Category: TV

Well, here we are, another of these “obligation” articles, where I don’t really have an angle or know what I can usefully say, but it feels like I ought to cover it all the same. Of course, because I put the article off so long, I don’t get to claim credit this time, since The CW’s new Friday the 13th TV series was announced months ago. But, of course, the newly announced series is going to be about Crystal Lake and the legend of Jason Voorhees. To which you’re probably thinking, “Well duh, obviously. What the hell else would a TV series called Friday the 13th be about?”

So there’s that. I don’t know if you remember, but when I introduced my series on War of the Worlds, I went on a little digression whose point was that you could be excused for thinking that the only reason there is a War of the Worlds TV series is because Sam and Greg Strangis wanted to do an Invasion of the Body Snatchers TV series but couldn’t get the rights. Well, sort of a similar implicit story here; Larry Williams and Frank Mancuso, jr. had this idea for a TV series based around hunting down cursed antiques, and they were thinking about calling it The 13th Hour. But then Mancuso suddenly realized that he had the rights to use the name of the popular horror film franchise he’d been working on for some years, and figured that would trick some unsuspecting audiences into watching their ridiculous little show be a better name. So that’s what they called it.

Our old friend first-run syndication is really what rears its head here. See, for the first few decades of television, the networks pretty much had enough power to keep television in line. If your show wasn’t bland enough to appeal to a big ol’ swath of middle America, your show did not get made, because it wasn’t going to get aired.

But in the ’80s, things were changing. It wasn’t going to last long, to be sure, but technology was changing the economics of running an independent station. In 1986, News Corp bought Metromedia’s little collection of TV stations — the remains of the long-defunct DuMont network. These would form the basis of the FOX network. But of course, FOX took several years to spin all the way up to programming a full prime-time schedule. Paramount too was starting to position itself to build what would, though not until the middle of the next decade, eventually evolve into UPN.

There was a perception that network TV, in its march to pander to the lowest denominator it could find, was largely banal and inclined to play it safe. FOX, of course, from its early days tried to position itself as “edgier”, with the crude humor of Married… With Children, and later with the edgier humor of In Living Color. At the same time, there was increasing tension over the impact of violence in the media. That would come to a head when the decade rolled over, but just at the moment, here in the nexus, really the only limiting factors on violence in television were economic. I mean, the FCC would step in if you showed a boob other than Al Bundy, an ass that didn’t belong to Dennis Franz, or said one of George Carlin’s infamous seven words, but in terms of horror-movie gore, it was a lot more vague where the limits were. And this was the decade when cable television really exploded, which put the pressure on broadcast television to push the boundaries.

In reference to Mystery Science Theater, we talked about the tradition of the TV horror host. Now, that was a phenomenon that attached itself to syndicated airings of old horror movies, but there’s a related tradition of horror hosting from the world of comic books. And it’s that tradition that inspired the 1982 film Creepshow, written by Stephen King and directed by George Romero.

The success of Creepshow got TV-makers thinking about the possibility of doing the same sort of gore-heavy anthology horror for television. Of course, Sci-fi/horror anthologies had been a thing already. The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Science Fiction Theater, all those. But we had something new here, going into the eighties. So we take just a pinch of The Twilight Zone, and stir in some of that pre-Code comic book horror, and we do it with a very ’80s desire to push the limits of acceptability.

I’d say “It could only happen in the nexus,” but the truth is that it really started out way back in 1983 with Tales from the Darkside, itself pretty much a continuation of Creepshow. Its very name is meant to remind you of the old EC comics like Tales from the Crypt (Which would, of course, get its own direct adaptation, but not until 1989). For some reason, the one that always sticks in my head is a particularly cerebral one, though, “Going Native”, the story of an alien who comes to Earth as an observer, and slowly lapses into depression as she internalizes the human conditon. Tales from the Darkside ended its run in 1988 and its makers moved on to Monsters, which to a large extent was just a continuation of Darkside, though, as the name implies, it was more monster-oriented.  Weirdly, I can’t remember a single episode of Monsters, though I remember watching it (I found the title sequence unpleasant to watch for some reason). And in 1988, Freddy’s Nightmares would see Jason Voorhees’s main ’80s slasher film rival Freddy Kreuger take a spin as an anthology horror host (I remember quite a lot of these. I always inexplicably freaked out at the Nightmare on Elm Street films, but for whatever reason, I rather liked the series). These shows would push the envelope for just how horrific and gruesome you could get on broadcast television.

But why am I talking about horror anthologies now? Well, mostly because I’m still struggling to find an angle for talking about Friday the 13th. Which isn’t an anthology.

Except that kinda sorta it almost is, but not quite. Friday the 13th the Series can’t really be properly called an anthology because it’s got the same characters from week to week in an ongoing storyline. But at the same time, it’s got a large guest cast, and there’s a lot of episodes where the regulars are really only sort of tangentially involved in the story, and every episode is, first and foremost, a self-contained horror story that’s connected to the rest of the series only at its periphery.

We’ve talked before about the concept of the series but I might as well spell it out here. Lewis Vendredi (The titular “Friday”, I guess), was an antiques dealer who sold his soul to Satan, as you do, gaining the power to magically curse antiques. Uncle Lewis and the hoofed man-beast had some sort of falling out, though, and Lewis breaks the deal, resulting in his death. Model, actress and singer (she had a minor Canadian hit with a dance cover of One Night in Bangkok that came out contemporaneously with Murray Head’s version) Louise Robey (credited as just “Robey”) and John D. LeMay play Micki Foster and Ryan Dallion, distant cousins who inherit the cursed antique shop, and sell off half the inventory before they find out what’s going on. They feel super bad about that.

Chris Wiggins plays Jack Marshak, an occult expert who’d spent years acquiring antiques for Vendredi, somehow not realizing what his old friend was up to. He becomes the de facto leader of the group, using his expertise and experience to help them reclaim an assortment of magical items which generally grant the user some magical boon when the necessary conditions are met, typically human sacrifice.

At the start of the third season, a run-in with Satanists transforms Ryan into a small child. Fortunately, his absentee mother just happens to have recently reentered his life and is happy to take another swing at childrearing. Yes, that does sound stupid. He’s replaced by Steve Monarque as Johnny Ventura, a freelance writer and sort of petty ne’er-do-well. He’s more or less playing the same character, except a little bit more naive and a little bit rougher. His more character-specific plots tend to involve him getting in trouble by yielding to temptation.

The guest cast is also full of familiar faces from the rest of our little wander through the nexus of TV shows produced in Toronto in the late ’80s. There’s a weird tendency to recycle actors as a new character who’s basically just a variation on the character they played previously. Denis Forest, for instance, turns up three times, always as a creepy weirdo. Jill Hennessey turns up three times. Colm Feore turns up twice as a brilliant, pretentious artiste — a choreographer once, and a novelist later. Colin Fox turns up three times, always playing a cunning, ruthless killer. Angelo Ricazos turns up three times, always as a guy who starts out trying not to be evil but who gets twisted by circumstance. Gwynyth Walsh turns up once, as do Catherine Disher, Belinda Metz, and Keram Maliki-Sanchez. Among the guests we haven’t run into yet are David Hewitt, Ray Walston, Enrico Colantoni, Sarah Polley, and Tia Carrere.

I’d hardly call the show formulaic, but there’s certainly a general pattern most episodes follow. The bulk of each episode tends to be devoted to watching the week’s guest star win fame, fortune and/or revenge using a cursed antique powered by human sacrifice. One of our regulars, usually Jack, finds evidence of the location of said antique, through either occult research or happening to read the newspaper on a day when “Bizarre and possibly comical human sacrifice victim found” makes the headlines. They try to acquire the antique, are briefly in danger of becoming the next sacrificial victim, and then take the antique back to the antique store vault after the owner runs afoul of the fine print in the curse’s licensing agreement and gets themself killed, dismembered, transformed into a goldfish, telefragged, or in extreme cases, dragged bodily to hell.

There are, of course, any number of variations you can do on it. The owner might be overtly evil, happy to murder for personal gain. Or they might be an otherwise good person in a desperate situation, such as in “What a Mother Wouldn’t Do”, wherein a desperate mother kills seven people, including herself, to invoke the power of a cursed cradle to save her dying child. Or they might be an otherwise good person who yields to temptation after discovering the curse by accident. They particularly enjoy the pathos of showing someone slowly undo themselves trying to do good with a cursed artifact, say, protecting their loved ones or bringing a villain to justice.  A few of the antiques even display agency of their own and are able to manipulate their owners, such as a tombstone radio in “And Now the News” which even attempts to manipulate the heroes at the end, offering to help them safely retrieve the rest of the antiques.

Our heroes might just show up at the end to sweep up, or they might need to intervene to end the cycle: one common twist is that the heroes are able to trick, manipulate or restrain the owner from holding up their end of the deal, thus causing the curse to backfire. Or they get caught up intimately in events — Mickey has a bad habit of being chosen by murderous antique-owners as the next victim. Other times either owner or victim is someone close to them. Jack’s fiancée, Mickey’s friend, Ryan’s father.

There are a handful of episodes that focus on other elements of the series mythology. Uncle Lewis’s break with Satan turns out not to imply he’s turned face, as his vengeful ghost makes a handful of appearances trying to return to the living world. And there are suggestions of a wider supernatural world: Lewis is revealed as the former head of a powerful coven which continues in his absence to scheme at world domination. Vampires are also a thing that exist in this world, independent of Vendredi’s cursed antiques. And word on the street is that the aborted fourth season would have introduced a subculture of independent supernatural-fighters, and you can almost kinda see this show trying to evolve into some kind of proto-Buffy. Another persistent rumor — no one really knows where this falls on the spectrum of “Someone involved in the production might have kicked the idea around briefly” to “They totally wanted to do it eventually” — is that the original plan was to have the final episode send the gang to Crystal Lake to recover a cursed hockey mask, in order to close the loop on why the show had its comically misleading title.

But the show is frustratingly short on follow-through. Uncle Lewis stops appearing after the beginning of the second season. His coven, though built up as recurring villains, only turn up once. There are occasional hits of romance between Micki and Ryan (They’re only cousins by marriage) or Micki and Johnny, but it never goes anywhere. The third season introduces the notion of three “Books of Lucifer”, whose prophecies endanger the world, but only one ever turns up. At the end of season 2, Micki discovers she has latent magical powers, which she temporarily exhausts her first time using them. It never comes up again.

That’s what I was getting at with that digression about horror anthologies. I get the distinct impression watching Friday the 13th The Series that Frank Mancuso Jr. wasn’t all that interested in an ongoing storyline. What he’s really trying to make is more of a thematically linked horror anthology series about ironically cursed objects, the linkage between them being only a bit less tenuous than in Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders. And that might be the key to understanding what went wrong with his version of War of the Worlds. Because, just as Friday the 13th feels like it wants to be a horror anthology thematically linked by cursed antiques, War of the Worlds season 2 feels like it wants to be a horror anthology thematically linked by alien genocide plots. And just like Friday, most of the individual episode premises are pretty good ideas. It takes very little effort to imagine, say, “Breeding Ground” or “Terminal Rock” being adapted as an episode of ’90s reboot of The Outer Limits. But with War, Mancuso was working with an established, and, importantly, character-driven, series, and his approach isn’t as good a fit there.

It’s widely believed among War of the Worlds fans that their show got the short shrift when it was handed over to Mancuso — that at best, he spent his A-game on the other show, and at worst, he actively sabotaged War. But when you really compare the two shows on an episode-by-episode basis, what becomes clear to me is that Mancuso wasn’t giving War of the Worlds a raw deal. In fact, his approach on both shows was strikingly, remarkably similar. It’s just that War of the Worlds was the wrong show to do that way.

A sci-fi-horror genre anthology style just isn’t quite the right way to continue the story that the first season of War of the Worlds started. It makes about as much sense as doing a cover of a song from a musical about chess at the same time as the original version was still on the charts, without even rearranging the music or anything.

The ’80s were weird.

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• Friday the 13th The Series is available on DVD from amazon.com

I explained some time ago…

It’s June 14, 2005. A 7.0 earthquake off the coast of California prompts tsunami fears, but a tidal (not actually tidal) wave doesn’t occur, there are no major injuries reported, and only modest property damage. Voters in Italy fail to overturn the Catholic country’s restrictive laws on fertility treatments. Michael Jackson is acquitted on all counts of child sexual abuse. Darth Vader is on the cover of the Rolling Stone. The Detroit Pistons beat the San Antonio Spurs 96-79 in game three of the NBA finals. It is a fairly quiet month, all things considered, and I hope you like it here, since we will be back.

It’s summer, so TV is mostly in reruns. Will Ferrell guests on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Pamela Anderson and Bob Saget are on Conan. We’re right around when I started getting too old to care about new music. Mariah Carey tops the charts with “We Belong Together”, followed by Gwen Stefani with “Hollaback Girl”. Kelly Clarkson is on there twice with “Behind These Hazel Eyes”, which I actually do rather like, and “Since U Been Gone,” about which I am neutral. The Killers enter the top ten this week with “Mr. Brightside”, or as you probably know it, “The Killers song that isn’t ‘Somebody Told Me’, but which is still pretty good aside from the fact that the second half of the song is literally just them doing the first half over again.” Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is still in theaters, having opened last month. New this week are the ill-advised Cedric the Entertainer-driven reimagining of The Honeymooners, The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3D, and a spy film called Mr. & Mrs. Smith which has nothing to do with the 1996 spy TV series Mr. & Mrs. Smith nor with the 1941 Alfred Hitchcock comedy film Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Tomorrow, Batman Begins.

But before that, this. I had this whole shtick planned where I was going to pretend that I wasn’t aware of the Stephen Spielberg movie and thought that this was the highly successful big-budget Hollywood blockbuster adaptation of War of the Worlds that came out in June, 2005, with me being all surprised at how great a departure it was for such a famously skilled filmmaker. But then I actually watched the movie, and… This movie does not even deserve the effort it would take to make those jokes. I try very hard to find the good in everything I watch. I can enjoy the basic wrongness of an Ed Wood film, and I can appreciate the zealous glee of a talented actor hamming it up because the script is crap, or an inexperienced actor giving a minor role in a cheap B-film everything they’ve got because they’re just so grateful for the work. And I can appreciate the sheer misguided gall of a Star Trek fan-series doing an episode where the dialog is just straight-up lifted verbatum directly out of an episode of The West Wing. And besides, I’m not a mean guy by nature, and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I’d hate to imagine Tim Dunnigan or Illya Woloshyn or Keram Malicki-Sánchez or Rod Pyle or Joe Pearson happening upon my blog (That last one actually happened) and hearing me badmouth them. And if I didn’t genuinely love stuff like War of the Worlds and Captain Power, I wouldn’t have spent four years doing this.

I just can’t do it this time. Hitler Meets Christ may have been a seriously fucked up movie, but at least you got to watch Jesus shoot Force Lightning at Hitler. But this movie is terrible. Timothy Hines, if you’re reading this, I know you put a lot of work in on this and I’m sure you’re a very nice person, but your film is awful, borderline unwatchable garbage, and it isn’t going to do either one of us any good to pretend it isn’t. The acting is wooden, the dialog is stilted, the visual effects are toddlerish, and the pacing is like Sapphire and Steel had a baby with Star Trek the Motion Picture, and that child smoked a whole bunch of weed while falling into a black hole.

It would be folly to call anything in particular the “worst” sin of this movie, but at least in terms of narrative, the first huge mistake is that it attempts to stay as faithful as possible to the book. If you’ve ever been annoyed by an acquaintance who complains when they change something from page to screen, show them this movie. In fact, show this movie to anyone who annoys you. They’ll probably leave you alone from then on.

What’s the problem with being slavishly faithful to the book? Remember, this is 19th century Science Fiction. Sure, we’ve talked at length about the outline of the book, but what’s the actual plot of The War of the Worlds? A nameless man walks from Woking to London, describing in detail what he sees along the way. There’s hardly any point where any of the characters express any agency. There isn’t much dialog, and when characters do speak, they tend to not engage in actual human speech so much as they pontificate. They open their mouths and exposition falls out. The book is by no means awful, but it isn’t really much of a story. Rather, it’s a fictional history that, for better or worse, has been structured like a travelogue. And you can do something with that. You could, for example, present it as a documentary. That worked really well for The Great Martian War. But you wouldn’t want to try to make a traditional narrative-based movie out of it; that would make as much sense as trying to make a traditional movie out of, say, World War Z.

And it didn’t have to be that way. When Timothy Hines started work on the film back in 2001, the plan was to set it in modern Seattle, orienting the tale around a news correspondent and arming the aliens with EMPs. But then September 11 happened, and the idea of a sudden, shocking attack out of the blue against major American cities suddenly stopped being the sort of thing folks were comfortable putting in a movie. It had, as Wells and Welles once said, “Ceased to be a game.”  So Hines and his colleage Susan Goforth rewrote the movie as a period piece. The film was scheduled for a theatrical release in March, 2005, but, according to Hines, venues pulled out for fear of reprisals from Paramount, which was getting ready to release their own adaptation.

Or maybe they pulled out because the movie was three hours long and basically unwatchable. Three. Hours. THREE HOURS.

The film was recut in September 2005 as H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds: Director’s Cut trimming it to a still-ponderous two and a quarter hours. It was recut again a year later trimming another ten minutes (and replacing some of the visual effects) as The Classic War of the Worlds. I have seen bits of all three versions, but my own innate sense of self-preservation forbid me from watching more than one of them all the way through and I don’t remember which one. Then in 2012, Hines took the footage, added some new material, and edited the thing in to a mockumentary called War of the Worlds — The True Story, purporting to be a documentary of historical events, with the 2005 film’s footage recontextualized as historical reconstructions and archival photography. And I wish I’d found that one first, because it sounds like that might actually be watchable, but I’ll be damned if I watch another version of this movie. Sorry.

There is hardly any point in summarizing the film. Just read the book. It’s all there, in excruciating detail. Most of the film’s dialog is closely drawn from the book, the nameless protagonist providing voiceover narration wherever it isn’t convenient to just have characters recite passage of the text, such as Ogilvy explaining that the apparent “pulsing” of Mars through the telescope is actually just the telescope vibrating due to the clockwork.

But somehow it gets worse when they go off-book. They insert a comic relief scene where Ogilvy, trying to get help upon discovering the first Martian cylinder, gets briefly locked up by a local farmer who assumes he’s gone mad.  Where Wells says, “One night (the first missile then could scarcely have been 10,000,000 miles away) I went for a walk with my wife. It was starlight and I explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her, and pointed out Mars, a bright dot of light creeping zenithward, towards which so many telescopes were pointed,” the movie tries to create a romantic scene. The nameless protagonist and his nameless wife out for a stroll at twilight, him playfully trying to make Mars’s “ruddy cast” sound sexy as he impresses her with his astronomical knowledge as they look up at the—

I don’t even. Night is a thing that actually exists, right? I mean, the filmmakers must have some firsthand knowledge of what night looks like, right? They should realize that night isn’t just day but a few degrees above the treetops the sky instantly turns black, right?

Hardly anything looks real in this movie. And not just the visual effects shots. Lots of the interiors are shot on a greenscreen, I have no particular sense of why. Exterior shots are invariably tinted to suggest the time of day, orange for daytime, and blue for night, these being the only concessions to the concept of day and night as things that exist. It’s basically like they keep beaming back and forth between CSI Miami and CSI NY. An establishing shot of Victorian London uses CGI so piss-poor it it seems to have inspired the Victorian London episodes of Doctor Who. Again, London is a real place, right? I mean, you can actually just go out and take pictures of it? What the everloving—

And it is just so ponderous. I was very glad to do as he asked, and so become one of the privileged spectators within the contemplated enclosure. I failed to find Lord Hilton at his house, but I was told he was expected from London by the six o’clock train from Waterloo; and as it was then about a quarter past five, I went home, had some tea, and walked up to the station to waylay him. — The War of the Worlds, Chapter 3. It takes half an hour for the aliens to actually present themselves, though it feels much, much longer. Before they do, we’re treated to five minutes of the protagonist walking from Horsell Common to the local manor house to ask the local lord to help set up a cordon. He isn’t home, so we’re treated to another five minutes of the protagonist walking back to his own house, waiting until six o’clock, then walking to the train station to meet said lord when he gets off the train. Then walking back to Horsell Common. No one will be seated during the exhilarating “walking back and forth to the train station” scene.

Finally, mercifully, a Martian shows itself… Well okay, I will give them that it is consistent with the description in the book, aside from the fact that it looks for all the world like it’s flying. I know it’s supposed to be walking on tentacles, but there is neither any sense of weight to it, nor any sense that those tentacles actually exist in the same spaciotemporal dimension as the background. Also, the alien is weirdly flat. It feels like it should be mounted on a wall demanding a robot bring it five teenagers with “attitude”.

And then suddenly it’s night and Ogilvy and his entourage are planning to approach the pit under flag of truce. If you haven’t read the book, you basically have no chance in hell of figuring out what the heat ray is meant to look like. To wit, it’s a wobbly mirror. Again, true to the book, the ray itself is invisible. They just wave their mirror around and stuff bursts into flames.

Or rather, they wave their mirror around, and we cut to the victims, and there are some little gold sparklies on the screen, and everyone just sort of stands there for a good ninety seconds looking alarmed and sort of dancing, and then they burst into flames, some instantly turning into still-dancing skeletons that kinda remind me of the skeletons from that high-end porno movie Pirates from a few years ago.

Oh, and one of the victims looks for all the world like being heat-rayed gives her an orgasm.

After what feels like about six hours of people very slowly gurning and not trying to run or anything until the special effects department gets around to drawing some flames on them, the horrified protagonist runs back home, stopping only to chastise some people by the side of the road who, not having born witness to the destruction, think the whole thing sounds a bit silly. This too is taken straight from the book.

I get the feeling that literally all the filmmakers knew about Victorian England came down to “They were kind of repressed and prim.” With absolutely no indication of excitement at all, the protagonist deadpans to his wife this bit of narration: “I must confess the sight of all this armament, all this preparation, greatly excited me. My imagination became belligerent, and defeated the invaders in a dozen striking ways.” She smiles nobly and suggests that it is, “Something of your schoolboy dreams of battle and heroism,” with far less passion but exactly the same sense of this as something that has real consequences for real humans as a Presidential candidate talking about the possibility of starting another war in the middle east.

But shit gets real when their CGI house starts getting grazed by the heat ray and starts dropping CGI bricks and roofing before catching on CGI fire.

We’re almost an hour in before we see a tripod. It’s… Not the worst thing in the world. Still very bad, though. It’s just about passable when it’s not trying to interact with anything. The illusion completely collapses when they do. The curate’s demise looks like something from Photoshop Disasters, and the black smoke is even worse, having, I think, been added in MSPaint. The whole “slavishly translate the whole text of the book verbatum” thing means that this is also the only adaptation to show us the less-common types of Martian machines, such as the flying machine (It serves absolutely no purpose in the story, and is clearly only there because it’s mentioned in the book that they had one) and the “handling” machine that collected humans for consumption.

The scene where we witness the aliens exsanguinating a human victim should be gruesome. And it would be, except that at the key moment, the live actress magically transforms into a low-poly CGI model. Not a model of a human, even, but, like, a ragdoll or something. What I’m getting at here is that this is an intensely ridiculous-looking movie.

But hey, at least the acting is terrible too. When people talk, they rarely seem to be talking to each other, just pontificating for the benefit of the audience. The artilleryman seems to be just reading from a prepared speech (and the protagonist’s abandonment of him is handled in a montage). Most of the dialog is delivered by actors staring vacantly off into the distance, which is terrible, but also probably the right way to do it, since most of the dialog doesn’t actually read like dialog, but rather as narration. Instead of freaking out at their impending demise, people will somberly declare their scientific theories about how Martian technology works or what their strategic plans are. Upon watching the Martians feed, the writer’s reaction is not to wet himself and crawl off into a corner to whimper, but rather to explain through his tears that the Martians, being highly advanced, must have evolved beyond the need for a digestive system. And when, again, as in the book, he finally decides to end it all by throwing himself in front of a tripod (The damned things pick that exact moment to die, forcing us to keep going with this interminable movie), he does so only after declaring his intentions. The single best performance in the entire thing is the newspaper boy who tells the protagonist about the Martian cylinder, excitedly chattering about the possibility of “Men from Mars, roasted alive inside a meteor.”

The tone is radically inconsistent. I assume they’re trying to convey Victorian stoicism again, but mostly, everyone just alternates between bored and a very low-key histrionic (That is, a degree of histrionic that does not interfere with all their dialog sounding like someone reading off a placard at the museum). Possibly the most egregious is any scene with The Writer and The Wife (Played by producer and cowriter Susan Goforth), which I think genuinely tries to suggest affection between these two despite a complete lack of chemistry, a complete lack of anything useful to this end in the book they’re adapting, a strong belief that as Victorians, no one should show emotion unless they’re having a panic attack, and neither one of them being any good at acting. When he returns home after the attack on Horsell Common, she listens to his shellshocked description of events with what’s supposed to be sincerity, but comes off like she’s humoring a small child who had a bad dream. The next day. the two of them apparently go about their business as usual, her, I think, pressing flowers as he reads the newspaper over tea. And though the narration dutifully tells us how compelling the writer found the artilleryman’s plans to build a brave new world, the actual speech is dull and passionless, and the rest of their time together is handled via a montage ending with the writer waving back to him as he walks away.

This movie is kind of a perfect storm of terrible. Bad in practically every way a movie can be (The audio levels are okay. That is the one common low-budget sin this movie doesn’t commit). I hope you can believe me when I say that its low budget is far from the worst of its problems. We’ve talked about low-budget productions before. Some people are able to squeeze out a masterpiece on a tiny budget, and some people can squeeze out… Something that has a kind of indie low-budget charm. You know what you can’t do on a shoestring budget? A three hour special-effects extravaganza. You could maybe do something with intense character-driven drama, but you know what the worst possible way to build compelling characters is? To slavishly adhere to the text of an H. G. Wells novel. Out of the entire cast, there’s only five characters who have names (And that’s counting “Greg the Butcher” and the Writer’s servant, who only has a name so he can shout at her to evacuate the burning house). Everyone else, including the nominal protagonist, is just “The Writer” or “The Wife” or “The Writer’s Brother”.No one was crying out for a completest, novel-accurate adaptation of The War of the Worlds. You couldn’t have given Spielberg this brief and had him turn out a functional movie. It’s just bad. Badly acted, badly written, badly made and a bad idea in the first place.

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• H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds is available in its original 3-hour cut from third-party sellers on amazon.com.
• The two-hour recut, The Classic War of the Worlds is available via Amazon video
• War of the Worlds: The True Story is available via Amazon video.