Star Trek V – The Final Frontier
This should have been a slam dunk in 1989 which was just a couple years after the box office smash of Star Trek 4 – the funny one with the whales as its known both to Trekkies and non-fans – and it was just two years into The Next Generation’s syndicated run, which is when that series really started to hit its stride. But instead, Star Trek V proved to be a financial, critical and audience disappointment, garnering five Golden Raspberry Award nominations that resulted in two wins for first-time director William Shatner: one for director and one for actor.
1.) Was the chemistry incredibly annoying for someone unfamiliar with the cast?
2.) How about that row-row-row-your-boat scene? I feel like Shatner was just too in love with the characters.
3.) Could you tell that the role of Sybok – played by Laurence Luckenbill – was originally earmarked for Sean Connery? The planted they travel to in the movie was named as homage to Connery – Sha Ka Ree.
4.) How about them special effects? Not so special eh? Paramount was stingy AF.
5.) Is there a good movie in here?
6.) Howzabout that Uhura dancing sequence. Poor Nichelle Nichols deserved so much more respect.
Bottom Five Gods
Whenever I think of Star Trek movies, I think about them by a single identifier. Kind of like the title for Friends episodes. For instance, 1 was “the one with the bald chick.” 2 was “the one when spock dies.” 3 was the one when “the Enterprise blows up” etc. V is known to me as “The one with fake God,” so it made sense to me that our bottom five for this episode be “the one with the bad Gods.” So, “Bottom Five Gods!”
5.) Moana (2016) – Maui
To be fair, the Polynesian demi-god Maui upon which The Rock’s version is based is an incredibly powerful entity that, among many crazy feats, catches the sun with a fish-hook and thus lengthens the days. He’s also fabled to have brought fire to mankind, harnessed wind so we could sail on the ocean and pulled many a Pacific island from the sea.
So why is he portrayed as a blow-hard braggart with a fragile ego and a bad temper? I get that human kind forgot about him for a thousand years and he’s got a chip on his shoulder about it, but giving a shipwrecked kid from a struggling island who just lost her grandma and is alone on a dangerous quest to find the heart of the ocean is just plain childish. And that’s what Maui is for a lot of the movie – a bratty child that’s tempestuous, self-serving, arrogant and exhausting.
I know he’s powerful and cool, and I have to admit that I love hearing The Rock belt out “You’re Welcome,” but I never connected with the movie because of the personality of Maui. And when I heard that some in the Pacific Islands found his rotund design offensive – with one person of Tongan descent calling him “half pig, half hippo” – it seemed this portrayal of Maui perpetuated a stereotype that Pacific Islanders are obese. Not cool.
It seems this version of Maui ultimately wins the hearts and minds of viewers for the most part, but for me, I found him troubling and troublesome and thus he lands on my bottom five list at number 5.
4.) Ghostbusters II (1989) – Vigo the Carpathian
In considering this list, I almost put down Gozer from Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters Afterlife because, let’s be real: while the movies are rather good, Gozer as a God is weak sauce. Choose the form of your destoyer? Doesn’t that pretty much just set you up for defeat? Nothing good was ever going to come from being a hundred foot marshmallow man.
But even weaker – and dumber – was the “God” in Ghostbusters II, Vigo the Carpathian. And while some may come at me with “Well, he’s not a real ‘God,'” I’ll have to remind you that his chief emissary and baby-knapper Janosz Poha, played wonderfully by Peter McNichol, is quoted as telling Sigourney Weaver’s Dana at one point: “The are many perks to being the mother of a living God” after it’s revealed the spirit of Vigo has chosen her baby, Oscar, to be the vessel of his rebirth. Also, don’t forget, Vigo clearly was never just a man as he was “poisoned, stabbed, shot, hung, stretched, disembowled, drawn and quartered.” That’s some damage.
But was he, y’know, a good God? No. With no disrespect Wilhelm von Homburg who portrayed Vigo onscreen or the magnificent Max Von Sydow who leant his voice to Vigo… he was a super lame God. He was silly looking, with his Fabio locks, never-ending fivehead and ridiculous shoulder-pads that even Nancy Reagan would have called gauche. And the best he could do was cover an art museum with mood slime? Seriously?
I think Dr. Peter Venkman best sums up why in his final show-down with the diety. (Play clip – “Not so fast, Vigo. Hey, Vigo, yeah, you, the bimbo with the baby. Didn’t you know the big-shoulder look is out? You know, I have met some dumb blondes in my life, but you take the taco, pal. Only a Carpathian, will come back to life now and choose New York. Tasty pick, bonehead. If you had brain one in that “huge” melon on top of your neck, you’d be livin’ the sweet life, out in southern California’s beautiful San Fernando valley.”)
Can’t deny that Mr. Venkman was right, and when Vigo is done-in by a horrifically drunken New York City version of Auld Lang Syne, I feel like Vigo – and the writers of Ghostbusters II – really did take the taco.
3.) Clash of the Titans (1981) – Poseidon
On film, I cannot think of a worse portrayal of a God than in the sword and sandals epic “Clash of the Titans.” I mean, while it’s true that the Greek Gods were a reflection of the psychology of we humans and that they were subject to the same failures and foibles as we are, they were still mighty, powerful and threatening. And among them, Poseidon was God of arguably the most powerful force on the planet: the sea!
And yet… in all of Clash of the Titans, all you see of the great God Poseidon, who was also god of Earthquakes, storms and horses – not sure how that last one got in there; All you get to see of him is him more or less just lifting the giant gate and “releasing the Kraken.” Essentially, this vengeful, vindictive, greedy and ultra-formidable God was reduced to the same level as the dude who kept the Rancor monster in Jabba the Hutt’s palace.
And that dude at least got to cry when the Rancor was killed. All we see of Poseidon is him looking up in awe as the Kraken swims above him offscreen. Ooooh ahhhhhh. The mighty stop-motion Kraken! And then… done.
Sure a few of the Gods get short-shrift in Clash of the Titans – I mean they all play second fiddle to Harry Hamlin, which is pretty insulting – but by God, poor Poseidon. He gets to do almost nothing but look dumb. I feel bad for veteran actor Jack Gwillim. A Shakespearean actor who starred in many a production for stage and screen, to just DUH gape at something offscreen while pretending to be God of the Sea… it’s the kind of thing you go home and eat the macaroni and cheese right out of the pan after doing.
2.) The Pyramid (2014) – Anubis
A pretty terrible film, The Pyramid couldn’t decide if it was a found-footage movie, a mockumentary or just a very shakily-shot horror flick. It’s produced by New French Extremity auteur Alexandre Aha and was directed by his frequent writing collaborator Gregory Levasseur, who was screenwriter on P2, Mirrors and the remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and Maniac. Not a great pedigree, but what’s really shameful about The Pyramid is it’s awful treatment of the God Anubis.
Anubis is the Egyptian God of Death and keeper of the gates to the underworld. He’s most often represented as a man with a canine head, and he’s pretty much the one-stop shop for all afterlife business: embalming, mummification, guidance of souls to underworld, tombs, cemeteries, etc.
In The Pyramid, the central revelation is that the archaeological dig at the center of plot uncovers a buried pyramid that houses the tomb of Anubis. I’m not blowing anything here, because there’s zero in the way of mystery or suspense for anyone that has even the most passing knowledge of any mummy movie ever: stay the Hell out of any Egyptian tomb.
So basically what we end up with is a bunch of annoying archaeologists and adventurers getting picked off first by booby traps and then by the God of Death himself. Yup, this is sentimentally a slasher movie with a dog-headed God as the villain. They try to work in Anubis’s role as the weigher of hearts – The Egyptian Book of the Dead explains he weighs the hearts/souls of the dead versus the weight of the truth and, if a heart is too heavy, he feeds it to the Goddess Ammit, which is a weird mix of a lion, alligator and hippopotamus known as the devourer of the dead. But that whole second diety proved too much for the writers or special effects people, so Anubis is reduced to chomping on the hearts himself.
But as bad as he’s poorly rendered in the script- and it’s BAD – he gets killed by mutant cats!- Anubis is brought to life with horrifically bad CGI that makes you beg for more booby traps and less terrible acting with tennis balls. The CGI work feels early 90’s at best, and it feels insulting to treat any God this poorly. Total blasphemy – never bother to check this one out.
Begotten (1989) – Untitled suicidal God
I don’t know what to make of Begotten, the directorial debut of filmmaker E. Elias Merhige. It’s it an art film? An experimental film? A horror film? A no-budget-shock-gore-fest? A meditation on existence? An endurance test? I think it’s all of the above, but with its vile and indelible imagery of a God disembowling Himself with a razor for the first several minutes of the movie, this thing lands firmly on my list as #1 bttom God. A God Killing Himself? Even if it’s to give birth to mother Earth, as is presumably the case here, it’s a rather chaotic bit of grandiose self-destruction that’s interestingly parallel to the death of Christ, who is also considered God and the Holy Spirit himself and who gives birth, I guess, to forgiveness.
That’s some big thoughts for our little podcast, so I’m just going to say that Begotten is a sloppy but visually compelling student film that was cobbled together by some New York artschool types and gained attention from the writer, filmmaker, activist Susan Sontag who called it “a metaphysical splatter film” and “one of the 10 most important films of modern times.”
Sontag liked to champion some questionable stuff when it came to film criticism and this is a prime example. Where she seems symbolism, I see laziness and grotesquerie.
Staff Pick – Tenet (2020) – Christopher Nolan
Nolan does Bond. Big noisy concept movies, which is his bread and butter, but no matter how non-sensical it gets, and oh does it get non-sensical – it manages to get legs out of an awesome cast. John David Washington makes an awesome African-American James Bond type. He’s at once tough as nails, confident and vulnerable. Robert Pattinson is super charming and rougueish, making me wish he could tackle Bond and make it funny. Elizabeth Debicki does thoughtful, sensitive work providing the movie with a much-needed heart and Kenneth Branagh, as a mean Russian arms dealer is something to behold, icy and simmering at the same time. The plot is insane, dealing with weaponry that operates in “inverted time” and the end-of-the-world dangers it poses. But it’s icing on a cake full of visual splendor.