From Crap to Gold: the Novelization of Cruel Jaws

Few people associate novelizations with fine literature, and rightly so. For the most part, novelizations are a paycheck for struggling authors. The effort is usually phoned in, with the author doing little more than putting the screenplay in past tense and calling it a day. But in rare cases, an author will take things a step further. A prime example of this is Alan Dean Foster’s excellent novelization of John Carpenter’s debut film, Dark Star. In that case, Foster delved deep into the minds of the characters to present an intriguing psychological study of people in isolation. Another good example is Brad Carter’s fantastic work on the novelization of Cruel Jaws, from Encyclopocalypse Publications.

For the uninitiated, Cruel Jaws is a 1995 sharksploitation movie by Italian filmmaker Bruno Mattei, who brought us such gems as Night of the Zombies (1980) and Robowar (1988). Following on the heels of previous Jaws knock-offs like The Last Shark (1981) and Deep Blood (1989), Mattei serves up a collection of scenes harvested from multiple Jaws films, such as an exploding boat and the shark eating a pair of divers (Jaws 2), a red herring tiger shark (the original Jaws), and a couple making out in the water and getting interrupted by their friends (Jaws 3-D). It stars a cast of unknowns, including a Hulk Hogan lookalike, who sleepwalk through 96 minutes of thinly written and statically directed mush that’s a real slog to get through. Aside from stock footage, it lifts all its shark footage from either the Jaws films, The Last Shark, or Deep Blood. To call it bad is an insult to bad films. And yet, perhaps due to Mattei’s sheer audacity, it has become something of a curiosity and has therefore garnered a cult following.

The novelization first dropped in 2020 as part of an effort by Severin Films to capitalize on their library of catalog titles. In 2024, Severin partnered with Encyclopocalypse to release a new edition. For a property like this, the expectation would have been the standard fast and dirty novelization, a tie-in product whose sole purpose would have been to make some easy cash and boost awareness of an existing property. But Carter was evidently not content to leave it at that, and instead poured everything he had into making the novelization the most enjoyable experience he could offer his readers. Did he succeed? In a word, yes. In spades.

To say that Cruel Jaws the novelization is better than the movie would be a contender for understatement of the year. Carter breathes such energy and passion into every page, it’s impossible not to have a good time. The most amazing part is that he did so while hewing closely to the movie’s overall structure. All the story beats are there, as are all the film’s many characters, and even most of the lines of dialogue ripped straight from the Jaws franchise. And yet Carter goes beyond that, infusing everything with a depth and complexity that was lacking in the source material. That’s not to say this book is on par with Moby Dick. The point is that Carter took the existing framework of the movie, which could generously be described as sketchy, and added texture and nuance. He put meat on the bones. And then let a shark chew on it.

The most obvious area where Carter improved things was with the characters. In the film, they’re one-dimensional, lifeless, dull. Bad dialogue is delivered by worse actors. The characters are never properly introduced, so it’s difficult to keep track of who everybody is or how they’re connected to each other. It’s even harder to care. But Carter takes the time to develop each and every one, even the side characters. Billy Morrison, the Hooper stand-in, is trying to kick his cocaine habit. Vanessa is a sex addict. Dag is still haunted by the recent death of his wife. Francis is a functioning alcoholic. More than that, though, the characters evolve over the course of the story. They have arcs and through-lines, even if those through-lines aren’t necessarily what we want for them. And that’s how you create good drama. Since Carter almost slavishly follows the film’s narrative, one might have expected these things to feel forced and nonsensical, but every moment is perfectly organic. The end of every arc in a story should ideally feel at once surprising and inevitable. That Carter could come anywhere close to achieving that, given the material he was working with, borders on miraculous.

There are times, though, where Carter detours into original material, and it’s always for the better. A trio of mafiosos introduced late in the movie almost as an afterthought show up earlier in the book. That gives Carter time to develop them properly, along with their relationship to Sam Lewis, the primary antagonist and stand-in for Larry Vaughan. It’s pulled right from the pages of Peter Benchley’s original Jaws novel, with the tension between the gangsters and Lewis/Vaughan stemming from the shark’s impact on their bottom line. Yet Carter manages to make it feel fresh, with the threat seeming more immediate. In the movie, the thugs are unimpressive and bland, but Carter’s version feels like The Sopranos. When they finally meet the monster shark, the movie goes for cheap laughs, but Carter plays it straight, upping the horror, going just over-the-top enough to get a giggle, but without overplaying his hand.

Ronnie, Lewis’s son, gets a lot of attention in the book, graduating from nuisance to full-fledged villain. Carter introduces an element of incest, with Ronnie lusting after his sister, Gloria. It’s creepy and disturbing, and it pairs nicely with his bullying behavior. Aided by his groupies, Ronnie commits full-on assault, breaking and entering, and cruelty to animals. He’s a true sociopath, the sort who believes that because of his wealth and status, he can do anything he wants. His father, on the other hand, is far from the sleazy, money-hungry caricature of the film. He still prioritizes money and power, but he’s not as brazenly callous as his cinematic counterpart. The reader gets the sense of a man who has worked hard to get where he is and doesn’t want to jeopardize it. And when the shit hits the fan, it becomes clear just how tenuous it all is. Lewis is only one disaster away from losing everything. It’s possible to sympathize with and even respect him a bit while still disapproving of his actions.

Especially delightful is how Carter handles Dag Sorensen. The movie establishes his backstory with a throwaway line about an accident that cost him his wife and his will to live. But the line is delivered without feeling and is quickly forgotten. Carter makes us feel it, though, taking us back through Dag’s memories as he relives it, making us experience the horror and pain. There’s also a reference to his past as a whaler in the North Sea, but the movie doesn’t do anything with it. Carter delves into it, though, exploring Dag as a Swedish immigrant and a real badass. The film’s climax has a few shots of Dag firing a shotgun at the shark, but in the book, he goes toe-to-toe with it, firing exploding harpoons in a sequence that’s both tense and delightfully absurd, culminating in Dag leaping onto the shark Gregory Peck style and stabbing it with harpoons.

There are some fun character additions, too. A black deputy who went unnamed in the film gains the name Lamar, along with a backstory about transferring from out-of-state after angering his superior. He gets some great scenes, putting Ronnie in his place and squaring off with a racist gun salesman. There’s also a town nut character, Crazy Old Isaac, somewhat in the same vein as Crazy Ralph from the Friday the 13th films, along with his friend, an Indian guru named Vijay. And there’s Osiris, a small-time drug dealer who fakes a Jamaican accent to impress the locals.

One way in which the novel deviates wildly from the film is the addition of copious amounts of sex. At one point, I joked that if I hadn’t already seen the film, I would’ve thought the book was based on a porno. The added sleaze is not a bad thing, though, instead bringing some sorely needed entertainment value while also strengthening character motivations. Carter uses all the sex to explore themes of jealousy and betrayal, and it all ties together in the end.

And then there’s the shark. In the film, the shark is explicitly stated to be a tiger shark, but all of the shark footage, whether it’s stock footage or lifted from a previous film, clearly depicts a great white. Carter, however, actually describes a tiger shark, with a wedge-shaped head and stripes on its back. Late in the film, there’s a throwaway line about the shark being the product of a military genetic engineering experiment. Carter takes this and runs with it, elevating the shark from a clumsy Bruce clone to a true monstrosity, an almost megalodon-sized nightmare that’s part shark, part machine, and part god-knows-what. It bleeds gloppy blood that comes to life and attacks people. It eats everything in sight regardless of hunger, strategically attacking with military precision. It’s a ridiculous premise, but Carter sells it, and scenes that seemed silly in the movie actually become suspenseful and thrilling in the book. A writer friend of mine once gave me a great piece of advice: if you can’t hide it, plant a flag on it. Carter is clearly familiar with this. By having characters in the story actually observe how fantastical everything is, that gives him license to go with it and bring the reader along for the ride.

Cruel Jaws the novelization may not be the greatest novel ever written, but it’s a masterclass in re-writing. Anyone writing a novel or screenplay that’s been through multiple drafts and still isn’t working would do well to watch Cruel Jaws and then immediately read Brad Carter’s novelization. He takes a structure that was hodgepodge at best and fine-tunes it into something that flows perfectly. Awful dialogue is replaced with good dialogue. Even lines taken verbatim from the movie somehow work, either thanks to altered context or simply not being ruined by bad acting. Scenes that were rushed or awkward in the film are transformed into well-paced and effective storytelling. Unnecessary padding becomes essential character-building. In short, the gulf in quality between the film and the book is as vast as it is amazing. A movie like Cruel Jaws should never have become a novel this good, but it did. Now we have something that can stand alongside, if not Peter Benchley’s original Jaws novel, at least the sequel novelizations by Hank Searls. Carter’s version is good enough that it could even serve as a starting point for a new movie remake. That would be something worth seeing. But even if not, the book stands on its own. It’s a rompin’ good time.

Jason Goes to Hell: Hot Mess or Hidden Gem?

It’s generally agreed that Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday is among the worst of the Friday the 13^thseries, if not the worst. It’s no secret that the genesis of the film was convoluted, with the intellectual property passing from Paramount to New Line and key aspects getting lost in the process. New Line couldn’t use the Friday the 13^thtitle, and fan-favorite Tommy Jarvis couldn’t appear in the film because New Line only had a license to use Jason himself. As often happens in Hollywood, the screenplay went through numerous revisions by multiple writers, and the director was fired late in the production and half the film re-shot. Such things seldom bode well for any movie.

One might ask how a movie that’s part of a series widely regarded even by its fans as little more than enjoyable trash could be any worse than its peers. The easy answer is that it fails to deliver the goods. When we sit down to watch a Friday the 13^th movie, we have certain expectations. Chief among those is that we’ll see a bunch of dipshit teenagers get sliced and diced by a marauding killer. Most of the time, that killer is Jason Voorhees, though there are two notable exceptions: in the original film, it was his mother, Pamela, and in Part V, it’s a grieving paramedic claiming revenge over the death of his son. What the producers of Jason Goes to Hell serve up is something decidedly different (spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen the film).

First-time director Adam Marcus has commented that he wanted to play with audience expectations in the opening of the film by depicting a stereotypical scene familiar from previous entries and then flipping it. A girl goes to a cabin alone, strips down for a shower, and is then pursued by Jason only for a SWAT team to show up and blow Jason to smithereens. It was all a setup, and the girl was the bait. So then Jason’s remains are hauled to a government facility for examination, whereupon the medical examiner is seized by a sudden compulsion to eat Jason’s still beating heart. At that point he’s possessed by the spirit of Jason and goes on a new killing spree, hopping from body to body seemingly at random.

Jason go boom.
Image copyright: New Line Cinema.

There’s a brief sequence in which some teenage campers are hacked up, but that’s the only bit that feels remotely like a traditional Friday the 13^th movie. After that, the film takes some unexpected and at times baffling turns. The first big problem we encounter is that the movie doesn’t seem to know who its protagonist is. Say what you will about the other films in the series, but we always had one person who we could identify as the main character, whether that be Alice in the original film, Ginny in the second, or Tommy Jarvis in later films. Here we’re introduced to a bunch of characters in rapid succession, and it isn’t at all clear who we’re supposed to be paying attention to.

First we meet bounty hunter Creighton Duke, played by Steven Williams, who would go on to play the recurring role of X on The X-Files. He initially wins us over with a callback to Jaws, promising to hunt down Jason and deliver “the mask, the machete, the whole damn thing.” Almost immediately we shift to Diana Kimble, played by Erin Gray of Buck Rogers fame, who then seems like she’s going to be our heroine, and we follow her for several scenes. But then she gets bumped off and we meet her daughter Jessica (Kari Keegan), who seems way too old for Erin Gray to be her mom, and it seems like she’s going to be our focus. The movie then shifts to Steven (John D. LeMay), a character who had been unceremoniously introduced a few scenes before and seemed at best like cannon fodder. We’re a good twenty minutes into the film at this point and we still don’t have a clearly defined protagonist. We follow Steven for a good bit before switching back to Jessica, then we toggle back and forth with both of them sharing the spotlight for the climax.

“I’ve got information for you, Mr. Mulder. But I’ll have to stab you first.”
Image copyright: New Line Cinema.

It might have been possible to pull this off except for the fact that neither character is introduced in a way that allows us to bond with them and form any sort of attachment. None of the characters in the Friday the 13^th series are especially complex, so I’m not expecting Shakespeare here, but in previous films we got a clear impression of who were were dealing with. Alice was an artsy type who cared about children, Chris was processing past trauma and trying to face her demons, Tommy Jarvis was into special makeup effects before becoming obsessed with killing Jason. And so on. But we get no sense of identity or personality from these characters. They’re just there, reacting to things, so there’s no real investment in them. Now it’s true that the Friday the 13^th series is full of such characters. Much of the fun of the series stems from the fact that we don’t really care what happens to anybody, so we can watch Jason hack away with impunity and not feel any guilt. But there’s always at least one character infused with some sympathetic quality who we can root for when it comes time for the final battle, and that’s lacking here.

There’s a baby as a stakes character – though since babies can’t really participate in the action, they tend to act more as MacGuffins than actual characters. Steven and Jessica have a kid together, and it is this child who Jason ultimately wants to possess so that he can be reborn. There’s a bit of business where Steven and Jessica have split up, and Steven wants to make amends, but we’re given no details about the breakup or why we should care whether these two get back together. She’s moved on and is seeing this douchey TV producer who at one point actually wants to use Diana’s body as part of a publicity stunt. I didn’t feel bad when that character died.

“Deader than shit.”
Image copyright: New Line Cinema.

A criticism often leveled at this film is that the plot is confusing and nonsensical. That is very much true. The core premise is a jumbled mess. For whatever reason, Jason’s heart is indestructible, and it can hop from body to body. But for some reason, it needs to find its way to another Voorhees so Jason can be reborn. But why would Jason care about that? If one body is as good as the next, why bother finding his way to a Voorhees so he can get his original body back? What difference does it make? Once he’s in the body of the medical examiner, he should have been good – killing spree can resume. But instead he hops from body to body almost at random. It seems as if he chooses bodies that will allow him to get close to his intended victims, but since when has Jason cared about that sort of thing? His style is to stalk in the shadows and pop out, surprising his victims. Also, with black ooze and blood seeping from every orifice, the shambling, zombie-like possessed bodies are hardly inconspicuous. At one point, he takes the time to shave the mustache off a guy’s face before transferring bodies. Why? So that the body will look more like his own? Who cares, when you’re not planning on staying in that body for very long?

“Braaaaains!”
Image copyright: New Line Cinema.

Creighton Duke acts as Mr. Exposition, providing information on Jason and how to destroy him. But it’s never made clear how he gained his knowledge, or even what his motivations are. There’s a bit at the end where he says to Jason, “Remember me?” hinting at some sort of history between the two, but that’s all we get. Director Adam Marcus later explained that the idea was that Duke’s girlfriend was killed by Jason, so he’s out for revenge and has devoted his life to studying him and learning how to kill him, like some kind of modern Van Helsing. But since that backstory is not revealed in the film, it leaves us with little to go on.

“I know we just met, but please break my fingers.”
Image copyright: New Line Cinema.

At one point, Steven willingly lets Duke break his fingers as payment for information on how to kill Jason. But considering at this point in the story, Duke is some rando that Steven just met in jail, there’s no obvious reason for him to believe that Duke’s information is reliable. It’s also not clear why Duke felt the need to do this. If Duke’s goal is to kill Jason, why not tell the whole world how to do it? Initially, it appears Duke’s only motivation is money: he’s charging $500,000 to Jessica’s TV producer boyfriend for the “service” of ridding the world of Jason. But he later says his motivation isn’t the money. Also, how does breaking some random dude’s fingers compensate for that financial loss. Maybe Duke is testing how far Steven is willing to go for information to ensure he’s sufficiently devoted to the cause. But Duke makes a point of saying that only a Voorhees can kill Jason, so Steven’s not even critical to the success of the plan. With a set of broken fingers, Steven manages to do the cliché prison escape where you grab the guard through the bars, steal his weapon, force him to open the door, then trap the guard in the cell. Surely someone as resourceful as Duke could have done that himself.

Given all the nonsense already mentioned, one might think it impossible to find anything to like about this movie. And yet it’s hard not to observe that the first eight entries in the series are essentially interchangeable, while this one dares to do something different. It was a ballsy move to eliminate the classic version of Jason from the proceedings. While the body-hopping plot might be pretty nonsensical, it does at least give us an interesting change of pace, and there is a body horror element that makes this movie unique in the series. Jason’s heart comes to life, oozing out of each body’s mouth like some kind of alien parasite, worming its way into the mouth of the next victim. Eventually it starts to look like the chestburster from Alien, becoming a full-fledged monster. At one point, after a transfer, we see the former body grotesquely dissolve in what is probably the film’s most memorable horror set piece. It becomes a different sort of horror movie than any of the others, largely avoiding the typical slasher format that had fallen out of vogue when this movie went into production.

Director Adam Marcus has a bit of fun with the mythology, which some might view as controversial. Venturing into the Voorhees family home, Steven discovers the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis and Kandarian dagger from the Evil Dead series, hinting at a connection between the two franchises. Because New Line did not own the rights to the Evil Dead series, Marcus could not make the connection explicit, but he has said the idea was that Pamela Voorhees tried to resurrect Jason using the Necronomicon, and the result was a body possessed by a Kandarian demon. This, to him, explains why Jason is unkillable. In the movie, it is only a Voorhees who can kill Jason by stabbing him in the heart with the Kandarian dagger.

“Kanda…”
Image copyright: New Line Cinema.

This is a fun little homage, but it doesn’t actually work in the context of either series. In earlier films, Jason keeps his mother’s decapitated head, along with her sweater, in a candle-lit shrine. Hardly the sort of thing that the Deadites from Evil Dead are known to do. Also, when possessed by a Kandarian demon, a person’s eyes turn white. And it is established in the Evil Dead series that a Deadite can only be dispatched by bodily dismemberment, not getting stabbed by the dagger. So none of this really works. Also, since Marcus could not overtly include any of this, the appearance of the Evil Dead props serves mostly as an inside joke, and we never get a full explanation as to what’s really going on. Fans of the Evil Dead series will pick up on the allusion and can make their own connections, but there are still a lot of gaps to fill in, and someone who isn’t familiar with Evil Dead will be completely lost.

So is there anything to enjoy about this movie? Well… yes. It lacks the humor and sense of fun that characterizes the rest of the series, and almost across the board doesn’t really feel like a Friday the 13^th movie. But in taking itself more seriously, it comes across as more of a genuine horror film than any of the others. The premise is unusual, though I understand there are some similarities to The Hidden, which I haven’t seen. The lighting is murky, the sound is bad, and most of the acting is sub-par. Harry Manfredini, who composed the music to the first five Friday movies, and whose memorable ki-ki-ki-ha-ha-ha continued to appear in subsequent films, delivers a lackluster synthesizer score. Lastly, with Adam Marcus removed from the project, original Friday director Sean Cunningham took over, only to deliver a static slog of a movie that feels more like a direct-to-video cash grab than a theatrical release. And yet… there’s a certain nostalgic charm that saves it from being a total disaster.

There’s enough gore, even in the watered-down R-rated cut, to keep things interesting, and while it’s not exactly fast-paced, things move along quickly enough that it never gets completely boring. That may not sound like much of an endorsement, but I can’t help but respect the filmmakers for trying something different in a series that was over a decade old and had become pretty formulaic. It’s not the movie they wanted to make. Sean Cunningham had been trying to get Freddy vs. Jason off the ground since 1987, and that project would not see the light of day until 2003, though the end of Jason Goes to Hell hints at its impending release. But at least Cunningham was able to exert some measure of creative control over a series that had gotten away from him, and he pushed things in a direction that makes this one stand out from the crowd – in a way that’s both good and bad. I won’t challenge anyone who doesn’t care for this movie. It’s certainly not my favorite. However, there’s just enough going on here that it’s not a total disaster.

The ending teases *Freddy vs. Jason*, but it would be another decade before we got that far superior film.
Image copyright: New Line Cinema.

So what’s the final verdict? If you’re looking for something in keeping with the rest of the Friday the 13^th series, this one’s not for you. It’s not exactly The Exorcist or Alien. No one is ever going to call this one of the all-time great horror films. But if you’re in the right frame of mind, you might discover something that’s actually enjoyable.

Holy Cartoons, Batman! Adam West in Animation

I finally watched Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders. In case you weren’t aware, that’s a 2016 animated film that reunites Adam West, Burt Ward, and Julie Newmar in their iconic roles from the 60s TV series.

I can say without reservation that I had an absolute blast. I had read online that it leaned a little too heavily into nostalgia, so I was worried that there would be a lot of pandering without much plot, but this was not the case. I was also worried that it would lean too heavily into crude modern humor and display disrespect for the original series, but this also was not the case. Across the board, the production team displayed great reverence for the original material. It was a very funny movie, but the humor was in keeping with that of the original series. In every way, it felt like a direct continuation — to the point that I’m prepared to consider it a canonical part of the original series.

West, Ward, and Newmar were in proper form throughout. I was wondering if the passage of time would prevent them from fully getting back into character, but they pulled it off effortlessly. West’s voice had become pretty gravelly at that point in his life, so that made it a bit of an effort to believe that this really was the same Batman, but his enthusiastic performance largely compensated for that. Ward and Newmar’s voices have hardly changed, though, so it was easy to believe that these were the same characters featured in the original series and that no time had passed.

Voice imitators rounded out the rest of the cast. Most of them do a pretty good job. You could easily tell that Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, and Chief O’Hara were voiced by different people, but the performers were convincing enough that I could buy into it. Aunt Harriet was probably more convincing than either of them. The weakest link by far was Penguin, who sounded nothing at all like Burgess Meredith. That said, the voice actor at least played the character properly, punctuating everything with a satisfying “Waugh, waugh, waugh.” Of all the voice imitators, though, Joker and Riddler were far and away the best. It really sounded like they’d resurrected Caesar Romero and Frank Gorshin and brought them in for a recording session. Spot-on perfection.

Perhaps most interesting was the overall style of the film. In every way, they kept to the spirit of the original series, but at the same time they were able to give it a modern vibe. The architecture of Gotham City was not the surreal gothic style we’re used to in modern Batman, but rather of the sort you’d expect to see in the 60s. And yet, it was decidedly not Los Angeles, with taller buildings in a sprawling cityscape, and dark lighting to give it some mood. So while it didn’t quite feel like modern Gotham, it didn’t really feel like the same Gotham we saw in the original series. Sort of a hybrid of the two, I guess. Bottom line, Gotham never really felt like Gotham in the original series. In this movie, it did. But at the same time, it felt like a Gotham Adam West’s Batman could inhabit.

There were other interesting aspects to the film’s visual style. For one thing, Commissioner Gordon finally grew a mustache, and he found his glasses. So they managed to make him actually look like the character from the comics while still coming across as the character from the show. Likewise, Alfred got contacts, I guess, because he wasn’t wearing his Coke-bottle glasses. They drew him like Alan Napier, but sans spectacles. It was a change I didn’t even notice until halfway through the movie. This bears out my assertion that if the show had gotten a fourth season, they could have made these tweaks without damaging continuity.

I especially enjoyed how they handled the Joker. Even though he was drawn to look like Caesar Romero, and the voice actor nailed his imitation, there was something subtly menacing about this take on the character that wasn’t present in the original series. There were hints of the modern, more maniacal Joker in this presentation of the character. He seemed a tad more unhinged, even brazenly boasting about murder at one point. Sure, Caesar Romero did that once or twice, but somehow they sold it better in this case. And it didn’t hurt that during the climax, when things were blowing up and there was utter chaos all about, he was just laughing maniacally through it all, unlike Caesar Romero’s original, who usually got grim-faced when his plans would go south.

But the way they presented Batman himself was the most interesting. They were absolutely drawing Adam West, and he cuts a similar figure. But they tweaked his upper body to be ever-so-slightly more muscular, and the cape draped over his shoulders in a way that was more evocative of modern Batman. In the original series, West often moved with a sort of stiffness that shattered the illusion, but the animators gave this Batman some of the grace and control you’d expect from the real Batman. The fight scenes in the original series had the awkward staging of any 60s show, but these fight scenes were carefully choreographed for greater effectiveness — while still retaining all the Pow-Zap-Whams. And the action scenes were staged with greater intensity and more effectiveness than in the old days. The end result was that it had the energy of a modern movie, but all the spirit and charm of the classic series.

My only complaints were in things that really shouldn’t have been changed. They didn’t bother to render Commissioner Gordon’s office the same way it looked in the original series. Okay, maybe he got a new office. I’ll let that go. But Wayne Manor and the Bat Cave looked completely different, and that I cannot forgive. We still had the bad poles and the red phone and the statue of Shakespeare and the atomic generator, and the general layout was more or less the same, but all of the details were different. That gave it sort of an uncanny valley quality, where it felt the same but wasn’t. At least they didn’t change the Batmobile. They must have known that would be going too far.

They also pulled a Superman III. Part of the plot involved Batman being given a drug that slowly turns him evil. That dominated the middle portion of the film. It’s not a bad dramatic device, and they often did that sort of thing in the series, but given that this was likely the last time West would ever get another crack at playing the character (that turned out not to be the case), I would have preferred to just let him be heroic all throughout.

Those are pretty minor complaints, though. Overall, it was a great time. Not only was it proper Adam West Batman, but in its own way, it was proper Batman, period. There were lots of easter eggs for die-hard Bat-fans to appreciate, and there were even cameos by most of the more memorable Adam West original villains, such as Bookworm, King Tut, Shame, No-Face, and others. Bottom line, this was a beautifully rendered love letter to Adam West’s tenure as the caped crusader and is sure to delight both hard core and casual fans of the character.

I then watched Batman vs. Two-Face, the 2017 follow-up to Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders. Adam West, Burt Ward, and Julie Newmar all return to their roles, and Lee Meriwether even gets a neat little cameo. But most delightful of all, none other than William Shatner takes on the role of Two-Face. For the first time, Adam West’s version of Batman takes on one of the most high-profile Batman villains who never made it into the original series (though had the show been renewed for a fourth season, Clint Eastwood was in talks to play the character).

They actually draw 60s-era William Shatner as Harvey Dent, complete with the trademark Captain Kirk hair swoosh. I was expecting Shatner to really ham it up in the role, but he plays it straight. As Dent, he talks in his normal tone of voice, never over-acting and playing him like a regular guy — though with a hint of instability. As Two-Face, he talks in a gravelly voice that’s almost unrecognizable, and he really pours on the intensity. Not in a campy way, but in a truly menacing way. Richard Moll is still the definitive Two-Face, but Shatner might actually be a close second.

I was wondering if any of the other villains would return for the sequel, and they do, but in a reduced role. That’s just fine. Given that Two-Face never made it into the original series, I wouldn’t have wanted any of the other villains to steal the spotlight away from him. Joker, Penguin, and Riddler all have a brief appearance at the opening of the film, played by the same voice actors, but then they step gracefully aside to make room for the titular villain. That said, King Tut and Bookworm both get a chance to shine, with speaking roles this time. Jeff Bergman does an excellent Caesar Romero, but his Roddy McDowall leaves much to be desired. Wally Wingert, on the other hand, not only does a spot-on Frank Gorshin, but an utterly perfect Victor Buono. It had me wondering if Buono had actually returned for the role (he died in 1982). Julie Newmar’s Catwoman still features prominently, though her role is slightly reduced. I was only slightly bothered by that. Again, it was important to let Two-Face shine.

Two-Face wasn’t the only classic villain who had never appeared in the original show to finally make it into the Adam West canon. Dr. Hugo Strange, who first appeared in the 40s, has a featured role in this film. He never upstages Two-Face, but he’s central to the plot. They also introduce Harleen Quinzel, and they flirt with a relationship between her and the Joker. I thought perhaps they were setting things up for another sequel, but alas, it was not to be. Adam West passed away shortly after completing this film.

The visual style carries over from the first film, with all the characters and locations rendered the same way, and with similar pacing and staging. The overall tone is basically the same, though this one is slightly darker. There are still plenty of laughs, but there are long stretches of the movie that are almost totally serious. I didn’t mind that, though. The overall sense of fun is still present, and the movie is well-paced and never dull.

It’s a shame Adam West is no longer with us. I would have liked to see more of these. But at least they were able to do these two, and they make a wonderful send-off for Adam West’s career as the Caped Crusader.

The Journey Begins

Hello there and welcome to my blog! I’m really old and so is everything I like. You won’t find much in the way of modern stuff here. I won’t be talking about the Marvel movies or the latest Netflix series. I grew up on the original Star Trek, the original Battlestar Galactica, and a host of old black & white sci-fi and monster movies. That’s what I’ll mostly be talking about here. Occasionally, I may have thoughts on something newer, but that will be the exception, not the rule. So join me as I celebrate flying saucers, stop-motion, and everything else I love about genre movies from the 20th Century!