Age isn’t a disease. It’s a natural progression.

The X-Files

11.9: Nothing Lasts Forever

(SPOILERS) More new blood, and lashings of it too, courtesy of series script coordinator Karen Nielsen, albeit helmed once again by James Wong. A very modern vampire tale, complete with queasy variant on The Human Centipede for good (or bad) measure, Nothing Lasts Forever has two strong guest star performances going for it but little else.

One of those is courtesy of Fiona Vroom as 85-year old former sitcom star Barbara Beaumont, who ensconces herself in her apartment building, cult acolytes feeding on her every word and she feeding on them (or whatever organs can be harvested thereby). The set-up has potential, but the tone fails to find a sure footing; the line between the broad (Barbara loves nothing more than quoting along to her sitcom reruns) and gross elements (pulling the plug from Dr Randolph Luvenis’ surgically attached supply and then moaning about the lack of sustenance of the vitally-drained victim) is a difficult one to walk, and this ends up mostly icky and not really very funny.

Even the hugely winning Jere Burns as Luvenis – anyone who hasn’t seen him in Justified needs to remedy that now – is rather at a loss with what to do. He’s an ideal actor for an X-Files, but couldn’t they have given him a role that amounted to something? Nothing Lasts Forever is essentially riffing on The Hunger as a modernistic, urban vampire take, but with an added entourage, yet lacks an idea of how to juggle its elements successfully so comes across as half-baked.

And most underdone is Buffy stand-in Juliet (Carlena Britch), running through “vampires” with railings plucked from her local church and leaving quotes from scripture at the scene. It doesn’t help that Britch’s performance is wholly unconvincing, but the character herself is entirely cornball.

FBI Guy: Look, we know your rep. You come into a case, take things over, turn it upside down.

Mulder: No, we like to think we uncover facts that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Inevitably, this being in part a rumination on belief and religion, Scully’s entirely tedious and logically askew faith (it makes little sense that Mulder should be the atheist in this partnership) gets an airing (“It’s a prayer candle, Mulder. Not a birthday cake”), and the emphasis on aging – Mulder’s bifocals, Scully’s “Just wait til you get gout!” – as a juxtaposition to Barbara’s quest for immortality is on the crude side. but there are some enjoyable interactions between the pair. Winding up the FBI guys is particularly good value:

Mulder: Stake through the heart, you mean. I would have expected the weapon to be made of wood. A combination of three types used in Christ’s crucifixion. Cyprus, cedar and pine. That would imbue it with the holy properties necessary to defeat evil.

The initial arrival at Barbara’s apartment is also well staged, with Mulder and Scully accosted, the latter pushed down a lift shaft (“You stink”: “Thanks Mulder. My fall was broken by a decade’s worth of trash”), but the arrival of Juliet disappointingly truncates any potential tension in the situation. Nothing Lasts Forever is thematically on point with the series since its return, but that may be the problem. Unless Darin Morgan’s handling them, these themes are invariably outmoded or stillborn.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

I think I’m Pablo Picasso!

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) (SPOILERS) I get the impression that, whatever it is stalwart Venom fans want from a Venom movie, this iteration isn’t it. The highlight here for me is absolutely the wacky, love-hate, buddy-movie antics of Tom Hardy and his symbiote alter. That was the best part of the original, before it locked into plot “progression” and teetered towards a climax where one CGI monster with gnarly teeth had at another CGI monster with gnarly teeth. And so it is for Venom: Let There Be Carnage . But cutting quicker to the chase.

I don’t think Wimpys still exist.

Last Night in Soho (2021) (SPOILERS) Last Night in Soho is a cautionary lesson in one’s reach extending one’s grasp. It isn’t that Edgar Wright shouldn’t attempt to stretch himself, it’s simply that he needs the self-awareness to realise which moves are going to throw his back out and leave him in a floundering and enfeebled heap on the studio floor. Wright’s an uber-geek, one with a very specific comfort zone, and there’s no shame in that. He evidently was shamed, though, hence this response to criticisms of a lack of maturity and – obviously – lack of versatility with female characters. Last Night in Soho goes broke for woke, and in so doing exposes his new clothes in the least flattering light. Because Edgar is in no way woke, his attempts to prove his progressive mettle lead to a lurid, muddled mess, one that will satisfy no one. Well, perhaps his most ardent fans, but no one else.

It looks like a digital walkout.

Free Guy (2021) (SPOILERS) Ostensibly a twenty-first century refresh of The Truman Show , in which an oblivious innocent realises his life is a lie, and that he is simply a puppet engineered for the entertainment of his creators/controllers/the masses, Free Guy lends itself to similar readings regarding the metaphysical underpinnings of our reality, of who sets the paradigm and how conscious we are of its limitations. But there’s an additional layer in there too, a more insidious one than using a Hollywood movie to “tell us how it really is”.

Give poor, starving Gurgi munchings and crunchings.

The Black Cauldron (1985) (SPOILERS) Dark Disney? I guess… Kind of . I don’t think I ever got round to seeing this previously. The Fox and the Hound , sure. Basil the Great Mouse Detective , most certainly. Even Oliver and Company , so I wasn’t that selective. But I must have missed The Black Cauldron , the one that nearly broke Disney, for the same reason everyone else did. But what reason was that? Perhaps nothing leaping out about it, when the same summer kids could see The Goonies , or Back to the Future , or Pee Wee’s Big Adventure . It seemed like a soup of other, better-executed ideas and past Disney movies, stirred up in a cauldron and slopped out into an environment where audiences now wanted something a touch more sophisticated.

The voice from the outer world who will lead them to paradise.

Dune (2021) (SPOILERS) For someone who has increasingly dug himself a science-fiction groove, Denis Villeneuve isn’t terribly imaginative. Dune looks perfect, in the manner of the cool, clinical, calculating and above all glacial rendering of concept design and novel cover art in the most doggedly literal fashion. And that’s the problem. David Lynch’s edition may have had its problems, but it was inimitably the product of a mind brimming with sensibility. Villeneuve’s version announces itself as so determinedly faithful to Frank Herbert, it needs two movies to tell one book, and yet all it really has to show for itself are gargantuan vistas.

Monster nom nom?

The Suicide Squad (2021) (SPOILERS) This is what you get from James Gunn when he hasn’t been fed through the Disney rainbow filter. Pure, unadulterated charmlessness, as if he’s been raiding his deleted Twitter account for inspiration. The Suicide Squad has none of the “heart” of Guardians of Galaxy , barely a trace of structure, and revels in the kind of gross out previously found in Slither ; granted an R rating, Gunn revels in this freedom with juvenile glee, but such carte blanche only occasionally pays off, and more commonly leads to a kind of playground repetition. He gets to taunt everyone, and then kill them. Critics applauded; general audiences resisted. They were right to.

It becomes easier each time… until it kills you.

The X-Files 4.9: Terma Oh dear. After an engaging opener, the second part of this story drops through the floor, and even the usually spirited Rob Bowman can’t save the lethargic mess Carter and Spotnitz make of some actually pretty promising plot threads.

Oh hello, loves, what year is it?

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) (SPOILERS) Simu Lui must surely be the least charismatic lead in a major motion picture since… er, Taylor Lautner? He isn’t aggressively bad, like Lautner was/is, but he’s so blank, so nondescript, he makes Marvel’s super-spiffy new superhero Shang-Chi a superplank by osmosis. Just looking at him makes me sleepy, so it’s lucky Akwafina is wired enough for the both of them. At least, until she gets saddled with standard sidekick support heroics and any discernible personality promptly dissolves. And so, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings continues Kevin Feige’s bold journey into wokesense, seemingly at the expense of any interest in dramatically engaging the viewer.

Three. Two. One. Lift with your neck.

Red Notice (2021) (SPOILERS) Red Notice rather epitomises Netflix output. Not the 95% that is dismissible, subgrade filler no one is watching but is nevertheless churned out as original “content”. No, this would be the other, more select tier constituting Hollywood names and non-negligible budgets. Most such fare still fails to justify its existence in any way, shape or form, singularly lacking discernible quality control or “studio” oversight. Albeit, one might make similar accusations of a selection of legit actual studio product too, but it’s the sheer consistency of unleavened movies that sets Netflix apart. So it is with Red Notice . Largely lambasted by the critics, in much the manner of, say 6 Underground or Army of the Dead , it is in fact, and just like those, no more and no less than okay.

He's not a nightstalker, and it'll take a lot more than bench presses to defeat him.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) (SPOILERS) The most successful entry in the franchise, if you don’t count Freddy vs. Jason . And the point at which Freddy went full-on vaudeville, transformed into adored ringmaster rather than feared boogeyman. Not that he was ever very terrifying in the first place (the common misapprehension is that later instalments spoiled the character, but frankly, allowing Robert Englund to milk the laughs in bad-taste fashion is the saving grace of otherwise forgettably formulaic sequel construction). A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master boasts the most inventive, proficient effects work yet, but it’s also by far the least daring in terms of plotting, scraping together a means for Freddy to persist in his nocturnal pestilence while offering nothing in the way of the unexpected, be it characterisations or story points.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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