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Kooshmeister
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Name: Bill
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| Island of Terror
1966, Planet Film Productions
The Characters:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dr. David West: Our hero, a young osteologist and resident ladies' man.
Dr. Brian Stanley: The most eminent pathologist in Great Britain, or so we're told. A friend and colleague of West's.
Toni Merrill: West's girlfriend and our resident damsel-in-distress. She apparently got together with West when she purposefully crashed her car just to meet him.
Dr. Reginald Landers: Doctor who practices on Petrie's Island, who first discovers the whole "no bones" problem.
Constable John Harris: Petrie's Island's town constable.
Roger Campbell: The "boss" of Petrie's Island. I'm trying to figure out what his official title is, but I'm guessing he's pretty much the mayor.
Peter Argyle: Owner of Petrie's Island's general store. Seems to be Boss Campbell's second-in-command in an unofficial capacity.
Ian Bellows: Petrie's Island farmer who wanders into a cave to investigate a strange noise. Bad move, Ian.
Halsey, Dunley, and Morton: Some of the islanders. Don't know much about Dunley and Morton (although Morton is a horse farmer), but Halsey is the typical pessimistic cowardly guy.
Dr. Lawrence Phillips: Our resident "mad" scientist, a famous oncology researcher.
The Silicates: A bunch of really, really nasty little green creatures with tentacles and have a taste for bones.
The Story:
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We begin on Petrie's Island, a remote island off the coast of Ireland (or so we're told; I can't find anything online to indicate it's a real island). Apparently the island was only recently modernized in the last twenty or thirty years because when the weekly supply ship comes in, farmer Ian Bellows is talking with store owner Peter Argyle and the island's "boss" Roger Campbell about the fact the government hasn't installed their telephones despite promising to do so for about two years now.
We're also introduced to local policeman Constable John Harris and town physician Dr. Reginald Landers. Neither Harris nor Campbell are too important right now as most of the talking goes on between Ian Bellows, Peter Argyle, and Dr. Landers. Anyways the men gossip (I thought that was women's job?) about a "Dr. Phillips," who we see with one of his assistants at the docks to take possession of a wooden crate marked "Chemical Equipment."
It seems Phillips recently came to Petrie's and set up shop in the spooky old mansion/castle located on the northern point of the island. And he's very reclusive and secretive, too. The other men find this odd, but Landers says that all researchers are like that. There's more complaining about the lack of phone service before we see Phillips and his assistant load the crate into a Land Rover and drive off.
Cut to Phillips' high-tech laboratory. We see that it comes stocked with the usual assortment of beakers, test tubes, and flasks, as well as three very large fish tanks filled with a yellowish liquid. Dr. Phillips and another assistant discuss their experiments, using a lot of techno-babble I don't understand and sounds made-up anyway. The basic gist is that they're doing cancer research and Phillips thinks they're close to finding a cure for it. He hopes to use the newly-arrived equipment to speed their work up.
The assistant warns against this, as they're working in conjunction with similar laboratories in Rome, New York, and Tokyo. Phillips waves him off, saying he sent his colleagues in Italy, America, and Japan a notice that morning of his intentions to continue, and advising them to do the same. After saying he's waited years for this, they start the experiment. There's a bright flash of red, the sound of breaking glass, and brief glimpses of dead bodies littering the floor as the opening credits kick in.
And since this movie was made in the 60s, the credits are very psychadelic. Yeah, baby, yeah! Our movie is Island of Terror, starring Edward Judd, Peter Cushing, Carole Gray, and Eddie Byrne. So far we've only seen Eddie Byrne as Dr. Reginald Landers.
After the credits come to a close we find Ian Bellows, the farmer, walking home that night in the dark. He suddenly hears an indescribably eerie, warbling electronic sound coming from a cave nearby, and goes to investigate. No sooner has he disappeared into the cave than we hear him scream in agony. His screams are cut off and we hear disgusting slurping sounds, like somebody sucking up a chocolate milkshake.
Cut to Constable John Harris' house. There's a knock at the door, and the officer admits a woman he calls Mrs. Bellows, Ian's wife. She's been crying. He sits her down and asks her to tell him what's wrong, and she says her husband has gone missing and she can't find him anywhere. She wants the constable to look for him. Harris agrees, but tries to console her and assure her nothing has happened to Ian.
Later, Constable Harris rides his bicycle out to the northern part of Farmer Bellows' land, which earlier dialogue revealed is not far from Dr. Phillips' castle. Uh-oh. Harris wanders around for a bit, calling the man's name, and eventually spies him laying just inside the entrance of the cave. He goes over and prods the body with his nightstick, and his appalled at how soft and mushy it seems. Repulsed, he rushes to Dr. Landers' house and informs him of his ghastly find. Landers is incredulous at first but can see how distressed the policeman is, and agrees to go have a look.
Landers examines the body briefly and says from the looks of it there's no bones in it, and although it's wearing Ian Bellows' clothes he's not even sure it even is Ian. He and Harris take the body to the local clinic where Landers performs an autopsy. He discover's it is Ian Bellows by identifying a surgical scar and birth mark. He also ascertains that, indeed, there are no bones in the man's body.
After trying to think of a way to tell poor Mrs. Bellows about her husband, Landers instructs Harris to try and see Dr. Phillips while he takes the island's launch to the mainland, to see a man named Dr. Brian Stanley in London. Stanley, he reveals, is a renowned pathologist who teaches at "the university." Landers also warns Harris not to tell anyone about the state of Ian Bellows' corpse... especially not his wife.
Cut to "the university" (I don't know how many universities and colleges there are in London so I don't know which one this is supposed to be) where we find Brian Stanley, played by Peter Cushing, finishing up a lecture on... er, something. He just tells his students he's hoped they've learned something before dismissing them.
Another teacher shows Dr. Landers into the classroom and he and Stanley shake hands. When asked what it is he wants, Landers cuts right to the chase and asks him if he knows of a disease that can completely dissolve human bone. Stanley, incredulous, says he hasn't, and is shocked when told the doctor has got a boneless corpse back in the morgue on Petrie's Island. Seeing how desperate Landers is Stanley agrees to help, and after striking out at the university's library the two decide to go and visit a close colleague of Stanley's, Dr. David West.
We go now to Dr. West's swingin' 60s shag pad! West himself - slightly drunk at the moment - is played by Edward Judd. That's four stars down, one to go. We meet our fourth and final top-billed star in the form of Carole Gray, who plays West's girlfriend, Toni Merrill.
Toni comes in wearing nothing but one of West's shirts, because, we're told, he's "better with a scalpel than he is a bottle opener" and spilled champagne onto her dress while trying to open it. What a goof. As they sit on his sofa they have some quasi-romantic banter that reveals West is a bone specialist, and they met when Toni, who is the daughter of a wealthy London businessman, crashed her sports car and broke her leg. She's all better now, though, and after some more playful banter whereupon she subtly teases him about whether or not he can get it up, they're interrupted by the doorbell.
He tells her she can put on one of his bathrobes while he goes to answer the door, and voila, it's Stanley and Landers. He lets them in and introductions are made. Stanley says Landers has an interesting problem for West, to which West replies he already has an "interesting problem," whereupon Toni re-emerges wearing his bathrobe.
Initially West makes fun of them for what they came to talk to him about. "Oh, yes, that's a very common problem..." When Landers, all business it seems, protests, West starts taking them seriously. Now we get playful banter between him and Stanley as Stanley suggests if West comes along they'll name the newly discovered disease after him. West retorts that he's astounded by Stanley's show of humility. "They've named so many after me it gets quite confusing," Stanley insists.
For some reason Landers keeps insisting there's "not much time," and Stanley agrees and says he was going to accompany Landers back to Petrie's Island to examine Ian Bellows' body and asks if West wants to come or not. Now all business, West asks if there were any wounds on the body, and whether Ian Bellows had any unusual medical history. Landers responds in the negative to both, stating Bellows was a very strong, healthy man.
Ultimately West decides to go along, too. Instead of taking the launch, Landers and Stanley want to take a plane. Suddenly Toni butts into the conversation and offers the use of her father's private helicopter. This sounds great, but there's a catch. "I knew it," West moans, and Toni demands to come along. West tries only once to change her mind, but she stipulates it's the only way she'll let them use the 'copter.
Cut to the airfield. The helicopter pilot explains that, whoops, Toni's father will need the helicopter first thing tomorrow morning, so in other words he can't park on the island and wait for them. He can only drop them off and then fly back home immediately. It's "too late" to make other arrangements, so they decide to risk, although Stanley seems to think a week stuck on Petrie's Island will be boring and asks what Napoleon did while he was there (?!).
West responds that Napoleon invented Solitaire, leadng to this exchange between Toni and Stanley: she insists she knows a game that's more fun, and Stanley asks, "Can three play?" Oy. So they board the helicopter and it takes off.
It's nighttime (or early morning, one) when they arrive at Petrie's Island, and Constable Harris, after lighting a signal fire to give the pilot an idea of where to touch down, greets Landers and the three mainlanders as they disembark from the 'copter, which immediately takes off. Landers asks if Harris has been able to get in touch with Dr. Phillips, but the constable says the scientist won't answer the door.
West, overhearing Phillips' name, asks if he means Dr. Lawrence Phillips, and they tell him yes. When asked by Toni, West explains that Phillips is a famous researcher specializing in the study of cancer. Not that this has anything to do with what happened to Ian Bellows. Nope. Uh-uh. No way.
Toni proceeds to vanish completely from the movie for a good while, as we follow West and Stanley around. They accompany Landers back to the clinic the following day and examine Ian Bellows' corpse.
More autopsying on Farmer Bellows, to the point where I wonder if there'll be anything left of him for the funeral. Our three medical experts discover microscopic holes in Bellows' skin and argue about what this means. Landers thinks it means something went into the body, while West thinks it means something came out of it. Stanley suggests they might both be right, that something may have injected a powerful enzyme that dissolve calcium phosphate, the major component of bone matter. It's CSI: Petrie's Island!
West whines that the clinic doesn't have sophisticated enough equipment for them to use, and Landers brings up Dr. Phillips again but doubts he'll see them. Stanley asserts himself and says he'll make Phillips see them. By this time night has fallen. The electricity almost winks out and Landers explains that the island's generator has been on the fritz. They leave a note for Constable Harris telling him where they went, then pile into Landers' car and drive out to the old spooky mansion.
They ring the doorbell but get no answer. West wants to keep trying but Landers says it's no use, so then Stanley gets a flashlight and goes around the side of the house looking for an open window. He finds one and climbs in, intending to go around to the front door and let his friends in. The inside of the house is spooky and dark, and while crossing a larg dining room he almost trips over a dead body on the floor. The corpse turns out to be in the same condition as Ian Bellows. Uh-oh.
I should add from here on in this section of the movie had to have been the inspiration for parts of the first Resident Evil game. The mansion, the dining room, and, shortly, the underground lab. Either that or it's an amazing coincidence.
Stanley then does the most intelligent thing I've ever seen a character do in a horror movie: he turns on the lights. He also turns on the lights on the front of the house, and after unlocking the front door and letting West and Landers in he shows them the body. They then start searching for the laboratory. They try a few rooms with no luck, and then Stanley discovers one door that opens into a stairwell and calls the others over. They then head down.
The stairs lead down to an almost medieval stone masonry hallway/dungeon type deal. At the bottom is a long curved hallway with three doors: one marked "KEEP OUT! Radioactive Materials", one marked "Laboratory," and a final one marked "Test Animals." Oh man, this is so Resident Evil I'm wondering if Planet Film Productions shouldn't sue Capcom.
First they try the "KEEP OUT!" room, where apparently there's lots of radioactive materials stored. Not that the sign on the door was any indication. After commenting that Phillips has "as much equipment as I have at the university," Stanley leads the way through the door marked "Laboratory." This turns out to be - yup, you guessed it - the lab from the beginning. There's lots of broken glass and all but one of the big fish tanks has been broken open from the inside. Oh, and Dr. Phillips and his assistant are laying dead on the floor, their bones all sucked out. So much for him.
It looks like our heroes have reached a dead-end, although since Phillips and his colleagues never had any direct contact with Ian Bellows West says they can rule out the possibility of a contagious disease. As to the destruction of the lab, West theorizes, "Either they were fighting something... or the death throes were pretty violent." They decide to collect and study Phillips' notes, thinking that maybe there's a connection between the boneless dead bodies and whatever it was Phillips was trying to do.
By the time they've gathered up all the notebooks and papers from around the lab and left, it's morning. Meanwhile we join Morton, another farmer. He's walking somewhere when he notices something odd in one of his fields and rushes over to investigate. It turns out to be a horse, or what was once a horse. He prods it with his foot and it's all mushy. Freaking out, he runs to Constable Harris' house.
Moton interrupts Harris having breakfast and tells him about the boneless equine, which makes Harris remember the note from the doctors he found at the clinic. After telling Morton not to tell anyone about the horse, he puts his uniform on and bikes out to the spooky old mansion.
Meanwhile, West, Stanley, and Landers return to the local inn where the visiting doctors are staying. They dump the notes onto the nearest table and set immediately to work, but then Landers reasons they should tell Constable Harris they're not at the mansion anymore and leaves to do just that while West and Stanley start reading over the notes.
Back at the mansion, Harris finds the door open. He goes inside and finds the dead guy in the dining, then starts looking around for the doctors in a rather lengthy sequence thay eventually has him venturing down into the basement/dungeon. He avoids the "KEEP OUT!" room and is about to enter the door marked "Laboratory" when he hears the same warbling, electronic sound we heard coming out of the cave earlier. It seems to be coming from the final door in the hall. The one marked "Test Animals."
He goes over and nudges the door open to discover the room is filled with cages. The moment he walks in, a green tentacle thing drops down and wraps around his neck. He screams and we cut away to Dr. Landers pulling up outside the (now almost certainly dead) constable's house. After failing to get an answer he drives down to the docks and happens upon Peter Argyle (the store owner, remember?) talking with Morton.
Despite the fact Harris told him to keep mum about it, as Landers approaches that's precisely what Morton is telling Argyle. Landers asks them if they've seen the constable, and Morton tells him that Harris went up to the mansion looking for him, West, and Stanley not too long ago. He also tells Landers about the dead horse (what part of "Tell nobody" doesn't this guy understand?), and Landers realizes his farm is way on the other side of the island from the mansion. He then hurries off, leaving Argyle and Morton stumped.
Morton thinks something strange is going on, and Argyle seems to agree and says he's going to go speak to Boss Campbell about it. We then cut to Campbell's house as he and Argyle are leaving, with the store owner asking the boss what he plans to do about all the weird crap that's been going down. Campbell thinks for a moment and then says they should round up the other farmers and ask them if they've been having similar problems, then to see Landers about it.
Landers returns to the inn to report the news about the dead horse and the misunderstanding that sent Constable Harris to the mansion. In the meantime, West and Stanley have gotten far enough into Dr. Phillips' notes to know that the late scientist was indeed doing cancer-related research, apparently trying to grow a living organism to combat the cancerous cells, but they haven't gotten far enough to discover what went wrong or why.
It's at this point that Toni reenters the movie, coming downstairs bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and greeting the three haggard men, asking them if they've been up all night. They admit that they have. Landers suggests they go see the dead horse, then go and get Constable Harris. West and Stanley agree, but Toni wants to come. Oy. West attempts to talk her out of it, saying that all signs point to some kind of dangerous animal that escaped from that mansion, and that going back there may not be safe. Toni, for her part, says that if there are some kinds of dangerous creatures running loose on the island, she doesn't want to be left alone.
Ultimately, West agrees to let Toni come along, apparently just to shut her up. We then cut to her sitting in Landers' car as the three men examine the boneless horse a few yards away. Guess West made her stay in the car. Suddenly she hears that warbling, electronic sound, and something thuds onto the roof of the car, and then she turns and sees something big, green, and ooky slither down the rear window and screams. The others come running, but by that point the thing has vanished.
Being a woman in a horror movie, Toni can't coherantly explain what it was she saw despite West's repeated insistences that "it's important!" All she does is whine and scream "I don't know!" a lot. She does, however, tell them it was "grayish," which is a blatant lie, as it was quite obviously green. Stanley then approaches a cluster of boulders nearby where, I'm assuming, he thinks the creature has hidden itself, but West calls him back.
West doesn't think they should take any chances. "Yes, especially with me!" insists Stanley, which I find a bit odd considering just a moment ago he was the one who was all about going over there. Landers suggests they find Harris and get back to town post-haste, so everyone piles into the car and drives out to the old spooky mansion again.
They find Harris' bicycle and the front door open. Entering the house they call out for him and then proceed immediately down into the basement. Landers spies he unfortunate constable's corpse on the floor through the now-open "Test Animals" door and everyone rushes over, only to stop as they hear that familiar strange electronic sound again. A lone green tentacle snakes around the corner of the doorframe, reaching for them. Startled and definitely weirded out everyone backs up as one, and we're about to get our first look at the movie's feature monsters.
This is it. This is why I wanted this movie. And man, how it delivers. There are so many ways this could have gone wrong, but the scene had me when they all jumped back together like I described, leaping instinctively away from the tentacle with expressions of "What the hell?!" written all over their faces. It's one of the best movie monster reveals I've ever seen, just because of the mood.
A two-foot tall lumpy green mass which slides along like a slug and has a long, green tentacle extending from the front of the body, slithers out of the room and into the hallway. Stanley asks what it is and, not surprisingly, no one answers. As the warbling creature approaches, West wisely suggests they run. They turn and run back down the hallway only to find a second creature between them and the staircase!
Everyone backs up against the far wall and Landers grabs an emergency fire axe off the wall behind him. The creatures continue to move towards them and they decide it's now or never, they start approaching the stairs, Landers wielding the axe. Despite Stanley's warnings not to get too close he walks right up to the creature and swings the axe. It thunks uselessly into the creature's back.
The monster responds to this by grabbing Landers' ankle with its tentacle, and Landers drops the axe and starts screaming bloody murder. He flops over on top of the creature (!) and writhes and screams before finally dying and we hear the familiar sucking sounds as Toni screams in horror and our three remaining heroes are right back where they started, up against the wall again.
Suddenly, the creatures stop and their tentacles retract into themselves. As they look on in shock, the two creatures begin to divide into four creatures, secreting a really gross mass of what looks like pulpy orange juice and wet noodles as they do so. After this is over with the electronic warbling stops and the creatures sit perfectly still. Playing Captain Obvious, Stanley exclaims, "They divided!"
He carefully steps around the one(s?) that killed Landers (who by the way is now laying around the corner in a completely different position than where we saw him fall; how did he get way over there?), picking up the axe along the way for some reason, and makes it safely to the stairs and then calls for West and Toni to follow. Toni refuses to budge from where she is, and West tells her, truthfully, that they don't know how much longer the things will remain static like this and that now is their only chance.
She finally screams that she's afraid, to which West says, "So am I!" He grabs her by the wrist and runs past the creatures, then rushes up the stairs after Stanley, dragging Toni with him. They run outside the mansion to hear the electronic sounds emananting from all around the surrounding forest. Stanley, apparently realizing the axe is, erm, kind of useless, throws it down and they all run and get into the car. Uh-oh! It won't start!
Cursing, West gets out and pops the hood, and starts trying to fix the engine. From inside the car, Toni and Stanley see a creature approaching from a nearby field and yell for West to hurry up. West responds by practically screaming in genuine fear, "I'M TRYING!!!" Hoo-boy, the actors really sell the urgency here. Finally he gets the engine going, then jumps back behind the wheel, and burns rubber.
We cut back to town now. A random islander (Dunley, I think) is pacing back and forth impatiently outside of Peter Argyle's store. He even pounds on the door once with his fist in frustration. He hears an approaching car and sees Boss Campbell and Argyle drive up in a Land Rover similar to the one Phillips had earlier (and given the low budget I'm betting it's the same car). He demands to know why the store isn't open and that he wants his "goods." Argyle replies the store is closed until further notice and Campbell asks the man if he's seen Dr. Landers. Dunley replies he saw Landers leave the inn earlier with two men and a woman.
Argyle and Campbell decide to head back to the inn, then. As they head back to their car, would-be customer Dunley shouts after them, "What about my goods?"
We cut back to the inn where we see West put some white powder into a glass of water, then carry it over to Toni who is in bed. Despite the fact she seems pretty relaxed, West insists she drink the stuff because it'll help her sleep. She does so, and as she gets sleepier and sleepier she mumbles about how awful it was seeing Dr. Landers die. "I've never seen anyone die before," she says, then adds she's never seen anything that terrible, to which West replies that he hasn't either.
He then says he's sorry he brought her here, but she him reminds she came of her own volition. After this she asks if he's still sorry he brought her here, then falls asleep. He kisses her on the forehead and then tucks her in and leave the room. You know, normally romantic relationships in these types of movies seem forced, fake, and shoehorned into the plot. While this one is still shoehorned (there doesn't seem to be any logical reason why Toni even wanted to come along in the first place), I never find any of the moments between her and West unbearably fake.
West heads downstairs where he finds Stanley drinking a tall glass of beer and still going over Phillips' notes. He explains he gave Toni a sedative, and Stanley says he needed one himself, indicating the beer.
Apparently our doctor friends didn't have the notes organized properly, but Stanley has done that now. I may skimp on a few details here but that's because I'm distracted and it takes me more than three viewings to fully memorize everything in a movie. But anyway Stanley has discovered that the last entry made by Phillips was a personal note talking about his pet Great Dane becoming sick after getting an accidental overdose of radiation from the lab. West finds this odd because they didn't find a dog at the mansion.
In fact, mention of radiation crops up several times in the notes, and West and Stanley seem to infer that this had something to do with the creation of the creatures.
It's at this point that Boss Campbell and Peter Argyle come in. Seeing these two strangers poring over papers and notebooks they infer that they're the ones the dumbass guy at the store was talking about and approach them. Introductions are made, and Campbell demands to know where Dr. Landers is. West and Stanley exchange uneasy glances before West explains he was killed, and that Campbell had better sit down. He admits that what he's got to say may sound outlandish, but he lays it out straight and says, basically, there's dangerous, seemingly indestructible creatures loose on Petrie's Island.
Needless to say, Campbell and Argyle stare at them like they're nuts. Well, actually, only Argyle does. Campbell is so utterly laid back about everything he takes it in stride.
West insists they're not insane and explains that the creatures are dividing geometrically, and that they don't know how many are slithering around on the island, and stresses that they'll need Campbell's help if Petrie's Island is to survive. Argyle says it's all a bit hard to swallow, but Campbell, cool as a cucumber, simply asks what it is they need, because, as it turns out, that one farmer's horse is not the first dead, boneless animal that's been discovered.
West says first he wants Campbell to get about ten or twenty reliable men, and to arrange for everyone in town to come down to the meeting hall so he and Stanley can explain the situation to them. In a morbidly humorous little example of the fact that so much is going on some details have slipped our heroes' minds, they initially neglect to mention the death of Constable Harris, too, until Campbell suggests informing him about the monsters, since he's the law and all. "You're a bit late," Stanley says darkly.
As he and Argyle go to leave Campbell pauses to ask precisely how many of the creatures there are, but West and Stanley aren't sure so they shoo him and Argyle away before returning to discussing experiments and stuff. And now I knew they're just spouting nonsense during this part because it doesn't ever pertain to anything else at all in the entire movie.
Cut to the meeting hall. All the townspeople are filing in as Campbell, onstage, has just finished explaining everything that West and Stanley told him. Speak of the devil, they come in at this point with Toni, who remains in the audience as the two scientists ascend the stage and address the yokels. It's here that they finally dub the animals "Silicates", although Stanley pronounces it like "Sili-ketts", and we finally get the whole story on Dr. Phillips' doomed experiments.
Basically Phillips was trying to accomplish two things: one, to better understand the growth of cancer he was trying to grow living cells artificially, and two, he was also trying to design a living cell that would attack the cancer and destroy it (which was revealed earlier).
Originally he wanted to try this using carbon cells, but that failed so he tried silicon cells, and, voila, the Silicates. After reiterating that the Silicates divide geometrically, West and Stanley explain that they think there are a total of 64 Silicates on Petrie's Island as they speak. If the Silicates keep dividing every six hours, by midnight there'll be over a hundred of them, and by the end of the week, a million.
They also say they want everyone to remain in the meeting hall until further notice, because if all else fails they'll just have to cut off the Silicates' food supply and hope they die of starvation really quickly.
Later, West, Stanley, and Toni meet with Campbell and the ten good men he picked, as they start formulating a battle plan. Among the men selected by Campbell are Morton and Dunley, plus another fellow named Halsey. They'll send Dunley and some men to scout the island; two more guys are selected by Campbell to round up the cattle on the island and bring them into the pens in town that he owns, in order to keep the Silicates from getting them. Their basic plan is that once they find the Silicates, they'll take guns and bombs and just throw whatever they've got at them and see what that does. Hey, it may not be scientific but until now all they've had to go on is one swing of an axe.
Everyone sets out, although of course Toni stays behind, but she has the important job of ensuring that the villagers don't panic. The fact that the generator keeps threatening to konk out on everyone isn't helping matters. West promises Toni he'll come back, whether they've killed the Silicates or not.
It isn't long before the little buggers are found, at least a few of them, clustered in a grove of trees somewhere on the island, sliding around and waving their tentacles and emitting their high-pitched warbling. West, Stanley, Campbell, and some of the islanders are observing them, awaiting the arrival of Campbell and Argyle and the stuff they need. Stanley says he counts 25 Silicates in the grove altogether, and then Argyle drives up with Morton and Halsey in the Land Rover, which contains rifles, ammunition, wooden boxes labeled "Dynamite," and other goodies, including geiger counters. Exactly where these came from is never revealed, but we do learn Stanley is the one who wanted them.
Apparently he thinks the Silicates themselves may prove to be radioactive, and so they should of course take steps to protect themselves from radiation poisoning. Better safe than sorry, I guess. Rifles, ammo, and molotov cocktails (referred to as "petrol bombs") are passed out among the men, with Morton in charge of the "petrol bombs" and Halsey in charge of dynamite, as everyone moves towards the advancing Silicates. West and Stanley open things up by shooting at the nearest of the beasties with their rifles to no effect.
Stanley points out the painfully obvious fact that the Silicates are really slow, and so he goes over to one with a geiger counter to try and get a reading. He's almost killed when one creeps up behind him, but West's yelling alerts him. Stanley yelps and runs back over to the safety of the group, grumbling, "Nasty little creatures, aren't they?" He does say, oddly, that there was no register on the geiger counter, which means the Silicates are not radioactive like he thought. West admits that's good news. It does mean, however, he ordered all thos geiger counters for nothing. Campbell and Morton forward with the molotov cocktails. The molotovs are lit and thrown, exploding to no effect.
Morton takes two molotovs and says he's going to get closer. I.e., he's gonna go get killed. He tosses the first one and it explodes again to no effect, and as he's lighting the second one, Stanley happens to glance up and see a Silicate in the branches of the tree the farmer is standing under. He and the others alert him to the danger but in typical fashion Morton just stands there and gawks as the Silicate falls out of the tree and flops down on top of him. Exit Morton with the requisite screaming and sucking sounds as he goes to join his horse.
Deciding it's time to break out the big guns, Halsey brings forward the boxes of dynamite. Many sticks are lit and thrown by our heroes, but with the same results as the bullets and the molotov cocktails. Nothing seems to hurt them, as West and Stanley so aptly point out. If anything, all it does is make them really, really mad. Even if an explosion occurs right beside them nothing even so much as flips them over.
West and Stanley are about ready to turn and run and have everybody barricade themselves indoors, so as to revert to their backup plan to starve the Silicates, when suddenly Dunley comes running up. He brings news that he's found a dead Silicate. They ask him if he's sure, and Dunley says it is because it hasn't moved in over twenty minutes after partially eating a dog. Remember Dr. Phillips' missing Great Dane? Radiation overdose? West and Stanley do, too, because that's the first thing that pops into their minds.
They make Dunley take them and Campbell to where he found the two dead animals, which turns out to be on the beach. While Campbell and Dunley maintain a safe distance, West and Stanley cautiously approach the Silicate first. Stanley pokes it with a stick a few times and it does not move. Its tentacle is retracted, and it also appears to have vomited a yellowish liquid. It's quite dead. Stanley waves the geiger counter over the Silicate and the reading buries the needle. Highly radioactive, unlike the other, living Silicates. Just to be sure they also use the geiger on the dead dog (represented by a hilariously fake dead puppet) and it, too, is radioactive. Eureka!
They take both the dog and the Silicate back to the clinic to examine them more properly (what happened to the clinic not having the proper equipment, huh, Dr. West?). West briefly announces to the understandably worried townsfolk they found a dead one but that they need to determine precisely what killed it, and, again, West makes Toni promise to keep everyone inside the meeting hall for now.
Examining the two dead animals reveals two very important things. Number one, that the Silicates have an outer shell just beneath their slimey yucky skin that is "impenetrable" (and one review of the movie put forth the theory that, as silicon-based lifeforms, the Silicates must have a genetic makeup similar to rocks, which would explain a lot about why they're so damn difficult to hurt with outside force).
As for the dog, it's discovered that the specific type of radiation it got contaminated with is called Strontium-90, a kind of isotope that, at least according to this movie, settles exclusively in bone matter. I've actually checked around the Web and found out that there is actually something called Strontium-90, but as I haven't done enough research on it I won't pretend to know whether or not the movie's depiction of it is even close to accurate. But for what it's worth, it makes perfect sense within the confines of the story, and, to me, that's all that really matters.
So now West and Stanley hatch themselves a plan. There must be more Strontium-90 back up at the mansion. And they have a lot of cows close at hand. Our two scientist heroes tell Campbell and Argyle to make sure nothing happens to the cows until they return. And, in the event that they don't return, West and Stanley make it a priority to tell Campbell and Argyle how to get the Strontium-90 and do it themselves.
I rather liked this part. West and Stanley are well aware they might die, and they do not want to die being the only ones who can save the island. Of course, they're the heroes so they end up succeeding, but it was just a nice little touch in a world full of movies where the main heroes are so conceited and sure of themselves they risk dying being the only ones with the knowledge to save the world. Not West and Stanley. They know they're probably heading off to die, and they just want to, y'know, pass the knowledge, just in case.
West and Stanley take the car and drive out to the mansion again. En route they pause briefly to observe more Silicates in the woods on the side of the road, and realize they're getting closer to the town so they don't have much time. West, at the wheel, floors it and they get to the mansion in record time. In another nice bit among several in the movie, Stanley says he doesn't want to go down into "that cellar" again, but go they must.
They proceed cautiously down the stairs but don't see any Silicates. Just the same, they don't dawdle and unlock the "KEEP OUT!" room and go inside knowing that for now they're safe since the Silicates won't come in this room. They conclude that Phillips kept the isotopes on hand in order to inject them into the test animals (for what reasons I'm not sure, but I'm not a scientist so what do I know?) and find a weird-looking gun that looks like it's used for cattle vaccinations. Bingo.
And here's where the movie partially derails. In order to get to and safely handle the isotopes, West and Stanley have to don radiation suits, right? Well, in lieu of radiation suits they done these big clear plastic things that are clearly designed for germ warfare or something along those lines. In K-19: The Widowmaker, this mix-up spelled death for some of the cast, but here West and Stanley survive and handle the isotopes without a problem.
Even funnier is we're treated to a very long sequence of them putting them on. This, combined with the long and ultimately pointless sequence of Constable Harris retracing the doctors' steps through the mansion as well as one or two other scenes like the helicopter takeoff earlier, makes me suspect they just had to pad out the running time somehow.
So anyway they put on the, er, radiation suits and open the sealed cabinet thingie with is filled with canisters bearing the biohazard symbol. West finds the one for Strontium-90 and gets it out, and then Stanley carefully removes the isotope thingie from inside it using a pair of tongs and loads it safely into the vaccination gun. Just for suspense, there's one or two moments where it looks like he's gonna have butterfingers.
The vaccination gun is then put into a small silver case and after removing their, er, radiation suits West and Stanley are ready to rock and roll. Except that by the time they're already in the hallway and West has already closed and locked the "KEEP OUT!" door he realizes he forgot the special gloves or whatever they'll need to handle the vaccination gun. Oops. Stanley decides to run upstairs and put the case in the car while West goes back for the gloves. Oh, now they split up.
Stanley heads outside and puts the gun case into the trunk and just as he's closing and locking it a Silicate appears out of nowhere and grabs him by the hand with its tentacle. By now West has the gloves and, hearing Stanley's screams, rushes outside to find his friend writing on the ground with the Silicate already trying to slurp up his arm. He then sees the axe Stanley threw down on the doorstep before.
So West grabs the axe, but we've already established axes don't hurt them, and Stanley realizes what West is think. West gets a nice moment where he chokes up and says, "I can't!" To which Stanley screams "You must!" West swings the axe, and cuts off Stanley's hand, letting the damn Silicate have it. What really shocked me is they show it. I was expecting them to maybe show West swing the axe and cut the hand off OFF-SCREEN and then immediately cut (no pun intended) to the surviving Stanley sans his hand. Hell no, they show the axe lop the hand off and blood squirting out.
West then grabs Stanley, who is understandably kinda bleeding everywhere, and drags him into the relative safety of the car where he ties a tournaquite (how do you spell that anyway?) to stop the bleeding. But they're not out of the woods yet, as West must now get back out of the car, avoid the Silicate that's still hanging around, and the get the keys from where Stanley left them: still in the trunk's keyhole. Get the keys he does, and for final time they burn rubber away for that damn spooky mansion.
Once back in town his first priority is to get Stanley to the clinic. With that accomplished, he takes the vaccination gun (using the special gloves, mind you) and accompanies Campbell to the pens where the cows are. There's a great sense of the fact West doesn't want to do this to these cows, but he kinda has no other choice, and Campbell has his men lead the cows by one at a time so West can inject them with the Strontium-90.
But there's a problem. There's not enough Strontium-90 for all the cows. He has the halve the dosage on the last couple, and Campbell wonders whether that will make a difference. West says he's not sure, and that they'll just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, Argyle is having the villagers set up bright lights around the meeting hall, which is right across the way from the cow pen, knowing it'll attract the Silicates. Campbell is worried this will be a strain on the already wonky generator, but once again, they don't really have much of a choice.
Campbell asks West, point blank, how long it will take for the Strontium-90 to work, if at all. West isn't sure, and Campbell realizes that even if the Silicates eat the contaiminated cattle, they'll attack the meeting hall next if the Strontium-90 doesn't work right away, and he says, "Those things are gonna be all over the building... aren't they?"
West says yes they will be, and that all they can do is wait and pray. He then heads to the clinic to check on Stanley. Campbell remains in the main room (apparently the clinic and the meeting hall are adjoined by a hallway, I just now noticed) and he tells Argyle to start circulating among the townspeople, to just talk to them, cheer them up, try to keep them from panicking.
In the clinic, Stanley is bandaged up and being tended to by Toni. It seems to keep him from dying he's needed several blood transfusions. Trying to remain in good humor, Stanley weakly says that if gets one more transfusion he'll be a full-blooded Irishman. He also refuses more morphine because he's worried about being addicted to it.
West and Toni retire to the hallway that adjoins the two buildings for some more romantic mushy talk. The basic gist of this is that they love each other, and that West is secretly doubtful they'll all survive. He initially tells Toni the usual stuff, that they'll be okay, not to worry, etc., to which Toni replies that he doesn't really believe that. West sighs and shakes his head and says, no, he doesn't although he wishes he did.
Also somewhere in here Campbell has to chastise Halsey who has been spreading crazy talk among the townsfolk, to the effect they should all run for it. An old woman says they've got nowhere to go and Halsey says if she'd seen what happened to Morton she'd try to swim to the mainland. Understandably, Campbelly pulls him aside and tells him if he starts talking like that again he'll beat the crap out of him and then toss him outside with the Silicates. This is similar to Ben's threat to Harry Cooper in Night of the Living Dead, which wouldn't get made until two years later.
Later, West joins Campbell and Argyle outside the meeting hall with binoculars to watch the cattle, who according to the two islanders are getting restless. Suddenly the Silicates appear and swarm the cattle pen. Because the movie is pretty much low-budget, they couldn't afford to show any more of the slaughter than a few of the Silicates getting into the pen. The rest is just off-screen mooing, electronic warbling, and lots of sucking sounds as West, Campbell, and Argyle look on.
It's over before long, and the men look appropriately disgusted, but what's this? The Silicates divide AFTER feasting on the cattle (again, this is never shown; West just looks through his binoculars and cries, "They're dividing!"). West is horrified. He was hoping the Silicates would divide before eating the cows. Now, the effects of the Strontium-90 will be cut in half and it'll take it longer for it to kill them!
He, Campbell, and Argyle quickly rush back inside and lock the doors as the Silicates approach. West rushes into the clinic to inform Toni and Stanley of this, but before the words are out of his mouth we here the electronic warbling of the Silicates. They're here. He goes back out into the meeting hall, and chaos ensues as the generator finally konks out, plunging the whole building into darkness, which is what West and Campbell were afraid of. Several of the panicked townspeople, led by Halsey, run for the doors as the Silicates surround the building outside, but West holds them back with a rifle. Onstage, Campbell, Argyle, and Dunley are also armed and Campbell fires his rifle into the air and says he'll shoot anyone who tries to escape.
The Silicates start breaking through the windows with their tentacles. Guess they should've boarded those up, I guess. Halsey is the first to go as he gets too close to one of the windows and isn't even paying attention because he's covering his ears to block out the sound of the Silicates' shrieking. Silicate tentacles grab him and quickly bites it. Another Silicate comes in through the skylight and flops on top of some poor bastard like the farmer earlier and starts a-suckin' his bones out. All hell breaks loose, basically.
It's all very chaotic and difficult to tell what happens exactly. But basically West and Toni lead the majority of the townspeople run through the adjacent corridor and seek refuge in the clinic, and now that the Silicates have actually entered the meeting hall, Campbell and Argyle are forced to follow and close and lock the doors. The sad part is there's still some people trapped in the meeting hall, and they can be heard screaming to be let in, but the others can't risk it, especially when a Silicate tentacle smashes through the wood.
The Silicates bust through that door, and soon fill the corridor connecting the meeting hall and the clinic (or so we're told; again, a lot of this is only really implied). Anyone left in the meeting hall itself is a goner. Everyone who is still alive rushes into the clinic, and they close the doors and push anything they can up against it, like medical equipment and a big heavy table of some sort.
Campbell moans that they've got nowhere to go and then the Silicates' tentacles start to smash through the frosted glass windows of the clinic doors. West goes and slumps in the corner, with this whole expression that says he realizes his plan failed and now they're all going to die. He rummages through a drawer and finds a syringe of some sort of presumably fast-acting poison, and it's obvious his plan is that they should all commit suicide. It'll be quicker than dying the slow and agonizing way of having their skeletons sucked out. He plans to start with Toni (!).
As West approaches Toni and Stanley with the syringe, Campbell yells for him to stop and points out that the Silicates appear to be weakening. Indeed, their flailing tentacles move slower, and slower, and slower, and then finally either go limp or drop out of side beyond the broken windows of the doors. Their ear-splitting electronic wails die down until all is silent. After a few moments, West asks the others to help him move the stuff away from the doors.
He slowly opens the doors to reveal the hallway is littered with piles upon piles of dead Silicates. He then practically collapses from relief and emotional exhaustion. As the mood gets more relaxed, Stanley tries to lighten things up by saying his hand itches - i.e., the one he no longer has. When West tells him to stop it, he jokes that he should sue West for medical malpractice. West and Toni embrace as everyone celebrates.
Cut to, presumably, the next day or the day after. Toni's father's helicopter finally returns. West, Toni, and Stanley await it with Campbell and Argyle. They discuss the events of the last couple of days, and Campbell says he wishes Dr. Phillips had never done his experiments, but West sticks up for Phillips, saying he wasn't an evil mad scientist. He just wanted to help humanity by curing a disease. He just got too impatient and careless and his experiments resulted in the Silicates.
Stanley asks if they're absolutely certain all the Silicates are dead. Argyle says they're positive because they've searched every inch of the island. The helicopter lands, and before they depart West promises Campbell they'll radio London and ensure that some aid is sent out to Petrie's Island as soon as possible. As they walk to the 'copter Toni says she can't get the Silicates out of her head. West tells her just not to think about them, and she says that's easier said than done. West sighs and says he knows. West then says he's glad it happened on such a small, remote island. "If it had happened anywhere else, I don't think we would have been able to stop them."
Cut to Tokyo, Japan. Two Japanese scientists pass one another in the hall, and one approaches a door marked "Director of Research." He knocks on the door and gets no answer. He knocks again and still nothing. Stumped, he opens the door and goes inside and we hear an all-too familiar electronic warbling. Cue horrible screams and sucking sounds. Roll end credits.
The End
Well, what can I say? This movie was everything I'd hoped it would be, and then some. The Silicates are kind of goofy, but like the shark in Jaws, by the time they actually appear it doesn't matter what they look like.
I highly reccommend this movie to anyone who is a fan of good-bad sci-fi. This one's a keeper. :) | | |
| My next review is going to be a bit of an oddity. After two previous forays into science-fiction, this will be my first review of an animated kid's program. In this case, it's Darkly Dawns the Duck, the pilot movie for Darkwing Duck, Disney's (somewhat) seminal early-90s action-adventure comedy "sequel" to the decidedly better DuckTales.
Although Darkly Dawns the Duck first aired as a two-part TV special on September 8th, 1991 (hence why I chose today to post the review) and currently airs, edited down for time, as two regular episodes of the TV series, the two parts were combined into one feature and released on home video as a 48-minute "movie", so it is the VHS release I'll be reviewing since - in this format anyway - it counts as a movie. Kind of.
Let it be known though that I do not like Darkwing Duck, not as a show nor as a character. The reason I own this video can best be summed up in two words: Taurus Bulba. Easily the most overlooked and underappreciated of Disney's stable of villains, I'm of the opinion that Bulba not only blows his fellow Darkwing Duck villains out of the water (especially Negaduck), but most of the "regular" Disney villains as well. Well, except maybe Ratigan in The Great Mouse Detective. Or Shan-Yu in Mulan. That guy rocked.
Anyway, onward!
Darkly Dawns the Duck
1991, Disney
The Characters:
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Darkwing Duck - Crime-fighting duck (whose real name is Drake Mallard) with an overblown ego who is the self-proclaimed defender of St. Canard.
Gosalyn Waddlemeyer - Orphaned little duckling who was raised by her grandfather, Professor Waddlemeyer, after the death of her parents. Supposedly she is "cute" and "full of spirit," but this is difficult to believe.
Launchpad McQuack - Darkwing's biggest (and only?) fan, a clumsy pilot who longs to be the hero's sidekick. And with a name like McQuack, do I really need to mention that he, too, happens to be a duck?
Taurus Bulba - Dastardly super-villain bull. Despite being in prison, he's hatched a scheme involving Professor Waddlemeyer's invention, the Ramrod.
Hammerhead Hannigan - The leader of Taurus Bulba's thugs, a goat who dresses, talks, and acts like a 1930s mobster and uses his head as a blunt object.
Hoof and Mouth - Taurus Bulba's other two thugs, a donkey and a ram.
Clovis - Taurus Bulba's faithful bovine secretary and personal pilot. Arguably the only intelligent person he has working for him.
Tantalus - Taurus Bulba's faithful pet non-anthropomorphic condor.
Mrs. Cavanaugh - The director of the St. Canard Orphanage. She appears to be a chicken.
Warden Waddlesworth - Warden of the unnamed prison where Taurus Bulba is incarcerated. Proud that his prison holds such an infamous villain, he stages daily gloats over Bulba.
The Story:
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We open in the modern metropolis of St. Canard, and are introduced to the character of Darkwing Duck in the middle of the high-speed pursuit of a gang of criminals, first on foot and then in his motorcycle sidecar, the Ratcatcher. First, Darkwing ramps the Ratcatcher up into the air and comes down in the bed of a pickup truck carrying two of the crooks. The force of the impact is enough to launch the criminals right out of the cab, and they land in some nearby garbage cans, the driver still holding the steering wheel.
This entire chase sequence, by the way, was among the scenes deleted for reruns of the special. In the current aired version, it merely opens with Darkwing dropping the defeated criminals off at the police station (which originally came later), and to my knowledge this chase scene is only viewable on the home video. Surprisingly, part of the sequence, where the Ratcatcher lands on the pickup truck and catapults the two guys out of the cab, is used in the opening montage of the series.
Anyway, the truck continues to drive for some reason. Hmm, must've been on cruise control. Darkwing jumps atop the cab (which no longer has a hole in the roof) and produces his all-purpose gas gun, which is capable of firing grappling lines. He snags the back of another crook's motorcycle with a grappling hook and is yanked forwards and dragged along the pavement, as yet another criminal, a biker pig, attempts to run him over.
He removes a manhole cover as he's dragged past it, causing the biker pig's motorcycle to crash when the front tire hits the open sewer, sending him skidding on his butt. In short order, he defeats the remaining two bikers (a pair of identical twins, no less) by bashing them each upside the head with the manhole cover. Next thing you know, all five of the criminals are tied up and riding in the sidecar portion of the Ratcatcher. After a harrowing ride he sends them all literally flying into the police station when he slams on the brakes.
Now then, the opening chase scene is actually fairly well-executed and manages to succeed in being both exciting and funny, and it's a good way to introduce Darkwing. Unfortunately, my gripe with it is that we never learn who these guys are or why he's chasing them. Sure, they're unimportant to the plot but, eh, nitpicking is what these reviews are for, right?
Darkwing addresses the desk sergeant who happens to be on duty: "Another order of dastardly delinquents deposited on your doorstep, courtesy of Darkwing Duck." He stresses the fact that his name is two words, not three, and that both D's should be capitalized, while handing the sergeant a glossy B&W photo of himself and his business card.
"And now I must be off," he adds. "The scent of crime is in their air!" And yes, he does sniff the air here for dramatic effect. Emerging from the police station, he strikes a heroic pose, only to discover the streets are totally empty. "So where's the press?" he complains. "I thought this was the age of media glut!" Further lamenting that he spent all afternoon ironing his cape, Darkwing hops onto the Ratcatcher and speeds home.
Home in this case turns out to be the tower of the Audubon Bay Bridge, the bridge which spans the bay. He gains access to the tower by driving the Ratcatcher up one of the bridge's thick steel cables. Once inside, he dramatically declares, "Another night cleansed of its criminal element, thanks to... Darkwiiiiiing Duck!" His hideout, by the way, can best be described as a budget-cut Batcave.
He "can't wait to hit the hay," but decides to have some breakfast first (who eats breakfast before going to bed?). Darkwing doesn't just eat breakfast though; he gets a full workout along with it. "Stay sharp, stay fit, stay fed!" he reminds himself as he enters the kitchen. He activates an egg timer, triggering the various food-themed booby traps.
These include, but are not limited to: A drawer that flies open and launches silverware and a plate, a machine gun that fires Froot Loops, a cannon that fires oranges (there's also one that fires grapefruits and eggs, but I digress), and, oddly enough, a fire pit in the floor. Darkwing catches eggs in a frying pan, then when a section of the floor slides back, flames shoot out and he holds the pan over the flames to cook the eggs.
Finally, after catching and preparing all the food that's hurled at him, Darkwing seats himself at the table and checks the timer. "Yes, a new world's record!" he exclaims. Looking over the food, he adds, "Everything a champion needs for breakfast." And then, a horrible realization seems to come over him: "...except the milk!" The fridge is then catapulted up into the air and lands on Darkwing, squishing him.
Don't worry. He's a cartoon character. Of course he survives. When the fridge door falls open he's gone through the bottom and looks a little like an accordion, holding a pitcher of milk. "I always forget the milk," he groans. Some superhero.
Deciding to skip breakfast this once, he changes into his pajamas and heads up to bed. "So I make a mistake here and there," he says to the camera - Yes, he's one of those characters that likes to directly address the audience. Oddly, it's just not as funny as Ferris Bueller. Further expositing that every criminal in town is scared of him, Darkwing flops into bed. "I just wish I could get a shot at a really big-time criminal," he sighs.
And another animation blooper here is that before getting into bed, Darkwing is clearly still wearing his mask. But when we cut to a close-up of him settling in, the mask has vanished.
We cut to an office at an undisclosed location, where Taurus Bulba, an enormous bull with dark purple fur, is in the middle of a meeting with his gang. It seems that Hammerhead Hannigan, a goat wearing a pinstriped suit, is questioning his plans to steal something called the Ramrod. It's being brought into St. Canard that very night by train, and Hammerhead wants to know why they can't wait until the train stops before stealing it. "Oh, you mean when the army takes control of the weapon, with its tanks, and jeeps and hundreds of guards?!" snarls Bulba.
And since none of them are given a proper introduction, I should mention that Bulba's gang also includes his loyal secretary Clovis, and a couple of thugs (a ram and a donkey), plus his pet condor Tantalus.
Hammerhead admits he hadn't thought of that, prompting him to spin around and knock the ram and donkey's heads together. Bulba suddenly reaches over and grabs Hammerhead by the throat, yanking him to eye-level, and reminds him, "That's why I am the brain and you are the stooge!" "That's it, boss! I'm a stooge," gags Hammerhead, "just call me Curly!"
Bulba continues that this is the first time the Ramrod has been moved since the death of its inventor, Professor Waddlemeyer. Suddenly, an alarm of some kind goes off, and Clovis monotonously informs her boss that Warden Waddlesworth is coming. "That nuisance," groans Bulba. He concludes the meeting, warning Hammerhead, "Do not come back without the Ramrod!" before sending him and the ram and donkey thugs away by pressing a button on his desk and dropping them through a trap door.
The entire office quickly begins to transform. A couch, some potted plants and other furniture vanish through more trap doors and secret panels in the walls and floor. Tantalus even picks up his own perch and flies off with it through one of the secret passageways before it closes. Bulba changes from his formal dinner jacket into a prison uniform (off-screen, of course) as Clovis takes his clothing and vanishes from sight along with Bulba's desk when the whole thing lowers into the floor and is replaced by a bunk bed. As a grand finale, some curtains are pulled back to reveal bars.
Yes, Taurus Bulba is in jail. I know that Warden Waddlesworth is just about the single dumbest person on the planet, and I'll buy that Bulba can smuggle his henchmen in for secret meetings, and heck, the idea of a super-villain staying in jail by choice to avoid being blamed for the crimes he has committed is actually a rather good one. But what I DON'T buy is that he's somehow rigged his prison cell to transform into a plush office at the push of a button. And it only gets worse, but that can wait.
Speaking of Warden Waddlesworth, he appears outside of Bulba's cell at this point and asks Bulba how he's doing. "It's peaceful," admits Bulba, now kicking back on the bunk bed. "No one bothers me. Actually, it suits my business needs perfectly." Waddlesworth gives him a weird look, but otherwise doesn't seem to suspect that anything is amiss.
That evening, Darkwing Darkwing Duck is, in his own words, "scanning the horizon for any evidence of wrongdoing," that being that he's in a precariously perched armchair atop the tower of the Audubon Bay Bridge with a pair of binoculars. He continues to talk to himself, something he seems to enjoy, as Tantalus flies overhead carrying what looks like a trunk. "I know birds travel south, but this is the first one I've seen with luggage," he observes, apparently ignoring the fact that he too is a bird.
"This bit of feathery intrigue is best investigated by..." Wait for it. "...Darkwiiiiiiiiing Duck!" Leaping down from the chair, Darkwing jumps onto the Ratcatcher and zooms out of the tower down the bridge cable, following Tantalus through the city as the large bird flies overhead. He's so preoccupied thus that he almost doesn't notice a huge truck speeding towards him. The other vehicle has to swerve to avoid him. After getting yelled at by the truck driver (and rightly so, as the guy is as bad a driver as Launchpad is a pilot), Darkwing sighs in relief and continues on his way as he follows Tantalus out of the city and into the countryside.
At the train tracks, Taurus Bulba's thugs put into motion their plan to board the oncoming train. How they accomplish this is dubious in the extreme - First they dig a tunnel underneath the tracks, and then when the train passes over them Hammerhead attaches a grappling hook to the underside, pulling him out of the hole with the ram thug holding his ankles, and the donkey thug holding the ram's. This results in the three of them getting dragged along the tracks in a rather painful-looking fashion.
The Ramrod is in the next-to-last train car, and guarding it is a grand total of two soldiers. Bulba's helpers jump them and steal their uniforms, tossing them off the train in their underwear. The ram and donkey don the soldiers' uniforms and stand in their place, with the ram gushing, "Hey, Hammerhead. Ain't we cute in our soldier suits?" Ignoring him, Hammerhead uses his horns like a tack hammer to pry off the huge deadbolt on the door of the boxcar, and peeking inside gets a look at the Ramrod.
As it turns out, the Ramrod seems to be some kind of enormous laser gun, resembling an outsized version of one of those cheap plastic space guns sold in drug stores across America. Hammerhead wonders aloud whether the "pea-shooter" is worth all the trouble, then climbs onto the roof and scans the skies for Tantalus. The condor arrives and drops the trunk he was carrying right on top of Hammerhead, and we see that Tantalus is wearing a little TV monitor on a collar around his neck, which displays Taurus Bulba's visage.
Bulba demands to know if the Ramrod is secure. "Like a baby, boss," Hammerhead assures him. Told to proceed, Hammerhead fiddles with the trunk for a minute until it transforms, little "legs" gripping the roof of the boxcar and sprouting a pair of wings and jet thrusters. "Excellent! Excellent!" cackles Bulba in his best super-villain laugh.
Meanwhile, Darkwing has caught up to the train, and driving on the tracks has resulted in a very bumpy ride. The poor hero is still shaking as he climbs aboard the train, noting, "I gotta see about getting new shocks!" Entering the caboose, he passes a conductor busy sorting mail (?), who warns him, "You can't go in there! That's Top Secret!" when Darkwing proceeds to the door leading into the adjoining car. Which makes me wonder why the conductor didn't notice the entire ruckus going on right next door earlier.
"No worries," Darkwing assures him. "Just checking out an unauthorized bird-boarding." He opens the door, then quickly slams it as he sees the ram and donkey guys outside, recognizing them even in their stolen uniforms. "They work for Taurus Bulba. Bulba's as big as they come! This is it. My shot at big-time crime busting! What Darkwing Duck was born for!" We also finally learn that these two are named "Hoof" and "Mouth." They never specify which is which, so I'll call the ram "Mouth" (since he's the only one with a speaking role) and the donkey "Hoof."
Hoof and Mouth seem to be enjoying their "soldier suits" a bit too much, as they begin twirling their stolen rifles around and showing off. Their fun is interrupted as Darkwing's disembodied voice emanates from nowhere and utters, for the first time, the first of many variations of his classic entrance line: "I am the terror that flaps in the night! I am the switch that derails your train!" He appears before them in a puff of smoke, but before he can say anything else they open fire on him. When the smoke clears, Darkwing is gone.
"Do you think he's dead?" Mouth asks, and Hoof replies by nodding. I guess they assume he fell off the train... but that's crediting them with too much intelligence. More likely, they were dumb enough to believe their gunfire totally obliterated him. Darkwing however appears behind them and bashes them over the heads. "Sorry, I'm fine! But you two are taking a turn for the worse!"
The conductor, getting the wrong idea from seeing Darkwing attack two guys in soldiers' uniforms, gets a camera and begins snapping pictures of the hero so that the police can have "more than a description!" Darkwing in turn also gets the wrong impression, grabbing the confused conductor and putting him a good position before jumping atop the two defeated thugs and striking a variety of heroic poses while the conductor snaps pictures. "How's this? It's not to pretentious, I hope."
He then sends the conductor on his way; rather, the conductor retreats back into the caboose and closes the door. Darkwing calls after him with instructions to get the photos to "all the major dailies," adding, "Oh, and I'd like a set too!"
Suddenly, Hammerhead appears (don't ask me where he was during all this). "Yeah? Well, paste this in your scrapbook!" he snarls, headbutting him into the door of the caboose. Hammerhead pulls off the chain-doohickey connecting the train cars, calling over to Darkwing, "You're out of your league, duck! Better run along to your costume party!" as the train speeds away, leaving the detached caboose behind. Citing that they can't get rid of him that easily, Darkwing pulls out his gas gun and fires a grappling cable, which hooks onto the back of the retreating boxcar.
The jet thrusters on the device attached to the roof activate and the boxcar is soon airborne, pulling a screaming Darkwing behind it. Meanwhile, Taurus Bulba has been observing events on a small viewscreen back in his cell with Clovis - Apparently, the TV monitor on Tantalus' collar is also a camera. "Who is this clown?" he wonders upon seeing Darkwing. Him and everybody else. He orders Tantalus to get rid of him, which Tantalus does by swooping down and biting the cable with his beak, causing Darkwing to, well, fall.
As fate would have it, Darkwing's fall is broken as he crashes through the roof of a ramshackle airplane hangar, leaving a Darkwing-shaped hole in the floor. Whoops, guess that didn't break his fall, after all. "Bruised, battered, but never defeated, Darkwing Duck springs back to action!" he wearily declares. Crawling out of the hole and snapping his twisted back into shape again, he notes, "Clever of me to use my spine to break my fall like that, heh, heh."
All of a sudden Darkwing is attacked by a big, red-haired duck in a pilot's uniform and old-fashioned aviator's cap, who has apparently mistaken him for a burglar. "Nobody but nobody messes with the airplanes in my hangar," he says, stuffing Darkwing into a tire. Yes, it looks quite painful. "Or my name isn't Launchpad McQuack!" Right after he says this, he walks into the Darkwing-shaped hole in the floor. Thud.
Darkwing tries to explain that he's not a thief, and when Launchpad finally helps him free himself from the tire and gets a better look at him, he instantly recognizes him. "Darkwing Duck!" he exclaims. "You know me?" Darkwing asks, puzzled. "Know you? I'm your biggest fan!" Launchpad replies.
"A fan? Really?" gushes Darkwing, then he assumes a more heroic pose and says in a deeper voice, "I mean, uh, really?" (This bit is actually funny.) Launchpad answers in the affirmative, then asks Darkwing what he's doing in his hangar. Darkwing is about to answer when he spots an old biplane sitting behind Launchpad. "Hey, you're a pilot!" he exclaims, citing that they can use the plane to catch the up to the bad guys.
Launchpad says he's got a better plane in the next hangar over (which is obviously going to become important later on), but Darkwing says, "No time! We have evildoers to thaaa-wart!" "But in the next hangar, I got this-" "No, fan!" Darkwing cuts him off, adding that if he just comes along he'll give him an autograph. Launchpad jumps into the pilot's seat in seconds. "I'm here for ya, DW!" he says. "That's Darkwing," the hero corrects him, and thus begins a legendary partnership, I guess.
And so Launchpad takes off... backwards! I don't know if it's possible to fly a biplane backwards, but there you go. During the ride, Launchpad expresses his desire to be Darkwing's sidekick, adding that he has "a whole scrapbook" of his newspaper clippings. "Of course, it's not a very big scrapbook," he admits. "Wouldn't it be easier to fly if we were facing the other way?" an understandably nervous Darkwing points out. "Oh, yeah," replies the pilot, "I, uh, sometimes have trouble with that." Turning the plane around and facing the right way, they fly on and soon catch up to the flying boxcar, with Tantalus flapping along behind it.
On Darkwing's instruction, Launchpad dives down, almost hitting Tantalus and startling Taurus Bulba, who is still observing things via the two-way (?) monitor on the condor's collar. Launchpad brings the biplane to a bone-shattering halt above the boxcar. "Gosh, thanks," groans Darkwing, dizzy from the sudden stop. "Hey, I aim to please!" the pilot says with pride.
"It's that costumed meddler again!" Bulba says to Tantalus. "Get rid of him!" Tantalus then swoops down and plucks Darkwing out of the plane while the hero is distracted trying to figure out how to make the boxcar turn around. "All right, beak-face, this is getting monotonous!" he says. And then Tantalus drops him. "Hey, you don't understand!" yells Darkwing as he plummets towards earth. "I like monotony!" Luckily for Darkwing though, Launchpad manages to swoop down so that his idol can grab the plane’s landing gear. Seeing this, Tantalus angrily gives chase, determined to make the hero go splat. The following chase demands that we suspend disbelief and believe a bird can keep pace with an airplane.
"Uh-oh. Looks like birdy’s coming back for seconds," notes Launchpad. "Don’t worry, I’ll shake him, DW!" "That’s Darkwiiiiiiing!" yells the masked mallard as the biplane zips back and forth through the skies, the unusually fast condor in hot pursuit. Doing his best to evade Tantalus, Launchpad flies low through trees and at one point even straight through somebody's house. Following them, Tantalus emerges from the structure covered with a sheet. Darkwing on the other hand ended up with a pink bra on, which he quickly removes and tosses away with a sheepish look on his face.
Ultimately, the biplane spirals out of control and crashes noisily at the base of a telephone pole. Satisfied, Tantalus turns and leaves. Both Darkwing and Launchpad survived the crash though, naturally enough, somehow ending up actually clinging to the telephone pole. "They got away," Darkwing whines. "Can't argue that point, DW," says Launchpad, then asks what they do next. "We? WE do nothing!" snarls the superhero as he climbs down from the pole. "I work alone!" "But I could be your sidekick!" suggests Launchpad. Darkwing tells him that only singing cowboys have sidekicks and repeats that he works alone.
Following him, Launchpad ends up clinging to Darkwing's leg, begging, "Oh, please, please, please, please, pleaaaase!" Darkwing manages to shake him off and tells him, "Let me make this clear for you: I never want to see you again; ever!" He then turns and stomps off down the street, presumably back to wherever it was he left the Ratcatcher. "Okay, uh, so . . do you want my phone number?" Launchpad calls after him. Not surprisingly, he doesn't get a response.
Speaking of the Ratcatcher, this is the second time he's just abandoned it in the middle of a chase and yet is able to remember exactly where he left it. A later episode in the series establishes that he can summon the motorcycle via remote control, but it'd have been less annoying if THIS adventure would explain this properly. So far, it's not exactly being the best origin tale.
Back in prison, Taurus Bulba is wheeling a cart of laundry to the prison laundromat, and we can see that Hammerhead, Hoof, and Mouth are hiding inside. In fact, the laundromat is where the Ramrod is now stashed, hidden behind nothing but a rack of cleaned clothes. Warden Waddlesworth stops in for a moment to harass Bulba, saying, "Doing an honest day's work must be a new experience for you, Bulba. Maybe you'll get some time off for good behavior... in 99 years or so!" Giggling like an idiot, he leaves the room without even noticing the poorly hidden giant gun.
The thugs emerge from the cart after he's gone, with Hammerhead saying how much he'd love to pound on the good Warden. "Ignore him," Bulba soothes, "Such petty annoyances will disappear once I use the Ramrod!" On cue, Hoof and Mouth (who by the way are back to wearing their "thug attire" of suits and ties) move aside the clothing rack to reveal the Ramrod is all its glory. "Oh jeepers, it's beautiful," gasps Mouth as though this is the first time he's seen it; which begs the question of just how they got the damn thing into the prison with no one noticing.
Hammerhead suggests they "fire it up and hit a few banks," but Bulba tells him it's useless without a special arming code. Wouldn't they (the henchmen, I mean) already have been aware of this? Guess not. As in Batman and Robin, Bulba gets to use his thugs to exposit some. Apparently, an earlier attempt to steal the Ramrod resulted in the accidental death of Professor Waddlemeyer before Bulba could learn the code. It's hinted at rather strongly that Hoof and Mouth did the deed, but the subject never comes up again. Bulba's got a backup plan, though. "Go to the St. Canard Orphanage and bring me his granddaughter," he tells Hammerhead.
Since she was "practically raised in his lab," there's a chance she knows the code. He then gives Hammerhead a photo to help identify the girl - the photo is a picture of Professor Waddlemeyer standing in front of the Ramrod, with a little redheaded girl with pigtails in his arms. Bulba also reveals his intentions that, after they get the code, the girl will "have an accident" like her grandfather, only this time on purpose. Dang, this guy's ruthless. Looks like we'll have some clichéd Child Endangerment soon.
At the orphanage, Hammerhead shows the woman in charge, Mrs. Cavanaugh, the photo, claiming that he's an old friend of the Professor's and furthermore, keeps saying, "That's me in the background there!" and pointing to a purple smudge in the photo. Studying the picture, Mrs. Cavanaugh says, "Actually, it looks kind of like of like a grape jelly stain." Hammerhead quickly snatches the picture back and asks where "the little cupcake" is. Mrs. Cavanaugh says she's is outside playing roller hockey, and no sooner are those words out of her mouth than a hockey puck flies through the (open) window. She ducks, and the puck smacks Hammerhead in the face. Ouch. He falls down with little Tantaluses flapping around his head.
Gosalyn Waddlemeyer, a red-haired duckling with pigtails that defy gravity, skates in and "plays it where it lays," using her hockey stick to smack the puck off Hammerhead's nose and back out the window, where it hits the goalie of the opposing team in the stomach and knocks him down. I can't even begin to express how annoying I find this character. While Gosalyn is far from the worst or most pointless character in the series, she is by far the most annoying. Regardless of the fact she's the clichéd Spunky Kid Who Darkwing Has to Save, she didn't have to be. Done the right way Gosalyn could've been a genuinely adorable little child for whose safety we would be afraid. Step 1 would be finding somebody other than Christine Cavanaugh to do her voice; she gives Eddie Deezen as Mouth a run for his money in being really aggravating.
She's about to leave when Mrs. Cavanaugh (the orphanage director, not her voice actress) grabs her and makes her sit down in a chair. Thinking she's in trouble, Gosalyn rapidly fires off, "I don't know anything about a pig and I was nowhere near the boys' bathroom at the time!" Mrs. Cavanaugh, genuinely puzzled, asks what she's talking about. Gosalyn recovers with, "Pig? I mean BIG! As in how BIG of you to take such an interest in me. How may I help you?"
Mrs. Cavanaugh isn't buying it though. "We'll talk later," she tells Gosalyn before introducing her to Hammerhead, or, as she calls him, Mr. Hannigan. "You knew Grampa?" Gosalyn asks, simultaneously surprised and happy. "Uh, sure!" Hammerhead says, and hands her the photo, again stating "That's me in the background!" "Actually, it looks like a grape jelly stain," Gosalyn observes. (Thankfully this is the final time this joke is used.) Grabbing the photo back from her, Hammerhead suggests they go for a walk and "swap stories about your Granddad."
Gosalyn asks if she can go with "Mr. Hannigan." Mrs. Cavanaugh says it would be all right, as long as they don't go too far from the orphanage. "Oh, yeah! Great!" Gosalyn tackles Hammerhead to the floor in a big hug. After they're gone, Mrs. Cavanaugh asks her assistant, Eugene, "Have you heard anything about a pig in the bathroom?" I don't know about the bathroom, but Darkwing sure busted one earlier who was riding a motorcycle.
Gosalyn and Hammerhead exit the orphanage through the front doors and begin a leisurely stroll down the sidewalk. As they walk, Gosalyn fills Hammerhead in on her life story: "After mom and dad died, Grampa was the only family I had in the whole world. But since he's been gone, I've made lots of friends here, so it's not so bad. Until adoption day . . . " It would seem as though most prospective parents don't want to adopt a child who is such a bundle of energy - I.e., a really annoying, angsty little brat. "I'm not a problem child," Gosalyn assures Hammerhead. "Grampa said I just have a lot of spirit. He said when you're full of spirit, everyone else looks empty. Someday I'll meet somebody who understands that. Then I'll be adopted."
What happens next is open to interpretation. Hammerhead gets all teary-eyed and blows his nose into a handkerchief. I know it's supposed to just be funny, but Hammerhead, already shown as a bad liar and an even worse actor, would be the last person capable of making himself cry on cue. So was he actually moved by her speech? Does he really feel guilty about working for the guy who killed her grandfather? Who knows. Nothing more is done with this possible bit of character development for Hammerhead because at that point, Gosalyn becomes uneasy at the fact that they're a little further away from the orphanage grounds for comfort.
"I thought we'd go for a little ride," Hammerhead tells her with an evil grin, suddenly his old self again as Hoof and Mouth jump out of a parked van that wasn't there three seconds ago. Gosalyn runs, but Hoof blocks her path, and the thugs surround her as he presses back against a chain-link fence. "Take it easy, kid," Hammerhead tells her. "Taurus Bulba wants to have a little talk with you." "Yeah? Well, here's a message for HIM!" Gosalyn says and swings her rollerblades, smacking Hammerhead in the jaw and causing his teeth to fall out.
Hoof makes a grab for her, but she smacks him with the rollerblades as well. She runs for the street, declaring, "Nobody kidnaps Gosalyn Waddlemeyer!" as Mouth dives for her, misses, and lands flat on his face. At this point, Darkwing suddenly (and I mean SUDDENLY) shows up on the Ratcatcher and snatches Gosalyn right off the pavement and out of the thugs' grasp. How he was able to arrive just at the right moment is rather lamely explained in a bit. "Never fear, little miss! Darkwing Duck has you now!" he assures her, and she promptly socks him in the gut and pulls his fedora down over his eyes, making it difficult to see where he's going, and the Ratcatcher veers into oncoming traffic.
"I'm not one of the bad guys!" Darkwing yelps, regaining control of the motorcycle. After narrowly avoiding colliding with oncoming cars, Darkwing and Gosalyn have a new problem - Hammerhead, Hoof and Mouth are behind them now in their van. They're also shooting at them, which makes no sense because Bulba needs Gosalyn alive, but I digress. This is enough to convince Gosalyn that Darkwing isn't one of the bad guys after all. "I take it you're convinced now? Stay down! I have a little surprise for them!" The Ratcatcher suddenly emits an oil slick just as they turn a corner; trying to follow them, the thugs' van hits the oil and goes spinning out of control.
The oil slick feature of the Ratcatcher impresses Gosalyn. "Keen gear!" she says. "What does this button do?" she asks, pointing to a green button on the handlebar. "Don't touch that!" howls Darkwing. "Why not?" asks Gosalyn... ...and she presses it anyway, causing the ejector seat of the motorcycle to catapult Darkwing into the sky. Aw, isn't that horrible little child just adorable for endangering the life of our hero (who is admittedly an egotistical asshole)?
Right about this time we see that Launchpad is peddling through the city on a bicycle. "I'll show him! Every hero needs a sidekick," he says. "But how am I gonna find DW?" At that very moment, the airborne superhero goes sailing over Launchpad's head, screaming. Somehow or another the Ratcatcher actually ends up ahead of the flying Darkwing, so that he lands safely in the seat again. And somehow, Launchpad's bike is able to keep up with the Ratcatcher. He must have some damn powerful legs. "Hang on, DW!" he calls after him. "What's the rush?" He gets his answer as the bad guys' van suddenly appears and rejoins the pursuit, the thugs firing their guns in every direction wildly for no reason.
Now though, Darkwing is intent on getting Gosalyn to the police station. "The orphanage isn't safe," he tells her. "But you'll be okay at the police station!" Alas, as the Ratcatcher nears the police station, it would seem as though the police have set up a barricade using their patrol cars. "He's attacking!" declares one officer. The dozen or so assembled cops open fire on the oncoming Ratcatcher, and Darkwing is forced to make a major U-turn to avoid the hail of bullets. "Oh, yeah, I feel real safe now," mutters Gosalyn.
Further demonstrating that the Ratcatcher is either really slow or that, as I said, he's got some damn strong legs, Launchpad peddles up alongside Darkwing and Gosalyn (backwards, no less!). "Wh-what did you do to make those guys so mad?" he inquires. "I didn't do anything!" protests Darkwing. But as they pass a newsstand, Gosalyn reaches out and grabs an issue of the day's newspaper. "How about robbing a train?" she suggests. "I didn't rob a--," begins Darkwing as he snatches the paper from her, but stops when he sees the dramatic photo of him fighting Hoof and Mouth.
Ugh, I was hoping to avoid getting into this, but I can't help myself. There's so many problems with the whole Darkwing is Framed sub-plot. For starters, let's examine the newspaper itself - The photo showing him fighting Hoof and Mouth couldn't have been taken, as the train conductor didn't start snapping pictures until both of the thugs were down. Next, there's the whole problem with Hoof and Mouth dressed up as soldiers, namely that, if Darkwing recognizes them as Taurus Bulba's thugs even in their stolen uniforms, shouldn't the police also recognize two such notorious criminals?
And what about the original owners of said uniforms? They make it a point to show that Bulba's thugs don't kill the soldiers, but merely steal their clothes and kick them off the train. Therefore, they're alive and should've given their testimony, which is that they were attacked by farm animal goons, not some duck with a flair for the dramatic. Hell, if the Ramrod was originally military property why isn't the army involved in any of this?! This whole portion of the special is its weakest, because the writers obviously thought none of this through.
Back to the chase, before my head explodes. Darkwing admits that the picture isn't bad, asking Gosalyn, "Uh, you don't think it looks pretentious, do you?" Naw, I'd say it looks faked. Suddenly they find themselves headed right towards the bad guys' oncoming van, with Hammerhead firing on them with a missile launcher (!!!). Um, okay. Right. Darkwing avoids the missiles, zooming past the van, which quickly spins around to resume pursuit as a bunch of police cars speed onto the scene. Wisely, the thugs drop out of the chase here and simply follow the police.
I should add that I think I'm really making this chase sequence sound a lot more exciting than it really is. It's actually quite dull, thanks largely to the crummy animation (not to mention the introduction of the lame-ass sub-plot mentioned above) and poor staging, as all of the participants seem to be everywhere at once. It's really annoying, and makes this my least favorite part of the whole thing.
The chase soon leads to the seaside district of the city. "Drastic times call for drastic action!" declares Darkwing as the Ratcatcher drives out onto a pier. "How are you at holding your breath?" he asks Gosalyn. Without waiting for her to answer, he drives the motorcycle right off the dock despite Launchpad's cry of, "Don't do it, DW! It's a dead end!" Unable to stop himself, Launchpad flies off the dock and splashes into the water after the Ratcatcher.
The pursuing police cars screech to a halt to avoid plunging into the water, while Bulba's thugs also halt their own vehicle, a good distance back from the cops. Popping up from the water, Launchpad says, "Nice trick, DW! That's one way to lose those bad guys!" When he doesn't receive an answer, he suddenly realizes he's alone. "DW? Uh, little girl? Anybody...?" Back in the van, Hammerhead moans that Bulba isn't going to be happy that they lost Gosalyn. Mouth suddenly begins having a panic attack, screaming, "We're all gonna die! We're all gonna die!" hysterically until Hammerhead pounds him on the noggin.
As it turns out though, Darkwing and Gosalyn are alive and have, uh, somehow made it to the Audubon Bay Bridge. What the hell? Did he drive the Ratcatcher on the ocean floor?! Does it turn into a submarine? Ugh. Anyway, he, Gosalyn and the motorcycle are next seen on an elevator of some sort taking them up to Darkwing's hideout in the tower. "Wow," exclaims Gosalyn, "a real police chase with bullets, crooks, and everything!" When Gosalyn inquires whether all of Darkwing's days are as exciting as this one, he replies, "No, because I'm usually sleeping. But when I learned that Professor Waddlemeyer had raised a granddaughter, I knew I had to get to you before Taurus Bulba!" When and how did he get this information? How did he even know what Bulba's thugs stole?
Having heard that name twice in one day, Gosalyn asks just who the hell Taurus Bulba is. Darkwing sums him up: "A deviously clever criminal mastermind, who, I'm convinced, is still operating his gangs from inside prison." "Wow, just like in the comics!" gushes Gosalyn. "I bet you guys are eternal enemies, right?" Chuckling modestly while pulling fish out of his clothes and wringing his fedora dry, Darkwing says he isn't even sure if Bulba knows that he exists. "But he soon will. Mark my words!"
They soon arrive inside Darkwing's abode. "Keen gear!" says Gosalyn, and even though it's only her second time saying this expression, I'm already sick of it. "What a hideout!" "Oh yes, it's just a little shack I like to call home," Darkwing says, attempting to look cool or whatever by tossing his fedora onto a nearby hatrack. He fails miserably, as the still soaking-wet hat plops into the wall instead. "Speaking of which, we have to find you a safe place to stay." He suddenly notices that she isn't there, then spots her on an upper level.
"Why can't I just stay here?" she asks. "We make a great team!" Darkwing starts the whole "I work alone!" business again, telling Gosalyn she'd just be in the way. He doesn't notice her messing with a control console of some sort until it's too late. She pulls a random lever, causing a radar dish-shaped laser to turn towards Darkwing and fire red bolts of energy into him, cartoonishly electrocuting him. "See?" he croaks afterwards. "Little things like that... ...tend to... ...cramp... ...my style... ...ack." I don't care if she IS an orphan, this little child is a brat.
Darkwing goes to over to a desk and starts digging through piles of paperwork and such, looking for his phonebook so he can find a hotel for Gosalyn. "Maybe the animal shelter has an opening," he mumbles. "Well, I suppose I could leave," says Gosalyn, "but I might let it slip where a certain masked avenger hangs out." See? The little twerp is taking to blackmail already! "You wouldn't!" gasps Darkwing. "Hey, I'm a kid. I'm supposed to be irresponsible!" she tells him.
Darkwing growls and looks like he's so mad he's gonna have a brain aneurysm, but then he calms down. "Like I said, it's much too dangerous out there!" he finally says, falling for her reverse psychology trap. "I'd better keep you close." She tackles him and gives him a big hug. "Thanks, Darkwing!" "Yeah, right," he grumbles.
Back at Taurus Bulba's office/prison cell, Hammerhead is whining, "It wasn't our fault! Oh, it wasn't our fault!" Bulba reaches down and seizes him by the snout, picking him up. "It was their fault! It was their fault!" squeals Hammerhead, pointing to a cowering Hoof and Mouth in the corner. Bulba finally drops him. "That costumed clown is too concerned about his image to kill a little girl," he says. "He has her hidden somewhere. We draw him out, and we'll have her!" He turns to Clovis, who is now wearing an aviator's cap. "Clovis, if the Ramrod is secured, I think it's time we said good-bye to the Warden." "Right away, Taurus Bulba," Clovis monotonously replies, as a control panel pops up from the floor and she pulls a lever on it.
In the prison courtyard, Warden Waddlesworth is talking to a guard. "Oh, I've got to run!" he says, checking his watch. "It's time for my afternoon gloat over Taurus Bulba!" Suddenly, the ground beneath their feet begins to shake. "Wh-wh-what's that?"
The perimeter walls crumble, guards leaping screaming from their watchtowers as they fall apart, and suddenly the entire prison itself explodes, revealing... a big goddamn airship shaped like a bull's head. Like I said, it only gets worse. It's not bad enough that Bulba is somehow able to have a prison cell that can transform into an office at the push of a button, but he's also got a gigantic airship (shaped like a BULL'S HEAD!) hidden beneath the prison itself for a quick and easy escape.
Waddlesworth and the guard he was talking to stand amongst the rubble and watch the airship lift off. "Huh, guess he's been making more than license plates," the guard observes. Soon the Giant Flying Bull's Head of Doom (as I shall call Bulba's airship from now on) is high in the clouds. "It's a shame to lose a hideout as perfect as a prison, but all things must come to an end," Bulba muses, making me even angrier that they're ruining this really cool villain with such a stupid escape plan. Couldn't they have just had Clovis arrive with the airship and spring her boss? Or better yet, not have Bulba be in prison at all? At any rate, he instructs Clovis to take them downtown. "It's time I met this Darkwing Duck!"
"But it's hopeless! No one gets the drop on Darkwing Du-," he begins, but is cut off with a cry of, "Gosalyn Waddlemeyer!" as the little sprat leaps onto him from above and wearing his fedora, knocking him to the floor. She tells him he's got to work on his narration, citing that they write better stuff on Saturday morning cartoons. Oh, the irony.
Darkwing jumps up, grabbing Gosalyn by her feet and holding her upside-down, narrating further that, "In a lightening move, Darkwing Duck turns the tables on the tiny terror!" She has the edge though; she starts tickling him. Finally, he releases her and collapses with laughter. She walks over him, literally (with accompanying squeaky horn sound effects), and ventures into the kitchen. Uh-oh. Spotting the egg timer on the kitchen table, she mistakes it for a clock radio. "Let's hear some tunes!" she says, turning it on. "What are you doing?" shrieks Darkwing as he rushes in. "Turning on the clock radio?" she innocently replies.
Out comes the drawer, flinging its knives and forks towards them. Darkwing grabs Gosalyn and pulls her out of the way, and he's then hit in the mouth with an airborne plate. "Keen gear!" gushes Gosalyn. Ugh, she did it again!. "This is some kind of training course, huh?" "You might say that," he says as he rushes to catch Froot Loops fired by that cereal machine gun. Gosalyn asks if she can try, but Darkwing tells it's too dangerous. Regardless, she gets a frying pan and uses it to catch the eggs, then nimbly avoids the fire pit in the floor and uses it to cook said eggs, wisely using an oven mitt so she won't burn her hand (which, I forgot to mention, Darkwing did earlier).
She then performs stunts no normal child could possibly do, leaping up and buttering toast in midair, then catching the oranges on the butter knife as she lands in the chair at the table. "That was amazing," Darkwing comments, checking the timer. "Uh, it's nowhere near MY level, of course, but that's still pretty impressive." Noticing an empty glass on the table, Gosalyn says, "Darn, forgot the milk!" Cue the fridge, which lands right on Darkwing. Splat.
Still holding the glass, she opens the fridge door and out falls Darkwing, once more squished into an accordion shape and holding the pitcher of milk. "Allow me," he groans, feebly pouring the milk into her glass.
Ordinarily I'm not picky about stuff like this, but one thing I've noticed is that this thing apparently can't make up its mind just how cartoony it wants to be. On the one hand, Darkwing survives having a fridge dropped on top of him twice, but at the same time we're supposed to believe that falling from a great height (when Tantalus dropped him earlier) would be harmful to him.
This REALLY annoys me, since it results in a very bizarre clashing of styles. In short, it's one part Batman: The Animated Series (before the fact) and one part Looney Tunes as far as the action is concerned. It's obvious that the writers wanted to have their cake and eat it too, by which I mean they wanted to have both as much physical comedy (the fridge getting dropped on Darkwing, Gosalyn's unrealistic stunts in the kitchen, etc.) as they could while at the same time place the characters in peril and have us fear for their safety, but mixing realistic violence in with flat-out cartoonishness just doesn't work. It all boils down to this: If Darkwing can survive having a fridge land on him, and if Gosalyn can pull all these acrobatic stunts, it makes their peril less believable.
Especially jarring is the fact that DuckTales, of which Darkwing Duck is a spinoff, was never this cartoony. At least, from what I recall. If my memory serves me, DuckTales actually did its best to stay within the realm of believability and had its characters and the situations they were in obey the laws of physics. I honestly don't know what Tad Stones was thinking.
Continuing, Gosalyn helps Darkwing extract himself from the fridge, advising him that he should be more careful. "Sounds reasonable," he admits. She then slams a motorcycle helmet onto his head, backwards, and drags him out of the kitchen by his cape. "I found this stashed in the closet. How come you don't wear it when you ride your back?" After finally managing to pull the helmet off, Darkwing says, "Because, uh, it doesn't look dramatic." "Neither do scrambled brains," replies Gosalyn, citing he should also have seatbelts on the Ratcatcher. "Look, kiddo, I appreciate the concern, but I knew this job was dangerous when I took it," he tells her.
The topic then abruptly changes to Darkwing's mask. Specifically, Gosalyn wants to know why he wears one. Suddenly pulling his cape across the lower half of his face, a la Dracula, Darkwing intones in a spooky voice, "Because there is nothing so terrifying to the criminal mind as the unknown! I am the thing that goes bump in the night! I am the neurosis that requires a $500 an-hour shrink!"
"You mean you don't take off your mask for anyone?" Darkwing responds in the affirmative. "What about a really, really close friend?" Gosalyn asks. That makes him pause for a moment before finally replying. "Uh, well, maybe someday." Gosalyn shrugs at the camera and says it's a start. Oh, no. He's known her for less than 24 hours and already he's bonding with the horrid little monster.
Later, it's bedtime for Gosalyn. Darkwing lets her use his bed. Him not having a place to sleep won't be a problem, because "I'm a night person, remember? And with Taurus Bulba at large again, I'll have to be extra vigilant!" Gosalyn finally asks just what it is that Bulba could possibly want with her. "Well, Bulba stole your grandfather's invention and he thinks you know the code that operates it," Darkwing informs her.
Again, how does he come by this information? I mean, that's the only logical reason that Bulba would have for trying to have her kidnapped, but still, how can Darkwing know this for sure? Mysteriously, even though he knows what the Ramrod is called (despite the fact it's supposed to be Top Secret), he hasn't got the foggiest idea just what it is, and asks Gosalyn. "It's a trachio-specific device that disrupts gravitational bonds on a molecular level and allows manipulation on a macro scale," she breathlessly reports. "What does THAT mean?" Darkwing asks after a lengthy pause. "I dunno," she admits. "I think it makes things float n' stuff."
Yet another plot hole follows. Gosalyn takes out a photo of her and her grandfather standing in front of the Ramrod in order to show him what the weapon looks like. My problem isn't that he has a photo, but that it's the exact same photo that Taurus Bulba gave to Hammerhead, grape jelly stain and all. Hammerhead took it away from her at the orphanage after she looked at it and stuffed it into his pocket. How did she get it? Is she a pickpocket?!
She also points out her grandfather, and Darkwing remarks that it looked like they were close. Sad music plays as Gosalyn says, "We were. But he never told me any code!" Unfortunately, Bulba doesn't know that, and Darkwing tells her as much, and also points out the obvious fact that he'll be searching for her now that he's busted out of prison. "Although if they knew how much spirit you have, they'd probably run the other way," he adds. "Thanks, Darkwing," Gosalyn says, giving the hero a hug. Could it be that there's a paternal relationship developing? Let's hope not.
After tucking Gosalyn in, Darkwing turns and begins to walk off. He's stopped when Gosalyn whines that she can't sleep. "You just need something to relax you," Darkwing says, and suggests a mallet. (If only...). "Grandpa used to sing me a lullaby," Gosalyn says. "I don't do lullabies," the hero glumly informs her. Gosalyn's sad look makes him change his mind. "Why don't you teach me one of his so I can sing it back to you?" he suggests. Gosalyn remarks that this has the suspicious ring of reverse psychology to it. "But have it your way." And to the horror every good, decent, and sane person in the world, Gosalyn begins to SING! "Close your eyes, Little Girl Blue! Inside of you lies a rainbow! Yellow, blue, red, blue, purple, too. Blue, purple, and green and yellow!"
"Not much on lyrics," Darkwing admits, but gives it a go anyway. And to the horror every good, decent, and sane person in the world, Darkwing begin to sing, too! "Rest your head, Little Girl Blue. Come paint your dreams on your pillow. I'll be near to chase away fear, so sleep now and dream 'till tomorrow." The last verse is repeated and by then Gosalyn is asleep, and, amazingly, so is Darkwing.
A loud snore from Gosalyn causes Darkwing to jolt awake. "Oh, jeez. This kid could wake Elvis," he yawns (making the first of many tired, unfunny Elvis references that would pop up throughout the series). "Sure is sweet, though." He can't get the annoying tune out of his head and hums it as he picks up and looks at the photo of Gosalyn, Professor Waddlemeyer, and the Ramrod. And then he notices what any idiot probably already figured out before now. Getting a magnifying glass and looking at the photo through, he notices that on the Ramrod's control console there's a row of color-coded buttons. "The lyrics match the controls of the Ramrod!" he gasps. I have to admit, it was a clever move on the Professor's part to teach Gosalyn the code without actually teaching it to her, if you know what I mean. Pity the song had to be so terrible.
"She's had the arming code all along and never even knew," Darkwing says, continuing his pointless expository dialogue. "And for her sake, it better stay that way," he says, putting the photo into the sleeping girl's hand. By then, evening has passed into night, and suddenly, bright flashes of light begin to illuminate the clouds in the sky in periodic intervals. At first Darkwing thinks it's lightening, but then he notes that the pattern is way too regular. That, and the light is also GREEN.
Cut to the Giant Flying Bull's Head of Doom flying in a holding pattern in the clouds above the city. The flashes of light are coming from beacons on the tips of the "horns." Standing at the controls with Clovis, Taurus Bulba instructs her to keep the beacons flashing for another half-hour, then turns to where Hammerhead, Hoof and Mouth are standing. "It's simply a matter of knowing your adversary," he tells them. "Somewhere down there is this Darkwing Duck. I've watched him. I know his weakness. His posing, his flamboyance, the mask and cape!"
As he talks, he parades around, comically imitating Darkwing's various heroic poses. "And that hat!" he adds, making Hoof look glumly at his own goofy, wide-brimmed hat. "It all indicates an ego the size of a small planet," Bulba concludes. Bulba explains that the beacons on the ship are flashing a message in Morse code - "Taurus Bulba, the criminal genius, recognizing the error of his ways, is offering to surrender himself. But only to Darkwing Duck!"
When he takes the bait, Tantalus will pinpoint his hideout for them, allowing Hammerhead, Hoof and Mouth to go in and snatch Gosalyn. "But boss," whines Hammerhead as Bulba opens a window, allowing Tantalus to fly out, "what if he doesn't know Morse code?" "That do-gooder?" snickers Bulba. "He probably keeps a Boy Scout handbook under his pillow!" Hmm, if this is supposed to be taking place in the same universe as DuckTales, shouldn't he mean a Junior Woodchuck's handbook?
Cut back to the Darkwing Duck residence, where the hero is carefully reaching under his pillow, trying not to disturb Gosalyn. "Sure glad I saved this baby," he says as he, sure enough, pulls out a Boy Scout handbook. Using the handbook, he's able to decipher what the Morse code is saying (and even though Bulba told Clovis to keep the flashes going for another half-hour, they stop as soon as Darkwing has finished deciphering the code).
"Yes!" Darkwing cheers. "It's headline city!" Gosalyn awakens at this point and walks over, yawning. "What's up? Win the lottery?" she asks. Darkwing apologizes for waking her up, and shows her the deciphered message as jotted down on a notepad. "It's obvious my reputation has spread to every sewer and gutter where criminals dwell. I don't even have to make a move! They come to me, groveling at my doorstep, pleading to be turned in! I sense a major motion picture, here!" To tell the truth, I actually think this has some potential to be an actual movie and I wish Disney would remake it and make it less silly, but that isn't gonna happen in my lifetime.
After studying the message for a moment, Gosalyn says, "But this doesn't make sense. He just escaped!" Darkwing replies that it's obvious Bulba has had a chance to speak with his thugs about him, and that he's scared stiff. "He knows he's outmatched! I have his men on the run!" Gosalyn laughs and says that from what she remembers, THEY were the ones doing the running. Darkwing takes this the wrong way. "Oh, you think it was all just luck, eh? Just a coincidence that you're here with me, instead of with him? That I'm just another clown in a costume? Who's going to take Darkwing Dip seriously!" This reduces Gosalyn to tears. Yes! Mwahahahahaha! How I savor this moment!
"Nevermind," grumbles Darkwing as he heads for the door. "It doesn't matter. After Taurus Bulba's back in jail, you'll be back in the orphanage. Then we can both get back to our lives." Some hero. To his credit however, he actually wears that motorcycle helmet when he hops onto the Ratcatcher and speeds down the bridge cable. And in doing so (taking the helmet, I mean) he signifies that he is indeed starting to get used to Gosalyn and is taking her advise. Nuts.
This movement is spotted by Tantalus, and his two-way TV monitor-on-a-collar relays the image of the bridge back to the Giant Flying Bull's Head of Doom. "The Audubon Bay Bridge? She's in the tower!" Bulba deduces, then tells Hammerhead to "take the boys and grab her," while he goes to keep his appointment with Darkwing Duck.
I'm guessing that the message also detailed a specific meeting place since Darkwing shows up at Canard Tower, the tallest building in the city. "I am the terror that flaps in the night! I am the jailer that throws away the key!" he declares, appearing in a puff of smoke per usual. He then realizes he's alone, and mutters that he hates it when he's early. "You'd think criminal masterminds would be more punctual," he gripes as he sits down on the edge of the roof.
Suddenly Taurus Bulba appears behind him. "Please accept my apologies." Darkwing turns to find Bulba looming over him, and is suddenly struck speechless. It took me a while to even fathom why, but then upon the umpteenth viewing I got the impression that until this moment Darkwing had never seen Bulba and this no idea just how huge he is. Seriously, compared to Darkwing Bulba is about the biggest and most intimidating fellow in all St. Canard. "I'm the terror that flaps in the night," he finally manages to declare, but quickly he begins to stammer fearfully, "I am the... ...s-surprise in your cereal box. I am... I am...."
Bulba waves him off. "Yes, yes, I know. I heard. You're Darkwing Duck. Your ego IS out of control, isn't it? I mean, seriously! Why would I surrender to YOU?" "Because I have your men on the run?" gulps Darkwing, earning a hearty laugh from Bulba. "Oh, please! I manipulated you like a puppet!"
Darkwing is quick to recover though. "Yeah, well, I manipulated you into manipulating me! I have you right where I want you! Alone with me - Darkwiiiiiing Duck!" Then comes my favorite moment in the entire cartoon: Darkwing does some cheesy martial arts moves and then leaps at Bulba, who catches him and calmly squishes him into a little ball with no effort whatsoever. "Sorry, I don't have time to play," Bulba tells him. "But I did call some of your friends."
At this point, a bunch of cops run out onto the roof. Spotting the two of them, they run over. Dropping Darkwing, Bulba says that the police have questions about "a certain train robbery," before he hops aboard a platform suspended below the Giant Flying Bull's Head of Doom and is lifted up to safety. "I'd love to stay, but I have a date on the bridge with a little girl." Realizing he means Gosalyn Darkwing prepares to fire a grappling line at the airship from his gas hook gun... ...and then he's pounced by the cops. "No!" cries Darkwing dramatically. "GOSALYYYYYYN!"
Thus, we get the payoff to the really stupid "Darkwing is Framed" sub-plot introduced earlier. Regardless of the fact that Darkwing is supposedly wanted for stealing a Top Secret military weapon, you'd think the police would be more concerned with Bulba, a dangerous super-villain who not only escaped from prison, but did so by making off with the entire building by turning it into a gigantic airship.
Back at the Audubon Bay Bridge, Hammerhead, Hoof, and Mouth make the tedious climb up the bridge cables to get to the tower. "Why can't this nutcase live on the ground like normal people?" whines Hammerhead. Yeah, he whines a lot. In the tower, Gosalyn is standing by the window, looking sadly out at the city. "I'm sorry, Grandpa," she says to, well, I guess his spirit in heaven, "I messed up again. I sure don't mean to make trouble. So much for spirit." Ow, she's breaking my heart. Thankfully, the sudden appearance of Bulba's thugs puts a stop to this sentimental nonsense.
Gosalyn kicks Hammerhead in the knee, causing him to stumble back into Hoof and Mouth, who catch him. "Get her!" he orders them, and they drop him (Thud!) and run after Gosalyn. Gosalyn, always a quick thinker it seems, runs into the kitchen and activates the egg timer as Hoof and Mouth run in. Oh, boy. Here we go again.
Despite the fact that neither Darkwing nor Gosalyn bothered to re-set the traps after using them the last time, everything is in readiness to subject Bulba's thugs to a grueling, third-rate Home Alone-ish hurtfest. First, Hoof is pinned to the wall by flying silverware, and narrowly avoids being decapitated by a plate - He saves himself by pulling his head down into his shirt collar like a turtle. Then Hammerhead runs in, demanding, "Where'd she go?" He gets his answer as Gosalyn jumps out of a nearby cabinet, wearing a pot on her head like a helmet and armed with the cereal machine gun.
"Eat fiber, horn-head!" she declares and opens fire on him and Mouth. They dive for cover behind the kitchen table as they're pelted by Cheerios, but the gun runs out of its sugary ammo. "Now we got ya!" Hammerhead sneers as they emerge from hiding and, joined by a suddenly-freed Hoof, move in on Gosalyn. Then they're smacked in the face with oranges. Hammerhead gets a mouthful of them while Hoof and Mouth end up with one in each eye - Owie! Citrus sting!
Then the floor slides out from under their feet and they realize they were standing over the fire pit. They leap screaming into the air as their feet and butts are burned, and finally land hard on the floor in front of the fridge, which, yes, springs up and lands on 'em. Splat. "Wait'll you see what we're having for lunch!" Gosalyn announces triumphantly. Poor Hammerhead. Bad things happen to him an "the boys."
But it's not over yet. Tantalus suddenly appears and swoops down, grabbing Gosalyn in his talons. He carries her over to where a smug Taurus Bulba stands. "Let go of me!" Gosalyn demands, telling Bulba, "Darkwing Duck is gonna crunch you like a stale corn chip!" This leads to - you guessed it - more evil laughter from Bulba. "Your friend won't be coming," he gleefully informs her. "He was playing way out of his league. Now, your Darkwing Duck is just another jailbird!"
So Gosalyn has been captured by Taurus Bulba, and now Darkwing is in jail, having taken the fall for the theft of the Ramrod. We find him in his cell at the police station, lamenting his sad, sad fate. "Oh, Gosalyn, I should've listened to you," he moans. "That trap was so obvious! Oh! Me and my stupid headlines!" At least he's finally admitting the truth. Things begin to look worse for our hero when we see his cellmate: one of the crooks from the beginning of the story, specifically the fat, grungy biker pig.
"All right! Payback time! You was only lucky the last time!" he tells Darkwing as he moves in to rearrange the hero's face. "I was lucky EVERY time!" Darkwing suddenly blurts out. "I don't stand a chance against gorillas like you!" The biker stumbles back, surprised, as Darkwing tries to goad him into taking a swing at him. "Come on, hit me! I'll show ya! I'll fold like a napkin!"
The goon lightly socks him. "Come on, you big wimp! Waste me! Ow! You call that a punch?" Finally the biker points an accusing finger at Darkwing and says, "You are WEIRD!" "Now THERE'S an understatement!" Darkwing says, jumping onto the guy and knocking him to the floor. "I could've had a life, but nooooo! I chose to be a clown in a mask and a costume! All I need are floppy shoes and a Bozo nose!" "Oh, THAT'S reverse. Heh, I thought it was park!" And yes, amazingly, the motorcycle remains entirely intact. Darkwing, surprised, asks Launchpad what he's doing here.
Launchpad explains that he followed Darkwing to Canard Tower (I assume he used his Junior Woodchu-- er, I mean Boy Scout handbook to decipher the Morse code as well), and adds that the Ratcatcher was left behind when the police took Darkwing away. He was coming to bail Darkwing out. "Guess there's, uh, no point to that now," he sheepishly says, pointing at the huge hole in the wall. He's now officially an accessory to jailbreak. So now Darkwing can either be a good law-abiding citizens and sit in jail until his trial, while Taurus Bulba runs free and wreaks havoc, or he can break the law a teensy bit and escape to put a stop to the supervillain. Guess which one he picks. On the grounds that "heroes don't stop for paperwork," (in response to Launchpad's abandoned plan to bail him out), Darkwing hops into the sidecar portion of the Ratcatcher and allows Launchpad to spring him.
I should add that they don't do anything to ensure that Darkwing's cellmate won't also escape, but I guess they're in a hurry and all...
Soon they're speeding down the street, and Darkwing reasons that by now Taurus Bulba must have Gosalyn held prisoner inside the Giant Flying Bull's Head of Doom. "We have to find a way of getting up to him," he adds. Thanks, Captain Obvious. Launchpad suddenly perks up and says he's got "just the thing!"
It's back to Launchpad's derelict hangar on the outskirts of town, where Launchpad unveils to Darkwing . . . the Thunderquack! It's a jet that looks a duck's head, but not just any duck. "I love this!" exclaims Darkwing. "It even looks like me!" "I told you I was your biggest fan!" the pilot gushes, adding that he spent a year building it. Either Launchpad has nothing better to do, or... he has nothing better to do. A sad example of the ultimate superhero geek.
Soon they're airborne. "We're gonna bring Bulba down like a ton of bricks," Darkwing enthuses, adding, "sidekick," much to Launchpad's joy. He's so happy he does some impressive aerial flips with the jet. Whee.
Back aboard the Giant Flying Bull's Head of Doom, Taurus Bulba explains that the Ramrod is so powerful they'll need to mount it to stabilize it. "Canard Tower should give us the best firing position," he tells Clovis. In the meantime, he'll have his "little chat" with a tied-up Gosalyn and get the code from her. Before the interrogation can begin however, that damn alarm starts going off again. "We have a bogey on collision course with us," Clovis informs him.
"What fool would DARE?!" roars Bulba. It's Darkwing and Launchpad in the Thunderquack, of course. After commenting that the design of the Thunderquack is ugly (I'm with you, buddy), Bulba orders the ship's battle rigs to open fire, and soon Launchpad is doing his best to evade midair explosions. Darkwing once again states the painfully obvious when he tells Launchpad they need to blow an entry hole in the airship. "I dunno, DW," says Launchpad, "it sounds dangerous!" "Yeah? Well, then... LET'S GET DANGEROUS!" Ah, the very first utterance of Darkwing's trademark line.
More dubious action follows - First Launchpad fires a missile that successfully blows a big hole in the hull of Bulba's ship, and then somehow or another Darkwing, on the Ratcatcher no less, manages to fly from the Thunderquack and through the hole and finds himself inside the core of the ship. I'm only describing what I see, folks.
Hammerhead steps into view, vowing to flatten Darkwing "like a two-penny nail," then charges at him full-force (complete with speeding choo-choo train sound effects). Darkwing casually steps aside and trips him, sending him flying into a metal pole that naturally bends on impact. Hoof and Mouth appear and try to sneak up on our hero, but but Darkwing holds them back with the awesome power of his gas gun. He calls them "muscleheads" even though neither one is at all muscular, and demands to know where Gosalyn is.
He gets his answer when Taurus Bulba appears on an upper level and dangles the still tied-up Gosalyn over the edge for Darkwing to see. "Really, Darkwing. All you had to do was ask," he sneers. With Darkwing thus distracted, Bulba's thugs manage to pull out some guns and surround him. Trapped, Darkwing drops the gas gun and surrenders. In an interesting bit of actual continuity, Hoof and Mouth are armed with the rifles they took off those soldiers earlier.
Cut to the roof of Canard Tower a short time later, where Bulba has set up the Ramrod. Everyone is present except for Launchpad and Clovis (the latter of whom is still inside the Giant Flying Bull's Head of Doom, which hovers ominously overhead the entire time), and there's a brief but surprisingly tender moment in which Gosalyn apologizes for letting herself be captured: "If they hadn't caught me, you wouldn't have risked your life." Darkwing says that before he met her, he "didn't have a life worth risking," and she gives him a big hug. Aww.
"So, you two are close?" observes Bulba, standing nearby with Tantalus perched on his shoulder. "How touching. How... ...fortunate." He laments that he'll never get the code from Gosalyn because she has "too much spirit," but he's willing to take the chance that she might have told the code to Darkwing. Tantalus suddenly jumps from his perch, seizes Gosalyn, and flies her high into the air, threatening to drop her. See, if Darkwing doesn't give Bulba the code, Gosalyn goes splat.
"She never told me any code," growls Darkwing. "Hmm, that's a real possibility," admits Bulba, "but I've always considered myself a gambling man!" He then motions for Tantalus to drop Gosalyn, which he does. "No! I'll tell!" Darkwing yells. Smirking, Bulba motions for the condor to swoop down and snatch Gosalyn out of the air. Tantalus complies, grabbing Gosalyn at the last second before she smacks into the pavement.
Bulba warns Darkwing, "No tricks, or she'll make a very ugly stain on the street!" (Is it just me, or is Bulba getting all the great lines?) Going to the Ramrod's control console, Darkwing grudgingly enters the code - yellow, blue, red, blue, purple, blue, purple, green, and yellow. The Ramrod hums to life, glowing and stuff. Darkwing demands that he bring Gosalyn down, but Bulba refuses to do so until he's tested the Ramrod's abilities.
He aims the Ramrod at the federal gold depository and fires. A sparkling, psychedelic beam shoots out and hits the building, lifting it up into the sky. In midair, the building cracks in half and Bulba manipulates the Ramrod's beam to float all the gold from inside the building up into the hold of his ship. "I'll strip St. Canard clean, then hit every city in the country!" he cackles triumphantly.
"Fine, then you're done with Gosalyn," Darkwing reminds him. Bulba nods, then signals for Tantalus to drop her again. "You butcher!" snarls Darkwing, kicking Bulba in the stomach. Taken by surprise, the bull goes down and Darkwing hammers him over the head, knocking him to the floor. Ouch.
Gosalyn, meanwhile, is saved when Launchpad swoops down and catches her on the "beak" of the Thunderquack and- Hey wait a minute!!!! Where the hell has Launchpad been?! He could've launched a missile and destroyed the Ramrod or lifted Darkwing and Gosalyn to safety, or done BOTH MINUTES AGO! And if he was just flying around he could've rescued Gosalyn the first time she got dropped!!! AAAAARGH!!!
Anyway, Gosalyn is saved. Unfortunately for us. Hammerhead dutifully helps his boss to his feet, and they suddenly notice that Darkwing has vanished. He was "right here a second ago," according to Hammerhead. "I am the terror that flaps in the night," intones the disembodied voice as a cloud of smoke appears on the other side of the roof, "I am the chill that runs up your spine!" Angrily, Bulba directs Hammerhead to shoot at the smoke. But when the smoke clears and they run over, there's no sign of Darkwing. Suddenly, he appears over by the Ramrod, finishing with, "I am Darkwiiiiiing Duck!" Oh, brother.
As Hammerhead moves to shoot Darkwing, Bulba restrains him since he doesn't want to inadvertently damage the Ramrod. Unfortunately, Darkwing does that for him. He begins randomly punching buttons on the control panel, causing the weapon to begin to overload, firing its antigravity beams in all directions and threatening to shake the roof apart. "What's happening?! Do you know what's happening?!" screams Mouth (AFTER Bulba helpfully says, "It's overloading!").
Hoof and Mouth are struck by one of the stray beams and begin to float away. Rushing over, Hammerhead tells them to grab ahold of something. They decide to grab him, yanking him up into the air with them. "Not me, you lunkheads!" he wails as all three of them begin lazily floating off into the distance.
Still flapping around in the air, Tantalus manages to avoid the Ramrod's beams, but Gosalyn proves how much of a nice person she is by deciding to take revenge on this animal that was trained by Bulba to follow his commands. Under her direction, Launchpad pursues the terrified condor. The "beak" of the plane opens up and bites Tantalus' tail feathers off, and in trying to cover his bare behind, the bird accidentally stops flapping his wings and spirals out of control down towards the streets.
Still up inside the airship, Clovis attempts to kill Darkwing by shooting at him with a big laser than lowers down from the underbelly of the ship. Darkwing deftly avoids this, and then the Giant Flying Bull's Head of Doom gets a taste of the Ramrod's power itself. Zapped by one of the beams, it veers out of control and then splashes down into the Audubon Bay, where it explodes (?). Clovis, who managed to bail out before the crash, parachutes to safety. "Mom was right," she sighs. "I should've been a dental hygienist."
Now it's down to Darkwing and Bulba stranded on the roof together with the Ramrod threatening to blow up. Logically this should be the most exciting part of the whole adventure, with the two enemies having their climactic final battle, the bigger, stronger Bulba beating Darkwing senseless until Darkwing comes up with a last-minute trump card he uses to defeat the supervillain. Unfortunately, that isn't what happens.
What does happen is Bulba simply grabs Darkwing, yanking him up to eye-level, snarling, "I underestimated you once, Darkwing Duck. This time you simply DIE!" Then the Ramrod finally explodes, obliterating the entire rooftop. Wow, so underwhelming. I get the distinct impression that they were rushing this, and it really hurts the overall proceedings, even moreso than the previously ranted-about plot holes, which I honestly would've been able to forgive as long as Darkwing and Bulba could have had a satisfying final battle. Alas, 'twas not meant to be.
Looking on from the Thunderquack, Gosalyn and Launchpad are shocked as the building is destroyed, and Darkwing with it apparently. "No," sobs Gosalyn. "He couldn't be!" As if they'd actually kill him off in his second freakin' episode.
Cut to the next day (I guess). Gosalyn is back in the orphanage, in her room looking mournfully out her window at Canard Tower, which is already being rebuilt. Standing with her, Mrs. Cavanaugh informs her that there's someone interested in adopting her. "I know you've been through a lot, but couldn't you show a prospective parent a little more spirit?" she asks. "Now there's a word I'm sick of," grumbles Gosalyn as she flops onto her bed. Yeah, that's right kiddo. Get all depressed over the death of an egotistical jerk who you knew for, at most, 24 hours.
Shrugging, Mrs. Cavanaugh leaves the room and can be heard speaking to a fellow named Mr. Mallard, apologizing to him and saying that Gosalyn doesn't feel like talking. Gosalyn suddenly perks up when she hears this Mr. Mallard speak. "Frankly, it appears as if you've seen better days, yourself," Mrs. Cavanaugh says to Mr. Mallard as Gosalyn peeks out of her room. Mr. Mallard is propped on a crutch with two broken legs, one broken arm, and bandaged up like a mummy. He tells Mrs. Cavanaugh it's a "kitchen accident." "I have trouble making breakfast," he says, looking right at Gosalyn. "I-I always forget the milk."
Just as Mrs. Cavanaugh is about to suggest that Mr. Mallard come back tomorrow, Gosalyn charges over and tackles him, knocking him to the floor. "Ow! Watch the ribs, kid!" She gives him a (almost literally) bone-crushing hug, and says she thought he was dead. "Ha! Nobody can stop Darkwing Du- er, Drake Mallard!" So, Drake is going to adopt Gosalyn, and asks Mrs. Cavanaugh if it's all right if he takes Gosalyn with him to go house-hunting. "But how do you manage to drive in that condition?" she asks. "Oh, uh, I have help," he replies.
Cue Launchpad, who plows through the wall in a red station wagon... ...backwards. He's still getting the hang of the "reverse thing." Gosalyn giggles and Drake looks mortified at the prospect of having to pay a substantial amount of money to Mrs. Cavanaugh (who doesn't seem that concerned that her office wall was just annihilated), and the catchy Darkwing Duck theme kicks in as we fade to the closing credits.
The End.
| | |
| Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster
1966, Toho
The Characters:
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Godzilla - Does this guy really need an introduction? The legendary radioactive dinosaur is neither good nor evil here, but is just kind of a big destructive klutz.
Ebirah - A giant mutant shrimp kept as a sort of watchdog by the terrorist organization Red Bamboo.
Mothra - Silly-looking giant moth worshipped as a goddess by the natives of Infant Island. Has an annoying tendency to take long naps.
Giant Condor - No idea what this guy's beef was, but he attacks Godzilla out of nowhere late in the film.
Ryota Kane - Just some poor schlub who wants to find his missing brother. He ends up stranded on Letchi Island for his troubles.
Yata Kane - Ryota's missing brother. He's been chilling on Infant Island ever since his fishing boat sank.
Daiyo - Obligatory scantily-clad island girl. She escapes from the Red Bamboo and joins up with Ryota and co.
Yashimura - Grouchy thief and safecracker who gets himself mixed up in Ryota's quest.
Nita and Ichino - Ryota's comic relief friends who he meets at an endurance dance contest (don't ask).
Mothra's Little Beauties - Mothra's identical twin priestesses. They're only about six inches tall and sing a lot.
Captain Yamoto - Eyepatch-wearing Red Bamboo officer tasked with hunting down Ryota and his friends and making them very, very dead.
Red Bamboo Commander - The commanding officer of Red Bamboo's base on Letchi Island.
The Story:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gojira, Ebirâ, Mosura: Nankai no daiketto, better known as Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, is one of my absolute favorite Godzilla movies. Why, I was just pleased as punch when it came out on DVD, in the restored original Japanese cut no less, because it meant I didn't have to wade through the bad editing and terrible dubbing, right? Boy, was I ever wrong. Although as I said the DVD is the Japanese cut of the film and even has the original Japanese language track, it also has a new, just-for-this-DVD English language track which is ten zillion times worse than the original Goodtimes Home Video dub! Seriously! The DVD of Son of Godzilla does this as well, but that's another story.
Anyway what I wanna try to do today is compare/contrast the two versions of the movie while at the same time tell the story, because like the previous two movies I recapped here, I feel it's a story worth telling. A lot of Godzilla fans lambast Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster and its 60s brethern, primarily because they're mostly set on remote tropical island and have little to no city-smashing. To that I say, who gives a fuck? As far as I'm concerned it's a nice change of pace from the city-smashing antics of the previous few movies, and people can knock Jun Fukuda all they want but I like his directing style, so nyah.
Anyway, on with the show! We open with a mother consulting a priestess in a rural Japanese fishing village. It seems that the woman's eldest son, Yata, has been missing ever since his fishing boat was reported lost at sea, and the priestess is praying and searching the land of the dead for Yata's spirit. Hope for Yata's mother is restored when the priestess comes out of her trance and reports that she could find no trace of the young man in the netherworld. Incidentally, the original English cut of Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster opened with a boat being attacked during a storm and sunk by a giant crab-like claw, and obviously this was meant to represent Yata's ship but it's actually recycled footage from later on in the movie.
The woman's youngest son, Ryota, however is meanwhile taking a more active role in trying to locate his missing sibling. The DVD includes a scene cut from the Goodtimes version, where Ryota goes to a newspaper office trying to gain funding for an expedition to look for Yata, to no avail. But while he's in the office he sees an advertisement for an endurance dance contest whose prize is a yacht. The Goodtimes version simply cuts right from the mother and the priestess to Ryota arriving at the dance contest, and although the scene in the newspaper office serves no real purpose whatsoever, completist that I am I was glad to finally see it on the DVD.
Much to Ryota's consternation, he arrives at the dance contest three days too late. Undaunted, he approaches and befriends two of the contest's losers, Nita and Ichino. Together they drive down to the docks because Ryota wants to "look at the boats," although it's obvious he wants to swipe one. The trio sneaks aboard one called the Yahlen.
The Yahlen as it turns out has an owner: the rifle-toting Yashimura. Or at least he claims to be the boat's owner. For whatever reason, instead of making the three men go home Yashimura allows them to stay the night on board. Bad move, Yashi.
The next morning, Yashimura awakens to discover, to his horror as well as Nita and Ichino's, Ryota has put the Yahlen out to sea. The only one who knows how to pilot the boat is Ryota, and Yashimura can't use his rifle to force him to take them back because during the night Ryota also "accidentally" dismantled Yashimura's gun! Gotta give this guy credit for being determined. And speaking of Yashimura, you're probably wondering why he, as the Yahlen's supposed owner, has no idea how to pilot it. Well, during the voyage we hear a radio broadcast about how a bunch of money was stolen by some shipping company. Despite all the clues - such as the fact Yashimura has a briefcase he won't let the others touch, and his hobby is making lockpicks - none of the others seem to get the picture.
It isn't too long before Ryota sails them all straight into a whole world of trouble. Not only is the food onboard running dangerously low by this point, but suddenly a huge storm hits. During said storm, that briefcase Yashimura had falls open and spills a lot of cash into the sea, proving beyond a doubt that he is indeed the robber they heard about on the radio. Mind you this occurs below decks with nobody to see but the camera so Ryota and co. still don't know the truth about Yashimura. Suddenly Ichino spots a gigantic claw rising out of the water, and it seizes the Yahlen and capsizes it, spilling its occupants into the water (and this is the footage I mentioned before that was reused as an opening sequence on the Goodtimes video).
Nita awakens the next morning to find himself laying on a rocky beach, soaking wet but alive. He sees Ryota, Yashimura, and Ichino lying nearby and runs from one man to the next, shaking him awake, yelling joyously that they're alive and on dry land. The three non-criminals are happy as clams, but Yashimura is mighty pissed when he finds his coveted briefcase among the wreckage that has washed ashore, discovering it to be empty of all the money he stole. Yashimura tosses the briefcase aside and all but nominates himself as the leader of the group, and they hike up the mountain trail into the jungle.
Along the way, Nita finds a cutlass lying on the ground, which he takes to be proof that cannibals inhabit the island. To me, it looks like a pirate's cutlass, and in any case the workmanship is a bit too professional for it to be the work of primitive islanders. But then again, nobody said Nita was observant or intelligent.
After having a lunch consisting of bananas and coconuts they, uh, hike around some more. Plenty of hiking. Eventually they cross the island and find themselves on a high cliff where they have a good view of their surroundings and discover that, yup, it is indeed an island. Suddenly they spot a weird-looking ship of some kind heading in from the sea and try unsuccessfully to flag it down. The ship itself is spraying some yellowish liquid from nozzles on the front. As if that wasn't weird enough, what they see next throws them for a loop. The ship heads into a modern dock, and not too far away from that is a military compound of some sort. Soldiers in gray uniforms with machine guns are patrolling both the base and dock. Yashimura instantly knows that something just ain't right.
The ship docks and a naval officer steps out and is greeted by a procession of soldiers, at the head of which is another officer wearing an eyepatch and carrying a riding crop. Although this guy is never named in the original Japanese version, in the Goodtimes version he is identified as "Captain Yamoto," so for sanity's sake that's what I'll call him throughout this review. Yamoto is informed that the "cargo" he ordered is here, and then some islander types are forced at gunpoint from the ship's hold. In exchange for the prisoners, the ship's crew is given several barrels of something called X-12.
While the naval officer is signing for the stuff, several of the prisoners suddenly make a break for it. They race along the beach as the soldiers fire on them, killing most of them, by two manage to make it to a conveniently placed canoe and start paddling out to see. While this is happening we see a young woman among the slaves quietly slip away and run off in the opposite direction. Captain Yamoto tells his men to hold their fire and grins evilly. We soon learn why. The two slaves in the canoe don't make it very far before the owner of the giant claw that sank the Yahlen appears: Ebirah, a huge, mutated shrimp! Yes, a shrimp. There seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding just what Ebirah is. He's been called both a crab and a lobster, but he's a giant shrimp. Also, in the Goodtimes version of the movie he is never called "Ebirah," just "the monster".
So anyway Ebirah makes short work of the two escaping slaves and eats them. Captain Yamoto then smugly tells the remaining prisoners that even if they get away from him and his men, they can't get past Ebirah. The slaves are taken away and Yamoto goes and reports his superior, a big scary guy known only as "the Commander". He somehow knows that the slave girl got away and chews Yamoto out, then orders him to send up a "search balloon" and recapture her at once.
Meanwhile the woman encounters Ryota, Yashimura, Nita, and Ichino while racing through the jungle (they saw the whole thing with Ebirah too, by the way). She pulls a knife and almost kills all four of them before Nita manages to convince her they're not with those soldiers. She introduces herself as Daiyo, and they don't have long to get acquainted because all of a sudden the search balloon appears above, revealing itself to be nothing more than a camera suspended by a balloon (!). Mere seconds later, Captain Yamoto and his men appear and start blasting away with their machine guns as our heroes beat feet into the jungle.
As all foot chases must, this one eventually comes to a seemingly dead end cliff overlooking the ocean. As the bad guys close in, our castaways and the island babe (apparently) take a gamble and jump right off the cliff and are saved by a narrow ledge several feet down. Oh, and since it becomes important later I should mention that Nita has kept that "cannibal" sword he found previously. They hunker back against the wall as the soldiers appear on the overhang above and look down. Thinking the fugitives leapt to their deaths, Yamoto decalres the pursuit over and he and his men return to base.
Back down on the ledge, Ryota finds a small cave entrance and leads the others inside. Once inside, Daiyo starts praying to Mothra. For those of you not in the know, Mothra is a big, silly-looking moth puppet-- er, I mean a giant moth goddess worshipped by the natives of Infant Island. Although she originally appeared in her own film, aptly titled Mothra, she made her debut in the Godzillaverse in Godzilla vs. Mothra (aka Godzilla vs. the Thing). Anyway Daiyo's prayer leads Ryota and co. to realize that that's where she and her fellow slaves are from. She explains that the soldiers work for a group known as the Red Bamboo, and that they just showed up at Infant Island one day and began taking the natives prisoner. At some point Ryota also learns from Daiyo that his missing brother Yata (remember?) is alive and well on Infant Island. And I'm not entirely sure where it comes up but the name of the island they're currently on is Letchi.
Cut to Infant Island. Mothra the all-powerful is currently asleep as the natives perform an elaborate ceremony involving lots of chanting and dancing, led by Mothra's Barbie doll-sized identical twin priestesses, known as "Mothra's Little Beauties." Apparently they're trying to awaken the moth goddess so that she'll go save their friends and family from the Red Bamboo before they become shrimp chow.
Back on Letchi Island, things start coming to a head. First, in a shocking plot development that is quickly discarded until later, our heroes discover that none other than Godzilla (!) is inside the cave, at the bottom of a deep gulley or something, unmoving. They think he's dead at first but then they're able to detect his heartbeat pulsing through the rocks, so he's just asleep. That same night, Yashimura decides they should sneak over to the Red Bamboo base and see what's what. The accomplish this by uprooting a bush and hiding behind it as they inch closer and closer to what I'm assuming is the back door. Ichino is doubtful that they can get inside, but Yashimura's eyes light up when he sees the lock on the door and says he can open any kind of lock there is.
It's at this point that the others finally realize that Yashimura must be the criminal they heard about on the radio, but he tells them that that's not important right now, and he's got a point. Anyway he picks the lock and they gain entrance into the Red Bamboo base. They find themselves in some sort of munitions storage shed, and stock up on smoke bombs. Daiyo finds a coiled length of copper wire which she mistakes for a necklace, and then they explore the oddly desserted base some more. They spot a pair of men in white lab coats exit through a set of double doors, and decide to investigate. It turns out to be some sort of high-tech laboratory that comes complete with its own nuclear reactor, and Ichino concludes that the Red Bamboo are making nuclear weapons. This is confirmed when we see those two scientists report to the Red Bamboo Commander and he chews them out for not making enough nukes to meet their quota or something.
The scientists return to the lab and start messing around with one of the control panels, forcing our heroes to duck down and crawl along the floor through the maze of equipment to avoid being spotted. Yashimura, in the lead, suddenly comes face-to-feet with Captain Yamoto, who doesn't seem too surprised that they survived. He then gets a smoke bomb to the face as the castaways make a break for it. On the way out they swipe two lab coats, and once outside, Yashimura and Nita put the lab coats on, then begin to carry two large pieces of reflective sheet metal (?) between them, between which Ryota, Daiyo, and Ichino are hiding. They mosey on over to the front gate without arousing too much suspicion, but Yashimura's lockpick somehow sets off an alarm and brings a whole swarm of guns running, machine guns blazing.
Yashimura manages to get the gate open anyway and slips out to safety, followed by Daiyo and Ichino. Ryota and Nita are forced to run elsewhere - within the perimeter - to avoid the guards' gunfire. Nita is quickly captured, but Ryota escapes when he somehow manages to entangle himself in one of the search balloons and then somehow manages to get the thing airborne, heading out to sea. Oddly, none of the guards seem to notice or care, apparently because they're too busy detaining Nita.
Nita is thrown into a dungeon with the rest of the prisoners and discovers that they're being used to make the yellow stuff the ship was spraying earlier. They grind up some kind of local yellow fruit into a liquid called X-12, which the Red Bamboo then use to fend off Ebirah whenever they come and go from the island. Nita then hits on a brilliant idea of how to sabotage the bad guys. He persuades the other prisoners to use just the leaves of the fruit and not the fruit itself. Thus, they'll still be making a yellow liquid but it won't be the X-12 formula that is so vital to the Red Bamboo's plans. It's not a bad idea, but I'm wondering why the slaves never thought of it before, or why the Red Bamboo isn't, like, supervising them to make sure they don't try something like this.
Meanwhile, Yashimura, Daiyo, and Ichino have returned to hiding out in the cave where Godzilla is. Figuring it's only a matter of time before the Red Bamboo find them here, Ichino comes up with the brilliant idea that they should wake Godzilla up. Yashimura thinks he's nuts, but Ichino manages to sell him on the idea by saying that it's obvious the Red Bamboo don't know Godzilla is here, otherwise they wouldn't have a base here. Therefore, they have the element of surprise. But how are they going to wake Godzilla up? Well, singing and dancing is out of the question, so instead they use the cutlass Nita found as a lightning rod, (somehow) attaching it to Godzilla using the length of copper wire Daiyo got from the Red Bamboo base. Now all they gotta do is wait for a storm.
Back on Infant Island, the natives are still trying to awaken Mothra, who is apparently quite the deep sleeper. Their ceremony is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Ryota, who literally drops out of the sky after the balloon he rode in on apparently runs out of helium. After picking himself up he immediately demands to know where his brother is, and then Yata comes running up, sporting native gear. Ryota fills everyone in on the developments that have been happening on Letchi Island, prompting Yata to develop a sudden sense of duty to his fellow man, and he and Ryota decide to take a canoe (!) and paddle back to Letchi to rescue the slaves. Paddle they do! The islanders then resume their dancing. Wake up, you big stupid moth!
As they near Letchi Island that night, a storm kicks up and Ebirah, who for such a big monster has an odd preference for really tiny food, appears and attacks the brothers. On Letchi itself, lightning strikes the sword and Godzilla pops awake after getting a rousing jolt of electricity. Ebirah capsizes Ryota and Yata's canoe and it looks like they're done for when the side of the mountain explodes outward and Godzilla appears! Godzilla and Ebirah take one look at each other and know they've just gotta rumble.
Most of the ensuing fight consists of the two monsters batting huge boulders back and forth. Godzilla throws them, Ebirah swats them back his way, etc. At one point Ebirah catches a rock in his claw and draws his arm back like a baseball pitcher, then hurls the rock at Godzilla, clonking him in the head. One of these wayward projectiles is even knocked in the direction of the Red Bamboo base and smashes into one of their lookout towers, prompting a guard to alert Captain Yamoto. Godzilla, pissed, finally wades into the ocean to duke it with the big shrimp man to ma-- er, monster to monster. Godzilla's atomic breath forces Ebirah to submerge, and the shrimp yanks the other monster underwater, where the fighting continues.
Totally ignored by the dueling monsters, Ryota and Yata safely swim to shore. Meanwhile the Red Bamboo Commander instructs Captain Yamoto to contact one of their outposts and bring in reinforcements. Back underwater, Godzilla finally wins the battle by bashing Ebirah repeatedly over the head with a rock, and the big crustacean retreats. Godzilla then returns to shore.
Regardless of Godzilla, the Red Bamboo are still determined to capture our heroes. They send search parties to scour the island for any sign of them the following morning. Their methods of searching involve wasting lots of ammo by firing their guns every which way for no apparent reason. Having seen and heard them coming from a distance (which isn't that difficult), Yashimura, Daiyo, and Ichino set a bunch of traps, but only end up catching none other than Ryota and Yata. After being set free, Yata immediately demands to know where the Red Bamboo's base is. He and Ryota then head off in its general direction with the intent of - what else? - freeing the slaves.
You'd think Ryota would've learned by experience and thus informed his brother that messing with the Red Bamboo on their home turf is ill advised. They don't get very far before they run into one of the aforementioned search parties, led by Captain Yamoto. It then becomes yet another manic foot chase, only this time everybody splits up and goes in different directions in order to confuse the soldiers. I dunno about the soldiers, but they sure confused me. Daiyo unfortunately decides to run over the rocky terrain of a nearby mountainside, where she is plainly visible, and the majority of the soldiers are soon hot on her heels. But then, Godzilla appears! The Red Bamboo guys freak out and run away, while Daiyo hunkers up against a boulder and remains motionless. Godzilla knows she's there but couldn't care less, then he lies down and takes a nap. Ryota, Yata, Yashimura, and Ichino regroup once the Red Bamboo guys have left and start trying to sneak over and rescue Daiyo while Godzilla's snoozing. Their efforts are hindered by the appearance of a giant bird that literally appears out of nowhere and attacks Godzilla for no reason. After a very brief fight, Godzilla roasts the bird with his atomic breath. Yeah, that sure had a point.
Then, the Red Bamboo reinforcements arrive in the form of a squadron of fighter jets. Poor Godzilla. The guy can't even take a nap without somebody bugging him for a fight. While he is occupied trashing the jets, Daiyo makes her way back to the others. After destroying the offending aircraft without much trouble, Godzilla has had all he can stand, so he stomps on over to the Red Bamboo base with the intention of stomping it flat.
The base's main defense is a perimeter of electrified fences with a hundred thousand volts (according to Captain Yamoto anyway), but since it was electricity that awoke and revitalized Godzilla in the first place here, that he wades through this like nothing is hardly surprising. Then it's the time-honored artillery fire, but that works about as well as you'd expect. Finally, the bad guys decide to get the hell out of Dodge while the getting's good. Captain Yamoto instructs the scientists in the lab to set the nuclear reactor to critical mass so that it will overload and destroy the entire island. Then he and all the members of the Red Bamboo who weren't killed in Godzilla's first wave against the base pile into the ship and vamoose. First though they collect the drums of what they think is X-12 to use against Ebirah, and prove what jerks they are by leaving Nita and the other prisoners locked in their cells to die in Godzilla's attack.
Luckily for them, who should arrive but Yata, who against the advice of the others ran headlong into the whole shitstorm going on at the base just so he could rescue them. He can't get the cell doors opened, but then Yashimura, who had run after Yata to try and stop him, arrives on the scene and puts his trusty lockpick to good use yet again. Following this they for reasons I'll never know pay a visit to the lab where they find the head scientist having just set the reactor to critical mass. Before they can force him to stop the process, Godzilla picks that moment to walk by and most of the building comes down.
The scientist is pinned under a ton of rubble and squashed, but lives long enough to tell them they've got two hours before the reactor goes kablooey. So they all vacate the base, after wasting valuable time trying vainly to stop the reactor from overloading, leaving Godzilla to finish stomping it to bits. The people from Infant Island, certain that Mothra is eventually bound to wake up and come to save them, build a net for everyone to ride in out of vines and such.
Nita spots the Red Bamboo ship heading out to sea and has himself a good laugh. "Oh, man! They're really in for it!" Sure enough, when Ebirah surfaces near them, the yellow liquid has no effect! The bad guys all die horribly when Ebirah smashes their puny boat with his mammoth claw. Having reduced the base to scrap, Godzilla spots Ebirah and the monsters decide it's time for round two! Godzilla wades on out and starts battling the giant shrimp yet again.
Back at Infant Island, all the singing and dancing has finally paid off. Mothra FINALLY awakens and takes off for Letchi Island to go and rescue her devoted followers, who frankly deserve better than this.
Godzilla meanwhile finally defeats Ebirah for good by tearing off both his claws. Handless, as it were, Ebirah turns tail and retreats out to deeper waters. Godzilla shows his fleeing foe who the biggest badass in these waters is by snapping one of the torn-off claws at him. Mothra arrives, and Godzilla, seemingly disappointed that Ebirah went down without much of a fight, heads back ashore and attempts to pick a fight with the moth. Mothra however has better things to do. She knocks Godzilla down, then picks up the net containing all the good guys and flies off back to Infant Island.
Ryota and co. can't help but feel sorry for Godzilla, who's about to be blown to bits when the reactor finally overloads, and since he did help them against the Red Bamboo, albeit unintentionally, they start yelling for him to get off the island. He ignores this, but then sense that something isn't right. He cannonballs off a cliff and into the water just as the reactor goes critical and the entire island is vaporized! Yay, a happy ending! Well, for everyone except the Red Bamboo... | | |
| Since today is my birthday, I decided to post a review of a movie I got for a past birthday: Resident Evil: Apocalypse. I also went to Best Buy and bought The Beastmaster and Darkman on DVD the other day, and I plan to eventually review those two down the road.
I'm a fan of the Resident Evil game series. Have been ever since I started collecting the action figures from ToyBiz back in, I think, 1998. Then I finally bought Resident Evil 2 for the PC, and from then on I was hooked. Since then I've bought, played, and beat the original Resident Evil, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Resident Evil: Outbreak, and Resident Evil: Dead Aim, and loved them all.
The comic books by Wildstorm/DC and the novelizations of the games by S.D. Perry aside, there wasn't ever any "expanded universe" type stuff for RE like there was for, say, Star Wars and Star Trek. The comics and novels both crafted their own continuity, separate from the games and from each other.
I saw, and kinda-sorta liked, the first film. Missed it in theaters, but got it on DVD for my birthday in 2002. I had mixed feelings about it, to say the least. Still, I was excited about the sequel, especially after seeing a preview for it before Alien vs. Predator (which, incidentally, was made by the same guy as both Resident Evil movies, one Paul W.S. Anderson, and which I refuse to refer to by its idiotic abbreviated title, "AVP").
Being a dirty rotten cheater who likes having things spoiled for me, I picked up the novelization of the film by Keith R.A. DeCandido at Barnes & Noble and devoured it overnight practically. I was VERY excited about seeing the movie now, and it was during a trip to South Carolina for my sister's graduation from army basic training that I finally got my chance, as there was a theater directly across the street from our hotel.
My first impression of the film was that it was quite good for a movie of its type; that is, a big, dumb, loud sci-fi action movie not unlike Alien vs. Predator. I proceeded to pretty much forget about the movie until, earlier this month, a friend of mine (well, more a friend of my sister's) brought Apocalypse over on DVD, along with some other movies, including Shaun of the Dead and Big Money Hustlas. We all watched it, and had a grand old time, as one of my favorite things is to watch movies with large groups of people.
Resident Evil: Apocalypse
2004, Constantin Films/Columbia Tristar
The Characters:
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Alice - Our kickass, mono-nomenclature'd heroine is back from the first movie and bigger and badder than ever. Pity she's not also wiser.
Nemesis - Big, ugly dude in a black leather trenchcoat carrying a gatling gun and rocket launcher. Formerly Matt Addison from the first movie until he got enrolled in the Nemesis Program.
Jill Valentine - Easily the most pointless character in the movie, which is surprising given that she's supposed to be the co-star. An ex-S.T.A.R.S. (Special Tactics and Rescue Squad) member with an attitude. A really bitchy one.
Carlos Olivera - The obligatory hunky male heartthrob, Carlos is a member of the U.B.C.S. (Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service).
L.J. - A two-bit thief whose life is saved by Jill. He has several adventures throughout the movie.
Major Timothy Cain - Our fiendish villain, the mastermind behind the Nemesis Program and (presumably) the head of the U.B.C.S.
Dr. Charles Ashford - Wheelchair-bound Umbrella Corp. scientist who wants to find his missing daughter.
Angela Ashford - The aforementioned missing daughter of Dr. Ashford, who pretty much the entire cast ends up trying to find.
Terri Morales - Incredibly annoying and whiny reporter for Raccoon City's Channel 7, out to get an Emmy.
Peyton Wells - Best friend and fellow S.T.A.R.S. member of Jill.
Nicholai Ginovaef - Russian U.B.C.S. member and friend of Carlos. (Note: Several sources give Nicholai's last name as "Sokolov", including the novel, but I'm going by the end credits and what is correct as far as the games are concerned.)
Yuri Loginova - Another Russian U.B.C.S. member. Nearly indistinguishable from Nicholai.
Captain Ryan Henderson - Captain of S.T.A.R.S. and Jill's superior officer. I only included him in the lineup of characters for the sake of completion.
Dr. Isaacs - Evil Umbrella Corp. scientist who performed some evil experiments on Alice.
Mackenzie - Flighty civilian who briefly joins up with Jill and co.
The Story:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, I guess I should start with a quick recap of the first movie. This being a sequel and all. So, the Umbrella Corporation is this super-powerful megacorporation that pretty much rules the planet. Or so say the opening monologues of both films; the first film's monologue (done by an uncredited Jason Isaacs) tells us that nine out of ten homes in America contain products from the Umbrella Corp., while the second film's monologue (done by our heroine, Alice, who I'll get to eventually) refers to Umbrella was the largest commercial entity in the globe. This leads to some rather dubious plot developments in the second movie, but all in due time. Anyways, in the games, Umbrella was pretty powerful, but nowhere near as powerful as they're depicted in the movies, needless to say. One other tidbit is that according to the movies, Umbrella's corporate headquarters is in America somewhere, while in the games it's in France.
Umbrella has itself a super-duper high-tech research facility called the Hive, located beneath the bustling (and New York-like) metropolis of Raccoon City. It's called "the Hive", I guess, because when they show computer 3D models of the place it looks like a beehive, and is controlled by an advanced AI system called the Red Queen. I have several problems with the whole "base underneath the city", because there ain't no way they could've built that thing without anyone knowing, unless they built the Hive first, then Raccoon City, but I rather doubt that. Anyway! The scientists working in the Hive created a synthetic virus called the T-Virus, which reanimates the dead, etc. A brother-and-sister team of environmental activists, Matt and Lisa Addison, teamed up with Alice, the head of security for the Hive along with her fake husband, Spence Parks, to try and steal a sample of the T-Virus so that they could prove to the world Umbrella's highly illegal bioweapon research.
Unfortunately, Spence, who wasn't in on the scheme, overheard them and decided to steal the virus himself so he could sell it on the open market and make millions. To cover his tracks (or because it was in the script), he purposely tossed a test tube containing the virus, which broke open and pretty soon infected the entire Hive and everyone inside. The Red Queen, taking note of this, did what any cool, rational computer system would do... it locked the entire facility down, killing everyone trapped inside in various horrific ways, like trapping them in elevators and cutting the brakes, trapping them in sealed labs and turning the sprinkler system on to flood the room and drown them, etc. Funny, I'd think the computer would lock the place down, then let everyone know what the problem was... I mean, there is a cure for the T-Virus, after all. But, hey, it's called the Red Queen. Off with their heads!
So, not only does the Red Queen needlessly and irrationally murder all the scientists, office workers and security personnel in the Hive, it also doesn't let the Umbrella Corp. in on what's going on. In order to get to the bottom of things they send a small commando team in to investigate. Said team included James P. Shade, a.k.a. One (the leader), Rain Ocampo (the obligatory butch femi-Nazi), Chad Kaplan (the techie), J.D. Salinas (just your basic cannon fodder soldier guy), and, uh, Warner (who is such a red-shirt he doesn't even get a first name), plus some nameless expendables. The team is soon joined by Alice and Spence, who are suffering from amnesia (and one of the film's few good points is how it handles these two characters) and Matt Addison, who is posing as a plain-clothes detective from the R.P.D. (Raccoon Police Dept., for those of you unfamiliar with the games). As for Lisa, she was posing as an office worker in the Hive, so she became a zombie.
Not only did the Red Queen not tell Umbrella about the viral outbreak (i.e., its reasons for thinking it had to kill everybody in the Hive), Umbrella in turn tells the commando team absolutely nothing about what they'll encounter on their mission. For instance, what is identified as a lunchroom on the team's blueprints of the facility turns out to be a storage chamber for monsters in incubation tanks. Half the commandoes die in the entrance corridor to the Red Queen's control room when they're all cut up by lasers; the others are all either killed by zombies or by the yucky monster known as the Licker, which, it is later revealed, the Red Queen released specifically to kill the intruders (or, at least, it didn't tell them that it escaped). If all this seems really, really dumb and contrived to you, you're not alone.
In the games, Lickers are pretty much mutated zombies, or, by proxy, a person who has been infected with the T-Virus on two separate occasions. They're nasty, reptilian critters that scurry along walls, have exposed brains, and, as their name implies, long, sticky tongues. Incidentally, the origin of the Lickers is changed somewhat in the movies... and it was so hard to follow I didn't even try to figure it out. One ability bestowed upon the Licker not seen in the games is quite hokey and stupid in my opinion. Apparently, if it kills and eats someone, "feeding on fresh DNA", it will mutate into a stronger Licker that looks vaguely canine-like. So, I guess this means whenever the Licker has a snack it'll violently and uncontrollably mutate...
And what, exactly, happens if it keeps eating? We never find out, and this whole idea is eventually done away with because-- Oh, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Of course, when Spence and Alice get their memories back, Spence turns into a real bastard and attempts to escape with the case containing the virus and the anti-virus, and ends up being puree Licker Kibble. Of course, after mauling Spence (which seems to consist of nuzzling him a bit - and despite all the blood Spence's body remains surprisingly intact) the creature mutates but is finally killed anyway. In the end, only Alice and Matt get away and escape the Hive, which they close and lock after themselves (before going in, the commando team had put a timer-lock in place), but not before Chad Kaplan fries the Red Queen's circuits and totally annihilates the malignant supercomputer... before he, too, ends up as monster snackies.
Once safely outside the Hive, Matt, who'd been scratched on the arm by the Licker during their encounter with it, begins to convulse as icky tentacle-things start emerging from the cuts in his arm. Alice attempts to administer the anti-virus to her ailing friend, when suddenly a whole bunch of clean-suited Umbrella goons bust in. They seize Matt, and the leader of them, observing Matt's condition, announces that he's a good candidate for "the Nemesis Program." So they cart poor Matt off on stretcher, and it takes like nine of them to subdue Alice because she's just going absolutely hysterical (she blames herself for the deaths of everyone in the Hive, because she trusted that jerk Spence, etc.).
Which brings us, roughly, to the sequel! Phew! I, uh, guess that wasn't exactly a "quick" recap after all, was it? Oh, well. The sequel opens, apparently, just after Alice and Matt have been carted off. Another Umbrella commando team stands at the entrance to the Hive, ready to go in. And since these guys obviously know what they'll be facing in there since they're wearing hazmat suits and carrying little "virus detector" things, it makes me wonder why Umbrella didn't send them into the Hive instead of the first team. It makes no sense! Anyways, they open the doors, go inside, and are all immediately killed by, um, something. They move too fast to be zombies, and Alice killed all the zombie dogs, so I'm guessing it's more Lickers (and later scenes support this theory).
We cut right to a fleet of black SUVs, accompanied by a black helicopter, breezing into Raccoon City by way of the interestingly-named Raven's Gate Bridge (which we'll later learn is the only way in and out of the town surprisingly). The cars have the Umbrella logo emblazoned on their vanity license plates, and the 'copter also sports the little red-and-white umbrella icon on its sides. And absolutely no one they pass seems to take any notice of them.
The SUVs split up and begin stopping off at people's homes. They grab people, who we learn are Umbrella employees, and their families, stuff them into the cars, and speed off. Hmm, methinks they're evacuating "their" people before it becomes too late. Whatever else goes wrong in this movie, I like this sequence. It's got a really well-maintained sense of urgency about it, and the music is good too. One of the last people to be evacuated is a man named Dr. Charles Ashford, a wheelchair-bound scientist with a British accent and the tiniest glasses I've ever seen. Two Umbrella guys in suits show up at his front door and ask him to come with them, but Ashford refuses to leave without his daughter, who has already left for school. The suits tell him it's "being taken care of", then pretty much kidnap him.
At the Raccoon Junior School (which is a wealthy prep school where all the students wear uniforms), two more Umbrella suits come and pick up Ashford's daughter, Angela, from her class. I think she's about eight or nine, but don't quote me on that. So they put her into the back seat of the SUV and peel off, and then they are suddenly (and I mean suddenly) struck by an out-of-control cement truck, which flips the SUV over... and over... and over... God that crash looks painful. Since the truck keeps on driving wildly we can guess its driver is kinda thinking more about eating brains than whether or not he just killed three people. When the car finally stops rolling (landing upside-down), we see that both of the Umbrella guys are dead. Angela, hanging upside-down by her seatbelt, we can't be sure about. Her hand twitches slightly...
We then get to meet the movie's most annoying character, as well as the most pointless and poorly-handled addition to the story... Jill Valentine. In the games, Jill Valentine was a member of the S.T.A.R.S. (Special Tactics and Rescue Service... or Squad, depending on who you talk to) team that encountered the zombies in the first game, and she was also the main character of Resident Evil 3, the game from which this movie takes most of its inspiration. Here, we learn from newspaper clippings in her home that Jill was disgraced and kicked out of S.T.A.R.S. because, um, I dunno really. She knows all about how to kill the zombies, but we're never told when and how she encountered them, or when she tried (and failed) to convince her superiors about the danger of them. The novelization by Keith DeCandido sort of clears this up, by stretching the timeframe out a little more and having Jill encounter the zombies in the woods.
My problem with Jill, especially in the novel, is her attitude towards her former co-workers. She's a complete bitch. She really holds it against her S.T.A.R.S. buddies, especially her commanding officer Ryan Henderson, for not backing her up when she went public with her wild stories about zombies and monsters. Um, Jill, honey? Why in God's name would they have believed you? Thankfully, they don't go into this in the movie... which is a double-edged sword. By losing the reason for Jill's bitchiness, we also lose the reason why she knows so much about the zombies. Anyway, we meet her when she walks into the police station, which is in total chaos. All the cops are trying to detain zombies in handcuffs, fighting with them, etc., and in comes Jill, wearing a skimpy skirt that makes her look like a streetwalker. She pulls a gun and proceeds to shoot every zombie in the room.
Shockingly, none of the 50+ officers on hand shoot her for killing what, for all they know, are normal people. I mean, if they didn't think they'd were still normal, living people they wouldn't be trying to handcuff them for God's sake. By all rights they should've blown Jill away, or at the very least arrested her. The most we get is a peeved snarl of "Valentine!" from Captain Henderson. She tells Henderson to "shoot them in the head", then proceeds to free the only non-zombified criminal in the whole place, a two-bit thief named L.J. (who becomes somewhat more important later on), then leaves.
I fibbed a little. The first movie did not end with Alice and Matt being taken away by the Umbrella people. Actually, it ends with Alice waking up in the Raccoon Hospital to find that Raccoon City has gone completely to hell, crashed cars everywhere, etc., and a newspaper whose headline declares, "The Dead Walk!" Alice, wearing nothing but a doctor's coat she got from inside the hospital, acquires a loaded shotgun from an abandoned police car and gets ready for action! They re-use the footage from that movie here, although oddly they eliminate the pullback to show the full extent of the citywide destruction.
We cut to the Raven's Gate Bridge. As I said before, this bridge is apparently the only way to get in and out of Raccoon City (and I keep having flashbacks to that episode of The Simpsons with the comet, and the "only bridge out of town" gets destroyed). Umbrella has sealed it off by, I swear to God in heaven, erecting a gigantic wall around the entire freaking town. Okay, okay, okay, the wall thing I can deal with, but, um, why is Umbrella doing this? The U.S. Army should be the ones quarantining this city, not some pharmaceutical company (which, to anyone not privy to their bioweapons research, is what Umbrella is). They really make Umbrella way, way too powerful here.
Regardless, they're the ones who've sealed off the city. Their private security force, the U.B.C.S. (Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service) assisted by S.T.A.R.S. members and uniformed R.P.D. officers, are trying to keep back the crowds of citizens trying to leave Raccoon City. To their credit, Umbrella is actually trying to resolve the issue nonviolently here, at least at first. They've got doctors and scientists checking people for signs of infection. If people are uninfected, they're allowed to pass through the gate. Otherwise... well, surprisingly so far no has show signs of infection yet.
Elsewhere, we see a woman identified in the credits as "Marla Maples" being chased by a swarm of zombies up a flight of stairs to the roof of the office building where she works. Part of this scene was left on the cutting room floor: Mackenzie, who will appear again shortly, runs up the stairs before she does, and closes and locks the stairwell door behind him. Thus, when Marla reaches it, the zombies get to her and bite her while she struggles to unlock the door. Removing Mackenzie from this scene makes it seem like the door was locked from the outside for no reason. Anyways, Mackenzie or no Mackenzie Marla manages to break the door down and runs out onto the rooftop, followed by the zombies.
Flying overhead at the time is an Umbrella helicopter carrying some U.B.C.S. troops en route to the Raven's Gate Bridge to provide some much-needed backup. Riding in the 'copter is none other than Carlos Olivera. Unlike most of his Umbrella co-workers, Carlos actually cares about whether or not innocent civilians die, so he talks the pilot into letting him and some of his teammates, including Nicholai Ginovaef and Yuri Loginova, off onto the roof. Well, actually the pilot refuses so Carlos jumps from the 'copter, and Nicholai then persuades the pilot to land. The U.B.C.S. troopers quickly annihilate the zombies with their machine guns, but are too late to save Marla. She says she "knows what happens once you've been bitten", and jumps to her death from the roof.
Back at the Raven's Gate Bridge, Major Timothy Cain is called to the top of the wall by a guard. Exactly why he does this is never revealed, but it's implied that the guard is worried that there are just way too many citizens for them to handle. Jill Valentine shows up, planning to leave the city via the bridge, to hell with her duties as a S.T.A.R.S. officer. Among the S.T.A.R.S. members helping out with the evacuation/containment, she spots her friend Peyton Wells, who just has "sacrificial lamb" written all over him. When asked later by Jill why he doesn't leave town while he's got the chance, Peyton responds simply, "These are our people, Jill."
A man in the crowd suddenly begins to convulse and falls down with his daughter clinging to him, trying to snap him out of what she believes to be a heart attack. Jill, realizing what's happening, runs over with Peyton. They pull the girl off her father, who proceeds to get back up as a zombie and take a chunk out of Peyton's leg (infecting him with the T-Virus in the process). Jill then shoots the guy in the head and, remarkably, the crowd actually cheers (!). Watching from the wall above, Major Cain realizes "it's here. It's reached the gate." He orders the doors closed, despite the usual protests of, "But our men are still on that side!"
The gates are closed, and after shooting a gun into the air to get everyone's attention, Cain tells the crowd to go back to their homes. When they refuse to budge, he gives them ten seconds to do as he says, or else the guards on the wall will open fire. Just to show how evil they are, the guards actually go through with their threats and fire into the crowd, sending everyone flocking back across the bridge to the city, which, we see in some cutaways, is overrun with mobs of zombies moving in blurry, super-slo-mo. Meanwhile, the S.T.A.R.S. and R.P.D., joined by Carlos and his team, are battling the zombies.
Major Cain descends from the wall, and finds himself confronted by none other than Dr. Charles Ashford. When asked why he hasn't left with the other evacuated Umbrella employees, Ashford simply responds, "I'm not leaving without my daughter." Cain explains that they didn't find Angela in the wrecked SUV, and even if she was alive the chances of them finding her now are pretty slim. Regardless, Ashford refuses to budge. Cain allows him to stay, but has him put where he can't interfere with his work.
The movie gets worse, as, somehow or another, Ashford uses his laptop computer to hack into the Umbrella network, and after surmising that Angela must have gone back to her school after the crash, begins to search for other living people in the city. His plan is pretty obvious: Find some survivors and talk them into getting his little girl for him. As to how he's searching, apparently there are security cameras all over the damn city. To their credit they actually show the cameras, giving us a reason why Ashford is capable of watching all this stuff, but it begs the question why Umbrella would have those cameras there in the first place.
The first living person he spots is none other than Alice, who we see go into a gun store and stock up on weapons (outside of which is parked a motorcycle, so you might wanna remember this). During her little shopping spree, her arm begins to convulse uncontrollably, disturbingly reminding her of what was happening to Matt when she last saw him, but thankfully nothing else happens. However, she does have some flashbacks to her time in the hospital, where it looks like Umbrella scientists were experimenting on her. Eerily, Major Cain is present, as is another guy in a lab coat who will become important later.
Next, Ashford spots Jill and Peyton, who, along with some woman with a camcorder (who got footage of the U.B.C.S. guards firing into the crowds), seek shelter in an old church, which is identified as the Raven's Gate Church. The woman is Terri Morales, a reporter for Raccoon City's Channel 7. She is a much more prominent character in the novel, and is rather poorly introduced to us in the movie: We see her at the start of the movie, giving a weather report, but it's so brief it didn't even warrant any mention in my recap.
Inside, the three are confronted by Mackenzie (who, thanks to the removal of his role in the earlier rooftop scene, makes his first appearance here). Armed with a large pistol and extremely jumpy, Mackenzie tells them they have to get out, that "this is my place! I'm hiding here!" Luckily, they manage to calm the guy down. Terri, explaining that she intends to get an Emmy with everything she's filming, asks Jill, for the record, what the deal with the zombies is. Jill doesn't respond.
Suddenly they hear a strange noise coming from elsewhere in the church and Jill goes to investigate. Uh-oh. In what seems to be the living quarters/office of a priest, Jill finds an old woman who is tied to a chair. She turns out to be a zombie, and then a priest appears. He explains that it's his sister, and that she is "not well." It's implied that the priest has been letting his sister eat the bloody remains of someone from nearby, but they don't go into this really. When Jill (rightly) attempts to shoot her, the priest intervenes, allowing her to break her bonds and get free. She attacks and bites her brother, forcing Jill to shoot and kill both of them. And the point of this scene was...?
Meanwhile, the others hear the gunshots. Terri panics and tries to leave through the side door, almost letting a mob of zombies into the church. Dummy. Luckily, the other two are able to run over and Mackenzie bars the door with a cross (?) while Peyton holds it shut. Suddenly, something leaps across the ceiling. It's really fast and makes growly noises, and Terri manages to get a glimpse of it on film.
In another example of poor choices in the editing process, there's a missing shot from when they first approach the church, panning along a row of gargoyles to reveal that the one on the end is a crouched Licker. This would've really made the scene inside the church more suspenseful, making the audience wonder when, if ever, the creature was going to get inside to attack our heroes. Surprisingly enough, this actually made it into the film's trailer.
When they finally get a good look at the thing, Mackenzie predictably freaks out and runs away on his own. He is rewarded for being an idiot when a second Licker appears, and after stalking him a bit wraps its tongue around his neck and apparently kills him. Jill, returning from dealing with the priest and his zombified sister, finds Mackenzie's gun, and then Mackenzie, when he drops down on her, all mangled. And despite being horribly torn up, there's no blood anywhere except on his clothes.
She returns to the main part of the church and rejoins Peyton and Terri. Peyton says there's three Lickers in the church, and, truly remarkably, he and Jill don't have enough ammo to deal with all of them. Oh, and remember how the Lickers are supposed to be able to mutate when they eat someone? None of the Lickers that ate Mackenzie changed at all. Nice continuity between the movies, guys. Anyways, they're cornered, and it looks like they're doomed, when suddenly Alice comes flying through a stained-glass window on the motorcycle we saw parked outside the gun store (apparently she thinks she's Miss Piggy from The Great Muppet Caper), running over one of the Lickers in the process.
She pulls off her motorcycle helmet and yells for the other three to move out of the way, as she revs up the engine and sends the motorcycle speeding towards the Licker she ran over. She does a backflip off the bike, and the bike slams into the Licker and somehow or another both end up shooting straight into the air. Alice pulls out a crapload of guns and shoots the bike's gas tank. KABOOOM!!!
Alice then proceeds to slay the remaining two Lickers with ridiculous ease, shooting both of them one of them after it has been pinned to the floor by a giant crucifix. Some of its blood splatters onto Jill's shoes (ha-ha!), and she thanks Alice for saving them by demanding, "Who the fuck are you?!"
Before Alice can answer we cut away to L.J. (remember him?) driving down the street in an undoubtedly stolen car, which he promptly wrecks after being distracted by some topless zombie hookers. He abandons the car and runs for it, and we cut to the big fight against the zombies in the streets. By now, Carlos' U.B.C.S. team has been whittled down to just himself, Nicholai Ginovaef and Yuri Loginova. Yuri gets bitten (uh-oh) by a zombie, prompting Carlos to take out the offending corpse with a knife to the head, and then Yuri clears a path for them through the undead by tossing a grenade.
The three heroic U.B.C.S. guards (the only three heroic U.B.C.S. guards in the entire movie, apparently), are forced to retreat when the zombies overrun the police and S.T.A.R.S. As Carlos and his buddies escape down an alleyway, we get a rather pointless zoom-in on a policeman's motorcycle helmet (?), to show a zombie reflected in the visor. This is an "homage" to the opening FMV of Resident Evil 3, and is really distracting.
We cut back to Alice, who is now leading Jill, Peyton, and Terri through a cemetary outside the Raven's Gate Church. Which, as we all know, is the best place to go in a movie featuring the living dead. Our hopes that more Lickers (or "those things", as Terri calls them) will come and do away with Jill for us are destroyed when Alice assures her newfound companions that there are no more in the general vicinity. Peyton finally begins to complain about the wound on his leg (where the girl's zombified dad bit him), prompting Alice to pull a gun and prepare to shoot him, knowing he's infected.
Jill, in turn, pulls her own gun to stop her and demands to know what she's doing. And we have ourselves a little Mexican standoff, it looks like. When Alice explains that her friend is infected with the T-Virus and is gonna become a zombie, Jill, who had no problems taking away a little girl's father and with killing a priest who was infected, refuses to think about killing Peyton. Regardless, she assures Alice that "if it comes to that, I'll take care of it myself."
Just when we most expect it, the dead bodies all around them become reanimated and start clawing their way free from their graves. Super-Alice pulls some Kung Fu shiz and starts handing the ghouls their undead, rotten asses before finally deciding there's too many to fight, so our heroes quickly vacate the premises. The one nice touch in this scene is when Alice slams one zombie's rotting, maggot-riddled head into a tombstone that visibly says, "Rest In Peace".
For what it's worth, this sequence has gotten a lot of flak from the movie's naysayers, who wonder how the T-Virus could have infected these buried corpses, and how said corpses, once zombies, could have gotten out of their coffins. Maybe I'm not as much of a nitpicker as I like to think I am, because this never bothered me one bit. I mean, it was predictable, but that was my only problem with it.
We cut back to the Umbrella Corp. base camp on the other side of the wall that surrounds the city, where Major Cain is informed by one of many sexy female technicians (what is this? A James Bond villain's lair?) that the city has pretty much gone completely to shit, and is a warzone. Cain, pleased, says that this presents a perfect opportunity for them to test out their newest creation, the results of the aforementioned Nemesis Program. In the Raccoon Hospital, we see a huge... something awaken on an operating table. We can tell he's humanoid, but not exactly human.
We cut to Carlos, Nicholai, and Yuri making their way towards the hospital. Well, Carlos and Nicholai are. Yuri is in pretty bad shape, and Nicholai has to drag him along with them. They've spotted an Umbrella helicopter headed for the hospital, so that's why they're going thataway. With regards to Yuri, I'm at a loss to explain why he's succumbing to the effects of the T-Virus quicker than Peyton, who got bitten and infected long before he did.
Unfortunately, the helicopter is not there for them. It drops off some big metal cases, which crash through the skylight in the hospital lobby. When the three U.B.C.S. guards get inside, the cases have already been opened. Carlos can tell that there were weapons inside, and displays some fine deductive abilities when he surmises, "These weren't meant for us." Suddenly, Yuri, who Nicholai had set down nearby, springs to life as a zombie. He bites Carlos in the shoulder, and then gets shot in the head by Nicholai.
Meantime, a S.T.A.R.S. sniper wearing a cowboy hat (!) and listening to music on headphones is sitting on the roof of a theater, shooting zombies for fun. Obviously an "homage" to Dawn of the Dead. L.J. appears, and the sniper aims at him. It seems at first that he mistakes L.J. for one of the undead and is about to kill him, but instead he shoots a zombified chick who had been creeping up behind the luckless criminal. As L.J. thanks him and runs inside a nearby gun store called Mostly Colt, the sniper feels compelled to add, "I got the power!" Yeah, sure thing, He-Man.
Inside Mostly Colt, L.J. immediately gets surrounded by about 12 armed S.T.A.R.S. members, including Captain Henderson. "Shit! Maybe I was safer outside," he observes. Instead of shooting him though, Captain Henderson hands him a shotgun. Or at least he tries to, since as it turns out L.J. is already armed, with a pair of gold-plated handguns. Improbable, but it's a nice bit where he pulls them out and dances around and announces, "My shit is custom!" Unfortunately, just when it looks like there could be an interesting friendship going between L.J. and Cap'n Henderson, they all hear thunderous footsteps approaching.
We don't see what it is yet... but the sniper on the roof of the theater does. At a distance he thinks it's another zombie, he looks through his cope to shoot him... and jerks back in surprise. THEN we see him. Nemesis, in all his ten-foot-tall, black-trenchcoated, tentacled, staple-faced glory, toting a gatling gun AND a rocket launcher as he approaches the gun store. As with the earlier evacuation-of-the-Umbrella-employees sequence, I really like how they handled Nemesis' entrance here. Somehow the guys back in the Umbrella base camp can see what Nemesis sees. Cain observes the many S.T.A.R.S. people present in the vicinity, so he tells Nemesis that his mission is to hunt and kill S.T.A.R.S. members, for no other reason than because S.T.A.R.S. are supposed to be the "best of the best".
After taking out the sniper on the roof with his rocket launcher (after the guy shoots at him uselessly a bunch of times), he aims his gatling gun into Mostly Colt and opens fire, spraying the store with bullets. When the dust settles, we see that somehow L.J. has survived, but all the S.T.A.R.S. members around him have been pretty much obliterated. And yes, Nemesis does grumble, "S.T.A.R.S.!" here. L.J. immediately drops his gold-plated pistols when Nemesis approaches, rendering him, to both Nemesis and the Umbrella techs back in camp, a "non-combatant", so Nemesis turns and stomps off without doing anything to him.
Cutting back to Team Alice en route to, um, somewhere, and find them walking along discussing stuff. Jill wants to know why Alice can fight so well, and Alice admits that she isn't entirely sure. She says that Umbrella "did something" to her, and leaves it that that. Not that she's purposefully withholding information or anything, you understand, 'cause that's pretty much the extent of her knowledge. Suddenly, a bunch of payphones begin ringing as the group passes them. Initially Alice suggests that they keep moving, fearful that the noise will attract zombies, but when phones just keep ringing as they pass them she finally relents and picks one up at random.
"God, I thought you'd never answer!" comes the voice on the other end. Because of the British accent it's fairly easy to deduce that it's Dr. Charles Ashford, and when this is revealed to be the case it isn't that big of a surprise. Alice demands to know who it is, but Ashford simply cuts to the chase: "I can get you out of the city. All four of you. But first we have to come to an arrangement." Jill alerts Alice to a camera looking at them from nearby, apparently to reveal why he knows there's four of them... which makes no sense as she cannot hear Ashford's end of the conversation.
Ashford asks if Alice is "ready to make a deal." Alice asks if she's got a choice, to which the scientist responds, "Not if you want to live beyond tonight, no." After hanging up, Alice and her friends have got themselves a new mission: Get to the Raccoon Junior School, and pick up a little girl named Angela Ashford.
We now cut back to Carlos and Nicholai, who are hiding behind a wrecked ambulance. Carlos, having gotten some stuff out of the ambulance, is tending to the bite on his shoulder where Yuri bit him. He complains, rather nonchalantly, that it "won't stop bleeding." Nicholai meanwhile wonders aloud why the crew of that helicopter didn't see them earlier. Carlos replies that the crew saw them, but didn't pick them up because he and Nicholai are "expendable assets" that have "just been expended." Little do they know they're being watched by Dr. Ashford too (and have been ever since they fled the battle with the zombies), and, nearby, somebody's discarded cell phone begins ringing, drawing the attention of the two commandoes.
Back with Team Alice now, who have taken refuge inside what appears to be a bus or trolley or something (and since a lot of what we've seen so far comes from Resident Evil 3, I'm betting it's a trolley). Peyton thinks it's crazy to go running off looking for some kid when they have no real guarantee that this mysterious Dr. Ashford guy will keep up his end of the bargain, and suggests they barricade themselves in somewhere until the crisis is over. Jill even suggests it's some kind of game and the guy is just having fun with them. Alice however, drops a bombshell: That Umbrella plans to do just that. Drop a bombshell, I mean.
According to Ashford, in order to prevent the spread of the virus beyond Raccoon City, Umbrella plans to destroy the city with a nuclear missile. Again, this is giving Umbrella way too much power. Peyton thinks so, too, because he says there's no way Umbrella could possibly get away with something like that. Alice, however, reveals that a "cover-up" is already prepared, saying they plan to pass it off as a nuclear power plant melting down... which, frankly, is garbage since a power plant meltdown does not produce an explosion, from what I hear. At least, not one that would look like it was caused by a missile after the fact.
Any investigator would be able to tell the destruction was caused by a missile anyway... unless Umbrella is so powerful they've got every single investigator of that type in their pocket. And trust me, they probably do, because Umbrella's level of power only gets more and more ridiculous as the movie goes on (but thankfully it's almost over). Anyway, with that in mind, they all unanimously agree that their best option is to try and locate Angela Ashford and hope that her father is the sort of man who keeps his word.
So, it's off to the Raccoon Junior School for our heroes! But first, a little detour when they encounter Nemesis. As they cross a bridge (called the "Arklay Overpass" in an apparent nod to the Arklay Mountains in the games), Alice stops them and tells them she sense that something bad is lurking nearby. She advises them against crossing the bridge any further for now. Peyton thinks she's full of it, and continues... only to be mowed down by fire from Nemesis' gatling gun. Oh well, he was gonna die anyway.
Continuing his mission to slay S.T.A.R.S. members, Nemesis initially targets Jill next. But we're not that lucky, for, observing events in the Umbrella Corp. base camp, Major Cain spots Alice and recognizes her, immediately telling Nemesis that there's been a change of plans, instructing him to go after her instead of Jill. Apparently, she is the other half of the Nemesis Program. In fact, in response to her appearance, Cain announces that the Nemesis Program is now "fully activated."
Alice leaps down from the bridge and confronts Nemesis... which amounts to shooting at him once and then running as he turns his much bigger guns on her. After leaping a fence in an improbably spectacular fashion and avoiding a missile from Nemesis' rocket launcher, Alice runs inside a building. And since there's police cars parked out front, I guess it's supposed to be the police station. Nemesis follows, busting through the wall (ala Mr. X in Resident Evil 2) and chasing her down a hallway.
Alice ends up falling down a laundry chute (in a police station?) and lands inside a clothes bin. Nemesis sticks his rocket launcher down the chute and fires, and Alice retaliates by tipping the bin over. The missile hits and explodes, but apparently the clothes bin is strong enough to withstand the blast (yeah, right). Since he can't fit down the chute too, Nemesis is ordered to disengage. Boy, for a creature named "Nemesis" he sure gives up easily.
Cut to Jill and Terri hotwiring one of those four-door pickup trucks that have gotten really popular lately. Terri still has her video camera (she's since been filming all sorts of stuff from the Lickers to Nemesis), and Jill is all upset that Peyton died. He returns to say hello, in a sense, and attempts to bite her arm, but she pushes him off of herself and shoots 'im in the noggin. Damn, he was so close!
They drive to the school, picking up L.J. along the way after he stops them and manages to convince them that he hasn't been bitten or anything (and it's here that we learn that his full name is Lloyd Jefferson Wayne). Once at the school, they find a wrecked police van outside whose side says it's a K-9 unit. The cages inside have all been torn apart. Uh-oh. Zombie doggies! Inside, Jill, brilliant tactician that she is, tells Terri and L.J. that they should split up to search the place. Understandably, Terri is none too keen on this, even when Jill provides her with a gun.
We follow L.J. first. He enters the school's biology (?) classroom, where he receives a scare from a skeleton before being attacked by a zombified teacher. The zombie is suddenly blown away by none other than Carlos! Carlos reveals he's here for Angela Ashford too, but was unaware that Dr. Ashford made a deal with anybody else. Regardless, he says that since they're in the same boat they should stick together. L.J. seems to agree (wow, so far Carlos and L.J. are my two favorite characters aside from Alice and Major Cain XD).
Terri, meanwhile, enters a classroom and finds a lone little girl crouched in the corner, her back to the reporter. She appears to be rocking back and forth nervously, and, inevitably, Terri thinks that this is Angela Ashford. She doesn't respond to Terri's repeated assurances that everything is okay, and when she finally gets close and touches the girl on the shoulder the girl turns, revealing herself to be a zombie munching on someone's severed hand. Terri freaks and attempts to run, only to find her escape cut off by a horde of zombie kids.
She can't make herself shoot them, so she just kinda lets them jump on her and start ripping her apart. She drops her camera, which lands and is aiming at the feeding frenzy, getting it all on film. Hurray for the film's most disturbing moment! Jill, hearing Terri's screams all the way in the gym, comes running. She finds the classroom empty. The zombie kids all disappear from the movie completely at this point, since they're not in the classroom when Jill gets there and we never see them again. They must be fast eaters too since there's no sign of any remains at all of Terri (not even clothes), apart from her camera which Jill dutifully picks up and takes with her.
And then who should appear but Angela Ashford! Yes, it is implied, rather heavily, that Angela was hiding in the room when Terri came in and got killed. Yet she made no attempt to approach Terri or tell her that there were little zombie children everywhere. She only comes out for Jill. Hmmph. And on a somewhat minor note, Angela bears a striking resemblance, in both appearance and voice, to the holographic representation of the Red Queen from the first movie, which was a red holograph of a little British girl. It was mentioned in a throwaway line that the guy who designed the Red Queen modeled said holograph after his daughter. And Dr. Ashford seems quite handy with computers. It's nice how everything comes together.
Angela opts to stick with Jill, and after some rather meaningless dialogue about how Angela is "not a little girl" or whatever, they head to the cafeteria. Here they encounter some random zombies, which Angela isn't worried about, plus some zombie dogs, which Angela IS worried about. Suddenly who should appear but Nicholai, who kills one of the zombie pooches (there are three), and when Angela runs away Jill goes after her, leaving Nicholai to die violently when he's suddenly jumped by two more dogs. Wow, you sure were a big help, Nicholai. You too, Jill.
I like Nicholai Ginovaef. He was my favorite villain in the games (even moreso than the popular Albert Wesker). Turning him into a good guy for the movie I can deal with, but giving him such a piss-poor death as this is just a crime. Nicholai deserves a better sendoff than a mumbled, "Oh, shit!" and then getting mauled by some undead mutts.
Anyways once Nicholai is dead, the dogs follow Jill and Angela into the kitchen. You'd think they'd prefer to eat what they've already got, but who knew undead animals would know the purely human concept that is greed? The scene inside the kitchen got totally butchered when they edited the movie. I looked at the deleted scenes on the DVD, and originally the scene here of Jill and Angela being stalked in the kitchen by the two dogs is quite lengthy and suspenseful, and, oddly, almost entirely silent. No music or anything. But, we can't be having any actual suspense in THIS movie, so they whittled it down to Jill and Angela going in and going out again in under a minute.
Maybe it's just me... I dunno, the problem is that Paul Anderson apparently seems to think his audience is comprised of morons with the attention span of five-year-olds. No scene in this movie except for the climax goes on for longer than three minutes, I kid you not. Scenes like the church and the search for Angela in the school are chopped up so that we keep cutting back and forth very quickly between the characters, and it's extremely jarring.
And incidentally, the entire scene in the kitchen is made even more pointless when, as soon as Jill and Angela go back into the cafeteria, there's Alice with a lit cigarette. She tosses this into the kitchen, and since the gas stove was on this results in the kitchen being blown up, along with the two dogs. Wow, that was easy.
Alice, having Spidey-Sense or something, can tell something is wrong with Angela. Again, the novelization is way more clear on this, revealing that Alice can sense when someone or something is infected with the T-Virus. As it turns out, Angela has some scars on her arm that looks oddly similar to ones that Alice has from where Umbrella's scientists, apparently, experimented on her. And I forgot to mention this as well, but at the beginning of the movie when the Umbrella suits came to the school to pick her up Angela insisted on taking her lunchbox with her. The lunchbox, as it turns out, has a secret compartment containing several syringes of the anti-virus that prevents the spread of the T-Virus.
Just when we begin to think that Dr. Ashford is not the nice guy he seems to be and experimented on his own daughter, we find out that he IS the nice guy he seems to be, and experimented on his own daughter anyway. Apparently, Ashford's being confined to a wheelchair is due to some genetic thing which he passed on to Angela. As a much younger child, Angela's legs were very frail and weak, and she had to walk on crutches. The doctors told her she'd only get worse and end up spending her life in a wheelchair like her father.
Dr. Ashford wasn't going to have that, though, and developed a regenerative genetic thingie he called the T-Cell. If properly controlled by regular doses of the anti-virus (i.e., why Angela carries those syringes in her lunchbox), this basically allows Angela to walk without the aide of crutches or a wheelchair. If not properly regulated though, the T-Cells can potentially develop into the T-Virus. And although Ashford created the T-Cells for noble purposes, the Umbrella Corp. took it away from him and "perverted it" into the T-Virus.
The remainder of Angela's story tells as much, showing us Ashford yelling angrily for two Umbrella executives to "get out of my house!" The novel handles this much better (and that's starting to become a recurring phrase throughout this recap), with Angela going on to say further that afterwards, she said she knew her father cried himself to sleep most nights.
Getting back to the present, Carlos and L.J. appear to join the three womenfolk. Recognizing Carlos' uniform, Jill asks him how many other U.B.C.S. members are on their side. Carlos says that with poor Nicholai dead, it's just him. Alice then senses as she did with Peyton earlier that Carlos is infected, but hey, they've got syringes of the anti-virus now, so the hunky hero gets to avoid turning into a zombie. L.J., meanwhile, is offended that Carlos didn't mention he was infected. "You never told me you got bit! And here I am, hangin' with ya 'n' shit!"
They get on the phone to Dr. Ashford, and after he has a brief conversation with Angela (a really touching scene if I do say so myself), he gets back to Alice and explains that at City Hall there is a helicopter waiting. It isn't for them, but it'll be lightly guarded, and they can steal it and fly out of the city to safety before the nuke is launched. They all pile into the pickup truck Jill hotwired earlier and drive on over to City Hall. On the way, Alice uses the last of the film on Terri's camcorder to record her confession that she worked for Umbrella and knew about their illegal experiments, etc.
As for Ashford himself, as he hangs up after explaining about the helicopter it turns out that Major Cain was listening in over the doctor's shoulder. Uh-oh. But not before his laptop fizzles out, prompting Cain to quip, "Computers. So unreliable. Just like people." I hear ya, man, I hear ya!
Our heroes arrive at City Hall, where there is indeed a large cargo helicopter of some kind waiting. After they take out a few U.B.C.S. guards and L.J. gets another comic moment to shine (in his contempt for Umbrella, he pauses to kick one of the guards when they're down), they're suddenly targeted by a sniper on the roof of the building.
Not to shoot down your hopes of the bad guys winning, but Alice takes out the U.B.C.S. sniper on the roof of City Hall before he can plug her oblivious friends below. No, I don't know how she got up there, but I do like the bit where she covers the guy's scope to ruin his shot. She then proceeds to attach a bungee cord to herself (?) and proceeds to run down the side of the building, landing amidst some more U.B.C.S. goons who she promptly kills.
There's more by the helicopter, and Alice whacks all of them too, well, almost all of them. Just before the overlooked bad guy is about to shoot Alice in the back, it's Carlos to the rescue! He tosses a knife that sticks into the poor sap's throat. "You missed one," he says with a shrug after. As they prepare to board the 'copter, Alice suddenly begins to experience more of those traumatizing flashbacks which basically repeats what we saw before: Matt being taken away, and her being experiment on while Major Cain and Mysterious Doctor Guy watch. Suddenly... Nemesis appears! L.J., proving to be quick on the draw, quickly deduces the helicopter's purpose: "We're stealin' his ride!"
They all hurry aboard, only to find Major Cain waiting for them. Next thing you know tons and tons more U.B.C.S. guards have come out of the woodwork and surrounded the place, and our heroes are all held captive and wearing, um, plastic twist-ties for handcuffs? What the hell? Okay, I'm not gonna bother with that one. Angela is reunited with her father, who seems to be on hand for no real reason at all. As Nemesis approaches, Cain instructs him to discard his weapons. Nemmy complies, and then Cain turns to Alice and reveals he wants to see her fight Nemesis in hand-to-hand combat, to see which one is stronger. Seems kinda like a waste of research I think. I mean, does it matter who is stronger if they're both exceedingly good at what they do? Apparently Cain doesn't think so.
Alice refuses, so Cain threatens to kill her friends. She tries to act all cold, asking Cain what makes him think she cares about them. The Major responds by pulling his gun and shooting Ashford in the chest, much to Angela's horror. It was at this point in the movie I knew that Cain wasn't long for this world: He gonna die! Cain tells Alice that unless she fights Nemmy, he'll kill Angela next. Jeez, this guy has such a hard-on for seeing a beautiful woman fight a big ugly monster. If only he'd just go and play Mortal Kombat none of this would have happened.
Alice, finally, complies. I was afraid the fight was going to be short and choppy, but, surprisingly, it's quite long, and both Alice and Nemesis seem to take as much as they dish out. Nemesis cheats a little, ripping off a sharp chunk of some modern art sculpture thingie-ma-jig that sits in front of City Hall and using it to try and bash Alice with. Cain actually helps Alice out by tossing her a sword that resembles a Japanese katana (!!!). It's obvious which one our friend the Major wants to win.
Ultimately, Alice wins the fight when she knocks Nemesis back onto the jagged end of the sculpture he broke off, impaling him on it. But being Nemesis, this doesn't do much except prevent him from coming after her anymore. And, in what is quite possibly the most emotional, well-executed scene in the movie, Alice realizes who Nemesis is. Or at least, who he used to be. Up until now, all her flashbacks have featured Matt Addison, but always only when he's being carted off by the Umbrella guys in hazmat suits. Now, though, as she angrily pounds on Nemesis' chest (not doing a thing to him XD), she gets more images of Matt before that. Just Matt, y'know.
The horrible truth dawns on her. Realizing that Matt is Nemesis, Alice believably freaks the hell out and resumes pounding on the big mutant's chest. Only this time, I think it's kinda in denial. She finally falls apart and begins to cry, telling Matt (or what's left of him) that she's sorry. Whether she means she's sorry she let him be taken away and mutated, or she's sorry she just impaled him on a big sharp chunk of metal, is up for debate. I'd say both, personally. Major Cain comes over, and tells her to finish Nemesis off.
She asks why he is so interested in her, and Cain explains that, as the other half of the Nemesis Program, she is Umbrella's greatest achievement since the T-Virus, and pulls the old "come with me, and I'll teach you how to really harness and use those cool powers of yours, but for my own evil, wicked purposes! Mwahahahahaha!" routine. Okay, so Cain doesn't cackle maniacally, but you get the idea. She asks what about Nemesis, and Cain just shrugs and refers to the big guy as a "dead end." I dunno, personally. But whatever you say, Major. Being referred to as a "dead end" doesn't sit too well with Nemmy, and it seems as though what little there is left of Matt begins to surface as he begins trying to pull himself off the jagged chunk of metal.
Cain and Alice continue to yammer. Carlos meanwhile has pulled a small knife or something and is cutting through his twist-tie handcuffs. Apparently Cain didn't order them searched or anything. For an evil mastermind, he sure is dumb. Alice, finally, turns down Cain's offer. He handles this rejection fairly well, simply shrugging and saying, "All that power and no will to use it." Nemesis finally pulls himself off of the sculpture and Cain, apparently deciding that a "dead end" is better than nothing, orders Nemmy to finish off the good guys and then come with him aboard the helicopter.
Nemesis picks up his gatling gun and proceeds to start shooting the U.B.C.S. guards instead... and all hell breaks loose. I honestly can't coherently describe the action sequence which follows, but I'll do my best. Carlos, freed from the Twist-Ties of Doom, begins to assist Alice in killing the numerous red-shirt villains. Cain, over his nifty little headset-mic, orders the nuclear missile to be launched. He runs onboard the helicopter, only to find that, in a nice reversal or circumstances, L.J. is waiting for him, and he socks Cain in the face. Lotsa fighting! Two more Umbrella helicopters show up, but these are smaller gunships. Suddenly Alice is inside of City Hall (?!) and running along a corridor with huge windows, as one of the 'copters, keeping pace with her outside, attempts to strafe her: She, of course, outruns the machinegun fire (I think this is an "homage" to Code Veronica).
The she's outside again and Nemesis suddenly appears and uses his rocket launcher to blast both of the offending aircraft from the sky. Unfortunately for Nemmy, one of the burning 'copters kinda lands on him and squishes him. Alice is appropriately horrified. Oh, well. I'm sure that Matt would rather be dead than be a big, nasty mutant cyborg thing anyway. Now, not only is the missile coming, but practically every single zombie in the city has decided to converge on City Hall. Everyone scrambles aboard the helicopter and the pilot takes off (luckily for him, none of them know how to fly a helicopter so he's indispensable). Cain is still aboard, so Alice kicks his ass outta the 'copter. Before she does so however, he tells her that killing him won't make things right. Alice admits that he's right, but "It's a start!"
Booted out and left behind, Cain grabs a pistol and begins to shoot at the zillions of zombies that are closing in. We even see Dr. Ashford's corpse rise and join the undead. Finally, surrounded, Cain decides to commit suicide rather than be eaten alive by the zombies. There's just one problem. He kinda used up all his bullets ineffectually shooting at them, so when he puts the gun to his head and pulls the trigger nothing happens. Even as he realizes this, the zombies pounce on him, and Ashford is the one that takes the first bite. Cain; he's what's for dinner.
So they fly away, and the nuke hits and completely wipes Raccoon City off the map, and the shockwave buffets the helicopter and causes it to crash in the woods outside of town. During the crash, a big, sharp piece of metal flies loose and impales Alice through her abdomen, apparently killing her. Oy, what is with this movie and sharp pieces of metal? We cut to the next morning, A search helicopter, sent by Umbrella, locates the downed 'copter and radios it in, and before long there's a search team out there.
Said team is led by Mysterious Doctor Guy from Alice's flashbacks. As revealed in the novelization (and the credits), he is named Dr. Isaacs as an apparent joke, since this is supposed to be the same character from the end of the first movie who was voiced by an uncredited Jason Isaacs (who also did the opening monologue of that movie). Isaacs pulls back a sheet to reveal Alice's apparently dead body, and asks if there were any other bodies found. The other guys respond in the negative (which means the helicopter pilot, a nameless minor character, actually lived!), and he tells them to take Alice to, uh, somewhere.
Next thing you know, the late Terri Morales' videotape of all that happened in Raccoon City is all over the news. U.B.C.S. guards shooting innocent people, a deadly virus, mutant monsters, all in glorious Technicolor. It makes the headlines, and then some. But somehow, somehow it's all dismissed as a hoax eventually. The only way this could potentially happen is if Umbrella had an absolute stranglehold on the media, which I guess they do since at the end of the movie we see that a satellite in space has the Umbrella Corp. logo on it. Um, no. No, no, no. They're not the government. I don't care how much money and resources they have, there's no way anyone would ever believe that EVERYTHING shown on that tape os a hoax. How would they have supposedly faked it? It'd be a mass conspiracy! Conspirators crying conspiracy...
Regardless, after briefly entertaining the idea that it's the genuine article and that Umbrella is, like, really bad and stuff, the TV reporters suddenly start saying that "new evidence" has surfaced which proves it's fake, and the official story goes right back to being that it was a meltdown at the nuclear power plant. Oh, and Jill, Carlos, and L.J. are now wanted as criminals for some reason. Dunno exactly what the charges are.
Cut to, again, some weeks later, on a laboratory located within Umbrella's corporate headquarters. Scientists walk around doing scientific stuff, and we see that Alice is currently inside of a large tank of green liquid. Dr. Isaacs, now sporting the requisite lab coat, enters and walks up the tank. For some reason we can hear Angela's voice, apparently in Alice's head, whispering for her to wake up. Trust me, it's only gonna get weirder. Angela's voice succeeds in awakening Alice, and after ascertaining that Alice can hear what he's saying Dr. Isaacs orders the tank drained an they take Alice out. Ooooh, nekkidness!
It's unclear whether they cloned her or what, but at the moment she is really scared and confused. Isaacs asks her if she remembers anything, like what her name is, or what a pen is when she becomes focused on one being used by another scientist, but she doesn't seem to be responding. when she doesn't answer he walks over and starts instructing other scientists to put her under 24-hour observation. Alice meanwhile suddenly begins regaining her memory in the form of rapid-fire flashbacks (pretty much the whole movie before this scene flies by in under twenty seconds). Only two of the scientists seem to notice that something is amiss, while Isaacs keeps talking and talking, until finally they get his attention by yelling and he looks over in time for Alice to say, "My name is Alice... and I remember everything."
She then proceeds to pretty much beat the shit out of every poor son-of-a-bitch in the room, in particular tossing Isaacs through the glass window of the tank. Swiping a spare lab coat, she leaves the laboratory. A guard in a control room someplace spots her on camera, and somehow she knows she's looking at him because she looks directly into the camera. This somehow causes the guy to bleed from his eyes, nose, and ears, and, um, keel over dead. Once outside though she's confronted by about 60 guards, all with laser-sighted machineguns pointed at her. Suddenly a black SUV pulls up and Carlos, Jill, and L.J. get out wearing U.B.C.S. uniforms, stating that they're here under orders as Alice's escort. The guards buy it, and Alice gets into the car with them, where she finds Angela waiting for her.
The guards at the main gate aren't so trusting it seems, and stop them. Meanwhile, back in the lab, Dr. Isaacs is still alive and phones the gate guards, telling them to let them go. The guards comply, and as the SUV speeds off Isaacs says that "Project Alice" is now underway. I smell a sequel. Cue end credits.
And there you have it. | | |
| Well there's not a whole lot to really say about myself. I'm 21, soon to be 22, and I was born in Augusta, Georgia, and subsequently grew up in Germany (since my dad was in NATO), and then in Harker Heights, Texas and Jackson, Mississippi back in America. Currently though I live in Zebulon, North Carolina.
I got sucked into the Internet around 1997 or so, and the rest is history. My primary pasttimes, other than sitting on my butt in front of a computer all dang day, are drawing, reading, and watching and talking about movies and cartoons. Likely as not, I'll be using this blog more for posting stuff like my own personal movie reviews for people to read, seeing as how my offline life is actually pretty dull and I don't really have a big desire to write about it in order to bore you all to death. :)
For my first review I've chosen, at the behest of my boyfriend Tris (yes I'm gay, or at least bi with a strong tendency towards liking other guys), would be Rodan!
Rodan
1956, Toho
The Characters:
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The Rodans - Big pterosaurians who fly at "supersonic speed" and generate typhoon-force winds by flapping their wings.
The Meganurons - Big bugs. Really big bugs. These caterpillar-like insects infest the Kitamatsu mines and kill several people.
Shigeru Kamura - Safety inspector for the coal mining company in Kitamatsu.
Kiyo - Shigeru's main squeeze.
Goro - Kiyo's hotheaded brother. A miner. Disappears into the mines and is suspected of killing Yoshi.
Yoshi - Goro's fellow miner. Goes missing about the same time as Goro and turns up dead.
Suteyan and Peek - Two comic relief miners who are friends with Shigeru and quickly die.
Prof. Kyuichiro Kashiwagi - Paleontologist called in to identify the Meganurons and ends up playing a major role in dealing with the Rodans.
Chief Nishimura - Chief of the police force in Kitamatsu, who is unusually open-minded and intelligent for an overweight authority figure.
Dr. Tsunikowa - Seismologist employed by the "Earthquake Institute."
Izeki - A reporter. This is about all he contributes to the story.
The Story:
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Sora no daikaiju Radon, better known as Rodan! The Flying Monster or just plain Rodan here in the U.S., was Toho's first Kaiju film in color, made after Godzilla, King of the Monsters and its sequel, Godzilla Raids Again (Gigantis, The Fire Monster), both of which were in black and white.
I remember as a kid, first seeing a preview for this movie at the end of an old VHS copy for the original 1954 Godzilla put out, I believe, by Vestron. As I recall it was a little too reliant on spoiler-heavy clips such as scenes from the Rodans' attack on Sasebo, as well as the scene where Shigeru sees the first Rodan hatch from its egg in the cavern.
Looking back, I must say I'm amazed that seeing these scenes before I actually saw the movie didn't ruin it for me, and I'm sure it would have had it not been for the Meganurons. There was nothing about them in the preview for the film - it was like they were Vestron's trump card. I find it silly now, but watching the film back then for the first time I was initially convinced it was Rodan doing the killings in the mines. I guess I figured he was a baby at the time or something. Imagine how delighted I was when the first Meganuron waddled its merry way into Kiyo's house to menace her and Shigeru.
I promptly forgot all about Rodan after that until back in, I think, 2002, when I found the Classic Media DVD of it for sale dirt-cheap in the bargain bin at my local Wal-Mart. I snapped it up along with Godzilla (and I would later acquire Terror of Mechagodzilla and Godzilla vs. Mothra from similar bargain bins at other Wal-Marts).
Rodan begins with the requisite stock footage of nuclear weapons tests, a big fad in 1950's science fiction movies it seems. An ominous narrator chimes in that Mother Earth is unhappy with these tests, which are being conducted by the stupid Americans as part of something called "Mission: Gigantic" (Oh, brother...).
This little "prologue" isn't in the original version of the movie. Rather it was stuck in there for the movie's American release, so in effect it's sort of like the Americans are blaming themselves. I say sort of because this prologue, and the thing about nuclear weapons testing, has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE MOVIE'S PLOT. After we see some atomic bombs vaporize a town and some ships at sea, the ominous narrator and his pointless pseudoscientific babble goes away forever. Thank goodness. And once that nonsense is over with we can finally get to the actual movie.
The scene is the Japanese community of Kitamatsu, a mining village. Our new humble narrator is Shigeru Kamura, the safety inspector for the nameless mining company that operates out of the town. He'll also be our hunky hero for today's adventure. As the safety inspector, he's got his hands full. It seems that the miners have dug too deep in the ominously-named Shaft Number 8, much to the annoyance of Shigeru's boss Mr. Tsuda. This has resulted in a "creeping floor," and Shigeru helpfully informs us that that means the miners have removed too much coal from between two strata of rock, causing the shaft to become unstable.
It isn't long before he gets a call saying that there's a ton of water in the mine. Donning his miner's helmet, Shigeru goes down into Shaft Number 8 where the flooding is. He's told by the miners that there was a break in the mine wall, which admitted all the water. As if that wasn't enough, two of the miners are missing: Yoshi and Goro. This is especially bad news for Shigeru, since Goro is the brother of Kiyo, the girl he's planning to marry. Along with some of the braver miners, including his friends Suteyan and Peek, Shigeru personally leads a search party into the flooded part of the mine to look for the two missing men. It isn't long before they find one of them, Yoshi, floating face-down in the water. Poor Yoshi is "almost hacked to pieces," as one guy puts it.
They take his body to the local hospital where the doctor examines him. He expresses bewilderment as to what could have caused the "ugly wounds" on the man's body, and informs Shigeru that he's called the police, since "it was not an accident." About the only thing he can tell Shigeru for certain is that Yoshi did not die from his wounds. He died from shock. Shigeru reasons he saw something "horrible and dreadful beyond words."
Regardless, everyone in town, including Yoshi's wife Otami, is convinced that Goro is the killer. This is due to the fact that Goro is still missing and has a history of trouble with Yoshi. In fact, the two men had gotten into a fight just prior to their disappearance. But Shigeru's not buying it. He tells Kiyo as much when he runs into her outside the hospital. "No matter what anyone else may say, I know Goro is no killer," he says. Let's hope he's right.
Meanwhile a policeman goes down into Shaft Number 8 to look for Goro, accompanied by Suteyan and Peek. When the three of them venture into the flooded part of the mine, Suteyan comes up with the brilliant idea that they should tie themselves together with a length of rope for safety purposes. We're then treated to a rather long sequence of them wading through the murky water, calling Goro's name. Then, in a scene that I vividly remembered from my childhood because it scared the shit out of me, Suteyan suddenly starts screaming that something is biting him and is then yanked under the water.
The cop, tied to Suteyan, is pulled under right after him. Peek manages to untie himself and makes a run- er, makes a swim for it, although I probably don't have to say that he doesn't make it very far before whatever's in the water manages to catch up to him and he fulfills his role as cannon fodder because he stops to make a phone call (!).
News of the killings reaches the press and soon the hospital is swarming with reporters and police. Dr. Tanaka, the head pathologist (or something along those lines) holds a small Q & A session in which he explains that whoever or whatever killed the four dead guys had to have been very powerful. Wow, he's a genius. Chief of Police Nishimura inquires what the murder weapon might be, but Tanaka regretfully admits that he is uncertain. Realizing that all this will cause a scare in the village, Nishimura promises to have his men patrol the streets at night to give the townspeople a sense of safety.
That night, Shigeru pays a visit to Kiyo. She hasn't been feeling too well in light of her brother missing and all these murders. The fact that Otami has recently tried to kick down the door in a fit of hysteria because she blames Goro for Yoshi's death isn't help matters much. "There's something horrible in that mine! It's not murder, it's worse!" she sobs, convinced that Goro is dead. Rather than ponder what could be worse than murder, Shigeru tries to cheer her up by suggesting that she get out of town for a while, away from all this bad stuff. The tender moment is rudely interrupted by what I can only describe as looking like a giant grubworm with glowing purple eyes and big crab claws. This is a Meganuron, and it's one mean motherfucker.
It waddles into the house through the open back door, scaring Shigeru and Kiyo, who wisely vacate the premises. Once safely outside Shigeru calls over to a group of the promised police officers: "Help! There's a monster here!" Because in this universe attacks by monster are a weekly occurrence, the police come running without a second thought. They venture inside the house, and the Meganuron cooperates by attacking them.
When the news reaches Chief Nishimura, he's on the phone in a flash with the nearby Japanese Self-Defense Force (or JSDF for short) base, requesting troops armed with machine guns. When a subordinate informs him that the giant grubworm has been spotted near the "outer coal dumps," he gathers together a bunch of his officers and, accompanied by Shigeru and some of the obligatory pitchfork-wielding townspeople, hurries over.
Shigeru spots the Meganuron atop one of the numerous mountains of coal, and the police spread out and start shooting at it to no avail. Two particularly stupid cops (mentioned in passing as "Konda" and "Sabonda") get too close to the thing and are seized in its huge claws and killed. Tossing its victims aside, the Meganuron retreats back into the mine. Arriving on the scene, the doctor examines the bodies and declares that the wounds are the same as on the other four victims. Therefore, all the killings have been the work of that big-ass bug.
The requested troops arrive on the scene shortly, armed with the promised machine guns. With Shigeru in the lead (seeing as how he's the mine's safety inspector) they all venture down into Shaft Number 8. The water has gone down since that morning, allowing the search party to get through and find the hole in the wall where all the water came in. They also find Goro, dead as a doornail. Damn. Poor Kiyo. Her brother's morgue meat.
Even as the grief-stricken Shigeru is vainly trying to shake his lifeless would-be brother in law awake, the Meganuron reappears and attacks! The troops open fire with their machine guns, but this only succeeds in annoying the insect. Coming to the conclusion that bullets don't work against this thing, the group turns and starts retreating back up the mine shaft, with the bug lumbering after them. Finally Shigeru decides that enough is enough and, yelling from everyone to get out of the way, he unhitches the brake on a train of mining carts. The carts then hurtle down the tracks and gain enough speed, slamming into the Meganuron with enough force to kill it dead.
So now the horror is over. Or is it? Shigeru is adamant about retrieving Goro's body in order to give the poor guy a proper burial, so he and the others venture back down into the formerly flooded part of the mine to get it. The corpse is wedged inside the hole in the wall, so Shigeru is forced to climb through into the adjoining cavern so he can push the body out to the others. As he is in the middle of doing so, another Meganuron appears inside the cavern with him. Apparently having not learned their lesson, the troops stick their machine guns through the hole and start firing (apparently with little regard for Shigeru). All this accomplishes is one massive cave-in. The torrent of falling rocks squishes the Meganuron, but cuts Shigeru off from the only exit. When the avalanche is over, Chief Nishimura calls out to Shigeru, but receives no answer.
Rescue crews dig through the mines over the next few days in the hopes of finding Shigeru, but have no luck so far. In the meantime, the authorities call in Prof. Kyuichiro Kashiwagi, a paleontologist, in the hopes that he can identify the monster bugs. After examining photographs of one of the creatures (When were those taken?), Kashiwagi declares that the Meganurons are a species of insect thought to have died out. A press conference in which Kashiwagi reveals this information is interrupted by a sudden earthquake. The Professor phones the "Earthquake Institute" and speaks with seismologist Dr. Tsunikowa, asking if he can pinpoint the location of the quake.
Tsunikowa informs him that the quake hit outside of Kitamatsu, near the supposedly dormant volcano of Mt. Toya. Intrigued, Kashiwagi arranges for the seismologist to meet him there so they can inspect the scene. When he arrives with Chief Nishimura and a slew of reporters in tow, Kashiwagi finds Tsunikowa waiting for him. Oh, and a really huge hole in the ground. The earthquake has opened a new fissure in the earth that makes the Grand Canyon look like a crack in the sidewalk. "There've been some strange underground rumblings these past few days," explains Tsunikowa, "I'm completely baffled." Some expert.
Suddenly one of the reporters, Izeki, spots what looks like a man wandering around at the bottom of the fissure (Wow, he's got sharp eyes! The thing looks like it's about ten thousand feet deep!). They all manage to make it down there in record time and discover that it is... ..Shigeru?! Yes, Shigeru. Badly injured and apparently in shock, as he does not react at all the sizable crowd of people. They take him back to the hospital in Kitamatsu, where the doctors begin treating him for amnesia. Professor Kashiwagi arranges for Kiyo to be brought in the hopes that seeing her will spark Shigeru's memory. Alas, he hardly even reacts to her presence. Needless to say, she's in tears. Hmm, something pretty bad must have happened in those caverns to make Shigeru lose his memory...
Meanwhile, the control tower of Big Fence Air Base (yeah, I know...) gets a rather distressing call from one of their pilots out on a routine flight. The pilot, Kitahara, reports that he is in pursuit of an unidentified flying object that is zipping about at "supersonic speed," making vertical midair climbs and performing loops and such. His jet can barely keep up with it. Not that it matters, as halfway through the chase the thing makes a major U-turn and flies right at Kitahara, somehow causing his jet to be snapped in half like a cheap plastic toy. When they find the wreckage of the jet, all they find of Kitahara is his blood-splattered crash helmet. The two guys in charge of the base are stunned.
For once, I didn't catch either of their names. Amazing that I know the name of the doomed pilot, Kitahara, who has about a minute of screen-time, but have no idea what the names of two relatively important characters are. Anyway, I'll call them, uh, Commander Guy #1 and Commander Guy #2. Commander Guy #1 wants very much to believe that Kitahara just went nuts and crashed his own jet, but Commander Guy #2 is a little more open-minded. According to him, Kitahara was one of their most reliable pilots. Izeki, who is on hand to cover the story, then gets phone call informing him about a British cargo plane which was just destroyed with no survivors. Pretty soon people all across the country start reporting that they've seen this UFO, which amounts to random extras gawking and pointing into the sky.
This forces the Commander Guys to entertain the possibility that it's for real. Wow, the army guys in this movie are actually fairly intelligent, or in the case of somebody like Commander Guy #1, they may lack brains but they have common sense. The same goes for the police, obviously. I thought Chief Nishimura handled the earlier Meganuron crisis pretty damn good. It's too bad most American movies have to make army guys rabid warmongers and cops fat idiots. Admittedly, Nishimura is an overweight man (He looks about to bust the buttons on his uniform!) he he's one of the most open-minded and thoughtful cop characters I've seen in a monster movie.
Around the same time, Dr. Tsunikowa calls Chief Nishimura and tells him that Mt. Toya has become active again and may erupt. He advises Chief Nishimura to block off the road leading to the volcano. However, the roadblocks do little to dissuade a couple of newlyweds from driving up there for the sheer thrill of it. The man has a camera and is taking pictures of his wife when she suddenly looks up into the sky and sees something that makes her scream. He sees it too and they both run for the car, but they don't make it. Whatever it is swoops down on them, and all that's left behind is one of the woman's shoes and the man's camera, which naturally goes off when it hits the ground.
Nishimura initially suggests that it might have been suicide, but Tsunikowa, who knew the couple personally, says they were "too happy." Besides, they just got married! I will say I'm glad that couple didn't have kids. Don't want the stupidity gene spreading. I mean, when your family friend is a scientist who says it isn't safe to go to a certain mountain, why go unless you're a fucking moron? When Nishimura and Izeki (boy, that guy gets around) examine the negatives from the husband's camera, and when they spot something weird-looking in the last reel, Nishimura orders the pictures developed. The developed photo shows what looks like a blurry bird's wing, complete with a clawed foot. "It must be the wing of a plane," says Izeki, making me rethink my earlier statement about him having sharp eyes.
Refusing to believe a bird that big could even fly, Izeki nonetheless takes the photo and shows it to Professor Kashiwagi. The pieces of the puzzle start to fit together when, upon viewing the photo, Kashiwagi instructs one of his assistants to get him a portfolio on Pterosaurians. Meanwhile, we get back to Shigeru. Kiyo has been looking after our mostly-comatose Hunky Hero since they discovered him up near Mt. Toya, and she's all but living in his room at the hospital. Shigeru has also apparently turned into an obsessive-compulsive, as all he does is doodle all day. The poor bastard.
Professor Kashiwagi has a hunch that Shigeru might know what the hell is going on, since the appearance of the UFO coincides with them finding him. He pays Shigeru a visit at the hospital, armed with pictures of various dinosaurs, as well as a photo of a Meganuron, hoping they'll spark his memory. Predictably, Shigeru reacts violently to the photo of the Meganuron, but otherwise the pictures don't do a bit of good. Dejected, the paleontologist departs upon Kiyo's insistence. Among the things Kiyo has brought with her during her time looking after her brain-dead boyfriend are her mated pair of pet birds, who have laid some eggs. When they start to hatch, she shows Shigeru, hoping it will cheer him up. Instead, he reacts with horror as he begins to remember. Yes, ladies and gentlemen. IT'S FLASHBACK TIIIIIME!
Following the cave-in in the mines, Shigeru had been wandering around through the maze of caves for days trying to find a way out, he stumbled upon the cavern that the murderous Meganurons apparently called home. But seeing them crawling all over the place isn't what left him in shock. Instead, it was the gigantic egg nestled in the cavern, which upon his arrival began to hatch, disgorging what looked like a Pterodactyl. Immediately the baby monster set about eating up all the Meganurons, and all this is too much for Shigeru's mind to take. Thus he wandered away, totally out of it, until he eventually found his way out of the caves. Well, that explains why the town had no further problems with the Meganurons after the cave-in...
Back in the present, Shigeru has gone into a fit of hysterics upon reliving the nightmare, but when it's over and Kiyo manages to shake him awake, she sees that he has come back to his senses (and he's really sweaty, too). "Your memory has returned to you!" she gushes, stating the blatantly obvious. He wastes no time in going to see Professor Kashiwagi, who once again shows him all the drawings of various dinosaurs. Shigeru picks out a sketch of a Pterodactyl and says that it looks most like what he saw hatch from the egg. He offers to lead the Professor and Chief Nishimura to the cavern where he saw the egg. Kashiwagi leaps at the opportunity. "If there are other eggs they must all be destroyed!" he dramatically declares.
So everyone dons miner's helmets and ventures underground. After a lengthy journey they arrive at the cavern in question, only to find no egg. At least, so it seems at first. Kashiwagi suggests it might have been buried by a rockslide, and some digging does in fact yield a hunk of Styrofoam- uh, I mean, a piece of eggshell the size of a dinner plate. Another rockslide occurs for no reason, forcing the group to hastily vacate the caverns, but at least they got what they came for.
Kashiwagi examines the eggshell back at his lab, and he and his assistants run a full series of neat-o scientific tests on the thing in order to determine how big the egg originally was, and thusly how big the animal in question was and is. "How big is the reptile when it's full grown?" asks one assistant after they've determined the dimensions of the egg. "I'm not sure," admits Kashiwagi, "it may have been full grown when it hatched. It obviously took to the air right away." Well, who can argue with that logic?
After all the testing has been concluded, the Professor quickly calls together a meeting with everybody. He reveals that the creature they're dealing with is a flying reptile closely related to the extinct Pteranodon, which belongs to the family Rodan. "It's weight is over 100 tons, and it has a wingspread of perhaps 500 feet," he adds. When questions are allowed, Chief Nishimura demands to know, "If this thing you call Rodan is extinct, how come it is still alive?"
"That's a good question," admits Kashiwagi. However he puts forth his own pet theory that the egg was "hermetically sealed" by a volcanic eruptions, "perpetuating the germ of life," until the miners dug too deep. Or something along those lines. The logic behind most of what Kashiwagi says is extremely difficult to grasp. I guess the pseudo-scientific babble didn't go away, after all. Commander Guy #1 (or maybe it's Commander Guy #2; they're interchangeable) states that it's the JSDF's job to find this "Rodan" and blast him into oblivion, and asks the Professor where he thinks the monster is hiding out. Kashiwagi thinks that Rodan can be found in the crater of Mt. Toya, and tells the Commander Guys that they should begin their search there.
A helicopter is quickly dispatched to do a flyover of the crater, and sure enough they see lots of human bones along with the other shoe of the woman strewn along the cliffs. The pilot then catches a glimpse of Rodan himself holed up in a narrow cave and radios Big Fence Air Base. They dispatch three jets (identified as "Dog Flight") to bomb the hell out of the crater. Shigeru drives out there along with Nishimura, Kashiwagi, and Izeki to watch the show. An interesting blooper here is that Shigeru, Kashiwagi, and Izeki are shown to be riding in the search helicopter moments before. Which means the 'copter flew all the way back to Big Fence, and then they got into their car and drove all the way back out to Mt. Toya.
Dog Flight arrives on the scene and they shoot at the crater a bunch of times before Rodan decides to come out and open up a can of whoop-ass on the guys who are ruining his nap. He rears up from the crater in all his glory, and Shigeru is quick to confirm the monster's identity: "That's it!" he cries, pointing. "The monster that hatched from the egg!" Rodan looks a lot like a Pterodactyl, except he's got spines on his chest and two short horns that curve back and away from his head. He takes to the air, flying over the small crowd of onlookers, knocking them all to the ground with the sonic boom he leaves in his wake.
As everyone climbs to their feet, they suddenly hear another roar from within the crater as a second Rodan appears! Needless to say, everyone panics, with Shigeru crying, "It has a mate!". Keeping his cool, Nishimura instructs a red-shirt police officer to head back and warn Big Fence that there's another Rodan (don't these idiots have radios?). The messenger doesn't get very far before Rodan #2 takes to the air and flies over the road, the typhoon-force boom left in his (her?) wake causing the poor officer's Jeep to be blown violently into the side of the mountain.
Oddly, Dog Flight chooses to go after this Rodan when they let the first fly off. Apparently realizing their blunder, they are quick to radio Big Fence and inform them that there's two Rodans. Rodan #2, who I will assume is the female of the obviously mated pair, is able to take out two of the three jets that make up Dog Flight by simply flying over them in midair. The sonic boom she generates causes them to break apart (which is what happened to Kitahara's jet, I'd wager). The remaining pilot wisely decides to get the hell out of there, allowing Rodan #2 to go on her way. The Rodans, by the way, can somehow fly without flapping their wings. They just sort of glide speedily along, propelled by some invisible force. Fart-propulsion? Maybe. They do leave a trail of white smoke behind them in the air...
Elsewhere, a second group of jets, "K-Squadron", is dispatched to look for Rodan #1. They find him pretty quickly, making a beeline for the city of Sasebo. They engage him in the skies over the city before he manages to destroy two more of them with his sonic-boom attack. The finally get the idea and beat a hasty retreat back to base. This leaves Rodan free to attack Sasebo, which he does.
This amounts to making numerous passes over the city, first bringing down a bridge and sending it splashing into the bay, then blowing cars, trucks, buses, and other vehicles around like Matchbox cars. As my friend Evy would say: "Bad Rodan! Bad!" Rodan eventually lands amongst the buildings and creates more destruction simply by flapping his wings. I feel so bad for the poor people of Sasebo, blown about like ragdolls. I especially pity whoever was driving that gasoline tanker truck that is sent spinning through a building.
The JSDF finally sends in its toy tank division. They surround Rodan and start blasting away at him and, remarkably, this is enough to keep him pinned down. Being heavily-armored vehicles, they also are not vastly effected by Rodan's homemade hurricane. Rodan is finally saved when his honeybunch shows up and distracts the military long enough for her mate to take to the sky. The fly away, leaving Sasebo in ruins. They do the same to two more cities (Or so we're told...), prompting Shigeru to exclaim, "If they're not killed they'll take over the Earth!" Pessimist!
Finally the Rodans just up and vanish without a trace. It takes the authorities an entire week to decide that the Rodans have returned to their caves. "These Rodans are reptiles, a member of the snake family," says Kashiwagi, making the single stupidest statement in the movie. "After they gorge on food, human or otherwise, they will hibernate a long, long time." They’re actually paying this guy? The JSDF commanders decide to try bombing the crater of Mt. Toya again while the Rodans are napping, hoping to bury them alive.
Dr. Tsunikowa is horrified, fearful that any more such action against Mt. Toya will cause the volcano to erupt and destroy Kitamatsu. "Think of the people. The women and the children," he implores them. Clearly it never occurred to the good doctor that they would of course evacuate the town, something Chief Nishimura is quick to point out to him. In any case, the authorities conclude that the Rodans are a bigger threat than the volcano, and the commander gives the go-ahead to strike.
The authorities evacuate Kitamatsu, then bring in the jets, tanks, missile launchers, etc. and set them up around the crater. Desperate to remain in the story, Shigeru and Kiyo watch from afar as the JSDF begins shooting at the volcano. As per Tsunikowa's predictions, the volcano begins to erupt. One of the Rodans actually makes it clear of the crater, but his mate is injured by some of the lava (that or she was overcome by the fumes) and falls back down into the volcano.
The remaining Rodan, refusing to live without its mate, gives up the will to live and allows itself to be overtaken by the fumes, plunging into the lava. As he watches, Shigeru admits that he can't help but feel sorry for the Rodans, and to tell the truth neither can I. In any case, man is once more victorious against the ravages of prehistoric nature. At least until the sequel. Although to be fair, Rodan never actually got a sequel. One of the title monsters (or another one just like 'em) would turn up in several movies alongside Godzilla, however.
The End | | |
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