The Screengrab : Star Wars Holiday Special

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Dead"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Okay, that's enough of the goofball so-bad-it's-good stuff. We all enjoyed taking a gander at bizarre foreign intrusions, both Mexican and Wookie, into the Christmas traditions in the form of Santa Claus and The Star Wars Holiday Special, but by the time I was done with those two, I needed a nice healthy dose of holiday melancholy to remind me that the festival season can be one of ineffable sadness as well as inexpressable joy. And nobody does ineffable sadness and inexpressable joy like the Irish, so I decided to get things back on the straight and narrow with John Huston's final film as a director, The Dead. Though it's not often thought of as a traditional holiday film, its action takes place on Epiphany, which in the Catholic calendar is the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas. And, considering how important the role of epiphany was in his writing, it's no surprise that this is based on a short story (from Dubliners) by the mighty James Joyce, who, like Huston, was an Irishman through and through despite his sometimes standoffish relationship with his homeland and its culture.

The Feast of Epiphany, like Christmas, is a time for family gatherings, for coming together and for realizing how important your friends and relations are in your life. Joyce needed little reminding of the subject; he lived most of his life in the long shadow of his family, for good and for ill. Likewise, John Huston -- literally deathly ill when he made The Dead, the third movie of his highly improbable but hugely successful late-stage comeback -- knew how important family was in his life. His own career as a successful actor and director had been predicted and preplanned by his father, Walter, and The Dead featured a fantastic screenplay by his own son Tony and a tremendous performance in the lead role by his daughter-in-law Anjelica. Like the characters in the story, Huston was surrounding himself, likely for the last time, with the people who loved him, and in the shadow of the people who made him, for one last realization, one last epiphany. The result is one of the smallest and quietest, but also one of the greatest, films of his career.

The action of The Dead, such as it is, revolves around a celebration of the Feast of Epihany in the company of Professor Gabriel Conroy (movingly played by Donal McCann, heading an almost all-Irish cast) and his wife Gretta (a stellar job by Anjelica Huston). The course of the evening's conversations -- and that's all there is to The Dead, conversation and memory and observation and realization -- will reveal a young love of Gretta's which has, through the course of her marriage and her entire life, lingered like an unquiet ghost between her and her husband. As they pass the hours at the home of Gabriel's aunts Julia and Kate, played with lovely grace and competence by Cathleen Delany and Helena Carroll, the professor will realize, in a stunning display of what the philosopher Richard Rorty calls the solidarity of irony, that he is capable of feeling intense affection and regret for someone he has never met, a long-dead rival for his wife's affections: and that because of that, he is capable of loving his wife all the more.

Joyce's work carries an emotional power that is often entirely internal -- its great revelations and transformations take place not in the world we can see, but in the much vaster world that exists inside our heads. The Dead is no exception, and presented John Huston with the challenge of showing us in a visual medium what is actually happening where no eyes can see; but he succeeds admirably by use of a deeply sensitive script and a more than capable cast. The Dead is filled with melancholy and even sadness, but in the purest spirit of the holidays, it's a sadness that binds, that brings together, that makes more human. In the rhythms of the Epiphany feast, in the stories told a thousand times, in the familiar songs sung, the predictable jokes laughed at, and the great sorrows of the past recalled, John Huston -- living out the very story he was filming -- reminded us of why shared unhappiness is just as vital as shared happiness: because it is shared. It is the snow that falls on the living and the dead alike.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A hearty Irish 11 pipers piping. If The Dead isn't a perfect holiday film, it's an intensely felt and enormously moving one, and one of the few that both fits into the mood and spirit of Christmas and is removed enough from it to be a film worth seeing at any time of year.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "Santa Claus"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:45:00 GMT

Last week, the 12 Days of Christmas Marathon took a bit of a turn in the direction of high-camp lunacy with a look at the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special Today we take an even harder left, into the realm of utter derangement, with a look at the innocuously named yet completely bonkers "Mexiscope" classic Santa Claus. The only holiday film, to my knowledge, to get the full-on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment, Santa Claus is a joint Mexican-American production from 1959. It was written and filmed south of the border on an ultra-low budget, and then re-edited by American schlockmeister K. Gordon Murray for a stateside audience. Who exactly this American audience was supposed to be, however, is left unanswered, as the movie makes no sense whatsoever in the original Spanish and actually crosses into negative sense-making in its English translation. Incomprehensible, culturally deranged, acted by people who weren't quite up to the high professional thespianic standards of professional wrestling, and so cheaply made it looks like it's peeling, Santa Claus is the movie equivalent of toys you buy at the dollar store.

Part of the problem with Santa Claus is that Mexico isn't entirely in synch with American Christmas tradition, so, just as the Japanese adapted jolly old St. Nick into "Annual Gift Man", the original producers of this movie envisioned Kris Kringle as a sort of extraterrestrial wizard whose goal is to turn children on the path of good and thwart the wiles of his crafty arch-enemy, Satan. That's right: the villain of this movie is none other than the Lord of Lies himself, and his wicked henchman Pitch, whose job it is to tempt the children of Earth, embodied in Mexican waif Lupita, into abandoning the true path of Santa and shoplifting toys for the greater glory of Lucifer. Luckily, Santa has his own right-hand man -- the wizard Merlin -- who supplies him with an arsenal of Dungeons & Dragons magic items, including sleeping powder, a skeleton key, and a flower that will make him invisible. Are you following all this? Because it doesn't get any less complicated from here.

Pitch, the gibbering little dope, has little success tempting the saintly Lupita to the ways of Satan, but he does have some success with a troika of bratty boys, recruiting them into a wacky scheme to kidnap St. Nick, steal his bag of toys, and, worst of all, make him a slave so that he will manufacture playthings in the name of the Devil. Along the way, he also manages to sic the cops on the Christmas icon, attack him with an angry dog, and generally make him wish he'd never left home, which for some reason is a futuristic floating cloud in outer space instead of a toy factory at the North Pole. Of course, you'd live there too, if it meant you got to play with cool shit like the Ear Scope, the Teletalker, the Cosmic Telescope, and the Master Eye; all this, combined with the garishly surreal set design, makes Santa seem like less of a beloved Christmas icon than a psychedelicized Big Brother. (He also employs kids in his workshop instead of elves, although it's not clear if that's an improvement or not by worker's rights standards, and when children don't fall asleep fast enough to suit him, he dopes them up with a mysterious substance that probably comes from a cut-rate Tijuana pharmacy.

As might be expected from the man who brought the world Robot vs. Aztec Mummy, there's all sorts of intensely strange stuff happening in Santa Claus. The jolly elfin hero has a disturbing laugh much more suited to a prison snitch than a cultural symbol of kindness and giving; Satan is portrayed by an actor nicknamed "Trotsky"; the dialogue -- much of which was translated by Murray himself -- has a hilariously stilted, Engrish-style literalism to it ("I promise, oh Priceless Prince of Hades, that by my many wiles I will finish Santa off forever, and see that the children commit terrible deeds, and make Santa Claus angry!"); and there's so much zaniness going on in every scene that it almost seems intentionally crazy rather than just inept. (What to make, otherwise, of Santa's mechano-zombie reindeer, which appear to be robotic but which crumble into dust at the sight of sunlight? Or Satan punishing Pinch by making him eat chocolate ice cream, which negatively affects his Satanic metabolism? Or the serious nightmare fuel of li'l' Lupita's dream visitation by an evil doll who tries to make her steal things?) Whatever the intentions of its various filmmakers, Santa Claus is truly one of a kind, and best of all, in our modern DVD age, it's available in any city with a large Latino population for no more than three bucks.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An robust and tasty 6 geese a-laying this rotten golden egg. It's surely not a good movie by any reckoning, but it's one that you'll never, ever forget -- show it to kids at your peril, because they'll be describing it to their therapists later.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Star Wars Holiday Special"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:25:00 GMT

The third episode of our trip through some of the most beloved Christmas movies of all time isn't actually beloved. Notorious would be a better word. Infamous would be another. It also isn't a movie; it's a television special. What's more, it isn't even a television special you can go rent at your local Blockbuster, or queue up via Netflix. In fact, unless you happen to have been watching CBS at 8PM Eastern Time, November 17, 1978, you've probably never seen it. Or, unless you have one of the approximately one hundred billion bootlegged copies that have been floating around sci-fi conventions for the last 30 years. Or unless you have Google video. Anyway, you sure as hell are never going to see an official release: George Lucas -- the man who willingly released Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith into theaters -- has said that he is so ashamed of the Holiday Special that if he could, he would hunt down every copy of it in existence and smash them to pieces with a sledgehammer.

How bad is the Star Wars Holiday Special? It's so bad that even Star Wars geeks, many of whom pretend that the second trilogy wasn't relentlessly awful and have paid real cash money for Star Wars novelizations, think that it's a bad joke. It's so bad that Harrison Ford, during an appearance on the Conan O'Brien show, attempted to deny that he even remembered doing it. It's so bad that it goes beyond so-bad-it's-good into so-bad-it's-actually-terribly-bad and back around into so-bad-it-in-fact-is-immune-to-such-meaningless-abstractions-as-bad-and-good. It's so bad you feel sorry for Jefferson Starship for having had to be in it. Unless you have spent two hours being savagely tortured by members of the Iraqi Republican Guard, it is the most excruciatingly long two hours you will ever spend.

Written and produced during a brief period of time when it wasn't completely certain how humongously successful the Star Wars mythos would become, its creators decided to cash in by putting together something that combined the worst elements of the sci-fi classic with the utter dregs of 1970s variety shows. To get one thing out of the way, the Star Wars Holiday Special does contain the first appearance of Boba Fett, in a nifty little animated sequence by Canada's legendary studio Nelvana. Beyond that, though, it is 100% utterly horrible and awful from the first frame to the last. It's so bad, you don't even know how it ended up on TV even in the late '70s. The plot, such as it is, involves Chewbacca's quest to defy an Imperial barricade and get home to spend "Life Day' -- a sort of outer-space super-Christmas -- with his Wookie family. But the Special isn't so much a story with a plot as it is a bunch of completely disastrous moments strung together so incoherently that it makes you want to commit suicide. At times, you begin to suspect that the Star Wars Holiday Special is what the head of the Silver Shamrock Corporation should have gone with in Halloween III instead of those lame masks that turned kids' heads into bugs.

Picking out the worst moment of the Star Wars Holiday special is like picking out the worst moment of the Second World War: it's really just one unspeakable horror after another, only WWII ended sooner. Every time you think you've seen a scene that is as ungodly bad as it can possibly get, another scene that's even worse shows up, and then you look at your watch and you realize that there's still an hour and a half left to go before it's over. A mere listing of some of the most memorable scenes should be enough to scare off any sane human being: there's the scene where Chewbacca's wife, son and father -- Malla, Lumpy, and Itchy -- bellow at each other in Wookie-speak (which resembles a couple of dying walruses bellowing at each other) for something like fifteen minutes, with no subtitles. There's the scene where Art Carney walks around with his shirt open to the belly-button talking about how he loves to make a Wookie happy. There's the scene where the nauseating old freak Itchy watches Wookie porn, which involves Dihanne Carroll manning a futuristic phone sex line, and makes profoundly disturbing Wookie pleasure noises. There's the scene where an Imperial storm trooper watches a Jefferson Starship music video for no discernable reason. There's the scene where Mark Hammill shows up wearing more makeup than Joan Crawford (and looking considerably less butch, to boot). There's the musical number by a coked-out-of-her-gourd Carrie Fisher, which would be the worst musical number in television history if it weren't for the fact that it comes after an even worse musical number by Bea Arthur. (Yes, that's right, Bea Arthur is part of the Star Wars canon, and there's nothing you can do about it, fanboys.) There's not one, not two, but three comedic roles by Harvey Korman, one of which involves him playing an outer space version of Julia Child called Chef Gormaanda. There's the scene where Han Solo kills a guy just to break up the monotony. And more, more, so much more.

The Star Wars Holiday Special is mind-numbingly bad, but it has a special cachet because of its inexplicable attachment to one of the most popular film franchises of all time. Fans of utter kitsch will enjoy it on its own merits -- I mean, honestly, this thing reeks so bad it's simply amazing that no one breaks character and asks director Steve Binder just what the fuck he think's he's doing -- but for Star Wars fans, it's virtually a rite of passage: if you can watch this colossal stench-bomb, featuring almost all the original cast, and still call yourself a fan, no one can dare question your loyalty to the franchise ever again.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An uncontrollable 2 turtledoves crapping all over your kitchen. The only way this thing could possibly be any worse is if it had Jar Jar Binks and/or Hayden Christensen in it.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

Video of the Day: The Five-Minute "Star Wars" Holiday Special

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:30:00 GMT

This week is the 30th anniversary of the Star Wars Holiday Special. If you're one of the lucky ones who missed this made-for-TV abomination, it is widely believed to be not only the worst thing ever made with the name "Star Wars" attached, but the worst thing ever made of any kind. How bad is it? It's so bad that George Lucas -- the man who released the crawling, hideous thing that is Episode III: Revenge of the Sith to theaters worldwide -- yanked it from circulation so that it can only be seen in low-grade bootleg form. It's approximately two hours long, but it seems like it's about two months long -- which is why we're eternally grateful to the good forks at The Late Night Explosion for culling it down to an agonizing but survivable five minutes.

This version gives you tiny snippets of almost all the things that make the original Star Wars Holiday Special so mind-searingly awful -- the endless untranslated bellowing of Chewbacca's family, the wookie porn, the Jefferson Starship music video, the song by a coked-out Carrie Fisher, the interminable clowning by a disco-shirted Art Carney, the sight of Mark Hammill made up like Joel Grey in Cabaret, the Bea Arthur musical number -- but in brief enough doses that your brain doesn't immediately seize up and fall out of your ear the way it does when you have to watch the whole thing. Enjoy!

Fantastic Fest Review: Fanboys

Batman: The Lost Years

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

You kids today, with your sequels and remakes and instantaneous re-boots, you’re spoiled! Between The Dark Knight and Gotham Knight and umpteen animated Bat-shows on the tube, you’re up to your pointy ears in Batman. It wasn’t like this back in my day, let me tell you. Growing up as a Batman fan in the 70s and early 80s, I would have killed for just one Batman movie, any Batman movie, even one directed by Joel Schumacher. But between the end of the ABC television series in 1968 and the first Tim Burton movie in 1989, there was a long Bat-drought, broken up only by the occasional rumor and ill-conceived attempt at resurrection.

As far as the comic books were concerned, mind you, we had it pretty good. My childhood coincided with two of the most acclaimed eras of the Dark Knight’s career. The Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams reign of the ’70s is rightly credited with restoring some mystery and moodiness to the character after several decades worth of goofy gimmickry. Those issues weren’t “dark” in the Frank Miller psycho-Batman sense – they were still kid-friendly, but just gritty and grimy enough to open the doorway to the adult world a crack for a young reader like myself. In one of my earliest childhood memories, I am practically grinding the 1973 issue “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge” into dust with repeated re-readings. (There are rumors that The Dark Knight draws heavily on that particular story.) Later that decade, Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers collaborated on a brief but memorable run of Detective Comics; their noirish, atmospheric take on Batman was later collected in the trade paperback Strange Apparitions.

Those of us who wanted to see our hero come to life on the screen, however, were basically shit out of luck. There was the occasional rerun of the ’60s TV series, which was fun for a kid with no conception of the word “campy,” and there was a Saturday morning cartoon, but that was about it until an ad for an NBC show called Legends of the Superheroes appeared in the TV Guide one week in 1979. This seemed to come out of nowhere, and I couldn’t have been more excited; not only did it promise live-action Batman and Robin, but a bunch of my other Justice League favorites like the Flash and Green Lantern, as well as a passel of great supervillains. Then the thing actually aired and my heart sank. There were two episodes total, a “Challenge” and an Ed McMahon-hosted superhero roast, both shot on videotape and featuring a laugh track. This was not what I’d had in mind:

These things made the Star Wars Holiday Special look like The Sopranos by comparison, and were quickly, mercifully forgotten. Not long afterward, however, rumors began to surface of an impending big-screen version of Batman. Back then we didn’t have the Ain’t-It-Cools and Dark Horizons tracking every blip and fart out of Hollywood; no, we were reliant mainly on Starlog magazine to keep us abreast of such happenings. In 1980, a small blurb indicated that a Batman movie would be in theaters by Christmas of 1981, with rights-holder Michael Uslan announcing, “This film will be done straight.” An update in October 1981 indicated that the original timeline may have been a little ambitious. Despite continued claims by the producers that the movie would be truer to the dark origins of the character, Adam West was now angling to reprise the role. When asked if he would be willing to take on a smaller role – say, that of Bruce Wayne’s father – the man who was then starring in the likes of The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood huffed, “If the character was important enough and handled well…I might consider it.” Even then, this made me laugh. Nonetheless, a whole “Put the Man Back in Batman” movement was launched, dedicated to restoring West to his rightful place under the cowl. There were ads, petitions and even a song, which fell on deaf ears.

A 1983 profile of Tom Mankiewicz revealed that longtime James Bond screenwriter was working on a script then titled The Batman. “We’re trying to return to the original concept – Batman as a dark avenger of the night,” said Mankiewicz. “The villains, while being outrageous, will be very cruel people.” While he wanted an unknown in the title role, his wish list for the supporting cast included Peter O’Toole as The Penguin, David Niven as Alfred, and…Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Of course, only the latter came to pass, and by the time it did I was past my Bat-prime. But it’s still possible to get a glimpse of the movie that might have been; the Mankiewicz script can be found here.

Biggs News To Me

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:00:00 GMT

As geeks go, I’m more Reform than Orthodox, so I’m guessing the majority of readers who know or care about Luke Skywalker’s doomed pal Biggs Darklighter already know everything there is to know about the long-lost Star Wars scenes I’ve only just rediscovered, but for my fellow slacker nerds and you casual fans out there in blogland who HAVEN'T already experienced the aforementioned scenes a dozen times on bootleg VHS cassettes, first edition laser discs, at George Lucas' house, etcetera...

...okay, so, remember the end of Star Wars (and no, I’m NOT going to call it Episode 4: A New Hope, thank you very much). Remember the rebel in the cheesy moustache who dies (along with Porkins and the rest) while trying to blow up the Death Star? And remember how Luke looks all sad about the dude's demise for a second or two?

Well, as you may remember from the screenplay or the novelization or the Marvel comics adaptation, that guy in the moustache was Biggs, Luke’s older, cooler friend from Tatooine who ran off and joined the Rebel Alliance while Luke was stuck farming moisture for his Uncle. (Hence the cryptic line early in the movie when Luke says, “Oh, Biggs is right, I'm never gonna get out of here."

Now, back in the day, I was more obsessed with Star Wars than all my future obsessions with sex, drugs and rock & roll combined...I knew Yoda was originally supposed to be a little purple elf on Luke’s shoulder, I knew the TIE in TIE fighter meant “Twin-Ion-Engined,” I even suffered through the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special.

But until just a few weeks ago, I'd never heard or even suspected that the following Luke/Biggs scenes had ever left the script stage...and thank God George Lucas left them out. Just as the extra footage in Apocalypse Now Redux showed the thin line between art and crap (goofy hijinx with the Playboy bunnies? The horror! The horror!), I think you’ll agree that the following scenes, while interesting from a completist’s perspective, clearly demonstrate the thin line between “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” and the worst of ‘70s sci-fi cheese.

LUKE'S ORIGINAL INTRO

LUKE & THE ANCHORHEAD GANG

LUKE & BIGGS