This movie scared the PANTS off me when I was a little kid. It was released to theaters in 1979; I would have seen it a few years later when it played on broadcast television.
It made such a terrifying impression on me that I’m a little surprised I never developed even the mildest phobic response to mannequins. (I’ve met other adults for whom they are just too creepy.) They don’t bother me in the slightest. I feel the same way about clowns.
I just need a Halloween horror playlist, though. I’ve already seen this year’s “Castle Rock” and (of course) the second season of “Mr. Mercedes.”
“Vampire” (1979) and “The Last Broadcast” (1998) both come highly recommended by some horror-fan friends that I truly trust. I also believe that I have never seen any of the classic Universal Studios monster movies in their entirety. I’ve watched bits and pieces of a couple of them on television when I was a young kid, including “Creature From the Black Lagoon” (1954) and “The Invisible Man” (1933). When I was a tot in the very late 70’s, the studio’s Gothic monsters were still very much a part of the zeitgeist … my older brother even had the Aurora model kits. I finally enjoyed F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” for the first time a couple of years ago, but of course the 1921 German film preceded the Universal movies, which re-imagined Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” entirely in 1931.
I’ll probably start first by trying to hunt down a copy of “The Wolf Man” (1941). That’s the one that other everyone always recommends.
DC Comics.
“Bigfoot and Wildboy” (1977 – 1979) is another obscure TV show that is perhaps best forgotten. It was a segment on something called “The Krofft Supershow” in 1977, I think, before the segments were re-edited into a half-hour program. I became a fan of it as second grader in the fall of 1979. (Or maybe I watched its reruns in third grade, in 1980 — to be honest, this was so long ago that I hardly remember.)
They don’t make TV shows like they used to. And that’s a good thing. “Bigfoot and Wildboy” seemed to rely heavily on three ingredients: an utra-cheesy 70’s score; truly terrible special effects (even for the time); and lots of shots of its two title characters either jumping, or running at the camera in slow motion. (I actually just watched a few minutes of the full episode you see posted below.)
I was pretty preoccupied with “Bigfoot and Wildboy” when I was very young. I remember having to make journal entries in the classroom, in which we could write and illustrate anything we wanted. (It was precisely the sort of open-ended journal writing exercise with little academic value to which I’d be subjected, occasionally, throughout my school career — even in my college poetry class.) But we were allowed to select our own topic in the second grade, and that was at least some fun for an imaginative kid. The nuns (it was a Catholic school) sometimes prodded us to write about real-world events; 1979’s Space Shuttle Columbia, for example, was high on their list of suggestions.
Given a blank slate, though, I tended to write almost exclusively about imaginary characters and monsters — peppered, perhaps, with intermittent entries about dogs. I distinctly remember drawing Bigfoot and Wildboy one day. (If memory serves, we wrote and drew in our journals after recess, maybe to get us refocused.) I drew them leaping over a fence and running toward the viewer. (Seriously, the show had a lot of shots like that. Check out the opening credits below.)
I remember a nun looking over my shoulder and inquiring delicately about the giant hairy humanoid and the half-naked boy … when I explained the characters to her, she suggested with (uncharacteristic) patience, “Tomorrow, let’s try to write about something from the real world.”
We were chatting about obscure TV shows a couple of weeks ago after I shared a post about “Manimal” (which I was surprised to find lovingly remembered by some otherwise sane people). I was shocked when someone else remembered “Cliffhangers,” which ran for a single season on NBC in 1979.
Dear God, did I love this show when I was a first grader. I hollered whenever it came on; I’m pretty sure my Mom was amused by that. I think this is technically the first prime-time show I was ever a fan of. (Yeah, I ended that last sentence with a preposition; it’s my damn blog.)
When I was in the first grade, I absolutely loved “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.” It was, technically I guess, a dystopian science fiction story in which a contemporary astronaut is frozen for 500 years, then returns to a post-nuclear earth. Its feature-length pilot was created by Glen Larson, who also wrote the pilot for “Battlestar Galactica” the preceding year. (Weird trivia — Wikipedia informs me that this was released theatrically, along with “Battlestar Galactica” in limited theaters.)
Of course I didn’t realize this at the time, but “Buck Rogers” was pretty bad. It was horribly bad. Indescribably bad. It was even bad by cheesy 1970’s TV sci-fi standards. You can actually find full episodes on Youtube, and I started one, just on a lark. I could only watch about one minute, maybe less — plus that soul-deadening clip of “Twiki” in the second video below. Seriously, it’s as though Larson was intentionally giving the worst script he could come up with to NBC as some sort of prank. (After being told to resuscitate the heroic Buck, one advanced futureperson advises another, “He’s liable to be not too coherent.”)
About Twiki — that little guy fascinated a lot of very young kids in 1979. For a while, it was all the rage for us to do our “deeby-deeby-deeby” Twiki impressions.
I was a second grader in 1979. I don’t think I have any recollection of people talking about the eclipse. And that’s odd, because I do remember the Blizzard of 1978 quite well.
I didn’t watch “WKRP in Cincinnati” (1978 – 1982) when I was a kid; it was a show for adults. I loved the theme song just as much as anyone else, though.
This was just meant as a catchy tune for the show’s opener — but it was such a cool and popular soft-rock number (performed by Steve Carlisle), that a full-length version was released as a singe in 1979. It reached number 65 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart in 1982.
I am part of a happy minority where “Alien Covenant” (2017) is concerned — I keep hearing about “meh” or negative reactions from my friends, but I quite enjoyed it. I’d rate it a 9 out of 10.
No, this second installment in the “Alien” prequel trilogy doesn’t bring much new to the table. It often seems like a collection of common tropes, and borrows a bit from previous films in the franchise — especially the first movie in 1979. Some aspects of it — like a predictable and slightly gimmicky development late in the story — even feel like horror movie cliches. (I am doing everything I can to avoid spoilers, so forgive how vague I’m being here.) “Alien: Covenant” isn’t groundbreaking, and it isn’t destined to be called a “classic.”
Here’s the thing, though — all of the movie’s common tropes are exactly what make fans happy. Think about it … if you had to name two “Alien” movies as unique or the most divergent, they might be the heady, ambitious “Prometheus” (2012) and the baroquely experimental “Alien: Resurrection” (1997). Whatever their failings, both of those movies deserve points for creativity. And they are among the three films that fans hated the most. (The third here is the smartest and most underappreciated installment, 1993’s brilliant “Alien 3.”)
With “Alien: Covenant,” Ridley Scott gives fans exactly what they were clamoring for — a frightening, gory, space-based horror film with creatively designed monsters and some nasty surprises. It very much returns to the tone of the first film. It is even jarringly darker than “Prometheus,” which was defined partly by its moments of cautious optimism. And, more than any other sequel, it seems directly inspired by the grotesquerie of H. R. Giger’s original, nightmarish monster designs. I feel certain this movie would have received the late artist’s blessing. (I could name a certain scene and an excellent surprise story development, but I won’t.)
Michael Fassbender shined in his two roles here. (He not only reprises his role as the android, “David,” but also portrays a newer model, “Walter.”) The rest of the acting was roundly good too.
I also found the movie nice and scary. I, for one, don’t think Scott’s direction of action scenes here is perfect. (They are harder to follow here, for example, than his beautiful arena melees in 2000’s “Gladiator.”) But they were still effective.
So this return to form made me pretty happy. I didn’t want another muddled attempt at profundity like “Prometheus.” Nor did I want a winding, bizarre, arthouse-horror tale like “Resurrection” — that movie was like a poorly written, drug-fueled comic book. I wanted a first-rate sci-fi horror show with lots of monstery goodness, and that’s what I got.
If I had to pick a criticism of “Alien: Covenant,” I’m surprised to have to point to some less-than-stellar CGI. This was something I noticed from early trailers for the film, and I’m surprised I haven’t heard another reviewer mention in it yet. One scene rendered a title baddie about as well as a modern video game, albeit a good one. Another’s depiction of an upright “neomorph” seemed … fairly bad. (Fans of decent creature features shouldn’t despair, however — there are still some outstanding monster moments, and no small amount of accompanying gore and goo.) Have I just become spoiled by the amazing dinosaur effects of 2015’s “Jurassic World?” I don’t think so … I suggest that the otherwise lamentable “Alien: Resurrection,” with its combination of CGI and practical effects, had far better creature effects than this newest outing.
Of course I recommend this movie. Maybe I should only do so with the caveat that I am (obviously) a huge fan of the series. It has been said that I’m easy to please, too — I actually gave a glowing review to “Prometheus” shortly after its release, before wiser minds pointed out to me its sometimes egregious flaws. (A friend of mine shared with me one of those “Everything Wrong With” videos that CinemaSins produces … it’s a hilarious webseries, but it sure will dull the shine of some of your favorite movies, lemme tell ya.) Your mileage may vary, especially depending on how much you enjoy horror movies, as opposed to more general science fiction.
Oh! There is a mostly non-sequitur postscript that I can’t help but add here … yet another one of my movie prognostications was flat out wrong. It isn’t a spoiler if it’s a far-out prediction that didn’t happen, so I’ll go ahead and share it here … during one of the ads for “Alien: Covenant,” I could swear I heard a character call out the name “ASH!!!!” (I’ve evidently started hallucinating at the start of mid-life.) I predicted that the new and robotic Walter would turn evil, and actually become the android named Ash in the 1979 original. (And why not? Androids do not age, and a web-based prologue for “Alien Covenant” suggests their faces can be easily swapped out.) I further predicted that the more human David would be pitted against him in order to save humanity somehow from alienkind. (These things do not happen.)
I still think that’s a pretty clever idea, though, even if I only accidentally arrived at it. It would be great if that happened somehow in the planned “Alien: Awakening.”
Or at least it is to the astronauts who make an abortive attempt to escort it back to Earth. (They realize that bringing a Martian organism home is a bad idea in this year’s surprisingly satisfying science fiction-thriller.)
I actually had more fun with this than I expected; the movie is much faster paced and scarier than the trailer made it look. There are some real surprises and moments of genuine horror here, following a requisite plot setup that is relatively brief. It’s a really nice monster movie that should please fans of the genre.
I actually didn’t prefer its ending, which is something for which other reviewers are praising it a lot. I’m disinclined to say more, for fear of spoilers. The movie’s marketing already spoiled enough. (The ads infuriatingly show the fate of a main character.)
I will say what the movie is not, however.
One, it’s not a stealth prequel for Sony’s planned 2018 “Spider-Man” spinoff, “Venom” (though that’s such a clever idea, I wish I’d thought of it).
Two, it’s not a ripoff of Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979). Yes, it’s got the same MacGuffin, and some story parallels that I noticed early on. But I like to think of this as a more grounded contemporary thriller, where “Alien” was a futuristic fantasy creature feature. Besides, if we criticize every “haunted-house-in-space” movie as an “Alien” imitator, we won’t get more of them.
I’d give this an 8 out of 10, and I’d recommend it.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 