Category: Feature

Direct Beam Comms #98

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

Loudermilk & Hit the Road

Hit the Road
Hit the Road

Two new series premiered on DirecTV last week — Loudermilk and Hit the Road. Both of these shows are decent, but I don’t think I’ll be watching any more than the first episode of each. Loudermilk stars Ron Livingston as the title character who’s an ex-alcoholic moonlighting as a counselor and “tells it like it is.” Hit the Road stars Jason Alexander as the head of a family band who tours the country. The band plays the loving family who has it all together onstage but are completely dysfunctional off.

Each of these shows are mostly regular sitcom series but with a bit of moderate nudity and cursing thrown in. Loudermilk is that sitcom character popular these days who has no filter while the family of Hit the Road have problems from lying to drugs — but in a sitcom family kind’a way.

In many ways Loudermilk and Hit the Road reminded me of British comedies that have a bit of an edge to them where neither nudity nor swearing is frowned upon. Except many of those comedies, especially the ones that air here in the US, have somewhat of an edge to them. Of which is totally lacking in these two shows.

Harsh Realm (1999) – Gone too soon

A few weeks ago I read an interesting post where writer Ken Levine talked about some TV series he liked that were cancelled too soon. Never afraid to steal a good idea I decided to pick up that mantle and write about some of my favorite series that I thought were cancelled too quickly.

The cast of Harsh Realm
The cast of Harsh Realm

Harsh Realm was the second series created by Chris Carter to follow his extremely popular show The X-Files. Sort’a a cross between that series and The Matrix, Harsh Realm takes place in a military computer simulation that’s “one mistake away” from our reality. This simulation is an exact duplicate to our reality except for one thing — here, New York was nuked throwing it into a lawless chaos.

A lawless chaos where real soldiers can plug in and go on realistic training missions without the possibility of being hurt. Except one of those soldiers, General Santiago (Terry O’Quinn) went in, took over and formed a dictatorship and now rules the realm. Enter Tom Hobbes (Scott Bairstow) who’s sent in to kill Santiago and end his rule. Inside this simulation Hobbes meets other people like Mike Pinocchio (D. B. Sweeney) who prefers life inside the game to outside where he’s disabled and simulated people like Florence (Rachel Hayward) who can manipulate the code of the system for her benefit.

I remember when Harsh Realm premiered in 1999 it was hyped like crazy by FOX. They already had a massive hit on their hands with The X-Files and while Carter’s follow-up series Millennium wasn’t as big of a hit as that series was, it was solid enough to last three seasons. And at the time I was a mega-fan of The X-Files with that series being my favorite show on TV so I couldn’t have been more excited about Harsh Realm.

Terry O'Quinn
Terry O’Quinn

The first episode was … interesting. It’s got a lot going for it from the post-apocalyptic look and feel to the idea that everything’s taking place inside a computer. Well, most everything. Part of the first episode of Harsh Realm also dealt with Hobbes’ wife played by Samantha Mathis trying to find out what the military did with her husband while dealing with a shadowy governmental agency trying to cover things up. I always thought this part of the show seemed tacked-on in order to have some element of The X-Files DNA in Harsh Realm.

Regardless, I liked the series enough and was excited to see where the first season lead when Harsh Realm was abruptly cancelled after just three episodes. The series premiered in October and didn’t make it to November. In fact, it wasn’t until years later when the show aired again on FX that I was able to watch the remaining six episodes. But even then there wasn’t much resolution as the series ended with just nine episodes of what I’m assuming was meant to be a 24 episode season.

Now, Harsh Realm is an oddity. Since there wasn’t a whole season the streaming services won’t touch it. And since there’s no resolution means that only dedicated fans of the genera or people who saw the series when it originally aired in 1999 are going to seek it out, making this one a series few have heard about and fewer still have watched.

Harsh Realm is available on DVD and episodes can also be streamed on YouTube as well.

Godless TV spot

Comics

Marvel Horror: The Magazine Collection Paperback

From Marvel:

Marvel’s supernatural superstars star in lavishly illustrated tales of horror! And many of these bizarre adventures from the age of the black-and-white magazine are collected here for the very first time! Blade hunts, Dracula stalks and the Zombie shambles! Meanwhile, night brings the daughter of the diabolical Satana! You’ll meet Gabriel, Devil Hunter! Discover the magic of Lady Daemon! Fear the Death-Dealing Mannikin! And brave the Haunt of Horror and the Vault of Evil! They’re rarely seen creepy classics filled with werewolves, vampires and monsters unleashed – read them if you dare!

Movies

Black Panther trailer

The Reading List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1943: Michael Crichton, creator of Jurassic Park, Twister and the TV series ER is born
  • 1959: Sam Raimi, director of The Evil Dead and Spider-Man franchises is born
  • 1984: The TV series V premiers
  • 1984: Terminator opens in theaters
  • 1994: Stargate opens in theaters
  • 1996: The TV series Millennium premiers
  • 1997: Gattaca premiers
  • 1998: Soldier opens

Stranger Things of the Third Kind

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There haven’t been a lot of movies made that take place in my home state of Indiana. Off the top of my head I can only think of a few like Breaking Away, Hoosiers and A History of Violence. Maybe movies don’t take place in Indiana since right up the road is the mega-city of Chicago where lots of them do that draws interest away from the Hoosier state? So when the Netflix series Stranger Things debuted last year that takes place in the fictionalized town of Hawkins, Indiana I got excited since I couldn’t immediately think of another cool sci-fi thing like Stranger Things that was set here. Then I remembered one of the greatest sci-fi movies in history was also set partially in Indiana that Stranger Things bears a striking resemblance to — Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was writer/director Steven Spielberg’s big follow-up to his smash movie Jaws. In this movie, several people including an Indiana artist (Melinda Dillon) and electric worker (Richard Dreyfus) experience alien encounters over the course of a night. In the electric worker’s case it’s spotting a UFO so bright it leaves him with a half-sunburn while with the artist her son abducted by aliens and is taken away. Afterwards, the two become obsessed with trying to come to terms with what’s happened to them while at the same time trying to put on paper an image that’s in both of their heads. When they finally realize this image is a calling from the aliens to meet at Devil’s Tower, Wyoming and the duo have to track across most of the US to get there while government officials, who also realize what’s about to happen, also gather there and try to stop anyone else from witnessing this event.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was born in an age where aliens could still be looked upon with wonder and amazement, something that essentially died in the 1990s with series like The X-Files, of which the TV series Stranger Things has taken its cue from.

Stranger Things
Stranger Things

Much like with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stranger Things also deals with a missing boy abducted not by aliens, but by a creature living in an alternate dimension known in the show as “the upside down” that’s much like our own only black and full of filth. And instead of the characters being able to witness these creatures with amazement like they do in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in Stranger Things they’re met with horror since these things literally want to consume us. And while you get the feeling that the government officials of Close Encounters of the Third Kind are lying to the people to keep them away from Devil’s Tower, it’s because they’re trying to protect us and keep the population from panicking. But the government officials in Stranger Things have no regard for the regular people. They’re ready to sacrifice us at a moment’s notice if it means forwarding their agenda, learning more about the upside down or keeping what’s happening hidden.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Close Encounters of the Third Kind

While different then each other, I think that Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of the best sci-fi movies of all time while Stranger Things was one of the best series on TV last season. Even if they’re essentially two sides of the same coin. On the one side is Close Encounters of the Third Kind that comes from a 1960s “flower power” idealism where of positivity and wonderment would win the day. On the other is Stranger Things that has its roots in a 1990s flavored mix of government conspiracy and general fear of the things that go bump in the night where you must fear the unknown and fight for your life.

And now comes a second season of Stranger Things just in time for Halloween with all episodes set to debut on Netflix October 27. Mums been the word on the actual plot of the second season, other than it looks to be a continuation of the first with the same characters but with larger monsters from the upside down. Much larger monsters — ones the size of cities.

Direct Beam Comms #97

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

Mindhunter

If David Fincher wasn’t such an all-around great director, one of the best working in the business, I’d be a bit worried that the guy would be type… err – …cast as only a director of movies featuring serial killers. His first film of note Seven featured a serial killer who murdered people based on the “seven deadly sins,” Zodiac was all about the Zodiac killer who terrorized California in the 1960s and 1970s and even the underrated The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was about a Swedish serial killer alternating between the 1960s and present day.

But Fincher has done more than just serial killer fare, he’s also directed things like Alien 3, Panic Room, Fight Club and The Social Network too all featuring characters who might be somewhat mildly psychotic, but not a single serial killer in the bunch!

Still, I had to wonder a bit about Fincher when his latest Netflix project was announced last year — a series about FBI agents who in the 1970s began interviewing serial killers in jail to try and see what made them do what they did in the series Mindhunter.

In Mindhunter, Jonathan Groff plays Holden Ford. An FBI hostage negotiator who’s trying to work within the confines of an agency built and setup to run in the 1930s but operating in a very different America of 1977. Ford wants to understand why criminals are the way they are, like why do people like Charles Manson do the things they’ve done? Whereas the average agent knows why criminals are the way they are — they were born that way. Period. End of argument. Ford and veteran agent Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) set out on a training tour of small towns across the country where they can bring a little light of more modern police work to them and these cops can teach these FBI agents about some of the realities of life on the street as it were.

In many ways, Mindhunter acts as a sort of prequel Thomas Harris novels like Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs of which were built around the work of people like John E. Douglas of whom the book Mindhunter was based on. In the works of Harris, the FBI agents are actively using the techniques that would have been developed in the time of Ford and Trench. But for those two living in 1977 anything that’s not related to kicking down doors and shooting the bad guys are looked down on. Even if the world was changing and murders like those committed by the Son of Sam were happening that didn’t have any logical reason behind them that could only be solved by psychological means.

Mindhunter is slow moving, but deliberately so. It’s not like the pace is slow just that the first episode isn’t so much an “episode” as the first part of a much longer story. I suppose that’s the ideal model for binge viewers where one episode leads directly to the next with only a smattering of credits before the start of the next show. But it does make it a bit harder for someone like me to watch and keep track of the story who might not watch all ten episode of the series in one sitting.

Stranger Things season 2 TV spot

Comics

Werewolf By Night: The Complete Collection Vol. 1

Another of the Marvel horror comics out in a collected edition this month is Werewolf By Night: The Complete Collection Vol. 1.

From Marvel:

Jack Russell stars in tales to make you howl, as Marvel’s very own Werewolf! Learn how Jack became one of the grooviest ghoulies of the seventies in this classic collection of his earliest adventures! Afflicted with his family’s curse, Jack’s sets out in search for answers. Could they lie in the terrible tome known as the Darkhold? But Jack’s quest is fraught with danger – from mad monks to big-game hunters to a traveling freak show! Then there’s the terror of Tatterdemalion, the horror of Hangman and the torment of Taboo! But few encounters can compare with Krogg, the lurker from beyond – except, maybe, a Marvel Team-Up with Spider-Man – and a supernatural showdown with Dracula himself!

Movies

Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer

The New Mutants trailer

The Reading List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1948: Margot Kidder, Lois Lane of Superman is born
  • 1977: Damnation Alley premiers
  • 1986: The Quiet Earth opens
  • 2004: The TV series Battlestar Galactica premiers

Direct Beam Comms #96

CategoriesComic Books, Direct Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

The Gifted

The Gifted is the second live-action Marvel superhero series to take place in the X-Men universe on TV now. While the other series Legion is a trippy, existential journey into the mind, The Gifted is more a straight-up comic book show where lots of things explode.

The Gifted follows the Strucker family; mom Kate (Amy Acker), dad Reed (Stephen Moyer), and siblings Lauren (Natalie Alyn Lind) and Andy (Percy Hynes White). Dad is a full-time hunter of superpowered mutants, a sort of modern day Gestapo agent who tracks them down and locks them away. Except what Reed doesn’t know is that his kids are actually mutants. Daughter Lauren has known for some time about her powers but hide them and bother Andy discovers his when he’s attacked by bullies at a school dance and brings down the school gym ala Carrie only less deadly. Enter the Sentinel Services who makes mutants like Andy and Lauren disappear, so the family goes on the run discovering that there’s a whole mutant underground group operating on the fringes of society fighting for mutants everywhere and waiting for the day the X-Men return.

I thought The Gifted was a good show, if a bit too on the nose. The story here is pretty much the same story that’s been told in comics and the movies for decades now. Mutants who are being oppressed by society/the government must run/fight for their rights.

Not that this is a bad thing, just that The Gifted doesn’t really elevate the material but instead continues the same themes that have been explored over and over again in the comics. It’s essentially the prequel to the movie X-Men: Days of Future Past where regular humans are starting to drive the mutants towards extinction. But maybe because TV is a totally medium from the comics and movies this doesn’t matter to anyone but the most ardent fans?

One thing I also noticed was how much the structure of The Gifted was like older series akin to The Incredible Hulk or Otherworld from the 1970s and 1980s. Where someone like David Banner in The Incredible Hulk or the Sterling family in Otherworld have to go on the run from government agents out to get them. Now I’m not saying that the stories of those shows will be similar to The Gifted — those early “on the run” series always had the protagonists one step ahead of the bad guys while helping the locals overcome some obstacle be it rebels stealing their food or government agents their land. It’s just that from all outward appearances with a few tweaks The Gifted could be plopped down in 1986 network TV and viewers then would recognize it.

Ghosted

I think the new FOX series Ghosted has a lot of potential, even if the pilot episode seemed overstuffed, overdone and was’t that interesting.

Craig Robinson and Adam Scott star as Leroy and Max, an ex-LAPD detective and ex-scientist who are pulled into the mysterious governmental organization investigating all things mysterious from ghosts to UFOs. One of their agents has gone missing and left a message that Leroy and Max are the only ones capable of finding him. We go from Leroy and Adam in their day jobs, being kidnapped and bribed to investigate the disappearance, agreeing to do so, having to sneak into a nuclear facility, being attacked by a something, more investigating, the duo fighting an alien presence then finally agreeing to join the mysterious agency.

All of which happens in the 19 or so minutes in the first episode. It’s so crammed full of story that things stopped making a lot of sense to me at about the halfway mark.

That being said, I think Ghosted has a lot of potential. The general premise has a lot of promise and Scott and Robinson act well together. I just hope that future episodes have a bit less story than the pilot did.

Comics

Tomb of Dracula: The Complete Collection Vol. 1

I was always into horror comics as a kid, but never the ones from Marvel. I wasn’t against them, they just weren’t around and available when I was collecting comics. It wasn’t until the 1990s with the resurgence of horror characters like Blade and Ghost Rider that I began picking up early horror titles at flea markets. Now, Marvel is set to release a few collected editions of these classic horror comics, one of which is Tomb of Dracula: The Complete Collection Vol. 1 out this week.

From Marvel:

Sink your teeth into a vampiric volume that chronicles some of the greatest supernatural comics ever printed! The all-time classic Tomb of Dracula ushered in Marvel’s glorious age of horror, while the black-and-white magazine Dracula Lives! delivered stories with real bite – and both featured legendary creators, including Gene Colan in his prime illustrating the Lord of Vampires! The tomb has opened, and Dracula lives again! But his descendant, Frank Drake, joins vampire hunters including Rachel Van Helsing and Quincy Harker in a bid to return him to his grave! Will they drive a stake through Dracula’s heart – or will that honor fall to Blade? Plus tales of terror from across Dracula’s 500-year existence, featuring Hell-Crawlers, the Monster of the Moors, wizards, gargoyles, voodoo queens and more!

The Terminator: The Original Comics Series–Tempest and One Shot

Some of my favorite comics series are the early Dark Horse Aliens, Predator and Terminator titles that all acted as sequels to those films before those films had sequels. With each of those tiles I own the original comics series as well as several collected editions of each title. They were highly influential to me and I still judge comics today based on them.

The first Dark Horse Terminator comic, now known as Terminator: Tempest, dealt with a whole group of soldiers from the future sent to their past, our present, in order to destroy Cyberdyne and end the Terminator threat before it begins. And instead of sending back just one Terminator to handle them, Skynet sent back a whole pack of them to do battle on the posh streets of Los Angeles.

From Dark Horse:

Heartless, mechanical cruelty meets dogged human courage and perseverance in Dark Horse’s very first Terminator story! John Connor sends a strike team into the past to destroy Cyberdyne. But the machines counter by sending a team of Terminators to block the attempt–turning Los Angeles into a war zone!

The Reading & Watch List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1949: Sigourney Weaver, Ripley in Alien, Galaxy Quest and Avatar is born
  • 1956: Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, Millennium and The Lone Gunman is born
  • 1979: Brandon Routh, Superman of Superman Returns and Ray Palmer of Legends of Tomorrow is born
  • 1993: Demolition Man premiers
  • 1995: Strange Days opens in theaters
  • 1999: The TV series Harsh Realm premiers

Why do I fall asleep when I watch Blade Runner?

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Blade Runner (1982) is one of the most beloved sci-fi films of all-time. Under-appreciated when it was released, today it’s considered to be one of the most important films of the 20th century, sci-fi or otherwise. Currently, Blade Runner is listed as one of the “Top 250” movies of all time on IMDB and since its released he been available on all sorts of home media formats from Beta all the way to Blu-ray with it having a theatrical version, a director’s cut and a version known as “The Final Cut” too. It was directed by one of my favorite directors Ridley Scott and was based on a novel by one of my favorite authors Philip K. Dick.

But here’s the thing; I’ve never liked Blade Runner all that much.

Harrison Ford

In the 1990s there seemed to be endless magazine articles and TV news pieces about the genius of Blade Runner, how it set the trends for all sorts of movies from Se7en to The Matrix and how true fans of film totally appreciate it. And since I wanted to be a true fan I really tried getting into Blade Runner.

I remember watching it on broadcast TV in the 1980s and renting the VHS of the movie in the 1990s as well. One of the first movies I ever bought on DVD was Blade Runner and just a few weeks back I bought the movie again via digital download to give it one more try. But no matter what, I come away from Blade Runner extremely bored. Let’s put it this way, if I really want to take a nap I’ll put on Blade Runner and will be zonked out in a few minutes.

Some of the characters in Blade Runner

Even the time I bought Blade Runner a few weeks back I went in hoping that this was going to be the time I liked the movie. I’ve found with a few films that I didn’t like as a younger person I actually enjoy as an adult. But still, even this last time I was only able to make it to the very first scene in Blade Runner, where one of the androids is being tested by an examiner to find out if he’s real or synthetic. And about half way though that scene I thought that to watch Blade Runner was going to be more like work than enjoyment and bailed on the movie yet again.

I don’t mind movies that are slow, but Blade Runner is painfully so. There are long shots of cities, people’s eyes, people staring off into space and flames blasting from the tops of buildings to name a few of the slower scenes that stick in my head. And for a movie that’s officially a little less than two hours long to crawl as it does is a bit of a shock. Honestly, I thought Blade Runner would have clocked in at two and a half or three hours long, but just two hours is amazing.

Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford

And the plot of Blade Runner, in a hellish/futuristic Los Angeles in 2019 a detective played by Harrison Ford is assigned to “retire” androids who go on the run and try to extend their artificially shortened lives a bit sounds like a winner to me. And the visuals of that hellish/futuristic Los Angeles along with the costumes, flying cars and robots are amazing as well. But every time I come back to the movie it’s the pace of the film that makes me bail on it again and again.

And now comes an official sequel to Blade Runner 35 years after the original titled Blade Runner 2049 starring Ryan Gosling with Harrison Ford reprising his role from the first movie. This version has a few things going for it. First of all it’s being directed by Denis Villeneuve who also directed The Arrival which I enjoyed a great deal and co-written by Michael Green who had a hand in the also-good movie Logan.

Still, I worry that the 21st century version of Blade Runner will be as plotting and slow as the 20th century one. Let’s put it this way — if the Blade Runner 2049 starts out with a slow scene of two characters talking to each other in a testing room, I might just get up and leave the theater.