Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Legend (1985)

Welcome back, midnight viewers. Do Father Malone's weekly round up. I'm Father Malone, and sitting beside me in a gown made of shadows is miss Ripley. Jean. I know you want the unicorns.

You would not stop when they were on screen. I get it, They're beautiful. How's everyone's a week? So odd? To find me here again with nothing really new?

I felt like covering. I'll get to twenty eight years years later in due time. In the meantime, I've been wanting to cover today's topic for a while now. But first, from around dollar two, quiet and the comments of your podcasting platforms, your apples, your Spotify's. Hit those episodes with some verbiage, if you would, I'll read them here and it'll get the show out there further, which will make me money so I can run out and buy DVDs to do this show.

No comments from the platforms this week, but I did receive a letter. Not an actual letter, don't be absurd. We live in a dystopian nightmare. No an email from Bill Shannon. He wrote in to say this.

Just want to drop a line and tell you that I discovered midnight viewing recently. When you did a collaboration with the Projection Booth and I can't stop listening. I have a one hour commute to and from work every day, and Midnight Viewing has been one of my favorite companions since then. Thanks for the hours of entertainment. Keep them coming.

My regards to Ripley Jean love your parasocial friends, and Bill. I love you too. Bill, beyond appreciated that you're letting me along during the daily commute. Truly one of the most hated of all activities, particularly in a snowy climate, those can be a grind, and I know full well then I get super particular about who I let in my brain during those johnts. So truly, thank you, Bill, and it's cool that you're a convert from the Projection Booth.

Obviously, Mike White is a co host round here, and he's pretty beloved and in fact came through for me at the last second and made this episode possible. So keep listening to the Projection Booth and Midnight Viewing and Ripley, g you're so proud to get a shout out, all right, but that doesn't explain why you're holding my lawgiver. Put that pistol down. Oh really hit it, hp K, Thank you, HP David Letterman reference. I'm always recommending the visual and audio masterpieces of film, and sometimes just the audio of something, and sometimes just the visual.

But what of the written word? It all starts with the word. Oh my god, every fucking Oscar ceremony. But seriously, are you reading start now. I've got recommendations, and some of them are really easy to get through, like Judge Dread.

Baby. There's always talk of another Judge Dread adaptation. They keep proposing a Megacity one series, which would be cool if they were actually making a series based on the entirety of the old two thousand a d magazines, Strontium, Dog, Black Max, Halo Jones. There's a lot to draw from, which sent me scurrying back to my library to dig up my old runs of Judge Dread. The progs.

They're not volumes with Dread, they're progs. Specifically, I went back and read the Dead World saga that's from the nineties when everything was extreme. I'm actually shocked they haven't adapted these already. I'm sure you've all seen Judge Death basically the Mouth of Saarn, but running around in the future and judging everyone he encounters. The crime is life, the judgment is death.

Great visuals by the King Joke artist Brian boland I like his long eared Batman almost as much as Bernie Wrightson's. His vision of a judge from the Depths of Hell is a beute, complete creepy potential. But I gotta say, revisiting the stories not that great. Judge. Dread, despite what we've seen in those first two films, isn't really bound to make a city one and I'm not talking about the Cursed Earth here.

Interstellar travel happens frequently in the Progus. Some of my favorite Dread stories involve a manhunt across the cosmos in which one judge is obsessed with the fact that Dredd didn't like him very much. It was such a weird touch in the middle of all the space opera shenanigans because of the wild and wooly nature of just where these stories can go. Interdimensional beings forcing their way into our world isn't far fetched, but somehow it just feels off. The so called dark Judges Judge Fear, Judge Fire, Judge Death, and Judge mortis so death that's death again.

Do you think it's weird in movies where they've named the mythological creature its own name. This is my dragon, Draco, Your dragon is named dragon Dragon, the Dragon. This is my cat, cat, my pug Pug. Anyway, other than the first run of Judge Death and the horrible solution to stopping him, it's really terrible, and I mean that in the best way possible. I did not enjoy my time though overall with the Judges.

Do you have any two thousand and eighty titles I should be focusing on. I have literally just gotten the entire run of the series, So point me at a direction midnight viewers, Father Malone seven to one at a gmail dot com. It's in the show notes. I just started Indigo Prime. That's a series from nineteen ninety and it's pretty good so far.

What other books have I been devouring? Well, mister know It All The Tarnished Wisdom of a filth Elder by John Waters, You're gonna see a pattern of comic books and entertainment memoirs with me. Water's latest gives us perspective on everything he's done since he became respectable with Hairspray. It's always a treat spending any time with mister Waterers, even if we've heard a few of these tales before. Oh.

In other John Waters news, they just released the John Wanders Screenplay Collection, which is worth a look if you haven't read any of his work. And it's always interesting to see a writer director's script versus a screenwriter. Only those tend to be the most rewarding or most frustrating. As a read, Anne Wanders doesn't disappoint. But if you're going to go ahead and purchase this title, don't get the book, get the audio book, because then you get John Waterers reading all the stage direction and performing every character.

So far, I'm only through Pink Flamingo's, but Jesus Christ, what a good time. He does, such a fucking good job that at a certain point he stops reading the character names before delivering the dialogue and you will be able to differentiate. One Dumb Guy is the title of the kids in the Hall biography. That's why Paul Myers, and it's a fairly exhaustive look at the comedy troupe from each of their separate childhoods to their eventual battles over brain candy, and then eventual reunion for the mini series Death Takes a Holiday. I think it was published before the television series return.

I learned a ton in this, particularly how involved they were in Saturday and Live in one form or another since Lauren took it back in nineteen eighty five, and how they all basically became pretentious assholes at one time or another, except for Bruce McCullough, he was an asshole from day one. Excellent book, and the longer you read it, the more you'll hear that big twang in gretch. Guitar. Books I'm still in the thick of right now are entirely Star Trek in nature. I'm about halfway through Nicholas Meyer's autobiography, The View from the Bridge, Memories of Star Trek and a Life in Hollywood.

Meyers is, of course the writer director of Wrath of Khan, writer of Voyage Home, and writer director of Undiscovered Country. It's fascinating, particularly the path that led him to Trek. His film Time after Time is magnificent, so it's a little jarring to hear him speak so dismissively about it. Also jarring is the fact that I don't think I like Nicholas Meyer quite as much as I used to. He comes off as particularly arrogant, which anyone would be when it comes to talking Trek.

I mean, the man saved the series multiple times. But the level of why can't they see my genius is baked into myers from the time he was a kid. He even addresses it at one point, people mistake my passion for arrogance. No, Nick, they are not mistaken. The other Trek book, hey, an actual fiction book with no pictures.

I'm currently reading Prey, which is book one of Hell's Heart by John Jackson Miller. It's a story about the House of Krug. That's right. This is what Krug was up to back in the Search for Spock days. He was building an armada of birds of prey called the Phantom Wing.

And this is what happens after his death, and it settles into the next generation era where Krug's legacy is now Picard's problem. It's pretty good so far, a little over reliance on already established Klingon phrases. If everyone is speaking Klingon, then why are they saying an odd phrase here and there in Klingon. It doesn't make sense, but I'm digging it so far. Not thrilled to be suckered into a book one situation.

But what are you gonna do? It's Starfleet any other nerd shit. It's all nerd shit. Nice. Well, you're not wrong, Ridley.

It's a nifty trick to put out a movie that ends up being beloved and then years later offer a different, more faithful to the original vision version that ends up being even more adored. But Ridley Scott managed that twice. While the cult of a legend was never as strong or vocal as the one for Blade Runner, I definitely found myself with a special place in my heart for the lesser scene flick. For one thing, While there has never been an actual shortage of fantasy film, the genre as a whole just never managed to break through with the same pervasive appeal as sci fi or horror. You need a Star Wars or a Halloween for that.

Fantasy never had a banner to rally around. So when Ridley Scott, director of both Alien and Blade Runner, both carrying on the lived in world tradition of George Lucas and Douglas Trumbull, set his sights on fantasy, well, let's just say it seemed like we were going to get a definitive statement that would open up the floodgates to others. Jean Affair like a good forecast that was half right. Legend didn't kick down any doors financially or culturally, but god damn it, it was a pretty definitive depiction of maybe not the fantasy genre in general, but fairy tales pretty succinctly. There is a balance to the universe.

The struggle to maintain that balance is the stuff of Legends. For there can be no good without evil, no love without hate, life needs death, Innocence creeds last. There can be no heaven without hell, no light quill out. Meeting ah darkness. I saw Legend on my twelfth birthday.

I sat three rows from the front so I could be totally immersed in the film. Having previously seen Blade Runner a drive in, I knew this was the right move, and I loved it. If we weren't getting a serious Lord of the Rings anytime soon, then this would do not that I think we had to settle. Not overall. Half of Legend is perfect, the dark half, the goblins and the Nightmare world into that evil tree, and of course Tim Curry towering quite literally over the entire glittery, smoky affair, and not just the visuals.

The anachronistic soundtrack, synthesizers and electrical instruments over shots of cherry blossom pedals raining overfallen unicorns was unusual, though not unwelcome. By this point, I had definitely seen Risky Business late at night on cable television, and while my friends kept talking about the sex scene on the train, I kept thinking, yeah, but the music that was playing during it. That music made me stay up on future evenings to catch the film's opening credits, where I was delighted that where ordinarily you'd see a name like John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith instead was the name Tangerine dream I don't think I've ever pondered its meaning. How can you when something is so painfully appropriate.

By the time I saw Legend, I had already pilfered the vinyl for Tangerine Dreams soundtracks for the Keep Wavelength and Firestarter from my cool older cousin's collection, and I had cajoled the purchase of the Risky Business soundtrack from my mom at a flea market. So maybe I was primed to enjoy the work that this little German electronic music collective was laying down. It certainly made me out to the local Strawberries Records, where are my Boston people at and pick up the vinyl with my birthday cash? And what a fucking soundtrack. It had that gorgeous shout of darkness on the front, and in addition to all the soundscapes and electronic flutes by Tangerine Dream, it also had a Brian Ferry tune that turns out to be an outtake from Roxy Music's Avalon session with David Gilmour from Pink Floyd on guitar, and that song was tribal and electronic enough to pair nicely with Tangerine Dream and their overall vision for the movie, a vision they had about three fucking weeks to conjure up.

It's hard to pinpoint a moment in time when you become disillusioned or disenfranchised with a particular filmmaker. It's usually after a distasteful film, or at least one that just feels okay, simply not as engaged as previous entries. And sometimes it's some horrendous act on their part. In the real world, you find out they're terrible to waiters, or they enjoy beating up women, and sometimes that filmmaker reveals something about the creative process and their decisions made in particular circumstances that make you think, well, fuck that guy. I don't think I could tell you the exact day that this occurred to me when it comes to Ridley Scott, but I know it was in two thousand and two.

That's when the DVD was released, presenting legend the Director's cut, that's right. Legend was rather legendarily a sorry excuse for what previously had been half an hour trimmed away, a fantasy appropriate orchestral score by Jerry Goldsmith tossed out like garbage, a tacky opening crawl hung at the beginning, and an almost immediate day glow reveal of our villain. I first learned of the original mythical director's kind of legend around nineteen ninety at a Star Trek convention in Boston. I was friendly with a soundtrack dealer. He had mailed me my first copy of the Creepshow soundtrack back in the day, but it came warped, which made the Camptown Race his portion of something to Tide You Over play like a TV show's version of an Acid Trip.

He replaced it, and we were friendly at shows. And behind him occupying a spot of prestige was an LP with artwork that was clearly for the movie legend, but I had never seen it. Oh, that's a Jerry Goldsmith's score. The what now? Then he played me the last track, the over the credits track with the voisterous chorus of fantasy voices, and it couldn't comprehend how they had changed directions so radically, What else was different, and why would they change in the first place.

How fucking stupid. I'd now like to present to you, sir Ridley Scott, explaining the reasoning behind a total tear down and re edit of his attempt to put a definitive stamp on the fantasy genre in general and fairy tales as a whole. When we previewed, I got a couple of sniggerers in the audience and I could smell pot right now. If that happened to me again, I would actually switch lights up and see you get out. Otherwise there's no screening right because I think they can disintegrate the screening, And we screened in the then the DGA, I think it was, and somebody obviously come in and think because it's I've done some pretty weird movies.

So they're come in and loaded up with it, and they started to those part and a bit of some comments happening, and I sat through it really angry, and I think it didn't help us. But anyway, it didn't help me because I got totally paranoid and started to say, right, the film's too long and start to hack away at the movie, and the gentleman at Universal literally trying to physically stop me. As opposed to him saying, well, we gotta cut the movie, it was me saying we gotta cut the movie. If I replicated how long I sat staring with my jaw dropped after watching that in the documentary that came with the All New Legend of Directors Cut DVD, then you would have changed to another show by now, because it'd still be dead air.

I don't care one fuck for what one's participation in or viewpoint on a vice might be. You want to day drink and listen to pantsy client and go for it a little speed at the seashore, as long as you're kind to the sea folk, have fun. You want to smoke a bowl the size of a walk through a homemade bong shape to resemble a lunar lander. I'm with you, brother, Hey, what's the body part most often mentioned by stoners here? And if none of those things are your bag, I'm cool with that too.

And I'm cool with you having a low opinion of those who do indulge. I don't expect anyone to understand anything I do, but to have your artistic concentration through by a couple of giggling stoners during a test screening, to the point where you gut your film and then slap a new score on it, and then, even decades later, make it clear that even though his reaction was extreme, it wasn't wrong. How's that possible He's bragging about tossing out potsmokers of future screenings because they poison the audience. I've been annoyed by stoners at a movie, but they've never convinced me of the quality of what's on screen. That's not the way it works.

Disruptive behavior is disruptive. If some couple kept talking during the screening, would he have kept an eagle eye out for future young lovers and deny them entrants as well. It's so fucking arbitrary and so fucking disappointing. Before that moment, I could convince myself that it was another and a long line of studio meddling, recent studio meddling, and at the same studio. Just a few years before Legend, Terry Gilliam was toting stolen prints of Brazil around Los Angeles to get it screened for critics in the hopes that they'd support his cut and not the one that Universal was trying to push.

And after Scott himself had been famously saddled with the bullshit narration and editorial cuts on Blade Runner imposed on him by the studio, it was a pretty well known phenomenon, so surely that was the case with the Legend. Turns out it wouldn't be the first time the movie had undergone a radical transformation. After Alien, but before photography had begun on Blade Runner, Scott had set his sights on a fantasy epic. He actually got it in his head around the time of the Duelist, but two's counting, and because he wasn't interested in tailoring his film to fit an existing, potentially restricting story, he figured he'd go all original, with the only directives that it was a genuine fairy tale, The villain be named Darkness, and it featured the swiftest steed alive.

Apparently that was a phrase he used often to describe the unicorns. To that end, he hired novelist William Heartzberg, who by then had written the terrific supernatural detective tale Fallen Angel, which would get its own adaptation two years after Legend as Angel Heart with Mickey Rourke and Lisa Bonnet. Swartzberg had already been dabbling in fairy tales and tack the screenplay, giving the epic that Scott had asked for a little too epic, with the budget going stratospheric, but also with characters speaking in rhyming couplets, a little of which still remains in the final film anytime Blix leaves, a scene that that Goblin has to go out like a perverted Shakespearean character, and more importantly, a second act that found Princess Lily transformed into a humanoid cat creature that fully embraces Lord Darkness and falls in love, a scene that reportedly caused a studio executive to declare, you can't have the villain fuck the Princess.

Fifteen drafts later and we get the film we have now now, not then? Obviously, how could we know these characters had deeper relationships than the ones we were presented. Also, I'd like to point out that in any version of this movie, Darkness definitely fucks the Princess. They may not show it, but you know it happened. Lily settles quite comfortably into that shadow gown and luxuriates in the ultimate Goth queen persona, if at least for a little while any of us would particularly.

And the magnificence that is Darkness, that's the mighty super nova of sexual devians and allure that is Tim Curry at the center. And has there ever been a more attractive devil, a more fully realized demon. It was shockingly great at the time and remains so. And Curry manages to make a complex, fascinating fellow. Beneath the tons of latex.

You see Darkness, frightening and imperious, but just as strikingly, you see him wounded and vulnerable, And both versions feature some of the most stunning visuals committed to celluloid. This was a fantasy world built whole cloth that never felt scent bound, and yet was entirely filmed on sound stages. That wouldn't be shocking when it comes to all the interiors. Scott was already a scent decoration production design maestro, with those excellent Nostromo corridors and Elden Terrell's beautiful office. But a good half of this movie takes place outside and in daylight.

And I bought it then and I buy it now. That's definitely the sun shining. Those are natural landscapes, and all that particulate matter in the air is definitely good to inhale. No, that's not true. Lots of people got respiratory problems because the sound stages were so thick with airborne bullshit, But goddamn it's effective.

I even like young Tom Cruise in it. I know a lot of people found him jarring, probably still do. I saw it for what it was. Jack O Green is a character older than Fables. He is a simple woodland creature.

All he needs to be is beautiful and capable, check and check. And Tom Cruise really goes for it as Tom Cruise is wont to do. You know who never gets mentioned in relation to this flick, Meg Mucklebones. Everyone's jizzing over Tim Curry's darkness, But another completely amazing prosthetic character appears halfway through as Jack's first test as a newly forged warrior. Just like Jack, is a character as old as time.

Meg is based on Jenny Green Teeth, a hag who haunts swamps and feeds on unwary travelers, and in this film she is just as grotesque as they could possibly make her, with Robert Piccardo, the doctor from Star Trek, the alien in Explorers, making her at turns menacing and muling, vain and kind of sexy. I gotta admit the movie didn't end up as pure fairy tale as intended, but Rob Botein, the mad genius behind the Thing and the Howling, never lost sight of that initial goal, and everything he delivers in this movie cements them as platonic ideals of fantasy archetypes. Take my favorite character I mentioned him already blicks the most loathsome of all darkness as Goblins whose heart is black and filled with hatred, played my Tony Award nominated actress Alice Playton.

You might remember Miss Clayton midnight Viewers. In another bit of entertainment we covered earlier on this show. That's the Anthologies Attack episode about heavy Metal. Go check that one out in heavy Metal during the So Beautiful and So Dangerous segment, that's the one where the aliens do a bunch of space cocaine. I know it's plutonium, Nyborg, but space cocaine is fun to say cosmic cocaine.

Oh, that's even better. The Earth girl that inadvertently gets kidnapped and ends up the robot that is Alice Playton Blis is so fucking awesome looking, and she gives him so many layers, cruel and craven and triumphant, and Blix acts like the de facto narrator or through line. It's his journey to darkness that starts the film, and his hunt for the unicorn that brings us to Lily and Jack, and then he continues to be a player throughout. It ain't darkness sleptin' through those petals and lightning storms to get some unicorn horns. Nope, that's Blick's.

I won't discourage anyone from watching the theatrical cut of Legend. Try finding it nowadays for a start, but I also wouldn't recommend it out of hand. Once you see the original vision, longer and fuller and scored with attention to the film's actual intention, there's no question which version to watch. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss being questioned if my love was strong enough as the credits rolled, And I do think that the moment that the shadow dress claims Princess Lily or vice versa in the theatrical cut is superior. It folds down over her, and then there's a match cut where the dress swings back around and now it's Lily.

The director's cut, it's all close up and you get a vague bit of confusion, and then she is that shadow. But it's just so much better originally. The rest of the scene, I will point out, though, is in fact way better in the director's cut. Lily is as frightened as she is tempted in this version, and the music is a waltz, big and bold and playful and ultimately twisted. For a movie about light and darkness, the soundtracks really are night and Day.

I'd be curious if you played both for someone who'd never heard of Legend. What they thought the film was that both of these scores had been composed for a space Western Gladiators on the Moon. So anyway, fuck Ridley Scott. Fucked those Prometheus movies and Napoleon and those awful biographical dramas. I watched all of them completely stoned, and they were all fucking terrible.

But much love to Legend, much love to its binary world of good and evil. It seemed corny when it was originally released, and that was what Ridley was actually scared of, not that the movie didn't work, that it wasn't modern enough, that the score was too old fashioned. He was afraid he'd gone from visionary to cornball in one move and was looking for any excuse to turn the ship fully around. It was the stoners. Get fucked, old man.

But don't you get fucked midnight viewers unless that's what your plans entail, in which case, get fucked mid night viewers. Later this week, it's a new Star Trek Fest with Star Trek six, The Undiscovered Country, the beloved final voyage of the original crew of the Starship Enterprise. Boy, you nerds are turning up for Star Trek Fest and HP and I thank you deeply. It is so popular, in fact, that we're gonna be diving into Trek Fest away missions where we can focus on some Star Trek effluvia that doesn't involve a thirty five millimeter camera. You know we're gonna cover the Harlan Ellison deblicle that is the City on the Edge of Forever.

But there's books that need highlighting and animated episodes and on and on and into the neutral zone. So hit us up and let us know if you have a fucking desperate need to hear two idiots talk about your favorite Star Trek thing. Email in the show notes for Ripley, Gene and me. Try to enjoy the daylight. Is just way of your heart and strange than fans.

On you. From the start, it had been pleased me the monel died for There's nowhere to do if you're not strong, though,