In Little Shop of Horrors, a very poor man discovers he can have all the success in the world if only he murders people to feed a talking plant their blood. Did someone say “capitalism will eat you alive”? Alan Menken did!

I grew up watching the Theatrical Cut of Little Shop of Horrors. It was one of my favorite movies on tape as a kid! I watched it so much, I think I wore out the VHS. Like, it would get all fuzzy and weird when I watched the parts I kept rewinding and revisiting. I’m still not sure why I loved it so much as a child, but there is something deeply endearing about the giant murderous plant, and putting the plant-puppet to music was my catnip.

This means I had only seen the version with the happy ending. It’s not the version the director wanted, but test audiences *loathed* his original ending, and the movie wasn’t going to get released unless they scrubbed it. So in the Theatrical Cut, Seymour electrocutes Audrey II. He escapes to the suburbs with Audrey I. You get a glimpse of little Audrey II flowers at the end, but it feels like more of a cute wink-nudge than a threat of more plant murder.

Even in this version, Little Shop of Horrors is an outstanding movie. The songs, performances, and set are wonderful. As an adult, I’m just as obsessed with the many puppets that portray Audrey II. Apparently it took sixty people to operate the big version, and you get the most amazing sense of majesty from it. Steve Martin vs Bill Murray is like “When Sado met Masochist” — a real romcom.

With the Theatrical Cut, it remains a tale of deep poverty and the lie of the American Dream. Seymour begins with small, painful sacrifices to earn his commercial success — bleeding himself into the mouth of the plant — and then moves onto acceptable horror by feeding Audrey’s abusive boyfriend to the plant. But the plant is never satiated. It never stops growing. It always remains hungry. Letting the heroes escape alive isn’t necessarily unrealistic, but it’s such a softball.

The Director’s Cut is truer to the theme. Audrey II lures Audrey I to the shop, fatally wounds her, and devours her body. Then it humiliates and devours Seymour despite his best attempts to kill it. I had heard that these things happened in the Director’s Cut. It was still shocking enough to watch for the first time — like I said, I’ve seen this at least twenty times, and the ending was happy! What a divine sensation, watching a new version of a movie I know so well.

The plant goes on to eat the whole country. Probably the whole planet. You get a lot of amazing shots of giant Audrey II plants terrorizing New York City — think people running away from Godzilla screaming. The Greek chorus emphasizes that we got here because everyone was greedy for power and willing to feed their plants blood. And in the end, we see one of the plants clutching the Statue of Liberty, cackling because bazookas do nothing to kill it.

I completely understand why everyone hated that ending. It was *dark*. But oh my God, I’m obsessed. It was hilarious for one. They played it up like a 50s monster movie, so it’s not exactly scary by modern standards. Watching the many ways the plant destroys things and eats people is a joy, especially because they laugh through the whole thing. The evil puppets are so great! I’m just so happy for them!

And at this point, it’s pretty obvious that capitalism really does work like that. It really will just eat everybody. It’s so blunt, without a whit of subtlety. But does anyone go see a horror comedy satire musical hoping for subtlety? Or do you go because you wanna see giant alien plants murdering the planet?

Personally, I think this version is so much better, and I’m delighted they remastered/completed the Director’s Cut for release. It takes the movie from “haha I loved that” to “OMG AMAZING.” I was downright giddy watching it. Let’s say that the Theatrical Cut is 5/5, but Director’s Cut is 11/10.

Everyone wanted to possess Isabeau d’Angou, daughter of the Comte. Her unearthly beauty captured the hearts of everyone who saw her, whether man or priest, and the Bishop of Aquila became obsessed with her. Yet the one man Isabeau wanted herself was Etienne Navarre, the handsome captain of the guard in Aquila. Isabeau and Etienne could have known such happiness if not for the bitter rage of the Bishop, who called upon the power of the Devil himself to curse the lovers: if the Bishop could not possess this woman, then nobody could, and damned be his immortal soul.

Once the curse befell them, Isabeau became a hawk by day, while Etienne became a ferocious black wolf by night. The two could always be together. But never as humans. Never at the same time. Navarre was truly forced to possess Isabeau as a man possesses a hawk, carrying her on his gloved arm with her face blindfolded and her legs in jesses. It’s easy to imagine they began their journey together with hope of finding salvation, but hope waned as it became obvious the Bishop of Aquila was untouchable.

And then came Mouse — Phillippe Gaston — a young thief who distinguishes himself as the only criminal to ever escape the dungeons of Aquila.

And also came some incredibly rad synth music.

And a convenient total solar eclipse.

The 1980s were a great time for fantasy movies. I could spend a long time listing them, but I’ll stick to my personal favorites: Legend, starring Tom “Babylegs” Cruise, and Labyrinth, starring David Bowie’s package. We also got The Princess Bride (flawless), The Neverending Story (traumatic), The Last Unicorn (divine), and so many more.

Amid its stylized brethren, LADYHAWKE stands out as a fairly grounded medieval fantasy story. You don’t get colorful puppets. There’s no amazing soliloquies from Tim Curry about unicorns. Instead of sets, they filmed in a couple of old castles and a lot of sweeping fields. The costumes, while anachronistic, are kept simple, focusing the visuals entirely on the performances of actors who aren’t exactly chewing scenery.

In fact, if the soundtrack weren’t completely out of place, I think Ladyhawke would be broadly better regarded. I love the synth score, personally. But you can’t tell me it wouldn’t age better for the general public if they’d stuck to something classically orchestral.

The real highlight of Ladyhawke, for me, is how deeply romantic it is. Watching Navarre clutch Isabeau’s dress as night falls, savoring the scent of a woman he hasn’t seen in two years, is just as heartbreaking as his anguish when he watches the hawk struck by an arrow. He must always put Isabeau’s needs before his own, even if that means surrendering his wounded lover to another man so that he can carry her to be healed.

Of course, ACAB means Navarre. He’s a former guard (let’s say medieval cops), and in a previous life, he would have been one of the hairy dudes hunting down poor little Mouse. His family history involves the Crusades. Yikes. But Navarre got his butt kicked by the Church, so he’s semi-reformed.

This reformation is shown with a stark palette: Navarre dresses in voluminous black capes while wielding his crucifix-like sword on the back of a black horse (named Goliath!). Meanwhile, agents of the Church are dressed largely in white, riding white horses. The Bishop of Aquila is pictured in lavish white gowns, entertained by sultry young women, while lamenting the poor commoners can’t be taxed when they have nothing. When Navarre arrives at the climax to fight against the Church, he has become the Hand of God, and it’s a stark contrast to the villains he fights.

There is no cooler aesthetic than Navarre with his huge-ass crossbow and sword mounted on his muscular destrier, hawk clutching his glove. None. I mean, this is the goddamn Bladerunner, and he’s a freakin knight. It’s so cool I’m in pain.

Isabeau looks pretty great in Navarre’s cloak, though. She’s dressed more neutrally in grays. Her hair is cut short and appropriately feathered, giving her the look of a noble daughter on the lam. I’ve spent my entire life thinking Michelle Pfeiffer is the most beautiful woman on the planet, and her performance as Isabeau is the main reason why.

Philippe “The Twink” Gaston is adorably portrayed by Matthew Broderick at peak fame. It’s sorta like having an especially mousy Ferris Bueller running around medieval France, except he totally lacks the raw charisma…or the brain cells.

Mouse is actually kind of the main character, serving multiple narrative functions. His humble origin as a scrappy little thief who knows nothing about the curse makes him a good viewer avatar. But his main relationship is with God, meaning he also offers stark contrast to the Bishop of Aquila, just not with colors. (Appropriately, Mouse wears brown.) Mouse is way too foolish to survive everything he survives.

But he is devoted to God, and God clearly likes the kid. God’s probably the one who tosses Mouse in front of Navarre. It’s Mouse who most earnestly seeks God’s approval — not the Bishop who sold his soul, and not even the priest Imperius, who’s constantly drunk and lazing around. And so it’s Mouse who is most truly blessed.

It’s so mythic, having the good-hearted lil thief be the holy one who needs to light a path for Navarre and Isabeau’s salvation. He bears Navarre’s sword until it’s time to skewer the Bishop of Aquila in the most majestic of fashions. And by lying his butt off to Navarre and Isabeau separately, he keeps their spirits high enough to fight through the end of the curse.

I really couldn’t offer any genuine criticism for this movie. Is it a little too grounded? Maybe a little slow? Maybe some of the characters’ actions are a wee bit nonsensical at times? I have no idea. I’ve watched this movie a couple times a year for my entire life, no joke, and I think I’ve spent my entire life trying to write something as grandly mythic and shatteringly romantic as this.

Ladyhawke was made by a skilled filmmaker whose effects never get real special, which is smart, given the budgetary and technological limitations of the time. The simple framing, grading, and lighting makes it feel vividly real, as anachronistic as the choices are. It’s not nearly as much of a kids’ movie (or even a family movie) as its contemporaries in 80s fantasy films.

If you haven’t revisited this one in a while, I urge you to go back. I think it must not be very popular because I haven’t seen a remastered version. The copy I got off Amazon is janky. Let’s not let Ladyhawke fade into memory, though. This one is worth keeping around.

(image credit: Warner Bros.)

SCOOP is a lightweight drama about a famous TV interview with Prince Andrew, where he ate his whole entire foot talking about his relationship with trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, as well as allegations of abuse.

My immediate impression of the movie was, “Why did they make that?” There isn’t a lot of incisive material behind the scenes. It focuses on the women who made the interview happen, but only dips a toe into their ambitions, regrets, and the class differences between them. Some time is taken to flesh them out as individuals, but not in any particularly meaty way.

Little drama actually occurs in the setup for the interview. Basically, the news team asks if they can interview him, and Andrew happily accepts. A little time is dedicated to Andrew’s staff fussing about it, but it never grows claws.

The interview itself is loyally performed — but you can just go watch the Andrew interview yourself, if you don’t yet know the prince’s role in the nightmarish sex trafficking that women endured through Epstein and Maxwell.

I suppose the main argument for making such an unembellished version of the interview is that it puts the interview in the news again. And, as the journalists discovered (both in reality and the movie), they just needed to let Andrew speak for himself. He’s his own worst enemy. Yet SCOOP was reluctant to go any deeper than that.

I do get a sense, somewhat, that the filmmakers mostly wanted to show off how well they could transform Rufus Sewell into Prince Andrew — an extremely angular, handsome actor becoming a soft-faced royal he doesn’t ordinarily resemble.

Or perhaps they just wanted to get Billie Piper and Gillian Anderson working together, which is a victory for the lesbians.

The whole thing feel like an ephemeral, fashionable snippet of journalism history. It’s appropriate enough to show in school or watch with your mum. It doesn’t do anything that might risk legal action. It might barely even offend the British royal family, who don’t seem embarrassed enough to tuck Prince Andrew away; he continues to make appearances with the family to this day.

If the intention is to remind us all that Prince Andrew is a predator and buffoon, then it succeeds, and it does it with competent filmmaking. At least the journalism students who have to watch this down the road won’t be bored.

You can watch the original interview with Prince Andrew on BBC Newsnight’s YouTube Channel.

Scoop is streaming on Netflix.

(image credit: Netflix)

My original Letterboxd review for this is pretty thorough and I stand beside it.

In this Y2K remake of Taming of the Shrew, an overprotective father prevents his teen daughters from dating unless both of them go out. The younger sister convinces guys to get her shrewish older sister hooked up. Enter Shakespearean shenanigans: One guy talks another guy into financing a third guy into dating the older sister, presumably so that the financier can date the younger sister, but *actually* so the first guy can date her. The younger sister does actually want to date the financier. But the ones who fall in love are the third guy and the oldest. Are you keeping up?

You can transpose Taming of the Shrew onto any generation, but this one effortlessly touches down on late-90s Hollywood High School. The daughters of a rich family have so many of the same concerns about finding appropriate matches — although here, the matches matter for school reputation and a father’s approval, not marriage.

Our hero-for-hire, Patrick, is played by handsome young Heath Ledger. He’s gorgeous in this movie. His curls! His bone structure! The intensity when he worries over Kat! He played a bad boy with arresting tenderness, and he remains a complete heart-breaker. I’m thirty-old now and I’m still like, damn, just as much as when I was a kiddo.

I always found Kat so relatable — played here by Julia Stiles, dancing slightly better than she does in Save the Last Dance. (Can we please note how she really got thee best romantic heroes in her early movies? Heath Ledger, Sean Patrick Thomas, Freddie Prinze Junior…) Her bad attitude has been my entire life goal.

It’s funny how Kat is built up like a stereotypical lesbian in many ways — her fashion sense, her music preferences, the books she reads, her school of feminism — and I feel like the sequel would have her character discovering lesbianism in college, yet I also totally believe her chemistry with Heath Ledger. I bet a lotta lesbians would have made him their exception.

How could you *not* fall for a boy so committed to keeping you awake after hitting your head drunkenly at a party? Or who tries to win you back by performing a huge song with the marching band, while also fleeing from cops? One who uses his illicit gains to buy you a friggin guitar? I can’t even.

Though the romance is what kept a lot of us coming back when we were young teens, I really think what makes this movie persist twenty-five years after its release is the goofy humor. 10 Things walked so that Bottoms could run. Which passing gag is the funniest: the cowboys using their lariats on trash cans, the PE teacher getting shot in the butt by an arrow, Joey Donner’s terrible modeling, the penis on Michael’s cheek, the kid weirdly interested in sheep…?

On a personal note, this is one of the few movies where I still haven’t mentally transitioned from relating to adult characters from the teen characters. When I watched Addam’s Family as a kid, I was Wednesday; I have been Morticia for over a decade. But something about 10 Things I Hate About You makes me regress completely to being in high school again. Falling in love with Heath Ledger again. Drawing boobs on cafeteria trays again.

(image credit: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution)

In “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians,” the Martians become worried about how boring their children have become since discovering Earth TV. The obvious solution is to kidnap Santa Claus and make him bring joy to Mars. This offers an alternate history United States where reporters have access to the North Pole, and Santa’s failure to hold a press conference as expected alerts the military to his abduction. Or something like that.

We watched this unseasonable classic at the request of my teenager, who’s a big science fiction fan and also has a great sense of humor. They didn’t want to watch the version with MST3K commentary, though. They wanted us to just dive into this low budget sixties-era holiday flick raw. So we did.

First of all, this title is totally misleading. Santa Claus does zero conquering. Santa Claus “smokes” his bubble pipe, allows the Martians to wreck his staff, and complains about what a nag his wife is.

Second of all, has any movie had a bigger asbestos budget? All the snow in this movie suspiciously looks like the makings of mesothelioma. I’m pretty sure that Billy and Betty (the human children) spent half this flick rolling around in huge piles of asbestos. When Billy put an asbestos-covered glove up to his lips, I actually screamed.

But for all the cheesy costumes, poor effects, and over-use of USA military propaganda, this…isn’t a bad movie? I really feel like I gotta reiterate my ethos: If a movie accomplishes what it sets out to do, and it’s not boring or especially offensive, then it’s a fine movie. This was obviously made to amuse children at Christmastime. I think it probably achieved that.

It doesn’t *look* good. But. It’s not like kids back then were watching on 4K widescreen TVs; most of them probably didn’t even have color. You gotta imagine watching this thing so blurry that you can’t tell the “radar box” is a loose handful of wires taped inside of a plywood box. So blurry that the uneven greenish makeup covering alien skin might have looked consistent. The aluminum foil antennae and flimsy costumes literally could not matter less.

We’ll just ignore all that. What you get, then, is a goofy story about Martians making up an excuse to kidnap Santa Claus, and Santa Claus setting up his first franchise location on Mars. You get a cartoon villain with a satisfyingly thick mustache trying to eject children out an airlock! Grown ups act goofy. Children get menaced by a legitimately scary polar bear costume and a robot with dial nipples. Kids defeating the bad guys by attacking them with toys during an acid trip of shaking cameras.

Nothing holds up to analysis, but it’s not meant to. This is basically one of those Marvin the Martian cartoons acted out by a handful of people on plywood sets. It’s kinda funny, very seasonal, and you won’t miss any critical plot developments if you wander to the bathroom.

I’d happily rewatch this camp classic with my family at Christmas if they wanted to, but they don’t. Making a load of inappropriate jokes about Santa “conquering” Martians is only funny once, I guess.

(image source: Embassy Pictures)

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a story about post-apocalyptic Earth, which has been devastated by a seeming invasion of aliens called Phantoms. One touch from Phantoms removes the soul from humans. Aki Ross has been dreaming about the Phantoms and believes she can solve the invasion. It’s a straightforward story, mostly because the story isn’t the main focus of the movie.

The focus for this movie was technological revolution. This was the first CGI feature film intended to look photorealistic. While Dreamworks and Pixar were making more stylized kids’ movies, studio Square hoped to create digital actors whose performances would be comparable to living actors. Aki’s model in particular was intended for multiple movie projects. This never happened, aside from a single demo made with the Aki model to land the Final Flight of the Osiris project.

Square’s ambitions sank the studio: costs went out of control, movie audiences didn’t love the project, and The Spirits Within bombed. They never got to make another full length movie.

The Final Fantasy franchise has always been about creative discontent driving artists to reach for their ambitions. From the Wikipedia article: “Though often attributed to the company allegedly facing bankruptcy, Sakaguchi explained that the game was his personal last-ditch effort in the game industry and that its title, Final Fantasy, stemmed from his feelings at the time; had the game not sold well, he would have quit the business and gone back to college.”

Creator Sakaguchi threw everything he could scrape together at The Spirits Within, and you can tell. Compare it to other CGI from the year 2001. Fiona from Shrek is a great comparison in terms of hair and skin; you’ll notice the lighting and designs are much more stylistic. Pixar’s Monster’s Inc was a contemporary. Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius is contemporary too. The much-humbler and lower-budget Barbie and the Nutcracker also came from 2001 and is more representative of commercial CGI.

These movies are all wonderful in their ways, but The Spirits Within was on a level unto itself. Note the efforts toward naturalistic lighting and realistic movement. Nowadays it looks like a video game cut scene. It compares unfavorably to, say, Death Stranding’s cut scenes, and maybe Baldur’s Gate 3’s in-game rendering. Both of them look more modern in style and quality, but you’d expect that after twenty years. Twenty years! A studio managed to put out a movie that was almost twenty years ahead of what video games would later accomplish.

The Spirits Within took four years for its team to create, amounting to many many terabytes of footage, and what would now be a $200 million budget to achieve. It’s hard to comprehend the kind of machinery it took to create The Spirits Within. They were using Maya and RenderMan, whereas your laptop can spit out the BG3 footage with hardly a fan-spin to recognize the effort.

Back when this movie came out, I was thirteen-years-old. From ages fourteen through eighteen, I was doing 3D Computer Graphic Design classes at my high school, where I ultimately became a teacher’s assistant. We weren’t taught by anyone who knew anything about 3D. Our teacher did photography. The technology was just too new. But they equipped us with Lightwave, Maya-comparable software, and let us loose. I couldn’t possibly overstate the impact seeing The Spirits Within had on my nascent artistic development. I spent those four years trying to create the Phantoms (as well as the Gungan bubble cities from Star Wars). I absolutely obsessed over what Sakaguchi’s team accomplished.

And I wasn’t the only admirer. The motion capture process used for the models was so good, they brought the mocap guy over to Lord of the Rings to work on Gollum. Andy Serkis’s performance as Gollum is definitive; it spawned an entire profession of mocap artists within cinema.

I’ll note that Gollum was photorealistic enough to perform with human cast mates in photorealistic settings. At the time, we thought this would be the future of movies. What’s actually happened is that we mostly use human actors against CGI environments (although this example video also has CGI Stormtroopers). Technology has also since progressed to turn human performances into CGI-tuned simulacra, prominently used for things like de-aging or resurrecting dead actors.

The Spirits Within was a major stepping stone for all of this, though it has now mostly been forgotten.

That’s because the movie really works best as a tech demo. It never gets lost in its story and becomes unselfaware of itself as an historic CGI creation.

Lingering shots on Aki are clearly meant to give us opportunities to admire her vividly realized model. A lot of shots feel unnecessary, mostly because they’re showing us something that is impressive for the technology of the time. And then there are some odd moments where they seem to have edited in shots because they couldn’t afford to do a more expensive angle on the scene (hair was *so difficult*).

Loving work was put into Aki, but the other characters kinda blur together. Many are kept in full-body suits due to the limitations of rendering the complex multilayered look of human skin. The romantic hero, Gray, would be basically indistinguishable from the villain if not for their different costumes. The vehicles and CGI-rendered environments also have a certain sparse sterility that reminds me of the original Mass Effect. Many environments aren’t CGI at all, but matte paintings. These were all necessary sacrifices. But you can tell where the most effort was focused.

The screenplay suffered for this tech demo focus. The dialogue is stilted to the point where it sounds like the English track is a dub — but it’s actually an English original. Great actors do their best to work with it, but it’s b-movie dialogue at best. The story structure is okay. The concept is Studio Ghibli-esque without the detail, humanity, or wonder. Movies at the time had vastly better screenplays. This is somewhere Shrek absolutely trounced Spirits Within. And if you look at recent years of cinema, like the bangers of 1999, you can see how spoiled we were for amazing story.

The marketing also did a disservice to The Spirits Within. They spent a lot of time talking about the photorealism, when that was the goal, but not really achievable. It got a lot of people hung up on the uncanny valley effect. Honestly, I think this is where I first heard the term “uncanny valley.” Moviegoers were looking at extremely sophisticated CGI and told to receive it as film, and that just wasn’t going to work. And they really couldn’t resist sexualizing Aki Ross, who was the first nonexistent person to appear on Maxim’s Hot 100 list. The movie itself is not sexy. People were disappointed on a few axes.

It’s fair to say that The Spirits Within didn’t age well, but that would imply it was good in its time — most people didn’t think so. Roger Ebert appreciated it. I also defended it with the passion only a thirteen-year-old can muster. And while I was absolutely delighted to rewatch it (I still love! it! so! much!), my own thirteen-year-old offspring was deeply unimpressed. This kid regarded it as a bad old video game cut scene, or maybe a project one guy made on his computer on the weekends. And they laughed out loud at the dialogue.

I’m not sure I’d recommend The Spirits Within to anyone who doesn’t have a particular interest in CGI’s relationship with cinema throughout history, no matter how much I adore the movie. And I do. It’s a great piece of mostly forgotten history that has resonated throughout the decades since. A lot of what we love owes thanks to The Spirits Within for its technological stretch.

(image credit: Sony Pictures Releasing)