SMALL SOLDIERS

 

Publicity poster for Small Soldiers (© Joe Dante/Amblin Entertainment/DreamWorks Pictures/Universal Pictures – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

On 14 September 2024, I saw at a local market the intriguing 8-inch-tall vintage Hasbro action figure pictured at the end of this present review, a vaguely leonine character with an arrow quiver slung across his back. I learnt from the seller that he was from the late 1990s sci fi/comedy movie Small Soldiers, which I own on DVD but had never watched. So I bought the figure for £1 and the following evening I watched the movie. Let's just say that I much preferred the figure!

Directed by Joe Dante, and released in 1998 by DreamWorks Pictures in North America and Universal Pictures internationally, Small Soldiers has as its title characters a set of toys that have been rendered self-aware and with the ability to learn but also weaponised for serious battle-fighting, due to their having been inadvertently implanted with a top-grade, top-secret microprocessor intended for use in the USA's military defence programs!

Through faintly nefarious means, albeit for a good cause (to sell them at his father's ailing toy shop and thus bring in some much-needed cash), a complete set of both toy factions – the gung-ho Commando Elite soldiers, who are programmed specifically to win; and their alien but peaceful, non-aggressive foes the Gorgonites, who are programmed always to lose (with my newly-purchased action figure proving to be the lead Gorgonite character, an emissary named Archer) – come into the hands of teenager Alan Abernathy (Gregory Smith).

But it all soon gets totally out of hand, when the Commnado Elite soldiers declare full-scale war upon the Gorgonites, as well as upon any humans who try to stop them. Moreover, despite their small stature, these terrifying toy soldiers soon prove exceedingly adept at utilising full-sized – and potentially death-dealing – equipment to achieve their ends!

Alan's family and their next-door neighbours the Fimples, who include Alan's high-school love interest Christy (Kirsten Dunst), swiftly find this out to their cost, once Alan and Christy attempt to protect the hapless, helpless Gorgonites from the Commando Elite's merciless, sustained, and seemingly unstoppable onslaught.

And this is when and why it all became rather tedious for me. I'm not a war movie fan at the best of times, and the ongoing, ever more violent battles between the besieging toy soldiers and the besieged humans (and Gorgonites) holed up inside their homes seemed interminable during this movie's second half after an equally drawn-out setting of the stage for these battles in the first half. Put another way, it didn't take very long for my boredom threshold to be reached!

Having said that, I enjoyed watching how the neat twist of the ostensible heroes of this movie's toy contingent turning out to be the villains and its supposed villains proving to be the heroes played out. Certainly, the Commando Elite soldiers are thoroughly obnoxious, and become ever more so as the movie progresses, with no redeeming characteristics at all, whereas the Gorgonites, although much more sympathetic, are not given enough screen time, so the viewer finds it difficult (or at least I did) to bond with or root for them.

Happily, however, the bad guys did ultimately get their comeuppance, the good guys survived to set forth on an inevitably small-sized but scenic voyage of discovery here on planet Earth in search of their own world, and I added an interesting new movie action figure to my collection, so everything ended well.

It's just that I feel certain that Small Soldiers could have worked so much more effectively had it been a tight 45-minute featurette rather than a stretched-out 90-minute feature.

Finally, I can't bring this review to a close without mentioning that the voice cast for the toys (brought to life on screen via a combination of puppetry and CGI) was nothing if not eclectic. For it utilised not only Tommy Lee Jones but also actors from the 1967 American war movie The Dirty Dozen (including Ernest Borgnine and George Kennedy) for the Commando Elite soldiers, and cast members from the 1984 spoof rock movie This is Spinal Tap for most of the Gorgonites (but with Frank Langella as Archer), plus Sarah Michelle Geller of Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV fame and Christina Ricci from The Addams Family movies for some weaponised dolls! I told you that it was eclectic!

If you'd like to watch an official Small Soldiers trailer on YouTube, please click here to do so.

And to view a complete chronological 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; also, please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.

 

My 8-inch-tall vintage Hasbro action figure of Archer, the Gorgonite emissary from Small Soldiers (photos ©  Dr Karl Shuker)

 

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE

A publicity still and quote from the movie Interview With The Vampire - click picture to enlarge for quote-reading purposes (© Neil Jordan/Geffen Pictures/Warner Bros. Pictures – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

Unlike tonight's decidedly chilly clime, on the evening of 27 May 2017 the weather was far too sultry for sleep. So exactly 30 years after reading the original Anne Rice novel from 1976, it seemed to me to be the ideal night for finally watching the 1994 Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise movie version of Interview With The Vampire, directed by Neil Jordan - so I did.

Although I much prefer the novel – Rice's flowery to the point of decidedly mauve if not entirely purple prose in places may not suit everyone, but in relation to its subject matter I enjoyed it – the film certainly holds its own. (However, my all-time favourite vampire movie remains The Lost Boys – overlapping as it does the rock 'n' roll and biker genres guarantees that!)

For those unfamiliar with the storyline, Interview With The Vampire begins, as its title suggests, with a vampire, Louis de Pointe du Lac, played by Brad Pitt, being interviewed, by a young reporter named Daniel Molloy (Christian Slater), in San Francisco. Louis recalls how, during the late 1700s, he voluntarily albeit somewhat reluctantly agreed to be turned into a vampire by the rapacious, murderous Lestat de Lioncourt (Tom Cruise), a veritable personification of combined immorality and immortality, actively relishing his everlasting life as a predatory vampire, unlike Louis.

When human, Louis had been a successful plantation owner in New Orleans, but after the death of his wife and unborn child during a plague, he no longer had no interest in his mortal existence, and had hoped that being a vampire would offer him a new, entirely different life – only to discover too late that he hated it but was now trapped forever as this repugnant unholy entity, blessed with superhuman strength and speed but cursed with an unquenchable, undying lust for blood throughout all eternity.

The plot follows that of the novel fairly closely, revealing how Louis initially strives to obtain his required but despised scarlet-hued intake from animals rather than humans, much to the shock and disgust of the ever-bloodthirsty Lestat, who revels in satiating his thirst with human blood and the resulting death or transformation of his victims. One such victim is a plague-orphaned young girl, Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), initially bitten by Louis after becoming unable to control his vampiric desire for human blood, but then turned into a vampire by Lestat in order to tempt Louis into staying with him. For Lestat deduces correctly that Louis's good nature will mean that he will want to look after the child and become a father figure to her, giving him a replacement of sorts for the family that he had lost, and focusing upon her well-being rather than upon breaking free from Lestat's noxious influence.

Nevertheless, Claudia also knowingly uses her sweetness and innocent persona as a deadly, enticing lure with which to procure victims for herself and Lestat. Eventually, however, she tires of being used in this way by Lestat, and with her mind maturing into that of a woman as the years pass by she also hates him for having condemned her to remain trapped inside a child's body forever (as vampires never age outwardly), which he did after transforming her into a vampire. So she convinces Louis to kill Lestat, which he does.

Louis and Claudia travel through the world together, and eventually find themselves in Paris. Here they encounter a theatre company led by Armand (Antonio Banderas), whose performers specialise in staging horror-themed plays in which they act as vampires preying upon members of their human audience. However, it soon transpires that the 'actors' really are vampires, who are using their theatre as a clever ploy, a subtle smokescreen, via which to obtain unsuspecting new victims.

Moreover, Louis and Claudia also find themselves in grave danger from this French vampire troupe, discovering to their great alarm that its members know all about Lestat's death and seek to avenge him. And as if that were not enough, Lestat himself later appears, not having been killed after all, but now both decayed and even more deranged than before!

I won't reveal any more of what happens, other than to say that there is a neat twist at the end of the movie, inspired directly from the novel's own denouement and involving the interviewer Molloy, but a twist that is then twisted even further in the movie version.

Tom Cruise and horror was something new for me, but his Lestat is undeniably and wickedly maligm – indeed, his performance even won over Anne Rice, who had originally and famously voiced grave reservations over his casting in this role. The young Kirsten Dunst as the vampire world's answer to Shirley Temple is chillingly good too. Brad, conversely, seems rather less enamoured by it all, which accords well with media accounts claiming that he was not overly enthusiastic about his role. Intriguingly, at one point Rice had actually suggested that he and Cruise swap roles, but having seen the movie I feel that the actual casting worked very well, far better imho than if they had indeed swapped roles. And so, another long-promised-to-watch movie duly watched – and enjoyed!

If you'd like to get a taste, as it were, for what to expect from this dark but alluring fantasy movie, click here to watch an official trailer for Interview With The Vampire.

Finally: a trio of trivia. At one point, Rice was considering rewriting the role of Louis as a female character for the movie, with Cher playing the role – happily, at least for diehard fans of the novel, like me, that didn't happen. River Phoenix was originally booked to play the interviewer Molloy, but tragically he died just a month before filming was due to commence. And although this doesn't accord with what I have read in various online sources (albeit some less reliable than others!), I can distinctly recall reading somewhere many years ago that the original Interview With The Vampire novel was written by Rice in less than a week, in order to fulfil the requirements of a novel-writing competition in which she subsequently entered it – sadly, however, it didn't win the competition, but it did go on to become the first in an immensely successful series of international bestsellers for Rice, collectively entitled The Vampire Chronicles. Sometimes, winning isn't everything!

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! 

The paperback edition that I currently own of the Anne Rice novel Interview With The Vampire (© Anne Rice/Little, Brown – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)