Baywatch Nights was surprisingly good considering it was supposed to be a sequel to Baywatch.
I agree that the first thing I thought of was Pirates of the Caribbean (already mentioned above in the second post). That movie was WAY better than I would have expected of a movie based o an amusement park ride. I didn’t care for Haunted Mansion very much, despite Eddie Murphy.
I thought that the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still also far outdid its SF short-story origin. The story had a minor twist at the end that the movie used, but not realy as a twist. The movie would’ve been great even without it.
An d it’s not a classic, but the movie They Live more than fulfilled the promise of the very short story it’s based on.
Let’s say “comic-book superhero movies”.
The reboot of Battlestar Galactica. The original series was a pretty, shiny, oh-so-70’s family show with lots of hair and teeth, and by the time they were done with the original series and its followups they were pretty much done. I don’t know why they thought a reboot would be successful, but they completely nailed it.
Is this the She that starred the woman who ran against Tricky Dick Nixon for a California congressional seat in the late 1940s? Because I loved that movie, even though it was B&W and set in the polar wastes instead of in deepest Africa.
I’m asking you instead of looking it up myself because I want to hear you talk more about it.
I walked away from Galaxy Quest thinking that it was far better than it had any right to be. Despite the rest of its cast, my mind was pretty much locked in on “Tim Allen is mistaken for a space captain; hijinx ensue!”.
I don’t think one was better than the other, they were just very different. I really liked the book, especially how Gloriana and Tully became engaged.
Self righteously, I imagine. With a bit of eye-rolling and sighing.
I remember my parents’ incredulity that there should be a board game of something so simple as Battleships, which had historically just been a pencil-and-paper game. How could anybody want to spend good money on such pointless plastic tat? Although I bridled initially at the “previous generation criticising what’s available to kids nowadays” phenomenon, this only lasted a few seconds, as I had to admit they had a point…
Yes, it was the one with Helen Gahagan (who later used her married name Helen Gahagan Douglas when she entered politics and ran against Nixon) She really was her one and only movie role, although she’d been a Broadway actress and tried to become an opera singer.
The movie was made by much of the same crew that had made King Kong the previous year, although without Schoedsack. His wife Ruth Rose again wrote the screenplay, and Max Steiner again did the music (at times it sounds amazingly like King King’s score). A lot of the effects crew came back, too, although not Willis O’Brien and his crowd – there wasn’t any stop-motion animation.
I’d wanted to se the film for years, having read about it in books on fantastic cinema, but it must have never made it to syndication in a big way, or got pulled from it, or something, because I don’t recall it even being on TV or in movie revival. I didn’t see it until I picked up the DVD a couple of years ago.
The DVD was colorized under the direction of Ray Harryhausen*, who HATED the slovenly way Turner had colorized King Kong (all the plants are the same shade of green", he complained), and took meticulous care in colorizing this film. He also had no qualms about colorizing it, unlike Kong, which was made to be seen in black and white, because it was supposed to be a color film. And it does look gorgeous in color, and far superior to the black and white version.,
One thing that stands out is how much the look of this film has influenced others. Lots of places will tell you how Gahagan’s costuime and character influenced the Evil Queen in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – that’s obvious once you se the costume. Less obvious is the way Harryhausen used the same footage of the avalanche in his first solo film the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, or the way the Throne Room of She influenced the Throne Room scene I his film First Men in the Moon, right down to the Obscuring Barrier in front of the ruler (a fog/mist barrier in She, a rotating crystal in FMitM).
She is an interesting product of its times. H. Rider Haggard thought he had created his masterpiece with it, and it was immensely successful. His character of Ayesha is one of the original femmes fatale and one of the most successful. She a strong and virtually immortal ruler who is also supposed to be Evil, although she never really does a lot of Evil things. I think a lot of her notoriety comes from simply being a strong female character, which they weren’t supposed to be in her day. Her death at the end of the book is actually pretty much unexplained, and makes more dramatic sense than logical sense, as she is consumed by the very Flame of Life that gave her immortality. But Ayesha was too good a character to keep down, and Haggard resurrected her in a sequel, Ayesha, the Return of She. It’s the first case I know of where a character we saw undeniably killed gets brought back from the dead, with some sort of justification (Dickens and Doyle had brought back apparently dead characters before, but there was always some ambiguity, and they didn’t try to explain) Then he brought her back for a couple more sequels, actually having her meet his other continuing character, Allan Quatermain.
The book provided the basis for two silent movies before Cooper’s, bits of which are included on my DVD. She also probably influenced Pierre Benoit in the writing of his novel l’Atlantide, about a similar “evil” female ruler, supposedly of Atlantis (although the story is set in the Sahara), that was similarly filmed multiple times. It also was adapted in comic book time at least three times, although not by Classics Illustrated.
More later
*Harryhausen also colorized H.G. Wells’ Thing to Come
Galaxy Quest is a perfect example. The premise sounds like an SNL sketch stretched to feature length, but it wound up being an extremely good movie.
My nominee is Repo! The Genetic Opera. The premise (in the future, people commonly get quasi-cybernetic enhancements paid on credit, and if you default a repo man comes and violently removes your enhanced organs) is convoluted as heck. It was an intentional attempt to make a midnight movie, which is usually a tone-deaf endeavor. The cast is an odd mish-mash of C-listers, past-their-primes, and unknowns. Oh, and it’s a goth musical released years after the goth aesthetic peaked.
But I think the whole thing kinda works, largely because a few of the performances are stronger than they have any right to be. The songs are catchy, a lot of the humor lands, and the art design is impressive for a small production. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s fun.
The Cooper film is interesting in lots of ways. One is the appearance of Nigel Bruce playing Holly. He’s not the ugly character Holly is supposed to be. You get the feeling that he’s warming up for the role of Dr., Watson to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes, a role he wouldn’t play for another five years. The novel she has them seeking her in Africa, but the movie moved her stronghold to the Himalayas, a good move for lots of reasons. In the first place, it was more photogenic. In the second place, it got them away from that Jungle milieu Cooper had spent two previous films in. It also got away from the “savage African tribes:” thing that makes people squirm today with its heavy racism. The Evil Savages and the folks of the Lost Civilization in She are both mad up of white guys.
The Mystical Flame of the novel is re-imagined here as some new radioactive element, which early on was thought to have wonderful curative powers.
Actually, both those latter ideas come from Haggard’s sequel – in Ayesha they look for her in the Himalayas. And when Haggard wrote She radioactivity hadn’t yet been discovered. It had by the time he wrote the sequel, so he included it as a piece of after-the-fact rationalization. It all just proves that Ruth Rose read both books.
The special effects for the film were pretty decent. You can appreciate them better in color, with details highlighted by the colorization that you could easily miss in black and white. The doors of She’s palace are pretty clearly the doors to Kong’s jungle, just dressed up differently.
The movie’s a bit dumbed down from the book. It introduces Leo Vincey just before his uncle’s death and has him starting on his journey immediately afterwards. It’s a good way to fit in exposition and move the plot along, but the original story was that Leo learned of his position years before, and he and Holly spent that time learning ancient Greek (which allowed them to speak with Ayesha). In the film, as in lots of Star Trek episodes, everybody conveniently speaks English.
The film was remade in the 1960s with Ursula Andress, Peter Cushing, and Christopher Lee. I’ve seen bits and pieces of it, but it looked pretty awful, and I’ve never tried to get a copy of that version. a 1982 version, set in a post-apocalyptic future, and starring Sandahl Bergman, just looked to awful too consider, despite having Rick Wakeman music in the soundtrack. There’s also a 2001 version that I know almost nothing about, except that it has some surprising names in the cast (Christoph Waltz!)
The new Westworld series. The original movie was decent for the time and had a great cast but it’s pretty simplistic. At least the first season of the show is so much better. It had me guessing the entire time as to where it was going and game me some genuine surprises. And that’s pretty rare.
Huh, it didn’t look like anything to me.
The 1965 version of She was a Hammer Films production, and no movie with Peter Cushing (in typical form as an archeologist) and Christopher Lee (one-note as cliché evil priest) can ever be completely without entertainment value. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of co-star John Richardson, who was devoid of talent or charisma, and whose performance taints the flick (why didn’t they just use a real block of wood?) Nevertheless, the one indisputable advantage of this version over the 1935 one is that Ursula Andress (and her dubbed voice) is way hotter than Helen Douglas:
https://img.posterlounge.co.uk/images/wbig/poster-she-ursula-andress-1964-356691.jpg
For some viewers, the appearance of Ms. Andress in her ‘60s prime transcends any other flaws of the film.
There was also The Vengeance of She (1968), a sequel similarly afflicted with John Richardson in the same role, though in reduced screentime. The star was Olinka Berova, who vaguely resembles Andress from some angles. It’s not even as good as the earlier film, but I found it more interesting and watchable than its reputation.