avatar mega-review, part 2: theme parks, comics & the way of water (2017-2022)

apparently james cameron told fox “imagine there’s a book series like the lord of the rings, and we’re making adaptations of them” when pitching the four avatar sequels. which sounds great to me considering the deja vu of pairing an obsessive filmmaker with weta workshop & weta digital probably has an awful lot to do with me loving this franchise as i do. my only thought is “i’d love to read those books, then?” (then again, the lord of the rings comparison suggests maybe not since those made much better movies than books.)

so far despite a few separate instances of avatar novels being announced & quietly canceled, we haven’t gotten any avatar stories in that particular medium unless you count the junior novelization of the first movie. but as i think you’ll see in this compilation review, it would be hard to argue that we’ve been lacking for meaningful returns to pandora in the ramp up to the way of water.

pandora: the world of avatar (theme park attraction 2017)

this theme park land is literally responsible for me becoming an unironic fan of james cameron’s avatar. after seeing one of my favorite youtubers do an extremely (some would say unnecessarily) thorough video review of it, i found myself thinking, “what the heck? that looks awesome!” the thing is, said youtuber was like… at least mildly ironic in her enjoyment of it? and i’m completely incapable of irony, so i knew if i enjoyed it once i got to experience it, it was going to be wholeheartedly.

and holy shit did i ever enjoy it?

seriously, avatarland is unreasonably good. there is absolutely zero reason for it to go as hard as it does, but as much as i have an above average appreciation for the avatar movie this is far and away the best thing the franchise has ever produced. it’s one of the best things disney’s done in years, and all of it is in service to an ip that it seemed like very few people had strong feelings about at the time? it’s just truly kinda bizarre.

as far as rides, the big draw is flight of passage, and yeah it’s a flight simulator that truly does kick ass. especially if you get really into it and kind of lean into the turns with the ride vehicle. it does an incredible job of making you feel like you’re really flying, and there are so many awesome little touches like the fact that you can literally feel your “banshee” “breathing” between your legs. the queue for this one is also pretty fantastic, which is good because you’re probably going to be standing in it for quite some time.

but i’m a dumbass so i actually love the much-maligned na’vi river journey? i know a lot of people (including the youtuber i mentioned earlier) think it’s underwhelming, and maybe it helps that i went in with lowered expectations due to all the backlash, but now it is my child and i will defend it.

like okay part of the reason i’m so into it is that i just adore dark rides? i’m working on getting more comfortable on rollercoasters so i can enjoy theme park visits with my family more, but i just love a well-done dark ride. just take me on a chill trip and show me some cool scenery & animatronics. sign me the heck up.

i get it. this could use more than one animotronic. but i kind of just don’t care? it’s like a microcosm of the entire land in that there’s so much attention to detail in the scenery. i’ve been on it four times, but i feel like i’m still noticing something new every time.

so yeah, both rides are great, but i could just walk around looking at the scenery for hours. i took so many pictures, and they all look incredible. the only thing i haven’t gotten to do yet is walk around at night when everything is lit up with fake bioluminescence, and i desperately want to do that because i bet it’s gorgeous, but yeah this whole area is just unbelievable. s-rank

avatar: tsu’tey’s path (comic 2019)

writer: sherri l. smith

artists: jan duursema & dan parsons 

this is basically a slightly better version of the movie with stunningly gorgeous art. like, some of the best art i’ve ever seen in a comic. and i get that the movie probably had to be what it was to be the colossal blockbuster it was, but heck i like this so much better.

it even has a much, much better version of jake becoming the leader of the omatikaya. i mean, i still think it’s a bad idea, and jake is still toruk makto which is still pretty infuriating. like, why does this dumbass who was one of the sky people literally yesterday have to be the Best Na’vi Ever?

but i’m going to have to get past that eventually, right? i’m really just complaining about avatar (2009) at this point. and just, again, this comic is a huge improvement on that specific aspect. given that it’s a retelling of the events of the film from a different perspective, it can’t escape that big, obvious glaring problem with the movie, but it does at least mitigate it somewhat.

i was hoping for more of the same in the movies, and frankly the way of water largely let me down on that score, but here’s hoping. granted i don’t really see them pivoting away from jake being the main character. maybe they’ll at least do more comics like this from various na’vi people’s povs. that would be nice. a-rank

avatar: the next shadow (comic 2021)

writer: jeremy barlow

artist: josh hood

i kinda hate that they introduced and just immediately wasted arvok, he’s such a good character. and honestly i still really hate jake being the leader of the omatikaya. this story does at least show that he has some good ideas about what leadership entails, which isn’t something he showed at all in either the first movie or the way of water.

in a way i can’t just keep holding this one thing against every iteration of the franchise for the rest of time (but also i totally can, fuck you).

it’s also great seeing jake consistently side with his adopted people over the sky people, and seeing the sky people get salty about it. stay mad about it! the more jake separates from the sky people, the more i like him. shocker, i know.

i love, love, love mo’at in this. she has some absolutely incredible lines. and it was great to see jake communing with tsu’tey’s spirit, and the advice his late comrade had for him. the best way to make people like me buy into jake at least a little is to continue to double down on the love he has for his adopted people, and the love they have for him. and having him continually defer to other people with more knowledge. which, again, the movies have consistently failed to do, but at least it happens a little here.

this is a good story told well. there’s pretty much always going to be the “yes, but” racism/appropriation hitch with any avatar media, but that’s just how that goes. and for what it’s worth, flawed anti-imperialist entertainment is still measurably better than pro-imperialist entertainment. b-rank

the world of avatar: a visual exploration by joshua izzo (book 2022)

i mentioned in my review of the activist survival guide that i’m a sucker for “nonfiction”-style books about fictional worlds like the star wars essential guides and roleplaying game reference manuals and the like, but the world of avatar: a visual exploration actually goes even further by being published by actual education titan dk books, and published in the same format as their visual guides that i grew up absolutely devouring on my (frequent) trips to the library.

this book covers a lot of the same ground as the activist survival guide, but with the addition of a single paragraph about alpha centauri expeditions and the valley of mo’ara (the lore from the pandora: the world of avatar attraction at disney world) and a two-page spread and other references sprinkled in here and there that seem to relate to things we might expect in avatar: the way of water.

the activist survival guide definitely has a lot more in terms of total and density of information given its more text-heavy format and larger page count, but what sets the world of avatar apart is the format. while the activist survival guide did include a lot of pictures, the world of avatar is designed to just be absolutely gorgeous to look at.

it also lacks, either due to its brevity or due to the mainstreaming of more progressive ideas, references to rigid gender essentialism or the racist malthusian myth of “overpopulation.” so that’s a drastic improvement from my perspective, obviously. but moreover, i just found it a more pleasant read on the whole. the framing narrative of the activist survival guide frequently felt a bit forced, and for me that interrupted the flow of its “nonfiction”-style presentation. in the world of pandora, there’s something undeniably satisfying about seeing pandora and the na’vi presented in a format from which i spent a lot of my childhood learning about real-world wonders like space and ancient cultures and the like.

part of it is certainly nostalgia, but i think a bigger part of it is that there’s a reason i gravitated towards books like these as a child. they just do such a great job of presenting information in a way that’s both easily-digestible and genuinely informative. and having that applied to a fictional world like pandora is just such a treat. a-rank

avatar: adapt or die (comic 2022)

writer: corrina bechko

artists: beni r. lobel

a clear-cut case of prequelitis if i’ve ever seen one. this isn’t terrible or anything, but like… what did it really add? dr. augustine arguing with selfridge some more? i knew as much as i needed to know about that relationship within the first 10 minutes or so of the movie.

the parts of this miniseries i actually liked were pretty front-loaded. like, surprising information alert, but i was way more interested in the na’vi stuff than the human stuff, so as the narrative shifted to be more focused on the humans i just found myself losing interest very quickly. i know, shocking.

i do approve of the idea of giving dr. augustine a starring role in a comic series, but it just doesn’t feel like it was executed very effectively here? again, i didn’t hate this or anything, i looked forward to each new issue, it’s just that it feels a bit lackluster compared to previous offerings. c-rank

avatar: the high ground (comic 2022)

writer: sherri l. smith

artists: various

it’s weird that i keep having to talk about star wars in my avatar reviews, but there are a lot of truly bizarre connections between the two considering i don’t think there’s any real cross-pollination between them aside from disney having a stake in both of them? but, yeah.

a lot of star wars fans are probably familiar with the story of splinter of the mind’s eye. this was a novel by alan dean foster (the ghostwriter of the first film’s novelization) that george lucas commissioned as a book that could be easily adapted into a low-budget sequel for star wars if the first movie didn’t make enough money to finance a sequel. of course, that was before the first movie totally redefined expectations for a summer blockbuster, so foster’s novel ended up not being needed for its original purpose, and it just sort of existed as a kind of awkward entry in the canon of the eu until disney nuked it. dark horse did a comic adaptation of the novel in the 90s with some of that gorgeous coverart that the dark horse star wars comics always had, which is the way i found out about it.

avatar: the high ground, on the other hand, was james cameron’s first pass at an avatar sequel script. it doesn’t appear that cameron altered the trajectory of the sequel for budgetary reasons, but rather due to a combination of just deciding to break the story differently and possibly technological breakthroughs in convincing underwater cgi? regardless, rather than wasting his first script idea, a decision was made to adapt it into a series of three hardcover graphic novels.

the resulting comis are… honestly not great, immo? i’d actually say this is my least favorite avatar comic i’ve read so far. like, even adapt or die which wasn’t great at least felt like it was something different? this felt like “avatar 2, but worse.” and repurposing it as a prequel is also kind of fraught because they obviously had a lot of the same storytelling goals in this version of the sequel so you end up with weird stuff like jake & meytiri’s kids running through what should’ve been their parents’ entire budget of “telling them to stay & wait in a place, them not listening & getting kidnapped” patience before the first movie? like, when the kids first get captured by blue!quatritch in the sequel, it’s this big shocking moment, but imagine if they had just been kidnapped & daringly rescued, like, last week? it would totally change how that would feel, right? there’s a very real feeling in the movie that this is the first time their innocence has been challenged like this.

… come to think of it, that’s actually another parallel with splinter of the mind’s eye? because towards the end of that book, luke has a lightsaber fight with darth vader, and when splinter of the mind’s eye was still considered canon that just made it really awkward that their confrontation in the empire strikes back was clearly supposed to be the first of its kind? i think this comic is just avatar’s splinter of the mind’s eye. i think it’s best to just pretend it doesn’t exist, because it’s definitely not going to impact the movies–i mean, no one’s really thinking “this is awkward becasue splinter of the mind’s eye got there first” when they watch empire, right? but it just makes the high ground pretty unsatisfying at the end of the day.

even ignoring those sorts of issues, it’s also just super obvious that this story wasn’t intended for a comic book format? it’s just a series of honestly pretty flat action scenes that don’t really translate all that well on the page. and it isn’t helped by the fact that the art, while pretty enough to look at, doesn’t actually do a great job of conveying the action in a way that’s painless to follow? it’s sometimes hard to tell characters apart except for in extreme closeup. so yeah, on the whole, really not a huge fan of this one, unfortunately. c-rank

avatar: the way of water (movie 2022)

“the way of water has no beginning and no end. our hearts beat in the womb of the world. water connects all things, life to death, darkness to light.”

pretty bold words from a movie that asks me to not pee for 3 hours & 15 minutes but also asks me to buy & drink a big soda in a ridiculous souvenir cup.

so, yeah. i’ve now seen this in both dolby & imax, and while i think imax was the better experience of the two, i can confirm that (as is usually the case in a james cameron venture) there just isn’t a bad way to see this movie. it’s funny, because most of the interesting things i can think of to say about it are criticisms but overall i definitely enjoyed it?

look, at a base level, the reason i liked this and i’m probably going to like all of the hopefully dozens of sequels this series keeps churning out is that the avatar franchise has become one of the few remaining standard bearers for high-effort filmmaking in blockbuster movies. like, basically every visual you see in this movie was probably created in a computer, but it does not look like it? at all? and i’ve said it before but i’ll say it again, it’s pretty clear that this is attributable to the absolute obsession that james cameron has for making movies look the way he wants them to look, and the fact that he seems to bring other people with that same obsession along for the ride.

the things that were problematic about the first movie (and the expanded universe surrounding it) are still problematic, plus a few new problems that they decided to add on top just so we don’t get bored, but before i start really digging into those things i just want to pause and say that i really miss when this kind of approach in blockbuster filmmaking was… not the norm, exactly, but definitely not as uncommon as it is now? so yeah, at the end of the day if i’m going to be watching some shooty scifi bullshit, i’d love for it to keep looking this good and having this much of an imaginative (but also extremely thoroughly well-thought-out) approach to the creation of a genuinely alien world. because the real star of these movies isn’t jake, and it isn’t neytiri, and it isn’t their kids. it’s pandora.

the movie seems to understand this, too, because yeah we start with jake narrating but it’s over this fucking wonderful shot of the camera just rapidly zooming down to the surface of pandora and then through the trees, and just sort of bludgeoning you with the fact that yeah, we’re back. and what i’ve kind of been dancing around is the fact that it’s pretty clear that creating pandora & bringing it to life was a labor of love for everyone involved, and that’s something that’s been obvious to me since the first movie, and i think it’s why so many people found pandora so achingly beautiful. returning there weirdly feels a little like returning home, or at least returning somewhere you really like being. it carries an actual emotional weight with it.

and, again, this opening narration is trying to very quickly usher us through the last 15 years or so of the sullys’ life but the visuals of these little vignettes are always emphasizing how much the forests of pandora are a starring player in these experiences.

honestly these opening scenes are asking you for a lot, because the status quo has changed quite a bit, and they’re about to hit you with the whole weird clone soldier thing? which still to this day doesn’t really make a lot of logical sense to me, but i’m willing to roll with it because such an entertaining movie is wrung out of it. and also because it fits in great with the thematic thrust of these movies, that the sky people are trying to steal pandora out from under the na’vi, so the idea of them literally appropriating na’vi bodies and shoving their gross human capitalist/military brains in there is just viscerally horrifying.

(... which makes it pretty fucking awkward that one of my biggest problems with this movie/franchise is that it appropriates & profits off of gross tons of indigenous culture…)

yeah okay let’s go ahead & pivot.

the white savior stuff is less visually apparent here because jake spends the whole movie as a na’vi, so that’s nice & i do drastically prefer things this way, but it’s still totally there? but on top of that jake is just the fucking worst father in this? like, neytiri calls him out exactly once for treating his family like a squad he’s the commanding officer of instead of a family? but he just proceeds to continue doing this for the whole rest of the movie and it’s never again a source of conflict? and i’m sorry, that’s not just bad writing, it’s fucking abusive?

in the first movie jake at least realizes he’s kind of a piece of shit and gets his ass kicked constantly for it. this movie acts like he’s just a big damn hero whose only flaw is that he tries to hide & protect his family (the objectively correct thing to do) instead of singlehandedly defeating the sky people. and i just. cannot.

i want to print out flyers about neytiri & staple them to telephone poles like she’s a lost cat, because where the fuck was she in this movie? she’s barely in it, and the one actually kind of big thing she does in the movie (threaten spider’s life to save her get blue!quatritch to release her daughter) is terrible? i just. ugh.

this is mirrored by the fact that when we see jake & neytiri with the omatikaya we barely hear from mo’at, who is one of the fucking best characters in the first movie and is even more awesome in some of the expanded universe stuff so i had a lot of high hopes that we were gonna get to see more of her, but nah, she basically just patches up some wounded and apparently has zero opinions about jake & neytiri leaving. (i mean, obviously that’s not the case, my point is that we don’t hear from her about it at fucking all.)

for that matter, we don’t see jake & neytiri interacting with the omatikaya at all really? we literally just see the clan functioning as a resistance cell against the returning rda. it’s hard to feel the sense of loss that you should feel when they leave because you never get to see them just… being the people? you’re asked to feel the loss exclusively through neytiri getting mad about it for exactly thirty seconds, which is treated dismissively by jake, which by the way is also an awful character moment for him. just. yuck.

i also don’t feel like i got to know the metkayina well enough? i know this movie is a lot more plot-heavy than the first movie, but it just feels like there’s an entire dimension missing this time, and i’m sad about it.

i know i’m starting to sound like i hated this movie, and i didn’t, for all the reasons i stated earlier plus a few more that i’m about to pivot to, but i just need to be really clear that me enjoying this movie is not an endorsement of everything about it? like, i feel like this is less of a star trek situation where i’m like “this 90% aligns with my values but has some issues because sometimes the writers suck” and is more like when i used to like star wars and was like “this is an extremely well-designed universe that it’s fun to immerse myself in and the movies are damn entertaining even if i frequently don’t like the stories that are being told.”

(okay i have to go on a quick tangent here since i don’t talk about star wars much anymore to clarify what i mean. hilariously, the last jedi coming along and actually being a good movie with good things to say is what made it impossible for me to continue enjoying star wars when i realized it had never been that before and was never going to be that again, like, it actually “ruined” star wars for me, but not in the way most people mean when they say that? like it’s probably the only star wars movie i’d rewatch if you asked me to. and i used to rewatch all of them frequently, and write fanfiction & whatnot. i was one of those.)

like the first movie, the way of water is a deeply problematic movie with superficially anti-imperialist themes, but like… considering that the vast majority of tentpole blockbusters are imperialist propaganda with a very thin coat of paint over them, that’s clearly better, right?

like, i think we often do this thing where when something at least superficially aligns with our values we hold it to a higher standard, and i’m not about to lecture anyone (especially if they’re indigenous) if they do that with this movie, it certainly deserves it because wow does it ever not practice what it ineptly preaches, but i am going to say that for me personally i would prefer imperfectly anti-imperialist movies that are made this well over unabashedly pro-imperialist movies that were clearly filmed in empty rooms composed of green screens or that circular led thing that the mandalorian & star trek discovery popularized. (for the record, star trek discovery does a much better job with it, but it’s still pretty obvious at times.)

and the other reason i really enjoy this is because, as much as i’m starting to feel like i kind of genuinely hate jake (but i can still empathize with him and i think the lengths he goes to to throw his own life between the bad guys & his kids is genuinely heroic) and as much as i fucking hate the way neytiri is written in this movie, i fucking love their kids? this jumped out at me even more on rewatch when i was more familiar with the general shape of the movie. when i first saw it i loved lo’ak & kiri but i thought neteyam especially wasn’t characterized nearly as much? like, he was just the “good kid” to lo’ak’s “rebellious kid,” but the thing about cameron movies is that so much characterization happens in the margins and when i was able to pay more attention to the details the second time through is fucking loved & wanted to protecc neteyam?

but yeah, i totally get why we focus on lo’ak. he’s an extremely good boy and i’m super invested in his story going forward. (kiri also rules, but i feel like that’s more obvious.)

also like, this movie has na’vi bullying in it, so uh. yeah. that’s… nice. for me. (sorry not sorry.)

so, uh, yeah. at the end of the day you have a deeply problematic but wildly entertaining movie that is kind of the standard bearer of high-effort blockbuster filmmaking in an age dominated by “just film it in front of a greenscreen & redirect people to the disney+ series”? again i have no beef with anyone who cannot enjoy this movie because of its problematic elements. i’m not out here waving my embarrassing unironic avatar fandom like it’s something to be proud of, and i don’t think i’ll ever really be able to enjoy this franchise in an uncomplicated way, which could very well result in me burning out on it like i did star wars before it, but idk. for now i’m enjoying it. and for me at least, this movie had more than enough to enjoy about it to overcome the things that infuriated me about it. a-rank

avatar: the way of water: the visual dictionary

by joshua izzo (book 2022)

this is another dk book like the world of avatar: a visual exploration, but covering the second movie. it feels like there was proportionately a lot more about the rda & recoms than there was about the rda in the first one, but that could just be a cognitive bias on my part because that is (shockingly) the part i’m the least interested in.

there is definitely a lot less about geography in this one, though, and that’s a shame because i think that oceanography rules and i was really excited for some fictional oceanography because i’m a fucking nerd, but alas.

this is still a great overall concept for a book, and the execution is for the most part pretty fantastic. i just found myself overall less entranced by it than i was by its predecessor. b-rank

star trek: lower decks, seasons 1-3 megareview

 

season 1

like a lot of star trek fans, i was pretty skeptical about this show going into it. the animation style screamed “family guy,” and there is quite a bit of rick and morty in the show’s dna. like, for instance, series creator and showrunner mike mcmahan was one of the first writers hired for rick and morty and served as its showrunner for a season.

star trek: deep space nine, season 3

3x01 “the search, part 1”

i could quibble about how dumb sisko showing up unannounced with the defiant is, but the truth is it’s an incredibly effective bit of storytelling. everyone’s reactions and the fact that it slips right through the station’s defenses really helps both to emphasize that the ship is built to be upfront dangerous in a way starfleet ships usually aren’t and to solidify the very real shift in stakes & tone the show achieved in the previous season’s finale.

star trek: deep space nine, season 2

2x01 “the homecoming”

this is an interesting one, because it seems like a pretty straightforward episode about kira rescuing a pow, and then it just kind of hits you with a last-second plot twist right when it seems like it’s wrapping up, and then flashes the “to be continued…” and if you don’t know it’s coming, you’re just sitting there like, “wait, what?” it’s honestly kind of super effective! like, i kind of like that this just seems like a lowkey “kira is doing bajoran stuff” episode until then, and then it just carries you forward into a larger arc in a way that feels like real progression & escalation.

star trek: deep space nine, season 1

1x01 & 1x02 “emissary”

the general consensus on season 1 of ds9 is that it’s bad & boring, and like, in a way fair enough? but there’s also just absolutely no comparing it to season 1 of tng, so i oftentimes find myself resisting this take even though it’s kinda totally fair.

spooky movie season theme: werewolf!, part 4: miscellaneous (pre-2000*)

 (*the only exception is i included the film adaptation of blood & chocolate even though it’s from after 2000 because it goes along with the book.)

“the were-wolf” (short story 1896)

by clemence housman

this story is styled as something rather like a fairytale, with a timeless and placeless quality to it. the titular werewolf (or were-wolf i guess) is a seductress who effortlessly bends people to her will while also being an absolutely terrifying combatant in both her human and wolf forms. this mirrors the way the story has room for both genuinely erotic tension and some downright gnarly violence.

i think the werewolf genre does just fine without one super obvious ur-text to hold up… but if you had to pick something to enjoy that honor, i think this would be a better fit than guy endore’s more widely-cited the werewolf of paris. b-rank

the werewolf of paris (novel 1933)

by guy endore

this is apparently considered by many to be the closest the werewolf genre has to a “dracula” or “frankenstein,” and i hadn’t even heard of it until i started researching for this project. i think a big part of that has to do with the universal monsters franchise, which really crystallized a lot of the popular culture “defaults” for horror movie monsters, not basing their werewolf movies on any specific source. and i imagine that had less to do with any perceived deficiency of quality in endorse’s book and more to do with the fact that he was blacklisted for being a communist sooooo yeah.

all of that being said i have to admit that i kinda thought the book was so-so? like, i guess that’s largely true of a lot of sort of seminal early works of horror, it’s just that with all the popular culture that’s built up around stuff like frankenstein and dracula i’m already bought in so even if the writing wouldn’t otherwise be my cup of tea, it makes the experience of reading them a lot more compelling than it might otherwise be? but yeah idk this is kind of meandering and oftentimes more interested in its politics than all the werewolf shit. and like… it’s for sure kinda refreshing to get straightforwardly leftist politics in something like this? but the politics are also by no means perfect, not that that’s ever really a fair expectation, it’s just that i don’t want anyone reading this and thinking “oh, okay, that’s what robin thinks.” like admittedly i oftentimes feel that way about things that were literally written by marx and other seminal communist theorists, so i guess it should go without saying but i kind of never assume things like this go without saying idk.

there’s a shit ton of bdsm-adjacent stuff in this that i think is actually pretty intentional so that was a pretty pleasant surprise for a book that was written almost fully 100 years ago? and yeah that is always stuff i’m gonna want in media i consume, but it’s like extra something i want in horror stuff? also the actual werewolf action when it does happen is fucking amazing, and by the end of the book the werewolf is in this weird kinky relationship where he’s just slashing up his girlfriend at night and she has all these scars and she’s kinda super fucking into it? but he’s all guilty and weird about it, so that’s a pretty big turnoff, but if you just kinda selectively ignore parts of it it’s pretty hot?

like again i wanna emphasize that in context it seems like a kinda fucked up situation and it’s not like actually inherently wish fulfilly or anything, but if you look at it kinda sideways then yeah, it would honestly be super hot. so, you know. just gonna continue fantasizing about werewolf boyfriends/girlfriends/enbyfriends/etc now. nbd. c-rank

i was a teenage werewolf (movie 1957)

this is bad in so many ways, and the worst way is that it’s just outright boring. we fully should’ve just watched the mst3k version.

distinct ways in which this movie is bad: not enough werewolf, the werewolf bits range from just okay to awful, the laziest werewolf transformation i’ve ever seen (they use that weird swimmy transition you usually use for flashbacks), the copaganda is laid on thick from the very beginning of the movie, there’s a godawful music performance towards the beginning that is pretty clearly just there to pad the runtime… when i say i don’t mind bad werewolf movies, this isn’t what i mean, folks!

in the positives column, the werewolf costume wasn’t terrible (it also wasn’t great, but still) and also i occasionally had fun clowning on the movie. like the movie opens with a schoolyard fight and the first intelligible line of dialogue is one of their girlfriends yelling, “hit him again! he’s been begging for it!” and i was like, oh, cool! i didn’t realize this was a consensual scene they were doing! that totally changes my understanding of this part of the movie!

but yeah, again, all of the fun i had with this movie was at its expense. it really wouldn’t have held my interest otherwise. d-rank

the curse of the werewolf (movie 1961)

i know a lot of people swear by them, but i just keep being thoroughly underwhelmed by hammer horror movies. i’ve watched all their dracula movies and quite a few of their frankenstein movies and i think i’ve seen like one, ever that wasn’t just an absolute chore to sit through. i really want to like them, but it just isn’t working out so far.

when this movie does eventually deign to get to the werewolf shit, it’s… fine, i guess? my favorite part are the first two on-screen kills which are both choking, which… yeah, i’m super into, but also isn’t typically what you come to a werewolf movie for? and regardless, it’s just super not worth the wait.

this is also loosely (very loosely) based on the werewolf of paris, and aside from like one conversation in a tavern at the very beginning of the movie, the novel’s marxism is just gone, as is all the bdsm-adjacent stuff. and it’s not like either of those things were perfect in the book, but they were interesting, and that’s more than i can say about basically anything in the movie. d-rank

werewolf in a girls’ dormitory (movie 1961)

the movie badly outstays its welcome, which is a shame because it has a pretty good creepy/moody atmosphere early on. it just starts to drag after a while, like it isn’t willing to fully commit to the dumb, sleezy fun that is clearly its highest possible destiny. i’m still left feeling like this was a better-looking werewolf costume away from being actually exactly what i wanted it to be, but keep in mind that i’m someone for whom “rapey werewolf strangling/mauling/unclothing a string of underwritten victims” actually sounds like a pretty good time if fully committed to. c-rank

the beast must die (movie 1974)

the description made this sound like basically a game of werewolf, and the ways in which it resembles that are just absolutely the best things about the movie. i love the dorky little intro and the “werewolf break” where you’re encouraged to guess which character is the werewolf.

i want to say the movie dragged at times due to a few overlong establishing shots & chase scenes, but the truth is it actually didn’t overstay its welcome in spite of those? like, i think this movie could be like 10x better than it is, it’s not hard to imagine making a genuinely amazing movie out of this concept. like i desperately want someone of a like jordan peele or rian johnson caliber to take a crack at something like this, because i think that would probably have a good chance of ending up being my favorite movie? like, ever?

so like, yeah this was just kinda okay and there’s nothing “wrong” with that per se, but it really doesn’t feel like it delivered on the promise of everything it had to work with. but i still am never gonna mind spending 90 minutes with hammer horror’s little brother telling a chill werewolf tale with the peter cushings of the world rounding out the cast.

my biggest substantive complaint is that i think to make this kind of thing truly work you need to lean a bit more heavily on character writing, like really agatha christie that shit up and make the cast a bit more vibrant. like what you really seem to be shooting for (pun intended & not apologized for) here is a cozy mystery but with werewolves, and you’re really missing one of the most essential elements there.

again, though, i’m probably just salty because i’ve recently grown quite fond of both the mystery genre and the werewolf genre, and this really seemed like a match made in heaven for me specifically, but instead it was just kinda okay. c-rank

the company of wolves (movie 1984)

i don’t hate the idea of expanding on the little red riding hood myth and really fleshing out the relationship between her and the granddaughter to one where she’s looking up to her benevolently witchy grandmother. there’s a lot to love there, actually. the problem is that it takes until literally the last stretch of the movie for the big, bad you-know-who to be remotely interesting, and the rest of the movie just feels frightfully wheel-spinny. also the werewolf effects are very hit-or-miss with the vast majority of them weighing the balance decisively in the latter category. ymmv, because this shit is hella subjective, but that’s where i’m at with it. d-rank

silver bullet (movie 1985)

if you made a supercut of this movie that was literally just all the werewolf shit, i would probably like it way better. the first few werewolf attacks are fucking hot, and the werewolf suit isn’t half-bad.

the non-werewolf parts of this movie are just a greatest hits collection of stephen king movie cliches, and it’s hard not to just roll your eyes at this shit when you’ve seen at least half a dozen or so adaptations of his books. it’s especially galling that the main characters’ awful parents aren’t supposed to be awful (you can tell because stephen king movie parents that are meant to be awful are a lot less subtle, there’s several examples in this movie even). i didn’t love the identity of the werewolf because that made the werewolf less hot by association, but the reveal itself was actually pretty damn fantastic?

but yeah, mostly i just loved all the hot werewolf kills. b-rank

scooby-doo and the ghoul school (tv movie 1988)

look, i was prepared for this to be kinda bad, but i was prepared for it to be kinda bad in the intentional, endearing way that a lot of scooby-doo stuff was. i was fully prepared to eat some cereal and watch some saturday morning toons.

and then i saw fucking scrappy-doo on the screen and me & my fiancx (who hadn’t seen this) simultaneously cried, “oh no!” and my boyfriend (who had) mournfully responded, “oh, yeah…” and i realized i was in for a much different time than i had planned.

look, i didn’t have much experience with scrappy before this, so i kinda secretly always thought y’all were exaggerating just a tiny bit about how bad he was… but by all the holy & unholy gods, he is literally the worst. i want to slam dunk him into a volcano. i want to give whoever thought he was a good idea an atomic fucking wedgie and while they’re hopping around helplessly kick them in the ass depositing them into a trash can. (for bullying. it’s my intention that they get out of the trashcan afterwards, i’m not saying we should dispose of a human being for doing something i don’t like, i’m not a fucking republican.)

it sucks because the titular ghoul school is populated by the most fucking adorable baby queer girl versions of all the classic monsters like (obviously) werewolves & vampires & mummies & whatnot. and that does occasionally break through & think “awww!” but then the camera just cuts back to scrappy so he can make some dumbass comment that no one cares about and you see red again.

i want to slam dunk him into a fucking volcano. d-rank

scooby-doo and the reluctant werewolf (tv movie 1988)

even a himbo who loves his dog & smokes his weed may become a wolf when the wacky race is monster-themed and the vampire’s plan is incredibly convoluted.

this is apparently scrappy’s last appearance in animated scooby-doo, and his role is so far scaled down compared to the previous outing that he was actually kinda almost tolerable? this is clearly the role he should’ve been slotted into all along, and it’s too little too late, but oh well.

i… didn’t expect this whole thing to be about racing? but it is? and that’s… something, i guess!

but like, the setting is so cool and dracula is such an over-the-top villain. this is “bad” in all the ways i want something like this to be “bad” in. and shaggy is an adorable werewolf omg, why did they have to change him back???

unlike the previous misfire, this is exactly the experience i wanted out of these. it feels the way i imagine eating all those halloween-themed cereals would be if i had any nostalgia for them. b-rank

wolf (movie 1994)

this isn’t a bad movie or anything, it’s actually pretty okay? it reminds me of like an american psycho or glengarry glen ross in that it’s like “this is about middle aged white guys being businessmen and i literally give zero shits but it’s well-written & well-directed if you’re into that shit i guess.” but like i like it better than both of those because at least it has a little bit of werewolf stuff in it, underwhelming and rare as it is.

even though jack nicholson isn’t my cup of werewolf piss the cast in this is phenomenal. like michelle pfeiffer & james spader make this totally worth watching. pfeiffer in particular gives this movie way more than it deserves given how little it gives her to work with.

look i just don’t really care about office politics between various white guy suits too much i wanted a fucking werewolf movie. if you liked the other movies i listed earlier you’ll probably like this way better than i did. c-rank

blood and chocolate (novel 1997)

by annette curtis klause

this is really messy ya fiction that goes to some fucking intense (and i think, occasionally, irresponsible) places. i know i say this a lot about books like this but it really does feel like a similar energy to the kinds of writing i always really vibed with in fanfic but never really intentionally seek out in profic and i really do need to do something about that because i frequently end up loving it.

also it does that super fanficcy thing where it refers back to characters’ backstories in a way that makes you wonder if you missed a previous book or something even though this is the only book in the series. perfect. exquisite. i’ll take three.

i just fucking adore this kind of heart-on-its-sleeve bullshit. and this one also does that thing where it feels like a pretty restrained, conventional narrative for a good long while and the intensity just very abruptly spikes and it’s like “oh! ok. we’re doing this now i guess!” for the rest of the book.

that kind of thing can frankly actually be detrimental if it just doesn’t land for you for whatever reason, and for me at least i find my reactions to this kind of thing to be pretty fickle, and in this particular case i actually found myself completely onboard with the abrupt shift (... heh, shift).

like there is for sure shit in here that i could be obstinate & complain about if i really wanted to, and i wouldn’t even be wrong because i actually do think a lot of it is big-P Problematic, but for whatever reason this particular book just really lulled me into enjoying it anyway, and i like liking things so i’m just gonna go ahead and let myself like this.

if you’ve followed my reviews for a while in one form/venue or another you might be thinking, “wait, robin, it sounds an awful lot like you’re describing a guilty pleasure, you said those aren’t a thing.” but i promise you that is not what’s happening here? nor am i “enjoying it ironically” (something i basically refuse to do, heck something i might be incapable of doing). my enjoyment is genuine. i will certainly allow that this is a “problematic fave,” which i suppose some people consider synonymous with a “guilty pleasure,” but i still think there’s an important distinction to be had there.

enjoying (or not enjoying) art is an inherently dialectical process and the meaning isn’t produced wholly in the media itself or wholly in you yourself, but rather in the relationship between those two things. i do not feel guilty about enjoying blood and chocolate. (wow that sounds like a whole thing out of context lmao.)

i am uncomfortable with some of the messages that can be derived about relationships from gabriel’s 180-degree turn from a guy made of literally nothing but red flags to the embodiment of gruff but tender masculinity, given the patriarchy-shaped patterns of abuse many women are subjected to in their searches for mates, and i think especially for a book marketed largely towards young women this does them a serious disservice.

but i’m an adult and i know better so i can separate my enjoyment of this from its problematic elements as long as i responsibly call them out when discussing the book. and against what i thought were pretty long odds when i realized where this story was going, i do like gabriel & vivian’s romance. i do like the guy he turns into later in the book, no matter how blatantly unearned that turn was. and i’m perfectly willing to just allow myself to enjoy that, in spite of all the fairly obvious reasons why i “shouldn’t.”

hell, his ideas about werewolves having an instinctive need to dominate & protect are fucking hot and i could easily see them being rewardingly incorporated into a power exchange relationship? and also like… even in the context where they came up in this book, they actually aren’t horrible? he’s basically explaining why relationships between werewolves & humans are inherently unsafe, but he’s doing it in a very empathetic, nonjudgmental way. and just… if that really is how things work in this world, i’m actually super behind his take?

but what really helped the most is that it wasn’t until vivian had been through something similar to what gabriel had been through, and he shared his story with her, helping her begin to recover from her trauma, that i was really sold on them. because their relationship really is built on them being kindred spirits.

i’m deliberately ignoring something rather huge here, and that’s the fact that vivian is 16 and gabriel is 24. and, i mean… some of the discourse about age gaps in romantic & sexual relationships can be overly rigid. like, as someone who was simultaneously being emotionally abused & manipulated by someone roughly my own age in a “romantic” relationship while also being in a much healthier fuckbuddies-shaped relationship with someone who was almost twice my age, i just don’t see how so many people can see this as such a one-size fits all kind of thing? but in the case of a 24-year old adult man and a 16-year old high school girl, i feel pretty fucking okay saying that this is one of the clearest-cut cases of “that shit is not okay.” and again this is an aspect of the story where i think the book pretty clearly fails its target audience, because holy shit should you never be drilling into people’s heads that that kind of thing is normal.

for the record, i also will briefly mention that i also don’t really think the way this book treats suicide is responsible at all, again especially in view of its target audience. i don’t super want to get into it in any more depth than that? and i am sorry if anyone feels let down by my bringing it up but not really feeling super comfy getting into it in depth, but i frankly just wouldn’t feel responsible if i didn’t mention it at all.

but, again, that really isn’t what decides whether i like a given story or not, it’s just context that i feel responsible to put out there. because in spite of all of that, i really like this book.

it really helps that vivian is actually super into being a werewolf? she isn’t all angsty & self-hating, she thinks her werewolf self is beautiful (because it fucking is) and she is hurt & confused & angry when aiden can’t see that. and gabriel seeing that & understanding it and talking her through it was a pretty huge breakthrough for me with that character. but really i just love vivian as a narrator, and i actually got pretty fucking miffed when a reviewer i usually like found her annoying because she really is my favorite thing about this book.

this is not only a problematic fave, it’s a problematic fave that has me excited to branch out and discover whole new problematic faves in this genre, because i understand that both a lot of the things that i found uncomfy in this book and a lot of the things i liked about it are basically genre staples. and yeah, i can for sure deal with more of this. a-rank

blood & chocolate (movie 2007)

hey what if we took a really cool book and turned it into an extremely cheap & extremely generic movie that has absolutely nothing to do with the book except for character names? and just drastically alter the relationships almost every character has with each other? like, obviously flipping the narrative roles of the romantic interests is the most eye-catching one, but also combining vivian’s mother figure with her biggest enemy in the book is just wild??? and like, basically deleting the narrative significance of both of them???

and like, it would be one thing if you made an adaptation in name only and just totally did your own thing with it and that thing was fun, but the thing they did make out of it just totally sucked???

vivian & aiden’s relationship in the book obviously wasn’t perfect, but at least she was the one that expressed interest in him and kind of got to be a badass in pursuing it? the movie’s version of this has him being a fucking stalker and then getting narratively rewarded for it??? and mansplaining werewolf lore to her??? who thought this was a good idea?

i would’ve actually been super okay with vivian ending up with the aiden from the book if you cut off their story right at the point that she revealed her lycanthropy to him and just write an alternate ending where he doesn’t suddenly turn into a dick. at no point was her ending up with movie aiden a remotely good idea??? just… no. all of the no. no no no. nope. thank you, no.

if you took all the parkour out of this movie i think it would be about five minutes long. also i actually had no choice but to laugh out loud when i saw how they handled visually conveying werewolf transformation in this movie? like, that was the point where i realized, “oh, okay, cool. not only is this not going to have any of the good stuff from the book, it’s also not just gonna be a remotely fun werewolf movie either. awesome.”

what a waste of time. d-rank