This is an anniversary of sorts: 400 columns over 10 years equals 40 columns per year. Not perfect by any means, but still pretty good. I first started writing for Amazing Stories® Online in or about June 2014. (Originally I had written the fan column for the print Amazing in 1980-81, but there was a long hiatus after that. So when Steve Davidson obtained the rights and asked for contributors, I jumped at the chance to get back on board with the original science fiction magazine. Figure 1 shows me and my wife, the Beautiful and Talented Lynne Taylor Fahnestalk, photo by Australia’s own Paul Sweeney. As you can guess by the dates, I’m not Gen X or a Millennial; I’m actually a Baby Boomer, and have been reading SF (I don’t call it “Sci-Fi”) and Fantasy since I was about 6. (That would make it about 70 years.) I guess only the amazing Robert Silverberg has been in Amazing® longer than I.
You’d think by now I’d know what I’m talking about, wouldn’t you? But hey! Unless I’m stating a verifiable fact, all my opinions are just that: opinions. Your Mileage May Vary; after all, opinions are like, um, amygdalas—everyone’s got one. Just saying—because my opinions may tread on someone’s toes, even though I try not to be too controversial. (Steve D wants to keep readers, not lose ‘em.)
All the above is intended to give you a clue as to why my opinions in a book or movie review might differ from yours. I grew up in a very different time; some modern readers might not understand that a) not everyone had a phone; b) you usually went to a library to find stuff out, unless you were lucky enough to have an encylopedia at home (we were; in the early 1960s, my mother sold World Book Encyclopedia, so we got a discount on one); c) after the Korean War (early 1950s) we had no involvement (er, that the public knew about) in wars outside the U.S. (I grew up in the U.S.) until Viet Nam blew up; and d) regardless of party affiliation, and whether you liked him or not (it was always a “him”), the President of the U.S. was respected at home and abroad. (Sorry about “d”—there’s an election very shortly, and there are some very deep feelings on both sides of the party lines, so I had to speak up.)
Anyway, movies—this column is about two new movies, remember?—were mostly, until the mid-1960s—in black and white (okay, black, white and shades of grey). Every special effect in a genre (here I mean science fiction and fantasy and everything in between) movie was either a practical effect if that was possible, or stop-motion animation, or early in-camera effects plus the occasional mirror for doubles. And many, if not most, distant backgrounds were matte paintings—mattes could be used for foregrounds (on glass) or backgrounds. There was no such thing as CGI—computers were big, expensive, bulky things that took up most of a whole room, and certainly most studios weren’t going to buy—or buy time on—one just for SFX (special effects). A “practical” effect is one that is actually physically done, usually with makeup, magicians’ tricks, or some other physical way.
One of the things we hardcore fans were wishing in the ‘70s and ‘80s was that we wish we weren’t an oddball group of people, ridiculed and sometimes actively disliked, reading “that Buck Rogers stuff” instead of getting out in the “real world.”
Remember the old saw “Be careful what you wish for”? Well, it kinda came true, didn’t it? The mainstream (what we used to call “mundanes”) has taken over, absorbed SFF (science fiction and fantasy) under the guise of “sci-fi”, and while core fans are still sort of made fun of, everyone is using a combination Star Trek communicator/tricorder—heck, some of them are practically welded to their cell phones—driving electric vehicles, some of which can drive themselves (more or less)—watching worldwide events happening in real time over their giant QLED TV sets—and some very rich ones are flying into outer space and doing space walks! (And the government is no longer the sole provider of journeys to, from, and in outer space.) We’ve gone mainstream indeed. And fandom itself has changed; many, if not most, fan-run conventions have quietly folded and gone away. Part of that is economics—fans used to go to cons on the cheap: $10-20 entry/badge fee; several fans could share a room, etc., but now cons can cost hundreds of dollars just to get in the door, plus travel, hotels that now cost hundreds of bucks per night, and so on. Many of the older fans—and the writers they used to go to cons to see and meet, have gone to Robert Heinlein’s great “Convention in the Sky.”
So even though there are more people doing science-fictional things these days, there are fewer of what we used to call fans. Many of the younger folks are happy to pay large sums to attend commercial conventions and shell out $20 for the autograph of someone who played the third red shirt on the left in a TV series, or $100 for someone who portrayed the captain of some starship, and buy overpriced trinkets in their various sellers’ booths. Which is okay, but not what we thought would happen—I was just totally chuffed when I found out I could carry dozens of SFF books in electronic form on my phone, or my tablet, or whatever.
So tastes have changed, plus people aren’t absorbing “fannishness,” to coind a word, as they used to—which is, again, okay. The world moves on, but somehow, not necessarily—at least to “old” fans—for the better.
Case in point: The Crow, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which I’ll here call Beetlejuice2 for convenience. Both my wife, the B & T Lynne, and I, saw both movies’ originals when they came out, and liked both of them. The original The Crow (1994) starred Brandon Lee, late son of the late Bruce Lee as the title character, Eric Draven. It was a supernatural love story, as Draven, a musician, and his girlfriend Shelly were murdered by a gang of thugs. A young girl says “people once believed that, when you die, a crow carries your soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, the crow can bring one back.” So Draven returns from the dead to avenge the deaths of himself and Shelly; killing several bad guys until he gets to the head bad guy (Michael Wincott). The movie takes place mostly in the down and dirty sections of whatever city it’s supposed to be, but it’s somehow not depressing. (I don’t know if the younger folks know this, but Brandon himself was killed during the making of this film by a stunt gun firing “dummy bullets.” The movie was completed with stunt doubles and some kind of early CGI).
The new movie (2024) of the same name features Bill Skarsgård as Eric (I don’t believe I heard the name “Draven” while watching it, but I might have missed it.).
Skarsgård is well known for playing, among others, Pennywise the Clown from Stephen King’s It. He seems to prefer roles that are very offbeat; Boy Kills World was, for us, very difficult to watch. The new version of The Crow is almost a completely different movie; neither Eric nor Shelly is anything like the originals. I can’t say too much about the plot for fear of major spoilers, but it features Danny Huston as a man who achieves immortality by giving the Devil souls of the innocent as substitutes for his own. The mileu of the film is not just grimy tenements, as in the original, but is more or less the bottom of the city (whatever city it is), and the dregs of society (including our protagonist and his “soul mate”). I’m not looking for “Pollyanna” type films, but there are plenty of good horror films where you actually want to root for the protagonist(s).
We are given no reason—right from the start—to like or sympathize with either of them; they are basically lost souls who, for my money, could pretty much remain lost. The whole last quarter—maybe a third—consists of a bloodbath; I can’t say more than that. I can say that unlike John Wick 4, where the violence is pretty neat and often bloodless except for gunshots, in this movie there’s a lot of explicit gore. The SFX in this one are all top-of-the-line CGI; you can see wounds knit as you watch, for example. The plot fills out pretty much as expected—but again, why should we care about a pair of bottom feeders except in a general way? I thought the acting was fairly sub-par, too, or possibly “only as good as it needed to be for this kind of film.” And by the way, someone should tell the filmmakers that ravens are not crows. I wouldn’t watch it again, and I don’t recommend it.
Beetlejuice2 is not a remake, unlike the previously reviewed film. It’s a direct sequel to the first one, and it assumes everyone watching has already seen the first Beetlejuice. Even most of the characters are the same with three notable exceptions: Jeffrey Jones has died, but they get around that in a clever way, and Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin aren’t present—Michael Keaton reprises his role as the titular demon; Catherine O’Hara and Winona Ryder play the same Deetz characters years older. Newcomer (to the movie) Jenna Ortega plays Lydia’s daughter Astrid. New characters or cameos include Monica Bellucci, Danny Devito, Willem Dafoe and Burn Gorman. Unfortunately, Keaton’s makeup can’t hide the fact that his face has gotten chubby and he (despite what I believe is CGI de-aging) looks older. The voice is the same, but the face—oh my! The plot is kinda nearly almost the same as the original, except we get some sequelitis in that Lydia Deetz is now a famous psychic on TV, and Beetlejuice himself has a previously unknown (to us) wife. Dafoe plays an actor who was a TV detective in life, but now gets to be a real one in the afterlife. (Reminds me of Only Murders in the Building, sorta. Lydia’s daughter Astrid (Ortega, who you might recall plays Wednesday Addams on TV) doesn’t believe in ghosts, and therefore doesn’t believe her mother can see any ghost except her late husband/Astrid’s father; she thinks her mother is making it all up and just won’t “see” her father. For that reason, they’re estranged.
Several intertwined subplots are shown: Beetlejuice still wants to marry Lydia (whether to become live or not isn’t really stated; it feels like he’s just kinda fixated on her); Delia wants to sell the house (“The Ghost House,” all the locals call it) now that she’s a widow; Lydia has a smarmy manager/fiancé who wants to marry her on Halloween; Astrid meets a local boy who has a dirty little secret, and so on. There’s a whole new set of old songs, including a very lengthy Richard Harris “MacArthur Park” that most of the cast gets to lipsynch. All in all, if you’ve seen the first one, you’ve pretty much seen the second one, unfortunately. There’s nothing new enough to warrant much enthusiasm for this movie. (I find that Rotten Tomatoes says it has almost the same 82% fresh score as the original (actually 81% today), which doesn’t (IMO, again) say much for the people rating it.
If you liked the first one, you won’t be upset at seeing this one. If you haven’t seen the first one, you might be confused by some of the things this movie takes for granted you know. All in all, there’s a bunch of cute CGI SFX (but no stop-motion sandworms, darnit!), some singin’ and dancin’, a bunch of familiar characters and some new ones, but nothing really new or exciting for Beetlejuice lovers. Mildly recommended.
If you have any comments, I’d love to hear them. Comment here, or on Facebook on my page, or even by email (stevefah at hotmail dot com). All polite comments are welcome. My opinion is, as stated before, my own, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of Amazing Stories® or its owner, editor, publisher or other columnists. See you next time! (Working my way up to 500!)
