meanwhile his Lady Macbeth (Tina Benko) has met up with the ghost of Shakespeare, who desperately wants to rewrite the show, having had 300 years to brood about where he got it wrong.

This one didn’t work for me. It’s so low key and quiet that it couldn’t hold my interest, and Shakespeare constantly talking in Shakespearian style (I give them a point for acknowledging that was a stage thing and not everyday Elizabethan speech) grew annoying more than engaging. “I am as far from my home as fish are from heaven.”

The third season of HPI ended with Morgane and Karadec not speaking and Morgane (Audrey Fleurot) discovering she’s pregnant but unsure of the father — it could be Karadec (Mehdi Nebbou) or a couple of other characters. Of course, there are still murders for the team to solve but now there’s also Lamaze class, identifying the father, bringing the subject up with the father, Karadec returning to the murder investigation team … The fifth season wraps up in France later this month, after which I assume it will air here on Hulu. “If head lice attack, let me remind you of my all-natural coconut oil remedy.”

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August 29, 2025 · 4:30 pm

Perhaps I need to leash myself better

This was a productive week but it left me feeling off-kilter. When writing goes very well, it’s easy for me to get caught up in it, not take breaks, and then feel wiped at the end of the day. While stopping the work feels counter-intuitive, it’s better in the long run.

Also there are one or two paperwork tasks I needed to do this week and I didn’t get to them. That’s not good either. I did get to several but one of them is big and complicated and it’s hard to carve out time when, like I said, the writing is going smoothly.

Two more things going smoothly. First Sage, a Persian vegetarian restaurant that’s a favorite of ours, reopened after a couple of years closed. Bigger place, co-owned — if I’m understanding it right — by a successful Indian restaurateur so I’m guessing more money. The start-up menu has a smaller selection than of old, but the food is still great.

Second, we’ve been concerned about Trixie’s weight gain. Slight, but she’s a small dog so even a little matters a lot. The big problem is that the added meds both dogs are on get wrapped up in food or pill pockets. I’m now setting her total soft food for the day in a small container in the fridge to give me some idea how to ration it. It’s obvious I was giving her way more than that so this is a win.

As to work, I spent more time on The Local Reporter than I’d planned, as often happens. Though in fairness, it was fun time: I was interviewing a local filmmaker about the Sick Chicks Film Festival (specfic films made by women) so I watched one of her films streaming on Amazon (review tomorrow). That added to the time. I also wrote about Carrboro’s plans to renovate its town hall.

My own writing is going to be Jekyll and Hyde for the rest of the year, I think. This week I rewrote the Nutty Professor chapter, which includes other films where Hyde is a womanizing party animal. I also wrote the first draft of the Monster Mash-Up chapter. I watched a couple of movies and several episodes of Monster High in various incarnations.

I also got some feedback from TYG and a couple of other people I trust on the tentative cover design for Southern Discomfort. More about that soon.

That was a good week’s work. I’ll end the post with a shot of the blue tower opposite the Carolina Theater. Not that we were there this week, but just because.

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August 19, 2025 · 5:04 am

Jekyll and Hyde: One book, one TV show, one movie

I’m not sure how I stumbled across JEKYLL AND HYDE ADAPTED: Dramatizations of Cultural Anxiety by Brian A. Rose but my initial thought was AAAAAAH! My searches before I signed the McFarland contract for Jekyll and Hyde led me to conclude nobody had done a survey of Jekyll and Hyde films before me; my editorial contact concluded the same.

Fortunately Rose and I are not playing in the same ballpark. Rather than discussing all the movies, his interest is how the different adaptations express different fears in different times. Thus, Jekyll acquiring a fiancee in the Victorian stage adaptations positions not just Hyde but Jekyll’s scientific research as a threat to the domestic values Victorians prized. The 1932 Fredric March version, showing Hyde as a neanderthal, distances evil — it’s not us, it’s our awful ancestral instincts — whereas the films showing Hyde as more or less human acknowledge evil as part of us.

I find most of Rose’s conclusions unconvincing — I don’t buy Paul Massie looking human in Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll is meant as a statement about the nature of evil, for instance. And he’s completely wrong to argue George Carew in the 1920 Barrymore version is a hypocrite — Carew is not at all hiding that he’s a libertine, he’s quite proud of it.

Another problem is that the book is written in heavy academese (“This is a postmodern reinscription of the traditionalist values and perspectives that ordered earlier melodramatic versions, but one that eschews earlier eschatological answers.”) which makes it hard for me to focus on Rose’s points. And some of them are good, such as noting Spencer Tracy’s version probably influenced filmmakers more than March’s superior production (small wonder — to avoid competition with the Tracy, MGM hid the March take away for 30 years). March is the last version for decades to show Jekyll doing charity medical work and up until the 1990 Michael Caine film, the Jekylls looked human rather than March’s ape-man (Tracy is also the first Jekyll to have his test animals acting strange, something repeated in several later films). This book wasn’t worth the $90 I paid for a used copy but it does have its uses.

As I mentioned last week, Tubi’s search function introduced me to a series I’d never heard of before, a 1969 Italian four-episode show called simply Jekyll. It’s another plodding attempt to adapt Stevenson faithfully and another adaptation where I see the seed of what might have been an interesting idea.

Lanyon here is a brilliant surgeon and Jekyll’s mentor before Jekyll went into research. Lanyon grumbles that Jekyll’s been seduced by the grant money available for cool research proposals and the media attention — good surgery doesn’t get your name on TV but if you announce a research breakthrough it might, even if it proves smoke-and-mirrors later. Exploring that aspect of science would have been interesting but nope, they do nothing with it.

JEKYLL: Jekyll gives Utterson his revolver just in case Hyde gets grumpy! In flashback, Hyde pressures a woman to drown her dog but she drowns herself instead! In the aftermath of this tragedy Jekyll’s friends lament his decision to tamper with god’s domain! I wondered how they’d squeeze one more episode out of it and they did it by extending Jekyll’s backstory to excruciatingly slow length. “Man created by man is the holy grail of molecular biology.”

Rewatching SCOOBY-DOO: Mask of the Blue Falcon (2013) right after seeing early episodes of the series was a little jarring: I was conscious some of the voice actors were different from the originals, which didn’t hit me when I first saw the film. That said, this is a fun adventure as the attempt to reboot the Blue Falcon TV show (in this version a live-action show) as a grim-and-gritty vigilante not only pushes the original star to the breaking point, it brings down the wrath of the hero’s arch-nemesis, Mr. Hyde. Whom I’ll note is dressed in the usual Fredric March-style Victorian outfits and top hat. This is the largest role Hyde’s gotten in any Scooby story, though it’ll still end up in the appendix I suspect.“Mr. Hyde is the monster that taught us to be afraid of monsters.”

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August 5, 2025 · 5:15 am

Jekyll and Hyde on the small screen

While I haven’t finished my reviews yet, I have now watched every Jekyll and Hyde film that I’m a)aware of and b)can access (there’s one or two that simply aren’t available on a US-compatible DVD). Now I’m moving into TV. Unfortunately the initial results have been dismal.

Long before Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf, the original Scooby Doo, Where Are You? series gave us “Nowhere to Hyde” as the first episode of the second season. The Ghost of Mr. Hyde is robbing and looting at will with his uncanny powers; is it possible that Dr. Jekyll’s descendant is up to his ancestor’s own tricks? There’s nothing much to say about this other than there’s no reason anyone should have identified the ghost as Mr. Hyde — he doesn’t name himself (or talk at all), doesn’t look like Hyde (none of the usual Victorian clothes) so why assume it?

“Sandy Duncan’s Jekyll and Hyde” was an equally forgettable episode of The New Scooby Doo Movies, the second series featuring the characters, this time pairing them off with guest stars ranging from Sonny and Cher to Batman and Robin. In this case the guest star is Sandy Duncan, appearing in a Jekyll and Hyde film when a real Mr. Hyde shows up and kidnaps her — except he got Daphne, appearing as her stunt double. From my perspective there’s even less to say, other than noting it exists.

The 2014-16 BBC series PENNY DREADFUL is another example of the monster mash-up, centering around Mina Harker’s father recruiting a werewolf, a psychic and Victor Frankenstein in his efforts to get revenge on vampire kind. As I said when I tried the first season it’s The League of Slightly Above Average Gentlemen and comparably uninteresting. Rewatching didn’t change that but as it did have Dr. Jekyll (Shazad Latif) in the third season …

The plotlines this season are splintered, which doesn’t make them any more interesting (I skipped a lot of scenes). The Jekyll part has Frankenstein recruit Jekyll, a psychologist and neurologist, to find a way to control the Bride of Frankenstein (Billie Piper), who rebelled against her mate and her creator to make her own way; Frankenstein’s in love with her and wants Jekyll to find a drug that will repress her mind to the point she’ll submit docilely.

In return, Jekyll wants Frankenstein to help him master the duality of man. Running an asylum, Jekyll has become convinced the human mind is balanced on a fulcrum between good and evil, and that to function we repress the evil. His patients have lost that ability; can Frankenstein help Jekyll find a treatment? The subtext is that Jekyll himself is intensely angry at his colleagues rejecting his ideas and that makes it even harder to win them over.

Frankenstein and Jekyll develop a successful treatment that cures at least one lunatic, and that’s the last we hear of it. They capture the Bride but Jekyll in the end sets her free. And at the end, Jekyll learns that his despised father has finally died, meaning Jekyll now inherits the family title — Lord Hyde. It doesn’t work for me but nothing in this series did.

2015’s JEKYLL AND HYDE stars Tom Bateman as Robert Jekyll, raised by foster parents in Ceylon. They’ve assured him they don’t know anything about his father, nor about why Jekyll becomes freakishly strong and violent without the drugs he takes. Then a letter from Maxwell Utterson (son of Jekyll’s solicitor) reaches him and Robert discovers his foster parents lied — they did know his dad (Louis, son of Henry). Hot with anger, he refuses to listen to their warnings and heads off to London to learn more.

What follows fits Jekyll and Hyde into an urban fantasy set-up, a war between MI-O (Military Intelligence Other) and the Tenebrae, demon-gods and their followers. On MI-O’s side we have Bulstrode (Richard Grant); the leader of the Tenebrae is Captain Dance (Enzo Cilenti). Hyde is in some fashion tied to the Tenebrae; he can free their dark god, Lord Trash (and who the hell came up with that name?) or he can perhaps destroy him. Both sides can make use of him.

This doesn’t make much sense: shapeshifting is a Jekyll family supernatural trait so why did he need drugs to make the change to Hyde? We might have learned in S2 but that never happened (the show-runner says we might as well assume the big explosion at the climax of the final episode killed everyone). On the plus side the cast are good and Bateman manages the change with very little physical difference; people can’t always tell by looking which persona they’re facing but it becomes clear fast (though this raises the question of why almost all the other Jekylls have a bigger physical change).

I also like that the two personas’ women are different from the usual. Lily (Stephanie Hyam) turns out to be manipulating Jekyll for MI-O while Bella (Natalie Gumede) is a music-hall owner rather than a streetwalker, both tougher and more independent than most of Hyde’s lovers in earlier incarnations. The show doesn’t grab me — the Tenebrae are standard foes for a series of this type — but it’s more fun to watch than Penny Dreadful.

I’ll add that while the 1930s look is great (the clothes, cars, fashions) there’s no sense of the politics or customs of the times and nobody smokes tobacco (though I’m sure it’s hard finding actors who are willing to light up and I don’t blame them for that).

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August 2, 2025 · 5:14 am

Creatures and Kryptonians: James Gunn takes over the DC Movies

James Gunn’s first contribution to the relaunch of the DC Cinematic Universe was last December’s Creature Commandos. I wasn’t thrilled. Now I’ve seen the Gunn-written, Gunn-directed Superman movie and I’m much happier. Fair warning, there will be some movie spoilers below.

Debuting in Weird War Tales #93, the Creature Commandos were three GIs who had been transformed, scientifically, into versions of the Big Three monsters, a werewolf, a vampire and Frankenstein’s creature. They were sent into the European Theater of Operations on dangerous missions, with the military gambling they’d freak Germans out simply by their presence. IIRC, the ugliness of war and the willingness of the high command to treat people as cannon fodder was a constant subtext.

I was puzzled why Gunn would pick them for his first production — they’re far from a name to conjure with — but watching the first episode I understood. In this take, Amanda Waller, having been banned from recruiting regular people, even criminals, for Task Force X, has recruited freaks held in government custody: The G.I. Robot, Dr. Phosphorus and Frankenstein’s Creature, among others. The vibe between them is very much that of the Guardians of the Galaxy, a gang of outcasts making a found family of sorts (the premise also reminded me a lot of Monsters vs. Aliens).

The trouble is, while I enjoyed the Guardians of the Galaxy movies I didn’t feel any need to listen to the same kind of banter for seven episodes. It wasn’t bad banter but I could not get into it. I did wonder whether that was a bad sign for the DCCU going forward.

It turns out no. I was very satisfied with Superman (2025), starring David Corenswet as Superman/Clark and Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) as Lois and Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor.

The plot has Luthor steal the message that Superman’s parents sent with him to Earth. The hologram is so fractured Superman’s only been able to hear the beginning, which appears to encourage him to help humanity. Among other attacks on the Man of Might, Luthor cracks and publicizes the complete message: Jor-El and Lara want Superman to rule humanity, break them to his will and impregnate enough Earth women to start the Kryptonian race over again. The world turns on Superman (“He probably has a secret harem already.”) and he finds himself questioning the reason he does everything or anything. Fortunately the Kents (Pruitt Taylor Vince, Neva Howell) are there to remind him his roots and his values come from Kansas more than Krypton, giving him the strength to rise up and renew the fight.

And in case you’re wondering, Gunn has said that the translation is accurate, not a trick by Lex. His parents wanted Kal-El to be Brightburn, but they failed.

The first thing that stands out about Superman is that it isn’t an origin story. Thank god. It was done as well as possible in the Chris Reeve Superman, badly in Man of Steel, and I doubt there’s anyone going to this movie who doesn’t know it. This takes place three years into Superman’s career, he’s already dating Lois, Luthor is his mortal foe.

The big rewrite of the origin — Jor-El and Lara aspiring to conquer Earth through their son — didn’t shock me much. It’s a good character problem for Superman but ever since John Byrne’s 1986 reboot Krypton has been an unpleasant place, either coldly scientific or militaristic. Jor-El and Lara were the exceptions; having them turn out rotten to isn’t that catastrophic.

The cast is good. Corenswet’s excellent as the good-hearted alien (“Maybe that’s the real punk rock.”), Brosnahan makes a somewhat harder edged Lois and Hoult nails Luthor as an arrogant techbro. His motives for destroying Superman are partly profit (I won’t detail the scheme) and partly jealous resentment that people look up at the Man of Might as a greater hero. My only reservation is the Kents, and that’s more Gunn writing the small-town couple as (in the words of Blazing Saddles) “the salt of the Earth — you know, morons.”

Much like the MCU, the movie seeds for the future. Along with Superman Metropolis’ Hall of Justice is home to Green Lantern Guy Gardner (Nathan Filion), Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi, more serious and competent than the Arrowverse version) and Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced — and why not Hawkwoman, I wonder?) as the “Justice Gang.” We later meet Metamorpho in Luthor’s pocket-universe prison. The opening screen crawl says metahumans have been a thing for 300 years. There’s a mural in the Hall of Justice showing that history, though I don’t see anyone who fits being the ur-meta of 300 years ago. This is not a dealbreaker; embracing figures from DCU history such as Super-Chief, Miss Liberty and Max Mercury is a plus. More broadly, there’s no doubt the DCCU is going to be very comic-book going forward rather than the toned-down version we get in Marvel movies.

There are elements borrowed from multiple incarnations of DC’s characters. The Fortress is modeled on the one from the Reeve films (it’s been the definitive comics version since Byrne’s reboot adopted it). The Hall of Justice from Super-Friends. Krypto, the Dog of Steel (TYG’s not a comics fan but she still loved him). A cameo by Supergirl modeled on Tom King’s take in Woman of Tomorrow, flying off to red-sun planets to get drunk.

And the movie emphasizes this is not the Zach Snyder Superman of Man of Steel, the one who engages in city-smashing battles without regard for collateral damage. Here he’s all about minimizing the damage: saving a dog, saving a squirrel, getting between people watching his fights and the flying debris or ray blasts. In one scene he even tries to save a kaiju attacking Metropolis rather than kill it.

They did the mash — the monster mash!

In 1943, Universal Pictures pumped new life into the Frankenstein series with the first ever horror crossover, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf-Man. The mash-up of Chaney’s Wolf Man with Bela Lugosi’s Creature was the first of several such films as Universal’s horror cycle wound down, including the closest they came to a Jekyll and Hyde film, House of Dracula.

The monster-mash crossover has remained popular ever since, including a number of Jekyll and Hyde films. Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, for instance, gives us Jekyll and Hyde, Burke and Hare and Jack the Ripper. Here are a couple more.

THE MUMMY (2017) was supposed to launch Universal’s Dark Universe which is why Dr. Jekyll (Russell Crowe) shows up: as head of the monster-fighting Prodigium (a counterpart to the MCU’s SHIELD though it feels more like the BPRD) he takes great interest in Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) whose reckless antiquity-theft efforts in Iraq have awakened Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), an Egyptian mummy with issues who plans to turn Nick into the avatar of Set, God of Death (chaos, actually) which is, spoiler, a Bad Bad Thing.

Cruise’s role is one he’s played throughout his career, the shallow, out-for-himself jerk who when the chips are down proves capable of becoming much more. It works for him in a number of movies but this isn’t one of them. Nothing about this works, including Ahmanet as the kind of demonic mummy Arnold Voosloo played in the Brendan Fraser Mummy — it has a same-old same-old by the numbers quality (I wasn’t blown away by the Fraser version but I wouldn’t accuse it of that).

Crowe’s Jekyll/Hyde is a headscratcher. He describes himself as a good man whose buried darker side “grew into an overwhelming desire, an unquenchable thirst for chaos, and the suffering of others.” which he now controls with constant drug injections. That could mean Hyde results from the usual experiment, or that he’s naturally schizoid, or something else; he could be the Victorian Jekyll with an unnatural life span or it could be there was no Victorian Jekyll. I honestly don’t care except for the purpose of my book. “This is not some common cold you have. Chicken soup and a good night’s sleep won’t make it go away.”

The TV series The Munsters was a monster mash from the first, with the Munster family consisting of Herman (Frankenstein’s Monster), Lily (Dracula’s daughter, visually), Grandpa (vampire/mad scientist), Eddie (kid werewolf) and Marilyn (the ugly cousin — actually a pretty blonde). The 1995 reboot film HERE COME THE MUNSTERS tells the story of how the family came to America and throws in Jekyll and Hyde to boot.

When the torch-wielding mobs back in Transylvania start wielding rocket launchers, Fred (Ed Herrman) and Lily (Veronica Hamel) decide to emigrate to America where Herman’s sister in law Elsa (visually the Bride) and her husband Norman Hyde (Max Grodenchik of DS9) can sponsor them as immigrants.

Of course it’s not that simple. It turns out something happened to Norman in a recent lab experiment; he’s disappeared, Elsa is comatose so there’s nobody who can sponsor them. Worse, an anti-immigrant politician, Brent Jekyll (hmm, could it be?) is holding out the Munsters as the type of immigrant filth who should be deported ASAP.

Forget torch-wielding mobs — if this came out today we’d have shrieking mobs on X denouncing the Munsters for going woke on immigration. A running theme is that we’re already a nation of immigrants as the family interact with a Sikh customs officer, a Polynesian limo driver, an Irish employment agent and others. When a cop, Warchowski, grumbles about these freaky foreigners, his partner quips “Right. Warkowski’s an old Apache name isn’t it?” Where the original show and the various revivals portray the Munsters as social outcasts, this has them fitting into the community, including Grandpa (Robert Morse) sparking neighbor Dimwiddy (Mary Woronov) and everyone at school thinking Eddie’s cool for being able to grow fangs and fur.

As for Jekyll, it turns out an opportunistic campaign manager saw the perfect opportunity when he stumbled across the transformed Hyde — a politician who never existed so he has zero scandals in his past (the film references post-smoking and draft dodging, both of which Bill Clinton had admitted to). While Hyde’s anti-immigration rants are depressingly prescient, it turns out the campaign manager didn’t need to find a spotless candidate after all … “We must ensure that foreign influences do not infiltrate the American way of life!”’

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