Dolly Parton Was Already an Advocate in Her First Film Role
When Dolly Parton died yesterday at the age of 80, she left behind an incredible legacy. Not only did she create timeless tunes such as “Jolene” and “Islands in the Stream,” and not only did she appear in films like The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Steel Magnolias—to say nothing of her countless television appearances—but she also left behind hundreds, if not thousands, of lives who were changed by her charity work.
In addition to her literary program Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library and her educational non-profit the Dollywood Foundation, Parton stood up for causes not often associated with country singers from the American South, such as Black Lives Matter and women’s issues. These parts of her legacy were not separate from one another. In fact, Parton did her advocacy work right from the beginning of her film career, drawing attention to sexual harassment in the workplace in her debut feature, 9 to 5.
9 to 5 stars Jane Fonda as Judy Bernly, a housewife thrust into the workplace after her divorce. Hence why she takes a job as a secretary at the offices of Consolidated Companies where she meets veteran worker Violet Newstead (Lily Tomlin) and Doralee Rhodes (Parton), secretary to domineering and incompetent vice president Franklin Hart (Dabney Coleman). After once again getting passed over for promotion by an unqualified man, and after smoking marijuana at Dorlee’s house, the three women hatch a plot for revenge against Hart, deciding to pour laxative in his coffee. But when Doralee mistakenly uses rat poison instead, the three have to deal with the fallout of potentially killing their boss.
From that point on, 9 to 5 becomes a delightful, farcical romp, and Parton owns the screen as a woman who has finally been pushed too far. In the first half of the movie, Doralee is the object of unwanted sexual attention from her male co-workers. Hart in particular puts his hands on Doralee and makes lascivious comments, and even spreads rumors that the two of them are having an affair, despite the fact that she’s married. The rumors not only embolden the men to objectify Doralee, but they anger the other women in the office, who treat Doralee as someone who got her job by doing sexual favors instead of good work.
9 to 5 released in 1980, back when sexual harassment in offices was still at Mad Men levels. The idea for the film came first to Jane Fonda, who had been spending time with female office workers. She wanted to draw attention to the plight of those who not only had their labor exploited by their employers but also had to have that labor valued lower than that of their male counterparts while also being leered at. Fonda recruited Robert Altman collaborator Patricia Resnick to write a screenplay about the issue, and found Colin Higgins, writer of the counterculture classic Harold and Maude, to direct.
By this point, Fonda had long been known for activism, particularly her speaking out against the Vietnam War and in support of Civil Rights. But the same was not true of Dolly Parton. She was still eight years away from founding the Dollywood Foundation and doing her most significant philanthropy. Instead she was more focused on being a popular musician, someone who performed excellent and catchy songs but who wouldn’t challenge audiences—especially more conservative-leaning country audiences.
Yet Parton was already looking to make the move into feature films, and had signed a three-picture deal with 20th Century Fox. So when she realized that the project that she, Higgins, and Resnick had put together was too didactic as a drama, Fonda went looking for someone to interject some sweetness and lightness into the film. And Fonda certainly found lightness in the form of the deliciously deadpan Tomlin and in Colman’s easily-hatable comic persona. But it was Parton who brought the sweetness, fully embodying a woman who just wanted to do her job and do it well without causing any trouble. Doralee does not set out to be a revolutionary, but she’s pushed to extreme ends by her ravenous boss.
To her credit, Parton manages to retain that sweetness, even when Doralee gets pushed to her breaking point in the film’s most infamous scene. Finally tired of Hart’s condescension and the rumors he’s been spreading about their affair, Doralee lets him have a piece of her mind. Even though Hart towers over her, Doralee keeps pushing forward, forcing him to walk back behind his desk. When he tries his old tricks to calm her, even placing his hands on her shoulders, Doralee just bats them away.
“Look, I’ve got a gun out there in my purse,” she finally declares when Hart tells her to sit and calm down. “Up to now, I’ve been forgiving and forgetting because of the way I was brought up. But I’ll tell you one thing—if you ever say another word about me or make another indecent proposal, I’m gonna get that gun of mine… and I’m gonna change you from a rooster to a hen with one shot!”
In that moment, with that line delivery, Parton cements her status as a bonafide screen star. Moreover, she transcends her status as a pop icon or a mere celebrity. With a single line delivery, she becomes an advocate, someone who won’t stand by while others suffer; someone who draws attention to wrongs in the world. She would continue being an advocate for the rest of her life.
Tim Curry: From Rocky Horror to Clue, A Fearless Character Actor Ham
In the heady Wild West days of 1970s New Hollywood, relatively few people knew what would work. That especially included the older studio executives who still ostensibly ran things. So when the opportunity came to transfer the bizarre, decadent, and delightfully queer curio The Rocky Horror Show from the London stage to the big screen—hence the new title of The Rocky Horror PICTURE Show (1975)—execs were adamant about getting a popular rock star like Mick Jagger or David Bowie to play Dr. Frank-N-Furter, that oh, so sweet, sweet transvestite from transexual Transylvania. (Dated vernacular being his own.)
Luckily, there was one person who knew absolutely what was needed: the man who created Frank on the stage, Tim Curry. With ruby red lipstick, too-tight tights made from fishnets, and an air of superiority that oozed all the way from West End to Hollywood, Curry always made the sharpest choices with the material, including giving this mad scientist in Goth makeup positively perfect Received Pronunciation via Frank’s posh English accent. In Curry’s mind, if Frank was going to hold court in the Hammer Horror house of Riff Raff, Magenta, Brad and Janet (gag), and all the rest, he simply must to speak the Queen’s English as beautifully as Queen Elizabeth II herself. Fortunately, film director Jim Sharman also revealed good instincts (about casting, anyway) when he demanded the studio bring Curry to Hollywood to play what has become his signature role.
The preternatural instincts of Curry as a performer unafraid to vamp across a soundstage, and how often those gifts went undervalued, is on my mind this afternoon following news of the actor’s passing. As confirmed by his longtime manager and agent, Marcia Hurwitz, Curry passed away at his LA home Tuesday at the age of 80. Following a longtime recovery from a stroke he suffered in 2012, Curry now leaves behind a career that is best defined by Frank-N-Furter’s devilishly arched eyebrows. Nevertheless, his talents lasted a lot longer than even Frank’s impossibly drawn out lisp.
An actor obviously unafraid to go ham and embrace the joys of artifice, Curry nonetheless had a character actor’s range and instincts. He offered a combination of gravitas and goof, and at the height of his career, the British born thespian enjoyed immersing himself fully into characterizations that some of the most popular stars of his day avoided. Famously, Curry was considered as a back-up option for the role of the Joker in Tim Burton’s original Batman movie, although ultimately that opportunity, along with studio alternatives like Willem Dafoe and even Robin Williams, was merely a negotiating tactic by producers to get mega-star Jack Nicholson closer to signing on.
Yet we did see Curry play cartoonish villains in ways that were unrecognizable. The satanic prosthetic designs applied by makeup artist Rob Bottin to Curry in Ridley Scott’s Legend (1985) drowned the actor in fantasy iconography. Even so, Curry’s delicious wickedness in the role of Lord of Darkness overwhelms the movie, dominating the screen in a way a young Tom Cruise as the boy hero could never hope to compete with. And of course despite dealing with the vast limitations of TV censorship as the original Pennywise performer in ABC’s 1990 adaptation of Stephen King’s It, Curry was still able to traumatize a generation of pint-sized millennials with a maliciousness that would have seemed shocking to even the most seasoned of Rocky Horror midnight revelers.
On the completely other side of the spectrum is Wadsworth, Curry’s underrated screwball comedy triumph in Clue (1985). Despite playing a character who never appears in the Parker Brothers board game on which the movie is based—at least if you go with either of the film’s first two endings—Curry tackled the most cliché of Agatha Christie-styled drawing room murder mystery suspects, the butler, and turned him into a manic, wide-eyed antihero who was equal parts Poirot and Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace. The film’s third and final ending is a particular showcase in which Curry gets to parody and mimic each of his many gifted comic co-stars, including Michael McKean, Christopher Lloyd, and Madeline Kahn.
In retrospect, it’s a calling card that should’ve led to more comic leads, but Curry ultimately found himself taking more supporting roles, including those where he stole scenes. Indeed, the first time this impressionable millennial met the actor was in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York where Curry played a smugly incompetent Manhattan concierge so charmingly that in a single shot he is able to do a better impression of the Grinch than Jim Carrey could muster in 105 minutes.
Curry had a great career, which also included memorable character work in films like The Hunt for Red October (1990), FerngGully: The Last Rain Forest (1992), and even a stint as Long John Silver opposite Kermit the Frog in Muppet Treasure Island (1996). There were no small roles for Mr. Curry, although I cannot help but wish he got more opportunities to own the spotlight like when Frank-N-Furter announced he at long last was going home.
Hannah Rose May On Navigating Horror From the Runway to the White House
From modeling to acting to writing comics, Hannah Rose May has proven time and time again that her creative expression knows no bounds.
Getting her start with Rogues’ Gallery, illustrated by Justin Mason and colored by Tríona Farrell, May has since become one of IDW Dark’s leading horror voices whose style blends sharp political and social satire with deep, character-driven narratives.
After Rogues’ Gallery, May found her stride writing The Exorcism at 1600 Penn, a White House-set supernatural thriller illustrated by Vanesa Del Rey and colored by Jordie Bellaire, and Smile: For the Camera, illustrated by Miriana Puglia and colored by Dearbhla Kelly that channeled May’s own years in the modeling world.
May’s newest project, Fatal Fest (illustrated by Andrea Scalmazzi), is a meta take on the horror industry itself, following contestants pushed to their limits by a producer who believes experiencing real trauma is the only way to make real horror. While the early 2027 release for Fatal Fest issue #1 creeps nearer, May sat down with Den of Geek to discuss that project, her dive into the Smile film universe and the upcoming Blumhouse film adaptation of 1600 Penn.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Den of Geek: Writing a prequel to an established film franchise means working with someone else’s mythology. How did you balance staying faithful to theSmilerules while still making this story feel like it’s yours?
Hannah Rose May: I’m very fortunate that Parker, with Smile, has made it so that we’re aware that it’s a debt chainmail, essentially. I remember those emails that everyone’s parents would get back in the day where it’s like, ‘Send this or you will die.’ That’s how I see Parker’s world in the sense of, you see it, you pass it on. Other than that, he’s danced around the mythology but hasn’t gone in too deep, so it made it kind of an open playground for the likes of me, which was very nice. I didn’t want to add to his mythology, more so play within the confines in which he’s already settled.
Which character challenged you the most as a writer and why for this series?
I think all of the characters are actually little facets of something that I have experienced from my time in the modeling industry. Unfortunately, a lot of the male characters are loosely based off of real men in the industry. Right before social media took off, I feel like I was kind of one of the last generations where we were attending 12 to 15 castings a day, and because of that, there were a couple of models who I’d lived with at the time, who knew who those characters were.
And then the girls were based on girls I had lived with and roomed with. I lived in New York City in a two-bedroom model apartment with 10 girls, and we all lived in bunk beds. I was very fortunate to experience a lot of different women of different ages, of different cultures and hear all about their experiences and I was in a way mentored by the women before me who had done it and yeah, so the story was for them.
When did you know exactly how the story was going to end, and did that ending ever change?
I knew going into this what I wanted. For me, it was just a matter of if Paramount and Parker were going to give me permission to do it. My thought process around it was, when you’re reading [Smile: For the Camera], I wanted to make sure that we were delivering a death every issue because in Smile, the deaths are what make those movies.
And with this, obviously if you’re following a group of girls, you ultimately know what the end result is going to be; they’re not going to survive. Because of that, I didn’t want to make it so predictable. I knew that I wanted to flip the script at the end and have a little twist on it and hopefully have readers walk away feeling satisfied. I’m very fortunate that people have messaged me over it saying that [Smile: For the Camera] was one of the most satisfying endings.
You toldHollywood Reporterthat you didn’t set out to be a horror writer but that horror themes find you naturally. What is it about this genre that keeps pulling you back?
When I said that, I meant in the sense that I think if anyone had asked me 10 years ago while I was full on modeling, would I see myself being at Comic-Con 10 years from now, talking about multiple properties? I could have never envisioned sitting here now talking about not one property, but multiple properties, so for that I’m very grateful.
But horror shaped me. That was the God’s honest truth. I’ve always loved the medium. I’ve always wanted to partake in it to some degree, but I grew up in a small town in Ireland looking out at cornfields. I didn’t know that I could have a hand in doing anything related to creating anything that would be in people’s hands.
You describedFatal Festas your most “twisted” story yet. What did you push further here than in your previous IDW series?
With Fatal Fest we go full fledged; we’re pushing characters to the absolute limit. [Smile: For the Camera] is child’s play compared to what is in store for [Fatal Fest]. We listened to the audience, people kept saying, ‘Hannah, I would love for you to do more gore, like more of a horror book,’ and I was like, you know what, it’s coming. There’s twists and turns in every element, there’s death at every issue. The hope for Fatal Fest is that I hope that you read one issue and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I wasn’t expecting that.’
You’ve said Hollywood is a system that consumes people. How did that idea shape Frank Finch and the world ofFatal Festspecifically?
I think it comes back to what we talked about, and I think at the core of most horror movies is trauma. And that’s why Smile is so brilliant, because Parker managed to use that trauma and create an entity around that. In a lot of horror, the underbelly is something traumatic. You know, we’re now at a time period now where the main focus in theaters is incel trauma and incels in general, but everything horror has always had a really layered substance, and I think now we’re finally giving it credit and we’re paying attention and realizing that these movies weren’t just slapstick.
With Fatal Fest, it’s a meta-narrative on the horror industry as a whole. A lot of horror directors have their thing, right? Horror directors specifically have a thing, a niche. They’re kind of characters in their own way, and in Fatal Fest, we get to put that at the forefront, where our lead [Frank Finch] believes that to show horror, you have to experience horror. So he basically puts all of the contestants to the test to be like, ‘Your movie was good, but you didn’t get there because you haven’t experienced real trauma.’
Now that a studio as closely tied to modern horror as Blumhouse is adaptingThe Exorcism at 1600 Penn, are there any story elements you would consider non-negotiable for the film to include?
Yeah, great question, because sometimes they cut stuff out, and you can’t get to everything, so my non-negotiable is that we do an exorcism in the White House. The only thing that I have voiced in the creative conversations is that I would like for the family to look like the family on the page, as in we have a first female president, and we have a diverse family.
What about this film are you hoping will appeal to the Gen Z audience who are craving more unique horror media likeBackroomsandObsession? Do you think the movie will appeal to the younger horror generation?
Yeah, a lot! So as much as it is our first female president’s story, it’s really Mara and Kevin, her children’s story. For the movie, we are going to focus on that. Can you imagine being the child of the president? You don’t choose that, you don’t choose to be born. You don’t choose who your parents are, and you don’t get to decide what they do for a living. We put a lot of emphasis on that throughout 1600.
We see that dynamic between them as siblings and see how their differing opinions are on taking on this. Kevin is loving his new popularity, Mara’s struggling with it. She’s struggling with what the media has to say about her mother. So yes, Gen Z, it’s your movie. I think all ages will be able to relate to it in some way, too. Parents will be able to relate to our first female president, our first gentleman, and then Gen Z will be able to relate to being those children and the expectations that are set for you.
All five issues of Smile: For the Camera and all four issues of The Exorcism at 1600 Penn are available where comics are sold and via IDW now. Fatal Fest #1 is expected to release in 2027.
10 Star Wars Rip-Offs That Are Actually Pretty Good
A long time ago—1977, to be exact—Star Wars revolutionized cinema. Not only did it break box office records and revitalize the action figure industry, forever changing the way movie merchandise was sold, but it created a fan base who would show up again and again for all things Star Wars, even when they’re made by Dave Filoni.
Star Wars also launched a host of imitators, also-rans who tried to build off the success of the mega-hit. Anyone who saw Orca knows that such knock-offs are to be expected whenever a movie does well at the theaters. But Star Wars was particularly open to imitation, since Star Wars itself can hardly be called an original work. George Lucas drew from everything from Akira Kurosawa to World War II films to fairy tales to craft his saga, which means that there was plenty of opportunity for others to find similar inspiration. Some of them are even pretty good, as demonstrated by these stand-out Star Wars imitators.
Starcrash (1978)
Leave it to the 1970s Italian film industry to cash in on a copy first. Directed by Luigi Cozzi, from a script he wrote with Nat Wachsberger and R.A. Dillon, Starcrash takes the barest bones of the Star Wars plot and refracts them through a mix of pop culture influences. In place of youthful Luke Skywalker, Starcrash focuses on bikini-clad Stella Star, played by Bond girl Caroline Munro, who goes on dangerous smuggling missions with her doofy pal Akton (Marjoe Gortner). Upon being captured by the lawman Thor (Robert Tessier) and his robot sidekick Elle (Judd Hamilton), Stella and Akton get caught in an intergalactic battle, eventually helping Prince Simon (David Hasselhoff) regain power from the evil Count Zarth Arn (Joe Spinell).
Starcrash doesn’t have an original idea in its 94-minute runtime, but it does manage to pack in a lot of glittery ’70s excess. The cast knows they’re making trash and they go for it, making the movie far more fun than it deserves to be. And if that’s still not enough to get you through, then at least watch the Mystery Science Theater 3000version, in which Jonah and the ‘Bots mercilessly mock the hapless hero Akton.
Moonraker (1979)
Moonraker easily ranks among the worst Bond movies. But as far as Star Wars rip-offs go, it’s among the very best! Famously, Eon Productions planned to follow Roger Moore‘s best outing The Spy Who Loved Me (which also features Caroline Munroe of Starcrash) with For Your Eyes Only. But Bond has never been above chasing a quick buck, so when Star Wars broke the bank, 007 went to space.
Surprisingly, a space plot fits pretty well within the world of Bond. In Moonraker, Moore’s 007 goes up against Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale), a rich industrialist who plans to create the perfect society by poisoning everyone on Earth while he and his chosen few wait out the panic on his space station. However, director Lewis Gilbert and screenwriter Christopher Wood botch the premise, filling their movie with dumb bits like Bond getting sick while G-force training and being somehow at his most sexist while condescending to partner Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles). No one even tries to go to space until the climax, but at least we get to see Jaws find love.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Painful as it is to admit, there would be no Star Trek: The Motion Picture if it were not for Star Wars. Gene Roddenberry had long planned to create a sequel series called Star Trek Phase II, but when Paramount Pictures saw the money to be made from space-faring adventures, then the studio changed plans and sent Captain Kirk (William Shatner) to the big screen.
However, as any Trekkie would tell you, the debt to Star Wars ends there. For better or worse, The Motion Picture has no interest in replicating the simple genre thrills of George Lucas’s adventure. Instead, the movie, directed by Robert Wise and written by Harold Livingston, from a script by Alan Dean Foster, is all quiet contemplation. Kirk and his crew take their time to reconvene and investigate the V’Ger probe, pausing to admire the modified Enterprise and to stare at screens. Even to this day, Trekkies can’t decide if the wonders of The Motion Picture deserve that level of attention. But no one can deny the pure glory of the moment that Bones comes aboard with a shaggy beard, a blue leisure suit, and a glistening medallion.
The Black Hole (1979)
Perhaps the greatest argument in the favor of Star Trek: The Motion Picture is the existence of The Black Hole. Anyone who thought that The Motion Picture was too slow should check out Disney‘s attempt at 2001-style sci-fi, the House of Mouse’s attempt to cash in on Star Wars, back when they didn’t have the capital to just buy franchises outright. However, they forgot that people like Star Wars not just because it was in space, but because it was exciting.
The Black Hole follows a simple enough plot, in which the USS Palomino discoveres an abandoned ship near a black hole. Upon investigation, the crew finds the missing scientist Dr. Reinhardt, who has become obsessed by the mysteries of the black hole and demands that the Palomino help him continue his research—no matter the cost. What follows looks cool for the time, but lacks both substance or thrills. But at least Disney remembered to include a pair of compelling robots, the one lesson it managed to learn from Star Wars.
Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)
Starcrash may have been the first real Star Wars rip-off, but Battle Beyond the Stars was the first to understand the central truth about George Lucas’ vision. Star Wars worked because blended several genres and sent them into space, which means that robots and space ships aren’t enough to tell an exciting story.
As with Star Wars, Battle Beyond the Stars finds its inspiration in the work of Akira Kurosawa, but pulls from Seven Samurai instead of The Hidden Fortress. Richard Thomas stars as Shad, a farmer who gathers warriors to save his village from invaders. Shad soon proves to have good taste, as he chooses his motley crew from some of the best B-movie actors of his generation, scoundrels and assassins played by guys like Robert Vaughn, John Saxon, and Sybil Danning. Even better, Battle Beyond the Stars boasts a script by John Sayles and special effects work by a young James Cameron, making it a knock-off that’s a cut above the rest.
Galaxy of Terror (1981)
If Battle Beyond the Stars offers a fun version of a cheap Star Wars riff, then Galaxy of Terror is the nasty underside of the George Lucas rip-offs. Like Battle Beyond the Stars, Galaxy of Terror comes from schlock king Roger Corman, who gave director Bruce D. Clark, who co-write the script with Marc Siegler, pretty basic marching orders: give us a horror movie in space.
Clark and Siegler succeed in the most unsettling way possible. David Lynch favorite Grace Zabriskie plays Captain Trantor, whose ship the Quest goes on a mission to find survivors of a shipwreck with protagonist Cabren (Edward Albert) and a crew that includes Ray Walston, Robert Englund, and Sid Haig, as well as Erin Moran of Happy Days fame. Unfortunately, it’s that last actor who gets the worst of it in a stomach-wrenching worm assault scene that Corman demanded for the movie to reach its nudity requirements. Unsettling as it is, Galaxy of Terror does show us just how strange Star Wars rip-offs could become.
Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983)
Yes, Luke Skywalker is the hero of Star Wars. But everyone knows that Han Solo is the breakout character, and we don’t get enough of him in the original trilogy. Director Lamont Johnson and his slew of screenwriters tried to fix that problem with Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, which puts a surly scoundrel at the center.
Peter Strauss plays Wolff, a trash collector and one-time warrior, who intercepts a distress signal sent by three captured beauties from a crashed space yacht. Wolff travels to a devastated planet, where the women are being held by the lascivious Overdog McNabb (Michael Ironside), but first encounters spunky teen Niki (Molly Ringwald). Despite his better instincts, Wolff agrees to take on Niki, giving him a reason to grouch his way through his adventure, just like an off-brand Han Solo should.
Krull (1983)
When George Lucas finally started making The Phantom Menace, there was only one choice to play the serene, if idiosyncratic, master who trained Obi-Wan Kenobi, Liam Neeson. But two decades earlier, Neeson wasn’t quite the respected thespian he would become, so when 1983’s Krull had a need for an imposing actor to play the axe-wielding Kegan, he took the part.
Of course, Krull has a lot in common with Star Wars, namely its melding of sci-fi with fantasy. Directed by Peter Yates, he of Bullitt and The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Krull follows the warrior prince Colwyn (Ken Marshall), whose marriage to Princess Lyssa (Lysette Anthony) will bring peace to the galaxy. That’s bad news for the creature known only as the Beast (Trevor Martin), who sends its forces to capture Lyssa and destroy Colwyn. Together with his band of misfits, including Neeson’s Torquil and Robbie Coltrane as Rhun, Colwyn embraces his destiny to save the galaxy. Krull may not be as heady as the work Neeson would later do, but its pulp pleasure proved to be the ideal training for entering the world of Star Wars.
Dune (1984)
According to one of the weirdest bits of Hollywood trivia, George Lucas asked David Lynch of all people to direct Return of the Jedi. Lynch famously turned down the offer, but he was convinced that he should make a big Hollywood blockbuster. And so when Italian superproducer Dino DeLaurentis offered Lynch the opportunity to direct Frank Herbert‘s Dune, one of the major sources of inspiration for Lucas’ movie, he accepted.
What follows remains perhaps the oddest movie in Lynch’s filmography. The broad strokes of the Herbert story are there: a planet filled with spice, the heroic Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan), the evil Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan), a rebellion that shakes the universe. But it all gets retold through Lynch’s perspective, resulting in a Dune that’s somehow weirder than Herbert intended and perhaps the most optimistic movie in Lynch’s oeuvre.
Masters of the Universe (1987)
Even six months ago, the idea of including Masters of the Universe on any type of “Best of” list seemed ludicrous. But now that we’ve seen the mess that is the most recent attempt to adapt the ’80s toy line, the 1987 Cannon film seems a lot better. Moreover, the 1987 movie may take its direct inspiration from Jack Kirby‘s Fourth World Saga, but it’s clear that the producers hope to cash in on any lingering Star Wars fever.
Masters of the Universe, of course, depicts an epic battle between He-Man (Dolph Lundgren) and Skeletor (Frank Langella) for the fate of the galaxy… for about 15 minutes of screen time. That’s because Masters of the Universe may have a huge budget for a Cannon movie, but it is still a Cannon movie, which means much of the action actually takes place in suburban California. There, He-Man and annoying not-Orko Gwildor (Billy Barty) hang around with Julie (Courteney Cox) and Kevin Corrigan (played not by actor Kevin Corrigan, but by Star Trek: Voyager‘s Robert Duncan McNeill), making the action decidedly not a long time ago and not in a galaxy far away.
Star Trek vs. Battlestar Galactica: Remembering When Enterprise Lost Post-9/11 TV
On May 21, 2003, the voyages of the starship Enterprise came to an end, at least as they were intended. When the NX-01 launched two seasons earlier, on September 26, 2001, it was full of grit and optimism. Enterprise, as the show was initially called sans the “Star Trek” title, would tell the early days of humanity’s exploration into deep space, setting the stage for the adventures of Captains Kirk and Picard, but through a more grounded lens, for a new generation. But when season two ended with the Xindi destroying everything from Florida to Venezuela, Jonathan Archer and his crew were given a new mission.
Unfortunately for the franchise, it was a mission that Star Trek wasn’t built to handle. Worse, mere months later, a new sci-fi show would launch, one that grappled with post-9/11 America far better than Star Trek ever could. The 2000s Battlestar Galactica reboot told complex and compelling stories about losing one’s humanity in pursuit of protection, while Enterprise briefly turned Starfleet into a stand-in for America, fighting a war on terror across the galaxy.
A Long Road
By the time Enterprise finished its second season, it was clear that the series needed a change. At this point, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager had already shown that a good Trek show can come after a couple of rough initial seasons. But Enterprise didn’t have the same benefit of the doubt, in part because audience interest was waning after nearly 15 years of continuous Trek shows, and in part because the series had tried to distance itself from its predecessors. Not only did it drop the name “Star Trek” from its title and use a pop song for its opening credits (which we can now all admit is incredible), Enterprise took place a century before The Original Series, giving it more of a grounded, more American military feel.
Whatever the producers hoped they’d get from this approach, it wasn’t working. The first two seasons of Enterprise either trod ground already covered by other Trek series, replaying the same first contact tales we already knew, and its emphasis on interpersonal conflict and sexual tension felt desperate and cheap. Worse, the Temporal Cold War arc that ran across the first two seasons failed to give the show a compelling direction, creating only more confusion for a show that seemed to want to underplay its connections to other Trek titles.
In short, Enterprise needed a big change, and the Xindi provided it. In the season 2 finale “The Expanse,” a new alien race called the Xindi (a people comprised of six different species) launch a preemptive attack on Earth, destroying a huge swath of the planet and killing the sister of Enterprise’s Commander Trip Tucker. The attack forces Enterprise to change its mission, coming back to Earth for a refit and then preparing to take the fight to the Xindi.
The Xindi War would span across season 3, and would include some classic Trek concepts. We’d see characters like Trip dealing with loss, we’d see humans form alliances with alien species, and we’d see how conflicts stem from misunderstanding. In particular, the third season reveals that the Xindi attack Earth because mysterious, malevolent aliens called the Sphere-Builders convince them that they will be killed by Earthlings. Moreover, Archer succeeds in his mission by forming a connection with Degra, a humanoid Xindi who comes to trust Archer and recognize the Sphere-Builders’s deceit.
Compelling as that sounds on paper, the execution left much to be desired. Archer was always written with a chip on his shoulder, due to the way that Vulcans disrupted his father’s career, and that chip only grew deeper after the Xindi attacked Earth without provocation.
Worse, the war made cruel soldiers out of Trip and T’Pol, the show’s two best characters. For three out of the four seasons, Trip was a folksy engineer who tackled complex problems with down-home charm, while T’Pol was a Vulcan who overcame her prejudices to connect with the human crew of the NX-01. But once his sister dies, Trip becomes consumed by vengeance and righteous anger, calling for the execution of those who wronged him (it doesn’t help that his twang makes him sound like the decider himself, George W. Bush). T’Pol’s shift isn’t as spectacular, but her frustration with the Vulcan Council’s inaction drives her to defy them and their rules, making her into something of a maverick who has no use for laws or treaties.
By the time the storyline ended with the season 3 finale “Zero Hour,” Archer and his crew had become blustering cowboys, jingoists who will only work with others if they form a “coalition of the willing” to go attack the terrorists, sacrificing Federation ideals in the process.
But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that Battlestar Galactica was doing it better.
All Frak’ed Up
When the Battlestar Galactica miniseries/pilot aired on the Sci-Fi Channel in December of 2003, it felt more like a curio than genre television that would speak to the problems of its time. After all, the original Battlestar Galactica was more admired than liked, a strange attempt to use network television and space opera to explore Mormon theological themes. The biggest draw to the miniseries wasn’t the source material, nor even respected thespians Edward James Olmos or Mary McDonnell. It was creator Ronald D. Moore, who had abandoned Star Trek after writing some of the best TNG and DS9 episodes to make a new show.
Like “The Expanse,” the Battlestar Galactica miniseries features an unspeakable act of mass violence. Via her relationship with the human scientist Gaius Baltar, the Cylon Number Six launches an attack that destroys the planets occupied by humans.
More than an inciting event that would launch the story engine of the Battlestar Galactica series, which took place upon the titular space ship, the destruction sets the mode and motivations for the characters. Humans had been lulled into a false sense of peace. They let their guard down against their enemies, enemies who could now live amongst them undetected, enemies who struck first and struck hard. Now, they’d have to take desperate actions to survive.
Not unlike Archer and Trip, the heroes of Battlestar Galactica make some terrible moral decisions. Colonel Tigh succumbs to his alcoholism more than once. Chief Tyrol wrestles with his allegiances after learning that his lover Boomer is a Cylon. Commander Adama and President Roslin devote time and energy playing politics against one another instead of seeking consensus. Even Starbuck, the hot-shot pilot and most traditional action hero of the series, is an emotional wreck unsuited for anything but fighting.
But those shortcomings aren’t covered over by the humans’ victories. The show doesn’t assume that we’ll forgive the humans because we want the humans to win and the Cylons to lose. Instead, Battlestar Galactica understood that flaws and shortcomings were part of the human experience, which was the whole thing the heroes were fighting to save. Moreover, the show understood that the heroes have much in common with the Cylon enemies, and that the way forward must necessarily involve a complicated, imperfect peace.
Where Enterprise tried to turn the anxieties of post-9/11 America into some futuristic triumphalism, Battlestar Galactica understood that messy insecurity was our natural condition—and it showed us how to live in it.
So Say We All
Ironically, for all that Enterprise did badly and Battlestar Galactica did right, the two series ended on very different notes. After beginning with a coda that wrapped up dangling Temporal Cold War plots, the fourth season of Enterprise gave the show its best episodes. The series lacked grand ideas or big themes, but it did manage to tell entertaining stories about the early days of Starfleet and the founding of the Federation. Simply put, it became regular, old Star Trek.
Conversely, Battlestar Galactica tried to move out of the moral morass in which it excelled with a high-concept finale that rivals only the ending of Lostfor its ability to anger or excite its audience, even to this day. The show concludes by revealing that all the events took place in the distant past, and that the peace between Cylons and humans eventually leads to the creation of Earth and its people. Peaceful though the ending may be, its ending was too easy for a show that embraced complexities.
Which is perhaps just as well. Star Trek has always been about looking beyond this present moment and toward a better future. Enterprise proved that the series stumbled when it tried to take on the current situation too directly. Fortunately, Battlestar Galactica could fill in the gap, if only for a few years.
Avengers Endgame: Encore Trailer Promises a Curious Doomsday Reward
Fans have speculated a lot about the exact content of Marvel’s upcoming Avengers: Endgame re-release. Encore is set to include about four minutes of bonus footage that didn’t exist in the 2019 version of the superhero juggernaut, bringing the runtime to 185 minutes, up from the original 181 minutes, but although we now have an updated runtime that gives fans a concrete four-minute difference, it still doesn’t say where those four minutes are in the movie.
Realistically, four minutes could be one scene. It could also be four minutes’ worth of footage peppered into the Endgame story. Yet, with a new trailer promising audiences who see Encore on IMAX and Infinity Vision-certified screens that “an additional sneak peek” at Avengers: Doomsday awaits, it’s still largely unclear if this new footage will simply be a post-credits scene slapped onto Endgame and even more Doomsday footage for those who can snag the rarer tickets.
Co-director Joe Russo’s words about Encore at the Sand Films Festival in April initially left fans unsure, simply saying that “We’ll be re-releasing the film with footage that is set in the Doomsday story that we have added to Avengers: Endgame.” Later, at CineEurope in Barcelona, Disney reps apparently confirmed that Encore will have “a custom introduction, new footage, and a special end tag that’ll be exclusive to Infinity Vision and IMAX releases.”
The lack of clarity about whether Marvel has actually altered its beloved blockbuster beyond a post-credits scene is more than a little infuriating. Going back to the theater to see Endgame won’t be free; it’s going to cost people money, and as some fans consequently dismiss the re-release as a simple cash grab ahead of Doomsday, Marvel is only giving others just enough information to raise expectations.
Russo’s description of the new material as a “critical companion story” that creates a bridge from Endgame to Doomsday makes the footage sound narratively significant, but if Marvel said, “We’re bringing Endgame back to theaters with a new four-minute Doomsday-related post-credits scene,” fans would know exactly what they’re buying.
As it stands, they don’t, so Avengers Endgame: Encore has become the cinematic equivalent of a pricey blind bag: tantalizing to some, exasperating to others. If Encore were simply a celebratory theatrical return, that ambiguity wouldn’t matter much, but Marvel is positioning it as part of the run-up to Avengers: Doomsday. The whole point is apparently to establish some connective tissue between the two films.
It might sound like a bit of a grumble, but let’s face it: Endgame is already available to watch at home. Anyone considering spending money to see it again on the big screen will naturally want to know what they’re getting that they can’t get by watching the original on Disney+ and either waiting for Doomsday or scrolling through the inevitable description that leaks online soon after the re-release.
A lack of compelling information either way isn’t helping some to view Encore as anything other than Avengers: Endgame – The Search for More Money, but only time will tell if this bonus material is just for hardcore MCU fans who don’t mind paying to see it, or whether Marvel has actually added genuinely worthwhile story material to Endgame that is relevant to understanding Doomsday.
Avengers Endgame: Encore will be released on September 25.
25 Years Later, Donnie Darko Is Getting An Unexpected Update
With the 25th anniversary of Donnie Darko fast approaching, writer-director Richard Kelly is teasing a major update to the film’s story, starting with a sequel book later this year.
The cult classic sci-fi film first made waves in 2001 and arguably launched star Jake Gyllenhaal’s career. It follows the titular Donnie after he narrowly survives a freak accident, only to be visited by a man in a bunny suit who prophesies the end of the world, and ends with Donnie going back in time to sacrifice his life so the movie’s events never happen. Now, we’ll finally get to find out what happened in the aftermath, thanks to Kelly’s upcoming book, The Philosophy of Time Travel.
Kelly, who hasn’t directed a movie since 2009’s The Box, told Variety that he’s spent the last 20 years trying to figure out how to make a Donnie Darko sequel work. The first step is covering key events after Donnie’s death in The Philosophy of Time Travel, but Kelly hopes this will lead to an animated adaptation of that story and multiple live-action sequels, as he also plans to shift the narrative 28 years into the future. At that point, he’s hoping the original cast will reunite for a follow-up feature film.
“My caveat with doing a real sequel was that I want to reunite the original cast, and I want to take it onto a gigantic scale and that takes time and it has a price tag and it’s hard to pull this off because it’s multiple movies,” Kelly said. “It’s this big, gigantic, unwieldy thing that I have to sort of wrestle into submission. But in my mind, that’s what it should be. Just given the way this movie has connected with people for so long. So I’ve set out to just build the whole thing out and map the entire thing out, knowing that there’s a lot of challenges associated with doing that.”
Although Kelly said he loves the original cast, he admitted it’s “up to the marketplace to decide” whether he can move forward with his plans and that new characters would appear in the proposed sequel movies regardless. He added, rather ominously, that “we have all this wonderful technology that didn’t exist five years ago.”
The director has also detailed his ideas for the ongoing Donnie Darko story, which will explore how the characters process the shared 28-day “Tangent Universe” experience and Donnie’s death. They eventually come together to form a kind of support group that gradually becomes cult-like. People who seemed villainous in the first film may even turn out to be ordinary or sympathetic in reality, struggling to understand why they committed terrible acts within the dream universe.
A straight-to-DVD sequel to Donnie Darko previously emerged in 2009. S. Darko, starring the late Daveigh Chase as Donnie’s sister Samantha, was widely panned, and Kelly had no involvement in the project due to relinquishing the rights to the franchise when he was 24 years old. Along with Chase, actor Patrick Swayze has also passed away since the original movie was released.
After the cult success of Donnie Darko, Gyllenhaal and his sister Maggie went on to star in a long list of Hollywood movies, as did Jena Malone and Seth Rogen, who had a small part in the film. The Pitt star Noah Wyle also appeared as a doctor who gives Donnie a copy of an important book of lore called The Philosophy of Time Travel, after which this new book is presumably named.
The 10 Best Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episodes of All Time
In the increasingly distant past, Mystery Science Theater 3000 was ground-breaking television. Part send-up of 1950s kid’s programming, part puppet show, part showcase for co-creator and prop comic Joel Hodgson, MST3K became a cult sensation, especially after it moved from a Minnesota public access channel to what would become the cable channel Comedy Central in 1989. So enduringly appealing was the concept of watching a human host make fun of cheesy movies with his robot pals that MST3K endured a change of hosts from Joel to Mike Nelson in its original run, a Netflix reboot in 2017 that brought comedian Jonah Ray on as new host, and a Kickstarter-funded second reboot in 2022, in which puppeteer Emily Marsh joined Jonah and a returning Joel as new hosts.
In fact, MST3K continues to be a favorite, so much so that it’s coming back this fall for yet another season. MST3K: The Rifftrax Experiments reunites Mike Nelson with Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, who perform Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot, as well as Professor Bobo and Brain Guy with Mary Jo Pehl’s evil Pearl Forrester. The Rifftrax Experiments will consist of four new episodes, including the 1966 creature feature Sting of Death and the 1983 Roger Corman-produced sci-fi adventure, Space Raiders.
But to truly understand the appeal of MST3K, we need to go back to these foundational 10 episodes, which taught us all that the series was, in fact, far more than just a show.
Pod People
Season 3 Episode 3
Once the hottest topic on nerdy internet message boards, debates about the merits of Joel vs. Mike don’t matter as much, especially now that Jonah and Emily have entered the fold. But there’s no question that the two original hosts have their own distinct personalities and unique ways of interacting with the movies they mock. Where Mike has a sharper tongue, Joel tends to be more laid-back and kind, setting a tone matched by his puppeteers J. Elvis Weinstein and Kevin Murphy, who performed Servo, and Crow’s Trace Beaulieu, who also portrayed the mad scientist Doctor Forrester alongside Frank Conniff as TV’s Frank.
The one glowing exception may be the bit he does in the middle of Pod People, when he mocks a jerky rock star in the film by throwing up an “okay” sign and declaring, with maximum snark, “It stinks!” Of course, Pod People truly deserves any ire it receives. An off-brandE.T.directed by Spanish schlock auteur Juan Piquer Simón (he of Pieces and Slugs), Pod People melds a straight-forward alien invasion movie about monsters from the stars attacking stupid teens with a heart-warming kid’s story about a boy who bonds with the kindly Trumpy. The results are baffling and lackluster, as when Trumpy shows off his powers by levitating a bunch of knick-knacks, prompting the (again, uncharacteristicly mean) Joel to quip, “Trumpy! You can do stupid things!”
Gamera vs. Guiron
Season 3 Episode 12
Classic kaiju movies have been fodder for riffing long before Hodgson pitched his show to KTMA in Minneapolis. So it’s no surprise that the mad scientists who send movies to Joel, Mike, Jonah, and Emily would often choose pictures about people smashing models in silly rubber suits. But no monster better fit the MST3K aesthetic better than Gamera, the giant fire-breathing turtle.
The show would cover many Gamera movies, starting with Gamera at the top of season 3. But the best of the entries is easily Gamera vs. Guiron, if only because it debuts the all-time classic bit, “The Gamera Song.” Sung to the tune of the theme song that plays across the Gamera movies, “The Gamera Song” includes lyrics like, “Gamera is really neat! / Gamera is filled with meat! / We’ve been eating Gamera!” The silly lyrics capture the original movie’s mixture of kaiju horror and family-friendly bits with percocious young children, perfect for the good-hearted ribbing that Joel did so well.
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
Season 3 Episode 21
Few genres are more outlandish than holiday films, which make them perfect fodder for MST3K. Yet, even by that standard, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians stands out. The 1964 children’s sci-fi movie leans all the way into its ridiculous plot, in which a Martian overlord tries to get the children of his planet out of their stupor by kidnapping Ol’ Saint Nick and bringing him to Mars.
With its cardboard robots and desperate attempts at broad humor, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians give Joel and the ‘Bots plenty of inspiration for jokes. And they take every opportunity, mercilessly mocking the child actors’ wooden performances and calling for the death of the comedic relief character, Droppo. Yet, the holiday spirit still gives the episode a certain sweetness, best illustrated by the song, “Patrick Swayze Christmas,” in which correctly identifies Roadhouse as the greatest gift of all.
Mitchell!
Season 5 Episode 12
Surprisingly, most of the people who made the movies mocked by MST3K didn’t take it personally, and were just glad that people found some way to enjoy their films. That was not the case with Joe Don Baker, who turned in solid performances in Walking Tall and GoldenEye, but who also starred in some shabby action films. Two of those movies got the MST3K treatment, 1985’s Final Justice and 1975’s Mitchell!.
Of the two, Mitchell! makes for the better episode, thanks to its incompetent construction and the slovenly lead performance by Baker. What’s supposed to be a thriller about a gritty cop instead meanders along in dull car chases and stilted action scenes. Worse, Baker plays Mitchell as a guy who just got out of bed, which prompts the movie’s best riff. When Mitchell’s car pulls up a driveway in the middle of the night, Joel whispers, “Michell, honey, put your shoes on. We’re at grandma’s house.”
Laserblast
Season 7 Episode 6
After Joel left the show midway through season 5, he was replaced by Mike Nelson. Nelson was no stranger to the show, having served as head writer and frequent on-screen actor. But he brought with him a more sarcastic sensibility, which often resulted in more mean-spirited jokes. Few episodes demonstrate the change in tone, and Mike’s comedic skills, better than Laserblast from season 7. A production of the notorious schlock purveyor Charles Band, 1978’s Laserblast follows a teenager who becomes corrupted by an alien pendant and cannon he finds in the desert.
Laserblast isn’t good by any means, but it has some fun decisions, including a pair of stop-motion alien lizards and a pretty nasty sensibility. The film’s big swings leave the movie open to some hilarious riffs, most of all those directed at a deputy tracking the teen’s violent activities, a deputy who happens to look just like Hank Williams Jr. It’s funny enough when Mike or the ‘Bots shout “Are you ready for some football?” every time he appears on screen. But the best bit comes when the deputy gives a sullen look to his partner, prompting the riff, “You know, sometimes I think you aren’t ready for some football.”
The Giant Spider Invasion
Season 8 Episode 10
MST3K worked so well in part because it stems from the Midwest. The affability of Joel, Mike, and the various robot puppeteers softened some of their insults, making the whole thing feel like good fun. So it’s somewhat surprising that the Midwest also gave the show one of its most unpleasant films in The Giant Spider Invasion. There should be something charming about a bunch of Wisconsinites making a movie about a town terrorized by a massive arachnid. But director Bill Rebane makes the material so mean and nasty that we actually feel sorry for the audience, even despite the jokes that Mike and the ‘Bots make at its expense.
Fortunately, the jokes are pretty spectacular. The best running gag occurs every time the movie cuts to a mob gathered on screen, prompting shouts of “Packers! The Packers won the Super Bowl!” Likewise, every scene in which Alan Hale of Gilligan’s Island fame stumbles onto screen gets a laugh, especially as he tries to play an authority figure. Yet, not even Mike and the ‘Bots know what to do with a scene in which a teen girl makes a dirty joke to her father, forcing them to scream, “The movie hates us!”
Space Mutiny
Season 8 Episode 20
While all the movies on this list are great, most fans put two at the top, starting with Space Mutiny. The 1988 sci-fi thriller stars Reb Brown, a generic hunk of muscle, as Dave Ryder, a soldier who resists the villain Kalgan’s (John Phillip Law) attempts to take over the massive ship on which his people live. Also, there are space witches, and B-movie icon Cameron Mitchell, looking like Santa Claus.
Directed by David Winters, Space Mutiny has ambition to spare. It does not, however, have much in the way of budget, resulting in all sorts of mistakes for Mike and the ‘Bots to laugh at. They make jokes about everything from space witches who look like Stevie Nicks impersonators to an editing error that allows a character killed in one scene to reappear on the bridge in the next. But the best gag comes with the ridiculous names that Mike, Servo, and Crow give Brown’s character, calling him Blast Hardcheese, Crunch Buttsteak, and, uh, Bob Johnson.
Werewolf
Season 9 Episode 4
As this list shows, it generally takes at least a decade for a movie to show up on MST3K. It’s a lot more fun to mock an older film than it is to tease a new one, as the dated elements lead to better gags. Yet, the 1996 horror movie Werewolf was so bad that it only took two years for Mike and the ‘Bots to start making fun of it, showing up on a 1998 episode of the show.
On a plot level, there’s nothing particularly awful about Werewolf. It follows a guy who starts turning into a wolfman after being scratched by the skeleton of someone infected by the same curse. But the execution of the movie leaves everything to be desired, including its awkward attempt to integrate Native beliefs, the presence of Martin Sheen’s brother Joe Estevez, and every garbled line delivered by Adrianna Miles. Her mush-mouthed performance earns enough laughs by itself, but are even funnier when reinterpreted by the hosts.
The Final Sacrifice
Season 9 Episode 10
The other accepted favorite among MST3K fans is The Final Sacrifice, the 1990 adventure film directed by Tjardus Greidanus. The Final Sacrifice a.k.a. Quest for the Lost City, stars Christian Malcolm as Troy, a young man who comes under attack by cultists looking for his father’s knowledge of a hidden city. Troy’s only help comes in the form of Zap Rowsdower (Bruce J. Mitchell), perhaps the world’s least convincing tough guy.
The Final Sacrifice is the most Canadian movie ever made, which does not go unnoticed by Mike and the ‘Bots. Rowsdower in particular gets a lot of their jabs, as they joke about him thinking only of beer. Making matters worse for the movie, but better for the jokes, The Final Sacrifice pairs Rowsdower with Troy, who is played like a guileless, perfect angel. The combination prompts some of the sharpest riffs that Mike and the ‘Bots ever made, starting them taking the tone of a disapproving parent who will allow one more sacrifice, “But that’s the final sacrifice!”
Mac and Me
Season 12 Episode 1
The revival seasons of MST3K didn’t just bring on a new host. They also brought new sensibilities and a new set of films, aimed more at millennials instead of the late-boomer and Gen X audiences of the original series. Thus, Jonah and the ‘Bots got to set their sites on Mac and Me, 1988’s Coke and McDonald’s commercial masquerading as a wholesome comedy about a boy who befriends an alien.
The Netflix era was marked by faster-paced riffing, as new performers Baron Vaughn (Servo) and Hampton Yount (Crow) come from the world of stand-up comedy. That style particularly suited Mac and Me, which fills the screen with such nonsense that it’s hard to keep up. Jonah and his ‘Bots can’t catch all the insanity they see, but they get a lot of mileage out of the awkward way the protagonist’s family declares their new home “Pretty nice!”
Astro City: The Greatest Superhero Comic Not From Marvel or DC
The world of comics is lousy with Superman homages. Marvel has Hyperion, Sentry, Blue Marvel, and Guardian. Homelander and Omni-Man show the dangers of being Superman. Anime fans have All Might in My Hero Academia. Heck, DC itself has Mon-El, Icon, and Apollo (no, Captain Marvel doesn’t count). While all these versions have their positive attributes, no homage quite captures the beauty and optimism of the original article. None, except the Samaritan, the star of the 1995 story “In Dreams.”
Most of “In Dreams” follows a day in the life of the Samaritan, a day he divides into half-seconds as he goes from one emergency to another, interrupted only by social obligations he owes (ie, receiving an award from the city). Only when all his work is done can the Samaritan sleep and dream. And what does this Superman analogue dream about? Flying, floating through the sky without obligation, without meeting any demands. Such an insight would rarely happen in an issue of Superman. But they happen all the time in the pages of Astro City, the brilliant superhero comic by Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson, and Alex Ross.
Welcome to Astro City
At first glance, Astro City bears little difference from the countless other superhero comics you’d find at a local comic shop. It’s filled with variations of recognizable characters, just slightly tweaked to avoid copyright strikes.
Samaritan fights alongside the Honor Guard, a variation of the Avengers and the Justice League, complete with a take on Thor (Cleopatra), a take on Ant-Man and the Wasp (Wolfspider and Hummingbird), and an Iron Man homage called Assemblyman. There’s also a Fantastic Four copy called the First Family, and characters that recall Wonder Woman (Winged Victory) and Batman (Confessor). The whole crew fights against the Chessmen (imagine if Intergang took notes from the Royal Flush Gang), Maneater (a killer Orca, but one more like the Wonder Woman nemesis Cheetah than the Batman villain Orca), and the Astro City kingpin of crime, the Deacon.
Yet, Busiek, Anderson, and Ross fill the city with other characters that don’t have any clear analogues, characters who exist only to celebrate the superhero comic genre. Chief among these is Jack-in-the-Box, a clown-based superhero who fights crime through merciless quips and goofy gadgets. Busiek may have reused a rejected Spider-Man pitch for Astro City #3, the issue that first debuts the character, But Jack-in-the-Box has a strangeness that makes him entirely his own. The same could be said of the living Barbie doll Beautie or the evil mastermind the Conquistador.
Whether original creations or obvious riffs, these characters allow Astro City to do what it does best: playing with the tropes of superhero stories to find moments of pathos that Marvel and DC too often ignore.
Sympathy for the Supervillain
Nothing demonstrates this tendency better than the 1997 story “Show ‘Em All,” published in Astro City #10. “Show ‘Em All” focuses on Hiram Potterstone a.k.a. the Junkman. Once a talented engineer at a research firm, Hiram was pushed out of the company due to a mandatory retirement rule and his advanced age prevented him from getting employment anywhere. Because he couldn’t earn an honest living, Hiram used his talents for evil, taking on the persona of the Junkman and relocating to a local junkyard. There, he repurposed discarded appliances and electronics to become his gadgets.
By the time that the issue opens, Junkman had already tangled with Jack-in-the-Box and other Astro City heroes time and again. But this time, he’s prepared. This time, it will be different. What follows in those next pages is the perfect crime, with Junkman showing both ingenuity and patience as he takes millions from a local bank, right under the nose of Jack-in-the-Box and the other heroes. Undetected, Junkman slips away to a tropical island, where he can live out his last days in ease.
There’s just one problem: Hiram doesn’t want to go quietly. So when he overhears others gushing about the superheroes, Hiram can’t help but let some details slip about his perfect heist. The revelations don’t lead to his undoing. No one takes the information and gives it to the superheroes, so that Junkman can pay for his crimes. Instead, no one believes him. They laugh at Hiram, refusing to accept that a feeble old man like him could ever outsmart a superhero.
And so Junkman returns to Astro City and again starts committing crimes. But this time, he doesn’t do it in secret. Instead, he stages spectacular capers and draws the attention of superheroes, battling them out in the open. He even beats most of them, before finally losing to his arch-enemy Jack-in-the-Box. In the final pages of “Show ‘Em All,” Hiram sits in the courtroom and listens to the prosecutor outlines his crimes, smiling with satisfaction when the prosecutor gives him full credit for being a criminal mastermind.
Super, Human
“Show ‘Em All” doesn’t do anything groundbreaking on a plot level. It’s just about a criminal who robbed some banks, and eventually was stopped by a superhero. The same is true of “In Dreams,” a story that’s just about a Superman-type saving the day again and again. Such stories have been told countless times since superhero comics were invented in 1938.
But Astro City isn’t about reinventing the superhero plot. Busiek is certainly capable of telling high-concept action stories; after all, he was making Astro City around the same time as his legendary run on The Avengers with George Pérez, which includes the mind-bending series Avengers Forever, and shares a lot of DNA with the DC Comics crossover, JLA/Avengers. That’s just not what he’s interested in here.
Instead, Astro City gives Busiek space to examine the actual human beings behind the outrageous costumes. And unlike most stories about superheroes with feet of clay, he doesn’t immediately veer toward the cynical. This isn’t Watchmen, with its ironically impotent superpowers, or the fascist madness of The Dark Knight Returns. Astro City is just a collection of stories about people. People who wear cool costumes and travel across dimensions, people who can fly through the sky. But also people who just want to be recognized for their achievements and just want to dream at night. People like you and me.
Ridley Scott Takes Aim at Hollywood’s Obsession With Superheroes and FBI Agents
Ridley Scott’s new film, The Dog Stars, is set for its theatrical release this week, and its director still seems to be as fired up about the state of storytelling as he was when he claimed that most of the filmmaking world’s output these days is “shit,” suggesting that Hollywood seems fixated on telling the same three stories these days.
“Look, everything now is about a murdered girl in the woods, or an FBI agent who is better than anyone else – or a superhero,” he told The Times. “Fuck me! There have to be other stories to tell.”
Though it’s easy to see why Scott might be preoccupied with some of Hollywood’s most visible commercial movies, and mainstream entertainment is certainly packed with serial-killer and murdered-woman thrillers, procedurals about unusually capable FBI agents, and superhero flicks, there are also plenty of stories being told that avoid those labels. Audiences still gravitate to original stories, as proved by the recent success of films like Backrooms and One Battle After Another, and acclaimed shows such as Hacks, The Bear, and Severance. Maybe we can sit him down to watch Silo or Widow’s Bay on Apple TV?
This year’s biggest films have admittedly been dominated by superheroes, sequels and well-worn IP, but 2026 has also produced a pretty clear counterexample to Scott’s argument in Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Project Hail Mary, a new adaptation that raked in almost $700 million globally.
Regardless, Scott says he’s keen to keep making original stories himself, claiming he’s “vulnerable” every time he does, but that he now sees himself as an influencer rather than a filmmaker. “I never want to repeat myself and all my films have been on the money. I’ve been ahead of the game frequently and, if you’re ahead of the game, you’re an influencer. So I’m not a filmmaker, I’m an influencer.”
Planning ahead, Scott also notes that he’s still yet to direct a Western, and has cast Hugh Jackman in a forthcoming adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, adding, “I want to do a musical and, also, have a marvelous film about the African elephant.”
While we await Scott’s film on the African elephant, there will be plenty more superhero movies and shows about savvy FBI agents. But there will be other things, too. Whether any of them will change the 88-year-old director’s mind on the state of Hollywood remains to be seen.
Playtonic Games Brings a Fighting Edge to Racing with Super Yooka-Laylee Kart
“I know that people are kind of expecting Diddy Kong Racing, like a copy & paste,” muses Playtonic Games studio head Gavin Price in an exclusive interview with Den of Geek. “I’m sure that a lot of people would be happy with that. But we have enough developer integrity to say ‘no’ and that we’ve got to advance and move things on. When I look at the potential to create our own flavor of a single-player game and really take advantage of our studio humor and Yooka-Layleeness. That needs to come through otherwise it’s a wasted opportunity.”
After developing two platforming games starring the fan-favorite duo Yooka and Laylee, Playtonic has taken the adventurous pair and their supporting cast into the realm of kart racing with the upcoming title Super Yooka-Laylee Kart. Formally announced as part of Summer Game Fest 2026’s Day of the Devs presentation, the game has players take on opponents in tightly competitive races with a pixelated art style reminiscent of Super Mario Kart. While many of the Playtonic team had previously been with Rare, the studio that developed the landmark kart racing game Diddy Kong Racing for the Nintendo 64, the developers aren’t interested in reheating leftovers but instead looking to push the genre forward.
Just looking at Super Yooka-Laylee Kart in action and it’s clear that Playtonic is subverting expectations and doing something new and exciting for kart racers. Yes, the experience is still very much a high-octane racing game, but there are visible fighting game influences to the gameplay too, with each racer having special moves and rage meter that builds up as they endure the setbacks that come from each intensely competitive race. More than just heightening the action and unpredictability in a given race, the volatile fighting game sensibilities add to the overall strategy that Playtonic has incorporated into the gameplay. To reflect those influences and engaging spectacle, the studio has ensured that even the game’s sound design reflects the bombastic action.
“We’re a karting game with a fighting game vibe,” explains Price. “When you close your eyes, this should sound as much like a fighter as a karting game. We have really nice and full bangs and crashes. I always say that the sound that gets me excited is when you press start in Super Punch-Out and the punch lands. That punch sound effect is so juicy and fantastic. That’s the bar for this.”
That sense of strategy extends to everything from coins that players pick up to improve their baseline speed to the way they can position something as seemingly innocuous as speed boosts on the stage. Coins can also be banked to buy upgrades between races during a grand prix or thrown at opponents as projectile weapons while boosts can be used to send unprepared opponents rocketing off the track or placed backwards to work as a sort of reverse-bumper. Even the act of approaching boosts on the track is strategic, with players getting a bigger boost if they jump directly on the strip but run the risk of accidentally jumping over it as part of Playtonic’s emphasis on rewarding raw talent.
“I’m from the age of Super Mario Kart where skill reigns supreme,” Price observes. “The best player won every single time and you earned every victory. Party games are more inclusive and you can play with your kids, where it’s more about luck. We’re definitely aiming more towards a skill-based experience. We think that this is going to be seriously competitive online.”
At the same time, Playtonic knows how to bring in the unabashed fun to the experience rather than providing nothing but cutthroat competitive racing, with plenty of options to make the races even wackier. The game allows for eight-person local multiplayer along with online multiplayer modes available to players to make the party even bigger. This comes in addition to the game’s tournaments, story mode campaign, time trials, and challenges that make this one of the most feature-rich racing games to come along in recent memory.
“There’s all this customization in the game so you can change speed, physics, bounciness, collisions, events occurring, what the surfaces are on each race track,” notes Price. “You can make everyone play invisible or shrunk down. There is tons of stuff so you can make a fun karting hang-out game for your friends, when you do need a respite from being competitive.”
Playtonic Games is currently taking requests from fans to participate in the game’s second playtest through its Steam page as the team continues to finetune the experience ahead of its eventual release. With each successive playtest and alpha and beta session, the creators are paying close attention to see how fans are responding as they set out to develop the ultimate kart racing experience. After years of perceived stagnation from the genre, Playtonic is ready to leave its own mark on kart racers and take things to the next level.
“We’ve got almost 35 years of bubbled-up ideas and frustration pouring out,” Price remarks. “We have to keep showing what’s going to be the next great thing about the game and build the hype trajectory up. This is such a big passion project for everyone on the team.”
Developed by Playtonic Games and published by Playtonic Friends, Super Yooka-Laylee Kart is coming soon with the studio taking requests to participate in its second playtest onthe game’s Steam page.
Robert Downey Jr. Understands the Biggest Problem Facing Avengers: Doomsday
In a wide-ranging conversation with CBR about Avengers: Infinity War, star Robert Downey Jr. and co-director Joe Russo have discussed the successful formula behind their Marvel blockbuster and the challenges this year’s Avengers: Doomsday faces as a result.
Infinity War shocked fans when it debuted in 2018. It was a high-octane chase movie that ended with the heroes losing and Thanos completing his mission to erase half of all life in the universe. There would be no real happy ending for some of the MCU’s major characters in the follow-up film either, with Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark and Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff sacrificing their lives for the cause.
Russo acknowledged that Infinity War was tough to pull off, and said he recently confessed to filmmaker Steven Soderbergh that making films like it is “really fucking hard” because they were “grinding it over and over and over obsessively for the two and a half years that we’re working on that project to make sure that [Downey Jr.] is happy and [Chris] Hemsworth’s happy and [Tom] Holland’s happy and [Chris] Evans is happy and Scarlett’s happy and everyone feels fulfilled.”
Despite the grind, Downey Jr. cited Infinity War as “the most important” one they’ve done so far, later adding that “I think people who see the films, they remember where they were at, where they were in school, where they were working, where they were bringing their kid the first time to see one of these films.”
Looking back at the impact of Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, Downey Jr. also seemed to understand that Doomsday’s potential success wouldn’t depend entirely on his performance as the villainous Doctor Doom and that one of the biggest problems facing the film is being compared to the last two Avengers outings. He suggests they’ve found a solution.
“It’s not even about how I executed it,” he said. “It’s about the way it’s been structured and the other characters. There’s something going on in Doomsday and forward that is literally the only antidote to ‘How do you not have these films be a letdown after an Infinity War and Endgame?’ And boy, have we laboured long and hard to bring that.”
Russo added, “The stakes keep going up. But emotional complexity is always the answer. You bring emotional complexity to anything, and it enriches it and makes it a fuller experience for the audience. It surprises you. There are a lot of surprises in this, and I think it’s the most emotionally complex of all of them. In a lot of ways, the most mature of all of them.”
Marvel Studios has struggled to recapture the highs of Infinity War and Endgame since 2019, spreading itself thin across theatrical releases and Disney+ TV projects. While some projects have been well received, including WandaVision, which Downey Jr. said kept him “connected” to the MCU during the pandemic, others have fallen flat or failed to create the same excitement in the fan base.
However, the studio is now well positioned to launch Avengers: Doomsday. With a scaled-back rollout plan and momentum from the box-office success of Deadpool & Wolverine and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, audiences are more than ready to see the Avengers in action again this December.
Hopefully, Doomsday will also avoid being unfavorably compared to Infinity War and Endgame, but the proof will be in the pudding.
Lanterns: What Does ‘Mogo Doesn’t Socialize’ Mean?
This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 2.
We still aren’t getting many scenes of Hal Jordan and John Stewart in green tights, but the second episode of Lanterns has a lot of comic book weirdness. Not only do the Manhunters get a mention and John makes a construct, but we also see a lantern tucked away in a pocket dimension. Hal and his fellow GLs have been keeping their lanterns in pocket dimensions since John Broome and Gil Kane have been telling their stories in the early Silver Age. But the most exciting reference might be the passphrase that Hal uses to give John access to his pocket dimension.
When John walks up to the box that hides access to the dimension, he lifts up the phone and asks Hal to speak. “Mogo doesn’t socialize,” declares Hal. That answer doesn’t just open the box, it also excites comic book fans in the audience, who know that phrase as the title of a classic story by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, the creative team behind Watchmen.
“Mogo Doesn’t Socialize” appears in 1985’s Green Lantern #188, as part of series of back-up stories called Tales of the Green Lantern Corps. The Green Lantern Corps were one of the innovations that Broome, Kane, and editor Julius Schwartz made when they reinvented the Green Lantern concept for the Silver Age. The original, Golden Age Green Lantern was Alan Scott, a man who made a magical wishing ring out of a meteorite that fell to Earth. 1959’s Showcase Comics #22 introduced Hal Jordan as the latest recruit into the Green Lantern Corps, a set of intergalactic peacekeepers who worked for the Guardians of the Universe.
Broome and Kane quickly began developing the Green Lantern Corps, introducing fellow members such as Tomar-Re in 1961’s Green Lantern #6 and Katma Tui in 1964’s Green Lantern #30, as well as Corpsman-turned-villain Sinestro in 1961’s Green Lantern #7. However, the other members of the Corps never got much attention until the 1981 miniseries Tales of the Green Lantern Corps by Mike W. Barr, Len Wein, and Joe Staton, and even that still had Hal Jordan front and center. Starting in 1982 with Green Lantern #148, back-up stories introduced readers to other members of the Green Lantern Corps, often weird aliens with wildly different backstories.
The anthology format meant writers could experiment with the Green Lantern concept, which drew the attention of Alan Moore, who would do some of his best DC Comics work in his three Green Lantern Corps stories. “Tygers” in Green Lantern Corps Annual #2 explains why Hal Jordan’s predecessor trusted a spaceship instead of his ring, creating a horror tale about the hellish planet Ysmault and introducing the Daxamite Green Lantern Sodam Yat. In the next issue of Green Lantern Corps Annual from 1987, the story “Blackest Night” sends Katma Tui to recruit Rot Lop Fan, a worthy member of a race who lives in complete darkness, and thus does not understand the concept of colors and lights. Together, the two find a way to communicate, with Rot Lop Fan interpreting Green Lantern powers as differences in sound, and eventually becoming the Lantern of the F-Sharp Bell.
“Mogo Doesn’t Socialize” combines Moore’s boundless imagination with the mandate to use Tales backups to develop the Corps. The story follows a merciless bounty hunter called Bolphunga the Unrelenting, who takes a mission to capture the Green Lantern known as Mogo. Bolphunga traces the GL to a distant planet, and begins announcing his intentions to capture his quarry. When Mogo does not respond, Bolphunga thinks that his boasts have scared his target, and begins scouring the forest to find Mogo. But every creature he finds lacks a Green Lantern ring, and therefore cannot be Mogo.
It’s only when Bolphunga looks at the map that he’s drawn of the planet, noticing the shape of the green forest and the various fields he’s charted, that he begins to realize. The terrified Bolphunga quickly packs up his gear and rushes back to his ship. As he flies away, we finally get a good look at the planet from a distance, and realize that the forests on the surface form a Green Lantern ring. That’s because Mogo is the planet, a sentient planet and member of the Green Lantern Corps.
“Mogo Doesn’t Socialize” uses a frame narrative in which the veteran Tomar-Re explains to the teenage recruit Arisia (not yet in an adult body and dating Hal Jordan) why she’s never seen Mogo at any of the Lantern gatherings. And, indeed, Mogo rarely appeared again on the page, outside of a brief reference in one of the nightmarish prophecies in “Tygers.”
But when Geoff Johns took over Green Lantern in the 2000s, he began borrowing heavily from those three Alan Moore stories, turning them from interesting genre exercises to straightforward superhero tales. Rot Lop Fan finally fights alongside the Corps in the 2011 War of the Green Lanterns crossover. Atrocitus, founder of the Red Lantern Corps, hails from Ysmault and is associated with the demons who taunted Abin Sur in “Tygers.” Moreover, the “Blackest Night” teased by the demons of “Tygers” becomes the center of DC Comics crossover that ran between 2009 and 2010, in which the Black Lantern Corps resurrects the dead. And Mogo does indeed start to socialize, becoming a regular figure in Green Lantern storylines—starting with 2006’s Green Lantern Corps #2, penciled by Patrick Gleason and written by Mogo’s co-creator Dave Gibbons.
Still, as popular as he’s become, Mogo can only participate so much in mainline DC Comics stories because, well, he’s a whole living planet. So don’t expect him to show up on Lanterns, unless that show wants to take a page from DC Studios co-head James Gunn and give Mogo a human body, just like Ego the Living Planet had inGuardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Barring that, we’ll just have to accept that Mogo doesn’t socialize on TV either, and make do with a cheeky reference on Lanterns.
Lanterns debuts new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.
Lanterns: The Manhunters Are The Messiest Bad Guys in DC History
This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 2.
We’re only two episodes in, and Lanterns has already had a lot more comic book weirdness than some detractors had guessed from the trailers. But when John Stewart asks Hal Jordan about Manhunters, Lanterns gets really weird. Most fans of Green Lantern comics know Manhunters as the killer androids created by the Guardians of the Universe before the Green Lantern Corps, unfeeling and brutal enforcers of justice who have become one of the Lanterns’ most bitter enemies.
But behind the scenes, the Manhunters are some of the most convoluted characters in DC Comics history, the result of multiple retcons and revisions. So while John and Hal know Manhunters as killer robots, other DC Comics fans may think the Lanterns are talking about something else… and they may be correct.
The Secret Origin of the Manhunters
Here is the official DC lore about Manhunters: Eons ago, the citizens of the planet Maltus achieved perfect utopia and immortality, and devoted themselves to scientific research. However, one of their number, a scientist named Krona, went too far and found a way to witness the dawn of creation. Doing so introduced evil into the universe, filling the Maltusans with regret. As penance, a group of Maltusans became the Guardians of the Universe, and searched for a way to enforce justice and protect the innocent.
One of their early experiments in this project was the creation of the Manhunters, androids infused with the same emerald energy that would later power the Green Lantern Corps. Initially, the Manhunters did their job well. But they grew dissatisfied with what they perceived as weakness in their masters and eventually rebelled, pursuing their idea of justice without remorse. When the Manhunters killed nearly everyone in Space Sector 666, the Guardians sent the androids into exile, spread across many planets, including Earth.
The Manhunters disguised themselves as citizens on these planets and, on Earth, established a cult. The Manhunter Cult, led by a mustachioed man called the Grandmaster, would recruit humans of exceptional skill and send them on dangerous missions. The most famous example is Mark Shaw, who became an ally of Batman and the Justice League before leading the crime organization Leviathan. The Manhunters also prepared for the next step of human evolution by placing sleeper agents in the lives of prominent superheroes, replacing people like Commissioner James Gordon and Superman‘s childhood pal Pete Ross with robot imposters in the much-reviled 1988 DC crossover Millennium.
Despite their defeat in Millennium, the Manhunters regularly show up to hassle Green Lanterns, making them one of the franchise’s most reliable villains. But they didn’t start that way.
The Many Messy Manhunters
The android Manhunters described above debuted in 1977’s Justice League of America #140-141, by Steve Englehart and Dick Dillin. However, characters called Manhunter had existed in the DC Universe for decades by that point, going all the way back to 1941’s Adventure Comics #58. The story “Manhunt on the Sun Limited,” written and penciled by Ed Moore, introduces Paul Kirk, Manhunter, a plain-clothes detective who goes on dangerous assignments.
Paul Kirk starred in several stories in Adventure Comics. But a year later, DC (then called National Comics) wanted to reinvent the character as a superhero. And so in 1942’s Adventure Comics #73, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon (the creators of Captain America), introduce Rick Nelson, a big game hunter who decides to hunt criminals under the code name “Manhunter.” The character reappears in Adventure Comics #74 the very next month, back in the same red and blue costume he wore in the previous issue. But now, Kirby and Simon called the character Paul Kirk, effectively erasing the Rick Nelson identity altogether.
So already, we have two, potentially three, DC characters called Manhunter. To make matters worse, 1942’s Police Comics #8 introduces a new hero called Manhunter, police officer Dan Richards, who fights crime with his trusty dog. Police Comics was published by Quality Comics, a rival to National. But in 1956, DC purchased Quality’s characters and integrated them into their universe, which means that DC suddenly had four potential Manhunters.
Despite the mess of Manhunters, none of them got much attention beyond the 1940s. And by the time 1955’s Detective Comics #225 introduced J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, the company wisely avoided giving Shaw or Kirk or Richards much attention. But when Jack Kirby returned to DC Comics after co-creating the Marvel Universe in the 1960s, he pitched a new Manhunter series. This series introduced Mark Shaw, a member of the Manhunter Cult led by the Grandmaster. The first issue of this series appeared in 1975’s 1st Issue Special, an anthology series meant to drum up interest for potential ongoings, but it never caught on. Thus, Shaw and his Manhunters were largely forgotten… that is, until Englehart brought them back and reimagined them as robot Green Lantern villains for Justice League of America #140.
While the two Justice League stories were strong, they weren’t exactly groundbreaking. But Englehart kept the idea around when he became the writer of Green Lantern and made the new Manhunters the center of the company-wide crossover he was writing, Millennium. From that point on, Manhunters became synonymous with the robot villains, easily overshadowing any other DC Manhunter, with the exception of J’onn J’onzz.
No One Escapes the Manhunters
So what became of the previous Manhunters? Retcons have explained that Paul Kirk and Mark Shaw have been influenced in some way by the android Manhunters. Only Dan Richards remained unaffiliated, and even he eventually gets killed by Shaw, who has since become a full villain. The Manhunter identity was most recently used by Kate Spencer, a federal prosecutor who took on the identity to catch criminals who beat the system. She has nothing to do with androids or the Manhunter Cult, but she does have some connection to the Green Lantern Corps, as she wears a decommissioned uniform of the Darkstars, a rival set of space cops created by a group of Maltusans who became the Controllers.
And what of poor J’onn J’onzz? Can he be the Martian Manhunter without having to worry about robots? Apparently not, as the 2003 Justice League storyline “Trial By Fire” (JLA #84-90, written by Joe Kelly, reveals that when the Guardians were designing the Manhunters, they took inspiration from Martian police, the same police force that J’onn J’onzz would eventually join, thus linking Martian Manhunter to the Manhunters.
Hey, what’s one more retcon when it comes to the messy world of DC Comics and the Manhunters?
Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.
Lanterns Episode 2 Review: Charging Up By Powering Down
This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 2.
At the start of Green Lantern #192 (1985), by Steve Englehart and Joe Staton, the supervillain Star Sapphire carries Hal Jordan into the air and drops him. Despite the fact that Hal no longer wears a power ring, having rescinded his membership in the Green Lantern Corps months earlier, he remains unafraid. He looks around as he plummets, searching for a way to continue his mission, despite the fact that he no longer has superpowers.
Nothing from that issue appears in the second episode of Lanterns, “Trust Fall,” but it’s hard not to recall that scene of a powerless Hal. The episode strips Hal of his power almost immediately, having his ring run out of charge in the first 10 minutes and sending John on a mission back to Coast City, California, to retrieve his battery to recharge. And yet, it still finds ways to be a compelling sci-fi mystery, even if Green Lantern can’t be Green Lantern.
Now that introductions are out of the way—including, it should be said, the death of Hal Jordan in 2026, something that episode two doesn’t even mention—”Trust Fall” can spend more time doing what Lanterns really wants to do, probing an alien mystery. Directed by James Hawes and written by Vanessa Baden Kelly and showrunner Chris Mundy, the episode spends most of its time sending Hal and John on separate missions before building to a trip off-planet to visit Sinestro, the big bad of the Green Lantern franchise.
Before flying to the Green Lantern Corps headquarters on the planet Oa, Hal plays the gumshoe in Rushville. That means breaking into the morgue and dragging the (very naked) victims of last week’s shootings through the metal-detectors around town, which reveal themselves to be alien detectors. These sequences also give Hal more time alone with Sheriff Kerry, a pairing that’s good for plot purposes, but even better for letting viewers enjoy the chemistry between the two. Even thirty years after Trainspotting, it’s easy to underestimate Kelly Macdonald, who seemed like a shy bumpkin out of her depth in the pilot, only to reveal herself as more than capable in “Trust Fall.” When she dresses down Hal for treating the fruit of his labor as a big revelation about aliens in the town, telling him, “Congratulations, you’re now caught up to me,” the viewer feels as if she’s talking to us too.
For his part, John gets sent across the country to retrieve Hal’s power battery. Although Hal calls it another training mission, John correctly realizes that Hal wants him out of the way. Annoying as that may be for Hal, it’s good news for us, because this segment indulges in a lot of deep Green Lantern lore, including name dropping a classic Alan Moore story, showing Hal’s battery hidden in a pocket dimension, and a look at Earl, Hal’s alien plant and a nod to Itty, the pet sidekick Hal had in comics from the late ’70s.
As with the pilot episode, those nods to nerdy stuff help fans accept the moments when the show veers away from comic book stuff. In particular, that comes when John gets abducted by Antaan (Paul Ben-Victor), leader of the aliens who have come to Rushville. Antaan reveals his group’s mission to find and execute a Manhunter, the last surviving member of a race of brutal enforcers responsible for wiping out several species, including his. Antaan gives John an ultimatum, to find and deliver the Manhunter to him in 48 hours, or he and his people will self-destruct like Waylon did in the pilot to kill the Manhunter, destroying much of Rushville in the process.
To convince John of the importance of their mission, Anton injects him with a liquid that allows him to live out his people’s genocide. And it’s at this point that viewers will either totally fall in love with Lanterns, or start to drop off. Because as much as Antaan demands that John “see” what the Manhunters did to his people, Lanterns doesn’t show us anything. All we get to see is a bunch of humans holding down another human, who makes a sad, suffering face.
To be clear, it’s an incredible piece of acting by Aaron Pierre. Once again, he gives a complex performance as John, constantly finding new ways of letting his character’s emotions seep through the calm exterior he’s been forced to adopt. And when he’s crying and writhing at the pain of what Antaan makes him witness, we believe that he’s seeing something horrific. Likewise, veteran character actor Ben-Victor feels like an alien in disguise, properly menacing but also not particularly bloodthirsty, even when talking about killing innocents.
But is that enough for people who want to see aliens and superheroes in a Green Lantern show? For some, a bunch of normal people pretending to be aliens and fight sequences that involve kicking and punching, but no constructs, may answer, “No,” even after we get our first look at Ulrich Thomsen as a properly diabolical Sinestro. But for this long-time Green Lantern reader, Lanterns‘s desire to be both human and superheroic works, if only because a falling Hal Jordan, unpowered but unfearful, showed me that the human part of a Green Lantern story is just as important as the weird aliens.
Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.
Green Lantern Illuminations:
Given the rivalry between Hal and Batman in the past 20 years of DC Comics, it’s somewhat satisfying to see Hal do more detective work than Batman ever has on screen.
As cool as it is to see Sinestro in a Sciencecell on Oa, they couldn’t give us a peak at one other Lantern while he was there? Salaak’s not running things? Kilowog’s not on patrol? Heck, we’d even take Deeter or Kreon at this point.
Let’s talk about Antaan. In the comics, the Manhunters greatest sin was committing genocide in Sector 666, leaving only a small group of survivors. One of those survivors was Atros, who became Atrocitus, leader of the rage-filled Red Lantern Corps. Great as Ben-Victor is, he doesn’t exactly have Atrocitus energy. And, as a long-time comic reader who is very, very tired of Corps War stories, I’m personally hoping Lanterns doesn’t get into the other Corps. But if Antaan isn’t Atrocitus, who is he?
We get confirmation this episode that Coast City is in California. I always understood Coast City to be DC’s San Diego, so why does Hal have a Texan accent? The real answer is that Chandler modeled his performance on Sam Shepard in The Right Stuff, but it is distracting.
The GTA 6 Leak Situation Explained
The past week has turned into full-blown chaos for Rockstar Games, as a wave of leaked Grand Theft Auto VI footage has spiraled into a legal fight over the identity of the person, or people, behind them.
The ordeal started roughly around August 18, when gameplay clips began circulating online under the alias “Cyberleek.” The material, ranging from short clips to map details, spread first through underground forums before jumping to mainstream platforms like Twitter/X and Reddit.
The leaker also launched a website featuring a manifesto, dubbed “The CYBERLEEK Edict,” that criticized monetization practices in the gaming industry and Rockstar specifically, while also directing attention toward a self-promoted cryptocurrency token.
The manifesto lays out three “commandments” the group or individual says publishers must follow to avoid being targeted: no selling digital pre-orders, no selling “fake” single-player DLC already baked into game files, and mandatory offline access for single-player content after servers shut down.
In the website’s final word section of the manifesto, Cyberleek leaves a warning: “Publishers should beware. If CYBERLEEK can reach Rockstar, no one is safe. This is a message to all big corpo: behave, or be the next target.”
The leaks continued in the days that followed, arriving just ahead of Rockstar’s planned “Extended Look” reveal, scheduled to premiere on Netflix onAugust 27. Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar’s parent company, responded by filing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests against posts sharing the footage of any leaks.
By far the most serious development, at least for gamers, came from signs that Cyberleek’s access may go far beyond a handful of stolen clips. Reporting by IGN has suggested the leaker likely has, or had, access to a full playable build of the game, rather than a limited cache of pre-recorded videos, raising the possibility that significantly more material could be revealed, potentially even content about the game’s ending.
The situation escalated legally on August 20, when Take-Two filed multiple federal subpoenas in the Southern District Court of New York, as reported first by Kotaku.
The legal order will target Microsoft and Discord, seeking records tied to the Cyberleek persona, including account details, IP addresses, linked devices, and identifying information for members of Discord servers connected to the leaks.
Take-Two has stated that the subpoenas are meant strictly “to obtain the identity of an alleged infringer or infringers” for the purpose of protecting its copyright. Both Microsoft and Discord have been given until September 4 to comply and produce the requested investigative records.
But despite this legal pressure, Cyberleek has continued posting new material even after the subpoenas became public, including additional gameplay footage shared the same day the filings were reported.
The stakes for getting caught are well established for those who go toe-to-toe with Rockstar and Take-Two. Arion Kurtaj, the hacker behind the massive 2022 GTA 6 leak, was sentenced to an indefinite stay in a secure psychiatric hospital in 2023 after being deemed a high risk to reoffend and is now awaiting a retrial that, ironically, is scheduled for the same month GTA 6 launches.
As of now, Rockstar Games has not issued any official public statement addressing the leaks, Cyberleek’s demands, or the ongoing legal action; the DMCA takedowns and court filings from Take-Two remain the only response so far.
GTA 6 remains on track for a November 19, 2026, release.
Mizu Is Back: Blue Eye Samurai Season 2’s Release Date Window and First Teaser Revealed
The hunt is back on. Netflix’s Blue Eye Samurai is officially gearing up for another round of blood-soaked justice, and fans finally have a date to mark on their calendars.
The streamer announced that season 2 will premiere sometime during January 2027 at Anime NYC, ending a wait that has stretched on since the series first debuted in late 2023. Alongside the announcement, Netflix also released a teaser trailer that offered a first look at what’s ahead for Mizu’s bloody quest for revenge.
Blue Eye Samurai became one of Netflix’s most acclaimed animated series almost immediately after release, holding a 97% approval rate on Rotten Tomatoes. The show also won three juried Emmys for Outstanding Individual Achievement on August 14, 2024, for animation in storyboard, production design, and character design.
Later the same year, in September, the show won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program, beating out competition like X-Men ‘97, Bob’s Burgers, and The Simpsons.
Created by husband-and-wife team Michael Green and Amber Noizumi, the show follows Mizu (voiced by Maya Erskine), a mixed-race, blue-eyed swordswoman living in disguise as a man in Edo-period Japan while hunting down the four white men responsible for her tragic past.
Season 1 ended with Mizu leaving Japan behind, setting sail for London with her captive, Abijah Fowler (voiced by Kenneth Branagh), in tow, in pursuit of the remaining two men on her list. As the official logline for season 2 details, Mizu’s revenge-fueled hunt continues, facing new friends, old foes, and her own demons.
Back in Japan, other key characters carry their own arcs forward: Akemi (voiced by Brenda Song) and Taigen (voiced by Darren Barnet) navigate a treacherous political landscape under a dangerous new shogun in Edo Castle, while Ringo (voiced by Masi Oka) searches for a sense of purpose away from his old life.
The teaser opens mid-voyage after a brief glimpse of the events from season 1, showing Mizu aboard a ship looking out at a nasty storm in the distance. Scenes flash between London and the swordswoman’s status at sea, contrasting London in a warm glow of hope with the tumultuous sea being painted in cool blue tones that instill a true sense of dread for Mizu’s survival.
Events crescendo as Mizu’s whole crew seemingly is swept away into the ocean, the storm Mizu spotted having caught up with the ship. But, of course, Mizu does not back down and declares that she once again chooses revenge as waves crash down around her. The next scene shows Mizu passed out and tied stubbornly to a part of the ship to ensure her goal of revenge is enacted when, from behind, a mysterious shadow appears and points a katana towards her.
Netflix didn’t stop at announcing season 2 either, adding that the series will officially end with a third season that is slated to debut in 2028. With that endpoint confirmed, fans can rest easy and watch the new season knowing exactly how much of the journey is left and that Mizu’s reckoning is building towards a definitive finish, not an open-ended one previously feared.
Blue Eye Samurai season 2 premieres on Netflix in January 2027.
Train to Busan Director Yeon Sang-ho on Colony and the Fear of Community
At first glance, the new movie Colony seems to cover a lot of the same ground that South Korean director Yeon Sang-ho explored in his 2016 breakout Train to Busan. In Colony, people transform into rabid killers and invade a public space, this time a shopping mall instead of a commuter train. But where the monsters of Train to Busan remained mindless beasts, Colony features creatures who evolve and learn to communicate and become a single community. And that’s truly scary to Director Yeon.
“For me, zombies illustrate the peril of collectivity,” Director Yeon tells Den of Geek. “They can illustrate artistic ides, but they can also represent the hidden fears of a given time.”
Colony stars Jun Ji-hyun as Kwon Se-jeong, a biology professor known for her brilliance and for her anti-social tendancies. Along with her ex-husband Han Gyu-seong (Go Soo) Kwon is invited to a tech conference at the prestigious Dongwoo-ri Building, where disgruntled scientist Seo Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) has unleashed a biological weapon. The victims become part of a hive-mind, communicating perfectly with one another and moving as a collective, even as they evolve. To survive, Kwon must work with a motly crew that includes security guard Choi Hyun-seok (Ji Chang-wook), his wheelchair-bound sister Choi Hyun-hee (Kim Shin-rok), and Han’s current wife, Gong Seol-hee (Shin Hyun-been), who monitors the action from outside the Dongwoo-ri Building.
For Director Yeon, the juxtaposition of the makeshift community created by the survivors and the hive-mind of the colony allows him to use horror to explore pressing issues. “In Colony, the zombies represent the outcome of society’s tendency toward collective thinking. It’s made possible by the rapid exchange of information, through social networks and now AI issues,” he points out.
“In the early processes of AI development, the program just mimics being human. Colony symbolizes all of these trends.”
But the threat of Colony isn’t all technological, as Seo uses material from fungi, making the movie’s zombies cousins to the cordyceps seen in The Last of Us. “There are natural organisms existing that show these traits,” observes Director Yeon. “As they develop, they all have the same ideas, and start to exist as one entity.
“However, those organisms also understand the danger of being such a creature. If it gets taken over by some threat, they can all perish at once,” he notes. “I realized that human society also has this mind. You know, it’s nice that we can have consensus on things, and we can think alike sometimes. That’s beautiful. However, if you don’t respect minority opinions, then society cannot be healthy. If society wants to keep functioning in a healthy way, we have to make that balance.”
Thus, while the monsters in Colony represent society at its unhealthiest, the diverse group of survivors represents a healthier society, as do the surprising familial relations on display in the film. The latter points to a theme that Director Yeon has explored throughout his filmography, including the central father/daughter relationship in Train to Busan.
“Family is the minimum unit of society, but not all family relationships are healthy,” he says. “In Train to Busan, especially at the ending scene [in which a now-orphaned young girl (Kim Su-an) bonds with a widowed woman (Jung Yu-mi)], we see that people without blood relations can form a sort of family.
We see something similar in the friendship formed between Kwon and Gong Seol-hee, who only have their connection with Han Gyu-seong in common. “They form this solidarity and make connections. It wasn’t easy for them to do so, but they become friends and collaborators.
“That’s sharply contrasted toward the zombies. They form a collective entity, but without any empathy toward each other,” he continues. “Because in Colony, I use Kwon Se-jeong to show someone who isn’t afraid of being an outsider. She shows that it’s dangerous to join into crowds without making your own contribution just because you’re afraid of being alone. In order to maintain our humanity, we have to be individual and think independently.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean that Director Yeon opposes all forms of outside influence, as demonstrated by the debt to horror master George Romero, which he acknowledges.
“When George Romero made Night of the Living Dead, he didn’t call the creatures in the film ‘zombies.’ That only came later,” he explains. “Still, I think the zombie film itself represents the underlying and hidden fears of contemporary society, whatever society you’re living in. Zombies help visualize and specify that fear, so you see what it is.”
In other words, as long as society keeps dabbling in dangerous behaviors, zombie movies will be important, and Director Yeon will be there to bring those fears to life.
Colony opens in theaters in the US on August 28, 2026.
Jon Favreau Talks Embracing Natural Storytelling With Nat Geo’s ‘Lion’
Two creative forces from two very different disciplines — one a blockbuster filmmaker with a penchant for spectacle and humanity, the other a nature documentarian with decades of field experience — have formed an unlikely partnership for a new project about the world of nature. Jon Favreau, director of Iron Man and the live-action remake of The Lion King, first formed a creative bond with Mike Gunton, the legendary producer behind Planet Earth II, while both executive produced the Apple TV dinosaur series Prehistoric Planet.
Now Favreau and Gunton have come together again for Lion, a new National Geographic documentary series following a pride of lions through the eyes of a young male cub named Kio. Part exploration of nature, part royal saga, the doc brings a very human perspective to the lion subjects.
With a career that has typically involved significantly more agency over what happens on screen compared to documentary work, Favreau had a unique perspective on the subjects of the documentary when he and Gunton were in the early stages of production nearly five years ago. During a press roundtable attended by Den of Geek and other journalists, Favreau jokingly said working on Prehistoric Planet with Gunton gave him a “false positive” about how prepared he was for Lion.
“We identified a few that were potential leads, four female matriarchs that we thought were gonna follow this power struggle,” Favreau said. “Unfortunately, some didn’t survive and next thing you know this little cub Kio was born, smaller than all the others. Of course, as a filmmaker, I’m like, ‘Well that’s who I want to watch.’ Mike forewarned me, he said, ‘You know, the statistics aren’t great, This is not an animated movie.’”
Despite the odds, Gunton and Favreau stuck with Kio. Over the course of the next 1,400-plus days, joined by a highly-experienced crew, the pair would anxiously follow the documentary’s young subject, knowing the whims of nature could very easily turn against him and derail years of work.
“We’ve had 20 years of anxiety suffered in the last four years,” Gunton said. “Every day you think this could all fall to the ground if Kio disappears or is killed. It’s a pretty intense experience.”
This commitment to Kio mirrors their commitment to embracing the natural storytelling that came with their subjects. Favreau and Gunton both agreed that they wanted the documentary to be manipulated as minimally as possible; the only tools their crew used in post-production were music and editing.
“I think we’re in a moment — hopefully this will all sort itself out with time — but there’s no transparency,” Favreau said. “So much imagery that’s hitting you, you don’t know what you’re looking at a lot of the time. And so to have this relationship with an audience to say, ‘Hey, sit down, let’s gather around the campfire, we’re gonna tell you a story, and this story is completely organic’ [is important].”
Ultimately, thousands of hours of footage were narrowed down to just under four hours. The four-episode event focuses mainly on the complex, interconnected relationships among the lions of the pride, particularly the bond between Kio and his mother.
“There was something about that relationship, it was almost as if she knew he was gonna be special and he was gonna be her kind of last chance. Even though he was a kind of a weak little cub, there was something about him that we just thought was amazing,” Favreau said.
Of course, no documentary about a family of apex predators would be complete without at least some action. However, Favreau and Gunton made it clear that this is a documentary meant to educate and inspire an interest in nature without losing its focus on storytelling.
“The natural world is an extraordinary place, but it’s a tough place,” Gunton said. “Every single one of those animals, every single day of their lives isa struggle to survive, but they have this burning flame within them to survive, and I think that is in itself inspiring as well.”
Both of Lion’s executive producers hope the documentary experience will bring people of all ages to a new world with a bounty of flora and fauna, all through the lens of a coming-of-age story.
“My kids, sometimes they’ll tell me, ‘Dad, go out and touch grass. Get out in the real world, get away from the screen,’” Favreau said. “Even though we are asking you to tune in on a screen, we are showing a world that really exists, and we were very fortunate to have a group of humans that were able to put this together in a way that curates and cultivates this experience that hopefully will introduce people to a world that they might not know so well.”
All four episodes of Lion premiered Aug. 19 at 9 p.m. ET on National Geographic and are available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu now.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma: A Guide to the Slasher References
This article contains spoilers for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.
Jane Schoenbrun‘s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a distinctive film, a mix of surreal postmodernism, gender critique, and surprising humor. It’s also a celebration of ’80s slashers, filled with references to movies that most people dismiss as tasteless trash, even if icons like Jason and Freddy remain in the popular culture.
The specificity in those references reveals Schoenbrun’s deep love for subgenre, as does the movie itself. Among the many other things it does spectacularly well, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma also argues for the value of trashy slasher movies, despite (or maybe because of) their problematic material. So if the argument convinces you to check out more nasty little horror movies from the era, here’s a guide to the most important movies referenced in Schoenbrun’s movie.
Friday the 13th
The single most important movie for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is 1980’s Friday the 13th, and its various sequels. Slasher movies existed before Friday the 13th, most notably the 1978 John Carpenter and Debra Hill movie Halloween. Once Halloween made huge profits on a small budget, studios clamored to cash in with their own stories about holiday-themed killers, and producer/director Sean S. Cunningham got in on the action. Nothing about Friday the 13th matched the skill of Halloween. But the story of camp counselors getting killed by what may be the ghost of the boy who drowned there years ago did big box office numbers, and a franchise was born.
Camp Miasma, the movie-within-the-movie of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, obviously draws inspiration from Friday the 13th, as it too has a drowned boy at its center. Camp Miasma also borrows the other most notorious thing from Friday the 13th, lots of scenes of teens and young adults partying and having sex, complete with shots of nude women designed for the male gaze. In particular, the scene of the killer Little Death (Jack Haven) running his spear through final girl Billy (Amanda Fix as a young woman, Gillian Anderson as an adult) while she has sex with Alex (Arthur Conti) comes directly from Friday the 13th Part II.
Part II also saw the death of Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney), another element Schoenbrun references. Crazy Ralph appears in the first two Friday movies, each time warning the counselors about the “death curse” on Camp Crystal Lake, before he gets killed by Jason as well. In the fictional Camp Miasma, a shopkeeper called Rudolph performs that role, played by David Lynch regular Patrick Fischler.
Other Friday the 13th sequels get references throughout Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, particularly in their covers and subtitles. Notably, Kris (Hannah Einbinder) gets a DVD copy of Camp Miasma Part VI: A New Beginning, which she calls a return to form for the franchise. That wasn’t the case with Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, a misfire that tried to replace Jason with another killer. But it was the case for Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives!, which brought the masked murderer back as a zombie.
Sleepaway Camp
The other major influence on the fictional Camp Miasma gets referenced almost immediately, during the opening title credits that establish the history of the franchise. As the sequence ends, we see shots of online think pieces reclaiming the transphobic ending of the original film.
That reclamation project recalls similar work done on 1983’s Sleepaway Camp, a truly inexplicable movie written and directed by Robert Hiltzik. Structurally, Sleepaway Camp follows the standard slasher pattern, in which campers around a summer camp end up dead in spectacular ways. But in the movie’s final moments, we discover not only that the killer is the shy girl Angela (Felissa Rose), but that she was born Peter and was raised as a girl by her Aunt Martha. The final shot of the movie, in which a nude Angela stands up to reveal her penis, is treated like a horrifying shock.
Sleepaway Camp is hardly the only slasher movie to treat gender identity as a reason to kill. In fact, it goes all the way back to 1960’s Psycho, the grandfather of the genre, in which Norman Bates’ psychosis drove him to dress like his mother. But Sleepaway Camp most explicitly made gender-nonconformity into something monstrous. Despite this fact, critics have reclaimed the queerness in Sleepaway Camp, not unlike the fictional fans of Camp Miasma.
Obviously, both Schoenbrun and their main character Kris love Sleepaway Camp, as the latter talks about not only the first movie, but also the two sequels starring Bruce Springsteen’s sister Pamela as Angela.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Schoenbrun has made no secret of their love of theA Nightmare on Elm Streetfranchise. But the high-concept dreamscapes of Wes Craven‘s 1984 film has far more ambition than slashers like Camp Miasma. However, Schoenbrun does work in a few references to Freddy Krueger. The most obvious comes when Kris takes a meeting with producers, who constantly compare her Camp Miasma reboot to Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.
Released in 1994, New Nightmare operated as something of a first draft for Scream. New Nightmare starred Heather Langenkamp not as Nancy, the final girl she played in the first movie. Rather, she plays herself, as do Robert Englund and Craven himself. According to New Nightmare, Freddy is in fact a real dream demon who influenced the creation of the 1984 movie. As Freddy became more silly on screen, the demon’s strength weakened, so he begins attacking the creators in the real world to make the world fear him again.
One of the things that made the “actual” Freddy so angry also gets a nod in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. During the opening credits, we see that Little Death became a not-scary public figure who spoke out against drugs and even cut a rap album. The same thing happened in our world, as Freddy Krueger had a 900-number, did a rap song with the Fat Boys, and even appeared on the 1987 novelty album Freddy’s Greatest Hits. However, as anyone who remembers Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare can tell you, Freddy left the anti-drug PSAs to Johnny Depp.
Amityville 3D, Hellraiser: Bloodline, and Silent Night, Deadly Night
During the title sequence, we get a glimpse at some of the later Camp Miasma sequels, all with high concepts that suggests producers were getting desperate to keep Little Death relevant past the ’80s. The fourth Camp Miasma film embraces 3D tech, while a much later movie sends Little Death to space. Both of these things also happened to Jason Voorhees, who finally got his famed hockey mask in the 3D movie Friday the 13th Part III and who slaughtered teens on a spaceship in Jason X.
But the Camp Miasma versions have more in common with films from other franchises, neither of which are really slashers. The cover for Camp Miasma IV features a hand reaching out of the screen and toward the viewer. That’s almost exactly the poster for 1983’s Amityville 3D, which embraced the era’s 3D craze and also featured a young Meg Ryan. The sci-fi Camp Miasma movie seems to be from the 1990s, which means that it’s not exactly like 2001’s Jason X. Instead, the images bring to mind 1996’s Hellraiser: Bloodline, which has scenes in the present and the past (in which a young Adam Scott plays as a devious French dandy), but is most famous for scenes of someone solving the Lament Configuration in deep space.
The last desperate genre hop made by the Camp Miasma franchise doesn’t match anything from Friday the 13th, but it does at least mirror a slasher movie. Camp Miasma producers made a holiday-themed horror movie, complete with Little Death in a Santa cap. To date, Terrifier 3 is the most well-known slasher movie to do a holiday-themed sequel and dress its killer like Santa, but that’s too recent for Camp Miasma to reference. Instead, Schoenbrun’s probably thinking of 1984’s Silent Night, Deadly Night, a mean-spirited film that horrified critics like Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who already hated slashers.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in theaters worldwide
Stephanie Williams Talks Bringing the Smile Entity to the Gridiron In New Comic Series
Few things are as sweet as a smile. It’s a sentiment most of us believe or, at the very least, have heard time and time again through songs, poems, or films. American filmmaker Parker Finn had other plans for that idea when he unleashed Smile in 2022, turning the universal expression of warmth into something you’d never want to see creeping across another person’s face again.
The film’s simple yet devastating premise, that trauma itself is a curse that can be passed from person to person with just a grin, struck a nerve within the horror community, and its 2024 sequel only widened the crack Finn had opened in audiences’ sense of safety when it comes to someone bearing their teeth.
Since then, Finn has been happy to let other storytellers step into his nightmare and build their own additions onto it. The first to take on the challenge was Hannah Rose May, whose comic series Smile: For the Camera, dragged the entity into the cutthroat world of high fashion modeling.
May’s series, illustrated by Miriana Puglia, was proof that the Smile mythology could travel well beyond movie theaters, and that other writers could find just about any dark corners of the world to plop the entity into.
“Parker, with Smile, made it that we’re aware that it’s a debt chainmail essentially,” May tells Den of Geek. “That’s how I see Parker’s world in the sense of, ‘you see it, you pass it on.’ Other than that, he’s danced around the mythology but hasn’t gone in too deep, so it made it an open playground for the likes of me, which was very nice.”
Now, the franchise is expanding again with Any Given Smile, a five-issue comic series from IDW Dark. It’s written by Stephanie Willaims, who made history this year as the first Black woman nominated for Best Writer at the Eisner Awards, and has numerous Marvel and DC titles under hit belt.
Set 10 years before May’s run, Any Given Smile trades runways for arena football, with art by GLAAD Media Award-winning artist Pablo M. Collar and colors by Tríona Farrell.
The comic takes place in January 1995 and the whole town of St. Augustine, Florida, has championship fever. The American Arena League title game is a week out and the Sharks backup quarterback, Maximilian Dupree, finds himself turned into a sudden superstar. There’s just one problem: Max is drowning in gambling debts.
His solution? Throw the biggest game of his life to make it all go away. Unfortunately for Max, the debts he owes are the least of his worries as the Smile entity has found its way into the local betting underworld too.
Leaving a trail of hallucinations and suicides in its wake, the entity works through everyone and anyone tied to Max. Meanwhile, a sports journalist starts digging into the deaths piling up around the championship, while Max spirals closer to kickoff and even closer to losing his grip on reality.
“Hannah and team did an amazing job laying a foundation for how to translate that world to comics and make it work. I thought of it as different Halloween houses, essentially,” Williams tells us. “Each issue is a different section of that haunted house. Basically the same thing for Any Given Smile, kind of treating it the same way and setting things up differently so that you’re getting a different scare.”
That different scare comes down to pacing, trading the entity’s quick hop from model to model in May’s comic run for a slow burn that lets tension build toward the championship game. This approach also gave Williams room to flesh out a cast of characters who feel lived in long before the entity ever comes for them.
Rather than centering the horror entirely on Max, Williams wanted the people orbiting his story to carry their own weight too, each one caught up in the same web of gambling and desperation slowly closing in on the town. Throughout the comic, she features characters who feel like “…people just trying to get by in life, and the various battles that they have to face in order to do that.”
“We have a cocktail waitress working at the casino, who is trying to help her son get the medication he needs. We also have a radio personality who, on the surface should not need to do anything shady on the side, but he gets sucked into that because that is just his vice,” Williams says, speaking on a couple of the secondary characters introduced in issue #1, which Den of Geek got an early look at ahead of its September 23 release date.
Williams’ character philosophy echoes something May has said about her own approach to the Smile franchise: that horror only lands if the trauma underneath it feels real.
“Smile is trauma. The entity is trauma,” May says. “For [people] to die, you have to see what’s traumatic to them, what their past trauma is on the surface. It allows for very fully fledged, interesting characters that have meat on the bones, essentially.”
That dedication to horror has now landed May a new comic series, Fatal Fest, and a film adaptation of her masterwork comic The Exorcism at 1600 Penn, currently in development with Blumhouse-Atomic Monster.
That same belief, trauma as the real engine of the horror, is what makes Williams’ next tackle at the franchise feel less like a stretch and more like the obvious next step. Dropping the Smile entity straight into the world of professional sports is a pairing that, on paper, sounds a bit odd but in practice Willaims argues it might be one of horror’s most natural playgrounds.
“What could be more scarier than going from being the guy on the bench to being thrust into playing the biggest game of your career?” Williams asks. “That’s a dream come true, but we’re just turning it into a nightmare.”
Williams points to the pressure that comes with that kind of spotlight, the years of training funneled into a single moment, and the unsettling question of what comes after. “All of these things, I would believe, would lead to somebody having an existential crisis. Or it could be scary in that way.”
For Williams, the hope is that readers will walk away seeing athletes a little differently. “I want the takeaway to be as much as you are enjoying the teams going out Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Thursday, and sometimes Friday now, that you’re remembering that these are real people who have a job, of course, they’re doing what they love, but at the end of the day, they’re still putting themselves on the line,” she says. “Kind of like modern day gladiators.”
Williams also isn’t shy about admitting the job of writing horror comes with its own strange risks, mainly when it comes to dreaming up new ways for the entity to torment its victims. “I was trying to come up with the deaths…so my internet search tab, I hope no one ever needs to see that,” she laughs. “It’s really bad. But also, I guess at the same time, fun, so it’s got me looking at myself a little bit differently.”
That fascination with guts and gore goes back further than this series for Williams, though. “I’ve always been a fan of horror,” she says, “but definitely more so in my adulthood. I love a creature feature, and I remember the very first time I saw the entity, the Smile entity, appear at the end of the first movie. I fell in love essentially with this horrific thing.”
It’s a sentiment May shares with us too, tracing her own love of the genre back to her small Irish hometown surrounded by nothing but cornfields. “Horror shaped me. That was the God honest truth. I’ve always loved the medium. I’ve always wanted to partake in it to some degree.”
That shared love of the genre is exactly what makes the entity itself such a gift to write. To Williams, it even belongs on the same pedestal as some of horror’s most iconic creations. “I just think the Smile entity is one that is going to stand out for a very long time for me in the same way that Michael, Jason, and xenomorphs do,” she says.
Wrapping up the conversation with some thoughts about the first issue preview, Williams discussed something she got to do that May couldn’t in her own Smile run. Without giving away exactly how or when, Williams was granted permission to bring the entity into frame earlier than fans might expect, a decision she said was meant to upend whatever assumptions readers would walk into Any Given Smile with following May’s series.
“I was thinking about it like a roller coaster ride. What was it? The Velociraptor at Universal Studios! I love a roller coaster and there’s a point in the ride where it’s like ‘Oh, ok, we’re almost done,’ then they shoot you off again at 70 mph. So, that was kind of the approach for this,” Williams teases. “I wanted readers to feel as though, ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ No you’re not!”
Issue #1 of Any Given Smile kicks off on September 23, 2026.
Explosive New Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Story Highlights Netflix’s Anime Release Calendar
“What kind of edgerunner are you?”
That’s a question asked…nay, screamed midway through a brand new first look at the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 2 (styled Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2), the next standalone installment set in Netflix’s anime adaptation of the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. It’s a good question too, as fans of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (which includes notable names such as Cyberpunk tabletop RPG creator Mike Pondsmith and acclaimed video game industry visionary Hideo Kojima) have also wondered what kind of edgerunner they’re going to get to see next.
The first season of the Netflix series provided an open-and-shut case, which means the 10-episode second season must introduce new characters and a new plot all set within the same familiar techno-dystopian universe. Thanks to the aforementioned Cyberpunk: Edgerunner 2 teaser from Netflix, we now have a better idea of how things will go down. Give it a look below.
So how will Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 look and sound? The answer to that question is: very, very loud. This is a bracing, bombastic 80-second clip that serves as more of a hype reel than a proper introduction to the show’s new faces. Fortunately, the hype reel is quite hype indeed. Set to an urgent, synth-fueled score from DOUDOU, viewers are entreated to fast-pasted glimpse of fresh violence and chaos in Night City and enigmatic text like “In Night City The Lines Between Redemption and Revenge Will Blur” and “Night City Will Burn Again.” It all culminates with a little boy innocently asking a man “You’re a weapon? A weapon made out of people?” Now that, my friends, is cyberpunk.
While the clip is light on plot and character details, Netflix has already provided a preview of precisely who and what fans can expect to see via its socials (and in a special issue of Den of Geek magazine as well). Joining the fray in Night City this time around are Weak Kingsley (Clancy Brown), a veteran edgerunner living in the shadow of his former glory; Talia Yang (Kimoy Lee), an augmented and battle-hardened member of Maelstrom; D (Nazeeh Tarsha), a nomad netrunner in search of revenge; and Roman Carax (Valeria Rodriguez), a young cinephile and filmmaker looking to document the real Night City.
Along with the exciting new trailer, Netflix also revealed that Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 will premiere all 10 episodes on Tuesday, October 20.
In addition to Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 news, Netflix also provided a bevy of other announcements and updates from Anime NYC regarding its upcoming anime-inspired animation slate. Key bits are as follows…
Bass x Machina, the “steampunk spaghetti Western” from Brian Tyree Henry, received several new photos and a fresh trailer.
The second season of Blue Eye Samurai was confirmed for a January 2027 launch window with a slick new teaser.
The biggest news, however, was saved for Fool Night. A brand new anime based on Kasumi Yasuda’s popular manga, the story imagines a world in which a lack of sunlight has led to “transfloration,” a process in which some humans choose to transform into plants rather than endure a world with diminishing oxygen supplies. In addition to a first trailer, Netflix unveiled a two-minute featurette that dives deeper into the desolate, yet colorful world.
From cyberware-enhanced freedom fighters to plant-shaped people, Netflix has a little bit of anime everything coming up.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Celebrates the Problematic Pleasures of Trash Cinema
This article contains full spoilers for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.
Trailers for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma made clear that the film would celebrate ’80s slashers. What’s more surprising is the fact that Jane Schoenbrun‘s latest is also about junk food. Not only do up-and-coming director Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) and reclusive actor Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) eat a lot of candy throughout the movie, but a stand-out scene involves the latter seductively placing pieces of KFC on a silver platter to serve to the former. While preparing the meal, Billy half-apologizes for serving take-out, speculating that Kris would be vegan or otherwise opposed to such crass food. But when Kris admits that she loves fried chicken, Billy purrs, “Right answer.”
The KFC scene, with its sensuous shots of the women smearing dipping sauce on breaded chicken, echoes Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma‘s central point about ’80s slashers like Friday the 13th (1980) and Sleepaway Camp (1983). Yes, they are problematic. Yes, they deal with harmful tropes. Yes, they often objectify women. But they sure are fun. Moreover, viewers of slasher movies don’t just passively take in their stories. Rather, the transgressions in the movies invite the viewers to define themselves in ways that trash movies could never imagine.
Beyond Good Camper and Evil Killer
Unlike their previous films We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Schoenbrun gives Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma a fairly straightforward narrative. After a promising breakout film that deconstructs slasher tropes, the sort of elevated horror film synonymous with A24, Kris has been hired to revive the Camp Miasma series, which was a massive hit in the ’80s but eventually went fallow after a host of increasingly lackluster sequels. Kris seeks out Billy, the series’ original final girl, and coaxes her out of the self-imposed retirement she’s been in for decades. But as the two connect and revisit the first movie, they find that there’s something deeper in the Camp Miasma franchise than anyone expected.
In a particularly telling scene, Kris and Billy watch the first movie together, which more or less follows the plot of 1980’s Friday the 13th: a group of partying counselors visit a summer camp that closed down years ago, when a camper drown and a killer called Little Death (Jack Haven) later attacked. Before the first night of partying can truly commence, one of the counselors (Zack Cherry) gathers his colleagues around a campfire to tell the story of the legend of Little Death. According to the counselor, Little Death was once a camper whose parents dressed them as a different gender every other day, which confused his fellow campers so badly that they drowned him in the lake.
“They had to do it,” insists the counselor, which his fellows all agree with and the fictional movie Camp Miasma seems to accept. But when Kris leans over to Billy and whispers, “This part is transphobic,” the actress hisses back, “Hush.”
Notice that Billy doesn’t tell Kris that she’s wrong. The counselors’ description of the non-binary camper, the actions of the other campers, are all transphobic. And that’s a completely acceptable read of not just the fictional movie Camp Miasma, but also the films that inspired it. In particular, Camp Miasma also echoes Sleepaway Camp, in which gender confusion drives the killer, and the reveal that the killer Angela (Felicia Rose) has a penis is treated as something more horrifying than the fact that she’s cradling a boy’s severed head.
Obviously, it’s wrong for any movie to suggest that anyone should be killed or feared because of their gender identity. But when Billy shushes Kris, she isn’t thinking about morality. She’s drawing attention to something deeper.
Our Killers, Our Selves
As Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma unfolds, we learn that Kris is not just interested in recruiting Billy to reprise her role. Rather, she wants to know more about a key scene from the original movie, in which Billy (played by Amanda Fix in the 1980s scenes) sexually climaxes while being stabbed by Little Death. In particular, Kris focuses on a shot from the film, an extreme close-up of Little Death reflected in Billy’s widening eye.
Through the surrealism that follows, Kris learns from Billy how to sexually release by identifying with both Little Death the killer and with Billy the victim, something that Billy herself did when playing the role years ago. That lesson comes through reality-bending scenes in which fiction and reality merge, to the point that Little Death may in fact be a mad god who watches humanity suffer for entertainment, and emerges through a hole in the lake to stave off boredom by killing innocents.
The movie builds not just to a climax in which Little Death invades the real world to kill for his own enjoyment, but also with Kris becoming a stereotypical final girl herself, running away from the killer in her underwear in a slow-motion shot that emphasizes her heaving breasts.
To be sure, there’s an inversion at work here, in which the intelligent and multifaceted filmmaker transforms into a one-dimensional sex object as defined by the male gaze. But the movie doesn’t degrade or victimize Kris in the transformation. Rather, it retains her agency, positioning her becoming a stereotypical final girl as an identity that she’s taking on as a way of making sense of the world. Moreover, she also identifies with Little Death in those moments, learning from Billy how to see herself as both the victim and the killer. Or, in the case of her final girl transformation, as both the object of the camera’s desire and the desiring subject.
In that moment, it doesn’t matter if Camp Miasma is moral or immoral, if it’s transphobic or inclusive, or anything else. In that moment, Kris has gone beyond enjoying Camp Miasma to embodying and transcending it, using the film and its tropes as a way to form her own identity and navigate the world. She becomes Kris, the sexualized victim in her underwear, but also Kris who is one with the killer Little Death, who is, in fact, the god of this world.
The Joy of Trash
The Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma establishes the history of the Camp Miasma franchise via winks to real-world slasher movies. The covers to the VHS tapes and many of the subtitles come directly from Friday the 13th movies, while jokes about Little Death cutting a rap album recalls the 1987 A Nightmare on Elm Street novelty record Freddy’s Greatest Hits. But a lot of the DNA of Camp Miasma recalls other, less reputable films, knockoffs like The Mutilator, Blood Rage, and, of course, Sleepaway Camp.
Most of those slashers were made on the cheap and sought quick profits by delivering base thrills. Sexism, homophobia, and racism were not uncommon. And a surprising amount of them followed the lead of Psycho and made gender-bending a sufficient reason for someone to start killing people.
And yet, as Schoenbrun’s film so powerfully illustrates, this bad behavior doesn’t brainwash moviegoers. Instead, indulging in something transgressive can open space for redefinition and even agency, whether it be the joys of watching an innocent camper get killed or luxuriating in the Colonel’s special blend of eleven herbs and spices.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’s Puppet Episode Is the Height of Silly Trek
This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 episode 5.
The title of the latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, “Level Five Transporter Accident,” brings to mind one of the most upsetting moments in franchise history. In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a transporter accident results in two people merging into one, screaming in agony as they die a painful death. Yet, what actually happens in “Level Five Transporter Accident” doesn’t come anywhere near horror, despite the fact that Pelia gets sliced in half by Orion pirates.
Instead, “Level Five Transporter Accident” pushes Star Trekto its silliest limits, even by the standards of modern Trek. By turning everyone on the Enterprise into puppets—excluding Spock, but including his hijinks-avoidant sometimes fiancée T’Pring—the episode leans heavily into the goofiness of things going wrong in deep space. “Level Five Transporter Accident” illustrates everything great about a silly episode of Star Trek, while also showing that not every potential premise makes for a good story, even with a sprinkling of Trek themes.
“Level Five Transporter Accident” is hardly the only Trek episode to deal with the iconic technology going wrong. Some of the most famous incidents lead to more dramatic beats, such as the split of Kirk’s personalities in “The Enemy Within” from The Original Series, the creation of Thomas Riker in the Next Generation episode “Second Chances,” or the merging of Tuvok and Neelix in the infamous Voyager episode “Tuvix.”
But it’s just as often led to shenanigans, even in the era of classic Trek. One of the best examples occurs in the season six TNG episode “Rascals,” in which Picard, Keiko, Guinan, and Ro Laren get turned into 12-year-olds and must repel a Ferengi invasion of the Enterprise. “Rascals” often falls among fans’ least-favorite episodes of the show, thanks to its high concept and uneven performances from the young actors. Yet, there’s no denying that “Rascals” adheres to the standard Trek formula: the crew faces a problem brought on by their mission to explore space, and they must work together and draw on their expertise to overcome the issue.
The same is true of “Level Five Transporter Accident.” Here, Scotty’s attempts to push transporter technology result in some merging of the crew’s DNA with that of a puppet he keeps with him for motivation. After they realize that they’ve all become puppets, the bridge crew convenes in Pike’s ready room to come up with a solution. When Orions attack the ship, the crew finds that their standard forms of fighting back fail, and thus must work together to find a different way to repel the invaders.
The animated series Star Trek: Lower Decks built some of its best episodes out of this approach. Take, for example, season four’s “Twovix,” a sequel to the infamous Voyager episode. Once again, two unlikely shipmates combine, Dr. T’Ana and Chief Billups, creating a new form called T’Illups. Aware of what happened to Tuvix on Voyager, T’Illups fights back by creating more hybrids that combine two, three, and even more crew members into a single individual.
“Twovix” illustrates what Lower Decks did so well, telling a story that’s funny, self-referential, but ultimately very Trek. Even in the face of such absurd stakes, Captain Freeman (the best captain in all of Star Trek, don’t deny it) does her job, putting professionalism first, even if she does so without grandiosity. She orders all of the hybrids separated because that’s what the mission calls for, even in spite of the absurdity and high emotions.
Freeman’s exasperation with the hijinks on the Cerritos helped Lower Decks feel like Star Trek, even thought it was a comedy show made to be as wacky as possible. Conversely, Strange New Worlds features a ship under the command of Captain Pike, whom Anson Mount plays as a supportive big brother, not the put-upon bureaucrat who Dawnn Lewis voiced on Lower Decks. Pike gleefully plays along with wackiness on his ship, leaving only T’Pring to object, and even she gets into the nonsense by the end.
Perhaps that’s why “Level Five Transporter Accident” is destined to the same fate as Strange New Worlds‘s previous most audacious episode, “Subspace Rhapsody” a.k.a. “the Musical Episode.” That episode once again had a proper Trek premise (an anomaly forces the crew to sing their feelings) and requires the crew to apply logic and professionalism to deal with a threat, namely invading Klingons. For some, “Subspace Rhapsody” pushes Trek forward, using the premise to go boldly into new genres and story styles. For others, it’s tedious and an excuse to shove an extraneous genre into Star Trek.
“Level Five Transporter Accident” won’t work for everyone. From its puppet silliness to the broad voice acting by the main cast to the guest appearances by comedy veterans Rachael Harris and Joe Lo Truglio as Orions, the episode goes big not just when looking for laughs, but also when conveying the wonder of space exploration. But that fact simply puts it alongside “The Enemy Within,” “Rascals,” and “Tuvix,” episodes that often get quite unintentionally silly and don’t have too many defenders, but are still firmly within the franchise’s canon. “Level Five Transporter Accident” is a silly episode, and it may not be a great episode, but it is undeniably an episode of Star Trek.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams new episodes every Thursday on Paramount+.
