Ghost Town (DreamWorks, Spyglass Entertainment, Pariah, Paramount, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Thursday night, after the bizarre four-day hate-fest of the Republican National “Convention” — featuring Donald Trump’s 70-minute speech warning of monsters —anarchists, socialists, gangsters, thugs and all the other menaces Trump imagines when he sees people peacefully protest police brutality against people of color loosed in the streets of America to destroy its major cities and end suburbia as we know it, with only himself and his administration standing between the U.S. and socialist/anarchist lawlessness (and presumably the burning of babies and churches) — I looked for a movie comedy I could show Charles and lighten our moods. I found it in Ghost Town, a 2008 DreamWorks production made under Paramount auspices (after Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenbach sold their company not to Universal, as had been expected, but to Paramount) co-written (with John Kamps) and directed by David Koepp. David Koepp’s name is a surprising one to see on a movie like this since he’s best known for writing action-adventure blockbusters — his most famous credit is adapting Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park for Spielberg’s 1993 film that kicked off a blockbuster franchise which is still going strong — and he’s not exactly the sort of person whose name you expect to see on a comedy.

Ghost Town is actually a ghost story, though the central character, dentist Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais), is neither fully alive nor fully dead. He went into the hospital for a routine colonoscopy aud emerged after having “died” for seven minutes, courtesy of an anesthetic he was allergic to, so he finds himself able to live a normal life and interact with other humans while also being in touch with a whole world of ghosts who are haunting New York City and won’t be able to get on with their (after)lives until they complete some piece of unfinished business they had in this world. The ghost that particularly haunts Dr. Pincus is Frank Herlihy (Greg Kinnear), who as the movie begins is walking down a New York street chewing out a real estate agent who mistakenly called Frank’s wife Gwen (Téa Leoni) with news of an apartment Frank was actually renting for his mistress Amber (whom we never see).

There’s a nice shot of one of those air conditioners you load into a window being put into an apartment in a building Frank is walking by, and obviously we’re being set up to believe that the couple who are installing it and are going to lose control, whereupon Frank will be crushed to death by the falling air conditioner. Only he steps out of the way to avoid the falling air conditioner — only to be hit and fatally injured by a passing bus, an artful reworking of one of Buster Keaton’s favorite gags (his car stalls on train tracks, a train bears down on him but turns out to be on a different track, then another train going the opposite direction bears down on Keaton and hits his car). The big piece of unfinished business Frank has on earth is to prevent Gwen from remarrying — specifically, remarrying a guy she presumably started dating just after Frank croaked, or maybe just before Frank croaked once she found out he’d been cheating on her, who seems to be a nice enough guy (he’s attractive, personable and works as a human-rights lawyer) but for some reason Frank takes a strong dislike to him and insists that Pincus do what he can to break them up.

The severely socially challenged Pincus seems like the last person you’d want to entrust to a mission like that — the fellow dentist he shares his office with, Jehangir Prashar (Aasif Mandyi), calls him a “fucking prick” for his total lack of social skills — especially when the co-conspirators decide that the way to get Gwen away from the human rights attorney is for Pincus to woo her himself. Accordingly there are some Cyrano de Bergerac-esque scenes with Frank communicating instructions to Pincus on his dates with Gwen — remember that Pincus can see Frank but no one else can, so when Pincus talks to Frank everyone else thinks he’s just talking to himself. Another complication is that Gwen is a well-known Egyptologist who’s preparing a major art exhibit of pieces from the tomb of a recently discovered mummy, and one of Pincus’s tasks in wooing her is to go to her lectures and feign interest when he has no idea of what she’s talking about. At one point Pincus begs off the job — and Frank strikes back by sending him huge numbers of New York City ghosts, including a man who was killed after he put his child’s favorite toy under the front seat of his car, and she’s been inconsolable ever since because her mom had no idea where it was; and an older woman who’s trying to bring her two daughters back together by getting one of them a letter the other left for her, but only mom knew its location.

Pincus accomplishes these missions, leading to a cool special effect in which the dead people, now fully freed from the burden of ghost-dom, literally crumble into dust as they leave the frame and move on to wherever Koepp and Kamps think we go after we die — and there’s a haunting closeup of the woman whose child has their toy back that made me wonder if Koepp and Kamps were going to have Pincus end up with her after globe-trotting Gwen fulfills her lifelong dream of a six-month assignment doing archaeology in the Valley of the Kings and then returns to her human-rights attorney. Instead Pincus himself gets run down by a bus (according to this movie, the biggest single threat to your life in New York City is bus drivers who run people down as they’re crossing streets!) and it’s touch and go whether he will join Frank in the afterlife, but it pretty much ends the way you expected it too all along, with Pincus surviving (and losing, at least for now, his toehold in the afterlife) and pairing up with Gwen for a quite unlikely relationship at the end.

Ghost Town isn’t exactly the freshest premise for a movie ever — Charles and I both thought of all the supernatural films there’ve been over the years that posited either a living person who was supposed to die or a dead person who was supposed to live, including Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death a.k.a. Stairway to Heaven, and more recent films like Ghost with Whoopi Goldberg — but it’s done with quite a lot of charm and in particular it gives Ricky Gervais a surprisingly sympathetic role. Gervais’ main reputation is as the insult comic who’s done several Golden Globe award shows and made snarkiness his stock in trade, but here he’s a character we end up liking even though he starts out the movie as a self-absorbed jerk. The part of Bertram Pincus gives Gervais a chance to play pathos — at which he’s surprisingly good — and though I could readily imagine this basic plot being made in the 1940’s with Lou Costello as Pincus and Bud Abbott as Frank (indeed, Abbott and Costello did make a quite good ghost movie, The Time of Their Lives, in 1946, though it was a major box-office flop and Universal moved them back to more formulaic fare), it’s nice to know Gervais has more in him than just superficial meanness. And there’s terror as well as humor in the thought of hundreds of ghosts prowling the streets of a major city, each seeking the chance to do whatever they left undone in their normal lives!

Sorority Secrets (Sunshine Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie, Sorority Secrets, turned out to be unexpectedly good even though “sorority,” like “cheerleader,” is one of those words promising tantalizing glimpses of young, nubile female flesh in a scanty minimum of clothing and thereby hoping to lure straight men into turning on this channel. Produced by the Florida-based Sunshine Films in association with Reel One Entertainment, directed by old Lifetime hand Damián Romay and written by Kelly Peters and Amy Katherine Taylor, Sorority Secrets is a variation on the J. Bryan Dick-Barbara Kymlicka stories like Babysitters’ Black Book and the other “Whittendale Universe” stories Ken Sanders’ production company has churned out for Lifetime about hot young college women either becoming mistresses or out-and-out prostitutes of well-connected middle-aged (or older) alumni to earn the money either to get into Whittendale in the first place or keep paying the ever-rising tuition and costs. Given that neither Sanders, Dick or Kymlicka were involved in Sorority Secrets, it’s interesting to note how differently Romay, Peters and Taylor play it — less for titillation and more for terror. In the opening scene Cassie Thompson (Brytnee Ratledge) learns just before she’s supposed to start her sophomore year in college that the funding for the scholarship she was counting on to pay her way has suddenly been withdrawn, and she tearfully tells her mother Debra (Elisabetta Fantone) that she’ll have to drop out and go to a community college instead. Mom, who’s so young-looking she’s frequently mistaken for Cassie’s older sister (make a note of that: it’s a “plant” of a plot point that’s going to be important later!), says not on your life — I haven’t worked all those years to support you just to palm you off on a proletarian education and the dead-end career it will prepare you for.

She insists that there must be a way to keep Cassie in her expensive four-year school, and the way suddenly arrives in the person (or persons) of the Lambda sorority. She goes to their recruitment table and at first is refused even to be given the application, but eventually (on the advice of a friend who tells her the Lambdas always give an initial rejection to see if the girl is serious enough about getting in to go to the table and ask again) Cassie gets the application, turns it in and is accepted. She’s also told by Wendy Klein (Marie Debrey), the college staff member in charge of administering the sorority, that Lambda membership gets with some really impressive perks, including a free ride through college and, for those who win their way onto the important “soc committee” (pronounced “sosh,” as in “social”) that plans the sorority’s big public events, free clothes, accessories and all-expense-paid trips to visit other Lambda chapters at universities all across the country. When Cassie asks how the sorority gets the money to afford to give its members all these goodies, she’s told it’s because of the generosity of well-to-do male alumni of the university. We’re immediately aware of just what the well-to-do male alumni are expecting in return for their generosity — indeed, Lambda has gone beyond the little student-run sex-for-sale enterprises of the Whittendale films and become a full-fledged human trafficking operation, supplying a continuous stream of hot young girls for sexual services to older men that has kept Lambda in business for decades and set up a rather dubious tradition Wendy thinks it’s her job to continue.

We start getting intimations of this when Kerrie (Shayna Bernado) is walking down the street, talking to her mother on her cell phone and telling mom she’s not only leaving Lambda but dropping out of the college altogether because “they want me to do really terrible things” (were they pushing her beyond vanilla sex and insisting she meet some alumnus’s demands for a girl he could physically dominate and torture S/M style?) — and just then two hands belonging to a figure we really don’t get a good look at push her off the train station platform, where she’s run over (ironically) by the train she’d planned to board to go home to her mom. Later another girl at the sorority gets pushed in the way of a semi-truck — a fate Cassie concludes was meant for her since she had lent the other girl her powder-blue hoodie (needless to say, the assailant was wearing the obligatory black hoodie that’s become obligatory for Lifetime killers, especially when they want to conceal their gender — in fact they’ve used that device so often that by now whenever you see someone in a black hoodie attack another person in a Lifetime movie, it’s a good bet that the assailant is a woman) — and still later, just after Cassie has had two unpleasant run-ins with an alumnus named Simon Hughes (Duncan Bahr — and at least casting director Lori Wyman didn’t make the mistake of her opposite numbers in the Whittendale movies — Hughes is O.K.-looking but hardly one of the hot babe magnets who played the johns in the Whittendale movies, men you could imagine the Whittendale hookers wanting to bed even if they weren’t being paid to do so), who was promising her a paid internship for his pharmaceutical company but made no secret that sexual services were part of the deal, Cassie decides to take her complaint to the college Ethics Committee.

Only Cassie can’t say she personally witnessed any Lambda girls being sold into slavery in the sexual marketplace, and the girl who can, Lois Mathers (Jessica Galinas), is a recovering drug addict who went through rehab. She swears she hasn’t used since, but she lied on her Lambda application and said she’d never used drugs — and she’s worried about being thrown out of the sorority and losing her free ride if she’s found out. But this becomes the least of her problems: the day she and Cassie are supposed to meet with the Ethics Committee, Lois is found in her room at Lambda, passed out and in a coma from an overdose, apparently an accidental relapse but … we know better, and so does Cassie, who’s now more determined than ever to rat out Lambda as a human trafficking operation and Wendy as its pimp. Meanwhile Cassie has risen in the Lambda hierarchy enough to have her own room and to displace blonde bitch Monica (Tommi Rose) as the head of the Soc Committee, in which position she has to plan Lambda’s next big event, a masquerade ball (and anyone who’s seen Verdi’s opera Un Ballo in Maschera knows what sort of skullduggery can happen at a masked ball!). Cassie’s plot is to get Wendy up to an upstairs room from which the co-chairs of the Ethics Committee can hear her and Cassie agree that Cassie will give herself to Simon that night in exchange for his continued financial support of Lambda. The Ethics Committee chairs duly get the goods on Wendy and say she’s going to be fired immediately and referred to the police for criminal prosecution, but they also say they’re going to have to expel Cassie for having agreed to have sex with an alumnus in exchange for her own continued perks — whereupon Cassie reveals that the woman who actually got the goods on Wendy was not her but her identically dressed mother Debra (see, I told you it was going to be an important plot point that Cassie’s mom looked so young people mistook them for sisters!), who isn’t a student and therefore can’t be expelled.

Then Cassie approaches her age-peer boyfriend Charlie (Nikolai Soroko), who served as the bartender at all the Lambda parties even though he barely looks old enough to drink himself (though at least he’s not quite as anonymously blank-looking a twink type as the age-peer boyfriend in the Whittendale movies!), and says that now that the case is broken the two of them can go on “a real date” — only just then he’s stabbed in the back by a mysterious assailant who turns out to be Monica, who had begun as one of the sorority’s stars until she was assigned to be Cassie’s “big” (as in “big sister,” to show her the ropes of sorority life), only she hated Cassie because previously Monica had been the mistress of Simon Hughes, and he had even talked about divorcing his wife to marry her (yeah, right … ), until Cassie caught his eye at the sorority’s white party and he decided to dump Monica and make Cassie his latest sorority squeeze instead. It was Monica who murdered the two people who were going to rat out the sorority and gave Lois her hot shot, and of course she and Cassie have a big fight in which THEY BOTH REACH FOR THE KNIFE (whose blade director Romay gives us a lot of extreme close-ups of with Charlie’s blood still fresh upon it), only fortunately the campus police arrive in time to arrest Wendy while Monica takes a plunge out of the sorority window and falls to her death on the ground below. (Since it was only one floor up, it might have been better poetic justice if Monica had survived but ended up paralyzed and needing a wheelchair for the rest of her sorry life.)

Sorority Secrets doesn’t win any points for originality plot-wise but it’s quite an effective movie, putting its heroine through legitmate terror, and as he’s shown in some of his other Lifetime credits director Romay is good at creating a Gothic atmosphere even in contemporary settings (and pretty prosaic contemporary settings at that). Romay also gets fine performances from his cast, especially the villains — Tommi Rose is electrifying as Monica, especially in the scene in which she reveals that she was not born to money (as she’s been leading Cassie, the rest of Lambda and us to think), but realized early on that letting men have their way with her hot bod was the only way she was ever going to have the good things of the world she felt she deserved, while Marie Debrey as Wendy ably portrays the character’s self-delusion that pimping out the students in her charge to super-rich men is the way to maintain an institution and make sure it endures. At the end Cassie is shown leading a rally on campus designed to end sexual exploitation of sorority girls, and while that seems a bit beside the point it does make for a logical and satisfying ending to an unusually well-done Lifetime movie.

Secrets in a Small Town (Fella Films, Paunch Pictures, Line Films, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After last night’s “Premiere” Lifetime showed a movie that turned out even better, despite a dorky title like Secrets in a Small Town. (The original working title was Nowhere, but it was obviously changed because Lifetime assumes its audiences have to have the story spelled out for them in a title and won’t go for something as ambiguous and curiosity-inducing as Nowhere.) That sounds like it’s going to be about a woman who moves from a big city to a small town and exposes all manner of secrets — political, financial and sexual. Instead it’s about a heroine, Claire Porter (Kate Drummond), who after the death of her husband from cancer in Chicago moves to a generic Midwestern small town to take a job as the vice-principal of the local high school. Things are complicated by the fact that she has a teenage daughter, Sarah (Nell Verlaque), who will be attending the high school where Claire will be an administrator. The first day of school for both Porters, Sarah is alone in the gym shooting hoops when she’s spotted by the women’s basketball coach, Ruth Simmons (Rya Kihlstedt), who notices that she never seems to miss (c’mon, director and co-writer Thomas Michael, even Michael Jordan missed once in a while!) and invites her to join the school basketball team, the “Vipers,” who even though they’re playing in a small town in the middle of nowhere and their season is winding down have hopes of winning the national championship.

Sarah plays her first game as a Viper and then is invited to join her teammates for a special “bonding” party — and when mom wants to come along and keep an eye on Sarah, she’s told in no uncertain terms that this is for team members only. That’s also what she’s told when she asks if there will be males at the party, so she’s reassured even though it’s already been established that Sarah is chafing at her mom’s overprotectiveness. Sarah even calls her a “helicopter mom” and says she’s always hovering over her. Things take a dark turn when Sarah leaves for that “bonding party” and never returns — during that long evening she neither calls nor texts her mom, as Claire had asked her to — and in the morning Claire wakes up and finds her daughter is still out. At first her complaints to the police and others result in a lot of hostility from the various townspeople — especially since the Vipers team is virtually the only thing they have that’s attracting any positive attention from the outside worid — and it seems like the only support Claire is getting is from Coach Ruth. Fortunately, the local sheriff (Ron Lea) assigns Sarah’s disappearance to a compactly built, bearded deputy named Rick Watchorn (Al Mukadam), who takes the case seriously and organizes a search party, recruiting the townspeople and dividing them into three groups, each assigned to a different sector of the hilly forest that surrounds the town, in an operation that reminded me of the hunt for the Monster in the original 1931 film of Frankenstein. Midway through the hunt Sarah is actually found, badly wounded but still alive, in a small shed in the middle of the forest.

Unfortunately, the girl who found her is Coach Ruth’s daughter, Kat Simmons (Joelle Foster), and she does the obvious thing and calls to her mother — only Coach Ruth tells her daughter that since she’d earlier told the police Sarah was dead, she’ll only get into trouble if she tells them anything different now and for the sake of her own future Kat needs to keep her mouth shut. Then she methodically and cruelly closes the shed and puts a padlock on the door so Sarah can’t get out and no one can get in to rescue her even if anyone passes by and hears her call out. Coach Ruth’s sudden transformation from seemingly understanding, sympathetic adult figure to the “new girl in school” to a black-hearted villain ready to let Sarah die in the wilderness reminded me of Louise Lewis’s marvelous performance in a similar role in an otherwise forgettable 1958 American International “B” called Blood of Dracula, and Rya Kihlstedt’s performance as both sides of the character is excellent. From that point on the conflicts driving this film reach an almost primal intensity — Sarah’s struggle to remain alive and conscious locked in a shed with no food, no way to use the bathroom and no realistic hope of escape (remember that she was already severely injured when she ended up in the shed, and director/co-writer Thomas Michael and his co-writer Paolo Mancini carefully sustain the suspense as to what happened to Sarah between leaving for the team party and ending up in the shed); Claire’s single-minded determination to find her daughter, alive or dead, and make whoever abducted and possibly killed her pay; the local population’s willingness to help but tempered by an awareness that they don’t want to make the Vipers’ team look bad and blow their town’s one chance for national recognition; and even Ruth, for whom Michael and Mancini supply an explanation for what made her “run” that makes her at least understandable.

As a diversion, Ruth plants Sarah’s cell phone (which she recovered back when she and her daughter found Sarah in the shed) in a boat and floats it down the river to divert the search away from where she and we know Sarah to be — only the plan backfires when the police recover the phone and give it to Claire. Claire watches an embedded video on it that shows exactly what happened to her daughter at that “bonding” party — contrary to Ruth’s solemn insistence that she didn’t allow hazing on the team, Sarah got hazed big-time, including having a wide plastic hose stuck down her throat so she was forced to drink massive quantities of some (unspecified, though presumably beer from a keg) alcoholic beverage, and then being taken to the edge of a cliff, blindfolded and led there with a rope tied around her. Ruth’s daughter Kat was supposed to lead her to the edge of the cliff and keep her from going over, only Kat lost control of the rope, Sarah fell off the cliff and the other girls left her for dead. Earlier Ruth had told Claire that she herself was hazed in the U.S. military when she was the only woman in her unit in Afghanistan (it’s a measure of just how long this stupid and pointless war — the longest the U.S. has ever been involved in as a nation — that someone could have served there, returned home and had a daughter who as of 2019 is a teenager) and it taught her that no one should ever have to go through that … only what it really taught her is that hazing builds strength and if she wants a game-winning basketball team she should let the stronger players haze the weaker ones and thus cull the herd until only the strongest survive.

After Claire sees the video of her daughter being essentially tortured, she goes to Ruth’s house — Ruth is out but her daughter Kat, whose crisis of conscience has been one of the strongest elements in this film, confesses all to Claire and gives her enough information that Claire can report to the police where Sarah really is and Deputy Watchorn organizes a helicopter flight to rescue her. Only it’s a race against time because Ruth has found out that her daughter ratted her out — she responds first by slapping her so hard she nearly knocks her out, then once again chewing her out for jeopardizing both their futures for some girl they barely know — and instead of just leaving Sarah in a locked shed to die, Ruth has decided to hurry the process along by digging a D.I.Y. grave and burying Sarah alive. At the climax Claire sees what Ruth is doing, rushes her and knocks her down — only Ruth pulls a gun on Claire. Deputy Watchorn pulls his own gun on Ruth and tells her to drop hers, but Ruth is still determined to kill Sarah. Claire gets on the ground to shield Sarah’s body with her own, but eventually Watchorn is able to get the drop on Ruth after Claire is able to get her to fall by pulling on the tarp Ruth was standing on. For once in a Lifetime movie, the principal villain is actually taken into custody alive instead of being killed off by some sort of authorial fiat — and her daughter is also arrested, though we can hope she’ll be treated leniently since she did give Claire the key information about where Sarah was.

Secrets in a Small Town isn’t exactly the freshest material plot-wise, but like Sorority Secrets (only even more so) it’s given power and distinction by the excellence of the execution. Thomas Michael gets great performances from both his female leads: not only does he support Rya Kihlstedt by making Ruth a complex figure instead of just a cardboard Lifetime villainess, he’s able to make Claire an overwhelming revenge figure, far more intense than the typical Lifetime mother trying to rescue her damsel daughter from distress. The wall of opposition and hostility Claire originally faces from the townspeople — including the rather supercilious boss who asks her to take a leave of absence as vice-principal “until this is over” (which ticks off Claire no end because she can hear the clear intimation in the man’s voice: “until we find your daughter’s body”) and the guy who vandalizes her garage door with the words “WITCH HUNT” (who does he think he is, President Trump?) and either him or someone else who slashes the left front tire of Claire’s car (though she doesn’t stop to change it; she just drives around with a flat tire until she can get to the authorities and give them the key information) — only adds to the peculiar intensity of the film. Thomas Michael’s imdb.com page lists him mostly as a writer and actor (and he’s got the dark, smoldering good looks to be quite effective as the latter!), but though he only has six directorial credits (including two shorts and an “announced” project called You’re Killing Me!) it’s clear he has a real future as both writer and director.

Live at the Belly Up: Soul Rebels Sound System, Talib Kweli (KPBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright @ 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ended last night by watching an episode of the local KPBS music show Live at the Belly Up — just the idea of live performances, of people sitting (or standing) together in the same room watching a band perform in real time and not wearing masks or staying the obligatory “social distancing” of six feet apart from each other is a nostalgia item by now! The show featured an odd group from New Orleans called the Soul Rebels Sound System and had as their guest star rapper Talib Kweli (Greene), who got started with fellow rapper Mos Def in a group called Black Star. The Soul Rebels are a curious ensemble who use no electronic instruments and also almost none of the traditional harmony instruments — no piano or keyboards, no acoustic or electric guitar, no string bass (either acoustic or electric) — just five front-line horn players (two trumpeters, two trombonists, and a front man who plays tenor sax), a tuba (actually a sousaphone, but it sounds the same) player as the only bass instrument, and two drummers, both of whom play standing up and one doubles on timbales.

They began with a set of six (mostly) instrumental pieces, many of which had the word “rebel” in their titles (“Rebelosas,” “Rebel Rock,” “Black Rebel,” “Can You Feel the Beat?” “Get Freaky” and “Tear It Up”) and most of which blended so seamlessly with each other I was thankful for the Live at the Belly Up chyrons for telling me when they’d stopped playing one song and started another. The Soul Rebels are the sort of group that sound great for a song or two, then start to pale because virtually all their songs sound the same: all bouncy uptempo dance numbers with tightly harmonized horn voicings and only occasional solos by one or another of the horn players, and mostly instrumental except for a few barked-out lyrics, mostly instructions to the audience to stand up, get down , scream or what-have-you. After the six selections mentioned above Talib Kweli came out and behaved like a typical rapper: as nearly as I could figure them out, his lyrics occasionally mentioned being Black and having some of the usual problems, but at least seemed to avoid the usual rap boasts about the number of women the singer has fucked, the number of babies he’s conceived without having any further contact, familial or financial, with their mothers, the number of crimes he’s committed, the amount of “bling” he’s accumulated, and the number of Queers he’s bashed.

What annoyed me most about Kweli was the sheer speed with which he spoke; one of my ongoing complaints about rap is its frequent unintelligibility. If you’re going to reduce music to nothing more than rhythm and lyrics, it doesn’t seem to be too much to ask rappers to slow down so we can at least hear and decipher the lyrics. Kweli spok,e many of the lines on last night’s Live at the Belly Up as if were trying to make auctioneers jealous: “Look, I can talk faster than you can!” After his four numbers, “Push Thru,” “The Blast,” “I Try” (which had one of the few lines I actually comprehended: “Life is a beautiful struggle”) and “Get By,” he turned it back to the Soul Rebels, who turned it over to their front-line horn players to do some competitive rapping with each others (reminding us of rap’s origins in “the dozens,” a Black male street game in the 1920’s and 1930’s in which young Black men would gather on streetcorners and speak boasts of how great they were and how terrible the other guys they were “dozening” with were. All in all, this Live at the Belly Up wasn’t a bad show (the copyright date was 2017, by the way) but I think I reached my limit with too many horns playing too many of the same riff patterns on the same song, and a good ballad singer joining them on a slower song would have helped a lot.

Ruthless Realtor (Fancy Pants Films, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights ressrved

Charles and I watched last night’s Lifetime “Premiere” movie, Ruthless Realtor — the night before they’d done a film about a sympathetic realtor and a psycho architect, so now it was the turn of the real estate profession itself to take its lumps, though as was revealed in a twist ending — it was supposed to be a big surprise but Charles and I have both seen so many of these things we saw it coming at the first hint writer Steven S. Toledo (holy Toledo!) dropped midway through, the “ruthless realtor” turned out a) not to be ruthless at all and b) a well-meaning if rather infuriating character trying to warn the good guys about the real villainess (more on that later). The good guys are young (or at least youngish) couple Ralph (Brian Ames) and Annie (Lily Anne Harrison) Savage. Ralph is an art photographer who shoots pictures of flowers and insects; Annie, a successful divorce lawyer, is the breadwinner of the family; and they stumble on their supposed “dream house” during one of Ralph’s photographic trips in the wilder regions of southern California. They buy the house through a listing from realtor Meg Atkins (Christie Burson, top-billed), only there’s a competing buyer who’s also made an offer: Lynnette Dee (Alexandra Peters), who arranged to buy the house from the bank that had foreclosed on it after the previous owner had mysteriously disappeared five years earlier. Lynnette owns the town pharmacy and complains to Meg that she was supposed to do an off-market sale of the house to her instead of opening the listing to anyone else, but Meg tells the Savages that though Lynnette had more money and looked like a better loan risk, she sold it to the Savages instead because they wanted actually to live in the house instead of tearing it down and building something else on the lot.

Meg soon turns herself into a royal pest, showing up at all hours, demonstrating her lock-picking skills when the Savages ask to see the house’s basement and nobody there has a key, making a brisket for the Savages’ family dinner and bringing it home to them when Annie had a long day at work (which happens often), and even jumping the gun by leaking the information that Annie’s pregnancy test has turned out positive and mounting and framing the pregnancy test and giving it to the Savages as a wall hanging. Also, while showing the Savages the basement — which Ralph decides to turn into his darkroom (though this is the 21st century, he’s so deliberately retro as a photographer he still shoots on film instead of digitally), Meg points to a recently laid wall that covers up … well, she doesn’t know what, but any remotely literate person watching this movie is going to think back to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and its protagonist Montresor’s dispatching his enemy Fortunato by getting him drunk on the titular liqueur and then walling him up behind a newly constructed brick wall. Like the crazy architect Jay Christo in the previous night’s Lifetime “premiere,” Secrets in the Basement, Meg doesn’t seem acquainted with the idea that a house sale should be final and the buyers may not want the sellers dropping in or hanging out outside at all hours. She also asks Ralph Savage to take promotional portraits of her, which he finally does even though he says he doesn’t do portraits (though he has a fully set up portrait stand in his basement, including lights and a posing stool), and while she’s down in his basement/darkroom/studio she makes a pass at him which writer Toledo and directors Devon Downs and Kenny Gage at first makes us think is reciprocated — but later that turns out to be just Meg’s fantasy and in reality Ralph rejected her and stayed loyal to his wife.

We’ve also been shown an opening scene whose significance we’re not going to learn until nearly the very end, in which a heavy-set man who’s the house’s previous owner is overpowered, drugged and ultimately killed by an intruder with a spray tank, a gas mask and an all-over black hoodie. (The Lifetime gimmick of the mysterious assailant in the black hoodie who chooses that attire so neither the victim nor we can see the killer’s gender has become such an obvious cliché we’re almost certain from the get-go that any attacker so dressed is going to turn out to be a woman.) Meg makes herself so annoying that the Savages twice call the police on her, and a hot-looking but rather hapless Black detective takes the call and the first time refuses to arrest Meg because she hasn’t actually committed a crime. The second time he does take her into custody, only Meg pleads with Annie Savage to visit her in jail by pretending to be her attorney and warning her about the real person who’s endangering them. To no one’s particular surprise (at least no one who’s seen more than five Lifetime movies before), the real culprit turns out to be Lynnette Dee, who’s determined to get that house back because years before, when she was 15, she murdered her parents, the Bradfords (“Bradford” is her true family name and “Dee” merely represented her middle initial), stuffed them into a back room in the basement and did the “Cask of Amontillado” thing to cover them up. (Though she only used stucco and plaster instead of bricks, she still complained about how long it took to dry.) Then she went to live with an aunt and uncle until she turned 18, when she received her inheritance from her late parents and found herself the owner of a drugstore, with access to all sorts of intriguingly dangerous substances.

She made another try to buy the house where she’d grown up, killed her parents and buried them inside the walls, only she got beaten out by a guy named Logan, which she responded to by staging the attack on him in the opening scene, first spraying him with Fentanyl (a powerful opiate first used as an elephant tranquilizer, later turned into a recreational drug by people who really want to live “on the edge”) to incapacitate him (her use of an aerosol drug was the reason she needed to wear a gas mask as part of her murder outfit), then srangling him with a chain and adding him to her collection of corpses in the walls. Lynnette takes out the Black cop surprisingly easily and leaves him fatally wounded in his squad car, and the Savages realize something is up when they encounter him, but do they do the obvious thing — call 911 not only to let the police know that one of their officers is “down” but also to get an ambulance in case he’s still alive and salvageable? No-o-o-o-o: instead they walk into their home and into Lynnette’s trap, as does Meg — Lynnette knocks Ralph unconscious and ties up Annie and Meg, then leaves them alone to get the gun with which she plans to dispatch them permanently, only while she’s gone Meg says she has a way to deliberately dislocate her shoulder to escape her own bonds and then free Annie, and in the resulting confrontation Lynnette gets killed (at least I think she got killed) and the Savages survive but decide to give up the nightmare house and high-tail it back to wherever they were living before — while the cutesy-poo final scene did not show Lynnette having survived after all but Meg showing THAT HOUSE, albeit with a new coat of paint, to a new prospective owner who mentions that he’s a single man, so there’s a hint that after she expressed her frustration to the Savages over her lack of luck in the man department, he’s going to end up not only buying the house from her but sharing it with her.

Ruthless Realtor was considerably better acted than Secrets in the Basement — the four principals are all quite effective and, though Brian Ames is the typical tall, lanky, sandy-haired guy Lifetime likes to cast as the innocent husband, at least he’s genuinely sexy as well, perhaps because the character is considerably younger than usual. He and Annie are about to have their first child instead of being old enough to have had their family already. But the plot is shakier (Charles noted that a couple like the Bradfords, who had money and did an estate plan, would have set up a mechanism to keep up the house payments and property taxes, so it would have never gone into foreclosure; also Annie Savage, an attorney herself, would have known how to get a restraining order against Meg and would have done so) and directors Downs and Gage completely fail to create much in the way of suspense or Gothic atmosphere the way Stanley Rowe did in Secrets of the Basement.

Secrets in the Basement (Sunshine Films, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was actually pretty good: Secrets in the Basement, an intriguing title (though the early working title, Designs for Revenge, was even weirder) for a story that despite some weaknesses — particularly three physically attractive but not conspicuously talented actors in the leads — offered good suspense opportunities for director Stanley Rowe and writer G. Y. Cohen. The basic premise is that a young married couple, Delilah (Melina Bartzokis) and Shawn (Nick Cassidy — I have no idea whether he’s any relation to those Cassidys, musical star Jack and his four kids David, Shaun, Patrick and Ryan, but he’s tall and reasonably attractive but not so hot as to confuse Lifetime audiences who expect truly sexy males in their movies to be villains) Brenner, have had to leave Miami (this film was made by the Florida-based Sunshine Films company in association with our old friends, MarVista Entertainment) and seek solace in a smaller beach community in the Sunshine State. The reason they’ve had to do this is that a year earlier something really terrible happened to Delilah (a name so associated with Biblical villainy it’s hard to accept as the moniker for someone we’re supposed to like) in the city and it’s forced her to take psych meds, though it’s only in dribs and drabs that writer Cohen lets us in on just what the catastrophe was. Through their connections with Barbara (Valentina Izzara), an old college friend of Delilah’s who’s now a realtor (or should that be “REALTOR[TM],” with a trademark symbol?), she lands them what appears to be a dream home, a spiky modernistic thing (it reminded me of the famous Richard Neutra house in Hollywood, commissioned by director Josef von Sternberg and later sold by him to Ayn Rand, who naturally told people she had commissioned it) with all modern conveniences and then some.

The “then some” refers to one of what I consider one of the most useless, pointless and potentially counterproductive inventions of all time, a “smart” grid throughout the house so you can simply give it voice commands — turn on the water, turn on the stove, turn on the TV, turn off the lights, run the trash disposal, etc. — and the house will obey. Or maybe it won’t; by coincidence I had been re-reading my notes on the Lifetime TV-movie Tiny House of Terror in which a similar gimmick exists, a software app called “Host” which unsurprisingly turns malevolent, switching the TV on and deciding which programs it wants to show (in Tiny House of Terror the “pussy in peril” was an apparent widow who was forced by her home’s software — and, we eventually learn, the villain controlling it after having hacked it — to watch video of the news coverage of the accident that killed her husband, who had made a ton of money inventing Host in the first place, without any way to shut it off) and at the end locking the doors of the titular tiny house of terror so the heroine couldn’t escape the homicidal maniac out to kill her. Why anyone would want that degree of automation in their home environment is beyond me — it may not be as dangerous as letting your car drive itself and hoping its software is good enough that it doesn’t crash into anything, but at least driving your own car is a burdensome task one can see why people might want to be liberated from it by an electromechanical gadget.

The main plot function of the home’s “smart” software seems to be to communicate text messages to and from the heroine; whenever someone texts her (which is usually either her husband or her friend Barbara), her phone gives her a message that she’s getting a text and asks her if she wants it read to her. The bad guy is the house’s architect, Jay Christo (Micah McNeil), who’s tall, blond, baby-faced and drop-dead gorgeous in the red slacks he seems to wear all the time. He also seems to be both able and willing to let himself into the Brenners’ new home any time he wants, and though at first we’re not sure he’s the same person as the mysterious gas-masked stranger who’s hanging out in the house’s basement (when I saw his full respirator mask I thought, “Isn’t he taking the COVID-19 prevention thing just a little bit too far?”), eventually we realize that he is the gas-masked stranger and he’s using the house’s basement, which doesn’t even exist in the original plans, as a base of operations to give Delilah Brenner the full Gaslight treatment. (In Gaslight the secret base of operations was the house’s attic, and the prey villain Charles Boyer was looking for was a stash of stolen jewels heroine Ingrid Bergman had no idea even existed, but for some reason even though most 1940’s movies are pretty much terra incognita in contemporary culture, the term “gaslighting” has entered the language as shorthand for any long-term organized attempt by one person to drive another person crazy.)

Jay hangs a particularly grim desert-dried skull of some antlered creature in Delilah’s and Shawn’s bedroom (moving the framed photo of the two of them to a different wall to make room for it); stealing her meds (forcing her to make a panicky trip to her pharmacy to replace them) and then replacing them; and ultimately knocking off Delilah’s friend Barbara after Barbara discovers the original plans for the house, which did include the basement the plans officially on file with the government don’t. Jay leaves Delilah alone in the house — her husband Shawn works as a marketing executive for a video-game company and while all this is going on the company is about to “drop” a major new game, so there are a lot of late nights he’s stuck in Miami working while his wife is home alone and vulnerable to the attentions of the creepy architect — and tells her “I’m going out to take care of some things,” said “things” meaning to get rid of Barbara — she’s stumbled onto the truth about the house but is given away by that infernal “smart” feature of the home that reads Delilah’s text messages out loud, so Jay can hear that she’s on to him and go out and kill her (though in fact Barbara flees Jay’s murderous attack but is run down by a passing car as she tries to run) across the street and taken to the hospital, and just when we’re hopeful that she’s merely been injured and rendered temporarily unconscious, we get told that she’s died). About the only Lifetime cliché writer Cohen avoided this time was motivating Jay with lust for heroine Delilah — a place I wished they’d gone if only because a hot soft-core porn scene between Melina Bartzokis and the truly hot Micah McNeil would have enlivened this film considerably!

Instead they went for Christine Conradt’s territory and concocted an at least understandable, if not sympathetic, rationale for What Made Jay Run: in pieces of exposition doled out like eye drops throughout the film’s running time, we learn that Delilah trained in college to be an interior designer, only for her first big project — a Miami apartment building — she agreed to use cheap plastic moldings between the ceilings and the walls. One day the building caught fire and the moldings literally melted, trapping the people inside and causing one unlucky resident to lose access to oxygen for long enough that, while she was ultimately rescued by firefighters, she was left in a persistent vegetative state. Delilah tried to help, even helping pay some of her medical bills, until she got moved from one hospital to another and the new one had an obnoxious Black woman in dark blue scrubs working there who took such an expansive view of medical omertá that when Delilah repeatedly called, the Black woman would tell her that because of “confidentiality” she couldn’t even confirm to someone who wasn’t part of her immediate family whether the woman was even a patient there, much less how she was doing. It doesn’t take much mental effort to figure out how the two plot lines connect: the comatose woman whose injuries were the result of Delilah’s cost-cutting design mistake was Betty Christo, Jay Christo’s wife. The house that seemed to “miraculously” come onto the market for the Brenners was actually one Jay had earmarked for himself and his wife, and when he learned from Barbara (an old friend and frequent business associate of his) that the Brenners were looking for a new home in his small town, he had Barbara sell it to them while at the same time keeping his identity secret and redrafting the plans so it wouldn’t look like the house had a basement. Delilah had enough architectural training to be suspicious; knowing that the property was in a so-called “blue zone,” highly susceptible to flooding, she knew that legally it would either have had to have a basement or the foundation would have had to be on underground stilts.

Eventually Shawn comes home and offers to go to the hospital to see how Barbara (ya remember Barbara?) is doing — it’s when he does that that the Black woman with the form-fitting dark blue scrubs and the devotion to “confidentiality” that verges on insanity tells him (and us), “I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but Barbara passed away” — and when Shawn leaves Delilah pleads with him to take her to the hospital with him. By this time I was wrapped up enough in her plight that I was rooting for him to take her along to get her out of the house in which she’s trapped with the Psycho Architect — but he doesn’t, and by the time he realizes that Delilah is in danger, Jay has emerged from the basement that supposedly doesn’t exist and is trying to kill Delilah by putting a plastic bag over her head so her death will look like suicide. (It’s established that she already tried to commit suicide once before by deliberately overdosing on her meds, though she was able to convince Shawn that that was an accident — and Jay, in the manner of quite a few villains in bad mystery fiction, prattles on endlessly about how people who’ve tried suicide once are far more likely to succeed on their second attempt.) Only Shawn’s sudden arrival leads Jay to take the bag off Delilah’s head; Shawn retrieves a gun from a lockbox but doesn’t realize that Jay took out the clip with live ammunition and replaced it with one with blanks, and after Shawn shoots Jay but doesn’t hurt him any,

Jay stabs Shawn with a kitchen knife, Jay grabs the gun, puts live bullets back into it and threatens to kill both Brenners — only Delilah is able to scare him by telling him she’s set fire to the house, which confuses him long enough that Delilah is able to wallop him with the proverbial blunt object twice and knock him into the house’s swimming pool, where he presumably expires. Though the plot verges on the preposterous (albeit it’s at least somewhat more believable than many other Lifetime movies) and the acting isn’t especially stellar (one wonders what the talent pool of actors available in Florida — as opposed to L.A. or Lifetime’s usual production stamping grounds in Canada — is like), Secrets in the Basement has some good suspense direction and a real sense of the Gothic — perhaps director Rowe saw Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1934 film The Black Cat (also a tale about a homicidally crazy architect) and learned from it that you can do Gothic horror as effectively in a modern, state-of-the-art home than you can in the usual crumbling old medieval pile! Even Bartzokis, who comes off in the beginning as the all too typical stupid Lifetime ninny who seems to deserve everything she gets, takes on a grim determination as the life-threatening perils her character goes through seem to add weight and force to her acting — though Nick Cassidy remains a nice-looking but dramatically inert last-minute rescuer and I really wish Rowe and Cohen had ripped off the ending of Rebecca and, instead of rather anemically killing off Jay in the swimming pool, had shown him going up in flames along with his super-house.

Game of Thrones, season six, episodes one and two: “The Red Woman,” “Home” (Television 360, Startling TV, Bighead Littlehead, Home Box Office, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I cracked open the DVD boxed set of season six of Game of Thrones and resumed our progress through this depressing saga, which seems to me to embody all the most sordid aspects of classical medieval fiction — the endless battles, bloodlettings, religious manias, family feuding and dynastic wars — without the corresponding elements of chivalry and nobility that had been part of the formula of medievalist fantasy ever since the Middle Ages were still going on. (In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, in the thrall of my first obsession with Wagner and everything Wagnerian, I sought out some of the literary sources for his music dramas — the anonymous Song of the Volsungs and the Nibelungs, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival — and found them utterly fascinating reading. Gottfried’s Tristan gripped me the way a contemporary novel about legendary times would, and Wolfram’s Parzival was slower going but still valuable not only as a work of literature but also as one of the few accounts we have of what being a medieval knight was like by someone who was one — and quite frankly a long-form mini-series adaptation of Parzival would probably interest and entertain me personally more than Game of Thrones). As before with my comments on Game of Thrones, I’m going to start out with the official imdb.com synopses of the two episodes that began season six, “The Red Woman” and “Home,” and then offer my comments on them, at least partly because (with a few exceptions) the narrative threads of the episodes are so diffuse, with so many cuts back and forth between plotlines and whole story strands and sets of characters totally overlooked for huge chunks of screen time and then suddenly brought back (no wonder so many people “binge-watch” Game of Thrones: it’s just about the only way you can remember who’s who and what sides they’re on!):

The Red Woman: The fate of Jon Snow is revealed. Sansa and Theon flee the Boltons. Jaime and Cersei reunite in King's Landing. The High Sparrow continues to grow in power. The Sand Snakes make a daring move. Tyrion takes his first steps in ruling Meereen. Daario and Jorah pursue the Mother of Dragons. Daenerys is brought before the Dothraki.

Home: Bran trains with the Three-Eyed Raven. In King's Landing, Jaime advises Tommen. Tyrion demands good news, but has to make his own. At Castle Black, the Night's Watch stands behind Thorne. Ramsay Bolton proposes a plan, and Balon Greyjoy entertains other proposals.

What struck me most about season six was that the creators, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss (they were adapting a series of medievalist fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin collectively known as A Song of Ice and Fire, but with Martin blocked on the last two books he had planned to complete the series, Benioff and Weiss were required to come up with their own ending, which has been widely criticized), seem if anything to be ramping up the already high level of cruelty and gore. Season five ended with a pitched battle in the castle of the Knight’s Watch, the Montsalvat-like order to which Jon Snow (Kit Harington) was exiled because he was an illegitimate son in the Stark family (the fact that Martin named two of his feuding families “Lannister” and “Stark” suggested he was drawing on the real-life Wars of the Roses, which consumed England during the 15th century and involved a battle over the English throne between two families named Lancaster and York). Eventually Snow rose to become the commander of the Knight’s Watch even though he was regularly violating the order’s vow of celibacy by having at least one girlfriend on the outside (but then a lot of the Knight’s Watchmen were breaking that vow and screwing around), only he pissed off the others in the order by letting in their historical enemies, the Wildings, to save the Wildings (who, despite their long-standing enmity with the Knight’s Watch, were at least fellow human beings) from being slaughtered by the White Walkers (ghosts of previously slain warriors who are a sort of cross between the dead heroes with which Odin peopled the armies of Valhalla, Bram Stoker’s vampire cult and George Romero’s zombies; the gimmick is that if you’re killed by a White Walker you become one, and Jon Snow’s plan was not only to save the Wildings but to enlist them on the side of normal humanity against the White Walkers, who are growing in number and threatening to storm the Wall that alone protects the rest of the Game of Thrones world, “Westeros,” from being overrun by them).

Alas for Jon, the other Knight’s Watch members could only think of the Wildings in terms of all the Knight’s Watch members and their families the Wildings had killed during their centuries of feuding, so at the end of season five, episode 10 the other Knight’s Watch members attacked Jon Snow en masse and stabbed him repeatedly in an assassination I suspect was patterned both on the real-life killing of Julius Caesar and Shakespeare’s depiction of it in his famous play. Only if you thought David Benioff and D. B. Weiss were going to let one of their most obvious masculine heartthrobs get killed off permanently, you had another think coming: the titular “Red Woman” of episode one, a sorceress who’s got just about everyone who’s either fallen for her, enlisted her aid, or both, gets enlisted to use her magic to make Jon’s wounds magically heal and essentially resurrects him (and episode director Jeremy Podeswa does indeed stage this to look like the Resurrection of Jesus, especially in having his wounds magically heal and disappear on screen). Also at the end of season five Queen Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke), whom at first we were supposed to like because she was sweeping though the various kingdoms on the island on the other side of the sea from the one Westeros is on (obviously we were supposed to be thinking England and Ireland here, though just to confuse things there are part of the Game of Thrones world that evoke continental Europe and even the Middle East) freeing the various slaves, only we later grew to hate her for being such a naïve idiot and refusing to accept the native customs of the places she was conquering, fled an attack by some sort of resistance group called the “Sons of Harpy” (who distinguish themselves by wearing beak-like metal masks into battle and pretty much slaughtering anyone they come in contact with) escaped by flying away on one of the three dragons she hatched from still-surviving dragon’s eggs, thereby reviving a species everyone else thought was extinct.

Only she’s been able to do damned little with the dragons — and David Benioff and D. B. Weiss haven’t either. They went to the trouble of hiring excellent effects people to produce almost totally convincing dragons but have hardly shown them at all, and what was originally laudable Lewton-style reticence is getting very annoying — particularly since having escaped the kingdom of Meereen on a dragon’s back didn’t stop her from getting captured and enslaved by the Dothraki, a tribe whose leadership she married into back in the first season in hopes of gaining them as allies in taking back the Iron Throne of Westeros following the assassination of her father (got all that?). Meanwhile, Ramsay Bolton, one of the younger and cuter aspirants for power in this world, methodically and remorselessly kills his father and then throws his infant half-brother and the woman who just gave birth to him into a prison cell full of fighting dogs (that’s the “plan” given the rather anodyne reference in the above synopsis; like the currently living and ruling North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Ramsay is determined not only to let anyone who might be a threat to his power live, he’s particularly out to get anyone within his family that might compete with him for power), just one episode after two female assassins equally methodically and privately dispatch a young heir whose family has decided he’s too weak even to live, much less rule.

As I’ve noted several times before, though the bulk of Game of Thrones was filmed while Barack Obama was still President, in terms of the Zeitgeist this is a story that very much reflects the Trump era, with its aspirants for power after it just for its own sake. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” Game of Thrones is a world almost totally devoid of the gentler emotions — the few characters who actually show any kindness or consideration for others are damned as weaklings and dispatched to oblivion as soon as the writers can arrange it, and even romantic love (as opposed to sexual desire, which is very much a part of these tales) is carefully kept out of the world of Game of Thrones. In the fifth season the writers introduced religious mania in the person of the “High Sparrow” (Jonathan Pryce), who comes off like a medieval witchhunter or a modern-day Right-wing evangelical Christian in his zeal to apprehend everyone he considers a “sinner” (which basically seems to mean anyone who likes sex, straight or especially Gay), extract “confessions” out of them and humiliate them in public — another aspect of Game of Thrones that seems all too contemporary today. Even the minor characters, like the sighted girl who regularly takes on a blind beggar girl and makes her fight (and of course the competition is totally one-sided and the poor blind girl does a lot of hapless flailing about with her combat staff in mid-air), seem gratuitously cruel to each other.

Had Martin, Benioff and Weiss followed the example of previous medievalist writers (including the ones I noted above who wrote while the Middle Ages were still going on!) and leavened the bloodshed and gratuitous cruelties with some sense of nobility and chivalry, some sense that their world had some moral codes even if they got broken a lot, Game of Thrones would be a considerably better and nobler drama than it is — but then it wouldn’t seem so “right” for our Trump-led political era, in which the current U.S. President has become such a personification of political evil and how a sufficiently strong-willed and determined man can destroy all our pretensions of “democracy” and establish himself as a Nietzschean Übermensch, the strong ruling over the weak by sheer force of will, goading his followers into virtual worship at his feet and running roughshod over, and ultimately destroying, anyone and any institution or norm that could conceivably check his goal towards absolute power!

Power Trip: The Story of Energy: “War” (Alpheus Media/PBS, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I stumbled on a show on KPBS that proved to be unexpectly compelling: the sixth and final episode of a series called Power Trip: The Story of Energy directed by experienced documentary filmmaker Mat Hames (though Beth Hames, presumably his wife, received co-director credit in the end titles) based on a book of the same title by someone named Melville Webber. I had trouble finding an online reference for this, partly because imdb.com listed it under the working title Thirst for Power since the whole thesis of the show was the connection throughout history between water and power. (Remember that water and wind were humanity’s first sources of energy that weren’t derived from humans or animals.) This episode was called “War” and made the case that the development of energy for transportation and actual weaponry made wars in the 20th and 21st centuries different from what they had been before. For one thing, they could be fought year-round (in previous eras, Webber and Hames argued, wars had been fought mostly in summertime and the armies had rested in winter to wait until frozen terrain became unfrozen and there was more light to see what was going on when you were fighting). Also, the ability to move conveyances first with steam power and then internal combustion (gasoline or Diesel) allowed the construction of giant military contraptions — tanks on land and submarines at sea.

Energy, and the need for natural resources to obtain it, also determined the actual conduct of wars, particularly who would fight whom, where and over what. Webber and Hames argued that World War I was the first “energy war,” not only in terms of the weapons used but why the war was fought — Britain had built a world-ranging empire largely through dominating the sea (which they had done, the show argued, first by replacing sailing ships with steamships and then replacing wood-fired steamships with Diesel-powered internal combustion ships) and Germany wanted to grab the resources as well as the colonies the British had conquered with it. I think the filmmakers rather overstated the case — when they argued that it wasn’t possible to transport water over long distances until the invention of motorized energy, with my usual sensitivity to claims of what I call “first-itis” I thought, “What about the Roman aqueducts?” They moved water great distances through gravity alone without any source of motive power at all! They made a stronger case for World War II as an “energy war,” not only because the armies that fought it were motorized (which meant they needed fossil fuels to run on) but because many of the military objectives were themselves energy resources (Russia began World War II on the same side as Germany until the Nazis double-crossed them and invaded largely to grab the huge oil reserves in the Caucasus and Ukraine, and the Japanese targeted the Dutch East Indies largely for the oil reserves there) and both sides targeted each other’s energy: Nazi U-boats aimed largely at sinking U.S. oil tankers delivering fuel to the European allies, and as the British were departing Singapore they trained their guns on their oil stores and blew them up rather than let the conquering Japanese get them.

The show then heads for more ideologically contentious territory, including the U.S. development of the atomic bomb — which itself required a lot of energy to refine uranium to make it fissile. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to locate the plant to do that in Oak Ridge, Tennessee because it was right next to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and its big dams at Muscle Shoals — so the U.S. relied for the energy to fuel the first nuclear weapon on a publicly owned energy company relying on a renewable resource!! Take that, advocates of the “free market” über alles! The show discusses the energy crises of 1973 and 1979, the growing power of the Middle Eastern oil exporters and the U.S. response, which was to develop “fracking” (short for “hydraulic fracturing”) to make the U.S. once again an oil exporter. It ignored the environmentalist critique of fracking, which is not only that it is environmentally destructive in itself (it injects toxic chemicals into the ground, where they can contaminate groundwater, and there’s evidence that it does enough damage to the substrata of the earth that it can cause earthquakes in places like Pennsylvania where there weren’t any, or weren’t many, before — reason enough not to do it in quake-prone California!) but it’s also releasing fossil fuels that would better be left in the ground.

One of the more bizarre results of fracking has been that it’s lowered the price of natural gas, to the point where it’s largely replaced coal as the fossil fuel of choice for electricity generation — though according to the latest reports on the California rolling blackouts (including an article in the San José Mercury-News, https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/17/california-blackouts-expose-problems-in-states-transition-to-clean-energy/), there’s a school of thought that outright blames the blackouts on California’s transition to renewable energy, to the point where solar and wind plants to generate electricity are now actually cheaper than gas-fired ones, so that’s what’s being built and therefore the state is losing the resources to keep the lights on at night when there’s no wind. For the most part the filmmakers ignored the environmental controversies around energy sources, including fracking as well as civilian nuclear power — though it touches on not only the 1991 and 2003 Gulf wars (including the decision of the retreating Iraqis to torch the oil fields of Kuwait as they withdrew in 1991) but America’s decades-long cold war with Iran and the ambitions of Iran to construct a civilian nuclear program. The show stresses how many safeguards were built into the Iranian nuclear deal and, though it doesn’t come right out and say that President Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of it was a mistake, it certainly depicts it as one. The latest outrage from the Trump administration over Iran was in this morning’s Los Angeles Times: it seems that Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have demanded that the United Nations Security Council impose the so-called “snapback sanctions” against Iran for allegedly violating the nuclear deal, and our historic Western European allies — including countries that are still parties to the deal — have basically told us, “Forget it. You pulled out of the deal, so you have no standing to enforce it.”

Psycho Sister-in-Law (The Ninth House, Beta Film, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was Psycho Sister-in-Law (the working title, Sinister Sister, was already tacky enough but someone at Lifetime thought it needed to be even tackier, possibly to fit it into their “Psycho” series that has already generated one of the silliest titles of all time, Psycho Yoga Instructor). Written and directed by Jake Helgren for The Ninth House and Beta Film, Psycho Sister-in-Law begins with two nearly lookalike young women — both rail-thin and with long black hair — acting in an independent play that at first looks like they’re two of the Three Witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth but turns out to be something more recent. Then, after the performance, one of the women accuses the other of stealing the lead role that should rightfully have been hers but taunts the other by saying she seduced her boyfriend — and the woman who thought she deserved the lead role takes a shard of glass or something and stabs the other one to death. We’re not sure of the point of this prologue until almost the end of this movie, but at least it does show us right off the bat that this striking-looking, rail-thin, raven-haired beauty is not to be trusted.

Lifetime then does one of its chronology jumps and we meet the Downes family: father Gavin (Rod Sweitzer) is some sort of real-estate developer (at least we assume that because he’s made a large fortune from a business that involves not only acquiring real estate but building on it), and his son Nick (Brando Eason, one of the homeliest actors Lifetime has ever cast as a Good but Naïve Husband type — he’s stocky and medium-height instead of tall and lanky, though he’s also got the sandy hair and nondescript features of a typical “innocent” Lifetime male) and daughter-in-law Haley (Andrea Bowen, top-billed and almost as homely as the actor playing her husband!), who’s about to have their first child. There’s another hanger-on at Gavin Downes’ palatial stone mansion in the desert: Callie Hayes (Diora Baird), Gavin’s trophy girlfriend; Helgren doesn’t tell us what happened to Ryan’s mom but we learn that Callie, though half Gavin’s age, was living in his house preparatory to marrying him but hadn’t actually done so when Gavin suddenly and unexpectedly dies in an accident on a construction site. Then, as Ryan, Haley and Callie are all mourning Gavin’s loss, Ryan’s long-lost half-sister Zara (Lydia Hearst, Patty Hearst’s 35-year-old daughter and William Randolph Hearst’s great-granddaughter) — apparently the product of a nonmarital encounter Gavin had before he married Ryan’s mom — shows up and immediately starts throwing her weight around. She’s pissed off that she only got $100,000 in her dad’s will (especially since Callie got $600,000) and, being a Lifetime villainess (whom we’ve already seen commit murder), she starts a campaign to grab the Downes fortune for herself.

She first sets her sights on Turner Stevens (Sterling Jones), the Downes family attorney (one suspects he inherited the job because he’s Ryan’s age or even younger), whom she claims she saw necking with Callie, hinting that Callie was a gold-digger out to grab Gavin’s fortune and either share it with Turner or seduce him into helping her get it. In one of the script’s quirkier scenes, Turner denies Zara’s accusation that he and Carrie were “all over each other” on their way to a dinner date by telling Ryan he’s Gay — they’ve known each other literally all their lives but Turner has never come out to Ryan before. (Turner tells Ryan, “You remember that French guy I brought over a couple of years ago?” Ryan doesn’t, but apparently that was one of Turner’s boyfriends.) Unable to discredit Turner and get Ryan to fire him, Zara sneaks into Turner’s office after hours, catches him working at his computer, and strangles him. Then she tries to hack into the file containing Gavin’s will and rewrite it, only she hears a security person on his way and has to cut things short. Her point is to frame Callie for Turner’s murder and take over as Callie’s godfather, but Helgren throws her a curve ball in the person of Reid (Ryan Carnes), Zara’s ex-boyfriend from Vegas, who demanded half of the share Zara was supposed to get from Gavin’s estate and says a mere $50,000 isn’t going to be anywhere near enough to pay off his gambling debts. Reid starts hanging around the Downes estate and ticking off Ryan, who at one point tells him to put on a shirt — more’s the pity, since Ryan Carnes is the only piece of hot masculine eye candy in this film and not getting to see those gorgeous pecs of his anymore is a real disappointment — only, all too predictably, Reid “gets his” when Zara sneaks up behind him one night when they’re alone, he’s expecting sex but he gets strangulation instead and she’s got another victim on her hands to dispose of and try to blame on Callie.

Ryan is himself injured when, as part of his new job taking over from his dad on whatever the Downes family business is, he’s nearly crushed by a falling beam on a construction site, though he leaves the hospital a day early because he’s getting more and more suspicious of Zara and her real motives. He finds a construction worker’s hard hat among Zara’s possessions, concluding from that that Zara not only caused his injuries but probably killed his dad as well, and during Zara’s days as an aspiring actress in L.A. before she moved to Vegas (and now she’s back in L.A. “seeing” a manager who’s promised to find her an agent and land her parts — and given what we’ve seen of her modus operandi up until now we’re pretty sure she got him to take her on as a client by sleeping with him) she lived with a woman who sees her photo on Ryan’s phone and tells him [spoiler alert! — though if you’ve seen more than about five Lifetime movies in your life the “surprise” reveal isn’t going to be a surprise at all] that the photo on his phone isn’t the real Zara at all. Now we know the significance of that Vegas-set prologue: “Zara” is really a girl named Ronnie who studied the looks and behaviors of the real Zara (Jess Adams), a fellow aspiring actress who called herself “Amelia” because she thought that would be a more “actressy” first name, then knocked her off not because she was jealous of the straying attentions of a boyfriend who probably wasn’t a prize package either but to take the real Zara’s place and impersonate her to grab the Downes family fortune. There’s a bizarre and very Helgren-esque final confrontation scene in which Zara (actually I think we’re told her real name is “Ronnie”!) gets, or appears to get, Haley Downes to agree to kill her husband in exchange for being allowed to live until her baby is born and “Zara” can grab the Downes fortune as the last remaining adult around to raise her. (There’s a lot of odd byplay for a 2020 movie about whether Ryan’s and Haley’s baby is going to be a boy or a girl — Ryan’s dad Gavin, before he’s knocked off, is dead certain he wants a boy because the first-born Downes has always been a son who took over the family fortune — which seems odd because Helgren’s dialogue says Haley has had sonograms done, and those would have revealed her fetus’s gender … unless the Downeses didn’t want it to, and according to the Livescience.com Web site at https://www.livescience.com/45582-boy-or-girl.html, Dr. Stephen Carr of the Prenatal Diagnosis Center at Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, 85 percent of couples do use the sonogram to tell the baby’s gender in advance but a growing number of couples don’t: “[M]ore and more people are telling us they want to wait until the baby arrives to find out the sex,” Dr. Carr said. “It’s the last great surprise left.”)

Psycho Sister-in-Law might have been a more interesting movie if Helgren had thrown a double reversal into his script and had “Zara” and Haley been in cahoots all along to grab the Downes fortune on behalf of Haley’s baby and eliminate the insufferably milquetoast biological Downeses once and for all, but instead it ends about the way we expect, with Haley feigning going along with “Zara”’s plans, grabbing “Zara”’s hand as she’s holding the gun she had trained on Ryan, and of course THEY BOTH REACH FOR THE GUN and Haley gives “Zara” a fatal bullet wound in the stomach. Psycho Sister-in-Law is yet another O.K. Lifetime movie whose entertainment value comes almost totally from the electrifying appearance of the villainess and the sheer venom of the actress playing her: Lydia Hearst (who surely brought to the role an awareness of what it’s like to grow up in a dysfunctional mega-rich family!) is a former supermodel who brings to the part a haunting hourglass figure, well shown off by the skin-tight clothes she wears throughout (including a pair of form-fitting blue jeans that practically become a character themselves!), and a perfectly honed don’t-screw-with-me attitude that communicates both her character’s self-centeredness and her utter unconcern for anyone else (gee, with an attitude like that she could be President!) as well as her ability to manipulate others to her will. She’s a magnificent villain figure — in some ways a lineal descendant of Ann Savage’s character in Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1946 film noir classic Detour (likewise an unscrupulous bitch trying to impersonate her way into an inheritance) — who quite frankly deserved to be showcased in a better story.

Beware of Mom (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “Premiere” movie was called Beware of Mom, though in this case there are two moms, one good and one bad, who are jointly struggling over the soul of a high-school junior named Kylie (Nicolette Langley). The good mom is, of course, Kylie’s real mom, red-headed Tanya (René Ashton — and why she uses what’s usually the masculine form of her first name, I have no idea), who’s been overprotective to a fault since her husband, Kylie’s dad, was killed as a U.S. servicemember in Afghanistan. The bad mom is Anna (Crystal Allen, top-billed), who moves in next door to Tanya and Kylie with her own teenage daughter, Jessie (Monica Rose Betz), in tow. The film actually begins with an opening prologue in which a mysterious stranger in black sweat pants and a black hoodie (not another mysterious stranger in a black hoodie! Lifetime’s addition of this gimmick as part of their cliché bank seems to have been so they can stage murder scenes without giving away the gender of the killer) opens an outside gas tap inside a home and a teenage girl steps into the house, triggering an explosion and killing her. (The explosion is represented by reasonably but not totally convincing CGI: the days in which filmmakers would have built a model house and actually burned it down or blew it up are long gone.)

Though we’re not supposed to know the significance of this scene until much later, once we hear how Anna’s husband died in an “accident” and their other daughter Lisa died with him, it doesn’t take us long to figure out that Anna was the mysterious stranger in the black hoodie, she intended to kill her husband and make it look like an accident, and Lisa was just collateral damage. Since then she’s raised Jessie as a single mom but has made it clear, à la Walk the Line and its spoof, Walk Hard, that she thinks the wrong one of her kids died — a more diabolical spin on the Smothers Brothers’ famous catch phrase, “Mom always liked you best!” Even before Anna starts her long-term seduction of Kylie, Kylie gets busted when a girlfriend of hers talks her into going into a wild party — as wild as a basic-cable channel like Lifetime can make it, anyway — in which college and high-school age kids are mingling and doing underage drinking (out of the obligatory red plastic Dixie cups) — and the next thing Tanya hears, her good little daughter is at the police station, though exactly what they busted her for (especially since she had virtuously refused the offer of a beer from one of the college boys) is something of a mystery. Mom grounds her for two weeks, but she relents one weekend when she’s going to be out of town on business (she makes custom wedding dresses and other costumes for formal occasions, and when she’s not at home we usually see her hunched over a sewing machine) and Anna agrees to look after Kylie for the weekend rather than forcing her to stay at home alone.

Only Anna throws a party for all the local kids, which shocks Tanya when she returns home from her business trip early and sees just what kind of scene she’s let her daughter get involved in with her neighbor. From then on the story turns largely into one of Lifetime’s oddball reworkings of the Faust legend, as Anna becomes a Mephistopheles-like figure leading poor defenseless Kylie into more and more temptations. Anna scores Kylie a ticket to a secret gig by a hot band (though the music we hear from them is the sort of sensitive “singer-songwriter” stuff that was probably popular when Anna’s mom was a teenager and wouldn’t be likely to appeal to a teen of today) whose 34-year-old lead singer invites Kylie up on stage and sings a song directly to her. Then, when Kylie begs off on any more intimate contact than that, she tells the singer she’s only 17 and the singer subsequently sends Anna a text chewing her out for bringing “jail bait” to his gig. Anna also dresses Kylie in hotter clothes than the ones Tanya will let her wear — clothes that turn out to have belonged to Jessie’s sister Lisa (ya remember Lisa?) — and Anna’s mad scheme eventually becomes apparent: she wants to knock off Tanya and effectively adopt Kylie as a replacement for the dead Lisa so she’ll once again have two daughters. Anna manages to influence Kylie enough that she gets disgusted with her own mom and moves in with Anna and Jessie, and Anna also tries to influence Jessie to get Kylie to break off with her real mom once and for all, including bringing up Kylie’s dead dad — which backfires and only bonds Kylie closer to her real mother. So Anna pulls out all the stops, first breaking into Tanya’s clothes shop and killing Renée (Jessica Buda), who’s either Tanya’s friend, business partner or both (the script doesn’t say Renée is part of Tanya’s business but it’s difficult to imagine why she would be at the shop after hours if she weren’t), when she shows up after hours while Anna is vandalizing the place.

She also manages to slip Tanya some poison (she’s gone on a Web site that offers the information about the 10 most common poisons) which gives her a heart attack and sends her to the hospital, and when that doesn’t kill Tanya, Anna sneaks in and screws up her I.V. in hopes of making her croak that way. At the end Anna kidnaps Kylie (thanks to yet another drug she’s slipped Kylie into her hot chocolate) and takes her and her own daughter Jessie to a seedy establishment called the Bloch Motel (I suspect it’s named after Robert Bloch, author of the novel Psycho on which Alfred Hitchcock based his classic film about a psychopathic killer who commits murder in a motel), where — having already killed Renée as well as her former sister-in-law Zoë (Andrea Lee Davis), who’s convinced (rightly) Anna murdered Zoë’s brother (Anna’s late husband) and has been stalking her ever since, looking for evidence she can take to the police, she knocks off the motel manager (Holgie Forrester — that’s a woman, in case you were wondering) when the manager sees Kylie and Jessie trying to flee and innocently asks Anna why one of “her” daughters has her arms bound together at the wrist with duct tape. Tanya traces her daughter and comes upon the body of the motel manager, and of course any sensible person would call 911, both to get an ambulance out there in case the manager (who was literally stabbed in the back) was still alive and to call in the police to help find her daughter and the other girl. Instead there’s a chase scene and confrontation in the desert country surrounding the motel and, as Anna is trying to kill Tanya with her knife, Anna’s own daughter Jessie sneaks up behind her with a tree branch large enough to do serious damage and hits her over the head with it. The blow seemed to me to be strong enough to knock Anna out but not to kill her — and I was actually looking forward to a scene in which the cops would finally arrive and take Anna into custody alive — but no-o-o-o-o, apparently we’re supposed to think Anna is really, most sincerely dead.

Directed by Jeff Hare for the Johnson Production Group from a script by S. L. Heath (this is Heath’s only listing on imdb.com and there’s no indication on their page whether they’re a man or a woman), Beware of Mom is an O.K. Lifetime movie, about in the midrange of their content quality-wise; a more sensitive writer (like Christine Conradt, maybe?) might have made more of the internal conflict of Anna’s daughter Jessie, who would dearly love to have a sister again but is also a thoroughly decent, moral girl who wants no part of her mom’s schemes. The most unusual aspect of this movie is the way Crystal Allen plays Anna: instead of the surface perkiness Lifetime usually gives the villainess when she’s a teenager herself or the matter-of-factness of most of Lifetime’s adult psychos, Allen plays her all fangs out, growling, baring her teeth and leaving no stick of scenery unchewed — much the way most male psychos were played in films before the Robert Bloch-Joseph Stefano-Alfred Hitchcock-Anthony Perkins Psycho revolutionized the depiction of homicidal psychopathology on screen and got us to believe that the innocent-seeming boy-next-door “type” Perkins had played in all his previous movies could really be a crazy killer. While nowhere nearly as nervy as Sarain Boylan in the 2017 movie Mommy’s Prison Secret, who practically threw her amply curvy, sexy body at the screen as a survival weapon and dared us to stop drooling over her and start hating her, Allen is a no-holds-barred screen presence, barely able to maintain the pretense of normality long enough to win the trust of her potential victims. She’s a lot of fun to watch and she does her level best to lift this movie out of Lifetime’s usual rut, but in the end there’s just too much of we’ve-seen-it-all-before in the plotting (even though the writer has no previous credits) for this one to be anything special.

Star Trek: “Charlie X” (Desilu Productions, Norway Corporation, 1966)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Oddly, after watching the Lifetime “premiere” I stumbled around the channels and found a MeTV rerun of a quite chilling episode of the original Star Trek: “Charlie X,” the third show in the first season in terms of actual air date. (Many of the original Star Trek episodes were not shown in the order in which they were produced, and apparently that was due to the way the scripts varied in terms of the number of special effects required: with no in-house effects department at Desilu Studios, where the original Star Treks were filmed, producer Gene Roddenberry had to farm out the effects work and so the more elaborate episodes took longer in post-production.) “Charlie X” was one of the very best Star Trek episodes and it was the first one that used a conflict Gene Roddenberry and his writers would return to again and again: the destructive innocent who appears human but has powers far beyond those of normal humanity — and who uses those powers in terrible and anti-social ways not because he’s malevolent but because he simply doesn’t know he’s not supposed to. This was the first time I’d seen “Charlie X” since I finally caught up with and read Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and the parallels were obvious — especially when Charlie (Robert Walker, Jr.) uses his superpowers to vaporize various Enterprise crew members (this episode was probably the first in which Star Trek introduced the infamous “red shirts” — so called because in the color scheme of Starfleet’s uniforms red meant they were part of the security detail — who would get themselves killed because they were so unimportant they could be got rid of without it impacting any of the series leads) and Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) has to explain to him that in Earth culture that sort of thing is called “murder” and is very much frowned upon.

I was surprised, however, when I looked up the imdb.com page for “Charlie X” and found that at least two trivia posters had identified an even earlier antecedent for this story than Stranger in a Strange Land: “It’s a Good Life,” a 1953 short story by Jerome Bixby that had been adapted for an episode of the TV series The Twilight Zone in 1961 and might have inspired both Stranger in a Strange Land and “Charlie X.” Though Bixby isn’t credited as a writer on “Charlie X” — Star Trek creator Roddenberry is credited with the original story and Dorothy C. Fontana (who signed her scripts “D. C. Fontana” so she could get writing assignments on action series for which the producers wouldn’t have knowingly hired a woman — I know this because I heard her speak at the 2016 ConDor science-fiction convention in San Diego which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek, and later Harry Potter creator Janice Rowling pulld a similar stunt) with the script, Bixby did get credit on four subsequent Star Trek episodes (“Mirror, Mirror,” “By Any Other Name,” “Day of the Dove” and “Requiem for Methuselah”) and it’s possible Roddenberry knew about him and promised him work if Bixby would let him recycle the premise of “It’s a Good Day” as a Star Trek episode.

The great irony is that Charlie Evans — to use his full name — was given superpowers by the people who raised him, energy beings from the planet Thasius, so he could survive in their environment. But at the same time he’s a typical teenage male Earthling, going through hormonal changes and feeling sexual desire for women (including the scantily-clad Yeoman Janice Rand, played by Grace Lee Whitney in a series of diaphanous costumes that always seemed to be on the verge of a wardrobe malfunction; a lot of people assumed her real function on the starship Enterprise was as an animate sex doll for Captain Kirk, since she seemed to have no other crew function) while having no knowledge of Earth customs, in particular how to approach a woman in whom you’re physically interested. Charlie gets more and more unhinged and sadistic as the show progresses, and by its end he’s glorying over his ability to take over the entire Enterprise and get the crew members to do whatever he wants them to — until the Thasians who raised him and gave him his powers suddenly reappear and take him back, saying that if he were allowed to live among Earth people either he would destroy them all or they would be obliged to destroy him to save themselves from his powers. Charlie’s last-minute whine over his fate, and particularly his lament that he had no fun among the Thasians because he was the only one with a physical body, is a marvelous touch. Robert Walker, Jr. was the son of Robert Walker and Jennifer Jones, and though he was 26 in real life when this episode was filmed he’s totally credible as a teenager. Indeed, Walker, Jr.’s performance here is a tour de force rivaling Walker, Sr.’s work in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Strangers on a Train, and while Walker, Sr. lived to make only one other movie, My Son John, after Strangers (and didn’t even finish it — Hitchcock had to give My Son John director Leo McCarey outtakes from Strangers to complete Walker’s part), Walker, Jr. worked steadily until his death in December 2019 at the age of 79 but mostly remained ghetto-ized as a guest star on TV series. Judging from his work here, he was a fine, edgy actor who had the chops for a star career!

Not the Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy) (Picture Production Company, Python [Monty] Films, Stage 6 Productions, 2009, released 2010)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I dug through the DVD backlog for a movie I could show Charles and I, and what I came up with was Not the Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy). Given the participation of two-thirds of the original members of Monty Python (all but the late Graham Chapman and the living but estranged John Cleese) and the basis of the show’s plot in the film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, I had expected this to be a musicalized version of Brian the way the stage show Spamalot was a musical adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Instead it turned out to be a filmed record of an October 23, 2009 performance at London’s Royal Albert Hall of a parody oratorio written by Eric Idle (text) and conductor John Du Prez (music) based on the plot of Life of Brian. The title Not the Messiah is a pun; it refers both to the scene, carried over from the movie, in which the perplexed Brian (William Ferguson, a boyish-looking tenor who’s quite good in his sweet-voiced way, though his future is probably as a concert singer since I suspect that little voice would be overwhelmed in an opera) is mistaken for the Messiah and tries to convince the throng that’s assembled to worship him that he really isn’t; and the work’s status as a deliberate parody of the British oratorio genre in general and Handel’s The Messiah in particular.

The show began in a shorter one-act version commissioned by the Toronto Symphony and its principal conductor, Peter Oundjian; later it was expanded to a full evening’s entertainment and presented on a tour of Australia and New Zealand — including a stand at the iconic Sydney Opera House where it was effectively double-billed with The Messiah: the hall presented Handel’s masterpiece in the afternoon and Not the Messiah in the evening. This Albert Hall performance was the only one given in Europe and was intended to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Monty Python TV show, and though no one either in the concert video or the “making-of” featurette mentioned the parallel, Not the Messiah is as much or more a parody of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar as it is of Handel.

The performance was excellent, with four first-rate vocal soloists — soprano Shannon Mercer (as Brian’s girlfriend Judith), whose blonde hair and rather “hard” face made her look so much like Hillary Clinton she’ll be an excellent choice if anyone writes Hillary: The Musical; mezzo-soprano Rosalind Plowright (Laurence Olivier’s sister-in-law — Lord Olivier’s last wife was Rosalind’s sister, actress Joan Plowright) as Brian’s mother Mandy; tenor William Ferguson as Brian himself; and bass-baritone Christopher Purves as authority figures on both sides of the Roman-Jewish divide, including the leader of the People’s Front of Judea as well as the Roman general “Biggus Dickus” (and Purves is a hot, hunky bear type whom I found myself hoping he lives up in real life to his Roman character’s name) — along with the BBC Philharmonic and an equally fine chorus. (About the one usual aspect of British oratorio they did not include was a chorus of boy trebles.) The piece was a fair adaptation of the original and included an hilarious number called “We All Love Sheep” featuring Carol Cleveland (the attractive young actress the Pythons used in the original show when they needed a good-looking woman instead of one of the Pythons in drag) wearing a shepherdess’s dress with three puppet sheep attached to it. (This was apparently based on a number shot for the original Life of Brian but not used in the final cut.)

We also got to see Michael Palin in (bad) drag as “Mrs. Betty Palin,” who gave the introductory narration (and at one point had to push her sagging falsies back into place) and Eric Idle — whose singing voice is listed in the final credits as “Baritonish” — not only playing several characters in the main story but doing a bizarre parody of Bob Dylan on a song called “Individual” that was one of the highlights of the show. Not only did Idle render a Dylanesque lyric almost totally incomprehensible, he did a few fart-like noises on a racked harmonica and the chorus members came out with harmonicas of their own to back him up in what’s probably the weirdest-sounding ensemble since the multiple banjo players in James Reese Europe’s 1914 Clef Club Orchestra. (Europe was the first African-American to lead what would later be called a swing band, and his group had the separate reed, brass and rhythm sections of later big bands but also a whole banjo ensemble.) While I missed one of the funniest gags of the original Life of Brian — the so-called “Palestinian Suicide Squad” that supposedly come to rescue Brian and his fellow crucifixees but instead merely stab each other to death — most of the rest of the familiar Life of Brian plot points got into Not the Messiah and the “Lumberjack” song from the original TV show got performed twice, once rewritten to fit into the Life of Brian plot and again, come scritto, as an encore.

About the only thing that bothered me was the use of flesh-colored tips on the head microphones the cast members were wearing, which at first looked like boils until I realized what they were. Though hardly as funny as the original Life of Brian, Not the Messiah, with its bizarrely eclectic mix of musical styles (especially the bagpipers in two scenes and the mariachi-style Mexican trumpets in another) and breezy (and very Python-esque) irreverence for musical as well as comedy conventions, was lots of fun. It also turned out to have a current political resonance I hadn’t expected and clearly none of its creators intended: the opening scene, in which Brian’s mother Mandy Cohen explains that he’s the product of a one-night stand between her and a Roman soldier who promised her “all the gold that I could eat” (one of those lines you’re likely to miss at first and then think back, “Did she really say ‘all the gold that I could eat’?”) if she’d have sex with him, couldn’t help me think of Kamala Harris and her mixed heritage (part Jamaican Black, part East Indian) and both her own difficulty in figuring out where she fit into America’s often bizarre racial caste system and her opponents tying themselves into knots trying to figure out which set of insulting racial tropes they should fire at her!