Sharktopus. Really. I’m Not Kidding. And A Special Treat.
Just when I got comfortable thinking that Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus set the low water mark for entertainment, SyFy comes along and produces Sharktopus. (Thanks, Miss C. Thanks SO much 
.) I knew it was coming, but some small part of me held out hope that it would never see the light of day. No such luck.
Apparently Eric Roberts hasn't had much to do lately. My best info is that Sharktopus will grace our screens in September. I know I'll be watching.
Now, as if this wasn't enough, SyFy has also seen fit to give us Mega Python vs. Gatoroid. Here's a preview:
Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, based on the preview, seems like not much more than an opportunity to get 80's singers Debbie Gibson and Tiffany onto the screen at the same time. (Gibson, if you recall, was the female lead in Mega Shark.) If they can find a way to get a cameo by Kylie Minogue, they'd have a trifecta.
I'll probably watch this, too - I'm particularly impressed by its sharply written dialogue.
It's apparently going to grace us with its presence in 2011.
So many bad movies. So little time...
-Jay
Movie Review – The Car (1977) (Updated)
In 1977, right around the time I recall seeing the first commercials for Star Wars (now known by the much clunkier title Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope), commercials appeared for a very different film - The Car (Updated to add the link that I forgot before). (Trivia - The Car was released on 13 May 1977, Star Wars was released on 25 May 1977.)
The Car was, for reasons I still can't fully explain, a film that captured my imagination from the start - probably because of my parents' unequivocal refusal to take me to see it. I can recall finding a novelization of the movie in the book rack at the local grocery store, where I read probably half of the story over the course of a few weeks. The writing, as is typical of movie novelizations, was fairly bland and not horrifying in the least, but the parental ban persisted.
Movie Review – Dead Snow
I like zombie movies.
Zombies as a concept can be seen as metaphors for a lot of things, from mindless consumerism to religious fanaticism to political zeal.
They're also versatile - they don't have the limitations of, say, werewolves or vampires, and they don't require much in the way of backstory to get the narrative going.1
Perhaps most of all, they're kind of fun.2
So, I was quite intrigued when I learned of the 2009 Norwegian film, Død Snø (Dead Snow, in English - I'll refer to it by its English title from now on.)
Dead Snow features a Norwegian cast and crew. I'm going to assume that neither of my readers is familiar enough with Norwegian film to be interested in who played what role, so I'll skip the part where I run through the actors and get straight to the story. (I'll caveat this review with the admission that I watched the film several weeks ago, so bits may be slightly out-of-order, much like the fresh entrails of a victim of a zombie attack. Consider it a feature of the article and not a flaw.)
We øpen øn a yøung wøman being chased thrøugh the snøwy wøøds øf Nørway at night. Thrøugh the trees, we catch fleeting glimpses øf her pursuer. She thinks she's løst him, and støps tø løøk arøund. We can almøst feel her relief, when her attacker springs up øut of nøwhere like a brain-eating jack-in-the-bøx and ends the hunt.3
Cut to the rest of our characters:
The guys: Martin, Roy, Vegard and Erlend are heading to their rendezvous point with their ladyfriends for a weekend in a remote mountain cabin.
The girls: Hanna, Liv, and Chris, are in their car. A fourth girl, Sara, is meeting the group at the cabin after having skied cross-country from wherever she started.
The group meets at the base of the mountain. One of the guys, Vegard I think, heads up to the cabin on a snowmobile, and the others follow on foot. We discover that Sara's family owns the cabin.
"Cabin", by the way, may be too generous of a term. I've actually seen hamster cages that are more roomy than this "cabin", and the hamster cages at least have the luxurious perks of the little exercise wheel and a water bottle. And sunflower seeds...
Our intrepid group appears to have packed for the weekend by bringing a CD boombox, some extra socks, and a case of beer.
After some snowcapades, it finally occurs to the group that Sara hasn't shown up yet, but nobody really seems concerned. (Gripe: if my girlfriend was skiing cross-country to meet me at a cabin, and wasn't there when she was supposed to be, I'd like to think I'd be quicker to start searching. Our little bunch here appears to think it's perfectly reasonable to show up a day or two late...)
Cut to later in the evening, the group has returned to their spacious accommodations. One of the ladies excuses herself to visit the outhouse. Yes. Outhouse. In the frozen hill country of Norway. Brrrrrrrrrr!
She catches fleeting glimpses of something moving around outside, and gets back in as fast as she can. Soon there is a knock at the door.
Enter The Drifter. I don't think he was given a name. We'll call him Sven. Sven looks like he's spent most of the last several years roaming around the woods waiting for someone to show up at the cabin so he can invite himself in for a cup of coffee and a smoke.
He sits down with the group, and tells them of the accursed history of the area. Seems that back in World War II, a group of Nazi soldiers led by an officer named Herzog set up shop in the area. When things went bad for the Nazis and it became clear they were going to lose, Herzog's group stole all the gold and valuables from the locals and fled into the hills, where they disappeared. Neither the Nazis nor the plundered treasure was ever found.
Ever since, stories have been told about evil lurking in the hills, an evil which must not be disturbed!!!!!
Sorry. Anyway, the group dismisses Sven as a nutcase, and he goes on his way into the night.
Our group of victims intrepid vacationers opens up a trap door in the floor to retrieve their beer, and we catch a glimpse of a mysterious box with some sort of eerie yellowish fog wafting out of the keyhole. The fog is there, I think, just to let us know that the box is important, since otherwise we might miss that important plot point.
From this point on, things get odder. We revisit Sven, the drifter, making camp out in the snow in a small tent. He hears a noise, and is promptly attacked, field dressed, and snacked upon by one of our evil Nazi zombies. Maybe they got ticked at Sven for making them look bad in the story he told to the folks in the cabin, or maybe the zombie just got a craving for some entrails, I don't know.
The next morning, Vegard heads out on the snowmobile to hunt for Sara - a search that eventually leads him to Sven's gore-splattered campsite and what's left of Sven.4
Vegard presses on, and eventually falls through the snow into a cave and is knocked unconscious.
The others spend their day with more snowy frolicking, and once again return to the cabin for an evening of quality bonding time. They discover the mysterious box under the floor and open it to find the Nazi plunder. In a plot device apparently cribbed straight from inspired by Pirates of the Caribbean, the zombies are attracted to the treasure. In fact, when I saw the scene, my first thought was "Holy crap! I bet that the treasure somehow drives the zombies, not unlike the way that the Aztec gold drove the crew of the Black Pearl to seek out every last coin!"
One of the guys (by this point I'd largely stopped trying to keep track of the names) heads to the outhouse, and is followed by Chris (the non-blond woman without the dreadlocks). The two share a tender romantic interlude in the outhouse.5
Loverboy heads back into the cabin, while Chris stays behind to freshen up, whereupon she is beset by what we now know to be a Nazi zombie.
Chris fares poorly in this encounter.
The others soon realize that she hasn't returned, and begin a search, only to find themselves under siege by a group of zombies wielding Chris' now-detached head. Amazing zombie action ensues, culminating with Loverboy literally going to pieces as the zombies pull him through a window. (Zombies dragging someone through a window and pulling them apart is a must-have event in any self-respecting zombie film.)
He makes a torch and looks around, discovering various Nazi artifacts - flags, machine guns, potato-masher grenades, Sara's head, and such. He soon discovers the zombies.
Madcap zombie mayhem ensues, complete with a zombie-hanging-by-the-entrails bit that made me bust a gut laughing.6
Feeling all manly, Vegard attaches a machine gun to his snowmobile and heads back for the cabin.
Our other expendables have decided that their best shot at survival is for the women to go for help and the remaining guys to distract the zombies.
In alternating scenes, the women head towards what they believe to be civilization only to end up chased through the woods while the guys go all Spartan on the undead with a variety of hatches, axes , chainsaws, and maybe a board with a rusty nail in it. Vegard shows up with his pimped out snowmobile and joins in the fun briefly before getting torn to bits, and the cabin burns to the ground.
The blond woman ends up getting taken down by the zombies, but before she can be completely devoured, she manages to arm a grenade on her consumer's belt, finishing them both off in a ball of fire. The dreadlock girl manages to get away for the moment, after we learn that zombies can climb trees, and that sometimes the makeup effects folks cut corners.
The guys, meanwhile, aren't doing any better, largely because the pack of zombies seems to be nigh-endless. Dreadlock girl finds her way back to the guys, where her guy mistakes her for a zombie and breaks up with her the hard way.
Herzog (the commander of the Nazis in the area, remember?) finally shows up. He looks none too pleased that his minions haven't completely defeated the warm bodies yet...
...so he summons the rest (seriously, just how many Nazi zombies can there possibly be in one forest?)...
...who proceed to chase the last two survivors down the mountain, where we lose one to disembowelment via tree. Herzog retrieves a piece of the treasure from the body, and our lone survivor finally makes the connection and heads back to the site of the cabin. He sifts through the rubble and finds the box just as Herzog and his posse show up.
He returns the box to Herzog (who seems satisfied), and flees down the mountain.
As he digs out his keys to start the car, a single gold coin falls to the floor of the car. He reaches down and picks it up, just in time to see Herzog's fist come through the window.
What a craptacular way to end a weekend getaway.
Let this be a lesson to anyone who ever finds a hidden box of treasure - make damn sure there aren't any zombies around before you open the box.
I'll give Dead Snow 3 half-eaten brains out of 5.
-Jay
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1Of the classic zombie films made before roughly 2000, Romero's 1968 Night of The Living Dead remains, in my opinion, the definitive zombie film. In the more recent batch, I have to give the nod to Shaun of the Dead (2004), although I also like Zombieland (2009), in particular Woody Harrelson's scene-chewing Tallahassee.
2I have a weird idea of fun...
3Honestly. I can deal with the jack-in-the-box bit if the monster is chasing the victim through, say, a cluttered building, or maybe a cornfield. At night. But the woods here aren't very dense, it's in bright moonlight, and the ground is covered in snow. Unless she's being chased by a vicious white rabbit, she should be able to spot whatever is following her. Do Norwegian zombies tunnel through the snow or something?
4Point of note: We often think of cinematic zombies as brainovores. However, close review of zombie films reveals that many, perhaps most, zombies are equally as fond of entrails. I propose the name cerebroentrailovore to address this particular dietary preference.
5If I never again have to watch a love scene set in an outhouse, I won't complain a bit...
6Yes. I made that joke. It's my blog, so I can do that.
The Terror Continues…
One of my brothers informed me a little while ago that SyFy, that esteemed purveyor of fine made-for-TV schlock, has signed Roger Corman to helm - wait for it- Sharktopus.
Yeah. Sharktopus. The mutant love-child of Mega Shark and Giant Octopus, no doubt.
This proves conclusively that any concept can be sold as a film given the right circumstances.
Look for this blockbuster to show up sometime in 2010, with a review here to follow. In the meanwhile, I'll leave readers with this little gem of concept art:
It Needs Little Shark Heads On The Tentacles...
Darth Vader, Sci-Fi, and Religion
Over at Exploring Our Matrix, James McGrath has a short post raising the question "should Darth Vader be forgiven if he repents?"
(James often writes about the relationships between science fiction and religion, and with good reason - there are almost endless opportunities to compare and contrast our notions of religion with those in various sci-fi milieus, and sci-fi gives us a mechanism to explore moral and ethical issues in ways we can't readily do in real life.)
I think it's a very interesting question, particularly when you start peeling away the layers.
As the question is posed, I interpret it as asking "can someone be so wicked that forgiveness is impossible"? (If I'm misinterpreting, hopefully James will let me know.)
James poses some discussion-prompting questions as follow-ups: Should Vader have stood trial? Been executed? Set free?
Before I go any further, I need to lay out a few assumptions:
- Anyone reading this is assumed to be at least passingly familiar with the life and career of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader.
- For purposes of this post, the Star Wars canon is taken to be the six theatrical films and the Cartoon Network series Clone Wars. This is mainly because I'm unfamiliar with the materials that make up the expanded canon.
- Han shot first.
Now, if we take the original question, "should Darth Vader be forgiven if he repents?" and attempt to answer it from a familiar Christian perspective, the answer would probably be a fairly straightforward "yes". But that's a boring answer.
To go deeper, we need to look at the follow-ups.
I grew up Catholic. A prominent feature of Catholicism is the sacrament of Reconciliation. It used to be called Confession, which always suggested to me something along the lines of the Spanish Inquisition, complete with tongue pincers and thumbscrews. The basic Catholic Reconciliation scenario involves a one-to-one chat with a priest, wherein the congregant 'fesses up to his transgressions, the priest says a little prayer and gives the repentant congregant some sort of assignment (such as ten Hail Marys) to perform whilst reflecting upon his sins.1
The sinner is then declared to be right with God, and can go along his merry way.2
Except that's really not all there is to it.
There remains the often significant matter of getting right with the folks that were on the bad end of the transgression. It's becoming more common for priests to include some sort of restitution clause in the post-confession assignment, encouraging people to take personal responsibility for their actions and deal with the consequences of them.
That's where James' other questions come into play.
In the Star Wars mythology, Darth Vader was either directly responsible for or complicit in the deaths of millions, if not billions of people. He tortured his daughter, maimed his son, encased a guy in metal, and dispatched minions to kill cute, fuzzy little spear-wielding teddy bears.3
If we had someone with that sort of rap sheet in custody, I don't think anyone would try to argue that he should be released - he just has too much to answer for even if he is genuinely remorseful. I suppose one could argue that he was insane, or "just following orders", but neither of those excuses seem sufficient to let him go free.
The bottom line is that if we took Darth Vader and dropped him into our world, he could be forgiven for his sins in the religious sense of the term, but that he would still have to accept the secular consequences of his crime - in other words he'd spend the rest of his life in jail or perhaps face execution.4
Now, let's look at things from within the Star Wars universe.
The first thing to consider is that within the Star Wars universe, at least as I've defined the canon for this post, religion doesn't seem to involve anything comparable to a Christian concept of God. The only mention I can recall is that C-3PO "thanks the maker" on occasion, but since he's a robot, "maker" could just as easily refer to the person who put him together as it could to God.
The religion, such as it is, of the Star Wars universe appears to be centered on the Force. The Force, though, seems to be more of an energy field or kind of magic that people seek to understand and control rather than something that people regard as an object of worship. The Force also seems to lack any sort of agency or intent - it's just kinda there, waiting to be used by people lucky enough to have a high midichlorian count.5
The Force, in other words, is morally neutral, and its energy/magic can be brought to bear for good or ill, depending on the intent of the user. Morality in the Star Wars universe appears to depend not upon some extrinsic objective standard, but rather on that which maintains order and harmony within society.
This makes the question of Vader's repentance and forgiveness more complicated. Vader didn't "sin" in the sense that he transgressed against the will of the Force and made the Force upset. Rather, his "sin" was that he elected to use the power of the Force for his own selfish reasons rather than for the betterment of his society as a whole. In this context, "redemption" means "turning away from the dark side" and using the power for unselfish reasons, and doesn't carry the connotation of "making the Force" happy or otherwise placating it.
In a similar vein, the Force can't "forgive" Vader. The Force itself doesn't care how it is used - at the heart of the matter it's just a resource to be utilized. "Forgiveness" for Vader must be sought from those he hurt - Luke, Leia, all the Jedi younglings he killed, and so on. Luke forgives him, but there isn't any opportunity for anyone else to.6
This leads us to whether Vader would have spent the rest of his life in prison (or faced execution) had he survived. I think that the situation remains the same as it was when we were considering his fate in our world - he still has an obscene amount of blood on his hands, and he still has an almost unimaginable debt to pay to society. I don't think there's any compelling reason to absolve him of the responsibility for his actions - that obligation remains regardless of the nature of any possible afterlife.
From here, it might be interesting to consider the philosophical ramifications we'd be faced with if we were to encounter a race of intelligent aliens. I'll take up that topic in a future post.
-Jay
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1Many parishes these days have communal services where the intimidating one-on-one chat with the priest is replaced by the priest delivering some prayers and a short homily to the gathered congregants, who personally reflect on their sins. The one-on-one part is then offered as an option. It always seemed to me that the one-on-one approach harkened back to medieval days. It's not much of a stretch to see how a priest who knew the details of the dark affairs of the nobility could use that knowledge as leverage. Anyway...
2No, there's no sarcasm in this statement. Really. None.
3No sarcasm here, either. By the way, I always found the responses of Luke and Leia to the knowledge of their paternity to be bizarre. Luke's response in Episode V seemed remarkably short-lived. Leia never really even gave any visible response at all. I would think that learning that your father was one of the most despicable, evil murderers in the galaxy might be more traumatic...
4Not much different than any other jailhouse conversion, really. Personally, I've always found it repulsive that some doctrines claim that someone like, say, Jeffrey Dahmer can be "saved" in prison, while the people that he raped, murdered, and mutilated might not be.
5Midichlorians (along with Jar-Jar Binks and Anakin Skywalker as a whiny brat) are a prime example of why George Lucas should not be allowed to write movies anymore. It's not that endosymbiosis is a bad concept in and of itself, but its use here essentially turns the Jedi into accidents of birth rather than dedicated warriors who achieved their skills through years of study and practice.
6We don't know, based on the films, whether ordinary people have any sort of consciousness or soul that persists after death, so we don't know if Vader could seek their forgiveness after he died. We are told that the ability of the Jedi to appear as "Force Ghosts" is something that they only recently figured out how to do, so we have a precedent for a concept of soul, but I don't think we have warrant to conclude that Vader could posthumously communicate with all of the people that he was responsible for killing.
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