Max Knight: Ultra Spy (2000, directed by Colin Budds)

Posted on July 3, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

Max Knight (Michael Landes) used to be the world’s greatest hacker but now he’s a spy who is more machine than man. He can turn invisible at will but he also has a computerized heart that has to regularly be recharged to keep him alive and functioning. I know it sound like he’s Iron Man but he’s not. He’s Max Knight: Ultra Spy. He works out of a futuristic office and he has a virtual assistant who might be in love with him.

When teenage genius Lindsay (Brooke Harman) is kidnapped by a Mark McGrath look-alike named Zach (Christopher Morris), Max is hired by Lindsay’s sister, Ricki (Rachel Blakely). Zach, who really does look like the lead singer of Sugar Ray, has a cult of followers who are all obsessed with living the rest of their lives online. (If they had just waited a few years, they could have all gotten twitter accounts and the problem would have been solved.) Zach knows that Lindsay has come up with the formula that will allow them all to become a part of the Internet and to destroy the rest of the world. (Because everywhere Zach goes, all around the world, statues crumble for him.) Eventually, Max and Zach enter the internet and battle it out, via some CGI that makes the entire movie look like an advanced level of Castle Wolfenstein.

Max Knight: Ultra Spy was originally a pilot for a television series and it very much wears its influences for all to see. Max borrows his look and his general attitude from The Matrix while the special effects owe much to The Lawnmower Man and Doom. The film’s obsession with the power of the net is, appropriately, taken from The Net. The first scene is even a recreation of the scene in Entrapment where Catherine Zeta-Jones shows off her agility by avoiding the laser beams that would set off an alarm if she made one wrong move. Entrapment is one of those films that has been forgotten today but back in 2000, everyone was obsessed with Catherine Zeta-Jones playing an FBI agent who pretends to be a thief to take down Sean Connery. Sadly, it’s not as much fun to watch Max Knight avoid detection than it was to watch Catherine Zeta-Jones.

There’s a lot of technobabble but it doesn’t add up too much. Don’t even try to figure out what exactly it is that Lindsay has discovered that will allow Zach to pull off his scheme. Even without Lindsay being the key, Zach’s plan never makes any sense to begin with. Michael Landes is a decent hero and Christopher Morris is an annoying villain. Rachel Blakely and Brooke Harman were cute so the film has that going for it. Max Knight is mostly interesting as a throw-back to the time when people were still fascinated with the possibilities of the Internet instead of just taking it for granted as one of life’s annoying necessities. In 2000, Zach was portrayed as being a dangerous madman for wanting to live the rest of his life online. Today, he would just be a normal Starbucks shift manager.

Cone of Silence (1960, directed by Charles Frend)

Posted on July 2, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

Cone of Silence is a very British film about aviation.

George Sanders plays an investigator who is looking into a crash of a “Phoenix” jetliner. The crash has been blamed on the pilot, Captain George Gort (Bernard Lee). Because Gort was killed in the crash, he is not around to defend himself. Gort had a previous crash on his record and had also been reprimanded for flying to low when he landed a flight in Calcutta. To Phoenix Airlines, Gort is the perfect scapegoat but a series of flashbacks reveals that Gort was a good pilot and that the cowardly Captain Clive Judd (Peter Cushing) was responsible for the incident in Calcutta. Captain Hugh Dallas (Michael Craig) tries to exonerate Gort’s name before another crash occurs.

Cone of Silence is named not for the famed listening device from Get Smart but instead for a key part of Gort’s certification process, where he has to fly a plane without being able to hear anyone or anything else around him. That Gort manages to do so is one of the things that leads to Dallas believing the Gort couldn’t have been responsible for the later crash. Bernard Lee is best-known for playing James Bond’s unflappable superior, M, and it’s interesting to see him playing a much more neurotic character in Cone of Silence. Gort is a good pilot but he knows that, after his first crash, no one trusts his judgment and everyone is expecting him to fail and it gets to him. It does not help that he has to deal with the weaselly Captain Judd, who is looking to blame anything that happens on Gort. Cushing does a good job of playing Judd as someone who is outwardly friendly but who is ultimately only looking out for himself.

Cone of Silence was released at a time when jet travel was still considered to be a luxury and pilots were viewed as being the men who could do the impossible. Not surprisingly, the film is full of lengthy scenes in which Captain Dallas and others explain every step that goes into flying a jet. Great care was taken to get every detail right, even if it meant limiting the film’s dramatic potential. This may have been fascinating to audiences in 1960, many of whom had never traveled on a plane, but today, Cone of Silence can feel dry and overly talky. It’s good to see Sanders, Lee, and Cushing all in the same film but Cone of Silence is never as compelling as its cast.

Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe (2022, directed by John Rice and Albert Calleros)

Posted on July 1, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

Beavis and Butt-Head, those two lovable, illiterate, and thoroughly moronic teenagers from Highland, Texas, are back and they are as dumb as ever! Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe is their second movie adventure. Currently streaming on Paramount Plus, it’s a smart comedy about dumb people.

In 1998, Bevis and Butt-Head (voice by their creator, Mike Judge) accidentally attend their school’s science fair and end up burning the whole place down. The toughest judge in Texas sentences them to Space Camp, where they can learn responsibility. As so often happens with these two, their utter stupidity is mistaken for genius and they end up going into space. Their job is to help the space shuttle dock with the International Space Station. Beavis and Butt-Head, however, think that they are being sent into space to “do it” with astronaut Serena Ryan (voiced by Andrea Savage). Quicker then you can yell “Fire,” the boys manage to destroy the International Space Station and get sucked into a wormhole.

The boys find themselves transported to Galveston. The year is 2022, not that Beavis and Butt-Head ever figure that out. Their multiverse counterparts, Smart Beavis and Smart Butt-Head, materialize to warn them that, unless they go through the wormhole again, the universe could be destroyed. Beavis and Butt-Head are more interested in returning to their house, seeing what’s on TV, and doing it with Serena. Serena, who is now governor of Texas, would rather kill Beavis and Butt-Head in order to prevent anyone from discovering what actually happened on the space shuttle 14 years ago.

It’s a long journey from Galveston to Highland. Beavis and Butt-Head get an iPhone to help and Beavis falls in love with Siri. A trip to a university leads to Beavis and Butt-Head interrupting a sociology class and it also leads to one of the film’s best moments, when a white student with a man bun proceeds to interrupt all of the women in the class so that he can mansplain white privilege. Beavis and Butt-Head take this to mean that they can steal without getting arrested and it turns out that they’re right, up until the moment they try to steal a police car. A trip to prison leads to Beavis shouting that he is the great Cornholio while the universe itself grows closer to destruction.

Yes, Beavis and Butt-Head are just as moronic as ever but, fortunately, so is the sharpness of Mike Judge’s satiric wit. It’s been close to 30 years since Beavis and Butt-Head made their debut on MTV and, through all that time, the main joke has remained the same. Beavis and Butt-Head are such utter morons that almost everyone who meets them assumes that there must be something else going on beneath the surface. In the past, it was just Mr. Van Driessen thinking that he could teach the boys how to be responsible by asking them to clean his house and not touch his valuable 8-track collection. In Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe, it’s expanded to NASA trusting the boys with expensive equipment and human lives. They fit right in at the college and they even manage to rally the prisoners in the county jail. The government thinks that they must be aliens while Sarena worries that they could destroy her political career, even though neither one of them can even read a billboard. Not even Smart Beavis and Smart Butt-Head can bring themselves to accept just how stupid their multiverse counterparts actually are!

But stupid, they are. The world is all the better for it.

Crypto is Back in Destroy All Humans! 2 — Reprobed!

Posted on May 31, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

From the minute that I first played the remake of Destroy All Humans, I’ve been waiting and hoping for the reboot of Destroy All Humans 2 and my hopes have finally been answered. THQ Nordic dropped the trailer for Destroy All Humans 2 — Reprobed today. The trailer not only gave us a release date (August 30th) but it also provided us with some incredible footage from the game.

This looks great! I can’t wait until August!

Liberty & Bash (1989, directed by Myrl A. Schreibman)

Posted on May 31, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

Liberty (Miles “How much Keeffe is in this film?” O’Keeffe) and Bash (Lou Ferrigno) served together in Nam and then came back to Los Angeles to clean up the streets. Liberty is a parole officer who doesn’t take no for an answer. Bash owns a gym and runs a Guardian Angels type of operation. Their friend and fellow vet, Jesse (Richard Eden), has a mullet and wears acid-washed mom jeans. Jesse lives with his sister, Melissa (Cheryl Paris), who never wears pants. When Jesse is murdered by a drug lord who spends almost all of his time soaking in the tub, Liberty and Bash eventually get around to seeking revenge.

The movie is called Liberty & Bash but Bash is actually only in a few minutes of the movie and Lou Ferrigno’s voice is dubbed by another actor. This was probably done because Ferrigno is partially deaf and, as a hard-of-hearing person who happens to be a big Lou Ferrigno fan, that really bothered me. Of the many storylines that floated through Liberty & Bash, Lou Ferrigno leading a Guardian Angels chapter was probably the one with the most potential but Liberty & Bash doesn’t do much with that. When Bash wasn’t around, the other characters should have been saying, “Hey, where’s Bash?”

Instead, the movie is all about Liberty. Even though Liberty is trying to bring the drug lord to justice and prove that Jesse didn’t commit suicide, the majority of the film is taken up with scenes of Liberty arguing with his girlfriend, a social worker named Sarah (Mitzi Kapture). Sarah is pregnant but she’s considering getting an abortion. Liberty spends almost the entire movie trying to talk her out of getting an abortion. Sarah and Liberty even argue about it during the film’s climatic action scene. I’m not kidding. This is the first action film that I’ve ever seen where the action was regularly interrupted by the abortion debate. The movie is obviously on Liberty’s side but Liberty is so obnoxious about it that the audience will be on Sarah’s side. Sarah can’t make up her mind until one of the bad guys points a gun at her belly and she says, “My baby!”

It’s a weird movie and doesn’t add up to the much. If not for a little profanity and some brief nudity, Liberty & Bash could have passed as the pilot for syndicated, Stephen J. Cannell cop show. Mr. B (Charles Dierkop) is Los Angeles’s least intimidating drug lord. Mitzi Kapture is sexy, elegant, and displays the patience of a saint as Sarah. Miles O’Keeffe is usually the coolest cat this side of Michael Pare but in this movie, he’s surly and won’t stop yelling at his girlfriend. Cheryl Paris spends almost the entire movie in her underwear, showing that the filmmakers at least knew who their target audience was. Those who like to keep an eye out for mullets and off-the-shoulder t-shirts will find the film to be a feast. The movie had miles of Keeffe but it needed more Bash.

Interactive Fiction Review: Graveyard Shift At The Riverview Motel (2022, Seb Pines)

Posted on May 31, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

In Graveyard Shift At The Riverview Motel, you have what might be the worst job in the world.

You work the graveyard shift at the Riverview Motel. The Riverview was once a quality establishment but it has since fallen on hard times. You can spend your shift sitting at the front desk or you can go outside and smoke a cigarette. If you get bored, you can step into the employee hallway and, moving the pictures on the wall aside, you can take a look in each of the six rooms and the people who are staying there.

Inside each room, a different story is playing out. Which story you get involved in depends on how involved you want to get. If you want to spend your entire shift sitting at the front desk, you can do that. You’ll get hints about some of the strange things happening in the motel but you won’t be under any obligation to pursue them. If you want to spend all of your time focusing on one room, you can do that as well. If you want to go from room to room and catch snippets of all of the stories playing out at once, you can do that too. It’s all up to you how involved you get.

Graveyard Shift at the Riverview Motel is an interactive text adventure, designed using Twine. Because of the game’s format, it can be played several times and it rewards player who have the patience to do multiple walkthroughs. The writing is clever and the sense of humor is acidic. It captures the feeling of being at work and looking for anything to possibly distract from actually having to do your job. I spent a few months working the graveyard shift to help pay for college and this game brought back some memories. All of the stories that occur in the motel pay tribute to classic horror films and they all end in a properly macabre fashion. One of my favorite aspects of the game was how blasé the desk clerk remained, regardless of what sort of strange things he was witnessing. It doesn’t matter how many people die as long as you can clock out when your shift is over.

There is a learning curve with the game. Several turns make up a minute in game time and, unfortunately, if you stay in one location (like the front desk or the parking lot) for that entire minute, then the same description is repeated over and over again until the next minute begins. So, if you’re in the front lobby and a man storms in and says something strange, remaining in the lobby means that same action will seemingly happen over and over again. When this first occurred, I thought the game itself was freezing on me and I nearly stopped playing. Eventually, I realized what the problem was and, after a while, I just made sure to keep walking from location to location until the next minute began. I think this is something that could be fixed whenever the game is updated and I hope it will be because it was really the only problem I had with this playing experience.

Play Graveyard Shift at the Riverview Motel.

Great Moments In Comic Book History #23: J. Jonah Jameson Is Elected Mayor of New York City

Posted on May 31, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

In 2009, the crusading newspaper publisher, J. Jonah Jameson, was elected Mayor of New York City. At least, that’s what happened in Amazing Spider-Man #591.

It didn’t turn out well, of course. Mayor Jameson spent too much time obsession on Spider-Man and not enough time fixing the subways. He was bombastic, stubborn, and refused to admit when he was wrong. That shouldn’t have taken anyone by surprise. New Yorkers knew what they were getting when they voted for him but they elected him anyway. Of course, in 2009, the idea of a buffoon like J. Jonah Jameson ever holding a major political office seemed like a fantasy. Today, Jonah would fit right in with the majority of the people in Washington.

As mayor, Jameson ended up getting manipulated by both Doctor Octopus and the Green Goblin. It’s no wonder that Mayor Jameson failed to even finish his first term before having to resign.

He was still better than De Blasio, though.

Previous Great Moments In Comic Book History:

Great Moments In Television History #19: CHiPs Skates With The Stars

Posted on May 31, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

On September 22nd, 1979, NBC aired the premiere of the third season CHiPs. The show, which revolved around the hijinks of the members of the California Highway Patrol, was never a favorite of the critics but it was a hit with young audiences who didn’t know any better. For the start of the third season, the show paid those fans back with Roller Disco.

On this special, two-hour episode, Ponch (Erik Estrada) and Jon (Larry Wilcox) pursued thieves on roller skates while setting up the patrol’s annual charity benefit, which also involved roller skates. The plot was not as important as the epic finale, in which Baker and Captain Getear (Andrew Pine) greeted all of the local celebrities who showed up for the the charity roller disco. The scene is remembered for both the quality of the stars (Melissa Sue Anderson and Nancy Kulp!) and the excited announcer who spent the entire benefit shouting out names.

Behold, the 70s: