Transylvania 6-5000 (1985)

 It seems that most movies are either timeless or fated to oblivion.  Movies like Back to the Future or The Princess Bride can be watched by anyone, even if they weren’t children of the 1980s.  Others seem to fall by the wayside the instant they’re out of theaters, never to be heard of again.

That’s kind of surprising in the case of Transylvania 6-5000.  There are a lot of big names in the movie, including Ed Begley Jr., Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis.  But it’s not a movie that I hear referenced a lot in conversation or in other movies.  (True, it’s not a particularly great movie.  But still…)

The movie starts with two tabloid reporters being sent to Transylvania in search of Frankenstein’s Monster.  Jack Harrison is the more respectable of the two.  He has aspirations of writing for a real publication, like Time Magazine.  Gil Turner is more of the lackey type.  It doesn’t hurt that his father, Mac Turner, runs the tabloid.  Mac got a videotape with some bad footage, which means that there has to be a story there.  So, he sends his two reporters to get said story…or get lost.

Things don’t look to promising once in town.  Any mention of the monster or footage is met with ridicule.  Add to this that the immediate area is basically a fledgling tourist town.  Mayor Lepescu doesn’t want any bad publicity, especially considering that he’s about to open his own hotel.

There are things going on in town and it might seem sinister at first, but everything has an explanation.  Jack and Gil do find the person assumed to be Frankenstein’s Monster, but there is a perfectly normal explanation.  The same goes for a werewolf, a swamp monster and a vampire.  Jack and Gil basically get their story, although it’s not the one Mac wanted.

I have to warn you that if you do see this, and I advise against it at this point, the replay value is going to be as close to zero as you can get.  Much of the humor is slapstick.  Consider that Michael Richards is in the movie as an overbearing butler who’s way too helpful.  He has all sorts of ideas that only serve to impede Gil and Jack.

It’s also not particularly complicated.  I think the movie is supposed to take place in Transylvania, but the movie’s title comes from the hotel’s phone number, which is rendered in the format of the exchange having a name, like Klondike for 55, so the hotel’s phone number would be 876-5000.  I would think that European countries would have had a different format.

I’m not even sure what prompted me to get the movie on DVD.  I guess I needed something a little different.  As I said, it’s not a great movie, but it’s not known for being horrible, either.  It’s the kind of thing that a broadcast network might have shown one Saturday afternoon.

I could see this being the format for an X-Files light show.  Each of the monsters get a back story, but none of it is particularly scary.  In fact, the only thing that might be objectionable for small children is that Geena Davis’s character is fairly forward, sexually.  At the very least, the movie does have a nice message of acceptance.  However, it wasn’t worth the buildup.  It was a hard movie to watch.  Maybe it was funny back then, but I’d recommend skipping it now.

IMDb page

 

Future Man (Season 1)

If you watch enough time-travel movies, there are certain things that would be good, like stopping Hitler before he becomes the leader of Germany.  If any of us invented a time machine, that’s probably the first thing we’d look in to.  The problem is that there’s no promise that this would be effective.  There were a lot of other factors at play, so there’s no guarantee that someone much worse wouldn’t have come along and done the same thing.

Such is the problem that Wolf and Tiger have.  They live in a world where genetically modified people known as biotics rule.  Regular humans have no hope except with time travel.  They’ve traced the Biotics’ origin to Doctor Elias Kronish,  All they need is a savior.

What does it take to become a savior?  That’s what Josh “Future Man” Futturman finds out when he beats Biotic Wars, a game that no one else has beaten.  Wolf and Tiger show up in his room to recruit Josh into their war.  You see, in their time, warriors play video games for training.  What they don’t realize is that Josh thought it was just a game.  Yes, in a giant nod to The Last Starfighter, they used a video game as a recruitment tool.

The first episode should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect.  There are plenty of references to major time-travel movies, like Terminator and Back to the Future.  There are all manner of sexual situations, like Tiger and Wolf having sex to relieve tension.  This is not a TV series you want to watch with your children.  Or your parents, for that matter.

The series has 13 half-hour episodes, meaning that it’s very easy to binge watch.  I was worried that the series might drag, as several other series have.  This isn’t a problem.  In fact, the series was originally developed as a movie.  It was eventually realized that they needed more time to tell the whole story.

Part of this is that they have several setbacks.  Josh is insistent on not killing Kronish whereas Tiger and Wolf would simply kill him as a baby.  Many of Josh’s attempts result in either failure or making the situation worse. I kind of wonder why Tiger and Wolf needed Josh in the first place, since it should be relatively easy to get that information.  It’s pure chance that Josh works at Kronish’s research facility.

It seems like much of the plot revolves around paying homage to various tropes of the genre.  In terms of time travel, very little is original.  Josh points out that killing Kronish at an early age is the central plot of the first Terminator movie.  There is also an episode that loosely resembles Back to the Future.  This isn’t to say that it’s not entertaining.  Wolf has an instant attraction to pickles and eventually takes up cooking, which leads to an interesting episode.

The series is at least maybe a little more realistic if that can be a thing with science fiction.  The amount of culture shock experienced by Tiger and Wolf is believable.  I also think most people in Josh’s situation would also teeter between wanting to go on an adventure and not waning to screw things up royally.

It did end up being a fun series.  (Yes, I know I’m a few months late in reviewing it.)  I don’t want to ruin the ending, but it looks like there will be a second 13-episode season.  I’ll be looking forward to it.


IMDb page