Bond Camp

Never Say Never Again: written by Lorenzo Semple Jr., based on the story by Ian Fleming, Jack Whittingham, and Kevin McClory; directed by Irvin Kershner; starring Sean Connery (James Bond), Kim Basinger (Domino), Klaus Maria Brandauer (Largo), Barbara Carrera (Fatima Blush), Max von Sydow (Blofeld), Bernie Casey (Felix Leiter) and Rowan Atkinson (Nigel) (1983): Thanks to some bizarre copyright issues, the rights to the James Bond novel Thunderball were never completely held by the traditional Bond production team.

Thus, another movie or movies could be made by another company with a screenplay based on Thunderball. Never Say Never Again was the result in 1983, with Sean Connery returning as James Bond 11 years after he had last played the role in Diamonds are Forever.

Roger Moore's tenure as Bond was winding down in 1983, though that year's official Bond entry, Octopussy, still outgrossed this movie. Connery looks game but a little tired here, and the pacing seems off, and the movie overlong by about 20 minutes and one too many changes of locale. Klaus Maria Brandauer does make for a surprisingly sinister Bond villain, while Barbara Carrera and Kim Basinger do OK work as Bond girls evil and good, respectively.

The tone shifts even more abruptly than usual for a Bond film, from parodic to serious and back again. That may partially be because of the screenwriter, Lorenzo Semple, who helped turn both the Batman tv series of the 1960's and the 1980 Flash Gordon film into smirking parodies of themselves. It's not quite Camp here, but it's close. M and the rest of the Bond hierarchy take the most severe beating, though Rowan Atkinson's first big-screen appearance, as an MI6 operative played solely for laughs, also grates. Bernie Casey is fine as CIA agent Felix Leiter, and actually has something to do other than supply exposition.

The prime oddity of Never Say Never Again is that the first thirty minutes or so play like a dry run for the recent Bond movie Skyfall, as a rundown James Bond faces suspension and the Double-O program itself faces termination in the wake of political changes. An historical oddity, Never Say Never Again also acts as a weird psychological test -- viewing a James Bond movie without the familiar soundtrack never feels entirely comfortable. That the score for this movie, and the title song, are both unremittingly terrible doesn't help things. Lightly recommended.

　

House on Haunted Hill: written by Robb White; directed by William Castle; starring Vincent Price (Frederick Loren), Carol Ohmart (Annabelle Loren), Richard Long (Lance Schroeder), Alan Marshal (David Trent), Carolyn Craig (Nora Manning), Elisha Cook Jr. (Watson Pritchard) and Julie Mitchum (Ruth Bridgers) (1959): Producer-director William Castle famously tried 'gimmicks' with many of his horror movies. This one featured a skeleton model jumping out at the audience at the right moment. Oh, Hollywood!

House on Haunted Hill features Vincent Price as a henpecked, possibly homicidal husband who invites five strangers to a house he's rented to see if they can survive a night in a haunted house. Each survivor's reward will be $10,000. Why is he doing this? And why do he and his wife hate each other so much?

There's a lot of charm here, much of it on the Camp side of the equation. Also, some extraordinary screaming from two of the three female leads. The shock ending left me a bit disappointed -- it really seems as if there should be one further reversal because of the goofiness of what we've witnessed.

The acid-filled pit really didn't help my suspension of disbelief either. Maybe it was different in the 1950's. Maybe the audience members nodded and thought, 'Yeah, I've got one of those in my basement too!' Still, Price is his usual silky presence, and Elisha Cook sweats bullets throughout. Lightly recommended.

Armagideon Time for Mack the Knife

Excalibur, Orlando, Anti-Christ, and Mina Harker (l-r)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century (1910, 1969, 2009): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Kevin O'Neill (2009-2012): In the otherworld of Moore and O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LOEG) series, our fiction plays out as that world's fact. Focused on the myths and stories of Great Britain, LOEG may or may not be Moore's last comic-book series. This volume is now done, but an earlier story mashing up Captain Nemo's daughter, the crew of the Nautilus, and H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness awaits.

Literary mash-ups aren't new, and LOEG has been compared to many of its forebears (Silverlock, the Harold Shea series by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and the Wold Newton universe of Philip Jose Farmer are three prominent ancestors) and contemporaries (Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's Astro City, Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's Planetary).

No one in my experience, however, has gone more metafictionally mashy to such bizarre and telling effect. This can be frustrating at times (who the hell are some of these characters?), but overall the effect has been thrilling -- indeed, more and more thrilling, at least in a intellectual sense, as the series has continued to become less interested in the bones of conventional superhero narrative and more interested in the nature of story itself, its care and feeding, its rises and falls.

At first, Century seems straightforward: the League of 1910 (now comprising Mina Harker, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Allan Quatermain, William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Carnacki the Ghost-finder, and British super-thief Raffles) seeks to stop sinister mystic Oliver Haddo from creating both a Moonchild and the Anti-Christ itself.

Subsequently, things go galloping off madly in all directions, including the direction of Bertholt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. There's a lot of singing in the three chapters. That Brecht's play was a major reference point for Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen probably shouldn't go uncommented. Andy Capp walks through several panels. Fictional characters crowd the background and foreground, most of them staring at the reader.

And there's 1969, and then there's 2009. Some of the major plot points are so weird and ultimately rewarding that there's no point in me spoiling them. The identity of the Anti-Christ manages to be hilarious, horrifying, and perfectly apt within this world of Great Britain's fictions, the narrative dream-time of an Empire's rise and fall. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Bartlet administration of The West Wing gives way to the Palmer administration of 24. Lost's Driveshaft releases a new album. The armies of different fictional Moon-dwellers clash on the Moon, observed by characters from The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street. Whew.

Back in 1969, a rejuvenated Allan Quatermain suddenly looks a whole lot like Moore's John Constantine. Back in 1910, revelations about the Jack the Ripper killings fly by, almost unnoticed. From Hell? So it goes. Boy, does Moore ever seem to hate James Bond. Highly recommended, though on-line annotation sites are also highly recommended.