The Keep (Movie) Review

There are a lot of movies that got a bad reception but go on to become cult classics. The Shawshank Redemption, The Thing and Blade Runner all bombed on release but are now hailed as masterpieces. Then there are films that don’t just don’t just fail, they are reviled like The Keep.

Hated by the director, the lead actor, the author of the book it was based on, and the studio that funded it The Keep was plagued by problems on the set, cost overruns, the effects supervisors untimely death, and a rejection by the moviegoing public. It is universally agreed upon to be a failure as a film.

A failure, but an interesting one, which is why it is still being discussed more than 40 years after it’s release.

The pedigree helps. Michael Mann (famous for Heat) directed an astonishing cast including Ian McKellen, Jurgen Prochnow Gabriel Byrne and other heavy hitters. The book it was based on was a bestseller and it also comes with an anachronistic, but strangely appropriate, soundtrack by electronica pioneers Tangerine Dream. The ingredients for success are there

We open in 1941 with a convoy of German soldiers heading up a mountain pass to a remote Romanian village. Their commander, Jurgen Prochnow (from Das Boot to Beerfest), is quickly identified as one of the Good Germans who serves Hitler’s War Machine while not buying into the Nazi cause. His goal is a mysterious black fortress with obsidian walls and little rhyme or reason. Is the courtyard his troop makes camp in open to the sky or is it a soundstage? How large is the keep? Who owns it and what purpose does it serve? When the soldiers under his command defy the local harbringer and break into a vast underground cavern a new question arises. With a cavern that big, why has the entire region not collapsed into it?

These questions are quickly abandoned when German soldiers start dying. Watching this on Pluto things happened so quickly I wondered whether parts of the movie were being snipped during the commercial breaks. It turns out the trimming happened much earlier. The director’s cut came in at 210 minutes but the studio demanded it be trimmed back to a slim 96. Mann being Mann kept all the moody atmospheric bits at the expense of plot and exposition. Probably for the best because The Keep holds your attention for most of it’s run.

Prochnow, fearing for his men, asks to abandon his post but never thinks of stationing them outside the eponymous keep. His cries for help are met by a detachment of the SS, led by Gabriel Byrne (Miller’s Crossing, Usual Suspects) who we meet massacring the local villagers. This establishes him as one of the Bad Germans whom it is OK to hate. Emphasizing this point, when we meet Byrne he is a disembodied torso protruding from the turret of an armored car, making him a literal part of the Nazi War Machine.

(On a tangent? The vehicle itself is apparently a LeichterPanzerspähwagen and this one later appeared as Hubert Jr in the BBC Comedy comedy set in Occupied France Allo_'Allo! 

After the opening massacre establishes his evil bonafides Byrne decides to get to the bottom of things. He starts by ordering the village priest to translate inscriptions in a dead language carved into living rock by claws of inhuman strength. Knowing he is out of his depth, the priest suggests calling in Gandalf/Magneto/Ian McKellen, a Jewish scholar who once lived in the village.

The plan is to spring McKellen, accompanied by his daughter and caretaker, Alberta Watson, out of the concentration camp and get him to safety overseas, but McKellen switches the plan after meeting the monster stalking the keep.

The monster, named Molasar, has been literally body building by snacking on German soldiers, but is now looking to leave the keep and recruits McKellen as his ally. After curing his ailments, saving his daughter from certain rape, and spinning a pretty good line of BS? Molasar quickly gains an ally in McKellen who needed little convincing, because hey, dead Nazis.

What follows is a game of wits as each of our four players schemes against each other amidst a background of horror and rising madness as Molasar’s influence erodes the sanity of all involved. Or it would in a better film. Instead we waste screen time one Scott Glenn, a stoic, mysterious and rather boring immortal who is summoned by Molasar’s efforts to escape the keep. Glenn by the way is wasted in this role but was a memorable bad-ass in his brief appearances in Hunt For The Red October and Silence of the Lambs.

This is where things kind of go off the rails and despite some pretty impressive scenes, including:

• A discussion on fascism that hits uncomfortably close to home in 2025

• A re-telling of Abraham and Issac where the good guys win

• A brutal offscreen massacre told entirely via sound effects

The rest of the film, and to be honest most of the earlier part as well, just doesn’t gel together. Some critics will refer to this as ethereal, fever dream-like logic soaked in symbolism. Freedonia’s take is informative and typical of that interpretation. Or you could just say it's half-baked.

Which might be why we are still talking about. Masterpieces are recognized and enshrined, mediocre works are forgotten, but the ones that are almost there, but just miss the mark… those are the ones that haunt us.

Or as the old social media chestnut goes? “No more remaking good movies. Remake movies that were almost good.”

Wednesday (TV Show) Review

Wednesday (Two Seasons, 16 Episodes – Netflix – 2022 to Present)

The Addams Family are becoming an increasingly popular touchstone in popular culture and the latest incarnation, Netflix's Wednesday, continues to expand on America's favorite spooky family. Sorry Munsters, but you'll always be number two in our hearts.

Starting as a series of cartoons in the 1930s New Yorker the macabre family rose to fame with a black and white sitcom in the 1960s, rose to dizzying heights with a pair of cult-classic movies in the 1990s and were kept alive in the interim via a beloved pinball game and a variety of cartoons and TV revivals that I never watched.

The current version focuses on Wednesday, the Addams daughter whose portrayal by Christina Ricci in the 1990s probably kept the Goth subculture going another decade. Filling in for Ricci is Jenna Ortega, a veteran of both the Scream franchise and The Disney Channel. You can choose what's more impressive, the fact that she hasn't fallen prey to the Disney Channel curse, that she can convincingly portray a teenager at the age of 20 or that she's a worthy successor to Ricci.

Dour, snarky, and above-it-all, this version of Wednesday is sent off to Nevermore, a boarding school for "Outcasts" or Cryptid-Americans like werewolves, gorgons, sirens and presumably the Addams Family. Fortunately the early efforts of sorting everyone into neat categories seems to have been dropped in favor of a supernatural grab-bag of Outcasts. As opposed to Normies aka ordinary people, muggles, mundanes, baselines, saps, flatscans, rubes or whatever reverse-fantasy racism term you prefer.

When you have a boarding school? Mysteries and love-triangles must follow and while there were plenty of hidden doorways, secret societies, riddles and puzzles in the first season they all kind of got lost in an effort to copy the "mystery box" format created by Lost. There was always a new mystery with supporting characters emerging each episode. Unlike Lost the old mysteries were neatly explained, but the leftover characters and red herrings did tend to pile up.

This continued into season two where they decided they needed to prune things back. Deceased characters were brought back as ghosts, presumably to welcome the red herrings and supporting characters who were ruthlessly killed at the hands of a bevy of killers including a super-intelligent zombie, a murderous psychopathic Hyde and the Alan Parsons Project which I believe was some type of hovercraft.

Suffice to say it's watchable, but with Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (Smallville and the underrated Into The Badlands) at the helm  it could be more. Even with the subplot pruning there feels like a lot of dead weight and aimless B-plots.

Less so in season two with frequent appearances by Gomez (Luiz Guzman) and Morticia (Catherine Zeta Jones) Addams as boosters of Nevermore Academy to speed things along. They join Principal Dort (Steve Buscemi) with appearances by Billie Piper, Lady Gaga and Christina Ricci herself amongst the surprising star power of the cast. Also Fred Armisen is a delight as Uncle Fester in a more animated performance than I think I've ever seen from him before. If Netflix doesn't give him a Fester's Eleven spinoff focusing on his criminal antics? Straight to jail. 

One thing the show isn't nailing is soap opera antics, despite the Smallville credentials of the creators. Wednesday's emotional restraint and disdain for displays of pathetic sentimentality unfortunately reins the rest of the characters in as well. Even when her werewolf roommate Enid (Emma Sinclair, ) is dealing with delayed puberty metaphors, boyfriends, peer group acceptance and cracking Wednesday's shell it's treated as a tedious intrusion on mystery solving.

Which is odd, because they mysteries don't have much depth. There were a few puzzles in the first season that were fun to unravel but those are gone. While Wednesday hunt serial killers during her summer vacation she doesn't show any any of the investigative chops of Veronica Mars, Dale Cooper, or even Dale Gribble. Instead she glowers and bosses others around like a pint-sized police captain from a 1980s buddy cop movie. That's when she's not longing for the return of psychic powers that others warn her are unreliable at best.

Given that Ortega convincingly portrays Wednesday as driven and obsessive you would think she'd be delighted to supplement her absent psychometry with observation, deduction and forensics. The opportunity for gruesome experimentation gags writes itself. Alternatively she could lean into the Dark Academia bookish side of things and drop references to Blackwood, Hopley and Campbell. At the very least she should have a psychic logbook noting her hits and misses. That would be a much more interesting MacGuffin than her unsold and frequently unsecured novel.

There's a lot of potential here, but like Tim Burton who directed a number of episodes it's all surface and no depth. It's frustrating because there are so many missed opportunities. It's watchable, but far from riveting.

So, what RPG system to run this in?

• You'd think that a PbtA version would fit best, MASKs or Thirsty Sword Lesbians, but those systems lean into soap-opera complications and Wednesday fails to hit the mark on those. Her own romances fall flat and those of her classmates rarely impact or interest her.
• Any combat oriented game isn't going to capture it. There are clear tiers of power and stronger always beats weaker. While you would think Wednesday would learn her opponents weaknesses and exploit them? You'd be wrong. She does look stoic and fearless when she's being knocked through a window, but she doesn't equalize a fight by prepping the battlefield with strobe lights, loud speakers, electrified tripwires, or mystical herbs. This isn't any of the Hunter lines from World of Darkness. 
• Gumshoe, or it's teen-oriented version Bubblegumshoe would seem to be a natural fit with the emphasis on finding clues, but most of the mysteries of Nevermore seem to have been exhausted in the first season. There's a lot of characters being introduced (and subsequently killed) but finding out their connection to a mystery is usually done offscreen without even the thrill of a Library Use montage featuring microfilm newspaper archives. 

So, probably best to ignore the show as written, lean into one of the choices above, or grab anything close enough, plus one of the brainteaser books always on sale at Barnes & Noble, set up a rival Griswold Academy and have fun. Something that Wednesday the show has had trouble doing despite being an overall entertaining watch.

The Night Comes For Us (Movie) Review

The Night Comes For Us (Directed by Timo Tjahjanto, Netflix, 2018)

This Indonesian martial arts movie is very much a throwback. Our unstoppable hero punches his way through hordes of endless mooks, each one of which is polite enough to attack solo before meeting their gory finish. The rest are content to wait their turn for a grisly demise, or to run around menacingly in the background for no reason. Except to look cool and pay homage to John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13.

The homages come frequently and the heightened gore and quick dispatch of nameless extras reminds me a lot of Sonny Chiba's The Street Fighter series. Which for those unaware should be taken as a warning. The Street Fighter was rated X when it was released in the US and The Night Comes For Us is cut from the same cloth. This isn't just a violent movie, it's a hard-R violent movie with buckets of blood and horrible deaths. Meat hooks are prominently featured in more than one scene.

The plot is bare bones but what do you want from a martial arts movie? An elite triad assassin has a crisis of conscience and saves a little girl after massacring everyone else in her village for stealing from his crime lord boss. This act of defiance can not be tolerated and the triad declares all out war, sending a battalion of their most-expendable henchmen after the traitorous Ito (The Raid alumnus Joe Taslim). Once the henchmen are dispatched in ignominious single combat, the field is cleared for the elite assassins (who actually have some personality) to arrive.

These include the younger, hipper version of Ito, his conflicted childhood friend Arian (The Raid 2 alumnus Iko Uwais) and a trio of female assassins who dispense with all the brooding and really vamp it up. The Operative (The Raid 2's Julie Estelle) steals the show and appears to be on loan from the Marvel Universe as a graduate of the Black Widow program.

It's not a great movie. It's very retro and that extends to a lot of the fight choreography. There are a few memorable scenes and fatalities, but none of the non-stop razzle dazzle you'd get from The Raid or vintage Jackie Chan. But for a bit of action movie nostalgia there are worse ways to spend two hours.

Notes

• The final fight between Ito and Arian borrows a lot from Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series, by which I mean Warner Brothers cartoons

• I'd like to give props to Ito's gang buddies who bravely join his fight, but *spoiler alert* none of them appeared in The Raid movies. Fortunately they are fun while they last and each gets the kind of cool last stand that guys fantasize about having.

• For some reason I accept this universe's treatment of guns. Guns exist, people use them, they are not dishonorable. They just don't get used much. People are really into stabbing.

• Speaking of which, if you get stabbed? You shouldn't pull out the knife. It's keeping the blood in. Also, walking into the knife so you can punch your opponent at closer range? Not a good idea.

• Fortunately nobody worries about blood because bleeding out isn't a thing. You can get stabbed twenty, thirty times and as long as you have an artfully ripped t-shirt to soak up the blood? You'll be fine.

• One last shout out? To Reina (Asha Bermudez) as the little girl who didn't sign up for any of this. She wakes up, pets her cat, helps mom with breakfast, goes to school. Then everyone she knows is murdered by gunmen, her village is burnt to the ground, and she's kidnapped by an angst-ridden psycho. Her next few days are filled with crazed murderers dying in brutal hand-to-hand combat interspersed with the occasional car chase and everybody is yelling all the time. The kid is going to need either years of therapy or a sequel where she appears as a kick-ass vigilante out for revenge.

Squid Game (TV Show) Review

Squid Game (Season One, Nine Episodes, Netflix, 2021) 

I'm obviously late to the party on this one, but I finally got around to watching South Korea's entry into the Battle Royale genre. It definitely deserved the hype as I can't remember the last series I watched which played with my emotions and intellect as much as this one did.

By Battle Royale, I'm referring to the 1999 book by Kōshun Takami which invented the now-popular “Let's all murder each other for prizes!” genre. Notable entries include the 2000 movie of the same name, the Hunger Game series (first published in 2008), and Squid Game in 2021. So if you are looking for a shockingly violent critique of society seen through the lens of a murder competition? We can expect a new one to arrive about every ten years or so.

Squid Game takes the formula and puts a reality show spin on things, with the characters signing up to play a series of children's games with deadly consequences. Teams, alliances, secret challenges and all the other tropes of the reality genre make their appearance but fortunately the show aims higher than a simple Survivor satire. Instead it takes it's audience and characters through a series of gut-punching twists and turns that feels surprisingly packed even at eight hours split up over nine episodes. If I was to compare it to anything it would be early Lost before the ever growing cast and mysteries turned it from compelling to frustrating

Unlike Lost, Squid Game actually answers the questions that the audience raises. Why don't the players do X? What about Y? Why are the game-masters doing Z? The creators thought of these things as well and rather than paper them over with more, distracting mysteries they actually answer them. And after doing that they pile on more plot twists, but all of them make sense in the context of the show, unlike some of the “OH COME ON!” twists in say... Money Heist or late-season Heroes and Westworld.

If I'm comparing Squid Game to a lot of other shows? That's because Squid Game shines in comparison. It's a thriller done right. And if that's all it did it, it would deserve all the praise heaped upon it. But, it's also a Battle Royale show and that is it's own special thing. The audience is compelled to wonder not only how they would handle the physical challenges, but the moral ones as well. It's a crucible where character is revealed, and Squid Game has some great characters.

Our initial viewpoint character, Gi-hun (played by Lee Jung-jae who I won't pretend I've seen before) does almost too good a job in the first episode portraying the sort of degenerate gambler who could easily vanish and not have the authorities concerned about his disappearance. It's actually a brilliant choice and without giving too much away while his arc may not be classically heroic? It's still a journey and we learn this man is just that. A fallible person who found life's circumstances more than they could handle. After the first episode you might decide you'll never root for him, and you might not, but you will understand him better as the series goes on.

The contestants are quickly whittled down but I do have to give shout-outs to Il-nam, the old man with no other place to go (played by Oh Yeong-Su), Deok-su, the gangster with a heart of poison (played deliciously and increasingly over-the-top by Heo Sung-tae) and Jun-ho, Republic of Korea's Super Action Police Agent Number One! (played by Wi Ha-joon). There's really not a bad performance in the bunch, and if you think there is? Just wait 15 minutes.

Speaking of which, this show is violent. Not John Wick violent or Kurosawa violent or John Woo violent with cartwheels and squibs and fountains of blood, but disturbingly close to the real world violent. Lots of people die in this show and it is depicted graphically on camera. People get shot in the head a lot and they don't die nobly. They plead and cry and beg for their lives and that's the point. The Squid Game (which by the way is named after a Korean schoolyard game whose closest equivalent was homophobically called “Smear the Queer” in my youth) takes advantage of people in bad circumstances and shows them no mercy. It makes sense since series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk had to hock his laptop to pay his bills while writing this script, then spent ten years getting rejection, after rejection while trying to get it made. When Battle Royale came out it was considered disturbing, controversial and horrific. Now we are grading the genre on how well they criticize modern society without falling into parody.

(Gore warning. Gore is plentiful but brief, and unlike the real world? Bullets are wands of instant death. You won't be subjected to endless screaming as participants bleed out and/or choke on their own blood. I guess that's something we can look forward to when the next Battle Royale drops in 2030 or so?)

For those into non-gore visuals? You are in for a treat. Some impressive design choices upfront are honestly like few things we've seen before. The bland contestant costumes, the inhuman outfits of the game-masters and the innocent, pastel sets for the deadly children's games add up to a gripping mix of beauty, dread and shocking violence. The terrible threat of violence elevates even the most mundane activities into terrifying situations and the recurring use of certain motifs might change your opinion of certain classical themes forever. Time will tell, but Squid Game has a good chance of claiming Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz away from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And switching back, not to say it's all horrific. There's plenty of twists and turns and thrilling victories, and to be honest? There are certain creators whose work clicks with me and I know we both read the same kind of stuff growing up. Squid Game, above and beyond it's social criticism, includes masked villains, secret islands, uniformed henchmen, frogmen, secret passages, even a monologue about how the bad guys are just trying to create a better world. Here's hoping that with his Squid Game success that creator Dong-hyuk can stretch his wings, because I am totally down for that kind of swashbuckling, comic-book action.

A second season is promised and while sequels rarely improve on the original I'm cautiously optimistic. There is a larger world to explore and while the games will undoubtedly return they don't have to be the whole focus. There is also an actual game show being worked on, which will somehow make the inspiration which focused on the horrific murder of desperate people for the entertainment of others wholesome and family friendly. Call me skeptical. But who am I to judge?

Additional notes:

• There's a surprising amount of competence porn going on, as in people who know what they are doing and doing it well. It's worth watching for that alone. And if you are into that? Watch Travelers, also on Netflix. Trust me on this one.
• If you are the least bit intimidated by the fact that this is a South Korean show? Relax. Dubbing has come a long way since 1970s Kung-Fu flicks. Besides you are probably old and watching with subtitles on anyway.
• You don't have to google exchange rates during the show. 1,000 Republic of Korea won is about a dollar. So 10,000 won is $10 USD, and one billion won is about one million USD. You can probably double that because things are cheaper over there. Or so I'm guessing from the price of a bus ticket mentioned on the show.

The Batman (Movie) Review

The Batman (Directed by Matt Reeves, Warner Brothers, 2022)

Finally got around to watching this on Amazon Prime. In terms of the Batman films (that I've seen) I'd probably put it in the top-half, but I'm not very enthusiastic about it.

For starters at 177 minutes this film is nearly three hours long and it absolutely did not need to be. Avengers: Endgame ran slightly longer at 181 minutes, but that movie was wrapping up story-lines, references and jokes that had been set up in 21 previous movies released over the course of a decade. The Batman was juggling four different villains in barely related plots and rule number one of superhero movies? The more villains you stuff into a film the worse it is going to be.

Despite suffering from villain bloat, the film has a lot going for it including a star-studded cast. Robert Pattinson channels his rage at the Twilight movies into his angry, young Bruce Wayne. Jeffrey Wright (Daniel Craig's CIA buddy in the James Bond films) is fun as always and gets some zingers in as Batman's police buddy Jim Gordon. Zoe Kravitz, Paul Dano, John Turturro and an almost unrecognizable Colin Farrell round out the Whitman's sampler of villains. Farrell deserves extra credit for clearly relishing his role as The Penguin who he plays as a snarling, Coppola-style gangster.

Which is where my other objection comes in. I get that modern directors want to pay homage to the films that influenced them. Lucas and Spielberg wanted to remake 1930s serial films giving us iconic series like Star Wars and Indiana Jones. 

For some reason the secret password to getting your Scorsese-homage filmed is to jump on the superhero bandwagon as seen in The Joker (2019) by Todd Phillips.The Batman follows the same title scheme and despite being set in the present day it's heart is clearly in the 1970s. From the stark opening credits to its depiction of Gotham as graffiti-covered and overrun by hoodlums it is clear what era Reeves is longing to direct in. Even the Batmobile harkens back to the age of Serpico being based on the chassis of a late-60s Dodge Charger.

The film captures the atmosphere beautifully and the cinematography is top-notch, but we've seen decaying Gotham City before, along with the constant arguing about whether it can be saved or deserves to be saved. Meanwhile cities in the real world have survived AIDS, crack, personal autos, suburban migration, reckless demolition, double-digit interest rates plus a host of other challenges and emerged stronger than ever. The skyline of today's New York resembles the futuristic towers of Metropolis more than the gritty hell-scape seen in early Al Pacino films.

Also, if Gotham is such a hell-hole, why would anyone live there? New York, even at the worst of times, was the place to be if you wanted to work in finance, fashion, advertising, theater or publishing. It was the Greatest City in the World and it's inhabitants never let you forget that, even if a garbage strike had let six weeks of trash pile up during the summer. That's the Gotham I want to see, not one consumed with self-doubt and morose musings about whether there's still room for hope in the world.

Batman and his supporting cast are a plastic bunch and while I've loved the more grounded take on a billionaire ninja who fights crime with a rocket car? It's starting to become stale. We don't have to go full Adam West, but let's see more knight and less dark.

Finally, while the film was respectful of the source material, something early superhero films often lacked, there were two little bits that struck me as off.

** SPOILERS BELOW **

There's a subplot where it's suggested that Thomas Wayne, Batman's dad, reached out to a mobster to do some dirty work for him. Making Thomas Wayne corrupt is part of that “grit fatigue” trend I mentioned earlier, but why would he reach out to a mobster? He's got Alfred the Butler (played by Andy Serkis aka Gollum from the Lord of the Rings) to do his dirty work. And Alfred is not a dude you want to mess with.

There's a related plot about a reporter working on a story about Martha Wayne, Batman's mom, who in this film was born Martha Arkham. The story was going to reveal that Martha and her family had a history of mental illness. And yes, that would be the Arkham family, of the Gotham Arkhams, the founders of Arkham Asylum, which was inspired by the insanity-filled tales of HP Lovecraft who was haunted by his own history of family madness

I did love Pattinson's reaction to this news and realizing that maybe he wasn't processing his grief in a healthy way, But the Arkham family has always been depicted as nuttier than a five pound fruitcake. Telling the gossipy citizens of Gotham (where Bruce Wayne is recognized on sight by everyone) that the Arkhams are a few sandwiches short of a picnic is like me telling the people of Boston that the Kennedy family has some acquaintanceship with tragedy.

Twisted Metal (TV Show) Review

Twisted Metal - (10 episodes of ~30 minutes, Peacock, 2023)

This is a show about post-apocalyptic delivery men using heavily-armed vehicles to fight murderous clowns. If you are looking for more than that? You won't find it. But if you want enough gratuitous violence and profanity to delight your inner 12-year-old? It delivers.

The only thing it's lacking is nudity, but this isn't the 1980s and that sort of thing is reserved for serious adult dramas instead of B-movie material. In exchange we get the talents of Anthony Mackie (Falcon from the MCU) who brings his charm as John Doe, Thomas Haden Church (Sandman from Spider-Man 3, that guy from Wings and Sideways) as a manically subdued police officer, and an interesting team-up of Samoa Joe (multiple belts in pro-wrestling) as the body and Will Arnett (Come On!, Arrested Development) as the voice of murderous clown Sweet Tooth.

That last one deserves some extra praise. Samoa Joe does a damn good job bringing the character to life and with any luck we will be seeing more of him. Will Arnett does a great job with the voice acting, but it's a very physical role and Joe plays it beautifully.

Rounding out the cast are Stephanie Beatriz (Rosa Diaz in Brooklyn 99) who is meant to be tragic, but just comes across as sulky, Neve Campbell (Sidney Prescott in the Scream films) as the intimidating leader of New San Francisco, and Jason Mantzoukas (perfume magnate Dennis Feinstein from Parks and Recreation) who plays, as always, a psycho. There's a bunch of crazy factions besides the clown and his followers including a convoy of trucks that never stops moving, the aforementioned police officer and his mall-cop followers and your obligatory, tire-wearing raiders.

That's why as much as I'd like to, I can't call it the Car Wars show. That 1980s era wargame by Steve Jackson also featured a post-apocalyptic society with fortress cities and heavily-armed cars fighting across surprisingly well-maintained highways, but it tried to stay grounded. The most absurd organization was EDSEL, an organization that hated heavily-armed cars so much they would attack them on sight with their own, equally heavily-armed cars. I'd mention that they also hated irony, but I believe irony didn't exist in the United States in the 1980s.

Twisted Metal is actually based off the eponymous Sony videogame, and the idea of putting guns on cars was probably dreamt about shortly after the first Model-T left the lot. Most people credit the Mad Max movies (though Max's car wasn't armed) with the idea, but nerd historians trace it back to Alan Dean Foster's “Why Johnny Can't Speed” in 1971. Which is just a long roundabout way of saying anything that looks like a rip-off is probably lawsuit proof.

Plus if you are looking for autodueling? There isn't much. Mackie gives a speech at one point where he talks about balancing offense, defense, handling and speed which would ring true for any Car Wars fan. Do you install a two-space turret for $1,500 and an extra 200 pounds to get 360° firepower for your weapons, trade that in for an extra 20 points of armor, install an extra rocket launcher or ride light and not have to worry about a bad driving roll sending your car into a flip?

Instead we get a bunch of cars speeding around and it's... OK? There are some admittedly cool scenes where people throw tomahawks into the skulls of other drivers, but nothing like the multiple calculations and trade-offs that my overly sugared teenage brain would have to consider before announcing my next Car Wars move using cut-out cardboard makers in the basement rec-room.

I'd tell you about the cars, except I don't really remember any of them, except for the purple hearses driven by a particularly loathsome faction's enforcers. Instead I was kind of amazed at how great product placement works in a post-apocalyptic show. Normally I never comment on the things around me, but if I saw a Double-Frosted, Cherry Fresh Pop-Tart with Self-Toasting Package™ for the first time in decades? Yeah, I could see myself launching into a speech about them. Of course if your product is being featured in a show where people get casually murdered and have PG-rated sex in abandoned fast-food playgrounds? You may not want that as a brand manager. Unless you are Rice-A-Roni. That cameo was impeccable.

So if you like to see Anthony Mackie act like a more charming version of Will Smith, then kill a bunch of guys with CGI blood explosions, and curse while doing so with some funny bits? There are worse things to check out. Oh and one major plus, there are ten episodes but each one is only a half-hour so it fits perfectly when you need to veg out between the endless grinding responsibilities of adulthood.

The '90s Action Hero - Aging Dads?

Every decade has its own action hero style. The 1960s was cool and sophisticated with jet-setting spies. The 1970s was gritty and urban with grizzled cops and private dicks. The 1980s was over-the-top action with beefcake commandos and ninja masters.

The ‘90s has always been a problem for me, even while I was living through it. What was the style, the ethos? After the fall of the Soviet Union everything felt a bit unmoored. Not bad per se, but there wasn't a central ethos or even a counter-culture. The best you could come up with was a vague paranoia exemplified by Delta Green and the X-Files.

Then the towers fell and like it or not we had an ethos again. Cowboy presidents and high-speed, low-drag, tier-one operators with names like Jack Bauer, Jason Bourne and George Bush. Last names starting with a b were very popular in the double oughts. But the '90s have always felt like a nagging gap, like a missing tooth.

Enter Max Read, who characterizes '90s action movies as “Dad Thrillers”

"If you're anywhere near me in age, you know the kind of movies I'm talking about: Movies set on submarines; movies set on aircraft carriers; movies where lawyers are good guys; movies where guys secure the perimeter and/or the package; movies where a guy has to yell to make himself heard over a helicopter; movies where guys with guns break the door into a room decorated with cut-out newspaper headlines. Movies starring guys like Harrison Ford, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Costner, and Wesley Snipes and directed by guys like Martin Campbell, Wolfgang Petersen, Philip Noyce, and John McTiernan. Movies where men are men, Bravo Teams are Bravo Teams, and women are sexy but humorless ball-busters who are nonetheless ultimately susceptible to the roguish charm of state security-apparatus functionaries. Movies that dads like."

The movie equivalent of the techno-thriller. Some competency porn, an inside look at the military, a bunch of mavericks working to uphold authority... and people say the Marvel Movies are formulaic. More importantly, they tend to focus on men of a certain age. Baldwin was born in 1958 putting him in his mid-30s. Ford was born in 1942 making him a solid 50-something when he was doing his action roles. The older and presumably settled nature of the actors is a key part of the genre according to Read:

"They are generally stories of men, often with families, professional degrees, and successful careers, who find themselves unexpectedly battling bureaucracy, conspiracy, irrational violence, imminent natural disaster, or some combination of the above as they confront an existential threat to their, their family, their country, or their planet's safety."

It's also interesting how often the Dad Thriller tries to dramatize the daily life of their audience. Phone calls are very important. Satellite uplinks need to be established and decisions need to be made and sometimes there's just no damn time to go through the proper procedures! Aka an ordinary day at the office. The Star Trek movies had Kirk fighting bureaucracy before he could fight the villains, but then that was a trope from the original series and he never went out of his way to actually contact anyone before he went and did his thing.

It also still doesn't lead to an easily identifiable action hero archetype for the '90s, but it is an interesting lens on how the genre developed.

Random Thoughts:

- The Dad Thriller catered to aging Boomers. The Marvel Movies probably do the same for Gen-X. While clearly they are marketed and tailored to all four quadrants the heroes are constantly quipping which reflects the cynicism and detachment of Generation X. After all, if you've lived through Reagan how bad is Thanos? Authorities are absent or useless but don't actually provide an obstacle to worry about. The heroes do their own thing without checking in with anyone like the latchkey kids they are. Also, while they recognize the importance of branding the heroes don't actually take the names seriously. Even Captain American thinks he has a dumb name and he ironically comments on his own costume and catchphrases, and he's the sincere dude from the 1940s.