Pictures of Insect Men: A Retrospective Analysis of the Mimic Trilogy

This week marks the release of the Mimic director's cut on Blu-ray, which includes all sorts of brand new goodies. I haven't gotten my copy yet, but I will soon. I heard that even though the new cut still doesn't have the ending that Guillermo del Toro wanted, it's closer to his original vision than the theatrical cut. I've also heard that del Toro's commentary track provides a lot interesting details as to how Mimic became less about what he wanted and more about what the producers wanted. (Then again, I don't think that the new director's cut further explores one of Mimic's grimly funny ideas, that a population of giant carnivorous insects could grow under the very nose of America's largest city but as long as the critters stay in the shadows and relegate their carnivorous diet to society's outcasts--the homeless, stray animals, and larger vermin such as rats--no one would really notice.)

Until I can put my two cents in about the new cut, here's a (slightly edited) reprint of an article I wrote that was originally posted on PopPolitics.com back in 2008. It's a retrospective of the entire Mimic trilogy, the original 1997 movie and its two direct-to-DVD sequels. All three movies were loosely inspired by a short story of the same name that was written by Donald A. Wolheim in 1942. This article examined how concepts and issues that are specific to genetic research and their related environmental impacts permeate the Mimic films, thus making them different from their irradiated Atomic Age "Big Bug" predecessors and worthy of unique consideration. Read on ....

For those of you who are not familiar with the Mimic trilogy, here's a summary of each film:

* Mimic (1997): The film begins with children in New York City dying in droves because of Strickler's Disease, a respiratory illness that was found to be transmitted by the common cockroach. To eradicate the disease, entomologist Dr. Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) genetically engineers the Judas Breed, an insect species designed to eradicate Strickler's Disease by attracting and killing the roaches, and then dying off when their intended purpose is fulfilled. Three years later, a series bizarre deaths and occurrences lead Tyler to discover that the Judas Breed didn't die after all, but mutated into six-foot tall, sewer-dwelling predators that have the capability to visually 'mimic' their prey: human beings.

* Mimic 2: Hardshell (2001): A lone male Judas Breed relocates a horde of Judas Breed larvae (presumably the offspring of the Judas Breed nest from the first film) into the basement of a run-down NYC school, a school where Remi Panos (Alix Koromzay), Dr. Tyler's assistant from the first film, teaches science classes. During the course of the story, Remi learns that not only is the monster stalking her and killing her potential boyfriends with the intent of making her the queen of his new nest, but that this particular Judas Breed has also gotten much better at mimicking humans.

* Mimic 3: Sentinel (2003): Marvin Montrose (Karl Geary) is the protagonist, a survivor of the Strickler's Disease epidemic in the first film. The illness had left his health in such poor condition that he has been restricted to living with his family in a dilapidated apartment building in the NYC slums. Limited to his room and a hobby of voyeuristic photography, he notices suspicious activity in his building suggesting that a nest of Judas Breed monsters are feeding on his neighbors.

The Mimic films are Big Bug movies, a horror movie sub-genre that is largely regarded as a relic of American 1950s cinema. Insects are the ideal choice for evoking fear in films, because their general appearance--multiple eyes, coarse hairs, and a seemingly endless arrangement of twitching legs, mandibles, antennae, and wings--is enough to make anyone's skin crawl and the Mimic films use those attributes to great effect. However, the plot device of man’s dominance over nature being challenged by oversized animals has been with cinema since its early days, in films such as the silent adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1925) and the early monster classic King Kong (1933).

While other animals have gotten nasty cases of gigantism through reckless science in the sci-fi/horror genre, movies where insects and arachnids become the giants emphasize both the absurdity and the alienating horror of the big beast narrative. The absurdity comes with something so small becoming so impossibly large, while the alienation and horror come from the idea of coming face to face with something so repulsive and inhuman and yet so deeply embedded within the natural world. Indeed, movies where people are attacked by giant insects--particularly as by-products of scientific negligence--could be seen as a statement of how alienated humanity has become from the natural world and its most abundant inhabitants: the insects.

A common plot device for Big Bug movies is that something related to atomic power, either in the form of atomic bomb testing or scientific research involving radiation, causes insects or arachnids to grow to mammoth proportions. Even though atomic power is blamed for gigantism in the Big Bug movies, their most obvious literary predecessor is H.G. Wells' 1904 novel The Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth, where giant rats, worms and wasps are the result of careless chemical testing on food supplies.

Some have dismissed the Mimic films as just updated versions of the Big Bug movie, particularly Them! (1954), with "genetic tampering" replacing "atomic radiation" as the public phobia du jour^[1]. However, a significant difference between the Mimic films and their predecessors and counterparts is the location of the monsters' origin. Where most Big Bug movies feature the monsters originating in some remote location (a desert, a cave, even the arctic) and then later posing a threat to a large human population, the Mimic monsters are purely creatures of the city: it is where they were created, evolved, and reside in all three movies.

The shift in location of the man-made monsters' birthplace in Big Bug movies could be a reflection of the shift in how people view the idea of environmental corruption: modern ecological awareness has led many to see the problem of environmental corruption as something happening within one's own living environment. The 20th century saw a number of health hazards associated with urban living, including asbestos, lead paint, inadequate waste disposal, and vermin such as bed bugs. In fact, the cockroach-spread Strickler's Disease in the Mimic movies is sort of an exaggerated nightmare of research findings that indicate how cockroach allergens contribute to the increase in asthma cases in urban areas.

The internalization of ecological concerns into urban settings is symbolized in the Judas Breed's appearance. Most other Big Bugs are just a species of insect or arachnid made large, either the size of a car or bigger; once these monsters are found by the protagonists, they are hard to miss. In contrast, the Judas Breed can walk among us unnoticed--in dark subway stations, alleys, and slums--due to their human-mimicking ability.

There is something oddly compelling about the Judas Breed's shape-changing: unlike the near-flawless pod clones from the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies or the various types of humanoid robots from the Terminator series, the Judas Breeds' ability to imitate humans is both limited and clumsy, only effective in shadows or at a distance. The Judas Breeds' appearance when they imitate humans is like when insects imitate twigs, leaves, or other insects. Seeing this natural survival strategy become part of an artificial, urban environment gives it an exotic, alien aura, further emphasizing the theme of humanity's disconnect from nature. The overall effect of the Judas Breed's deception was best described by Roger Ebert in his review of Mimic: "We're instinctively frightened when an entity looks like one thing and suddenly reveals itself as something else. ... As for the insect predators, what they have learned to mimic, and how they do it, provides one of the best payoff shots in the movie."

Then again, the end result of the Judas Breeds' metamorphosis provides a commentary of its own. The insects look like a giant mantis/termite/cockroach crossbreed with various exoskeletal growths that, when shifted around, appear to look like something vaguely human. Their malformed appearance symbolizes the increased media coverage in recent years of the horrible disfigurement of animals that have been subjected to chemical poisoning, resulting in fish and frogs with multiple limbs or hermaphrodite anatomies. It also reflects modern biological experimentation that has allowed scientists in 1997 to grow human ears on the backs of mice and genetic research that incorporated jellyfish DNA into rabbits and pigs, resulting in glow-in-the-dark animals.

As Big Bug movies go, the Mimic movies have much in common with the The Fly (1958), its 1986 remake, and their various sequels when it comes to the narrative and visual themes of insect and human worlds suddenly fusing together in haphazard, grotesque arrangements that are horrifying, preposterous and tragic in equal measures. For example, the title monster of the original Fly movie is somewhat like the Judas Breed, in the sense that both are genetically-spliced, underground-dwelling, human-sized monsters who hide their insect identities behind awkward, makeshift masks. There are parallels between the classic scene in The Fly, when Helene Delambre (Patricia Owens) pulls the hood away from her husband's head only to see the enlarged face of a housefly, and in Mimic, when Dr. Tyler suddenly sees a full-sized Judas Breed insect unwrap itself out of its human disguise for the first time.

The Fly/Mimic connection is more evident in Mimic 2, which is essentially The Fly in reverse: instead of a man becoming more like an insect, Mimic 2 features an insect slowly becoming more like a man. The ending of Mimic 2, when Remi's Judas Breed admirer shows up at her front door to 'date' her, is likewise very similar to the freakish imagery in The Fly movies.

If the Mimic movies have anything in ample supply, it's irony. The most obvious irony is in the creation and development of the Judas Breed themselves: they were created as bugs that could 'fool' real cockroaches for the purpose of killing them, and then they mutated into something that can 'fool' people for a similar predatory purpose. Likewise, with their original intent as a solution to Strickler's Disease, the Judas Breed put a new ironic spin on the term 'superbug', a term coined to describe an infectious bacterium that is antibiotic-resistant.

In each Mimic film, there is an ironic yet parallel connection between the human protagonists and the Judas Breed:

* In Mimic, even though Dr. Tyler saved countless children through her research and her scientific offspring of genetically modified insects have become much more fertile than she intended, she herself is unable to conceive a child with her husband, Dr. Peter Mann (Jeremy Northam). In contrast, her Judas Breed creations reproduce with great success, even though they were intended to die off after they served their original purpose.

* In Mimic 2, Remi cannot find a boyfriend who understands her but nevertheless cannot shake the sexual designs of a male Judas Breed insect--a suitor that Remi understands better than her human suitors because of her background in entomology. This plot of cross-species attraction is an extension of both the Judas Breed's transgenic creation and the fertility/infertility theme from the first movie. Remi's habit of taking photos of her own face when she is dumped is also paralleled in the lone Judas Breed's ability to attach the faces of its victims--the same people who dumped Remi--to its exoskeleton for better mimicry of people.

* In Mimic 3, Marvin survives Strickler's Disease only to become an asthmatic bubble boy stuck in his room, while the very things that ended the Stricker's epidemic are freely roaming the streets and systematically slaughtering Marvin's neighbors^[2].

Another recurring irony in the Mimic movies is photography. The films' protagonists use photography to identify the presence of the Judas Breed menace. This theme complements the Judas Breed's capability for deception, that the human eye cannot be trusted to identify such well-hidden threats. However, the characters' reliance on photography to find the monsters also indicates that technology is more adept at noticing environmental problems than humans; in other words, humans are so far removed from the natural world that we need technology to identify when our technology wreaks havoc with nature.

Plot details aside, the pervasive ironies in the Mimic series allows for commentary on some real issues:

Genetic Modification: Even though the Mimic monsters in reviews and plot summaries are referred to as "giant cockroaches", the Judas Breed are a hybrid of cockroaches, preying mantises, and termites; to use real-world terminology, the Judas Breed are genetically modified organisms (GMOs), particularly one of a transgenic variety. The plot device of elaborate, inter-species genetic splicing is supposed to give plausibility to the Judas Breed's later changes in size and shape, as if to say that humanity's tampering with the genetic code of several insect breeds somehow (to use firearms terminology) took the safety off of nature's mandated order of gradual mutation and evolution. The notion that genetic tampering could result in uncontrollable dangers is further emphasized in the first Mimic film when the Judas Breed were supposed to self-terminate shortly after they fulfilled their purpose--thus limiting their environmental impact to only the cockroaches that served as a vector for the propagation of Strickler's Disease--but instead propagated out of control.

Anti-Vaccination Fears: By intertwining the creation and existence of the Judas Breed with Strickler's Disease--as well as making children frequent victims of the giant insects in all three films--bears symbolic similarities to recent efforts by the anti-vaccination movement. In other words, scientific solutions designed to protect children from disease that in turn endangers them is the underlying premise of the both Mimic trilogy and anti-vaccination paranoia. Coincidentally, the MMR (mumps-measles-rubella) vaccine has been accused of promoting autism, while the only child who survives a close encounter with the Judas Breed in the first Mimic film is obviously autistic.

On a deeper level of irony, director Guillermo del Toro uses Christian imagery throughout the first film to argue that scientists "shouldn't play God" in spite of their efforts to fight a child-killing disease^[3] (as if the name "Judas Breed" wasn’t enough of a nod to religious themes). In contrast, some people actually use their religious beliefs as a reason to either exempt their children from vaccinations or to justify denying them medical treatment. Del Toro does not specify in his film when science actually should intervene in the natural order to save lives (you'd think he'd be more sympathetic to the Dr. Tyler character for all of the lives she saved as the result of her work^[4]), and the parents in the real world who refuse to immunize or give proper medical care to their children for religious reasons have not offered any remedies to when children die as the result of such beliefs.

Urbanization and Species Displacement: While the underclass are usually the victims of the urban-dwelling Judas Breed monsters, many animals have been reported raiding dumpsters in large cities. Some animals normally thought of as wild (such as raccoons and monkeys in India) have become "urban wildlife", animals that are extremely adept at adjusting their behavior to exist in large cities--essentially, the real-world Judas Breeds. The supreme irony that permeates the Mimic trilogy is that the genetically-engineered bugs are much better suited to survive and thrive in filthy, disease-ridden urban environments than the people who built and live in them. In a biological sense, New York City is more of a home to the Judas Breed than its human inhabitants, suggesting that it is humanity that will be displaced from the world of its own making.

Social Class and Technology: Because each of the films takes place in dirty, impoverished, and neglected urban environments, they provide an opportunity for commentary on social class, particularly how poor urban minority communities suffer from disproportionately higher rates of illness due to prolonged exposure to man-made toxins. In the trilogy, there are hints of an allegorical link between the poor and the scientifically-engineered Judas Breed, an allegory that is akin to the Eloi-Morlok relationship in another H.G. Wells' novel, The Time Machine. Where Wells' story portrays the upper and lower classes evolving into different species to the point where the once-exploited now live underground and feed off of the descendants of the exploiters, the Mimic movies show the upper class promising amazing solutions to complex problems, but once the solutions go underground and out of the public eye they ultimately cause more suffering among the underclass. The theme of linking of urban lower class suffering caused by corrupted technology is also found in the cult horror films such as C.H.U.D. and Street Trash.

While the Mimic movies are very inaccurate in their portrayal of how scientific research actually works and what insects are capable of doing in terms of their biology, they nevertheless provide opportunities to examine the larger implications on humanity's relationship with corrupted scientific research and its results. If anything, the relationship between the camouflaged Judas Breed and their human prey are similar to modern problems that stem from science, technology and industry and our relationship to them: they are familiar but indistinguishable shadows against the dimly lit horizon, vague shapes in the periphery that do not make their true forms known until they are standing directly in front of us. If horror films such as the Mimic trilogy can stimulate further discussion on real problems, one can only hope that the most horrifying of technological terrors will remain limited to the silver screen.

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FOOTNOTES

1. This is not entirely an inaccurate comparison, because much of the plot of Mimic and its two sequels faithfully follow what film critic Glenn Erickson calls the "generic 50's monster threat movie" template, albeit with some gender switches among the characters: "The menace (revived dinosaur/beast from space/mutated life form/giant insect) first appears in an odd form that leaves baffling clues and various victims dead in mysterious ways. With the aid of a loyal and patient girlfriend type, a young scientist (or scientist wannabe) eventually discovers the real truth of the menace just as it is about to leap to a new level of terror and threaten the whole world. The hero struggles to get official cooperation (martial law/military intervention) and the radical resources (radioactive gun/CO2 fire extinguishers) needed to stem the menace. After some visually exciting mass destruction, quick thinking and plain good luck enable the hero to put things right. With the menace stopped, the fadeout gives us the time to ponder the next step. Are similar threats on the way? Will we be ready?"

2. Mimic 3 has often been thought of as Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" (1954) with giant bugs. However, because the Judas Breed in this sequel succeed in eliminating all of the human obstacles between Marvin and his love interest, Carmen (Rebecca Mader), Mimic 3 also features some similarities to another giant animal movie: the original King Kong. As Danny Peary writes about Kong in his book Guide for the Film Fanatic, "Kong is a manifestation of (Carl) Denham's subconscious. Denham conjures up Kong as a surrogate to battle (Jack) Driscoll for Ann (Darrow)’s love . . . Kong is Denham's female-lusting side--his alter ego." By this rationale, just as Denham's subconscious created Kong to abduct Ann and steal her away from other possible love interests, it could be said that Marvin's subconscious created a nest of Judas Breed monsters--symbols of the same health problem that rendered Marvin impotent--to destroy all things standing in the way of him winning Carmen's love.

3. In a message he posted on a fan site on his feelings about his work on Mimic, Del Toro stated: "The movie tries to be Medieval in its vision of the world. It tries to define the fact that we don't know anything about the order of nature or the real dimension of God's plan. It tries to say something about pride."

4. As commented in the Mimic review on the And You Call Yourself a Scientist! Web site, "Having succeeded in establishing Susan (Tyler)’s credentials, however, Mimic proceeds to treat her, in my opinion, most unfairly. Once again, we have a(n) "expert", a "leader in her field", apparently knowing less about the correct applications of her discipline than anyone else in the world. . . . Yes, Susan's work has spawned giant killer cockroaches (hey, happens to the best of us, right?)--but, as the screenplay bewilderingly fails to stress, it has also achieved exactly what it set out to achieve: it has eradicated Strickler's Disease. Something strange happens in the course of this film. The fact that "an entire generation of children" is at risk at the opening of the story; that there have many, many deaths already, and that nothing approaching a cure or a vaccine has been found; that Susan's actions have saved countless thousands, perhaps even millions of lives, ultimately has less resonance than Manny's hysterical cries of, "How could you do this!?" and Leonard’s angry--and flagrantly untrue and unjust--addendum, "Yeah, you tell her, Manny, 'cos she don't give a goddamn!" This is not to say that Susan should not be held accountable for the unseen consequences of her actions, nor indeed that the end justifies the means; but merely that I think that Mimic could have put rather more effort, rather more emphasis, into presenting the case for the defense."

Trailer Thursday: Batman Versus...

Gotta love this one. Not really a trailer, but so funny I couldn't pass it up.

Moments That Made the Bronze (and Modern) Age: Crisis On Infinite Earths

In the mid-80's, DC took a bold step and admitted it had a problem. They just had too many different Earths floating around out there! Initially it was used to explain how the Justice Society of the 40's could exist and still work with the JLA 20 years later, which was a good idea. Unfortunately, they soon started creating new worlds whenever they needed a convenient excuse, giving us Earth 3 with the Crime Syndicate, Earth X with the Freedom Fighters, and many more.

The time came for a clean-up, and DC gave it to the world in a big way. Creating a 12-issue maxi-series, giving it to one of their best artists ever (George Perez), and deciding it was time to kill some major heroes, DC boldly stepped forward and blew my mind with every issue. But the one that truly blew me away had to be the death of my favorite hero at the time: The Flash.

Now I've mentioned Barry Allen's death before in other posts, but that pivotal moment in the series changed the landscape of the comic book world for me. This was years before the Internet, so finding exact issues where other heroes had died wasn't something I'd been able to do with regularity. Yes, I knew the Batman of Earth 2 had died somehow, and I'd seen the JLA issue where Mr. Terrific died, but most hero deaths were stuff that happened in books I would never get to read. The Flash's death, however, I held in my trembling little hands and couldn't believe as I sat in the floor of the drug store in front of the magazine rack.

The Flash's death was preceded by Supergirl's in the previous issue, but I'd never been a big fan of her's so it didn't bother me nearly as much. I kept waiting for the next issue to come out and say that Barry was alive somehow, but it never happened. Wally West stepped in and became the first major sidekick to take on the role of his mentor.

Marvel didn't sit on the sidelines though, as they unleashed Secret Wars and tried to make some changes. They gave us the symbiote Spider-Man suit, and...and...um...well, the suit was cool. They just weren't able to pull off the universe-altering effect DC did with this series.

Another favorite of mine who died was the original Dove, Don Hall (his death is pictured in our blog's title image). Again, I'd hoped for a return, but it never happened. Even up to this day, Don has never come back, even though Supergirl, Barry Allen, and even the Crime Syndicate has found their way back to the land of the living. Oh well, if I ever get the chance to write for DC...

The thing that makes this series stand out is that the changes here were long-lasting--for comic books anyway. Wally West stayed the Flash for the next 20 years as Barry Allen stayed dead. We had just one Earth to deal with, but all the heroes were on it.

Then someone got the stupid idea to try and write a sequel to this hit and we ended up with the "Phantom Menace" of the comic book world: Infinite Crisis. That series decided the hero of the last maxi-series should actually become the villain of the new one. Fortunately for them, Grant Morrison took everyone on such a mind trip in the follow-up Final Crisis, that he was able to make IC look almost readable.

All cruel words aside, Crisis on Infinite Earths was, to me, a pinnacle for the 80's. I still hold it as a standard I judge other miniseries by and think DC really knocked it out of the park with this one. I consider the Absolute Edition of this story a must-have simply because seeing George's artwork in the larger-than-life format is a real treat.

I have just a couple more stories to mention over the next two weeks, and then I want to dive into the black hole decade of the comic book world as we discuss what went horribly, horribly wrong in the 90's. But first, next week: A guest shot in another comic had this hero defeated in his first fight, but his next appearance in the comic world helped create one of the most popular titles of all time...

A Look Back at the 1979 Spider-Woman Cartoon

It's not easy being a female superhero, especially if you're the less popular female version of a widely known male superhero. For example, while DC Comics makes oodles of cash from the popularity of Superman and Batman, it often seems completely clueless as to what to do with Supergirl, Batgirl and Batwoman.

Over at Marvel, there's Spider-Woman, the female counterpart of one of Marvel's most popular character, Spider-Man. Between 1977 to today, there have been at least three Spider-Women in the Marvel Universe--four if you include the one super villain who assumed the same name. The first Spider-Woman was Jessica Drew, who had her own comic book series that ran from 1978 to 1983. Unlike the other Spider-Women, Drew also had her own short-lived animated TV series that aired on ABC on Saturday mornings in 1979.

I vaguely remember seeing the Spider-Woman cartoon on Saturday mornings way back when I was just a wee lad, so I decided to track down all 16 episodes of the series to see how well it actually was and how it compares to more modern superhero cartoons such as Avengers and Young Justice. While Spider-Woman isn't that great of a show in terms of writing and animation when compared to the superhero cartoons of today, it sheds some light on how Marvel was still struggling in the late 70s to establish their characters in other mediums outside of comic books. Read on for my complete retrospective.

When I watched Spider-Woman during its original broadcast, I tuned in largely for the guest appearances of Spider-Man. Even though he only appeared in two episodes of the series, that was enough for me. Besides, Spider-Woman also gave me the chance to see another colorful spider-powered hero fight all sorts of outlandish super villains, so it was the next best thing to having a Spider-Man cartoon on Saturday mornings. Even though Spider-Man appeared on Electric Company and had his own short-lived live-action series in the late 70s, no Spider-Man cartoons were made during that decade.

Even to this day, Spider-Woman remains unique among half-hour superhero cartoons because it is one of the few shows that features a female superhero as the main character, not as part of a duo, trio, or team of other superheroes. (The second Spider-Woman, Julia Carpenter, would later appear in animated form during the mid-90s, but only as a secondary character in the syndicated Iron Man cartoon.) Spider-Woman also sets a record within the ranks of Marvel superhero cartoons: While other Marvel heroes had to wait a few years between the launch of their own comic book series and the production of their own cartoon, Spider-Woman aired less than a year and a half after the publication of the first issue of the Spider-Woman comic book in April 1978.

Yet such a background raises a few questions as to why Marvel chose to produce a cartoon based on a superhero who didn't have enough stories or her own rogues' gallery of super villains to transfer to TV. The early animated versions of Iron Man, Hulk, and the Fantastic Four from the 60s might not have been great cartoons, but at least they had super villains and stories that the script writers could use in creating cartoon plots. Another curious detail of the Spider-Woman cartoon was how different it was from the Spider-Woman comic book. In both the comic and cartoon, Spider-Woman had spider-like powers and the alter ego of Jessica Drew, but everything else was different. While the comic book Spider-Woman/Jessica Drew was a private investigator by profession and regularly fought the terrorist organization HYDRA and supernatural beings from Arthurian legend, the cartoon Spider-Woman/Jessica Drew was the editor and lead reporter for Justice Magazine who regularly went on adventures with her photographer Jeff Hunt and her nephew Billy. If the Spider-Woman cartoon was intended to boost readership of the Spider-Woman comic book, then changing the main character so drastically between the two versions seems counterproductive and ultimately self-defeating.

I can only speculate as to why Marvel did what they did with the Spider-Woman character and her cartoon adaptation. It could have been that because so many of the more popular Marvel characters were caught up in other legal arrangements, Spider-Woman was one of the few characters remaining for an animated series. For example, the second Fantastic Four cartoon, which aired a year before the Spider-Woman series, didn't feature the Human Torch because the rights to that character were tied up in a TV movie project that never happened. Marvel was working on live-action TV versions of characters such as the Hulk, Captain America, Spider-Man and Doctor Strange during the late 70s, so this theory could be true. It has also been suggested that because Filmation had a cartoon superhero character called Web Woman, the Spider-Woman comic book and cartoon were rushed into production to secure the intellectual property rights to the "Spider-Woman" name. Web Woman was part of Filmation's Tarzan and the Super 7 cartoon and while she did have spider-like powers, she had more in common with the Green Lantern than Spider-Man. Her costume even bore some similarities to that worn by Star Sapphire, one of Green Lantern's enemies. However, neither of these theories explain the differences between the comic book and cartoon versions of Spider-Woman.

A Web Woman animation cell.

After watching all 16 episodes, I concluded that Spider-Woman isn't that much better or worse than other superhero cartoons from its time. Since the show relied on the repeated usage of stock character animation of Spider-Woman performing various superheroic acts (flying, spinning webs from her fingers, shooting venom blasts from her hands, etc.), most of the dialogue consists of descriptive, exclamatory statements of events that just happened, are currently happening, or are about to happen. This budgetary limitation would also explain Jessica Drew's profession as a reporter (a quick way to explain how she encounters so many villains and situations that require the immediate involvement of Spider-Woman), the location of Justice Magazine (reusable background art, which would save money on the limited animation budget), and the involvement of Jeff and Billy (characters who can regularly interact with Jessica/Spider-Woman and provide more stock character animation to fill time). While Stan Lee was credited with adapting Spider-Woman for TV, each episode was scripted by veteran TV cartoon writer Jeffrey Scott. Scott's pre-Spider-Woman credits include The All-New SuperFriends Hour, Challenge of the SuperFriends, Scooby's Laff-A Lympics and Dynomutt Dog Wonder, so he knew how to write for cartoons with very low production budgets.

In spite of being a cheap, formulaic superhero cartoon, Spider-Woman does have its share of quirks that keep it interesting. On its surface, the relationship between Jessica, Jeff and Billy isn't too much different than the relationship between Clark Kent, Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen in an average Superman story. Yet where things change in Spider-Woman are in the gender roles, which play out much differently than in other superhero stories with a central male character. While Jeff is a well-meaning character, his attempts to impress Jessica with acts of masculine bravado almost always backfire. For as predictable as this is within the context of the cartoon, I can't think of another animated superhero series that regularly puts the potential love interest of a female superhero in the role of unintentional (and somewhat emasculating) comic relief. While Jessica comes across as an intelligent and capable person (a characterization that is largely accomplished through Joan Van Ark's confident and playful line readings), she often has to portray herself as a helpless, flighty woman to convince Jeff and Billy that she is not Spider-Woman and provide excuses for her all-too-convenient absences whenever Spider-Woman is around. As a result, Jessica ends up assuming the roles of both the powerful hero and the powerless victim in each episode.

Another feature of Spider-Woman is its occasional indulgence in over-the-top plot twists. Perhaps as a way to compensate for the lack of source material from the then-fledgling Spider-Woman comic book, Jeffrey Scott utilized many sci-fi cliches (mad scientists, evil androids, space invaders, time travel, mind control, secret civilizations, etc.) in drafting scripts, sometimes to the point of absurdity--even by superhero cartoon standards. For example:

* In "The Amazon Adventure", Fort Knox is robbed by a group of powerful women who a dressed as Amazonian warriors. It turns out that they are actually from a secret Inca civilization in Peru, and they steal gold to power their solar technology that is capable of taking over the world. (It is never specified whether the women are Amazonian Incas or Inca Amazons.) They also are ruled by a queen who is over 400 years old but stays young because of a time rift.

* In "The Lost Continent", Jessica, Jeff and Billy investigate the Bermuda Triangle, only to find a secret island where a mad scientist who controls an army of dinosaurs and laser gun-wielding, jet fighter-piloting cavemen. The mad scientist later has his dinosaurs attack New York City.

* In "Games of Doom", an evil scientist Jacques LeRhode replaces athletes at the World Athletic Games with androids so they can each win gold medals. LeRhode needs the gold medals to transmit a radio frequency that allows him to control the minds of people (I guess silver and bronze medals can't do that). After Spider-Woman defeats his plans, it is revealed that LeRhode is actually an android who is controlled by the real LeRhode, who looks just like the android but is one-fourth the size of an average human being.

* Spider-Woman featured plenty of monsters, and many of them had the ability to turn people into monsters too. In "Pyramids of Terror", ancient Egyptian mummies are revealed to be alien mummies who intend to conquer Earth, and their attack includes shooting beams from their pyramid-shaped spaceships that turn people into stumbling, groaning mummies. In "Dracula's Revenge", Dracula, the Wolf Man and Frankenstein's monster plan to take over the world by turning people into monsters--not by biting them, but by shooting them with energy rays that shot from their hands, eyes and neck bolts, respectively. In a nod to The Fly, "The Spider-Woman and the Fly" features another mad scientist who uses a fly clone to turn himself into a winged human-fly monster who can shoot rays from his eyes that turn other people into human-fly monsters.

Adding to the goofiness of these stories are their poor sense of geography, which make distant locations such as Africa, England, and Romania look like close neighbors to New York City. Indeed, many of the Spider-Woman episodes would be right at home at Mystery Science Theater 3000.

For comic book fans who are interested in the history of Spider-Woman, they should pick up the reprints of the original Spider-Woman comic in the Marvel Essentials compilation paperbacks. Yet if you're a fan of animation history with a particular interest in superheroes, you should watch a few episodes of the Spider-Woman cartoon to get an idea of how this kind of animation was produced in the late 70s. (In particular, Marvel cartoon history buffs will recognize some of Spider-Woman's background music, which was reused in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends in the early 80s.) A Region 2 DVD of the entire Spider-Woman series was released in 2009 and it still available from some retailers, and plenty of Spider-Woman video clips can be found on YouTube.

Bones, Bugs, and Botany: The Skeletal Sculptures of Cedric Laquieze

Question: What do you get when you mix together animal skeletons, dead insects, and plastic flowers? Answer: A series of sculptures by Amsterdam-based sculptor Cedric Laquieze. For as ghastly as such a combination may sound, his unique combination of organic shapes and colors result in some fascinating artwork that evokes both the wonderous diversity of life and inescapable conclusion of death. For some reason, his flowers and bones sculptures remind me of artwork associated with the Mexican holiday known as Día de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead.

Laquieze's work has been exhibited in locations such as Paris, Belgium, Italy, and Germany, and you can read more about him on his blog. Click below for some examples of Laquieze's creations.

Top Picks: 2011 Sci-Fi and Superhero Christmas Ornaments

With September here, merchandise for the big three holidays--Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas--is currently flooding the shelves of stores everywhere. As sure as the leaves change color in the fall, this tidal wave of merchandising also includes geek-pandering Christmas ornaments. Highly-detailed and highly-affordable miniatures are like catnip to me, so here are my recommendations for this year's ornaments. While I couldn't find any ornaments to recommend that would fit into the category of horror, there are plenty of others left in the areas of science fiction and superheroes. Read on ...

I've divided my list into two sections: characters and vehicles. All of the items listed here are Hallmark ornaments. Carlton Cards are still making franchised-based ornaments as well, but the only one that I can recommend from this year's set is their Stargate SG-1 ornament (which depicts Colonel Jack O'Neill fighting off some Replicators) and I can't find a good, non-watermarked picture of this noteworthy collectible to include in this post.

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Characters

When it comes to superhero ornaments, Batman and Spider-Man have become annual mainstays with an occasional Superman ornament showing up from time to time. Not much has changed this year--Batman and Spider-Man have their own ornaments yet again--but there are also Green Lantern and Thor ornaments available as well. While I'm sure that these two ornaments are part of the promotional merchandising campaigns for these heroes' first appearances on the big screen last summer, it's nice to see some variety among the kinds of superheroes you can put on your Christmas tree.

One of this year's biggest collector's item is the limited edition Bossk ornament, which debuted in Hallmark stores last July. If the bounty hunters are among your favorite characters in the Star Wars universe, then you should pick this one up--even though it's a limited edition ornament, it's still available at various online stores. Then again, if you already have the Jango Fett and Boba Fett ornaments and were lucky enough to pick up the Dengar and IG-88 ornaments at last summer's Comic Con, then getting a Bossk ornament for your collection is mandatory.

Another must-have for die-hard sci-fi collectors is the new battery-powered Cylon Centurion ornament, which will be released in October. This Centurion is from the original Battlestar Galactica series, and it plays a few Galactica sound clips. If you love robot ornaments, you should probably get this one ASAP--lest it become like the Robby the Robot ornament from 2009, which has since become so rare that it can go from anywhere between $100 to $200.

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Vehicles

In keeping with this year's theme of Star Wars bounty hunters, Hallmark has released a battery-powered Slave I ornament that plays lines of dialogue and sound effects from Empire Strikes Back. Hallmark previously released the Slave I in 2002, although that ornament was made out of die-cast metal, it didn't play any sounds, and it featured the vehicle's color scheme from Attack of the Clones.

For Star Trek fans, there's the Romulan Bird of Prey ornament. This ornament is modeled after the Bird of Prey ship as it was first seen in the original Star Trek TV series, and it features glowing warp nacelles.

There's another Tron ornament out this year, and it's another light cycle. Last year, the Tron ornament was modeled after the light cycle driven by Sam Flynn and it glowed blue; this year, the ornament is modeled after CLU's light cycle and it glows yellow. I was hoping that this year's Tron ornament would be a different kind of vehicle (say, a Recognizer or a Light Runner) yet because this is for a franchise that's been largely dormant for almost three decades, I'll take whatever I can get.

Probably the coolest vehicle ornament from this year's selection is the battery-powered Batmobile. This isn't the first Batmobile Christmas ornament--there have been plenty of those before now--but this one is modeled after the Batmobile from the 1960s Batman TV series and it plays 20 seconds of the series' theme song.

Moments That Made the Bronze (and Modern) Age: The Death of Elektra

There are so many moments to look at in comic history that grabs me, but this particular comic death didn't affect me so much as a kid when I first read it, but the comics that followed actually got me hooked on Daredevil for a short period of time.

I grabbed this one off a spinner rack in a strip mall in Birmingham while my mom was shopping (yeah, I read a lot while mom shopped), read the entire issue, but for some odd reason didn't buy it. I loved the story, but neglected to spend my precious allowance on this issue. Given the current value of it now, it was a big mistake on my part.

What made this issue so interesting to me? It as that amazing showdown between Elektra, a character Marvel had introduced just a few short issues before with the sole intention of killing her off as a major pivot point in the DD series, and Bullseye, a villain who could turn anything he got his hands on into a weapon.

Frank Miller and Klaus Janson were magic in this time of the series. Their gritty art styles worked perfectly for this down-and-dirty fight to the death between two warriors.

The biggest kick-in-the-face moment of the fight for me? That had to be Bullseye using Elektra's own sai to kill her with.

You might not realize how important that scene was until you consider the catastrophic failure that was Ben Affleck's Daredevil movie.  The only potentially saving grace of that film was how it tried to give us this one Elektra storyline including that final death scene using actual dialogue from the comic, and it managed to stay fairly close to those few pages. Say what you will about that movie, they did get that one scene right.

Of course, Daredevil got his revenge later in the story. If this story had been published today it would have taken him the better part of six issues to find Bullseye, confront him, and deal out his brand of justice. In the 80's though, we were blessed with a complete story in that one double-sized issue.

Daredevil, usually a straight-arrow in the Marvel universe, beat Bullseye down and eventually let him drop to a bone-crunching finale. It looked like this cool villain was done for, but we know of course that he came back and became a regular in comic titles everywhere.

But reading that comic at the time, I was stunned by how Daredevil just let him drop. Actually, I was stunned by how graphic Elektra's death was drawn. Seeing it today in light of the gore-filled comics you find everywhere it looks tame, but back then it was a powerful moment simply because you didn't see that sort of stuff unless it was one of Marvel's magazine titles.

As I mentioned, this storyline led to DD becoming involved with ninjas galore and a guy named Stick, and even to eventually bringing Elektra back to life. That was good stuff and I followed this comic for a while after this issue. When Miller left, I did too. It was hard to imagine this gritty character being drawn by anyone else for me.

That Marvel moment grabbed me and didn't let go. I just regret not purchasing that issue when I had the chance. Even though I didn't buy it, I consider it a pivotal issue in Marvel history.

The Creature Flops Among Us

From what I've been reading, the new monster movie Creature has been setting box office records--although not the kind of records any movie should want to set. According to Box Office Mojo, Creature currently holds the distinction of having the fifth lowest-grossing opening on record for a nationwide release and the second-worst in terms of per-location average, with an estimated per-showing attendance at less than six people. I didn't think much of this at first, until I heard who the lead producer of this z-grade movie was and arranged for its theatrical run: Sidney Sheinberg, former President of Universal Pictures.

Sheinberg has been credited with "discovering" Steven Spielberg and using his position at Universal to support (and lavishly profit from) many of Spielberg's most popular movies, starting with Jaws and concluding with Jurassic Park. However, just because a movie mogul discovers and cultivates a talented movie director doesn't make the mogul himself a creative talent. As I've posted here before, Sheinberg spearheaded the atrocious Jaws: The Revenge, which he rammed through pre-production, production, and post-production in less than a year's time to meet a summer release date. (The end result, both in terms of quality and profitability, roars loudly for itself.) Other ideas championed by Sheinberg include dreadful re-edits to Ridley Scott's Legend and Terry Gilliam's Brazil. He also tried to shake down Nintendo for money by suing them in 1982 under the claim that Donkey Kong was a rip off of King Kong.

According to The New York Times, Sheinberg aimed to prove through Creature that a small movie could achieve national distribution through direct negotiations with theater chains and online guerrilla marketing, instead of having to rely on a big studio for support. While the accomplishment of having Creature play at 1,507 single screen locations without the aid of a big studio is supposedly a victory of sorts for independent filmmakers, I think it instead proves that old habits die hard for retired big studio executives. As Creature proves, it doesn't matter how clever or cost-efficient an advertising and distribution campaign for a movie is if the movie itself is unoriginal, poorly made rubbish.

Here are some other interesting Jaws/Creature connections:

* Common Inspirations: Creature rips off its central idea from Creature From the Black Lagoon, a classic creature feature that strongly influenced Jaws and its sequels. In fact, Sheinberg approved of the production of Jaws 3D (a 3D sequel that's similar to the 3D sequel Revenge of the Creature), which sidelined a remake of Creature From the Black Lagoon--a remake that was proposed by Lagoon director Jack Arnold himself and supported by John Landis.

* Redneck-O-Rama: Creature opened within weeks of another water monster movie, Shark Night 3D. Shark Night 3D has been described as Jaws with homicidal rednecks; coincidentally, Creature can be described as Creature From the Black Lagoon with homicidal rednecks.

* A Creature Couple: Peter Benchley, author of the bestselling Jaws novel, also wrote a book called Great White. Great White was later adapted into a TV miniseries that also bore the title Creature. While Sheinberg's Creature is half-man and half-alligator, Benchley's Creature is half-man and half-shark.

The other Creature, courtesy of Peter Benchley.

Trailer Thursday: Luke Cage

Now here's a Marvel movie you probably won't see made any time soon, but you have to admit the guy does a good job of bringing out the essence of the character. Just kidding! Just for fun...enjoy...

REC 2, Quarantine 2, and the Limits of Found Footage Filmmaking

I love found footage movies. When they're done right, they live up to their name of being "found footage"--namely, film and/or video footage that was "found" and edited together for our viewing (dis)pleasure. They're like horror films told solely from the victim's perspective: no cutaway shots to the monsters, ghosts, and/or madmen, no background music to let you know when something bad is about to happen. On the other hand, when found footage films are done wrong, they are either dreadfully boring (such as The Wicksboro Incident) or the story that the filmmakers want to tell doesn't really fit the found footage style of filmmaking, so they abruptly break with the style at some point during the movie. This break usually happens towards the end, when footage is inserted that either wasn't found (such as The Last Broadcast) or couldn't be found because the logic of the story clearly indicates that the footage would've been destroyed before anyone could see it (such as The Last Exorcism).

In the 2007 Spanish film REC, the story is told through video footage captured by journalist Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and her camera operator who become quarantined inside of an apartment building during an outbreak of an unknown illness. Quarantine is the American remake of REC, and it is very faithful to the plot and visual style of its source material. Where the two films differ is in their sequels: REC 2 stayed with the found footage format and Quarantine 2 abandoned it, opting instead for a cinema verite style that's similar to found footage in appearance but is not limited to found footage storytelling conventions. This difference between the two sequels demonstrates the limits of the found footage subgenre of horror, with Quarantine 2 making the somewhat wiser decision. Read on for my full review, which contains some spoilers.

What make REC/Quarantine compelling is that it took the narrative structure of Night of the Living Dead and pulled it inside out. Instead of a group of survivors who seek to maintain a shelter that protects them from an outside epidemic, REC/Quarantine traps a group of ordinary people in the very building where a virulent epidemic is starting and surrounds them with armed authorities who will kill them on site if they try to leave. It's easy to empathize with these trapped characters, who understand why they are forced to stay where they are but still have the overwhelming desire to survive--even if the public would be better off they don't. With such harrowing, personal drama at the heart of the story, the found footage format enhances it by capturing the characters in their most vulnerable moments.

What sets REC and Quarantine apart is how each film ends, where the starting point of the infection is revealed in the top-floor apartment. REC has the infection turn out to be some kind of demonic possession that stemmed from Tristana Medeiros, a girl who was being treated by a Vatican-appointed priest in the apartment, while Quarantine reveals that the infection was rabies-like pathogen engineered by member of a doomsday cult who lived in the apartment. Despite Quarantine's almost identical plot to REC, these differences in outcomes play out differently in each sequel.

REC 2 stays at the same apartment building as the first film, and it begins almost exactly where REC ended. Dr. Owen (Jonathan Mellor), an official from from Spain's Ministry of Health, and a team of SWAT troopers (who each have helmet-mounted video cameras, hence the found footage) enter the building. On the other hand, Quarantine 2 likewise begins almost exactly where Quarantine ends, except in a Los Angeles airport on a red eye flight that's leaving for Nashville. One of the passengers becomes infected with the hyper-rabies pathogen and the plane forced to land in an air port in Las Vegas, which is then placed under quarantine. With REC 2 dealing with the beginnings of a demonic possession epidemic and Quarantine 2 depicting the ongoing containment of a terrorist-made bioweapon, you'd think that REC 2 would the more ambitious and outrageous film--something along the lines of the Evil Dead or Demons movies. Yet it isn't, and I think that the found footage format has much to do with that shortcoming.

REC 2 centers on Owen's mission to find a cure for the possession epidemic by getting a blood sample from Medeiros. Since this search takes place in just one apartment building, Owen and his team don't have very many places to go, both in terms of location and plot. Of course, complications occur that hinder Owen's mission--such as the possessed people in the building who attack them, a fight with Medeiros, and Medeiros' original blood sample bursting into flames--but they are largely superfluous, padding the plot to stretch it into a feature-length tale instead of creatively contributing to it. This padding includes a lot of repetitive attack shocks, shouting, shooting, and jiggling footage of people running up and down stairs. (REC 2 has so many jumbled stair climbing shots that I couldn't help but to think of a line from Ghostbusters, uttered by Bill Murray as he ascends a seemingly endless staircase: "When we get to twenty, tell me. I'm gonna throw up.") Some of the intense, feral action scenes will leave you slack-jawed, but those scenes alone can't save a script that doesn't have much to do.

Another problem with REC 2 is its pacing. The sequel starts in the middle of the epidemic, so it doesn't give us much time to learn about the new set of characters. Such a brief, hurried introduction makes most of the characters feel interchangeable. The only unique character is Owen, who is later revealed to actually be a priest sent by the Vatican on a secret mission to contain the possession outbreak after the failure of his predecessor. However, this revelation happens within the first 20 minutes of the movie, and the other characters don't get anything to do to identify them as unique individuals.

Yet where REC 2 stumbles the hardest is in its search for more "found footage" once it exhausts most of the dramatic possibilities with Owen and his SWAT team. Almost one-third of the way into the movie, the narrative shifts to a group of teenagers who have their own video camera and decide to break into the apartment building through the sewer after seeing the commotion going on around it. Yet even the teens' sketchy motives for entering a building that's covered in protective plastic sheeting and surrounded by fire fighters, ambulances, heavily armed police, and helicopters with high intensity spotlights can't provide a plausible reason for the teenagers to keep their video camera running for as long as they do. Angela and her camera operator kept their camera running in REC as part of their professional obligation to document a disease-like outbreak, while the SWAT team in REC 2 keeps their cameras running at the behest of the priest from who they receive their orders. On the other hand, the teenagers keep their camera running while they are being chased and attacked for no other reason that the narrative requires them to so that there's enough footage to make for a feature-length film.

That said, the teenagers run into two other characters while they're in the apartment building: The father of an infected little girl who was seen in REC and a firefighter who helps him get into the building to find his family. Given his emotional investment in the apartment building, the father should have gotten more scenes to add more dramatic depth and give someone with whom the audience can empathize. However, because neither the father nor his firefighter escort have a logical reason to carry a video camera, both characters are quickly dispatched along with the narrative opportunities they would've provided.

REC 2's "flashback" finale further emphasizes the problems that the sequel has with the found footage format--namely, how enough video footage can be provided by the movie's characters to tell a complete story. The flashback is the same piece of night vision footage that features Angela at the end of the first REC, only a few minutes longer. Given the overall conclusion of REC 2, this snippet could have been put on the end of REC--but there would've been no point at all behind REC 2 had that happened. (That's right: REC 2 is an 85 minute movie that leads up to single major plot development that could have been included in the final few minutes of the first film.) The end of REC 2 also suggests that the apartment building will be burnt to the ground with all of its contents inside. This makes sense in the context of sequel's story, but it defeats the purpose behind shooting REC and REC 2 as found footage movies. After all, how can these movies consist of found footage is there is no footage left to find?

Looking back, I can see why Hollywood remade REC and made the changes that they did. Not only did the source material prove to be successful in its own country, but the new ending in the remake that features the terrorist-made bioweapon perfectly captures America's paranoid mood after 9-11 and the anthrax-by-mail cases that happened the same year. Quarantine 2 capitalizes on the 9-11 connection by shifting the setting to locations commonly associated with terrorist activity: an airplane and an airport that features post-9-11 security features. The film paces itself well, the characters are believable and sympathetic (albeit mundane), and the end product tells a satisfying story that sheds more light on where the hyper-rabies infection came from and where it might go next. Yet by abandoning the found footage angle, Quarantine 2 loses something in unique the process; with a few minor edits, it could easily be renamed as a sequel to 28 Days Later or the remake of The Crazies and nothing would be lost. I can't imagine how the found footage format could've improved Quarantine 2, but what it gains in narrative flexibility by not being a found footage movie it also loses in franchise distinction.

Of the two flawed sequels, I liked Quarantine 2 better. Quarantine 2 tells a complete story with differentiated characters and a logical sequence of events. Furthermore, its story behind the virus' origin is much more consistent and intentional than what is provided in REC 2. On the other hand, REC 2 is a sequel that I want to like because of its potential, but it's just too frustrating and plotless to merit recommendation. I think that the idea of a demonic possession spreading like a disease is a fascinating idea, much like how Ringu and Ju-On (and their respective American remakes) explored a similar idea of lethal ghost hauntings spreading like a disease. Had REC 2 dropped the found footage style of storytelling, it could've freed itself to explore its characters and underlying plot threads in more compelling and less arbitrary detail.

It could very well be that the found footage subgenre's biggest strength--the visceral feeling of seeing a horrific situation occur through the eyes of one of its victims--is also its biggest weakness when it comes time to make a sequel. After all, found footage films are mysterious by their nature, and not knowing the true nature of horror depicted in the footage is what makes them so frightening. When the mystery behind the horror is revealved, the fear surrounding it recedes considerably, more so than other kinds of horror films. While the possibility of a Quarantine 3 is uncertain, two more REC sequels are in the works and they will retain the found footage format. Hopefully, these sequels can put the mystery and fear back into the story that started in REC.