John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV
Creator of the award-winning web series, Abnormal Fixation. One of the horror genre's "most widely read critics" (Rue Morgue # 68), "an accomplished film journalist" (Comic Buyer's Guide #1535), and the award-winning author of Horror Films of the 1980s (2007) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002), John Kenneth Muir, presents his blog on film, television and nostalgia, named one of the Top 100 Film Studies Blog on the Net.
Monday, May 19, 2025
30 Years Ago: Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)
Sunday, May 18, 2025
20 Years Later: Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)
Meanwhile, Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman) reveals that she is with child, and this revelation terrifies Anakin, for he has been experiencing terrible visions (like the one about his mother, in Attack of the Clones.)
Eventually, feeling he has no option, Anakin succumbs. He betrays the Jedi Order but in doing so, no longer remains the man that Amidala loved. On opposite sides of the war now, Obi Wan and Anakin duel, and Obi Wan wins, leaving a hobbled, burned Anakin to die on the side of a volcano on the planet Mustafar.
What has happened to the Republic? Well, to face a grave and gathering threat (the Separatist movement), the Senate voted for the creation of a "standing" clone army to fight evil renegade Count Dooku. In thousands of years (and presumably having vanquished many other threats), the Republic never required such an army, but rather was safeguarded by the noble protectors of peace, The Jedi Knight.
Thursday, May 15, 2025
Guest Post: Novocaine (2025)
Time To Call It: Jack Quaid Is A Star
By Jonas Schwartz-Owen
Jack Quaid overflows with magnetism, whether playing a hero or villain. A scion of Hollywood royalty, he bubbles with charm. In the action comedy, Novocaine, Quaid’s boyish appeal and sincerity grounds the cartoonish film.
The plot is as high concept as you can get. Hapless Nate (Quaid), a man with a lifetime ailment -- he can feel zero pain -- chases after sadistic thieves who have kidnapped his new girlfriend, Sherry (Amber Midthunder). Because of his disorder, he’s able to do things no one would be able to, like retrieve a gun from boiling oil or continue fighting despite losing limbs or blood.
Always an outsider due to his “superpower,” Nate is used to being isolated, so the burgeoning love with Sherry is a brand new emotion for him. If only he can survive the night.
Screenwriter Lars Jacobson tailor-makes his story for Quaid and his vast charms. Filled with many twists and turns, the film is controlled chaos, where the audience has no idea where the film will progress.
Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen (responsible for the crafty Villains with Bill Skarsgård) manage to keep the romance from becoming saccharine and always has the audience on the edge of their seat. The violence is grotesque in a Tarantino way. Audiences will be cringing but laughing at the same time. Nate may not feel pain, but the squeamish will feel every stab and burn that eludes his senses.
Quaid is backed by a quality cast. Midthunder, with her self-assuredness, is no one’s maiden is distress. Their dynamics are of two equals protecting each other. Ray Nicholson, as the villain, exudes contempt for the peons that fill this earth. His high-pitched, maniacal giggle will remind audiences of his dad, Jack’s, playful malevolence as Joker in the Tim Burton Batman. After this role and Smile 2, Nicholson makes for an uncomfortable, vicious monster. It will be intriguing to see if he has the vast range of his father and can play romance, drama, and light comedy. The final lead is the tall, strong, connected game partner of Nate’s, someone who has bonded with him in the virtual world but has never actually met Nate. When he defies his best interests and agrees to help this essential stranger who’s wanted from the police and stalked by killers, Nate discovers the online bio does not match this warrior IRL. Goofily played by Jacob Batalon (Tom Holland’s sidekick in the latest Spider-Man trilogy), he’s a hilarious cherry on the top.
An early entry in the summer blockbusters, Novocaine is a delightful, action-packed comedy that will have audiences swooning, squirming, and woo-hooing. The film proves that its two nepo-babies – Besides Ray Nicholson being Jack’s son, Quaid is the son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan -- stand on their own two feet.
Thursday, May 08, 2025
20 Years/Top 10 JKM Posts #7: The NeverEnding Story (1984).
Both tonally and visually, The NeverEnding Story boasts a softer, more whimsical vibe than the film's appreciably darker and more adult contemporaries, Krull or Legend for instance. But the world The NeverEnding Story so ably depicts is also refreshingly fanciful and indeed, a bit surreal; what Variety called a "flight of pure fancy."
I realize the movie won't be everybody's cup of tea, however. It's not all orc battles, clashing armies and sword fights; and there's never any sense that this tale is part of some larger, realistic, otherworldly saga.
Instead, as valuable description of the film's atmosphere, let me quote the Boston Globe's Michael Blowen. He termed the movie "so wonderfully appropriate to children that it seems to have been made by kids. But there is enough artistic merit in the tale to enchant adults equally."
Looking back today, it's clear that The NeverEnding Story succeeds most powerfully indeed as this "dual track"-styled fantasy that Blowen hints at. On one hand, this is a genre film starring children and intended for children; alive with adventure, whimsy and excitement. On another level all together, however, adults can enjoy the film because it cleverly references (albeit symbolically), the vicissitudes of adult life.
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A dangerous book: The NeverEnding Story. |
In The NeverEnding Story, a sad boy named Bastian (Barret Oliver) is doing poorly in school after the untimely death of his mother. His father is cold and distant, and Bastian feels alone, rudderless. At school, he is relentlessly bullied by his classmates, and the world feels devoid of hope; of warmth.
There, Atreyu begs the apathetic old creature -- who lives by the motto "we don't even care whether or not we care" -- for help. The Old One finally informs the boy warrior that he must travel ten thousand miles to the South Oracle if he hopes to get his answer about the Empress.
First, he must walk through a gate in which is self-worth is judged. If his self-worth is found lacking, two giant statues will destroy him with eye-mounted particle beam weapons.
The second test at the Southern Gates is the "magical mirror test." There, Atreyu must gaze into a mirror and countenance his true self. Here, brave men learn that they are cowards inside. And kind men learn that they have been cruel.
Surviving both tests, Atreyu learns that he must next pass beyond the "boundaries" of Fantasia to save his world and his queen. This is something of a trick answer, however, as he learns from his feral nemesis, Gmork.
As Gmork confides in the warrior about Fantasia: "It's the world of human fantasy. Every part, every creature of it, is a piece of the dreams and hopes of mankind. Therefore, it has no boundaries."
In the end, worlds collide. Atreyu needs the help (and the belief) of Bastian in his world; and Bastian must be the one to save the Empress, even though at first he can't quite make himself believe that he can help. As the Empress notes, Bastian "simply can't imagine that one little boy could be that important."
But, of course, he is...
"The Swamp of Sadness," for instance, is a place that -- if you stop to dwell -- you sink further and further. In other words, this specific trap is a metaphor for self-pity. If you stop to focus on how sad you are, how depressed you feel, you just keep sinking. And the further you sink, the harder it is to escape; to pull yourself up. Sadness creates more sadness.
And the Ancient Guardian? He represents apathy and old age; wherein acceptance of "how things are" has overcome the desperate need of hungry youth to change (even save...) the world. Appropriate then that this guardian should be visualized as a turtle...since he can just hide from everything in his over sized shell, never to face reality. As the movie notes, "There's no fool like an old fool!"
The Southern Gate's first test, of "self worth," also relates to us, right here, everyday. If we don't believe in ourselves and what we can accomplish under our own steam, how can we make others believe in us or our abilities? Feelings of strong self-esteem and self-worth must by need precede all quests of "self actualization," right? If you don't believe you can do something in the first place, why try?
The second Oracle test -- also encountered before victory -- involves facing yourself. There are all sorts of "monsters" and crises to fear in our everyday lives, but none of those beasts is worse or more terrifying than self-reflection; how we sometimes view and judge ourselves.
The magical mirror test asks us to solemnly reflect on who we are; on who we have become. Are we the good people we could be? Or are we hypocrites hiding behind platitudes about being good? When we look in the mirror, which face do we see?
Even the movie's nebulous but effective central threat is contextualized as a danger to the psychology; a danger to self. What's at stake if you have low self-esteem, if you sink into depression, and you don't see yourself truthfully in that mirror of conscience?
Well, the creeping Nothing around you -- and inside you -- just grows and grows. "It's the emptiness that's left," Gmork says, describing the "Nothing." "It's like a despair, destroying this world...Because people have begun to lose their hopes and forget their dreams. So the Nothing grows stronger."
So, meet 1984's The NeverEnding Story: the self-help book of fantasy cinema, in which every challenge Atreyu faces alludes to the book's reader, Bastian, and his unique set of challenges. Not to mention our challenges too.
Should he wallow in self-pity in despair, with the end result that the quicksand will consume him? Should he hate himself because he is sad, and not pulling himself up by his bootstraps as his Dad desires?
If Bastian succumbs to these visions of himself (and does not see his own self worth), the Nothing consumes him...just as it consumes Fantasia. The answer, of course, is to believe in himself, and this message is not as heavy handed as it might have been, in part because of the delightful fantasy trappings.
It's amusing and also rather charming to see our grown-up fears (of depression) and foibles (like low self-esteem) made manifest into the physical genre trappings of the heroic quest; dangers to be avoided and beaten down. Depression as a swamp. Apathy as a turtle inside his shell. Self-worth as a hurdle that must be crossed, etc.
Another highly commendable aspect of The NeverEnding Story is how it views imagination and education.
Of course, the act of reading (and of imagining the adventures of literary figures) is championed here as a way of dealing with unpleasantness in real life; unpleasantness like death, and like bullying. Reading is the catalyst of everything important in the film: the introduction to adventure and the key to saving the world. As Julie Salomon wrote in The Wall Street Journal back in 1984, The NeverEnding Story "brings back the early excitement of reading as a child, when the act of turning pages took on a magical quality."
But more than that, I appreciate how The NeverEnding Story turns the idea of "the Ivory Tower" on its ear. In metaphor, the Ivory Tower has become synonymous with something negative. The phrase Ivory Tower widely "refers to a world or atmosphere where intellectuals engage in pursuits that are disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life."
Today, people decry Ivory Tower residents as "elitists" or as being somehow bad, even evil. Instead, ignorance and anti-intellectualism are raised up as virtues, instead. Don't read the newspaper? Great! Don't know geography? Terrific. Who's the leader of Pakistan? Don't know? Outstanding.
Well, as The NeverEnding Story makes plain, nothing bad EVER originates from the Ivory Tower. Self-enrichment and education are universal positives...in any reality. There is no down side to being smart; to gathering knowledge; to being a resident of this "Ivory Tower."
Ask yourself, what do others gain by keeping another person away from learning, away from the proverbial Ivory Tower? By keeping others ignorant? That's the danger of anti-intellectualism right there; that someone will "bully" another being into being something less than what he or she could be.
Gmork makes the case aptly: "People who have no hopes are easy to control; and whoever has the control... has the power."
When you tie together The NeverEnding Story's multiple strands of education (and learning to read, to experience literary worlds), imagination (putting yourself into the literary fantasy...) and self-worth to the movie's paradise -- "The Ivory Tower," -- you get the point plainly.
It's a message perfectly suited for adults and kids: don't for a minute believe that one person can't be important.
The question, for viewers, of course, is simply: are you interested in a fantasy film created in this vein, a fantasy film in which the advice "never give up, and good luck will find you," is championed at the expense of more mature, nuanced themes.
I can easily imagine that, before having a son, I might have felt that this message was somehow cheesy or over-the-top. But being the parent of a four-year old, I find myself appreciating The NeverEnding Story more than ever before. The movie is fun and inventive, and it has a light touch with this material. I find it audacious and courageous that a fantasy movie should take the form of, literally, the aforementioned "self-help book."
Now, I don't know that I would want other fantasies to emulate this mold; but in this case, the unusual symbolism successfully differentiates The NeverEnding Story from its many brethren of the early 1980s. The result is that the movie is distinctive...and memorable.
Of course, not everyone agreed. Critic Vincent Canby wrote, of the movie's approach: "When the movie is not sounding like ''The Pre-Teen- Ager's Guide to Existentialism,'' it's simply a series of resolutely unexciting encounters between Atreyu and the creatures that alternately help and hinder his mission."
Perhaps that's true, but what about when the movie does sound like a Pre-Teen Ager's Guide to Existentialism? For me, that's where this movie's worth ultimately resides; in the idea of real life foibles and crises made manifest in fantasy terrain. I don't think the movie's great strength -- the brawny central conceit -- should be discounted quite so readily.
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Falcor, the Luck Dragon...looks suspiciously like a puppy. |
In fact, this movie, -- much like The Dark Crystal (1982) -- is a wonderful testament to the things practical effects can achieve given an adequate budget and a sense of unrestrained imagination. Here, an entire world is built from the ground up; and it's a world of leviathan Rock Biters, racing snails, Sadness Swamps, weird "elf-tech," and much more.
Using prosthetics, gorgeous sets, miniatures, and mattes -- and no digital backgrounds or monsters whatsoever -- the makers of this film support the storyline with their droll, highly-detailed creations. Some of these creations are really, really weird, mind you.
For instance, the Rock Biter is an amazing, idiosyncratic and wholly individual thing. He's crazy-looking, and yet he's got real personality and character. I can't say he looks "real"; more like something you'd imagine from Alice in Wonderland. And yet he has weight and presence, and when he is sad, you feel his pain. In the movie, the Rock Biter contemplates giving himself to the Nothing, essentially committing suicide, and the pathos is authentic. A bad special effect could not have accomplished that feeling.
Today, some of the flying effects don't hold up; certainly that is true. The ending of the movie also feels sudden, and a little too convenient.
Also, I can't honestly say there's a scene here of as much emotional maturity as what we got during the "Widow of the Web" interlude in Krull.
But nonetheless, The NeverEnding Story still has...something. It may not be what we desire of a fantasy as "serious" grown-ups, but trenchantly it does recall such youthful stories as Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland.
Empire's Ian Nathan wrote of The NeverEnding Story: "This was sweet and charming at the time but now it just lacks either the comedy or sophistication of kids' fantasy film that we've all become accustomed to."
I agree with him that The NeverEnding Story remains sweet and charming. And the film's sense of sophistication arises from the central conceit of turning human emotions -- depression, self-hatred, apathy -- into the trials of a heroic, fantasy quest.
But I know what he means.
There's the sense after watching the film that, somehow, The NeverEnding Story isn't merely child-like, it's actually childish.
I'll leave it up to each individual viewer to decide if that's the film's ultimate weakness, or true strength
Tuesday, May 06, 2025
Space 1999 This Episode - The Infernal Machine
I had the great pleasure of being a guest on the Space:1999 "This Episode" podcast to discuss the Year One episode "The Infernal Machine" with co-hosts Roy and Warren.
We spent a little over 90 minutes really digging in, so I hope you enjoy it!
Monday, May 05, 2025
20 Years/Top 10 JKM Posts #8: Inland Empire (2006)
Inland Empire is a film in which logical, conscious connections between scenes are negligible and therefore almost fruitless to discuss or assess. Instead, the logic of dreams holds sway (powerful sway...) and Lynch's dream sense sweeps viewers from one emotional and terrifying moment to the next.

Both personalities are "blurred" out so that viewers can't make out their faces (or even, in fact, that they have faces). This disquieting blurring effect cloaks their identities but also grants these mystery figures a strange timeless quality, as though their identities have been smudged and stretched (bled actually...) beyond the boundaries of the immediate context (a dark, seedy hotel at night).
Very soon, the man broaches sex with the woman ("do you know what whores do?") and the duo engages in it. During the act -- which is obscured by the blurry faces -- the woman asks fearfully "where am I?" and admits that she is "afraid."
Following this sequence Lynch cuts to shots of a crying woman in close-up, trapped in another hotel room and watching a banal TV sitcom replete with laugh track. The actors in this TV program are horribly creepy, humanoid bunnies. "What time is it?" asks one of the nicely-dressed bunnies.
"I have a secret..." says another ominously.
Next, in modern Los Angeles, we meet Nikki Grace (Dern) an actress up for a leading role in a new Hollywood film called "On High in Blue Tomorrows." A strange, foreign (Polish...) neighbor, a Gypsy played by Grace Zabriskie, shows up and introduces herself . She reports that Nikki will get the coveted movie part, specifically that she has a "new role to play." In sinister fashion, she also informs Nikki that the new role involves a "brutal murder" and that it has something to do with marriage.
The strange gypsy then tells Nikki a story, an "old tale" about a little girl, and it carries faintly diabolical overtones: "A little girl went out to play. Lost in the marketplace, as if half-born. Then, not through the marketplace - you see that, don't you? - but through the alley behind the marketplace. This is the way to the palace. But it isn't something you remember," she says.
Nikki is appropriately disturbed by her neighbor's creepy demeanor, but the woman continues to chatter. She informs Nikki that actions have consequences, that there is "magic," and that if it were "tomorrow" Nikki would be sitting on her sofa...over there.
Cut to Nikki, already seated on the sofa, as though time has indeed bent to the neighbor's will. It is tomorrow.
Promptly, NIkki learns that she got the part and that she will be starring in the film with an actor named Devon (Justin Theroux). Disturbingly, Nikki and Devon also learn from the film's director, Halsey (Jeremy Irons), that "On High in Blue Tomorrows" is actually a remake of a film that was never completed, a Polish film called "47." Like the current screenplay, it was the tale of two illicit lovers ,and one based on an old Folk Tale. "Something happened before it was finished" says Halsey enigmatically, and the implication is that the story itself is cursed.
And then Nikki seems to slip between realities, inhabiting other lives. And this is where the movie really gets complicated.
As we eventually suss out, Nikki's journey is part film making illusion and part reality. But the final destination is frightening and sinister. She ends up at a hotel room labeled 47, where must pass a malevolent "Shadow" to free the woman we saw earlier -- perhaps the real Sue -- trapped in that hotel room (and still watching TV bunnies...).
Got it?

Also, the 2006 film showcases the "gateway" to other worlds, other realities, like the Black Lodge of Twin Peaks or the world-opening/changing "box" of Mulholland Drive. Here, there's a gateway tagged with the legend AXXoNN that transports the protagonist, Nikki Grace, from one reality to another; from one state of being to another. On the surface it's just a door, with those letters scrawled roughly in chalk on it.
However, if we interpret the nonsense word "AXXoNN," we come up with a close approximation in science: the word "axon."
And, biologically-speaking, an axon is a crucial part of our mental landscape. It is (by Wikipedia) "a long, slender projection of a nerve cell, or neuron, that conducts electrical impulses away from the neuron's cell body or soma."

The diagram from Wikipedia (left) actually proves quite helpful here: it diagrams "axons" linking sections of the brain, closing the gulf between synapses and carrying "thoughts" from one point to another.
The AXXoNN gate in Inland Empire fulfills much the same function. In the film, it links realities, identities, dreams and even disparate time periods together. Nikki navigates this gate and taps not into something personal (the "day residue" of dreams described Freud) but something much more Jungian in concept: an unconscious idea hidden in the conscious mind of the race itself; something about the "genetic" memory of women; of womanhood/sisterhood itself.
I discussed in my review of Lynch's Dune how Paul Atreides' dreams seemed to originate with the Divine, one important school of dream interpretation. In Inland Empire, the dream sense of David Lynch suggests supernatural communication instead; the magical linking of at least two women (Sue and Nikki), and perhaps more, across time and space.
The magical AXXoNN gate is a symbol for the human mind. The "longest running show" in human history is the human collective memory, in this case the female of the species' collective memory of sexual violence and abuse through the ages, across the globe.
The perpetrators of such violence are symbolized in Inland Empire as one male uber-being or presence, the "Shadow," a recurring monster figure. The Shadow is the Blurry Man in the film's opening scene who demands sex, and also an unseen killer on the prowl in Poland. Finally, he is monstrous man "guarding" room 47 and keeping a woman locked up there.
The Gypsy (Zabriskie) has prepared us for the presence of this thing in her first scene: "A little boy went out to play. When he opened his door, he saw the world. As he passed through the doorway, he caused a reflection. Evil was born. Evil was born, and followed the boy."
The Evil that has followed thus "little boy" is the mistreatment of women; the "dark side" (or reflection) of manhood.
But by taking on the role of "Sue" in the movie, by becoming the receptacle for the remake's "curse," Nikki has crossed the gate and become aware of the collective memory of abuse in the "sisterhood" of women, and it is up to her to free the woman in the hotel (again, perhaps Sue herself...) who has been trapped there, unable to return to her husband and son because of the "box" (of sexuality?) where the Shadow has locked her up.
One of the most significant aspects of Inland Empire is Lynch's complete negation -- nay annihilation -- of any coherent "timeline" of events. The film's dialogue constantly refers to time as meaningless or, at the very least, circular. Examples:
"In the future, you'll be dreaming,"
"I figured one day I'd just wake up and and find out what the hell yesterday was all about. I'm not too keen on thinkin' about tomorrow. And today's slipping by."
"This is a story that happened yesterday. But I know it's tomorrow."
"I'll show you light now. It burns bright forever. No more blue tomorrows. You on high now, love."
And, one of the creepiest incidents in the film involves Nikki passing through the first AXXoNN gate and coming upon...herself.
Once more, we must delve into dream interpretation or dream distillation to afford ourselves an understanding of what's happening in a Lynch film. Consider that, as dreamers, we do not experience time. In dreams, there is no past and no future, just the eternal moment of now (to coin a phrase). Time moves differently in the world of dreams, if it moves at all. More likely we -- the dreamers -- are the ones that "move;" from one vision or idea to another; from one phantasm to the next. But we don't "drive" or "fly or otherwise travel to new ideas in any conventional fashion On the contrary, we miraculously, seamlessly transition from things that happened, to things that might happen, to things that will happen. And they all seem to be happening NOW.
This is the dream sense of David Lynch, translated to film. We jump from one reality to another without conventional physical travel. The connections forged in the film are the connections of the mind, the subway path of the axons, the AXXoNN gate. A thought triggers another thought and we witness this progression of ideas played out. Only here, an idea in a scene (like the abuse of women) triggers another scene that's a variation on that theme, and on and on. The connections are the light-speed connections of cognition itself, of thought. David Lynch is an artist who knows his own mind, and Inland Empire is his mind's eye brought to the surface...dreaming on film for us.

30 Years Ago: Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)
The third Die Hard film re-establishes the action franchise’s reputation for excellence…with a vengeance. The highest grossing American ...

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Last year at around this time (or a month earlier, perhaps), I posted galleries of cinematic and TV spaceships from the 1970s, 1980s, 1...
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The robots of the 1950s cinema were generally imposing, huge, terrifying, and of humanoid build. If you encountered these metal men,...