Sounds Like an Asylum Movie to Me

So, the above image was captured by the Hubble telescope last week, and is assumed to be a green cloud of gas illuminated by a quasar that blinked out of existence some 200,000 years ago. 

The object, given the catchy moniker Hanny's Voorwerp (which sounds more like a top-shelf expenditure in Amsterdam's Red Light District than an astronomical anomaly), is said to be the size of our own Milky Way galaxy, and composed of a 300,000 light-year-long stream of gas. The glowing part is supposedly oxygen, and this nebulous nebula is, by current calculations, 650 million light years from our peaceful planet. So even if it was dangerous - which officials insist it is not - it wouldn't reach Earth for several, several, several lifetimes.

Yeah right.

That's exactly what they would say, isn't it? Of course it's just gas, of course it's harmless, of course it's too far away to be dangerous. Let me pose a question: if this thing's moving so slow, where was it the day before you discovered it? It's green and glowing and 300 thousand light-years long, not exactly the kind of thing that creeps up on you. For all we know, this thing leaps light-years like lily pads and it's just resting up between jumps.  

And maybe I'm being paranoid, maybe I've been influenced by too many science-fiction films, but since when is a glowing green cloud from deep space the size of our galaxy not considered dangerous? Nothing the size of our galaxy is harmless. Blue whales are supposed to be docile things as well; try dropping one on your house. Docile or not, big shit causes damage. 

from www.longhousestudios.com

Of course it's coming for us, this strange radiation cloud, this cosmic dragon that as we pass through it will incinerate everything that crosses its green, glowing line, unless a team of crack scientists can find a way to reflect or some other way thwart the cloud from causing the whole planet to combust. 

And every team needs a leader, preferably a bit of a maverick, a brilliant and well-educated, vastly-experienced rogue who plays by his own rules, isn't afraid to take a risk, and in the end cares more about survival and discovery than fame and fortune. Ooh, ooh, and his ex-wife should be involved. James Van Der Beek and Kristen Miller were born to play these roles, born I say!

Round out the team with a couple of technicians/specialists, roles for folks like Kim Little, Jude Gerard-Prest, Jay Gillespie, Erica Duke, that sort of crew, and maybe even a two-man astronaut crew, valiant martyrs for the greater good, played by Rhett Giles and Griff Furst, just for old time's sake.

Stranger films have been made, but not much stranger things have been discovered.

977's Unsolicited yet Copyrighted Pitch #6: THE MYSTERY OF FLANNAN ISLES

So the backstory is this: in 1900, seemingly in the middle of a meal, all three lighthouse keepers manning the lonely lighthouse on Scotland's Flannan Isles mysteriously disappeared without a trace, leading to more than a century of paranormal speculation and rational investigation that has still yet to produce a suitable and satisfactory explanation of events. Using this historical anecdote as a jumping-off point, I humbly present the pitch for The Mystery of Flannan Isles: A Charles Fort Adventure.

We open with our three, ill-fated lighthouse keepers enjoying the above-mentioned meal. Outside the weather is frightful, a strong storm is blowing off the sea and bringing wind and rain and crashing waves against the Isles' stone cliffs. Suddenly a frightful sound is heard, a cry like screeching metal or something mammoth screaming. The keepers are startled and exit the lighthouse to investigate. At the west landing, they find significant structural damage to iron railings and wooden platforms, too high above sea level to have been caused by waves. Then the sound again, and - without seeing their assailant - we watch the three keepers picked off one by one by something whose appearance turns the expressions of the hardened men to those of terrified children. The men dead, the sound slinks away, the storm rages on unwatched.

Cut to Eastern Europe, a small village in a mountainous range, gypsy-inhabited but for two men, both dressed in the academic fashion of the day, both in their mid-thirties. They are Charles Fort, paranormal investigator, and his assistant, Stanley Pelkington (who I'm picturing being played by Rhett Giles and Jay Gillespie, respectively), and they are here to investigate some supernatural phenomena such as red rain or strange lights, any of the myriad phenomena detailed in "The Complete Books of Charles Fort," (an outstanding read) that serve to introduce the man and his particular field of study, as well as his assistant's rational, scientific, skeptical and Scully-esque counter-approach. As he is wrapping up his research, a cable comes from London informing him on the occurrence at Flannan Isles. His curiosity piqued, they leave at once.

Once in Flannan Isles, CF finds the locals not at all eager to share what they know about the disappearance, any other disappearances on the island or their suspicions as to the cause of the disappearance, almost as though they are guarding a secret for their own, superstitious curiosity. Every small town distrusts outsiders, especially rural citizens against a cosmopolitan denizen like CF, but they are especially distrustful when they are a centuries-old small community isolated from the rest of the world on a small chain of islands in the North Atlantic. So CF will find little help here. His first obstacle is Finn, the caretaker of the Flannan Isles Lighthouse and a former keeper himself, not returned to the job until the Northern Lighthouse Board can find a suitable, more permanent replacement. Finn won't give any details other than to stir CF's preternatural leanings by admonishing that there are some answers better left undiscovered, some things man wasn't meant to be able to understand, only fear and respect. 

CF begins to study his books on local lore and tests or researches the possibilities rational (washed away, murder/suicide, abducted by pirates) and irrational (ghost ship, sea serpent, fabled monster bird) but it isn't until he meets the daughter of one of the disappeared keepers, the lovely lass Siobhan (The 7 Adventures of Sinbad's Kelly O'Leary) that CF becomes convinced the disappearance wasn't a rational thing at all. Seems Siobhan's old man had reservations about taking the job in the first place because of rumors of a ghostly serpent taller than the isles who appears during great storms and tries to smash the island to bits with the fury of waves. This ghost-serpent is supposedly the reason the lighthouse was erected here centuries ago, at the utmost northwest corner of Scotland: to guard the UK against spectral invasion from the wild, unknown, ephemeral Arctic regions. When her dad turned up missing, Siobhan knew the serpent was somehow responsible. Armed with this new knowledge and teammate, CF and crew investigate the creature and - without giving away too many act two and three twists - discover the only way it can be vanquished is to confront it and capture it in a stone reputed to be it's eye hardened to gem once plucked from its head by the lance of a long-ago lighthouse keeper. So Fort must find this stone, then this serpent, then capture it face to face if he is to save the island from its supernatural threat.

The nice thing, I think, about this pitch is the franchise it opens. Charles Fort, as the link above attests, was a real dude, the so-called "inventor of the supernatural," and, cinematically speaking, a kind of Indiana Jones of the paranormal, a Sherlock Holmes of the otherworld. Fort's books provide dozens above dozens of launching-pads for the sort of steampunk paranormal amalgam we saw in Rachel Lee Goldenberg's Sherlock Holmes. In fact, she'd be a great choice to direct this flagship film. She could even co-write with me, if she wanted; I'm amiably collaborative like that.

I'm just sayin'.

observation notes: 2010 Moby Dick

Man oh man have I been looking forward to this."Moby Dick" is my favorite novel of all time, and when I heard it was being adapted by my favorite studio, well, let's just say I've been beside myself with anticipation. I mean, as far as American writers go, Melville's pretty much the Godfather, and "Moby Dick" is his coup de grace, and, in my and many others' opinions, the finest work ever produced by an American novelist. So, some pretty big shoes to fill here. Or should I say "mega" shoes? Let's get into it.

The Asylum's version opens in the arctic in 1969 aboard a submarine on which there serves a young seaman by the name of Jonah Ahab (Jay Gillespie, #1 Cheerleader Camp)(love the addition of "Jonah," as in, that dude in the Bible lived in a whale for a while. in the book, it's just Ahab. but Bales, he's cross-referencing his whale lore. awesome!). On the young Ahab's sonar there is sensed something large and biological approaching the sub. He tries to inform the others, even records it's sound, or song, on a Maxell cassette, but his superior dismisses his suspicions as glitches of equipment and inexperience - that is until that something Ahab detected, a gigantic and ruthlessly aggressive white whale, attacks the sub and body slams it down on the ice shelf, killing the majority of the crew in an instant. Young Ahab, as you would expect, gets out alive, but loses a leg.

Cut to our modern era and the coast of California where Cetologist (whale scientist/actress Renee O'Connor, "Xena") Michelle Herman (get it? Ismael and the last name of the author. brilliant!) and her assistant Pip (Derrick Scott) are recording the songs of her specimens in a purple bikini on a boat cutely named "The Coffin," a reference, no doubt, to the buoyant slab of wood that saves Ismael's life in the novel. 

I'm going to tone down mentioning all the little references to the novel, promise, I just wanted to make the point that this script, whatever else it is, is firmly loyal to the original story. Back to it, now:

Said specimens are responding just fine until something below the surface spooks them and they take off. That something, it's revealed seconds later, is a U.S. Navy Nuclear Submarine, the Pequod, whose crew has breached to request - in a rather forceful manner - the services of our whale doctor and her associate. This request comes on behalf of the Pequod's unseen captain, Ahab, now forty years older.

Cut to a nice little scene here where a whale-watching tourist boat is crushed by the underbelly of the great white whale of sea-faring lore, Moby Dick. More on this in a bit.

Back in the sub, the doc is being briefed by first-mate Starbuck (easy BSG geeks, the name was ours first) about the incidents leading up to her specific, shall we say, acquisition by the sub. Seems there's been a lot of weird whale attacks lately, but not by any ordinary whale, oh no, but by a five-hundred-fucking-foot white whale, a whale like no other, a prehistoric megawhale freed from the arctic and now wreaking havoc off the coast of Southern California. Doc dismisses this as ridiculous, impossible, besides, it's a myth, a legend, no one's ever actually seen this thing. Enter modern-day Ahab (the great, gray Barry Bostwick, Animal House, "Spin City"). Not only has he seen the foul leviathan, he's still got its song on cassette (enter your own "Moby Dick" '69 bootleg/Zeppelin joke here). To Ahab, Moby Dick is no mere myth, no slight story made up and meant to scare sailors, oh no, this whale to Ahab is all too real, he feels it in his phantom leg, and over the last forty years he has become quite insane with vengeance (while still being able to hold down a skippership position with the Navy). He will stop at nothing short of this glorious creature's permanent extinction, and that's where the doc comes in: he's been following her work for years and knows that if anyone can use the song he has on cassette to track the real whale, it's her. Doc isn't too pleased about abetting this violent mission, but when Ahab convinces her all they want to do is stop the attacks on innocents, she's reluctantly in.

On shore, an old seaman buddy of Ahab's, and one who served all those years ago on the same sub Moby Dick made mincemeat of (he lost an arm) is being questioned by Navy higher-ups about Ahab's state of mind. Seems the Navy got pretty nervous when Ahab, on his own, tricked out his nuclear sub to become even more dangerous and formidable, and then they got even more nervous when he ceased to make regular check-ins. Navy realllllllllly doesn't like that. Futhermore, these attacks that have been happening, the ones we know Moby Dick is responsible for, well, no one else believes in a prehistoric whale freed from arctic stasis, so naturally, they're blaming these things on the rogue sub captain with the pimped out vessel. Ahab's buddy is commissioned the responsibility of finding his old friend and bringing him in.

In the meantime, however, another sub on the lookout for the Pequod conveniently chances upon the latter vessel, although before it can take action, in another ridiculously convenient chance encounter, Moby Dick is there as well, honing in on the pinging of the former sub's radar, and quickly making said sub no more. Now it's getting personal.

On shore again, Ahab's buddy interviews the only survivor of the whale-watching debacle, a Russian chick who dispels the rumor it was a sub that attacked them, instead blaming the tragedy on a massive white whale.

The Pequod is tracking that very whale at that very moment in the wake of its attack on the other sub. What it finds first is a truly chilling scene I won't give away here, I'll let you experience it on your own, but I will say it's the most illustrative scene - for me, at least - in regards to the sort of dark tone screenwriter Paul Bales establishes here; this is no mere creature feature, it is, as is the novel, a tale of violently irrational obsession, the most shadowed sector of the human soul, played out against a grandiose and horrific setting in which nature comes to personify man's basest attributes, or something like that. The whale kicks mad ass, takes out a bunch of impressive shit.

From here things only get more harrowing. Ahab accidentally invokes further hostilities from his own Navy, but then so does the whale. This does, however, produce the single greatest scene in cinema history involving a whale and a helicopter, undisputed. But after this, Ahab's battle is two-fold: get the whale before the Navy gets the Pequod.

I'm going to leave the rest for you to discover on your own, but I will say that thus far, Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus still pending, this is easily my favorite Asylum production of 2010, and I say that honestly thinking this year has been their best so far. Everything is upped here - the script, the FX, the direction, the acting; The Asylum is just plain functioning on a higher level here. I loved the shit out of this movie, I honestly did.

Paul Bales' script honors the original, changing very little in the way of the story but to modernize it. The result is a story that maintains the venerability of the novel and blends that with the excitement, suspense and terror of an Asylum flick. It's a flawless thing, this blend, complete with inventive twists and imaginative reworkings of the source material - I'm thinking here of The Coffin, Ahab's second peg leg and the awesome harpoon gun Ahab uses (that, according to bonus features, Bostwick built himself one weekend out of shit in his garage. Awesome!) - that help this ambitious undertaking become realized.

As for FX, the whale looks great, really great: tremendous, vicious, formidable and frightening. The centuries' worth of harpoons embedded in its back is a particularly nice touch. The other FX also, the helicopters and subs and whatnot, look a lot cleaner, crisper, all around better, than they did even a year ago. This is not the work of Tiny Juggernaut, as I expected, but of visual effect supervisor Mark Kochinski, a veteran of "Star Trek" and "X-Files" and, yes, "Xena," who also worked on Titanic II and whose FX can next be seen in Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus, Mega Python vs. Gatoroid and Battle of Los Angeles. Sounds like we're going to be hearing a lot about him in the next year. 

As for the actors, there wasn't a weak link in this chain. All of Melville's characters are here - Ahab, Ismael, Starbuck, Pip, Doughby, Bulkington, Queequeg - and the actors portraying them did so with loyalty to the original but also with the flexibility to make the roles their own. Particular standouts include Derrick Scott, Adam Grimes as Starbuck, Michael Teh (Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus) as Queequeg, and, in too brief an appearance, Mike Gaglio as an officer on younger Ahab's sub. Renee O'Connor is acceptable in her role, but truthfully it isn't big enough or given enough development to really judge. Overall, however, she's vibrant and urgent and it's great to see her in action again.

But the real standout, the irrefutable ace in this deck is Barry Bostwick as Ahab. In a word, the man is simply incredible, the best I have ever seen him, so impassioned, so violently desperate and insanely disciplined. He gets Ahab in a way no one else has, really sees the madman at the root of this guy and lets him run loose. Pound for pound, and I say this with the utmost respect and admiration to the eras of moviemaking that have come before us, Barry Bostwick captures the maniacal intensity of a man behind such a delirious quest at least as well as the late, great Gregory Peck (from the John Huston 1956 adaptation). Let the hate mail commence, but I say stovepipe hats off to the man for a truly wonderful and stirring performance.

Man, I feel bushed after all this. I knew I liked this movie when I sat down to write up these notes, but I don't think I knew exactly how much until just now. I've seen a lot of Asylum movies, quickly approaching all of them, and though I have my favorites - I Am Omega, The Beast of Bray Road, Titantic II - this one in time might take the cake as my absolute favorite. And again, I fully admit I'm biased because a) the book's my favorite, and b) so's the production company, but I truly believe this is a great action-adventure, above par when it comes to story and FX (barring a scene or two at the end when some crew are hiding from the whale behind a rock), and anchored with the utmost capability by a strong, fierce lead performance by Barry Bostwick, in my opinion, again, the best he's ever been. 

2010 Moby Dick  was directed by Trey Stokes, who makes his feature debut here. Mr. Stokes, I'd like to see a lot, lot more. A lot.

Kudos!