Project X (1987) + The Accused (1988)

PROJECT X
(PG, 20th Century Fox, 108 mins., theatrical release date: April 17, 1987)

The Roger Corman Academy is known for turning out some formidable directors back in the 1970s: Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante, Ron Howard, and Jonathan Demme (R.I.P.). But the most ignored of them has to be Jonathan Kaplan, which is a shame because he has a skill with economy that could've only come from filming on the cheap and tawdry. Scorsese himself broke Kaplan into Corman's good graces, which resulted in the sexploitation efforts The Student Teachers and Night Call Nurses. Then he directed Jim Brown in The Slams (for Roger's brother, Gene Corman) and Isaac Hayes in Truck Turner (for AIP). In 1975, Kaplan delivered a B-movie hit for Columbia with White Line Fever, only to bomb two years later with the Terence Hill vehicle Mr. Billion.

The failure of that film must have caused some apprehension amongst the majors, because nobody paid attention when Jonathan Kaplan rebounded in 1979 with what I consider one of the greatest teen angst movies of all time, Over the Edge. Funded by Orion Pictures and starring both Matt Dillon and Vincent Spano in their debut roles, it should've restored the Parisian Kaplan to the top of the B-list. Over the Edge was instead handled with kid gloves due to the controversy kicked up by Walter Hill's hoodlum-rousing The Warriors. It got buried as a limited release, only to reemerge in 1981 through the festival circuit and HBO. By 1983, Kaplan got his chance to return to the big screen, after a trio of TV movies, with Heart Like a Wheel, a biography of drag racer Shirley Muldowney which netted Bonnie Bedelia a Golden Globe nomination.

Much of what Kaplan did in the aftermath of Heart Like a Wheel wound up on MTV, since he directed videos for Rod Stewart ("Infatuation," co-starring White Line Fever actress Kay Lenz, and "Lost in You") and John Cougar Mellencamp ("Lonely Ol Night," "Small Town," "Rain on the Scarecrow"). Which leads us to PROJECT X and THE ACCUSED, two of the topical dramas which were among his last feature directorial efforts of the 1980s. Kaplan graduated from Corman's fringy New World Pictures to a pair of heavyweight production teams responsible for some substantial blockbusters. Project X came from Walter F. Parkes & Lawrence Lasker, whose WarGames managed to conquer a sizeable chunk of the summer of 1983. The Accused came from established mogul Stanley Jaffe and his partner Sherry Lansing, as well as Paramount head Dawn Steele, who boasted the second-biggest hit movie of 1987 with Fatal Attraction.

From what I've researched, Project X is loosely based on real accounts of the U.S. Air Force having exposed roughly 3,000 rhesus monkeys to radiation far beyond the standard lethal dose in order to gauge human endurance during a nuclear war. But there was a larger controversy involving Kaplan's own dramatization when the Los Angeles Department of Animal Regulation, as spurred on by TV personality Bob Barker and the United Activists for Animal Rights, investigated an alleged 18 felony counts of animal abuse from several trainers. This went against the reports of the American Humane Association, who were officially active during filming, but Barker pressed on by going public with photos from the set which he believed showed chimpanzees being threatened with blackjacks. He was hit with a multimillion defamation suit from the AHA which was settled for $300,000.

Project X's lukewarm reputation has not been helped by being caught in such a scandal, and one might be tempted to view the movie with eagle eyes to see if the chimps' behavior may have been provoked by blunt force stimuli to validate what some claim is hearsay and others harmful. All I can say is that the movie did work on that visceral, primal level which helped make Over the Edge such a surprise.

The film pivots on one simian actor, Willie, in the role of Virgil, who is captured from his jungle habitat and put on the black market. He eventually lands in the care of Theresa "Teri" MacDonald (Helen Hunt), a grad student at the University of Wisconsin's psych department. Her intentions are to teach the playful animal sign language, although she strikes up a friendship with Virgil which ends once her grant is cancelled. She is told Virgil will be moved to a Houston zoo to receive proper care, but given his innate desire to fly, fate detours Virgil to the Strategic Weapons Research wing of the U.S. Air Force in Lockridge, FL.

His ‘sapien counterpart is Jimmy Garrett (Matthew Broderick), an insubordinate airman who is grounded against his will and assigned to the "Experimental Pilot Performance Project" at the Lockridge laboratory. It would appear that Garrett's ultimate goal is to innocently teach Virgil and the rest of the caged primates how to master a flight simulator, but Garrett notices the morale of his fellow draftees, Isaac Robertson (Johnny Ray McGhee, Kaplan‘s A-1 regular) and Watts (the great Stephen Lang), calcifying into stony silence. And he's picked up on Virgil's aptitude in talking with his paws, forming a bond just as deep as the creature once had with Teri. So when Garrett takes Watts' position as "lord of the apes" and is granted clearance to witness the end results of the chimps' VR air travels, he too is rattled by the radioactive death sentence Dr. Lynnard Carroll (William Sadler) has planned for the primates.

WarGames found Broderick, as the teenaged instigator David Lightman, in a race against the machine, one designed to simulate extreme and destructive conditions (like the arcade-friendly flight cabinets in Project X) but working of its own rationale and buying into the non-existent threat of "Global Thermonuclear War" with missiles bared and ready to launch. Project X renders the recycled peril a frigidly manmade decision as opposed to mechanical (Sadler, playing the first in his singular repertoire of chilly antagonists, specializes in evasively academic validation) and doesn't shy away from the physical casualties. However, it is also comparatively lighter in the lead-up to the nefarious reveal, with composer James Horner offering a dry run of the sounds that would make Titanic unsinkable a decade later and some cute monkey business in which Virgil's cellmates pick up on less civil gestures than the domesticated hero, who clutches a toy alligator in his first encounter with Garrett.

Jonathan Kaplan keeps a commendable pace before and after the 42-minute mark, the point where Garrett's affable naiveté as caretaker is shattered by his powerlessness upon witnessing the "graduation" ceremony for Bluebeard. Matthew Broderick, subdued in a way that must have thrown his Ferris Bueller fan base for a loop, adapts to the material with his reliably superb wits and expressiveness. Having been established as a miscreant, wheedling a ridiculous excuse for treating a girl to a champagne-fueled night flight, Garrett asks the right questions about the illogic of the experiments (namely, that a human pilot's knowledge of impending death is unlike how a chimp thinks) to get him fired by Dr. Carroll. He reaches out to Teri in fear but just as cravenly tries to take his mind off the horror by getting drunk and playing poker at an Air Force tavern. Just as excellent as Broderick is co-star Willie the Chimp as Virgil; when he discovers the frightening truth, his shrieks of alarm startle the viewer as much as it does Garrett.

Aided by master cinematographer Dean Cundey, Kaplan offers no-frills contrasts underlining the remoteness in Garrett's environment as another freshman to the project receives the same routine from Sgt. Krieger (Jonathan Stark, of Fright Night and House II: The Second Story) he once gave Jimmy. The movie does succeed at its stated goal of making the chimpanzees as intelligent as the humans, and there is a moment where the chimps in the vivarium taunt and stare at Dr. Carroll that is like a moment of eerie calm before they act upon their primal rage. The biggest hurdle in the story comes when Garrett and Teri lead the monkeys on their escape, a moment of uplift which allows Virgil to realize his wildest wish (as well as for Garrett to echo the misdemeanor which busted him down to the project) at the expense of credibility. Yet Kaplan's sleek effectiveness gives what could have been shameless melodrama a potent urgency, and both sets of actors are handled with care.

As a fan of Kaplan's Over the Edge, I suggest one watch out for appearances by Daniel Roebuck, who made a strong impression in OE scriptwriter Tim Hunter's River's Edge, as well as the two leads of that that ‘79 film, Michael Eric Kramer and Pamela Ludwig, in minor roles. Peter Gabriel's oft-misinterpreted "Shock the Monkey" (which literally happens at one point during the finale, as Dr. Carroll futilely tries to control the escalating revolt) is deployed for the opening credits, which leads to a cameo by none other than Dick Miller.

THE ACCUSED
(R, Paramount Pictures, 111 mins., theatrical release date: October 14, 1988)

Inspired by the New Bedford assault case of Cheryl Araujo from 1983, The Accused is the adult flipside to the family-oriented science fiction of Project X, a fight for autonomy from the perspective of a rape victim instead of a lab animal. Sarah Tobias (Jodie Foster), who is as uncouth as Goliath but graced with enough integrity as Virgil, is a low-class waitress who decides to release a thick cloud of steam from a domestic quarrel by visiting her best friend at a roadhouse dive, The Mill. One thing leads to another, and soon Sarah, her senses weakened by casual marijuana and alcohol use, is sexually assaulted by three men on a pinball machine in the recreation room, a rowdy batch of yokels egging them on. This is staved off until the final act, though. Kaplan begins at the climax, fixating on the Mill's freeway-stationed exterior for the main credits, followed by Sarah bursting out of the front door in obvious distress, hitching a ride to the hospital where the doctor inquires about her recent bouts of intercourse and whether she carries a venereal disease.

Birchfield County Deputy D.A. Katheryn Murphy (Kelly McGillis) appoints herself Sarah‘s prosecutor, but the battered client poses a huge risk as a case subject. Outside of being stoned and intoxicated, her ordeal could be cheapened by such looming double standards as provocative dress and flirty banter, the latter Sarah doesn‘t confess to until far too late in the investigation. To the goons who were there, Sarah was obviously teasing and putting on an exhibition; this "consensual" chauvinism is paralleled by Ms. Murphy's chief executive boss, Paul Rudolph (Carmen Argenziano). Leveling a lesser charge of reckless endangerment at the plea bargain, Murphy commits a flagrant offense to Sarah by denying her a proper courtroom recounting. It isn't until after Sarah has an unpleasant encounter with her aggressors' head cheerleader, Cliff "Scorpion" Albrect (Leo Rossi), and rams his pick-up truck in retaliation does Murphy seek a proper legal statute to go to trial with: criminal solicitation. "No deals," the women finally agree to demand in a precedent-setting act of litigation which will set the record straight.

There is transparent foreshadowing when Ms. Murphy and Lieutenant Duncan (Terry David Mulligan) consult the initial rape case with Mr. Rudoph while watching an ice hockey game, where the violence is expected to be cheered if not goaded on by the carefree spectators. Barmaid Sally Fraser (Ann Hearn) is only good for pointing out Scorpion and the two other aggravators; she provides unflattering truths to Murphy about Sarah's carnality and fled the scene of the crime without so much as an anonymous call. The only significant testimony could come from Ken Joyce (Bernie Coulson), the college student who has kept a sullen distance since reporting the gangbang. Murphy gets to him, but Ken becomes reluctant to take the stand once he's aware that his frat buddy, Bob Joiner (Steve Antin), will be indicted for the rape Ken knew he'd committed and serve the full prison sentence of five years.

In its own generous if grueling way, The Accused is a fitting reprise of the major theme of Project X, as studied complacency stirs a righteous call for justice. For Sarah, defiantly regaining her self-confidence by kicking out her dealer/musician boyfriend Larry (Tom O'Brien) and cutting her hair so as to resemble a trailer-park Laurie Anderson, it's the betrayal of her lawyer and the badgering of that odious bystander which activates her sensitivity to the beleaguered Ms. Murphy and the frightened Ken. Murphy's patronizing careerism gives way to bold humanity by acknowledging an equally independent, gutsy soul as vulnerable as she is unrefined. And Ken, the silent witness, selflessly experiences a moral awakening in distinct opposition to the nasty machismo of Bob and Scorpion.

The Oscar-winning Jodie Foster plays Sarah so phenomenally close to the bone to that it would seem to elbow out the solid work of Kelly McGillis (Witness, Top Gun) and "newcomer" Bernie Coulson, a Canadian actor who did one notable exploitation role as aggressive townie Jimmy Cullen in Paul Lynch's Bullies. McGillis does live up to her character's given name by turning in a performance as exquisitely composed as Kathryn Harrold (cf: Modern Romance, The Sender). Kaplan directs both the moodily blue-eyed Coulson and even schlock stud Steve Antin (that conspicuously gay monotone aside, it's his best work to date) within their element. The plot's true catalyst is Scorpion, the most boisterous of the six indicted cretins, embodied with disturbing gusto by Leo Rossi (Heart Like a Wheel, River's Edge, both Halloween and Maniac Cop's first sequels).

Foster, 25 at the time and painfully self-conscious, found herself at the second wave of her career but with trepidation about the alchemy of her character. It's a confidently heartbreaking portrayal, built from offhand sheepishness and bravado but suffused with a lonely pathos Tom Topor's script and Kaplan's more stylish camera seize upon. After returning to the Mill with Murphy and Lt. Duncan to locate two of her violators, Sarah is driven home and, her voice still cracked, asks whether her face looks good. She tries reaching out to her mother, who is typically frigid, hoping for a vacation which will allow her to recompose herself. The fact that Sarah's vanity plate reads "SexySadi" is tempered by the discovery that it's referring to her pet cat. The one subject she does have deep-seated knowledge about, astronomy, is cathartic rather than insular, especially since Sarah is not your average dippy star child or grotesque palm-reader.

When The Accused takes us to "show time," reconstructing the night of April 18 from Ken's confessional, it is very unpleasant and charged with a volatile sexuality brought on by Sarah's cocksure cock-teasing. Entertaining it is most certainly not, given one does not defend the predominantly piggish male crowd, but it is effective given the degree of character investment we've been spoiled with. You know enough about Sarah to realize she's flawed and fascinating, but the test which arrives 30 minutes near the end is whether you can deny the "blame the victim" outlook and perceive not just the three-pronged crime of forced entry, but also of excessive verbal abuse. Jonathan Kaplan puts us in Ken's horrified position over by the arcade on that night and as well as under oath (it pains me to consider Bernie Coulson another case of drug-addicted showbiz insouciance, since he is so capable under Kaplan's guidance).

Since his career peak with Over the Edge, Kaplan's ability to spin sensationalism into gold has been taken for granted. Both Project X and The Accused confirm that his talent runs deeper than most people have given him credit for. Whether it's restless teens banding together to send a destructive message to the PTA or a reckless young adult who commands our sympathy if not our pity in the wake of a degrading molestation, Kaplan paints broadly but knows well enough to keep a can of gray primer at his side. More so than the populist Ron Howard or even brilliant formalist Martin Scorsese, Kaplan is both accessible and resonating. That his fortunes waned after Bad Girls (1994) and Brokedown Palace (1999) is Hollywood's loss as much as it is ours. Give him some of our brightest contemporary talent and a worthy script again, and maybe we can all flash that signature Roger Corman grin.

Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight

TALES FROM THE CRYPT PRESENTS: DEMON KNIGHT
(R, Universal Pictures, 92 mins., theatrical release date: January 13, 1995)

Interior: a bloodied bedroom at night. The camera glides across the scene of the carnage as a buxom blonde in black lingerie phones her illicit lover, Jack, to break the good news. The woman has just planted an axe in the chest of her wealthy husband, Carl, and is writhing passionately on the bed, orgasmic in her description of the dirty deed. As Carl is soaking in a vat of acid down in the basement, the murderess draws a hot, soapy bath, unaware that she is in an E.C. Comic version of reality where the dead don't lie still for very long. Placing a hot towel over her eyes, she cannot see Carl's grisly corpse is approaching with an axe of his own to grind.

Unfortunately, the only cut is off-screen, as it is yelled by the director of this tawdry tale, none other than your old pal, The Crypt-Keeper (reliably voiced by John Kassir). He is not too pleased with the "hack-ting" of guest star John Larroquette as zombie Carl, tossing off a couple more puns in anger before calling for a reset. That this moment occurs after we've seen the familiar opening credits sequence of the HBO series Tales from the Crypt, replete with downstairs tour and Danny Elfman's jaunty theme music, seems to tell us we're not getting the same old slash-and-jive familiar from the TV scream.

Nope, the Crypt-Keeper's gone Hollywood, and is taking his show to the sinner-plex. Okay, I'll stop, which is coincidentally what happened to the Tales from the Crypt Presents banner after just two widely-released movies.

The 1980s was the decade of the horror anthology revival, which went full throttle both theatrically and on television. Not only was there a Twilight Zone: The Movie released by Warner Bros., but there was a New Twilight Zone developed for CBS. Warner also distributed 1982's Creepshow, the George A. Romero/Stephen King collaboration which kicked off the trend, with its own unofficial, syndicated spin-off in Tales from the Darkside, which was also made into a movie. However, by the time it was released in 1990, its popularity was eclipsed by Tales from the Crypt, which came from the same pay-TV channel who brought you The Hitchhiker and was produced by the some of the biggest wigs in the biz: Richard Donner, Walter Hill, Joel Silver, and Robert Zemeckis.

The series premiered in June 1989 with three back-to-back episodes which boasted these blockbuster directors (excluding Silver) offering their own personal spins on William Gaines' controversially lurid EC Comics. The series would go on to court fellow superstars like Michael J. Fox and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who would each direct their own episodes, and revolving door talent in front of and behind the camera helped keep the show fresh on a weekly basis. In short, Tales from the Crypt established a successful blend of irony and scatology, reveling in cheap thrills and cunning comeuppances for several years.

However, the inaugural Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight was not an adaptation of a previous story from the Gaines library. It was written as early as 1987, and was initially offered to filmmakers Tom Holland and Mary Lambert, both of whom were drawn to ill-fated projects like Fatal Beauty and Pet Sematary Two. Before it even made it to Joel Silver, it was passed along to schlock horror impresario Charles Band and his Full Moon Features label. Demon Knight was meant to be the second of the mythical Crypt movie trilogy, with Donner, Hill and Zemeckis developing their own separate entities. Universal Studios, who initially green-lighted all three planned projects, ordered this as their first.

Things didn't quite work out that way, as Donner's "Dead Easy" and Hill's "Body Count" never came to fruition. The former was name-dropped as a post-credits stinger, essentially becoming the working title of what would be Bordello of Blood, a box-office stiff. As the seventh and final season emigrated to Great Britain, Tales from the Crypt was clearly on its way out. The final episode adapted The Three Little Pigs, itself originated in English literature, as a decidedly Mad Magazine-style cartoon which was even more puerile than Green Jellö.

Although the opening tracking shot evokes Zemeckis' early "And All Through the House," the maker of Forrest Gump doesn't fully influence the final project in the manner of, say, Mr. Spielberg. The director of Demon Knight is Ernest Dickerson, a famed cinematographer known for the early Spike Lee "joints" from She's Gotta Have It to Malcolm X. Dickerson made his feature debut with the ghetto drama Juice (1992), which starred Tupac Shakur as an unstable, Cagney-worshipping thug named Bishop(!) who homicidally threatens to derail his friend's promise as a star DJ. After that, it became clear that Dickerson's directorial career was less informed by Do the Right Thing and more by the less incendiary, genre-friendly yeoman's work of Def by Temptation.

This is the Ernest Dickerson of Surviving the Game and Bones, refashioning familiar B-movie scenarios into much livelier if no less disposable entertainment than any handful of low-budget/direct-to-video hacks. The plot as it stands is a straightforwardly apocalyptic knock-off of Night of the Living Dead, pitting good vs. evil and placing a disparate bunch of stereotypical bystanders under siege from the supernatural.

The mysterious adversaries at its center kick off Demon Knight with a car chase as our eventual hero Brayker (William Sadler) fervently unloads a shotgun at his tracker, a demon prince known only as The Collector (Billy Zane). Both vehicles explode into fiery wreckages, but Brayker crawls toward a head start into the next town, Wormwood, New Mexico, where he unsuccessfully tries to steal a truck parked outside a diner. Escaping authorities, who are tied up with the crash and The Collector's damage-proof survival, Brayker runs into the friendly neighborhood lech, Uncle Willy (Dick Miller), who takes him to safe haven at The Mission, where all that's missing is a welcome bell.

Also among the denizens of this Villa of the Damned are sassy proprietor Irene (C.C.H. Pounder); loveless prostitute Cordelia (Brenda Bakke) and her regular client Roach (Thomas Haden Church); a disgraced postal clerk named Wally (Charles Fleischer); and work-released housekeeper Jeryline (Jada Pinkett Smith), who will reveal herself as a purer soul than her equally hard-boiled hosts, most of whom turn stool pigeon on a dime. For instance, since Wormwood's such a small world, Irene intuits that her latest customer is the car thief Roach mentions and calls Sheriff Tupper (John Schuck) and Deputy Bob (Gary Farmer) on the scene, with The Collector in tow.

Just what is it that this chrome-domed, cock-of-the-walk Occultist covets? It's a combination key and vial filled with holy blood that in the right hands can be used as a weapon against evil, and the worst case scenario being that it could be used with six other keys for the same evil to take over the world. The Collector is foiled in his acquisition, and one memorably sick decapitation later, he conjures an army of green-eyed Pumpkinheads to lay waste to his human enemies. As Brayker spills his magical plasma to barricade the windows and doors, The Collector dutifully possesses the weak souls of his captives, and in turn spills their blood as punishment.

Whereas Night of the Living Dead had a palpable sense of friction and social awareness, Demon Knight condescends to juvenile degrees even Tom Savini resisted in his straight 1990 remake. It wouldn't be a Tales from the Crypt movie without a moment in which one character's temptation is lifted straight out of a beer commercial, where the girls are topless and the booze bottomless (but not the other way 'round...this is R-rated, after all). In the film's most refined moment of black comedy, Irene gets her arm ripped off by a crazed Cordelia and is later offered it back on a silver platter by The Collector, to whom she lifts up her stump as a means of flipping the bird. There's even a lost boy thrown into the mix, Danny (Ryan O'Donohue), the same tot who scared Brayker away from the diner, who reads a poisoned issue of Tales from the Crypt which takes him over, the subsequent chaos mirrored in the panels of the book.

Dickerson keeps the slime and splatter flowing in a rather futile attempt to cover up the utter senselessness of the scenario. There is a puzzling moment where one of Brayker's force fields is shotgun-blasted out of commission by the noxious Roach, thus allowing the demons easy passage. Whilst Roach will later betray the rest of the survivors by scrubbing off the blood which bars the demons, that violation of safety at least seems credible. But if a gun can shatter the blockade like it were plate glass, you'd presume The Collector could help himself to the weapons in the cop car and get at his victims a lot easier. Not that there is a rationale for how The Collector does manage to return to inside the motel; he just shows up without even a dramatic entrance.

Equally flimsy are the limitations imposed on the good guy, Brayker. There are seven stars burned into the palm of his hand, each meant to represent someone he is forced to guard, and if all seven die, Brayker apparently loses. If he runs out of good blood, he loses without even them taking the precious Key ("They bring back the darkness...just like that"). Forced into explanation, he screams, "God damn it! I'm not making these rules up!" Nope, he didn't, but three flailing screenwriters certainly did, and they generalize Genesis to such a degree that the name "Jesus" is never once intoned even with obvious crucifixion flashbacks. And if Brayker is supposed to protect these seven flakes, maybe the joint suicide bombing of Irene and Bob which happens later is a huge mistake.

On a purely pulpy level, though, Demon Knight has plenty going for it. Billy Zane imbues sinister charm and glee into the role of The Collector, owing more to Beetlejuice than Freddy Krueger as he taunts his foes ("You're not worth the flesh you're printed on!") and croons disingenuous come-ons to first Cordelia and then Jeryline. Jada Pinkett Smith proves her mettle as a feisty heroine, although her best moments are built-in to the film later on in typical Final Girl fashion. However, it's William Sadler's resolute, ravaged lone wolf which keeps the action credible and the stakes high. As adept here as his Niles Talbot was in Walter Hill's first season Crypt episode "The Man Who Was Death," Sadler conveys a universe of intensity and ferocity in both his gritty delivery and behind blue eyes.

The rest of the supporting cast perform duly to their strengths, with C.C.H. Pounder's brassy matron and Thomas Haden Church's yellow-bellied braggart the clear highlights. Dick Miller is a delight to spot in dutiful "That Guy" fashion, but Dickerson never deigns to showcase him with as much invention as Joe Dante would allow, and Charles Fleischer's simpleton is the butt of a particularly lame topical joke which posits him as yet another budding psychopath.

Although the demons themselves are impotent enemies, as a lot of the killing comes from possession-and-dismemberment routines straight out of The Evil Dead, Todd Masters and his FX team have a field day with their creations, all drippy flesh and eyes as brightly green as Herbert West's reagent formula. There is also a hasty if spectacular farewell to The Collector which is a practical tour de force.

Unlike Wishmaster, which stained too hard to live up to Fangorian standards with very little to show, Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight is a distinctly mediocre thrill but nevertheless spirited where it counts. Putting it in context of its televised antecedent, though, it's a shame that both this and Bordello of Blood were such warmed-over, secondhand premises for which to launch a theatrical franchise. Given that its producers were responsible for gems such as The Warriors, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Superman: The Movie, the lack of imagination on a conceptual level is frustrating. But this first attempt proved to be it's most satisfying, especially compared to its desperately campy follow-up.

To be continued, Creeps...