Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)

In this morning’s movie, we see the Mona Lisa…

…and we see Shaggy and Scooby dressing down Matthew Lillard for his impersonation, so you just might think I arrange these TV shows and features so our wonderful kid would appreciate some of the jokes in this excellent and hilarious movie a little more. And you’d be right, except I was doomed to fail. The kid laughed so hard over the sight gags that I swear he missed every funny thing that the characters were saying, and I don’t know what I was thinking, expecting him to recognize Matthew Lillard after seven whole days had passed. Oh, well.

So I might be a shade disappointed, but our son certainly wasn’t. We watched Looney Tunes: Back in Action and it’s become, yet again, one of the funniest films he’s ever seen. I don’t think anybody was expecting that in 2003. The film was a huge flop, largely because money-making garbage like Space Jam had convinced the world that Warner Brothers had lost every conceivable clue they ever had, and audiences stayed away in droves because Michael Jordan was not one of the star attractions. Oddly, Warner even proved this with one of the special features on our edition: a Duck Dodgers cartoon called Attack of the Drones which does not appear to have a single joke in it. There are five other cartoons made around the same time on the Blu-ray. I don’t plan to ever watch any of them.

But the feature itself was an incredibly pleasant surprise when I took my older kids to see it seventeen years ago. Director Joe Dante, who gave his old pals Dick Miller and Roger Corman cameo parts, created a ridiculous and very, very funny world that draws from so much of popular culture that there’s just no way I could have prepped the kid for every gag in it. This is definitely a film to keep around and prompt your kids to rewatch as they get older. I mean, I’d completely forgotten that among Joan Cusack’s captives and henchmen at Area 52, the Robot Monster’s hanging out in a Mason jar. I remembered that she had a couple of Daleks, Robby the Robot, the thing from This Island Earth and poor old Kevin McCarthy, still in black and white, but I forgot the Robot Monster.

So if you’ve never seen this movie, or if you’ve been avoiding it like the plague because you know how terrible Bugs Bunny cartoons have been since about 1962 and you heard this one is so desperate for contemporary relevance that it features a cameo from a NASCAR celebrity and a gag about Wal-Mart, I promise it’s a million times funnier than it has any right or reason to be. The plot concerns an aspiring stuntman played by Brendan Fraser and a Warner Brothers executive played by Jenna Elfman on a globetrotting search for Timothy Dalton, who is an incredible superspy who poses as an actor who makes superspy movies. Bugs and Daffy come along for the mayhem, while the supervillain in charge of Acme sends an army of animated henchmen to stop them.

Actually, the only thing about this movie that has never worked for me is Steve Martin’s portrayal of the Acme supervillain. The movie stops dead almost every time Steve Martin is onscreen. This is the only movie that you can conceivably say that about, so I guess it’s notable for that as well.

Everybody avoided this film in theaters, and they all missed out. The kid loved it, and he’ll appreciate it more and more as he gets older and the references make more sense. My favorite bits probably include the Georges Seurat sequence, Area 52, the spy car running out of gas, and Bugs getting Marvin the Martian to roll down his space rocket’s window.

But I’ll tell you what’s the best thing about this movie and its world. It’s not the idea that there are twelve or thirteen Damian Drake movies that are probably really entertaining, and it’s not that all the cartoon characters are, Roger Rabbit-like, able to interact with humans, it’s that in this world, Joe Dante established that Roger Corman directs Batman movies. Can I please jump into this picture and watch one of those, Joe?

Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)

Our summer season of Star Wars cash-ins comes to a crashing finale with the much-maligned Battle Beyond the Stars, a movie so derivative that it recycles sound effects from Battlestar Galactica, making it a cash-in of a cash-in. It’s also a remake of The Magnificent Seven, with George Peppard in the Steve McQueen role and Robert Vaughn in the Robert Vaughn role, which was itself a remake of The Seven Samurai… could you tell that Roger Corman produced this?

Actually, one of the most delightfully Cormanesque qualities of this movie is that all of the principal actors, except for John Saxon, who plays the Vader Villan Sador, were probably only required on set at the same time exactly once. Saxon never interacts with any of the principal characters, who also include Richard Thomas, Sybil Danning, Marta Kristen, and Sam Jaffe, who plays a cyborg. I think that if I were casting a movie in 1980, Sam Jaffe would not be the first name I’d come up with to work for about eight hours as a disembodied head stuck on top of a bunch of wires and machinery.

I can’t credit this turkey with much of anything myself, except that I was genuinely impressed with at least the first two-thirds of the script, which is lean and mean and moves absurdly fast, all character and nuance chopped for the bare bones of a fast-moving plot. It makes a huge error in breaking the battle against Sador into two chunks; the momentum vanishes when they return to the planet Akir (as in Akira Kurosawa) for the respite between fights with Sador. The last half-hour of the movie drags.

But it certainly didn’t drag when I was ten or so. This was one of those movies that was shown on HBO about thirty times over a couple of months and I saw most or all of it about twenty-nine of those times. I don’t know why bits of it were so unfamiliar this time around, though. I’d forgotten all about the collective-consciousness aliens who join the fight, but remembered Sybil Danning’s last line exactly. This is a movie that you watch when you’re a kid for all the space explosions and the illicit thrill of some mildly bad language because your parents see this and assume it’s more kiddie space junk and they don’t need to monitor it.

There are other cute little bits. I like that John Saxon’s character is in search of a new arm, and there’s one of the all-time great “Show me more of this Earth thing you call kissing” scenes between Thomas and Darlanne Fluegel, in a very early role. George Peppard’s Cowboy character has a belt that dispenses scotch, soda, and ice.

I nearly fell asleep during the last half hour, and my wife cringed and winced through the mess, as indeed she did with all the other outer space dramas we’ve watched this summer. But our son whooped and hollered and punched the air and had the best time in the galaxy again. He has, in that delightful way of six year-olds, decided that each and every one of the eight silly movies we watched during this season of cash-ins was better than the previous one, and this – this! – was the best of them all. I’d say that it’s not half as good as Starcrash or Message From Space, but it’s his opinion that counts the most.

We’ll head back to Earth for our next few Sunday movies, but we’ll let him see the actual sequel to Star Wars one day next month, so stay tuned!

Starcrash (1979)

There are exactly two reasons anybody ever needs to watch Starcrash. Either they’re under ten and want to see laser swords and Vader villains and exploding spaceships, or they’re over ten and want to ogle Caroline Munro while she’s wearing several ridiculous, skimpy costumes.

Well, alternately, a person could be stuck trapped on a sofa between these audiences. Poor Mommy.

Starcrash is arguably one of those projects that began its long development before Star Wars, but nobody outside the producers’ immediate families is going to defend its originality. It even opens with a shot that’s been stripped right from Wars, only while the ships in that movie looked like actual spaceships, these look like toys. All of the miniatures here look like toys with the little leftover bits from model kits glued on them and given solid white or gold spray jobs.

No, what money there was in this movie, after securing the services of Christopher Plummer, Caroline Munro, David Hasselhoff, and a bunch of other people who look like they were on a two-week furlough from the steel mill, went into the location filming. Munro plays Stella Star, a pilot and smuggler who’s been pardoned by the Emperor of the Universe and commissioned to find his missing son. The search takes her and her crew to a beach planet, an ice planet, and a volcano planet, where they get into battles with space amazons and space cavemen, before confronting the evil Count Zarth Arn, which might be the best and silliest name for any of the screen’s Vader clones.

Speaking of best and silliest actually, and you won’t believe me, but my favorite part of this movie wasn’t actually Caroline Munro in her leather space bikini and boots, but the laser guns used by Zarth Arn’s troops. They have these absurd and delightful little red crosshairs printed on the barrels of their rifles and I chuckled every time I saw them.

For our six year-old, this was serious business and he adored this film. He liked it just fine until the climactic space shootout, and told us that his favorite part was “the end, when everything went boom boom boom. I liked everything else, but I really liked it when everything went boom boom boom!” There are lots of explosions as all the extras and stuntmen shoot at each other in a set that looks about the size of our apartment, but which nevertheless somehow holds about a dozen of these little torpedo ships which crash through the living room windows of the Death Sta– I mean whatever Zarth Arn calls his space station — but that wasn’t the really big explosion.

Our son also really enjoyed this movie’s obligatory robot. This sort of movie just wouldn’t be complete without one. It’s a police robot called Elle, voiced by Hamilton Camp in a possibly Texan accent. Like C-3PO, he worries and complains about everything from water to flying a floating city, but he also guns down amazons and cavemen.

With the battle almost lost, Emperor Christopher Plummer realizes that there’s no alternative but to execute the dangerous plan of Starcrash. The other really great thing about this movie is the wonderful way that David Hasselhoff replies “Fourth dimensional attack!” You’d think that something called a fourth dimensional attack would be a little more impressive than two model kits bumping into each other, though.

Starcrash was released in America by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures after the original producers, AIP, judged it too poor a movie to bother. It’s been a cult classic for almost forty years of mocking – some friends have been shouting “Fourth dimensional attack!” at inappropriate moments since the early nineties – and it finally made its way to Mystery Science Theater 3000 three months ago. I very much doubt my wife will ever sit through this film ever again, even with Jonah, Tom Servo, and Crow to help us through it.

Incidentally, the unmistakable miniature work and silly Christmas light star systems in this film would, you’d think, be unique enough that nobody would think about using them anywhere else, but two years later, the visual effects all turned up again in a really dopey movie called Escape From Galaxy 3. It was apparently marketed in some countries as a sequel to Starcrash, but it certainly isn’t!