dmann-62849 Reviews

Perversions of Science: Given the Heir (1997) Season 1, Episode 5

Fun with Time Travel

[9/10 · 3 May 2023]

This is yet another interesting script in the underrated Perversions of Science series. This is really Yancy Butler's chance to shine. She's a futuristic mogul who hires a scientist to build a machine to go back in time after she's altered her body in the pursuit of perfection. Why? So she can go back to the 90s and romance her own perfect partner, the playboy Nick Boyer. I won't spoil the quite surprising twist, but the core of the episode is why she's so obsessed with Nick, who we see flashback video is rather full of himself. At first, it doesn't make sense.

The episode is based on a comic story of the same name from Weird Science #16. In the original story, Seymour and Helen are a couple putting off marriage. When Seymour's great-great-grandson Zenob (complete with a futuristic cape) visits the past on a time vacation, Seymour convinces him to go back in time to kill a millionaire who Seymour's great-grandmother divorced before their marriage broke so they can inherit his vast wealth. He does so. It turns out that the millionaire was Helen's great-grandfather, so she vanishes in a puff of smoke, therefore negating the whole reason for the murder in the first place. The whole thing is an amusing trifle with a surprise ending.

Yancy spends the episode either in a revealing body suit, in a trench coat (and nothing else), or in a red dress picked just to stimulate Nick's interest in her. There's also a steamy sex scene, but no full nudity. I think that critical reactions to this episode really show to what degree attitudes toward heterosexuality have darkened since the 1990s - the intersectional left would probably hate it. David Leisure, known in part from his Subaru commercials in the 1980s, plays the role of a troubled bank manager. For me, it's a classic Twilight Zone type story with a bit of "perversion" mixed in. You can't say they didn't warn you - after all, the series is called PERVERSIONS OF SCIENCE.

Perversions of Science: Dream of Doom (1997) Season 1, Episode 1

Dreamy Trip

[8/10 · 3 May 2023]

Keith Carradine trips his way through multiple dream worlds, trying to wake up. The other four principal actors show up in various roles. Ambitious for a half-hour SF episode, with a complex storyline which explores Descartes' idea of an evil demon tricking the thinker. Has an interesting twist at the end. Arkin's character even quotes the Cartesian "cogito ergo sum." Carradine plays a college professor, fairly effectively.

I'm not sure why this series has to DVD or Blu-Ray release - it contains some classic storylines seemingly based on the pre-Code EC Comics from the early 1950s. It's probably because of the overt sexuality of the robot narrator, along with the small amount of nudity.

Based loosely on "Dream of Doom" in Weird Science #12 (#1 in renumbered "new line" of EC Comics), a similar story, though in the comic the hero is an comic-book artist working for "Gill Baines". It has some meta commentary on comics production. In the comic, the hero drifts through a series of dreams, like Carradine's character in Perversions.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022– )

This was certainly a TV show!

[6/10 · 6 September 2022]

It had lots of people in it, and was very expensive.

I can tell they used very good cameras in it.

The kraft table was probably well stocked.

But seriously, I couldn't help but notice that all the reviews which gave it less than 6 stars have been deleted. Presumably these were all hateful fans.

But the bots and shills who gave it 10 stars were left on the site. I hope they were well paid.

The original Star Wars film from 1977 stands at 31.1% ten star ratings. This show stands at 32.5% ten star ratings. Are you seriously saying that fans prefer this widely panned show to one of the greatest scifi space operas of all time?

I sense a disturbance in the power of the critical force.

Also, I have a bad feeling about this.

IMDB: these are NOT the critics you're looking for. They appear to live in hives of scum and villainy.

Lastly, I find their lack of faith in the power of Tolkien disturbing.

Nemesis Game (2003)

Riddles within Riddles

[7/10 · 1 August 2022]

I stumbled on this movie on a streaming service and found it intriguing, though with some flaws. Without giving away too many spoilers, it's about Carly Pope's character Sara Novak becoming obsessed with a riddle game combined with a sort of treasure hunt, where riddles written in blue paint lead to some sort of "design" that explains everything. She's a university student in Toronto - a real Toronto, not the ersatz one that subs in for Chicago or New York in other films shot in Canada because of lower costs - though this film is a New Zealand-Canada co-production, with the interiors presumably shot in New Zealand.

It's a very low-key drama with pretensions to telling its audience the meaning of life. It was interesting to see a more analogue version of Toronto (and apparently Hamilton's McMaster University) from about 20 years ago - the grimy subway without digital billboards, a university lecture with overhead projectors and students writing in notebooks, a comics-video shop where Adrian Paul's Vern works full of VHS tapes - it seems like another world, even though it's only a flyspeck away in time.

The main mystery is a bit wonky, and too often the characters stumble into things that a wiser person would avoid, though on the other hand the tricky riddles are solved a bit two easily for my taste. It has a certain intelligence.

Ian McShane is the best thing in the movie in the role of Pope's father; Adrian Paul struggles with a flat American accent, though is suitably enigmatic; Jay Baruchel provides some mild comedic relief as a creepy fellow student who is after Sara; while Rena Owen has a small role as a disturbed killer just out of jail. All in all, a slow burn, suitable for a quiet Sunday night if you have nothing pressing to do.

Flash Gordon (1979–1982)

A Forgotten Classic

[9/10 · 20 April 2021]

I only discovered this cartoon in 2021 during the Covid lockdown, and it was a very pleasant surprise for several reasons: it was presented as one long serial broken up into 16 chapters (at least for season 1), it features often gorgeous painted backdrops and solid animation, and had some pulpy adult themes. Pretty well every episode involves Flash, Dale and Zarkov visiting some new kingdom or meeting a new species, usually with a too-literal name like "Arboria" or "Frigia" . There's Hawkmen, Lionmen, Arborians (tree dwellers), giants, dinosaurs, etc. Ming is indeed merciless, Princess Aura a femme fatale, while all the local queens fall in love with Flash as Dale frets in the background. Well deserving of a DVD re-release.

Watchmen (2019)

Alan Moore Would Roll in His Grave (if he were dead)

[1/10 · 25 March 2021]

Cheap attempt to use the Watchmen name to preach 21st century politics. The producers should have had the courage to make this an independent series with its own name and thematics rather than taking the tiniest sliver from the classic comic (and Snyder's film) to trick people into watching it.

The Twilight Zone (2019–2020)

Some Satirical Pitches to The Twilight Zone Containing No Useful Information

[3/10 · 22 May 2019]

Here are my pitches for future episodes of the wonderful re-imagining of Rod Serling's classic series. The actual scripts shouldn't be too hard to write - they practically write themselves. I hope you don't find the titles to be too literal: we want to be subtle after all.

1. MANSPREADING

A woman gets on a bus in a busy city. She tries to find a seat, but all the men on the bus are taking up two seats each. She slowly becomes more panicky, eventually having a breakdown after she drops her bag of tomatoes on the floor of the bus (accompanied by ominous music a la Psycho as the tomatoes explode in a flurry of red vegetable matter). The episode ends when a team of white male doctors appear and take her away to an asylum. The bus driver gives her a condescending smile as she leaves.

2. MANSPLAINING

A woman goes to a party. She has too much to drink, blacks out, then wakes up, only to find that the lighting in the apartment has become ominously dark. From that point on, whenever she tries to explain what happened to one of the men at the party, she is interrupted rudely by one of them, who explain to her that she has a drinking problem. In the final scene the men at the party take off masks, revealing themselves to be Martians (I know, it's a shock, but a good director can make it work).

3. WHITE PRIVILEGE

A black woman who teaches at a local college thinks her life is great until she wakes up one day and looks in the mirror, discovering that she's white. Oblivious to her change in skin tone, everyone treats her well at work. She has a flashback to an ugly incident ten years ago when one of her colleagues criticized the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw to her face and she cried. That's followed by another flashback to a second ugly incident from her past, when she opened the fridge in the faculty lounge and found that her can of Coke was missing (we can do Pepsi if there's some product placement dollars in it). In the final scene, all the white people reveal themselves to be hideous aliens, just like in the John Carpenter film They Live! (don't worry, no one remembers that film). They sprout long proboscises that fasten on to the necks of the remaining humans, sucking blood with a loud slurping sound. Fade to black.

4. THE WALL

A loud-mouth, narcissistic man named Donegal Hurrump lives in a nice home in the suburbs. The hard-working Castro family moves in next door. Hurrump doesn't speak Spanish, and hates Ricky Martin, so he builds a wall to keep the Castros at a distance. Just as he's about to nail in the final plank in the wall, he falls off his ladder and cracks his head on his backyard statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, dying. The camera slowing zooms into the blood on the Lee statue as we hear "La Vida Loca" playing in the background. PS I realize that you've already covered this issue in "Point of Origin", but since immigration is such an important issue, it's worth hammering it home again.

5. JUSSTICE

A gay black actor living in Chicago is hassled by two local white guys who wear MAGA hats, taunting him, in one case throwing a milkshake at him from across the street (though it doesn't actually hit him). The actor complains to the police, who arrest the MAGA guys. They are put on trial, found guilty, and sentenced to twenty years in Alcatraz (which has re-opened for dramatic reasons). In a surprise ending, the warden sets up a guillotine in the prison yard, and then executes the MAGA guys. In the final scene, we see the actor crying, and then uttering the line "That's jusssstice!"

(PS to IMBD team: this is satire, there is nothing to "verify").

The Twilight Zone: A Traveler (2019) Season 1, Episode 4

I Really Wanted to Like This One...

[4/10 · 21 April 2019]

I like Steve Yuen from his role on The Walking Dead, and Greg Kinnear is a steady performer, and newbie Marika Sila is suitably paranoid (and she's from NWT to boot), but even this episode moves at a slow pace, and the whole alien invasion thing is muddled: who are they? What do they want? Why did they put the Traveller in a jail cell? Does he really care about being pardoned?

Should have been titled "The 'Monsters' Are Maybe Due on Alaska Street, If They Don't Decide to Go Back Home or Eat Pie, Or Something LIke That."

If you change the title Glen Morgan, I expect an end credit.

The Twilight Zone: Nightmare at 30,000 Feet (2019) Season 1, Episode 2

Strange Fruit with a Podcast

[3/10 · 16 April 2019]

Like the other episodes broadcast so far (we get them on the airwaves in Canada), this one makes clear why Jordan Peele's new TZ is a slow-moving snoozefest whose central moral is fuzzy and unclear, not to mention its internal logic. So our hero has a mp3 player with a podcast of his plane's crash. Why not quietly offer to play it for a flight attendant? The podcast plays the same role as Shatner's gremlin in the far superior original episode, except that in that one there's a good reason why only he can see the danger (i.e. the gremlin hides). Further, the longer run time of the new TZ (up to an hour), added to Peele's emotionless, laconic narrations, adds elements of tedium to a show that was tightly paced in Serling's original.

And then there's the ending. What in the world was the moral of this story? Don't listen to podcasts? Don't fly in planes? Don't make deals with shady ex-pilots? Peele shows us a number of potentially dangerous passengers, then opts to make the villain a generic white guy whose motivations we're not clear about, even though he had lots of time to tell us.

And when the passengers, who all miraculously survived on some atoll that looks like it's off the cost of Newfoundland, find our podcast lover alive on the beach, they lynch him. Why? He tried to warn them there was a danger on the plane. Aside from the incongruities of the plots of the first three episodes, there's an unpleasant undercurrent in Peele's reboot that simply wasn't there in Serling's original. Watch this last scene carefully and you'll get what I mean.

Where's Shatner when you need him?

The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure (2012)

This is Why Crowdsourcing Reviews Doesn't Always Work

[1/10 · 20 December 2018]

Look over the disjunction between the negative and positive reviews of this movie - clearly one side is lying. I leave it up to the intelligent reader to guess which side.

Cunk on Britain (2016–2018)

Standing at a fork in our crossroads...

[9/10 · 5 May 2018]

A clever satire on all those BBC and Channel 4 historical documentaries that we Canadians get to watch on public networks like TVO. I kept thinking, "this sure looks like a bad Neil Oliver doc", when lo and behold, Neil Oliver shows up answering Cunk's questions with a deadpan face. I swear that the steam train shots were taken from that show where the hosts try to live like Victorian farmers. Taking the piss in the nicest way.

The X-Files: The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat (2018) Season 11, Episode 4

The Evil Machinations of Dr. They

[10/10 · 25 January 2018]

This is the funniest X-Files episode ever, funnier than even "Bad Blood" and "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'". Written by the show's best writer, Darin Morgan, it's a wild and wacky exploration of false memory driven by the stories told by the supposed co-originator of the X-Files, Agent Reggie. Without giving away any spoilers, the final scene with the alien is priceless. Once it starts firing in its second act, it's sublime. Perhaps a bit too precise in its references to Trump, still the core philosophy of truth in the digital age presented by Morgan is worthy of being discussed in university courses. Perhaps I'll do precisely that. The best line comes from Skinner in the final scene.

As some critics have said, the episode is more political than X-Files mythology episodes traditionally have been, but the show was ALWAYS about politics - the first Gulf War and Clinton received multiple references in Seasons 1-9, and then there's the classic "Musings of Cigarette-Smoking Man", which is about the whole political history of Cold War America. So critics, you're not playing fair.

Also, you miss the cutting profundity of Dr. They's dialogue with Mulder, especially the point that in the age of the Internet and portable digital media, hiding the truth is no longer possible: it's definitely out there. But there's so many versions of it out there, and since people are so stuck in their ideologies, the truth no longer matters. Hence Dr. They doesn't have to "silence" Mulder and Scully - he even makes a YouTube video about his machinations.

Modern Educayshun (2015)

Orwell Was Right

[9/10 · 5 November 2017]

I think reviewers here (and many on YouTube) totally fail to understand Neel's sharp and witty short.

First, it's not meant to be "realistic", any more than 1984 or The Hunger Games are meant to be "realistic". It's a dystopian satire. Good satires make fun of extreme versions of real-world ideas and institutions. In fact, the 1+1=2 math problem is an obvious reference to Orwell.

Second, since he's attacking the extremes of identity politics today, not movements for racial and sexual equality and civil rights from the 1960s and 1970s, he would NOT be kicked out of Australia if political correctness ended. Comparing civil rights to political correctness is like comparing house cats to tigers: one is nice (though it has claws and meows a lot), one is a ferocious and dangerous beast. In fact, the tendencies that the video satirizes are potentially totalitarian in themselves.

A must viewing for college and university students across the Western world. It's funny that this video has only attracted three comments on IMDb, two of them in incomplete sentences and full of language errors: so much for clear, rational debate.