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Saturday, January 30, 2021

DAREDREAMER

 
Front cover of my official ex-rental big box VHS videocassette of Daredreamer (© Barry Caillier/Futuristic Entertainment – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

Earlier tonight, I watched in VHS videocassette format a really obscure oddity of a fantasy/musical movie – Daredreamer.

Directed by Barry Caillier and released in 1990, Daredreamer was the debut movie of Tim Noah, with all songs in it written and performed by him too. Its fantastical, Billy Liar-reminiscent storyline focuses upon a hopeless high school college student named Winston (played by Noah), who spends far too much of his time living out his fantasies of being liked and successful in daydreams, instead of attending to his studies – daydreams so vivid and all-consuming, moreover, that they often result in Winston causing all manner of mayhem, havoc, and chaos at school.

Unsurprisingly, this leads to the despair of his only friend, Max (Adam Eastwood), as well as to the derision of his trio of personal nemeses – three leather-jacketed cool dudes led by quiff-wielding Dante (Billy Burke, also making his movie debut) and dubbed The Three Ds (as in Dante, Donny, and Dicky), not to mention all of his other classmates too.

All except one, that is – a creative girl called Jennie (Alyce LaTourelle), who yearns to become a writer, and who also daydreams, albeit in a much more controlled, non-disruptive manner! One day, Winston and Jennie accidentally discover that they can actually enter one another's daydreams and interact in them together. As a result, Winston and Jennie become strongly attracted to each other in real life too, because each has finally found someone who understands them.

Winston's daydreams are presented as 1980s music videos (Jennie's are not shown except for one in which hers and one of Winston's coalesce). In fact, the entire movie is little more than a framework upon which to hang a succession of these videos. Consequently, it wasn't long before my interest and attention began to wane, especially as, having been written and produced specifically for this movie, none of the songs and videos were in any way familiar to me, although they were all typical of their genre.

The thrust of Daredreamer is the undeniably noble, positive message that it's okay to dream, because who knows what real-life successes those dreams may inspire? This message is given full rein via the movie's uplifting climactic scene, in which the shy Winston finally comes out of his shell and sings his self-composed song 'Dare To Dream' in front of the whole class in real life, not in a daydream and, in so doing, finally wins their acclaim and acceptance of him, as well as even the grudging approval of The Three Ds!

This scene – and song (which deserved to have been a hit in the singles charts but wasn't) – also redeems what for me was an otherwise somewhat pedestrian albeit quirky film, the music video/daydream components not being sufficiently strong or memorable enough in my opinion to elevate the movie as a whole. Nevertheless, Daredreamer is among those one-off novelty flicks that I'm glad to have seen, even if only once.

If you'd like to watch a clip from Daredreamer featuring its climactic scene and the song 'Dare To Dream', click here.

And to view a complete listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE!

 

Thursday, January 28, 2021

LOVE BITES: THE RELUCTANT VAMPIRE

 
Full cover of the official DVD for Love Bites: The Reluctant Vampire (© Malcolm Marmorstein/Waymar Productions/Double D Distribution – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

What do you do when you can't sleep? Stay up at night and watch a vampire movie, of course. On 5 January 2021, I watched one that was entirely new to me, and which I thoroughly enjoyed. Based upon an original play by Malcolm Marmorstein, who also directed this film version, it was an engaging vampire-themed comedy fantasy from 1993 entitled Love Bites: The Reluctant Vampire.

Unexpectedly, its star turned out to be none other than British pop singer Adam Ant, the literal Prince Charming of the 1980s New Romantics movement. He plays 300-year-old vampire Zachary Simms who oversleeps in his coffin, as you do, and belatedly wakes up in 1992, only to find that a house has been built over the building that formerly housed his crypt, and is inhabited by a feisty young woman named Kendall Gordon (played by Kimberly Foster).

Far from being a sinister fiend, however, Zachary is very much the wide-eyed innocent, fanged but friendly, an ingenue fascinated by modern technology and modern-day Los Angeles, and both bewitched and somewhat bewildered by just how headstrong 1990s women seem to be in comparison to the demure damsels from his long-bygone time period.

Romance soon blossoms, especially when Zachary reveals to Kendall his desire to be devampirised, which can take a year but is achieveable, and will render him fully human once more. Needless to say, all sorts of complications ensue, not least of which is the arrival of Nerissa (Michelle Forbes), the toothy seductress who turned him into a vampire in the first place three centuries ago and despite having subsequently deserted him has now had a change of heart and wants him back, much to Kendall's anger…

Incidentally, one could be forgiven for wondering whether the supposed ability of a vampire to remain forever young if transformed into one from a human when still young may actually rub off upon anybody playing the role of a vampire. For I was amazed to realise that although he looked little more than 20 when playing the very youthful-appearing Zachary in this 1993-released movie, in reality Adam Ant was actually almost 40 years old at the time! That boy's got good genes, to quote what my late mother would always say if she saw someone who looked a lot younger than their real age.

Love Bites: The Reluctant Vampire is yet another of those charming, easy-to-watch fantasy movies from the 1980s-early 1990s period that should have been much more successful than they were.

I watched this movie in its ex-rental big box videocassette format, but at least at the time of my posting my present review here on Shuker In MovieLand it can be watched for free on YouTube by clicking here.

 

 

Tuesday, January 26, 2021

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

 
Publicity poster for Where The Wild Things Are (© Spike Jonze/Legendary Pictures/Village Roadshow Pictures/Wild Things Productions/Playtone/Warner Bros. Pictures – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

On 12 June 2019, I watched on DVD the fantasy movie Where The Wild Things Are – that's 97 minutes of my life I'll never get back!

Directed by Spike Jonze, and released in 2009, Where The Wild Things Are was inspired by the famous award-winning children's picture book of the same title, which was originally published in 1963 in French (with its first English translation appearing in 1967). It was written and exquisitely illustrated by Maurice Sendak, and is a book that I've always loved.

However, the intrinsic problem faced by anyone trying to convert it into a movie is that this book is basically a series of gorgeous pictures, with few words and minimal associated story.

In it, a young boy named Max (played by Max Records in the movie), wearing his favourite wolf costume, is naughty one evening, so his mother (played by Catherine Keener) banishes him to his bedroom, inside which, inexplicably, a forest grows and a sea develops, on which Max sails in his boat until he reaches a land where the monstrous and highly ferocious Wild Things live. But after he stares them in the eye, they make him their leader, they all cavort together for a while, then Max leaves them, travelling back in his boat until he re-enters his bedroom, where there is no longer a forest but there is a piping hot supper waiting for him. The end.

Consequently, in order to make a feature-length movie based upon this briefest of plots, a much more detailed, extensive storyline needs to be devised. Unfortunately, however, the one that was devised – and which also introduces additional characters, including Adrian (Mark Ruffalo), the boyfriend of Max's mother (unnamed in the book but christened Connie in the movie) – is imho truly abysmal, repetitive, and mind-numbingly dull. So much so, in fact, that halfway through Where The Wild Things Are,  I had to pause the DVD, go off some place where they most definitely were not, and do something else for an hour or so, in order to wake up my stupefied brain before subjecting it to the second half of this film's slumber-inducing tedium. If you're looking for a cure for insomnia, here it is!

To my mind, this movie seems to have been aimed at an audience of four-year-olds with the attention span of a gnat, because it consists of a series of disjointed scenes of imbecilic, infantile content that its creators presumably thought that such children would enjoy, which in turn makes the film's PG rating both unexpected and in my view wholly unnecessary – no-one would surely keep awake long enough to be frightened by it!

The Wild Things were represented by humans in enormous suits, whereas CGI or traditionally animated monsters would have been much more effective, especially as the source material is a picture book famed for its detailed hand-drawn illustrations.

All in all, Where The Wild Things Are was for me a very disappointing experience, and also a very depressing one – the monsters were inexplicably unhappy throughout the movie. And quite creepy at times too, calling to mind some bizarre hybrid of H.R. Pufnstuf and The Wicker Man! Indeed, at one point I half expected to see Max and his huge Wild Thing companion walk around a corner near the cliff face and be confronted by a giant wicker man, with all of the other Wild Things assembled there, ready to capture Max and place him inside it!

Not even Tom Hanks, who didn't star in it but did serve as a co-producer, could inflate this flat fantasy for me. I'm sorry, but, at least as far as I'm concerned, Where The Wild Things Are is a very weird but not in any way wonderful movie. Or, to use a 1960s music-inspired metaphor: Wild Things, I think I love you – NOT!!

Nevertheless, you may feel differently, so please click here to watch an official trailer for Where The Wild Things Are on YouTube, and make up your own mind.

And to view a complete listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE! 

 
Published in 1988, this is my 25th Anniversary hardback edition of Maurice Sendak's beautifully-illustrated book Where The Wild Things Are (© Maurice Sendak/The Bodley Head – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

 

Sunday, January 24, 2021

THE MONROES - FINALLY FINDING THE FOREST DEVIL

Publicity photograph for The Monroes (© Milt Rosen/Qualis Productions/20th Century Fox-Television – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

It's always a great feeling when the lost is found, when a mystery is solved – and especially so when the lost had been lost, and the mystery concerning it unresolved, for over 40 years.

Right from a very early age, I had always been fascinated by mysterious and mythological creatures, making my eventual cryptozoological career little short of inevitable. And so it was that a certain episode of a Western show that my family and I viewed one Sunday afternoon on British television during the mid-1960s, when I was around six years old, engaged my attention to a far greater degree than might otherwise have been expected, given the fact that, normally, the Western genre held little if any interest for me.

The episode in question concerned the stalking of a family living alone in the American wilds a century or so previously, by a mystifying but greatly-feared beast of such rapacious, belligerent, yet elusive nature that it was referred to superstitiously by the local Native American people as a devil (a name that, as far as I could recall, also featured in the title of this episode). They also called it by another, more exotic-sounding name, and, as in all the best suspense movies, the creature itself was never seen, until the very end. Instead, the viewer had to be content with savage growls, rustles in the undergrowth, and off-screen activity.

Finally, the 'devil' was lured close enough to be shot, and at the denouement it was revealed to be an unexpectedly large specimen of a creature not generally encountered in those parts. But what exactly was that creature? Only at the end was its English name finally given, and it proved to be a species that, as a young child, I had never heard of before – the wolverine.

Known scientifically as Gulo gulo, native to northern North America and also to northern Europe and northernmost Asia, the wolverine or glutton is the largest living terrestrial member of the mustelid family, growing to the size of a small bear. Moreover, it is infamously ferocious, powerful, intelligent, and tenacious, making it one of the most feared species of mammal throughout its range. Little wonder, then, that in the episode it had been referred to by the native people as a devil.

This particular programme had a strong impact on me, as I had been enthralled waiting to discover what the mystery beast in it was, and I can remember watching it avidly a second time a couple of years or so later when the series in which it appeared was repeated on television (even though I now knew the creature's identity beforehand), but after that, nothing. As far as I am aware, neither the entire series nor this particular episode from it was ever broadcast on British television again. But what was the series?

The years passed by, and despite remembering the wolverine episode in great detail, I never could recall the name of the series itself, and whenever memories of the episode periodically came to mind I always promised myself that I'd pursue this intriguing little mystery, but somehow I never did. Eventually, even the wolverine episode faded in my recollection until it became little more than a hazy, half-forgotten dream. And although I would often flick through books on vintage television, I never obtained any clues as to its series' identity.

 
A wolverine (public domain)

Just like its subject, however, the wolverine episode was nothing if not tenacious, and about 8 years ago it came to mind yet again – but now, armed with the vast research power of the internet, I decided that the time had come to track down this cryptozoological tele-phantom once and for all. I began my search on YouTube, in the hope that the episode, or at least an excerpt or two from it, had been posted there. I knew that I could still remember enough details to be able to recognise it, should it be there. But despite using a variety of key words – 'Western', 'television', 'wolverine', 'devil', '1960s' – nothing promising came up.

So I turned my attention to Google, and used the same key words in its search engine. After a time, I thought I'd discovered it, but it was a false lead. Google had turned up an episode from 1963 called 'The Wolverine' in a Canadian TV series entitled The Forest Rangers, in which a ferocious wolverine turns up in Indian River (the fictional location where this series was set), killing all the livestock there. This plotline certainly compared closely with the programme that I had seen, and the creature was even referred to in it by the same exotic name that I now recalled from 'my' episode – carcajou, an Ojibway name. But when I researched The Forest Rangers series, I discovered that its rangers-focused storylines didn't accord at all with those of the series that I had viewed all those years ago. Exit The Forest Rangers.

Happily, however, my continued Googling did finally achieve the long-awaited success that I had been hoping for, because there, at last, on my computer screen, was the answer. The series, created by Milt Rosen and first broadcast in 1966, was entitled The Monroes, which was produced by Qualis in association with 20th Century Fox-Television, and included Michael Anderson Jr and Barbara Hershey (playing the parent-substitute figures of big brother Clay and sister Kathy) among its stars. It centred around the story of five orphans (Clay, Kathy, twins Jefferson and Fenimore, and Amy, aged from 18 down to 6 years of age) trying to survive in 1876 as a family on the frontier in the area around what is now Grand Teton National Park near Jackson, Wyoming, after their father and mother had drowned.

Running for just a single season, 'The Monroes' consisted of 26 episodes – the fourth of which, entitled 'The Forest Devil', was the wolverine episode that had played such a key role in kindling my interest in cryptozoology as a youngster and had afterwards teased and tantalised my mind for over four decades.

And as if my solving this longstanding mystery from my childhood were not satisfying enough, I then discovered that the entire episode had actually been uploaded on YouTube (click here to view it). Needless to say, and for the first time since the mid-1960s, I duly sat back and watched 'The Forest Devil' – an experience made even more memorable this time by being able to view it in colour. For just like so many other families in Britain at that time, we'd only owned a black-and-white television during the 1960s, so until now I'd never seen this programme in colour.

Returning when an adult to a television show, a book, or even a location that had been so appealing as a child does not always live up to expectations, with the long-treasured memory of it sometimes proving to have been much more special than the reality. However, I'm happy to report that in the case of 'The Forest Devil', it was every bit as thrilling and enjoyable now, even in these jaded 21st-Century times, as it had been for me back in the 1960s, when everything was still bright and fresh and new and exciting.

It also showed me that miracles, even if they are only very minor, personal ones, do indeed still happen in this mundane old world of ours. And that is something else well worth treasuring.

To view a complete listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film/TV reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE! 

 
Front cover of a Dell comic book of The Monroes (© Dell/Milt Rosen/Qualis Productions/20th Century Fox-Television – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)