Jekyll and Hyde (1990 TV Film)

 "'Evil' is not a scientific word!"

Adaptations of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde always have a bit of a problem in that you can't just adapt the source material- the novella is entirely framed around the big reveal at the end that Jekyll is Hyde, rather than being blackmailed and controlled by him. And... we've all been spoiled that surprise for 139 years. Any adaptation therefore has no choice but to craft its own tale based around the duality of Jekyll and Hyde, overemphasising the difference between them in terms of personality, and sometimes crowbarring in other characters from the novel in another context.

So it is here. There's no mystery; Jekyll transforms for the first time fairly early on in what is a rather good effect. Utterson appears, in the person of Ronald Pickup, but the excellent Joss Ackland gives us a very different Dr Lanyon, not a friend of Henry Jekyll but a true antagonist.

And this antagonism between them grows into a complex love tragedy between Jekyll (Michael Caine may be phoning it in a bit but he can't ever fail to be excellent) and Sarah (Cheryl Ladd is rather good here, and her accent never slips) which takes up a huge amount of screen time.

However, this is a cut above most adaptations in that it shows Dr Jekyll's deep moral flaws rather than using his two selves as representing good and evil. In particular, Jekyll gives a deeply chilling speech on what is essentially eugenics during a lecture and this, rather than anything Hyde does, is easily the film's most chilling moment.

Well, aside from the shockingly clever ending!

The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

 

I found this novel to be... fine. Admittedly the ending is very well done indeed, but I'm nit inclined to use any superlatives. It was good, that's all. Which is... not how I was expecting to feel after reading a novel which is not only one of the most famous works of alternate history ever written but also an absolute pioneer of the Steampunk here.

Might this, though, be an example of the "Citizen Kane problem"? Said film pioneered so much in the way of cinematic technique yet, in a world where such technique has long been commonplace, the film looks unremarkable? Could this be the case here?

There is a plot, yes, or rather a few broadly linked narratives. Yet the plot is merely a pretext for the real point- the worldbuilding. I cannot comment on its riffing of Benjamin Disraeli's "Sibyl", but I can certainly be impressed and, indeed, dazzled by the cleverness and complexity of the alternate history that is built here. We have Babbage, Byron, Keats, Ada Lovelace as sort of Victorian versions of Steve Jobs and Woj.

Victorian mores, too, social and sexual, are well sketched, alongside a convincingly Victorian kind of radicalism.

In 2025, though, a world beginning to fear the possible consequences of AI, the ending of the novel is enough to make one shudder. We can, perhaps, be grateful that Charles Babbage did not in reality build his Difference Engine.

Total Recall (1990)

 "Hey, I've got five kids to feed!"

Yes, I know. I'm exactly the age and demographic to have seen this film close to when it came out, but have somehow contrived not to have seen it until I'm tantalisingly close to forty-seven years old. Well, I've seen it now. And, well, it's fascinating.

I mean, obvioudsly, it's an Arnie film and does all the Arnie stuff, but it's also fascinatingly conceptual hard science fiction, based on a story by Philip K. Dick. Admittedly, the only novel of Dick's that I've actually read is The Man in the High Castle, but I've seen enough film adaptations to recognise his signature themes of memory, identity and reality in play here- and the film is conceptually fascinating.False memories of great experiences being marketed to the public; false memories of an eight year marriage; the sheer bloody cldeverness of the plot when revealed at the end; a sex worker with three breasts; the question of, if you have amnesia, would you lose your new identity if you had your old memories back?

Arnie is gloriously Arnie, Sharon Stone has a nicely subtle little role, and you can always rely on good old Ronny Cox to play a damn good baddy at this time. And the effects- not CGI but real effects- are a joy to behold. That thing with the eyes when people are exposed to the Martian surace, though... urgh.

The end may be a bit of a cop out- surely Quaid and Melina would have died long before Mars was fully terraformed by the alien magic button? And would the alien device really terraform the planet with the exact amount of oxygen needed by humans? But these things don't stop Total Recall from being an absolute joy.

Gremins 2: The New Batch (1990)

 "I've got rabies, and I'm supposed to get the flu this week."

Oh, I love this film. It is- and I know this is a weird thing to say for a Hollywood sequel-a different level of wit, enjoyment and fun from ther original. fourth wall? you're dead?

Yes, this is a sequel. We have Billy and Kate, moved to New York. We have some very real, surreal and, I suspect, very dated satire of Wall Street and the absurdities of thre reagan era. Reagan was no Trump, but, well, he was stupid. It's all excellent stuff. Poor Mowlgli.

But that barely scratches the surface. The first breath in the fourth wall comes from the mime artists being escorted out of the police van. Then we have, yeah, the Hulk Hogan interview. The fourth wall dies at this point, even after the review of the first movie which has hilarious consequences. It's sad to see the great Christopher Lee in a character part, but he's superb.

The knowing wit is hilarious throghout. This cannot, sutely, have been written by committee. Halleluljah. And I can't even begin to touch on the satire. This is the Reagan era. Corporate culture was insane.

There's so much to talk about. The old man- Kato in the old Green Hornet movie serials- dues. Poor Gizmo is bullied. So is Billy, unappreciated at work. The whole satire on 80s corporate excess is exquisite. At one point the lift asks for a car to be removed beause it's cheap and old.

I adore this film. If you don.'t ,then I shall challenge you to a duel. Sith Re Leicrster cheese. Be warned.

Frankenstein Unbound (1990)

 "This is not the end of the world."

Some films are very good, so you enjoy them. Some films are pants, so you dontr. This film fits into an interesting third category: the interesting failure. And this is one of those: Roger Corman's first film in twenty years and one which is, although right up his street- a mainly period adaptation of a novel by serious science fiction author Brian Aldiss featuring both interesting ideas around time travel and a postmodern riff on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein featuring the lady herself... er, shagging John Hurt's hero. Er, yes.

The film starts in the (this being 1990) far fututre of 2031, where there are no longer any Brazilian rainforests and KITT from Knight Rider exists, thus predicting both the disgusting Jair Bolsonaroand self-driving cars. If only cars in 2022 looked so cool.

Anyway, John Hurt is maverick scientist Joe Buchanan, selling out his country to the Yankee dollar, tut tut, and risking tim slip side effects in his attempt to sell a superweapon to the US military. He fails, but is propelled back in time to 1817, where he meets not only Mary Shelley but Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, both of whom are played for laughs, at Lake Diodati, in an early Nineteenth Century Switzerland where language differences are airily handwaved. There's all sorts of what I rather suspect are clever subtexts about the meaning of "unbound" from the novel that are never quite explored and which remain unclear.

John Hurt is superb. He cannot be otherwise, Bridget Fonda is adequate, as ever. Raul Julia chews the scenery with his usual class. Yet something doesn't quite work. Nevertheless, the film is far from dull.

Alice in Chains- Facelift (1990)

I didn't buy, this, Alice in Chains' first full album, until surprisingly late, around 2006 or so. I used to play it a lot while playing Civilization III, which shows you how long ago that was, but I nevertheless hadn't heard more than the two big singles during the years when "Grunge" was a thing.

This album has always, therefore, been a bit of an artifact from the past for me. It may be from the beginning of theband's career, but I heard it four years after Layne Staley's horrble, squalid, lonely death after a period of years where his life had gradulally narrowed into nothing but video games, filth, and heroin. It's unnerving how "Sea of Sorrow", in its lyrics "You live tomorrow/I will not follow..." foreshadows Staley's death less than twelve years after the album's release.

In 1990, though, this is at one fresh and similar to the later albums we all perhaps know better. It's heavier, more obviously showing their early pigeonholing as a metal band, but otherwise pretty much what you's expect. "Man in a Box" and "Sea of Sorrow" are standout tracks but, while their later albums would improve on this, it stands up bloody well, and preserves an ineffable Seattle-ness in its sound that later albums would not quite be able to catch.

Wild at Heart (1990)

“Too bad he couldn't visit that old Wizard of Oz and get some good advice."

This is a David Lynch film, so you just know there's going to be weirdness, symbolism and ambiguous subtext. We get all this in Wild at Heart, yet it simultaneously is and isn't what one might expect from Lynch.

Interestingly, despite the arty directorial flashes, dreamy atmosphere, eschewal of nturalism in both directorial and acting styles and Lynchian blurring of what is and is not real, on the surface this is quite a straightforward film, to the extent of being cheesy. After all, it's a road movie, a romance with a happy ending, and interestingly the kind of action movie based on American  grotesques that looks ahead to Tarantino.

And yet there's so much going on beneath the surface- playful irony, yes, but much more. There's a loving relationship between two flawed but decent people, lots and lots of good sex, and the soppiest ending ever- but there's also a lot of darkness, particularly sexual darkness. We learn of Lula being sexually abused as a teenager, and Bobby sexually assaults her in a very uncomfortable scene. Yet, although this film doesn't flinch from the fact that this is a sometimes dark world, where good people suffer and die needlessly, it's also a film that holds out the hope of eventual happiness.

It's also, interestingly, a film full of characters reminiscing to one another, but these memories are unclear, frangmentary and inconsistent: all the characters, and indeed the narrative itself, are unreliable narrators. Memory, and thus the past, is a fragile, vague thing. There is only now. There's a melancholy to this, but also hope: we don't have to be prisoners of our past, as Sailor ultimately learns from the Good Witch.

And no, I've no idea what those Wizard of Oz references are all about, beyond the obvious rarallel of a journey. But this is a film that can be enjoued at a much deeper level while also being a weirdly straightforward melodrama. Fascinating.

Captain America (1990)

“This time we’ll have it made in Japan.”

Let's make no bones about this film, before I start to ironically praise it: there's no question that it's shite.

Its sins are many. Yes, films often change the mythology from the comics, but making the Red Skull Italian and not particularly Nazi means you haven't really got the |Red Skull... and then they remove the actual, er, red skull bit of him for the present day sequences. Matt Salinger has zero charisma or talent, and spends the first half of the film running away or being nervous. It's all plot with no characterisation- we're given  no reason to like these characters.

Comparing this with the 2011 MCU film would be a  cheap shot but, well, why not show us Steve in 1943 (why this pointless change?), telling a mate how desperate he is to serve his country, rather than having random characters blatantly exposit? Why not show Steve and Bernie as a couple before their embarrassingly awkward parting? Let's not pretend this film is at all adequate.

And yet... this film is by an offshoot of Cannon (it's complicated), by the same director as Cyborg, and has a perverse B movie charm, amusingly of its time in so many way. It's bad, of course, but entertainingly so. The Italian locations are pointless but beautiful. So yes, this film is rubbish, but perhaps more enjoyably so than its execrable reputation may imply.

Robot Jox (1990)

“But there’s nothing special about your body.”

“Thanks!”

I hadn’t heard of this delightfully bonkers Stuart Gordon film 24 short hours ago- I was ignorant of this magnificently silly, splendidly stop motion (I miss that) and enormously fun little film with a script by, er, Robert Haldeman.

The whole thing feels like a fight between a serious tone and a deliberate silliness, which for some reason works brilliantly. The very concept has a four in both camps-  a post-nuclear holocaust world, of the type that was all over the zeitgeist around 1990, where war has been outlawed and replaced by single combat with people controlling giant robots. Already we have a sort of cross between serious science fiction concepts and a potential toy advert, where the designers of the robots are Japanese, like Transformers. It’s a future full of casual racism and sexism and with “tubies”- genetically engineered warriors who are made, not born. Then again it’s also a future with rampant pollution and, er, 1990 standard computer graphics coexisting with flying cars. Also, the interior decor is a bit pants. There are also hints of scarcity and an authoritarian society that pushes people to breed.

There are no stars and the acting style throughout is hardly naturalistic, but it works. Even the sort-of romantic subplot between the two leads is incredibly macho and eventually abandoned so we can end the film in a massive fight between stop motion giant robots. It has no stars, no budget, the script is mad... I think it’s bloody brilliant.

Back to the Future, Part III (1990)

“My horse broke down...”

There’s a difference between our favourite films ever and the ones we objectively think are best, and it’s the second list that is likely to feature all those intellectual films that we may regard highly but tend not to use as comfort food. Back to the Future, Part III is my favourite film of all time. And no, it isn’t as “good” as cleverer films with more to say; it’s a blockbuster. It just happens to be the most perfect blockbuster that has ever been made or ever will be.

This is the third and final film in a series that starts as excellent and just gets better with every film, and which is so uber-familiar that we forget how good it is. But we have the timey-wimey plot, with an opening scene that manages to recap both of the previous film, along with a superbly constructed Western pastiche that gives us yet more versions of the McFlys and a villainous Tannen, along with lots of adventure, thrills and even romance. And comedy. Lots of that. And yet again the great Christopher Lloyd is superlatively good. In fact, Doc is the real hero of the trilogy, isn’t he? Marty is just this kid who isn’t that bright and is a bit bland. Well, until you call him a chicken, that is. It’s Doc who invents the time machine, acts the hero and even, this time, gets the girl. Marty is just the Boswell to his Johnson, the Hans Castorp to his Settembrini, the person through whose eyes we see it all and with a heroic arc of his own, but very much a sidekick.

So why is this third film my favourite? I think it’s because we know the drill by now, we can have more fun with this 1885 Hill Valley as we know the later ones so very well by now- we get by far the best version of Strickland, too. It doesn’t have to be extremely timey-wimey- it’s done that- so can explore the fun of the Western setting more. And it has a kickass conclusion, with Marty learning a lesson that helps him to avert his bleak future, and us getting to see Doc’s new family (let’s just not think about his age here) and a time travelling train.

And there are great touches- Doc in 1955 hasn’t heard of Clint Eastwood and is amazed to hear that Japanese parts in 1985 are considered the best. Doc gets utterly bladdered after one shot of whiskey. But this film works because it has heart, it has plot, it has humour and it has characters, all combined perfectly. Sod it, this is one of the greatest films of all time.

RoboCop 2 (1990)

"What about democracy? Nobody elected you."

"Anyone can buy OCP's stock and own a piece of our city. What could be more democratic than that?"

It's been six long years since I blogged the excellent first film; a superbly written and shot dystopia about privatisation and corporate greed that was very Paul Verhoeven. It was hard to imagine how a sequel would not disappoint. Yet this doesn’t. It’s a superb film and a fine sequel.

But perhaps we should expect no less from Irving Kershner, he of The Empire Strikes Back: he has, after all, directed the greatest sequel of all time. Here he doesn’t quite reach the same heights but he does something similar- following an iconic director in a self-effacing yet worthy way. Kershner isn’t a director with a distinct style of his own, but as a craftsman of cinema he’s superb.

Hence we get a film that’s very faithful to its predecessor’s style, with the satirical commercials not looming quite so large but certainly present and correct, and with many familiar faces returning to the same Detroit which faces the same dystopian problems, courtesy of a superb script from an at-his-peak Frank Miller, writing for cinema at a time when comics scribes were not so well-respected as they are now.

And, of course, again we have a hard-boiled Hollywood film where, unusually, the message is clearly a left-wing one. We begin with OCP, owners of the privatised  police force, cutting their wages by 40% and cancelling their pensions, leading to inevitable strikes. There’s an uber-addictive drug called Nuke, there’s a kingpin called Cain and a child gangster called Hob, but the real villain is the anorak and grasping OCP, who deliberately engineer for the city to become hopelessly in debt to it so they can privatise the whole thing. And, much as RoboCop may defeat Cain, who has been turned into the body horrific and fourth wall breaking “RoboCop 2”, The film ends with OCP seeming to succeed in this, and getting away with this through a little scapegoating.

There’s lots of touching character stuff, too- the bit where Murphy pretends not to recognise his wife to protect her is heart-wrenching- but it’s all done perfectly in the same slightly cyberpunk corporate dystopia of the first film. This is how to do a sequel. So can we have another one please?

Predator 2 (1990)

"Ok, pussy face. This is your move..."

Meh. After the glory that was Predator this is such a let-down. It's not a bad film, per se: it's adequately shot and acted. But after the first film's brilliantly maintained atmosphere and superb ensemble cast it's missing that spark.

It isn't Danny Glover's fault; he plays his bland cipher of a character well. But the whole thing seems so uninspired. The opening titles seem dated in a way the previous film's didn't, and the overuse of the creature's POV shots dates the film terribly. And then there the uninspired setting- a turf war in LA in the dim and distant future (1997). Yawn. A future where crime has spun out of control is both a cliche and vaguely right-wing as a concept. It does at least give us the character of King Willie, who is glorious: Calvin Lockhart's magnificent chewing of the scenery is the best thing about the film by far.

Still- Jamaicans doing voodoo? Er, that's Hairians, chaps. Some would say that mixing up your Caribbean countries is a wee bit racist.

Anyway, the Predator looks good. This film can't take any credit for the design, but at least we eventually see more of it, and the film admittedly does a good job of keeping it semi-hidden for the first two thirds of the film. But you can see why they tested the franchise for a while after this. Eminently skippable.

IT

Part One

"A clown brought us down here. We all float."

I hadn't heard of this before, but my uber-coulrophob ic fiancee bought this years ago and, in spite of her phobia, rates it very highly. It's a 1990 two part US TV adaptation of Stephen King's novel of four years earlier, a novel which, arguably, did as much as John Wayne Gacy to make clowns in the modern world figures of fear rather than fun. Also, Tim Curry is superb, John Ritter is in it and we even get a glimpse of a very young Oz from Buffy. What's not to love?

It's a fairly straight, for which read long, adaptation. The first part is the atmospheric one, and thus the better of the two. We begin, though, with a little girl, and a little cultural difference between Yanks and us Limeys; apparently for them it's Itsy-Bitsy Spider, not Incy-Wincy, who falls down the spout. Fancy that. There are also cultural and visual differences between the two time frames within the film- the 1980s present day and the late 1950s, a time when I Was a Teenage Werewolf was a current film. Mike, our central character, is a black man living in the USA,a fact which has somewhat different connotations in our two time zones, either side of the Civil Rights era as they are. The contrast between these two particular time zones make it hard not to think of Back to the Future.

We have a small group of seven kids / adults, including Beverly, our one token girl, and we follow their contrasting fortunes, haunted by the awful Pennywise, up until the present. Mike, the only black character, is our point of view yet also an oddly passive and unambitious character. Bill, a successful writer, is Stephen King, but harbours a deep guilt over his brother's death. Ben is annoying as an adult, yet more vulnerable and likeable as a kid, and demonstrably the same person. He reminds me of Tony Stark. Stan is the intellectual Jewish kid who dies at the end of the episode rather than face Pennywise again. Eddie is the sexless, mother-dominated hypochondriac, a deeply tragic figure. Richie is, if you'll forgive me, the clown. And Beverly is an abused woman whom we desperately want to get together with Ben, her childhood sweetheart. All of them have character traits that, rather too neatly, reflect their future jobs as adults.

Glimpses of Pennywise are, rightly, rationed and put in a child's perspective, but are deeply effective for all that. He has a strong New England accent.I 'm not sure what this is meant to signify: is this a traditional Maine accent or does it paint him as an outsider? He represents, I think, paedophilia, a subject so awful that it is often wise to approach it obliquely. He's not the only villain, of course; there is also the deeply disturbed bully Henry Bowers, seen here only as a youth. He is left the most marked by Pennywise, becoming confined to an institution.

One of the creepier moments is where a photo is made to move; this is like something straight out of Sapphire and Steel and is deeply unsettling.We end with a showdown, some excellent use of stop motion, a pledge, and a suicide.


Part Two

"You're too old to stop me. You're all too old."

This episode is not as good. Having said that, though, it is perhaps inevitable that the atmospheric set-up episode will outshine the part that has to do the donkey work of resolving the plot; the two episodes should not really be considered separately.

Our protagonists, passive until now, are faced with having to go after Pennywise and destroy him, thus achieving catharsis over their childhood demon(s). They have quite a foe; we begin with Pennywise goading them with the above quote and a library soaked in blood. There's rather a lot of blood; even tea becomes blood, proving that nothing is sacred. That's before we even get to the fortune cookies. And a lot of people from our protagonists' pasts are possessed and say awful things. Henry, meanwhile, being weaker than our protagonists, becomes its pawn.

Our protagonist have a good wine-fuelled night, but the time comes to face what they have to do. Eddie is the most reluctant. His back-story is perhaps the most developed; his asthma is non-existent, he's a virgin and, it's implied, he's gay and closeted. The scary events continue apace, including a scene of a typewriter typing with no typist which may well have influenced one Steven Moffat for both Doctor Who and Jekyll.  There's a moment, where Henry stabs Mike, where we assume he's dead because of the "black guy dies first" trope. He doesn't, but there's still a bit of metatextuality there, methinks. Henry, rather predictably, dies next. There's nowhere else for him to go having fulfilled his plot function, besides he's both a baddie and a tragic figure. He has to die.

We approach the climax, and there's a rather good stop motion giant spider. Eddie dies a forty-year-old virgin.The rest all survive the showdown, but there's no conclusion; Pennywise will be back in  thirty years' time. If we're looking for a happy ending then we must make do with Ben and Bev finally getting together.

Child's Play 2 (1990)

“I hate kids!”

 

You don’t expect much from a sequel to a delightfully fun, but ultimately daft little horror film like Child’s Play. In fact, this is an extraordinary film, in fact one of the most under rated films out there. It works brilliantly as a silly and pleasingly violent outing for Chucky and his usual fun and games, but at the same time it has a very serious and very heartfelt message about how children are treated in 1990’s America.

If you’ll excuse the cliché, this is a film of two halves. The first half, at first glance, seems to closely parallel the previous film, with little Andy settling into a new foster family as Chucky does his thing. The second half is far more exciting, fast-paced and modern than anything in the first film as Andy and his new sister Kyle battle Chucky in an obstacle-filled toy factory in scenes that would make a first-class 1980’s video game.

Look again, though. Both halves of the film parallel each other in depicting cruelty to children. The film has a lot of harsh words to say about the state of fostering in 1990’s America, mainly from the mouth of Kyle. It is tempting to speculate that the writer speaks from bitter personal childhood experience here. The anger in the script is subtle but palpable. The foster father is at most lukewarm about fostering Andy, but the mother, played, bizarrely, by Jenny Agutter of all people is initially a kind, caring and seemingly perfect parent. But as soon as her husband “accidentally” dies, she suddenly rejects Andy in terms which seem even harsher in the light of her apparent previous affection for him. The teacher is also horrible, but gets her just desserts. Why do I get the feeling that the writer was enacting gleeful revenge?

Enough serious, though. Chucky rules. There are some great and delightfully evil deaths, the best of which is, of course, DEATH ON THE PHOTOCOPIER! Chucky’s never ending deaths are increasingly silly and the perfect conclusion to a sublimely and darkly hilarious bit of horror hokum which buries its seriousness deeply and effectively. Don’t be put off by the serious themes, though. This film is a right good laugh.

Edward Scissorhands (1990)

“Drop your weapons!”

Finally getting to see this film, after so many years, was an interesting pop culture experience: although I’d never seen the film I distinctly recall seeing Rob Newman riffing on it in The Mary Whitehouse Experience all those many years ago. It turns out that those sketches were, well, pretty accurate, but this is nevertheless a superb and surprisingly deep film.

It’s smalltown America during some strange timeless amalgam of the 1950s and the 1980s. On the hill is a blatantly out-of-place spooky castle straight out of a Roger Corman flick, which makes the casting of Vincent Price highly appropriate. But the style, particularly Edward himself (Johnny Depp, of course, in his breakthrough role), is unmistakably Tim Burton, immune to the passing of the years. The fact that Edward always wears a gimp suit in spite of all narrative logic is the most stylistically Tim Burton thing ever, as well as partly symbolising the theme of the film: stultifying small town nosey conformity and snobbery vs. the freedom to pursue alternative lifestyles.

There’s an obvious parallel, I suppose, with the Garden of Eden (which here is a creepy horror film castle!) and the corruption of the world (which, pleasingly, is represented by 1950s conservative values), especially as Edward is shown to be a brilliant gardener, if highly unconventional. I like the dinosaur.

Edward’s “fall” is down to the corruption of this environment by means of Winona Ryder’s love interest, and the final scenes are very reminiscent of James Whale’s Frankenstein, except for the fairytale ending. Ah yes, that word “fairytale”. It keeps coming up in my reviews of Tim Burton films, doesn’t it?

There’s a nice structural trick revealed at the end (the elderly narrator is Winona Ryder), and the film is both visually brilliant and powerful in its message. Any film that has its innocent protagonist be largely based on Freddy Krueger has got to be a classic.