Supergirl

Tales From 
The Krypto

Supergirl
Directed by Craig Gillespie
USA 2026
DC Studios
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: Very light spoilers.

Supergirl is a direct follow up to last year’s new Superman movie (reviewed here) and the second film (kinda, it’s complicated) in James Gunn’s rebooted DC Cinematic Universe... which I still think was totally unnecessary and has deprived the world of a third, stand alone Gal Gadot/Patty Jenkins Wonder Woman movie. So I had every reason to hate this movie going in and... not just for that. 

I mean, as we already discovered from her cameo in the last Superman movie, Kara (aka Supergirl) is a bratty teen with a bad attitude who nobody would really want to hang out with. Added to that, the trailers for this movie were terrible and made me not want to see the movie... I mean, why can nobody cut a trailer which wants you to go see a film anymore? More importantly, to what I finally thought about the movie here... why are trailers not effective at showing the true spirit of the product anymore? Are they deliberately trying to keep people in the dark (frankly, the only time when I wished they’d done that to people was when Takashi Mike’s Audition came out... I’d have much rather gone into that movie thinking it was a standard, romantic comedy but, of course, if I’d thought that then I never would have gone in at all so... it’s a conundrum)?

Anyway, for all the expectations I had of this movie... I actually loved it and, though it has its flaws, it manages to somehow do a tonal tightrope walk and really pulls it off to give a coherent story with characters who grow through their adventures and... yeah, I was certainly entertained. Even though, through pretty much the whole movie, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak... expecting the director or somebody to screw it up and let everything down. Instead, we have a movie which leads to a quite moving ending. There may even have been a tear in my eye although, to be fair, the air conditioning in the cinema wasn’t great and I could have been responding to something else.

The film tells of a teenage girl called Ruthye, played by Eve Ridley. She sees her whole family slaughtered at the start of the film by this tale’s bad guy Krem... played somewhat charismatically by Matthias Schoenaerts. So she goes to various places on her planet, trying to ‘True Grit’ somebody into accompanying her in her quest for revenge. 

And I’m just going to pause a little here and compliment myself because, as I watched the movie I thought... yeah, revenge for hire just like in True Grit and I wondered if they even realised they were doing this. Well, when I looked up the trivia for the movie after I’d seen the film, it turns out that the original Supergirl comic this film is mostly adapted from is actually confirmed to be based on True Grit so, yay! Go me. 

Anyway, Ruthye stumbles upon Kara, aka Supergirl, played by Milly Alcock, who, like John Wayne before her, is always only a half step away from the next bottle. In fact, it’s mentioned both here and in Superman that she spends lots of time in Red Sun solar systems so she can get drunk on alcohol because, just like Superman, her powers reject intoxication when she is in a Yellow Sun environment. Anyway, she gets roped in by accident when her dog, Krypto (who is used less of a crutch in this movie and more as a catalyst), gets poisoned by Krem and has to stay with a vet as he slowly dies over three days, unless Kara can get the antidote from the bad guys. 

Shenanigans ensue, including a nice turn by Jason Momoa, somehow playing DC character Lobo and retrofitted into the story. Now, I’ve never read a Lobo comic in my life but he was all over the marketing of the DC universe in the 1990s (if I recall correctly) and, if I was being cynical, I’d question why you’d have an 18 rated character like Lobo turning up in a 12A rated movie. But, they somehow make it work and, I have to say, for a 12A movie, they do manage to push the envelope on the brutality of some of the shenanigans. I guess it’s that questionable, modern censorship issue where studios have learned they can go hard on the violence as long as they don’t show any actual blood or if the blood is a different colour. Personally, I’d rather they just raised the age rating and did it all properly but, cynically, the studios are just maximising the box office potential... I get it. I just don’t think it’s the right move. 

And the film works really well... quite surprisingly. There are a few problems, mostly around Kara’s constant and repetitive healing and weakening by red and yellow suns, depending on her situation. And the way her body rejects the Kryptonite in her system with exposure to the yellow sun does, of course, make a mockery of the whole plot because, as I wondered at the start of the movie... why doesn’t she just fly Krypto near to a yellow sun and heal him in minutes? But then we’d have no movie, I guess.

Anyhow, the performances and the well written dialogue really worked in this one and I was really surprised that I was still loving it by the end of the movie. Kara’s back story/origin and how she happens to stumble upon Krypto keeps coming in to give the audience something to believe in, with regards to the main character and, though it maybe does it one time too many, it doesn’t hurt the film so much. Tonally it feels a lot like Marvel’s Captain Marvel movie, to the point when music and song cues are structured to come and go at the same kinds of story beats, to give the longer battle scenes a kind of second wind halfway through, for example.

And that’s me done with Supergirl. I didn’t bother staying past the end credits because I read that there were no post or mid credits scenes on this one (which is a shame in this case) so I’ve no idea where the DC Cinematic Universe Mark II is going next. Two relatively good films in a row does not a franchise make (or break, for that matter) so, yeah, I guess we’ll see what happens next. 

My 2500th Blog Post

 

Where Are All
The Heroes?

2500th Blog

For my 2500th Blog Post I thought I’d have a look at the current cinematic battleground for two competing comic book companies, Marvel and DC... giving my views on just what is happening with these two behemoth’s in 2024. And I don’t mean specifically movies based on comic books (which can be a whole other thing)... I mean super hero movies, which are the dominant strand of that genre, to be sure.

So... is superhero fatigue really setting in?

I know it did for some people around about seven years ago, when regular Marvel/DC consuming friends and acquaintances I know just stopped going to see either company’s movies. I am, I guess, a hanger on but, I think it’s about to get really interesting sometime next year. So, musicals and westerns are two genres I can think of off-hand which were huge with cinema audiences at one stage but, though they’re still occasionally made, the box office for these things dropped considerably (some decades ago) and getting one greenlit in either category seems like the exception to the rule these days.

Now, here’s the thing... Marvel and DC haven’t got a lot going on this year. DC are busy turning their back on all the good work they’ve been doing for the last decade or so by rebooting the franchise completely (a foolish decision in my humble opinion), sometime for a 2025 Superman movie to kick it all off again. So that means the only film they have coming, in October of this year (at time of writing) is the stand alone, non DC universe sequel Joker - Folie à Deux. Marvel are kind of in a similar situation in that they have only one pure Marvel Cinematic Universe movie coming up this year, a sequel to two non-MCU movies... namely Deadpool 3. Now, there are also three of Sony’s sideways Marvel spin offs coming in 2024 but they’re all based on supporting characters from another character’s comics (all of them being Spider-Man, in this case) and so they’re a) not closely associated with the MCU brand of Marvel and b) not exactly top tier characters... so we have movies of Madame Web, Kraven The Hunter (why, for goodness sake, do this classic Spider-Man villain without Spider-Man?) and, what may possibly be the only successful one of the lot... Venom 3.

And none of those are guaranteed successes (even Deadpool 3, if they handle it badly). Now, the studios are making it known (probably with a degree of exaggeration) that the writer and actor strikes affected their plans badly but... I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I think what’s going on is bad box office. Off the top of my head, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 (reviewed here) was the only superhero movie that made any real money (enough to be considered a strong success to the company, at least). Other live action Marvel and DC movies of 2023 such as Shazam - Fury Of The Gods (reviewed here), Ant Man And The Wasp - Quantumania (reviewed here), The Flash (reviewed here), The Marvels (reviewed here), Blue Beetle (reviewed here) and Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom (reviewed here)... were all big failures from what I can make out.

But hold on a minute... I say big failures but I’m talking about money because, as far as I’m concerned, we got some of the most interesting superhero movies of the lot last year. I mean, okay, The Flash and Quantumania were pretty dire but, all of those other ones I mentioned, actually had a lot going for them (very surprisingly, in the case of Blue Beetle) but, it doesn’t matter because most of them got a hard, critical mauling (not from me) and did terrible business (again, relative to the greedy expectations of the companies bankrolling them, at least).

So I’m guessing the lesson learned by these two giant corporations is... time for a soft reboot (or in DC’s case, a hard reboot, it would seem) to try and get things back on track. After all, quality movies do not make for quality box office and, in the case of the 2023 slate of superhero movies... that certainly was true. So cinematically, 2024 is going to feel very strange and desolate. I’m guessing there will be a lot more bigger budget horror movies stepping up to fill that superhero void and I’m guessing that these will also start to receive mixed to negative reviews before long (horror movies definitely seem to have a cyclic nature in terms of their box office success from decade to decade... usually when the world governments are having some kind of crisis, which means their box office foothold has been particularly strong for a while now).

Are we, then, finally reaching the end of an era for the superhero genre? The fatigue that keeps getting predicted? Well, I hope not but then again, in the period between the 1930s to the mid 1960s, I bet people thought westerns and musicals would be popular forever. So who can say just how things will roll but, beware, things like physical media releases could be in jeopardy too if these superhero movies continue to fail and studio heads (as they often do) see this as a sign of certain revenue streams failing because of the quality of the product (as opposed to what is just a lack of interest in that product). Time will tell, I guess.

In the meantime, that marked my 2500th blog post so, whether you’ve read all of them or just this one, thanks so much for taking the time to peruse.

The New Mutants

The Fear Hunter

The New Mutants
USA 2020 Directed by Josh Boone
20th Century Fox

The New Mutants is the latest and last of the 20th CenturyFox X-Men movies, by way of being a spin off, much like the original comic was. I can’t talk about the original source, though, because I’ve never read it. It’s also had a very troubled production history. I first saw the trailer three years ago in cinemas as a ‘coming soon’ and then it was pulled and there were reshoots and it continued to get pulled and rescheduled around other tent-pole superhero movies until, the last time it was moved, was because coronavirus hit. It finally got a cinema release, for the few cinemas still open, in August of this year but it wouldn’t have done much at the box office, I would have thought, because, you know... Coronavirus guys!

The film follows the adventures of five new mutants who are being held prisoner, under the guise of being treated medically to find their powers and determine whether they are a menace to others (spoiler, that’s obviously not the real reason they’re being held there... well, not quite). The five are played by Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Henry Zaga and, the newcomer to the ‘patients’, Blu Hunt. The ‘questionable’ doctor who seems to be the only person locked in with them and who has mutant powers herself is played by Alice Braga (I'm not sure where the cleaners are supposed to be). However, a day after Blu Hunt’s character comes to stay, things start going wrong for the mutants and it looks like their collective pasts are catching up with them in the form of various fears and, frankly, some very cool looking creatures which look a little like the Slender Man but with big, gnashy Venom teeth. Can the five learn to work together to defeat their mysterious foes?

Well, yeah, of course they can. And, as it happens, it turns out to be a quite entertaining movie. Not bad at all, though, certainly it is a troubled film, as you can see from the number of times it got pulled and rescheduled. Even further reshoots were required at some point which, due to the teens having aged since the original footage was shot, didn’t happen in the final instance.

Like the other X-Men films put out by Fox, the time frame continuity on this is shot to hell. There is evidence to suggest it was supposed to take place during the events of X-Men: Apocalypse (reviewed here) and, also, evidence on screen to support it taking place after the events of Logan (reviewed here... even though I’m still not sure how the heck these films even join up credibly themselves). It makes no sense at all and... well... I’m not sure what year it’s supposed to be set but I do know they have my old Cathode Ray Tube TV up in their attic so... yeah, your guess is as good as mine.

Unfortunately, it’s not just timeline continuity that’s the problem here. There’s a scene early on in the film where Blu Hunt slams into a force field at full pelt, causing her to bash her nose in, starting it bleeding from both nostrils. Unfortunately, there’s a couple of close up shots in the same scene where the blood from her nostrils has gone. Her power is she’s a quick healer then? Oops, no, apparently not because, in the very next scene, her nostrils are back to bleeding from the accident. Hmm... I don’t know if this continuity was a casualty of the reshoots or was just slack the first time around. No clue but... it’s very noticeable. Maybe they'll digitally correct this for the Blu Ray release.

Another thing which puzzled me is when the gang of five start bonding and get all The Breakfast Club on the audience. They find a polygraph in the attic and start playing a kind of non-dare version of 'truth or dare' with it. I just can’t figure out where they suddenly got all the paper from to keep the polygraph running? Quite strange, in all honesty.

Now, you may remember the film was pitched, very definitively, as a horror film when the trailers came out and... well it’s kind of like that, in a way. It certainly uses the cinematic language of the horror film to weave its simple story but, the problem is, the source of the evil things that go bump in the night is pretty obvious after the first ten or twenty minutes... so it all seems somewhat less concerning. I honestly thought the director was trying to lull me into a false sense of security and that he was suddenly going to pull the rug from under me at the last minute but... no, alas. The source of all their problems is actually the one you figure out from the start so, yeah, it could maybe have strived to be less obvious, to be honest. It kind of takes the dark sting out of things.

There were a couple of nice little things in it though. At one point, Blu Hunt is told that she’ll get out of there... “Probably before the rest of us cuckoos.” This is almost a double reference, I felt. One, because the five are being held in something like a psychiatric facility (which is where some of it was shot in real life, apparently)... and so it could be considered a reference to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. However, given the special talents of the teenagers, I couldn’t help but think it might also be a reference to John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos so, yeah, a nice double reference, I reckon.

And there’s also some nice stuff happening with the music (including a very Glass-like end credits piece). Going from X-Files to X-Men, we have a nice score from composer Mark Snow (sadly not on CD at time of writing), which is pretty good. There’s a lovely moment when Charlie Heaton’s character notices something up with one of the washing machines and as the sound design of the washing machine continues, you notice a rhythm which blends into the percussion on the score. So, yeah, as obvious as this film is, it still has some nice ideas and moments like this that elevate it to a point farther than some of the shoddier X-Men films.

And, yes, not much else to say about The New Mutants other than, it doesn’t get dull and I liked it enough to hopefully buy the Blu Ray when it hits the mid-year sales. It has a wonderful bunch of actors doing their thing and, although it doesn’t quite get into the realms of horror as much as it seems to want to, it manages to entertain and I would have liked to see where the other two parts in what was supposed to be a trilogy might have gone. Alas, before this film was even finished, the director nixed the idea of a post-credits teaser because, by then, the rights to the X-Men had reverted to Disney when they bought 20th Century Fox so, while I’m sure this is not the end of the X-Men movies, I’m guessing they’ll be redeveloped to dovetail into the main Marvel Cinematic Universe and recast with new faces and adventures. So we’ll never get an actual sequel to this one... which is a shame because it’s quite enjoyable, for the most part.

Avengers - Endgame

Snappy Endings

Avengers - Endgame
2019 USA Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo
UK cinema release print.

Pre Spoiler Warning Warning: Okay, so it’s not going to be that possible to point out at least one of the glaring faults with this movie without going into fairly mild spoiler territory to do with the story solution of this one but I’ll put a big warning sign up before the relevant paragraphs.

Okay so... I really loved the last Avengers movie, Infinity War (which I reviewed here) and was kinda looking forward to seeing the resolution to the ten years of Marvel Cinematic Universe which it’s all been leading up to. Alas, my best hope for this movie now is that, somehow, I flip flop on this film once I’ve processed all the information for a subsequent viewing. I’ve done this before in my reviews of Star Wars - The Force Awakens and Avengers - Age Of Ultron, where I didn’t much care for the films in question at all on the first watch but then loved them on subsequent viewings. So my fingers are kinda crossed that I can find something good in Avengers - Endgame on any further revisits but, in all honesty, my anger has been growing steadily since I watched this one.

I don’t understand how a creative team responsible for Avengers Infinity War, one of the most dramatic, hilarious and beautifully put together films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, can make a follow up movie which... well... is the opposite of all those things. Now I’m going to try and give as little away as possible until I get to the really unforgivable stuff, which I’ll put a warning on, but I’m going to try and find some nice things to say about this first.

Okay, so here goes with the nice things.

Um... performances were mostly good, which I’d expect from actors of this calibre who are used to these parts. However, I must say that the path they’ve gone down with both Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk/Banner character and Chris Hemsworth’s Thor character really didn’t amuse me. I thought their dialogue and story development was awful, considering how great these characters have been in the past... especially in movies like Thor Ragnarok (reviewed here) and the aforementioned Avengers - Infinity War.
Another nice thing was the opening of the movie (pre-title) and also the quick culmination of events to the Avengers finally doing some actual 'avenging.' The expected resolution to events is over within the first half an hour but, this brings its own consequences and I thought this was a brilliant piece of dramatic misdirection from the film-makers. Alas, this set of consequences kind of dictated a specific kind of solution so, pretty early on, you get a bit of an idea which direction this story is going to take. And take that option it does... failing quite spectacularly on the way.

Okay, onto the bad stuff...

Well I thought the character development between Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow and Banner was selling both of these people short. There has been a set up to their story arc in Avengers - Age Of Ultron and this has not been honoured, as far as I’m concerned.

I know a lot of audiences coming out of the initial screenings of this were saying it was a good film but with not very much action and, I’d have to say I do agree with the second part of that sentiment. Infinity War was filled with spectacle and action... Endgame, wasn’t. And when audiences did get to see the battle royale they had been expecting to turn up in the previous Avengers movie, it was quite badly edited, I thought. It was not put together nearly as well as the two, simultaneous conflicts that ended Infinity War and consequently, some pretty heroic and dramatic moments, which I’m sure looked great on paper, just felt a bit numbing. They didn’t want to make me cheer and, similar, certain moments in the film which people have said had them crying didn't affect me at all because I was already quite cross with the film by the time these scenes arrived. And I cry easily in movies, usually.




And a troubling loose end which seems to be left unanswered from Infinity War is this... Why does Thor's new axe Stormbreaker still have a handle when the rest of Groot turned into oatmeal after the finger snap in the last movie?

OKAY... SPOILER WARNING TIME.
EVERYTHING IN THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS COULD BE SEEN AS A SPOILER...

Okay, so if you guessed from the opening half hour that the rest of the movie must therefore involve time travel... yeah, you’d be right. And rather than bothering to think about things logically, these people make the same rudimentary mistakes to do with temporal mechanics that Back To The Future 2 famously did. If you stop a past version of someone from doing something that they will do by changing their path before they even do it, you can’t both have your cake and eat it by having that event still have taken place in the past. It’s impossible and it’s not rocket science. And, no, badmouthing the Back To The Future trilogy on screen in your movie does not give you carte blanche to make exactly the same mistakes in your own film, hoping people won’t notice. It’s preposterous. Even if you place certain key objects back the way you found them in the past... the focal point never gets to happen because that person is no longer around at that time. So immediately we have a paradox.

 And the idea of a person killing a past version of themselves when that past version comes into their own future? The person who killed that person would never have been there to pull the trigger and live to tell the tale because she never got to that point in the first place... her future self had already killed her. So, yeah, this movie really is a catalogue of schoolboy errors and I wish that was the only thing putting me off the movie because I’m more than happy to throw common sense out of the window for a bit but... the movie was so humdrum, especially the bulk of the dialogue which was nowhere near as sparkling and witty as Infinity War, which had me laughing a lot). This film kinda failed big for me, I’m less than happy to say.

OKAY, THAT”S THE END OF THE SPOILER ZONE. NORMAL SERVICE MAY NOW RESUME.

Alan Silvestri’s score was nice at some points but it didn’t have the emotional impact, for me, of the heroic version of his original Avengers theme which he used in the Scottish Train station scene in Infinity War. I am hoping to get to listen to this as a stand alone CD when it’s released in a while but I’m not that fussed about hearing it again at the moment, truth be told. But hopefully the score CD will be a bit of a revelation when I hear it without the distracting sound effects in the mix.

And... yeah, that’s me done, I think, on Avengers Endgame. I was really hoping this would be a good follow up to Infinity War but even Captain Marvel, who debuted only last month in her own feature film (reviewed here) was totally wasted in this one. She has, what amounts to a couple of basic cameo scenes, as far as I’m concerned and I was really expecting the Russos to make more of her in this. Alas, it was not to be and her status as a character seemed much diminished in this, I thought. There’s not much point in me saying steer clear of this one because this has a built in audience who wants to see what happened after Infinity War and, rightly so, is what I say. Personally I don’t think this movie is anywhere near top tier Marvel and if I was ranking these films it would be way down the bottom of the list along with the likes of Iron Man 2, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America - The First Avenger, Captain America - Civil War and Guardians Of The Galaxy Volume 2. As in... films I can tolerate to give me a greater appreciation of the better Marvel movies in the ‘three phases’ to date. It’s just a shame that such a major, concluding piece of the puzzle turned out to be a little more wanting in most departments than was usual, it has to be said.

Ladies Of The Night

Working Tales

Ladies Of The Night
by Maggie McNeill
Createspace
ISBN: 978-1494370701

Okay so this is a book I had as a recommendation from Twitter. Not that anyone actually recommended it to me personally but I saw someone or other talking about how good it is (they were right about that) and I looked at it and thought that the cover was really cool. Added to that the fact that the writer, Maggie McNeill is/was a sex worker and that all the stories, more or less, feature characters from a world where sex is sold or bartered as a service was just the icing on the cake. I’ve always thought that working girls were criminally underrated and persecuted in terms of the attitude towards service they provide to the general public at large so, whenever one sticks their head up from behind the parapet and does something additional with their talents, I’m always interested.

Now, I was a little wary about this volume called Ladies Of The Night because, for the last few years, I’ve not been getting on with the short story format as much as I used to as a kid. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the short stories of, say, Philip K. Dick are almost always absolutely amazing but some of the ghost story anthologies I’ve read lately (and if you’re a regular reader you’ll know my December habits by now) have been pretty underwhelming.... especially when they purport to have some kind of Twilight Zone style twist but rarely end up delivering anything either a) surprising or, b) remotely thought provoking. Then again, I really wanted to own a copy of a book with that printed cover so... yeah, I gave it a go.

As it happens, though, I was pleasantly surprised by both the quality and content of McNeill’s short fiction. She can spin a yarn or, in most cases here, a nicely realised sketch of a concept and, although the majority of the stories hosted here which are, for the most part, taken from the writer’s blog The Honest Courtesan (which you can go to by clicking here) are only a few pages in length, she manages to invoke and weave together some pretty cool ideas and atmospheres in this tome.

I say hosted because a really nice touch with this collection is that McNeill’s written a short introductory passage to each story which gives a little context as to why it came to be written or in what kind of time period it is set. And there are some real corkers in here too with different writing strengths coming through in various stories. For example, the extra long opening tale Pandora is all about the atmosphere of dreams and the ways that the curious world of sleep can dominate and bleed into the everyday. Whereas another tale may be more about the way in which the attitudes and perceptions of the professional choice of the central protagonist are highlighted with, often, a much more idealistic conclusion in the understanding of some of the heroine’s decisions portrayed than comes about in a real life scenario.

Now, while the stories mostly involve ‘ladies of the night’ in various incarnations, it would be true to say that this collection isn’t exactly erotic in nature. Instead, like good science fiction, the writer uses that milieu to explore ideas which are not necessarily specifically about that... it’s just a useful metaphor to be able to tinker with certain themes.

Indeed, almost all of the tales here could also be labelled as either science fiction, fantasy or supernatural in content. There’s even a brilliant, recurring character in three of the tales called Aella, who is an amazonian heroine in the style of the kinds of characters you’d find in Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian tales such as the likes of Conan of Cimmeria and Red Sonja.

In the first of these three Aella shorts, A Decent Boldness, Aella finds herself far from home and her actions to rescue a girl find her offered a hefty wage to be security in a brothel. She learns the ropes and it makes the point, quite succinctly, that a more than decent wage can be made from the encouragement of the sins of the punter.

The second tale, A Haughty Spirit, is set four years later as she and her friend/lover are on a long journey back to her tribe of Amazons and I loved the tactics that she uses to rescue her friend from the chieftain of a hostile tribe.

The third of the Aella tales. Glorious Gifts, offers a more practical approach to things perceived by others as affairs of the heart. This places our heroine in a possible dilemma that is, in some ways, a metaphor for how our stupid governments treat the idea of sex work (if I read it right).

These are all great as, indeed, the majority of the stories in this volume are and I found it refreshing that, asides from the theme of sex as an item of transaction, the events and situations are from a wide variety of fictional times and places. In here you will meet sex robots, vampire hunters (and, of course, vampires), detectives, superheroes, aliens, ghosts, mirror portals, Gods, faeries and even, in one memorable instance, a tale which examines an underlying problem of a certain, unnamed, time travelling Gallifreyan in a very interesting manner. So, yeah, as a longtime watcher of Doctor Who, I was very pleased with this one.

The other thing about this collection is that... for the most part... the little twists at the end of each tale are actually something which you might well not see coming. I was surprised, in a good way, a few times and, as my regular readers will know, this is a talent that I value highly. I’m very rarely surprised but this collection has some nice little ‘stings in the tales’, so to speak. They more often than not come in the very last paragraph or line of the story too... which is maybe even harder to do. My absolute favourite one in this collection is called The Specialist and it is a tale told by a working girl who has developed a service where she caters for a very specific kind of client. I’m not going to spoil that for you here though but, you know, worth a read. Like a number of the stories in the book, this one starts off with a character looking backwards at certain events until we catch up to the present, usually right at the end of the story.

And that’s all that I have to say about this one, I think. Maggie McNeill’s Ladies Of The Night is a truly interesting, entertaining and thought provoking collection of short stories. Well written and none of them outstay their welcome. Really enjoyed this one and am very much looking forward to purchasing and reading her second collection of short stories, Forms Of Things Unknown, when I am able to. In the meantime, if you are a fan of short fiction, this one might be right up your street.

Argoman - The Fantastic Superman

I Am A Very Curious Yellow

Argoman - The Fantastic Superman 
aka Come rubare la corona d'Inghilterra 
aka The Incredible Paris Incident
1967 Italy
Directed by Sergio Grieco
Dorado Films DVD Region 0

When a large budget movie production of the 1962 comic strip super-criminal Diabolik was announced, to be called Danger: Diabolik, it started off the usual Italian rush of bandwagon films even before it had gone into production... it had a very troublesome route to the screen is my understanding but, when it came to Mario Bava’s turn to sort it all out, things got rolling along nicely and we have the film as it is now.

However, because of the delays to Danger: Diabolik, there was a very unusual phenomenon occurring whereas a lot of the films made to cash in on the presumed success of the Bava movie were released a year or more before the original template movie. A very strange state of affairs.

Argoman - The Fantastic Superman, was one of these films.

The film stars the always strait-faced Roger Browne as one of Scotland Yard’s criminologist consultants, Sir Reginald Hoover. In reality, Hoover is really Argoman, criminal mastermind but all around nice guy who, as he tells his faithful manservant Chandu, possesses super-powers well within the bounds of known science... especially in the realm of science that deals with telekinetics (promise I’m not making this up guys and gals).

What does this mean?

Well... Argoman (or Sir Reginald to his friends) can, for instance, hold his breath underwater for 33 minutes. He could probably have stayed down there for longer but, as he says, it gets boring down there.

And it means he has psychokinetic powers to catch a passing girl’s mind and make her steer her hovercraft (yes, you read that right, hovercraft... with greatful acknowledgment to the Isle Of Wight apparently) towards his beachside lair and then levitate her backwards through the air to him so he can entice her into a game where, if he wins, he gets to bed her. “I adore your emeralds” she says to him, after they’ve had a hot, sexy session.

Luckily for us, we’re clued in as to when he’s practicing his telekinetic powers by the subtle visual clue of having eyes that glow green while he is exerting his facial muscles or employing his thoughts as a voice-ever effect on the film. It’s a lot like Village Of The Damned in that respect except, you know, a lot less well executed.

What all of this also means is that we have an Italian production set in London and Paris which rumbles along like a Derek Flint movie on acid. It’s seriously loopy and groan-worthy. Honestly, if it was any more camp the audience would be pitching tents to watch the thing. And, goodness gracious me, the amount of unbelievable exposition in the movie is beyond compare... especially in the scene where they’re talking about the big diamond the French government has in its top secret echelons which can, basically, turn stuff all bendy when light is refracted through it and directed at an object.

Anyway, the movie opens in England with shots of the Queen’s Guard marching around in formation and Piero Umiliani’s stab at British brass band stuff. Now I like Umiliani... one of his most famous cues, Mah Nà Mah Nà, from the sex film Sweden: Heaven And Hell, was even strangely procured by The Muppets and has since become a phen-no-me-nal catch phrase for them. Here there is lots of cool n’ swinging “doo weee doo waaas” on the score but also, some very unintentional laughs. He goes for Englishified sounding stuff when the movie is set in England and the French national anthem kinda stuff when in Paris, for example, to set the tone. However, being an Italian film, nobody told them that various establishing shots of Scotland Yard Headquarters in London should not be scored by bagpipes. Oh yes... he gives the famous London police bureau some nice Scottish notes.

Okay... back to the plot. We find out very early on that Argoman has a specific achilles heel and it is this. When he has sex with a woman, he loses all his uncanny superpowers for six hours. Why this happens is kept as unclear as to why he possesses these superpowers in the first place, to be honest, but hey... I guess he’s a modern Samson or something?

Anyway, after the self styled Jenabell, Queen Of The World (as it says on the looped audio track, smoothing over the hastily written Italian-English note which says that she is Queen Of The Worls), has stolen the crown of the crown jewels from the Tower of London by getting a Queen’s Guard to smash and grab it and hide it under his incredibly tall, furry hat (known as bearskin)... she returns it and demands the big diamond thing I told you about a few paragraphs ago.

Things are not good... especially when she does all this when Argoman (who seems to also want to stop Jenabell and help out his Scotland Yard colleagues) has just made love to “passing hovercraft girl” only a few hours before... thus rendering his superpowers superfluous.

But wait... what’s this? Turns out hovercraft girl was really Jessabel all along, getting herself levitated for sex so she could render Argoman inconsequential when she is performing her nefarious schemes! But it’s okay everybody! Because, after the two of them spent time practicing their superpowered lovemaking techniques on one another, she made the mistake of smoking one of Argoman’s radioactive cigarettes, which he presumably keeps in his extra special lair for just such an emergency. This means, hooray, he can find her location with his special geiger-counter ring. Ha! In your face Jessabel.

This allows Argoman to change into his ludicrously yellow costume, with it’s “billowing but tiny enough so it doesn’t get in the way and snag on something” red cape and infiltrate Jenabell’s headquarters, rescue another of his regular lady-friends from the clutches of Jenabell’s big n’ clunky killer robot and beat up loads of people by just punching them a little and watching them spin away from the impacts in an unbelievably acrobatic and spectacular fashion (seriously people... campier than Adam West’s Batman TV show).

Of course, this all relies on Jenabell’s black clad henchman failing to carry out her special plan should Argoman penetrate her hidden lair with the same enthusiasm he penetrated her special lady parts earlier in the movie. And when she takes her two main henchmen to one side it becomes obvious how well it will do. Here is the plan that she shouts at them in her moment of stress... “Do as I told you! Kill him! Kill him, I said!” Oh yeah, subtlety definitely rules in Jenabell’s super-villainess lair.

And that’s about it really. The film is fairly nicely shot (well it is an Italian film, they’re masters at this kind of stuff) and you will see twenty or more black clad, Dalek Invasion Of Earth 2150AD style roboman look-alikes, enter a public building without... we’re presumably supposed to believe... being noticed as anything conspicuous to the rest of the world outside the building. So that’s fun.

You’ll also see Argoman change into his costume, beat up a few bad guys and then jump ostentatiously out of a van with his arms and cape flapping shouting... “AHaaaaaaaaa!” Which is kind of worrying and probably says a lot about Sir Reginald’s mental state, to be honest.

Whatever, if you don’t want to see this brilliantly dire movie after the descriptions I’ve just put on the page here then you are either dead or a soulless, emotionless machine who doesn’t realise, yet, the simple pleasures of a really stupid and quite frighteningly ambitious on it’s budget movie like the incredible, diabolikal... Argoman - The Fantastic Superman. Miss it at your peril!