WITCH HUNT (March 2021)

WITCH HUNT

(March 2021)

/ ‘wiCH, hunt/, Noun

1. A search for, and subsequent persecution of persons accused of witchcraft.
2. A campaign directed against a person, or group, holding unorthodox or unpopular views, usually based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence.

Witch Hunt’s harrowing opening quickly tips the viewer off to the fact that they’re now in the middle of an alternate history:
 
A world where witches are real, and are hounded by the Bureau of Witch Investigations (the BWI), modern-day witch hunters all too ready to strike a match so they can “stop hysteria and uphold the law”;
 
A world where the threat of Proposition 6, the Witch List Act (AKA Prop 6) looms.
Its full title: the Control, Regulate, and Restrict Potential Witchcraft Act, meant to “restrict the rights of blood relatives of convicted witches”;
 
A world where the particular combination of one’s genes potentially carries a death sentence.
 
Working against this system is Elizabeth Mitchell’s Martha Goode, a widow who helps smuggle witches to safety.
In this world’s parlance, Martha is a “harborer”, which makes her life and that of her children a daily tightrope of secrets and subterfuge.
 
“Did you see the way that they looked at me? How am I supposed to control something that I’m not even allowed to practice?
“And why does it have to be bad?
“I’m not bad…
“I’m not bad!”
 
Witch Hunt is writer/director Elle Callahan’s sophomore feature, on the heels of her excellent ¡Qué horror! 2019 title, Head Count.
It’s a brilliant and powerful follow-up that brings a very different kind of horror from that of Head Count, to the screen.
 
A piece like Witch Hunt can be a particularly potent narrative because, like comic book tales of the X-Men, it’s the kind of story where the persecuted minority--whether witches or mutants--can be swapped out for any number of real-life discriminated groups.
It’s a fictional reflection of the hardships that some people--through no fault or choice of their own--are subjected to, simply due to the color of their skin, or their gender.
 
It’s the kind of troubling, uncomfortable horror that critiques the very real-life systems we all find ourselves slaved to.
It’s the kind of horror that asks, So then, what are you going to do about it?
 
“So, vote ‘Yes’ on Prop 6, and keep our streets safe from anyone with magic in their blood.
“No magic is good magic.”
 
(Witch Hunt OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

¡Qué horror! 2012

Candidate # 21

THE WOMAN IN BLACK

(February 2012)

If you’re in the mood for some old school ghost story hijinx, you can’t really go wrong with James Watkins’ The Woman in Black.

Adapted from Susan Hill’s novel by she-of-the-flaming-red hair, Mrs. Jonathan Ross, Jane Goldman--who, as frequent Matthew Vaughn collaborator, has also adapted Neil Gaiman (Stardust) and Mark Millar (Kick-Ass), and brought the X-Men back to the swinging 60’s (X-Men: First Class)--this one has got a decrepit mansion surrounded by a vast, mucky marsh, suitably saddled with the unbearably charming name of “Eel Marsh House.” It’s a rotting domicile dominated by a black-garbed ghost, and chockful of cobwebs, creepy kids’ toys, and a rocking chair.

What more could you ask for in any self-respecting haunted house?

Sure, poor old Harry Potter (actually, Daniel Radcliffe, in period 'cut and garb) has no business galumphing around Eel Marsh House when he should be working, what, with his job in jeopardy, and yes, that damned dog disappears conveniently enough when he’s not needed to bark at unseen ghostly apparitions, but the creeps and the scares are so finely tuned, one can choose to overlook these slights.

The fact that this is such a different kind of film from Watkins’ feature debut, past ¡Qué Horror! title, Eden Lake, is simply another reason why this gets on this year’s Candidate List…

(The Woman in Black OS’ courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com.)

AFTERTHOUGHTS (96)
EMPIRE’S! 50! GREATEST! COMIC! BOOK! CHARACTERS! [2 of 5]
THE X-MEN EDITION

Though I’m pretty much a DC fanboy (and always have been), the one Marvel title that I loved way back when was ­The Uncanny X-Men, back in the classic Chris Claremont era.
And naturally, I was rabid over Grant Morrison’s New X-Men.
Filmwise, I wasn’t bowled over by Bryan Singer’s first pass on the material, though I love X2. Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand was, like Spider-Man 3, a mess that had too much going on in it.
Hopefully, next year’s Wolverine spin-off will have learned from past X-film mistakes…
I also loved Sir Ian McKellen’s Magneto, more so than Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, who is already, let’s face it, a pretty good fit. (Though I do think Magneto’s helmet in the film looks terrible…)


30 Emma Frost (aka: The White Queen)
Bad girls in comics are always so useful that they tend to reform and become at least semi-goodies (cf: Catwoman, Elektra).
Emma Frost was introduced as an exceptionally nasty—and explicitly perverse—villainess, running a school for evil mutants in competition with Professor Xavier and high in the councils of the nefarious Hellfire Club (in homage to the famous ‘Touch of Brimstone’ episode of The Avengers).
Marvel made her a qualified goodie in the X-Men spin-off Generation X, and writer Grant Morrison reinvented the character when he took over New X-Men and wasn’t allowed to use his original choice, Storm.
Now an actual X-Man, Emma remained the manipulative slut fans loved to hate—and caused a minor kerfuffle when she began a ‘telepathic’ affair with Cyclops, long-term partner of Jean Grey.


Despite strong competition, Emma has consistently worn the most striking lingerie (and little else) in comics—the covers for her brief solo series Emma Frost are basically porn star poses.
FIRST APPEARED IN UNCANNY X-MEN #129 (1980)
CREATED BY CHRIS CLAREMONT AND JOHN BYRNE


9 Magneto (aka: Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, The Master of Magnetism)
Magneto is... complicated.
A Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who is determined to save his fellow homo superior from the fate of his fellow Jew, he sometimes seems fated to repeat some of the Nazis' mistakes, pursuing the subjugation of homo sapiens in favour of homo superior.
He is—as producer Tom DeSanto told Bryan Singer when he was trying to persuade him to make the first X-Men movie—Malcolm X to Professor X’s Martin Luther King.
His ‘by any means necessary’ approach has seen him commit hideous atrocities in the past, including the sinking of a submarine full of sailors, and yet he’s not evil—not in the traditional sense of the word, anyway.
Even though he’s traditionally their number one nemesis, he has been known to actively align with the X-Men, even taking over as the team’s leader/teacher in the absence of Charles Xavier, while he’s previously had a relationship with Rogue.


Currently in the films, he’s depowered, and living life as a human—which, for him, is purgatory. But we’re sure his powerless state won’t last for long.
FIRST APPEARED IN X-MEN #1 (1963)
CREATED BY STAN LEE AND JACK KIRBY


4 Wolverine (aka: Logan, James Howlett, Patch, Weapon X)
Originally conceived as a villainous means of giving Hulk a bit of a workout, but swiftly retooled as a conflicted hero, Wolverine’s always been a character comfortable with shades of grey, and it’s his contradictions and complications that enable him to be all things to all geeks.
So he has an unmatched capacity for violence (even berserkery) and finely honed animal instinct, but is capable of tempering his highly emotional reactions with cold-blooded calculation where required.


And he’s no mere thug: his studies in Japan and long history of travel, espionage and trouble-finding have given him a knowledge of differing cultures, he speaks a number of languages, and has a deep appreciation of ice-cold beer (see, for example, Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, where beer brings Wolverine back from a hypnotised state).
Also, he has the sort of facial hair that generations of young men have grown up aspiring to.
FIRST APPEARED IN HULK #181 (1974)
CREATED BY LEN WEIN, JOHN ROMITA SR


The above write-ups are from Empire’s list.
For more on the above characters (including who Singer saw as his potential White Queen), just click on their names; the entire list will be accessible from there.

In Part 3—Afterthoughts (97)—we note some characters from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

(Images courtesy of greghornjudge.com [Emma Frost and Wolverine, art by Greg Horn]; artofhagan.com [Magneto, art by Brian Hagan]; about.com [Sir Ian McKellen as Magneto; photo by Nels Israelson]; and marvel.com [Emma Frost, New X-Men cover art by Frank Quitely, Wolverine, and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine].)

reVIEW (33)
ELEKTRA

Since my review for Suspect Zero went up here at the Iguana because it was co-written by Zak Penn, I figured this one should go up too, since it was also written by Penn. (Boy, it’s a good thing I enjoyed Incident at Loch Ness, or Penn might think I’ve got it in for him…)

Marvel really does know how to shoot itself in the foot.
For all their initiative in translating their superhero properties onto the big screen in the past few years—leaving DC far behind in the dust—it’s really only been Bryan Singer’s X2, Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-man, that have passed muster. All their other movies have run the gamut from, a) better-than-good-but-not-great (X-Men), to b) disappointing (Ang Lee’s The Hulk), to c) just plain awful (Mark Steven Johnson‘s Daredevil).
Rob Bowman’s Elektra though, has the distinction of being the first of Marvel’s recent screen adaptations that is downright boring. And if it’s one thing a comic book film shouldn’t be, it’s boring. The four-color world of comics is frenetic and stylized, charged with adrenaline, and, in the case of red-clad assassin Elektra, a fair amount of pubescent hormones. Unfortunately, none of that is carried over to Bowman’s film.

Picking up some years after the events in Daredevil, Elektra begins with some voice-over back story by Terence Stamp’s Stick, before segueing into a standard sequence which is supposed to establish how formidable our heroine is. Her existence is now considered an urban legend, since she died, after all, in Daredevil. Now an assassin-for-hire, it isn’t long before she gets embroiled in the affairs of The Hand, an evil order of ninja—we know they are evil because when their minions die, they dissolve into billowing yellow smoke—with sinister designs on “The Treasure,” a warrior pivotal to the battle between light and dark.
What follows is a film that is not so much predictable as it is blandly unsurprising. Revelations are made in the course of the story that do absolutely nothing to raise the tepid sense of detached observation which quickly sets in while watching Jennifer Garner alternate between agonizing over the loss of her mother at an early age, and kicking Hand butt.
Sadly, not even the action sequences do much to alter the tenor of Elektra. Uniformly unimpressive—despite one that has a neat set-up with a multitude of floating white sheets—the fight scenes are even more inept than another recent Marvel entry, Blade: Trinity’s, and those were already nearly dispensable. Even the showdown with the quartet of enemy warriors—who we know are formidable and merciless because their grand entrance is done in slow-motion—are horribly inconsequential, as is Elektra’s face-off with main baddie, Kirigi (Will Yun Lee; Colonel Moon from Die Another Day). More’s the pity, considering Kirigi’s (again) none-too-surprising significance to Elektra’s life.

Zak Penn‘s script, in attempting to give us a human protagonist with a past filled with pain and emotion, ends up delivering a story totally devoid of action and tension, dealing, as it does, with story elements we’ve all seen before: the supposedly stone-cold killer with a good heart; the contract that isn’t what it seems; the targets that cause the killer to be conflicted, etcetera, ad nauseum.
Nowhere in the film’s running time do we actually feel a threat, a sense of danger. At no single point do we feel that life is a precious thing. After all, those of Elektra’s order can raise the dead, as they did with her. With that sort of power in your corner, why bother to worry?

Rob Bowman, meanwhile, elevates Elektra not a whit beyond its tension-free beginnings. An X-Files directorial alumnus, Bowman then went on to helm the X-Files feature film, as well as Reign of Fire. Other than a phantasmagoric kiss in a forest, and one of Elektra’s flashbacks involving an apparent demon, nothing in the film is indicative of any sort of directorial flair. Like the X-Files movie, Elektra is straight-forward and by-the-numbers, leaving no residue at all, no lingering feeling of “What did I just see?”, of the revelatory wonder that cinema is capable of.
Perhaps if the director were more versed in the very specific sort of world Elektra’s story is set in, then things would have turned out differently. This is a world steeped in martial arts and mysticism, the world of the Hong Kong martial arts genre, or, to be truer to Elektra’s comic book roots, the world of Japanese manga and anime.

Now, lest I be accused of racism, let me reiterate: Elektra needed a director versed in the genre. Quentin Tarantino understood it well in the Kill Bill saga, as did Guillermo del Toro in Blade II, and the Wachowskis in The Matrix, and none of them are Asian. Inappropriately, Bowman seems to have approached the material as if it were a normal action film with a touch of the supernatural thrown into the mix. Elektra needed to be soaked in a certain atmosphere, to have a specific sensibility. Instead, it languishes in a flavorless stock of mundane proportion.
Not even the presence of charismatic Terence Stamp—who has done everything in his career from facing down the Man of Steel in Superman II, to prancing around the Australian outback in drag in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert—manages to make a dent in the terribly pedestrian armor Elektra is wrapped in.

In the end, where Elektra is concerned, I think this was the biggest surprise: spinning off from the awful Daredevil, I thought it would either be better, or worse, with the greater possibility of being better, as Daredevil was already pretty bad
I just never expected Elektra to be a big, stupefying bore.

(Elektra OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

(The above is a slightly altered version of a previously published review entitled “Marvelous Bore.”)

AFTERTHOUGHTS (13)

13.1 The U.S. Television Critics Association announced the winners of this year’s awards, so congratulations to Michael C. Hall, for winning the award for Individual Achievement In Drama (for Dexter), and all involved in Heroes, which won the big enchilada, the award for Program of the Year.
Yahoo!

(See the complete list of winners here.)

13.2 I’ve been following the whole Cloverfield/1-18-08 thing since the story broke on aicn, and the latest bit of vital information: the first official teaser poster is online courtesy of ew.com, and newlywed Harry Knowles (congratulations, Harry!) may just know what the film’s real title is. (If Harry’s spy is on the level, X-Men fans will know it too.)

13.3 And before I go, Michael’s coming back to Lost.
I really hope the schmuck returns just so he can wind up dead and have that viewing no one attends in season 3’s finale. (Yes, I’m still ticked off about his not only shooting both Ana Lucia and Libby, but also leaving Jack and company in the hands of the Others.)

(Dexter image courtesy of tv.com; Heroes image courtesy of comicbookresources.com; 1-18-08 teaser OS and Harold Perrineau image courtesy of ew.com.)

HEROES
Season 1
Episode 20
(WARNING:
SPOILERS)
“Five
Years
Gone”

Okay, to do my usual episode reaction wouldn’t be so much fun this time out, as our five year jaunt into the future with Hiro and Ando gets so spoilery it isn’t even funny.

I will say three things though.

One: Up to this point, Heroes has been a smart, moving, and addictive entertainment that any self-respecting comic geek had to watch to retain their membership in the Club. This episode is no different in that respect, as it’s pure Dark Age comics on the small screen; heroes reviled by society, having paid the hefty cost of their calling, bearing the scars (both literal and figurative) of their struggles.
There are, in addition, strong echoes of the classic X-Men tale, “Days of Future Past,” including some traumatic character deaths.

Two: This episode tops even those achievements though, by smoothly joining the ranks of Battlestar Galactica as a resonant and evocative tale for our post-9/11 world.
The terrors and paranoia of society after the NY explosion are a mirror to our own 21st century anxieties, and the 40+ minutes of “Five Years Gone” are some of the best, jaw-dropping moments of the season thus far.

Three: Parkman is such a huge, flaming a$$hole.

(Image courtesy of comicbookresources.com.)