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This article was published 08/08/2013 (4791 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Swamp Thing

In an interview on the Blu-ray extras of this comic book movie, actress Adrienne Barbeau confesses that after sitting through the 1982 première of Swamp Thing, she was mortified by how crappy it was and found herself dreading the process of having to promote it.

Unexpectedly, however, positive reviews started rolling in, including two thumbs up from that then-influential duo Siskel & Ebert. Barbeau says she subsequently considered the possibility that maybe her first impressions had been wrong.

Well, no, actually, they weren’t. Barbeau, herself, acknowledges director Wes Craven started with a terrific script, but cheapskate producers whittled it away in tandem with the budget, leaving the talented horrormeister Craven (The Hills Have Eyes, Scream) with few resources to make a half-decent movie.

The upshot is that it’s not a very good movie at all, although Barbeau doesn’t embarrass herself, least of all in a nude swim scene that was excised in the U.S. release. (Be advised the PG-rated Blu-ray contains the 91-minute version and not the longer 93-minute film.)

Barbeau plays Alice Cable, a government agent assigned to assist in the benign experiments of Dr. Alec Holland (Ray Wise) to create a plant-animal hybrid. But bad guys under the command of the villainous Dr. Arcane (Louis Jourdan) invade to steal the formula and destroy the lab. Alice escapes and Holland is transformed into the titular, rubber-suited vegetative humanoid (Dick Durock), now committed to saving Alice’s life.

Seeing it now, one is struck by how this story clearly inspired Sam Raimi’s Darkman, which is likewise about a scientist intent on avenging himself against the scummy criminals who destroyed his lab and transformed him into a monster.

Derivative as it may have been, Darkman is the far superior comic book movie, even if it didn’t technically start out as a comic book.

*1/2

 

The Sapphires

The Sapphires begins with a scene that shockingly recalls the so-called “’60s scoop” of Canadian aboriginal children, forcefully removed from their families so they could be integrated into white Canadian families.

This movie is set in Australia, however. Apparently, the government there was no less arrogantly patriarchal in its conviction that pale-skinned aboriginal children were fair game for a widespread program of forced assimilation.

From those tragic beginnings… a girl group arises.

If that sounds like a trivialization of a tragic history, one should keep in mind the plot of The Sapphires is based on a true story.

After that introduction in which a young girl is snagged by officials, we are introduced to a trio of sisters attempting to assert their musical talent in an unappreciative town near their home in the Cummeragunja Reserve, circa 1968.

Gail (Deborah Mailman), Julie (Jessica Nauboy), and Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell) enter a talent show at a local pub and endure racist jeers from the crowd. But musician/emcee Dave (Chris O’Dowd from Bridesmaids) recognizes raw talent when he sees it and offers to take the girls to the next level, as long as they abandon their country music repertoire and perform soul music. He memorably asserts the superiority of soul, even if both forms of music are about loss.

“The difference is in country and western music, they’ve lost, they’ve given up and they are just all whining about it,” Dave explains. “In soul music, they’re struggling to get it back.”

The bossy Gail emerges as the sisters’ alpha-songstress, but she goes along, and recruits their estranged long-lost cousin Kay (Shari Sebbens) from a life of passing as white in urban Melbourne.

Under Dave’s dubious supervision (“Can you do it blacker?”), the girls succeed in getting a showcase gig. The bad news: It’s performing USO shows in war-torn Vietnam.

At times, the film seems a mash-up of showbiz movies — Dreamgirls meets For the Boys. So it is best to take it on its own terms as a unique piece of work unto itself, hinging on the curious harmony between O’Dowd’s fizzy charm and Mailman’s magisterial gravitas.

***

 

Oblivion

Oblivion comes tantalizingly close to being a serious science-fiction movie. But by the film’s concluding explosion, it turns out to be just another Tom Cruise action movie.

Jack Harper is a typical Cruise character: brave, capable, a little haunted. He is a caretaker of a post-apocalyptic Earth. The planet has been devastated in a Pyrrhic victory with an alien enemy. So-called “Scavengers” took the novel step of blowing up the moon to play havoc with Earth’s tides, causing widespread destruction and starvation.

So Jack patrols the skies, maintaining killer drones still seeking out any surviving “scavs” and keeping watch over huge machines that are transforming the planet’s oceans into fusion energy to be transported to one of Saturn’s moons, where the rest of humanity has taken up residence.

At the end of his workday, he returns to an elegant glass-tower residence he shares with his partner Victoria (Andrea Riseborough). Their life among the clouds resembles a painstakingly elegant perfume commercial.

But Jack is a little haunted by the memories of a beautiful woman whom he knew before the war. The memories come despite the fact he supposedly had his memory erased after the war for security purposes.

One day, Jack disobeys orders to protect a quartet of humans packed in hyper-sleep pods, inexplicably targeted by the nasty spherical attack drones Jack maintains. He saves only one. Its occupant happens to be the woman of his dreams, a similarly haunted scientist named Julia (Olga Kurylenko).

Writer-director Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy) delivers a certain bleak spectacle, but the film doesn’t register as serious science fiction because it is, first and foremost, a Tom Cruise vehicle. The action is like a Tom Cruise greatest-hits retrospective. See Tom dangling from a cable (Mission Impossible), racing a motorcycle (Days of Thunder) and expertly piloting a tricked-out, death-dealing aircraft (Top Gun).

It’s not bad. But Kosinski could stand to be reminded the best science-fiction films put their intellectual energy into ideas as opposed to gratifying the audience’s expectations of their star.

***

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca