Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Wolf Man, Star Trek: Section 31

to HP for that theme. What are we talking about this week?

go potty? And he turned and he said, didn't you mean the lou And I said no, I meant potty like a brat would use because you're a fucking brat. And then we both said see you next Wednesday, bitch, and I thought we were going to kill each other. But it turns out that that Freaky Friday movie was right. If you say the same thing at the same time

with the same intent, it causes magic. Except if you say see you next Wednesday at the same time, it conjures up John Landis and he just immediately starts talking about Lon Cheney. It diffused the situation, and I'm thankful, But man, he made us watch Kelly's Heroes and he did a running commentary. Oh he was exhausting anyway. Speaking of werewolves, this would have been Rip's picked this week if I could have smuggled her into the theater to know.

Neither your brother nor sister are interested in forming a pantomime human to sneak into movies with you. Wait wait, Norman says he'll do it, but he wants to be the head and shoulders. I'd actually love to see that. You'd be like some kind of wolf man.

that was Universal Pictures. The literal murderer's row of boogeymen they gave us would come to symbolize horror in the twentieth century. Dracula, Frankenstein, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Invisible Man, The Phantom of the Opera, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Mummy, Doctor Jekil and mister Hyde, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Wolfman.

of pretty decent scare shows, the open seen here has a camera move that made me giggle at how skillfully it manipulated me. Bravo oneell. The goal in both The Invisible Man and here in Wolfman, not the wolf Man, just wolf Man, seems to be to drag those characters into the twenty first century. Invisible Man is easier than most because you don't have to deal with the supernatural.

It's always been a mad scientist. Now a suit of cameras that project what's behind you on the surface is just as plausible now as the bleaching properties of monocane

were to audiences in the original. So it's amusing that he sets this film in a cabin isolated in the wilds of Oregon, conveniently allowing the first of all modern horror checklist items to be marked present can't get any cell service out here, shocker, but at least that's a clear choice that the film has made the rest of its motivations are about as opaque as any window seems to be in this film. That is ultimately going to be the theme. By the way, movement without clarity, the

whole thing is set up. I should mention with an opening crawl that tells us, you know what, I'm just going to read the entire word salad here. In early nineteen ninety five, a hiker disappeared in the isolated mountains of central Oregon. After several observations, some members of the isolated community, have you got an the idea that it's isolated, that's twice began to speculate that the missing man had contracted a virus transmitted my animals that they call He'll fever.

The indigenous peoples who preceded them called it differently, mouth of the Wolf. Okay, so that's a cheat right there. From the get go. I want this to be plausible, but also, you know, it could be spooky, supernatural stuff.

He and his wife have reached that convenient place in movies where they've grown distant, but without any real discernible reason to be pointed to. It's just one of those generally drifted apart that is in most flicks conveniently solved with a declaration of love scenarios. Is there jealousy because she's a working journalist and he's unemployed. That's attack you could hang the film on. So Blake, that's the lead

character's name. I had to look it up. A side of being superdad and somewhat estranged from his wife, has just received word that his dad, missing for an indeterminate amount of time, has been declared dead and his personal effects have been passed down. That's the cabin in the forest, So off they go. Does this make this like straw Dogs about the thin veneer of society that covers up animal instinct. Hell of a theme to explore. You can

figure out where this is going. Blake is bitten or scratched. Let's say he's wounded, and then the fun begins, or it would if the film had any interest in that. It is a great setup. There's a monster patrolling the exterior, waiting to pounce and attempting to gain entrance, while your spouse is slowly becoming that very same beast. Maybe Oneell, being Australian, didn't see the fucking super obvious allegory he

could have pursued here. I mean, in general, tell me a relationship you've been in where over time you feel the person has changed, or maybe you've changed and they haven't. That is worth exploring. Never mind the current state of affairs here in the United States, where we no longer recognize our friends.

a controlling relationship. It's a potent idea on its own, but the timing of the film's release crested the me too wave and gave the film a gravitas that may not have been entirely earned, or maybe it was. In any event, that's not something you can replicate spontaneously. The Fly can be taken as a very real allegory for the AIDS epidemic. It was in the right place, at the right time, with the right subject matter. But the fact is Cronenberg had been dabbling in body horror all along.

I suspect if he had made The Fly in nineteen seventy nine, it would have been remarkably similar to the film that we received, though it would have been viewed through whatever lens was popular at that moment. So one L doubles and triples down here, throwing out all of these possibles of what he's trying to say about the wolf Man without focusing on any of them at all, which is fine if it has good scares, which it does,

and interesting characters, which it does not. I won't spoil that or really anything else, but I will say, because one hell wants this to be science based, if a character loses a foot, they don't become faster you dig. More likely they bleed out after two minutes tops, no silver bullet required.

around and recommend things people might actually find diverting. But then I started reviewing contemporary entertainment and things get dicey, which is a long winded way of apology. This show isn't about snark unless I'm pushed, and goddamn it, the entertainment gods are pushing me like well, like you do rip when you're trying to get a treat out of my hands.

through the cosmos. In my mind, Star Trek has always had something of quality on at all times until Voyager anyway, that show was terrible, but Star Trek has always been hit or miss. This was a film franchise marked by the fact that the even films were good. That means the odd films were bad. So maybe Star Trek fans are a little more flexible given the mutability of the show's quality over the years, or the quality of the shows.

Here are my Starfleet credentials. I'm fluent in the original series, the animated series, Next Gen, and most of Deep Space nine. I watched Voyager intermittently until seven of nine showed up, and then with a little more regularity. Nice work, Brandon Braga, and then there's Enterprise. There was so much I like about that show, or wanted to like about that show, but the completely interchangeable white guy Bridge crew was so fucking dull man. No complaints about DePaul, No complaints with

the continued use of Jeffrey Combs as an Andorian. He should be in all the Star Trek's dummies. He's a good luck charm. Treat him like Ratzenberger is treated by Pixar. Do I have to mention the opening song. I'm gonna have to mention the opening song. It's one of the best track credit sequences with the fucking worst possible piece of music. It's like they hired Mike Post circa nineteen eighty.

the sound of Star Trek in song form. Even if it's three or four dunderheads, even if it were only them, then the fact that it gone on the air would make sense. But now that song has to be recorded, Musicians and vocalists have to be hired, time is booked at a studio, and engineers services are engaged. How many people is that now? No pushback? Okay, so maybe none of those people are really affiliated with Star Trek. There's session people and contractors. Not their job to comment on

the material. It's to do as they're told and cast the check. But then that song has to be laid into the show over those credits where the credits designed around the song. What a terrible thought. Now, how many people haven't opened their mouths and said the fucking obvious. I'm sure I could find the actual answers to these questions, but I'm treating them hypothetically because there is no decent

reason for that fucking song to exist. Because of it, there is no streaming skip credits button fast enough to get me to rewatch that series. Enterprise really took the joy out of the show for me for quite a while. That in the fact that it found itself in between Insurrection and Nemesis. I mean, seriously, that's a fucking terrible sandwich. I mentioned failing Upward. Well, meet Alex Kurtzman. He and his partner Robert Orsey have been responsible for so much

fucking mediocrity in the last twenty years. It is staggering, jumping from that Kevin Sorbo Hercules series to the Island, that fucking awful Michael Bay film. From there to Transformers. You know, when everyone was saying Michael Bay ruined their childhood, even though that movie made billions and spawned too many sequels,

that script was by our man Alex Kurtzman. To be fair, he also wrote the horrible scripts for the Amazing Spider Man two and The Mummy with Tom Cruise, which is hilarious considering that film was meant to kick off Universal's misbegotten Dark Universe, where they were attempting to turn the Universal Monsters into the Avengers, a concept that was considered dead until the surprise success of Leewanel's Invisible Man. Somewhere

between Transformers and The Mummy, a terrible thing happened. This guy got hold of Star Trek, starting with jj abrams remake of Star Wars as Star Trek in two thousand nine.

Kurtzman has been there for everything track since. There were a few writers on that first film, so I can't say for sure who did what I'm gonna say the notion of exiling Kirk on a random planet that they're passing, where he then gets chased by a beast into a cave, where he then runs into alternate timeline Spock, who has just so happened to set up shop there a veritable dais I Spakina, Shut up. I lay the blame for

that nonsense on Kurtzman. When I saw his name was attached to the first new series in over a decade, my expectations were not high. So when Star Trek Discovery hit the airwaves, I was shocked. I loved it. I loved setting it just prior to the original series. I loved the aesthetic, I loved the characters. I loved having a complicated, shaded, and potentially morally corrupt character as a lead. I loved the Klingon double Agent, the whole Mirror Universe thing.

Everything in that season was aces. I didn't finish the second season. It just felt off.

The creator the American Gods television series. That Brian Fuller, the one in the JJ Abrams verse with actual talent, the one who apparently kept nagging Paramount that Star Trek is a television based franchise and maybe they should get back to it, and apparently pitched a series that would base its model on American horror story, with each season being self contained and set in different eras of Starfleet season one before the original series, season two, during the

original series, season three, during Next Generation, and on and

on into the future we've yet to see. Paramount had him streamline it down to one timeline, so instead of plotting out different stories in different eras, he plotted out one season of Discovery and then bailed, leaving us with Kurtzman and leaving Kurtzman and Discovery adrift for all seasons going forward now This might be a shame on me scenario, because even with all of that precedent, all those terrible stories and half bank characters and lapses in logic and

everything the man has written. When I heard he was making a series about a Black Ops division of Starfleet, I kind of got excited.

Section thirty one.

shit off immediately? I'm sure section thirty one showed up in the comics and novels and all of the other apocrypha, but we wouldn't really get them again on screen until Star Trek into Darkness, and there they were hardly themselves, not a clandestine thing at all. They were like some insurrectionist group with an admiral and a giant fucking Starship marauding around speaking of into Darkness screenplay by Alex Kurtzman.

There's a scene where Spock has turned in Kirk for some infraction, and before Kirk is able to save the day by throwing a fire hose into the intake of a spacecraft's engine, a fire hose on a spool in the twenty third fucking century. Before that piece of anachronistic idiocy, Kirk refers to Spock's betrayal as being thrown under the bus.

it two hundred years from now, right, fuck you. Section thirty one is a wash in that kind of dialogue. Remember the Delvins in Star Trek. The motion pictured the bald girl, super sexy. She was a Delvin They've got one here, and Michelle Yeo calls her a honey trap during the time between Kirk and Picard. The term honeytrap is still being used by a character from a parallel dimension.

She was an emperor there, grew up knowing nothing but pain and blood and murder, eventually becoming a genocidal emperor before finding her way into our universe somewhere between slaughtering her own immediate family mom, dad, little brother and attempting a coup. In our universe, Emperor Philippa Giorgio learned and still employs in casual conversation the term honey trap. If that fucking anachronism doesn't grab you, how about calling a guy in a mech suit a Swiss army knife a

what Swiss? What's that? That emperor played by Michelle ye first appeared on that well plotted first season of Discs. Evidently Michelle Yo enjoyed playing her so much that it was her suggestion for a spinoff series, So in a way, we weren't getting a section thirty one series without her.

But I question her involvement here, not her the character adding the former emperor to a morally questionable part of the United Federation of Planets seems like a natural, but the opening scene of this movie illustrates exactly why she isn't. That's where she murders her family and his crowned emperor while simultaneously branding and breaking the spirit of her only rival, who happens to be her lover. This character is too grand and has too big an arc to be running

around and scooby dooing week after week. I keep saying series because that's what this was supposed to be, and they were as far along as having the entire first season scripted, and then there were delays and pandemics in scheduling difficulties, and finally Paramount decided it'd be best to use this as a one off instead. You ever watch a fan cut of some epic trilogy or television series boiling it down to some bastardized reader's digest version, check

out Breaking Bad the Movies sometime. That's what this feels like. They took the major arc of the season and turned that into a two hour film. Guess what happens when you do that. Everything suffers. Characters meant to evolve and reveal themselves over the course of a season with their own standalone episodes get boiled down to their base characteristics given through various exposition dumps of clumsy dialogue. Kurtzman has described a series overall as Mission Impossible meets Guardians of

the Galaxy. It's not it's Ocean's Eleven meets Guardians of the Galaxy. Actually, it's Ocean's twelve meets Guardians, and I mean just Guardian that twenty seventeen Russian knockoff. The problem with any of those combination is it's bumping up against the fundamental, hopeful, shiny bright future that is Star Trek. Star Trek has had plenty of moral ambiguity in the past, but the characters are always fighting against it.

which is frustrating because it nullifies anything that's good. There is an early heist that's pretty ingenious. We get the planning scenario scene with cuts to the potential role of each of the members, and then Michelle ye proposes a different plan, pairing herself and the mcguffin using a device that sets them out of phase, allowing her to walk unobstructed through physical threats and phaser fire and just walk

away with the item. It's pretty clever, except they immediately turned it into the big action set piece they had cleverly circumvented. What's worse is that it's a big hand to hand fight scene between Michelle Yeo out of phase against a masked villain also out of phase, with them blinking in and out of existence and robbing the fight of any immediacy. This may be owing to Michelle Yeo's age, She's relying on her cape for most of her acrobatics

these days. No judgment, We all know she's a goddess, but it just underlines the complete lack of necessity of this drawn out martial arts display when this is supposed to be an espionage show. For every visual effect that is stunning, and there are a lot, there's an unnecessary chase scene on hovering platforms with even more fisticuffs that is so horribly rendered that you have to worry about

these folk. You didn't recognize the irrelevancy of the scene at its core, but then you saw this and you still thought the scene was necessary. Speaking of Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain Boomerang is the dude in that Swiss Army knife mech. That's right, every Australian and every show has to be boisterous and unhinged and completely reckless. Other members of the team include team leader Common That's Common, the rapper actor from John Wick and Suicide Squad, except

he's not in this. We've got discount Common, or maybe it's common Common just a dull mysterioso with few words and less personality. Sam Richardson shows up as Quasi, the shape shifting comic relief who is not funny and his transformations look remarkably ai in nature. Don't know if it was just looked remarkably as if he were about to start crashing uncontrollably into the walls or eating an oversized

hamburger in the next few frames after the cut. I wish this was the final member of the team because it's the only character I enjoyed. But there is another. I have to talk about this one first, though, because that other character I'm gonna be furious after speaking of Lieutenant Rachel Garrett, A regular old human here is played by Casey Roll, and she's fucking great. She completely embodies the spirit of the previous series while slotting nicely in

with an idea of where this series could go. I found her performance alive in ways everyone else's wasn't. She seemed like she was on a mission for Starfleet. Everyone else seemed like they were in a sitcom. And I didn't even realize that her character was a younger version of the one from yesterday's enterprise. From the Next Generation, she was originally played by Night Gallery Elam Tricia O'Neill. There.

I fucking loved that character, and unknowingly I fucking loved her again here, which leads us to fuzz there have been some pretty annoying characters in Star Trek's seventy year history. But they've done it. They've reached the top of the Paramount Mountain on section thirty one. They've officially created the most annoying character in Star Trek history. A nanosized worm piloting a robot Vulcan. Very fanciful. Oh he's wearing gold chains.

Kind of a loose Vulcan. Oh wait, he's talking in the world first fucking Irish accent ever, So this makes it a tiny Irish worm. And for all the unknowing world to see an Irish Vulcan, a manic, unfunny Irish Vulcan. They get a chance to feature a fully emotional Vulcan, and faith and Bacora, they give us this. What's worse is if you hear the actual actor speak, I won't say his name and promote him so great or his crimes. He speaks with an odd South African accent that would be,

I don't know, perfect for Star Trek. The character's very presence feels like a reach. Hey, we've never seen this. Yes, there's a good reason in seven decades they haven't done this. I don't want to end negatively, but I'm struggling to continue with anything positive, so I'll say this section thirty one is still a great idea. It was a great idea when they created it for Deep Space nine, and hopefully it will remain a great idea when someone in the future takes the Helmet Star Trek and can do

it some justice. I was hoping we'd get the Star Trek equivalent of and or we got the.

Just head on over to Patreon, or if you can't see yourself paying for this, dude, you can still support us by giving us five stars and sharing the show and reviewing it in a nice manner, nicer than I've been today, or you know, just keep listening. I am going to leave you with a bit from the greatest song ever written.