Reviews

Oddly enough, though I haven't yet seen the original Scary Godmother movie (Spooktacular), I've seen this one _twice_.

Basic premise - the plucky little girl heroine Hannah became friends with the Halloween creatures of the Fright Side last Halloween, and is now looking forward to a wonderful holiday this year. Unfortunately, her mean older cousin Jimmy got terribly scared (unexpected side effect of a mean Halloween joke he played on Hannah last year) and is terrified of it this year. So he plots to keep Chri- er, Halloween from coming! But how?

The interplay between the actions of Jimmy (threatening Halloween) and Hannah (saving it) and the consequences of those actions on the Fright Side makes up the bulk of the movie. Eventually there is a happy ending. Not an earthshaking piece of cinema, but great for kids on H- can't type it again. Next year, I'll have to get the first movie, and have a double feature for the kids and their friends.

My favorite line - when Scary Godmother realizes that something is threatening H-, she cries out, "Somethings's bad! Black socks with sandals bad!"

A previous reviewer wrote "The reference to Ferber's "So Big" makes fun of a vain actress. (I'm not positive about that caricature. Katharine Hepburn perhaps? She had been box office poison for some time.)"

That was Greta Garbo. The urban legend about the size of her feet was current at the time, and several of these shorts (e.g., Hollywood Steps Out) reference that.

The part about these 'topical' shorts that surprises me - my nine year old son, who has NO idea who any of these people are, watches these with almost as much enjoyment as the more timeless episodes. Some of the bits - Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson tap dancing up The 39 Steps, or the hideously dated images in the Cab Calloway sequence - which may strike him as offensive in years to come, just blend in with the rest for him right now.

This was one of those "the store is out of Movie X, so I'll pick up this and hope it's not too bad" movies.

I was honestly expecting some "Ferngully"/"Dinotopia - Quest for the Ruby Sunstone" level abomination. The things we go through for our kids, blah blah.

But it wasn't. Mind you, I'm not saying it's great - just better than a title like "The Snurks" would lead you to believe. "Return to Gaya" would have conveyed the quality better, but sounds like a sequel.

The thing I liked best about it was that it did not unswervingly obey genre conventions. The idea of fictional, fantasy characters winding up in the Real World (tm) is by no means new, but it was treated with some intelligence. The Big Dumb Hero who, we discover, KNOWS that he's dumb, and doesn't seem entirely happy about it, the ostensible villain who displays a streak of heroism, the coward who, released from the narrative imperative, proves capable of bravery - and a real villain whose motivation for villainy is - get this - rage over having had his television show canceled in favor of less intellectually demanding fare - all these are surprising details, and display more originality than you'll find in a half-dozen similar movies.

This was a favorite of my childhood - I can remember seeing it on television and thrilling to it each time. Now that I'm grown up and have a kid of my own, I wanted to introduce him to this classic movie. We watched it last Friday, and he liked it. During Abu's fight with the giant spider, my son's hand crept over and took hold of mine - he was genuinely scared. "Is he gonna beat the spider, Poppa?" Just watch, you'll see. He has no historical frame of reference to speak of (eight years old), so Bagdad under the grandson of Haroun al-Raschid might as well be Oz under Ozma.

I think he especially liked how much of the heroics and derring-do were perpetrated by the boy-thief, and not the grown-up king. In fact, if you deconstruct the film's narrative a bit, the king is the thief's sidekick, not the hero at all - which must be very satisfying to imaginative, adventurous young boys.

It's definitely a period piece - I suspect that by the time he's eleven or twelve, my son will find it 'corny' or whatever word the next generation will be using by then. The love story is barely one-dimensional - as a cynical friend commented, "Why does Ahmad love the Princess? Because the narrative demands it." The willingness of Abu to put himself in jeopardy (repeatedly) for the clueless, love-struck deposed king is equally improbable. But to quibble about such things while accepting flying mechanical horses, fifty-foot genies and the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye would be fatuous in the extreme. The satisfaction of seeing the prophecy fulfilled at the movie's climax is tremendous, as is the final shot of Abu triumphantly flying away on his (stolen) magic carpet, seeking "some fun, and adventure at last!"

Meh.

For the record, I loved loved LOVED the original book, and even read and enjoyed the sequel (World Below, IIRC).

This was. . . well, it was only 76 minutes. That's the best thing I can say about it.

Rough summary (spoilers ahoy!). Protagoniat Kex runs away from an orphanage (?!) in what appears to be present-day Seattle, or possible San Francisco, stows away on a ship's lifeboat, which conveniently falls overboard in a storm. Shipwrecks or boatwrecks on a tropic island shore, and is promptly confronted by a small dinosaur speaking flawless, colloquial American English. It doesn't get better from there.

Almost everything that made the original Dinotopia wonderful IMHO was carefully excised to make this 'kid-friendly', and a lot of kludge was carefully wadded in. The brief scenes in Waterfall City were a painful glimpse of the movie this could have been had they given a good g*dd**n.

In closing, this could have been the lowest point in Malcom McDowell's career - but there's still GigaShadow.

This was one of those "oh, look, I've never heard of this movie, wonder what it's like, let's give it a try" rentals.

It didn't take very long to get the impression that it was a sequel to ANOTHER movie we'd never heard of, and why we hadn't. Not so much bad, as. . . strange. Is that character a baddie, or is the actress merely not very good? Now I discover that the disjointed dialogue is at least partially due to dubbing. Bulgaria, hmm? Well, that explains all the beautiful country landscapes alternating with anonymous soundstage interiors.

The distressing part was, this was a good idea that will never be made into a good movie, because someone already made this movie.

Spoiler - I did like the glowing floating jellyfish . . . thing inside the Torus, and the special effect of zapping people into some strange white-lit space - and then back to where they'd been before. Inexplicable, and strange in a good way. I got the feeling that whoever/whatever was behind the Toroi

was doing some High Weirdness, and it came out looking like what we were seeing. Then it was back to wooden acting, dubbed dialogue and inexplicable plot development. <Sigh>

This is not Citizen Kane, but it ain't Curse of the Demon, either.

For its time, it was quite groundbreaking - a horror story by daylight, with modern day people who (more or less) covertly practice a religion which, in 1972, most people thought was as dead as Etruscan. Nowadays, when my sister and brother in law can drive a car with a pentacle bumpersticker around rural California without concern, and my husband can use "Good God - and Goddess" as an exclamation, we may not remember what things were like thirty-plus years ago.

My own personal favorite memory of seeing this in a cinema, back in the '70s, was what my friend Jose said afterwards. Warning: spoiler ahead!



At the end of the movie, the islanders are standing around the burning Wicker Man, with the unfortunate mainlander screaming inside - and they start singing "Sumer is i-cumen in"! I was so moved by this I started singing along, softly, to myself. Jose, sitting next to me, realized that I apparently knew the song - which he'd never heard or heard of before. Then he remembered that I'm of Scots ancestry - and was suddenly, if briefly, utterly terrified. "Oh my God, it's all _true!_"

I probably love this movie more for that one moment than for the movie itself.

Robert