Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Creature Commandos, Watchmen Part 1 & 2, Dear Santa

Speaking of current I sincerely keep attempting to do a Christmas horror movie episode, but all this new entertainment keeps flooding my eyeballs and it's hard not to ride that wave. You ready, Let's get it on. I was a DC comics kid. Marvel had a healthy horror line and that's where most of my attention would rest if I was on the other side of the comics divide, but DC

was the appealing one to me. The tone overall was just darker, certainly with my man Batman, even though during the late seventies he was basically James bonding around the globe and fighting ninjas. When that happened, I started getting into the less super heroic amongst the DC titles like House of Mystery or Sergeant Rock Sergeant. My God, what a book that led me to the point of this

stroll down three color print nostalgia lane. Once you get into the Sarge, it isn't a stretch to get into books like Star Spangled War Stories or more importantly, weird war Tales. It was an anthology, Hello, hosted by Death. It was Walt Simonson's first title. Frank Miller got his start there. It was also the title that, near the end of its life.

credit on the New Animated Show. So I just wanted to say their name out loud.

took place during World War II, with the commandos based out of London. They weren't prisoners, by the way. Instead this is a dark mirror image of Marvel's Super Soldier program. Each of the commandos were turned into the creatures. The lineup is Sergeant Vincent Velcrow, which I love. They turned him into a vampire. Warren Griffith became a werewolf, though he doesn't need the moon to change. In fact, he

really has no control at all. And Lucky Taylor, who stepped on a landmine and was Frankenstein back together into Frakenstein. A couple of issues in they'd fuck up a mission and turn a scientist into the Gorgan. She'd fill out their roster. These guys fought dinosaurs and Nazi robots, and

I fucking loved them. So when James Gun announced not only was dc changing its logo back to the glorious seventies version, but the first phase was called Gods and Monsters, and then on top of them, the new DCU would begin with the Creature Commandos.

Come on, Johnny Blaze, I'm counting on you now. Given the shakeup to the Guardians lineup, it was no surprise that these Commandos would have a whole new configuration. I mean, the original Guardians were Starhawk and Major, Victory and Nikki. It was James Gunn that assembled that group that we love right right now. That was Nicole Perlman. No one

ever talks about miss Pelman. She was in the writer's program in the early days of the MCU, and when asked what characters she'd like to write about, she said the Guardians, and they were intrigued enough at her odd ball choice to let her assemble the team, which is what she did. Picking from the two thousand and nine rebooted Guardians, she boiled their fourteen characters down to five and then wrote the first draft of that script. Oh,

it didn't have a Walkman in it. If you think the soundtrack is what makes the Guardians a good movie. You're out of your fucking mind. Gunn has said that the animated versions of these Commando characters and their live action counterparts will be interchangeable, which in fact is really cool because I would actually like to see these actors in these roles. Into the animator's credit, the character models

could very easily be inhabited by the actors. I just want to see them in a movie written by somebody not named gun The animated lineup here are the Bride voiced and I guess played by Indira Varma. Doctor Phosphorus is Alan Tutek. Frankenstein is David Harber. He must have gotten the taste for Frankie with that weirdo Netflix Frankenstein thing he did. Frank Agrillo is Rick Flagg's senior and Sean Gunn as Weasel again and Gi Robot.

of that. It's just a bunch of dicking around, a bunch of lame jokes, a bunch of lame dialogue, some cool set pieces and clumsy flashbacks meant to endear us to the characters, but are so fucking transparent it's genuinely shocking. I'm most likely in the minority on this one. I always seem to be when it comes to James Gunn and Christopher Nolan and Robert Eggers? Am I a snob? Good? I'm not hating just to hate. I think Gun is

the right guy to be in charge of DC. I just want him to loosen the reins and let some other talented people in there who can, you know, make good movies and good TV shows. These are okay, but they should be fucking awesome. DC has all the potential. Did they lead with this because it was ready or because they knew Agatha all along was coming out? I don't know. It's a seven episode show and they've only released the first two episodes, so who knows it might

get great? Is knowing that you're telling a multi episode story letting writers off the hook from writing a f fucking brilliant pilot. What do you think the ratio is for sustained series that you loved that started great versus ones that eased into greatness? I think that's worth considering. If you're high quiet you narcotics officer, what do you think? Listeners? Let me know your opinion, particularly if you're in ealing

in the UK. That's right, it's a bit ripley. I'm calling out the areas in which we're getting a lot of downloads, so we're spot letting ealing this wintery week. How's life annealing? Is it anything like those comedies from the fifties? Let me know? Email is in the description. You better believe I'll read them on the air. Write me a letter, I'll read it. I am not getting you an ink well for Christmas. You can't hold a pen. Those aren't fingers, they're beads. HP. She's at it again,

Thank you HP for the holidays. I'm sending you some thick, juicy steaks. What do you got? Hound Rip's pick puts me in a weird headspace. When I was thirteen, when

I was twenty three, when I was thirty three, I would have died to see any filmed version of Alan Moore's Watchman. Just give me a crumb of visual effects, demo reel anything. The movies plural we're talking about tonight. When they were first announced, my thought was, do we really need another version of Watchmen?

was to be had of Watchmen. The same year that Frank Miller was throttling comic book fan with the notion that Batman could get old and hurt, Alan Moore took a defunct line of Charlton Comics characters and reach with them each gen real world examination of what our world would be like with costume superheroes. The great fuckaroo here being that Allan Moore created the book with the understanding that when it went out of print, the characters would revert back to him. But even in years when the

book wasn't selling, DC kept putting out new editions. Just one of the many reasons Alan Moore now lives on a farm and worships nature deities. I won't say I'm a defender of Zack Snyder's two thousand and nine live action adaptation. I am a champion of that film. As a visual translation from book to screen, it is unparalleled. That world is fully realized, and it has some solid goddamn casting choices. Who else but Jeffrey Dean Morgan could

be the comedian, and what a coup was it? Having Jackie Earl Haley as a roarshack hell Billy cut Up is credible as Doctor Manhattan and Meelan Ackerman is in it, and Matthew Good is miscast. Sorry, Antonio will settle up over on Anthologies attacks next show. He is miscast. They should have cast a Jude Law someone Virol, and that movie manages a minor miracle. The book is sprawling and seemed impossible to adapt. I read the first adaptation of

Watchman in nineteen eighty nine. That was Sam Ham, who had just written the Batman script for Tim Burton. That version jettison so much of the book it was virtually unrecognizable. Then it added an opening prologue that saw the Watchman in action at the Statue of Liberty, failing to stop a terrorist attack. Because you want to add scenes to a story that you're cutting seventy five percent of the

original material out of. Over the next two decades, there were so many boneheaded attempts to turn it into a movie. The main problem is the ending of the book. Every single drest by every single different screenwriter had a newly concocted ending for the movie, including the Zack Snyder version. The difference between those early drafts and what we got was the new ending made perfect sense. The world needs

to be united against a common foe. In the book, Osymandias creates that foe separate from the rest of the action, and it's only revealed in the final pages. It would have been incredibly jarring on screen and quite frankly unnecessary. What better foe is there than Doctor Manhattan. It doesn't excuse the fucking horrendous old age makeup on Carla Gugino, or on Jeffrey Dean Morgan, or the pitiful music choices. Was I making fun of James Gunn earlier, bite my tongue.

And I know Zack Snyder can't allow an actor on set with less than three percent body fat. But Dan Dreiberg is supposed to be a middle aged fat man. Zack, I'm sorry he was fat. So then they released the director's cut. Then they released the motion c you know, panels from the comic with a few images kind of swaying around a little bit while an actor reads dreadful. Then they released the Tales of the Black Freighter anime. Bullshit,

this isn't the order they released them in. By the way, don't email me about shit like this, please, My point being, oh wait no. Then they had that new HBO series set in the events after the comic book that wasn't in the movie continuity. It was the comic book continuity. Then there were a whole bunch of prequel comics that

came out, the comedian Friends with the Kennedys ridiculous. So, like I said, even with Warner Brothers animation at the Helm, the idea of yet another Watchman adaptation was not exactly tantalizing. And this was going to be in two parts. Boy was I wrong? This is it. This is the one. If you want to see a filmed adaptation of Watchmen,

skip everything else and watch these two movies. The voice cast is perfect, there is no one miscast, and because it's two movies, the characters are given the room to actually interact and pause and amote with one another. You see why they like each other and why we like them. And Watchman was always a mystery. Every version has paid a bit of lip service to that. This one pursues it, and even as steeped in the comic as I am, I thought the investigation here was fairly riveting. The adaptation

is by J. Michael Strazinsky. Midnight viewing listeners will recognize the name from his time over on Twilight Zone eighty five. He'd of course go on to create Babylon five. If I've said anything again him in the past, it's mood. Here he's doing a fucking fantastic job, improving on the comic's dialogue wholesale and reorganizing scenes to maximum dramatic effect. And it doesn't skimp on the bits that made the

comic book special. I know Snyder tried to weave in the tail of the Black Freighter comic by literally cutting to a fucking horribly animated version from time to time in the film. It was awful and jarring and took you out of the movie. Watch the theatrical cut of Snyder's movie, if you're going to watch it. The kid

is reading the comic book. Here we've get the kid reading the comic book, and we get close ups of the pertinent panels with narration, But then we cut to other scenes where the comic book word balloons appear over the actions of other characters, and the narration continues. It's a nifty effect, making all the bizarro connections you know that Alan Moore layered in these films retain the comic book's original ending. If you don't know it, I'm not spoiling it because I am very curious to see if

it worked on you. Even in the book, it was tough to get immediately behind, but I swear watching it come to life here, it totally would have worked in live action. It would have been haunting. Actually special shout out to the voice of Doctor Manhattan. That's Michael Servers. He was a Sweeney Todd back when they did that

as a concert. Marvelous singing voice marvelous voice in general, he absolutely nails the detachment in wonder of that character, and Titus Welliver would be a great roar shack in any media. Oh and Katie's Sakoff is brilliant as well as Silk Spector. Look at you, Katie Sakoff, just muscling your way into every goddamn franchise. Good for you? Is she in a Marvel film yet? I'm sure it's on the way. Part one of Watchmen is on Max. Part two is available for purchase, but it'll be on Max

soon enough. I'm shocked I enjoyed it as much as I did. I have quipples about it. I mean, yeah, it would have been nice to have the whole thing animated by hand, or at least given another six months to render into absolute beauty. But the designs are great and the action is solid, and the colors are popping, and I'm gonna shut up. We got one Mornago ripping. Then it's time for a boiled egg. Oh, someone's ears just perked up? Are yours perked up?

she's fucking horrible, horrendous. And because no one but the little girl sees this and no one believes her, she begins to believe that the stepmother turns into a whole other creature. She decides, in fact, that her stepmother must be an alien. Here's a synopsis of the movie they made with Dan Ackroyd and Kim Basinger trying to rescue her home planet from destruction. A gorgeous extraterrestrial named Celeste

arrives on Earth and begins her scientific research. She woos quirky scientist doctor Steve Mills, a widower with a young daughter. Before long, Celeste finds herself in love with Steve and her new life on Earth, where she experiences true intimacy for the first time. Quite a leap. Huh, that's the feeling I got watching Dear Santa. It's about an awkward, misfit, dyslexic boy who accidentally sends his letter to Santa instead to Satan, and Satan shows up and will grant three wishes,

at which point he'll own the kid's soul. And the kid's parents are on the verge of splitting up, and the girl he likes is an interested and his best friend has horrendous dental problems. Everything I just described appears in this movie. Think of all the promise in those premises. I'm not the biggest Fairly Brothers fan, but if they had made this in the nineties, it would have been

the raunchiest Christmas movie ever made. I'd expect a movie whose plot is predicated on a joke about dyslexia would have a black heart at its center. Instead, it's a gentle Christmas movie. They want to actually tug at your heartstrings instead of ripping them out, which is what the movie really wants. This isn't a Genie or the Ghost of Christmas whatever. It's the fucking devil, and the only mischief he can think up is making the officious prick

of a teacher fart a lot. I get it, it's a kid's movie, but there's no reason to invoke our dark Lord if you're not gonna let him run riot. They may as well have animated a snowman or one of those fucking elves from the mystic Land of Shelves. If you want to see what this movie actually wanted to be, go check out the segment The Knight and Billy Raised Hell from the anthology film Tales of Halloween. It's directed by Darren Lynn Boozman the repo genetic opera Fella.

It's about a young boy who's goaded on by Satan to commit worse and worse tricks on the community during Halloween. It's a fucking spectacle and it has way more spark in a few seconds than this entire flick. I think a movie about Christmas dealing with outsiders and fractured families and grief could be great, fucking necessary actually, and this film is trying, but there's just too much weight and the guys behind Stuck on You aren't exactly up to

the task. And clearly a bunny movie between a nine year old and Satan is a great idea. This film does have its charms. The kids are uniforms Disney kid over eagerness, and they're really natural. And Keegan Michael Key shows up is one of the film's view antagonists. And Jack Black is having fun, but he tends to do that no matter what he's in. So maybe do something better next time, Jack, Maybe next time we'll do a Christmas horror movie. We really shouldn't be keeping Joan Collins waiting.

Thank you Midnight viewers for lending us your ears. If if you want these episodes early and commercial free, head over to patreon dot com slash follom alone. Subscribers will also get bonus content HP. This show's composer and host of his own fantastic podcast Night Mister Walters, a taxi podcast, will be joining me on some of those shows, and

we're pretty excited about them. Those will only be for the Patreon listeners or if money is tight tight this is Christmas, then you can make my Christmas wish come true by giving us five stars and giving us positive write ups and sharing the show and telling other people join us this Thursday for a new Anthologies attack. I think we're doing pink flamingos on that episode, which is going to be a blast. Until next time, we'll leave you with a bit of wisdom from Watchmen.