OK. So i saw what the cool kids are calling LXG a few weeks ago. More like a month, really. I’ve been wrestling with this beast of a review since then. I’m a fairly large Alan Moore fan. I think From Hell was a good story (with quite enough Victorian London T+A and penis slang, thank you) that was murdered by Johnny Depp and company. “Top 10″ is probably one of my favorite graphic novel series. I think that “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” is a breakthrough concept that looks at traditional literary figures in a way that is fresh and the antithesis of hidebond, while at the same time preserving their characters. League is incredible, and i await the arrival of the Volume 2 graphic novel with severely baited breath.

Needless to say i left the movie theatre feeling very cheated. The movie was godawful drek, and i can’t say as Moore was anywhere near the production. If he was it was probably for the purposes of extracting information via torture. Seeing your work ripped apart like that would be about like watching somebody shoot your dog, i think.

Yeah, i’m a little bit unimpressed.

See, everything stems from the fact that whoever is doing writing (outline drafts) for Hollywood has fastened on to a mad lib for writing comic book movies. It goes something like this:

1. Go to comic store.
2. Spin around 25 times with one hand out.
3. Whatever your hand is pointing at, buy.
4. If this is not a comic book, then purchase the person’s life story, streatch everything wildly out of proportion, and write “Coyote Ugly 2: The Ugly Stick”
5. If you are pointing at a comic, don’t bother to buy it. Just read the first few pages, and make a photocopy of a cast shot
6. Start writing your script. Here’s the outline: All cast members meet for the first time and start fighting crime. They will fight the first villian in the series.

I am getting pleanty tired of this formula, and in the case of League, it makes no damn sence. I mean if you don’t know who the Invisible (fucking) Man is, go back and finish Middle School you ignorant slope-browed troglodyte. The process of turning a 192 page book into a two hour movie should be entirely too easy. But hey, they had to first remove anything that made the series intelligent, add pleanty of stupidity, then showcase it with the most wretched action choreography that i’ve seen in years.

Lets start at the top. First off we can pretty well tell that Connery is one of the film’s producers. There was a little change from the comic… Quartermain is an opium addict whose particular inner demon is an extreme attraction to apotecary shops. Actually while guarding Mina (dressed as a hooker to draw out Hyde in Paris) he nips off for some juice of the poppy, drawing some pretty angry notes on his personell review. Also he seems to have been elevated to Team Leader. No way that they’d let Mina lead the group. I’d hate to think this was somehow related to her stance in the comic as an independant, divorced woman. This is the 21st century, after all.

Mina, Mina, Mina. How can you go from a badass in the comic to some insane Buffy reject so damn quickly. See in the book she never even mentions the D-word (Or the V-word at that). But ten minutes into the damn movie she’s all “Oh, and i’m the wife of Jonathan Harker, we fought Dracula and now i’m a Vampire.” I detest how idiots need major literary figures to wax into a silliloquy about their backstories in order to understand who they are. In the book she’s an independant woman who never takes off a scarf after “some business involving an Eastern European man.” In the movie she’s bereft of her leader role so of course she has to be the brain. I mean she is a woman after all. No reason to think that Captain Fucking Nemo, the inventor of the submarine, automobile, wireless telegraph, homing torpedo, and radar could tell what commonly used photographers chemicals are. No, we need a damn VAMPIRE with a chemistry set to perform the Time Honored Scientific Experiment (mixing two things in order to produce a colour change and fizz) to determine what flash powder is.

Nemo doesn’t have much of a role. Of course he leaves his sub all the damn time so there is that. Oh, and for some reason he, as a Hindu, knows tons of Kung Fu.

The Invisible Man is, amusingly enough, not there at all. See in the comic there was a series of “Immaculate Conceptions” at a convent in Britain and thereby the Man was tracked and dragooned into the League. In the movie… well, some random Cockney just took the formula. Isn’t that interesting. *Yawn*

Then there’s the travesty of Hyde smiling. Edward (damned) Hyde. The personification of everything evil about Jekyll learning to care about people. Hyde is no more capable of empathy and caring for his fellow being than any serial murderer. It should come as no surprise that i find Moore’s cannibalistic, venal mutant a lot more interesting and a good source of team friction (”How the hell am i supposed to work with this guy, he just tore someone in half and ate him!).

The two new characters are alright, i suppose. Sawyer is pretty cool, what with being the quintissential American. Brazen, twangy accent, has never seen a car before but is one hell of a stunt driver, shoots akimbo. If there was a Moore version of Sawyer, this is it. Remove the absurd Quartermain’s son subplot and you’ve got yourself a character. Dorian Gray is ok as well. Foppish, rude, very much an indolent british foil to these men (and female) of action.

There are two (count ‘em, two) dencent bits in this movie. Quatermain is taking automatic weapons fire in his lounge in Kenya and some other brit says “Automatic weapons? How unsporting!” To which he replys “They’re probably Belgian.” That was pretty pithy, and not altlgether uncool. The duel between the immortals started off really nicely. The witticisms before and after were more than badass.

The duels themselves are a huge dissapointment. I’m not trying to sound racist, but white people doing action choreography make me physically ill. It’s called a wide shot you idiot, learn how to use it. I’d love to see both people involved in a fight once in a while. Its a bit better than the Ridley Scott Jerky Cam that the entire Moriarty/Quartermain duel is shot in. I swear the camera spends all of its time looking at Sean Connery’s armpit, and for a while there i wasn’t even sure what the hell they were duelling with. Swords? Knives? Pipes? Fish? Who the hell knows, its just blurs on screen with some clanging sounds attached. I could get more enjoyment out of closing my damn eyes than actually watching that fight scene.

This doesn’t really help the movie. OK, so they find the big secret arms factory at the end: under production is a set of Nautiluses and big crazy tanks. That’s enough to worry any circa 1900 armed force, right? Well, armies of europe and abroad, no need to fret! The idiot designing the crap managed to build a factory in the middle of fucking mongolia. It is more than a day of dogsledding to the nearest river. See, if you are building an exact copy of a sub the size of an aircraft carrier, wouldn’t it stand to reason that the sub itself could, i don’t know, navigate all the way to your sub pen? And if there’s one thing that tanks love then it is being built on the top of a damn mountain in the middle of a snowstorm. I’d love to see him move an armoured division down the Himalayas during a blizzard. I think that would be very entertaining.

And its that type of crap that ruins the movie for me. You have an amazing concept for a team, all based on widely known figures and you have to completely mess it up with a Greatest Hits, everybody stands up and introduces themselves, here’s our first mission pile of garbage. My problems with Mina and Quartermain would be solved by setting this as Volume 3 and putting Mina’s translation into a full-blooded (haha) turning-into-bats vampire as a “coming out” metaphor. Quartermain would be coming to terms with his dead son in a way that doesn’t involve heavy drug use, basically a twelve-step program for weary british adventurers. Invisible Man and Hyde would be saved by an R rating and behaviour like their literary namesakes. I want a completely venal Invisible, and a totally brutal Hyde, is that too much to ask? Nemo takes care of himself, as once he’s Team Brain again he’ll have a role rather than just being an indian face on a submarine.

In closing, they didn’t have much the needed to adapt. Less than 200 pages. And if you cut title pages, expository mastheads, and one-page spreads then you probably have less than 180. Add to that the fact that you are introducing characters that are over 100 years old, and are iconic parts of literature and you don’t have to spend any time on intros. Just launch into an adventure, have fun with it, and try to create something that is just a bit less bland and stupid.

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So you’re playing Breath of Fire 3 (As i was, until i found out that i had completely neglected the Masters System until level 20 and had ostensibly wasted 20 levels of experience gathering. I’ll be starting over once i’m bored to tears), and you’ve just gotten Momo, the kickass bunny-chick with the bazooka and robot (we immediately know who’s my favorite. She’s cute, she has a robot, and is packing a bazooka. What am i made of, stone?) and of course you gleefully pack her into the party. First battle she strides confidently out, draws her huge cast-iron bazooka, and lets fly with a volley of (undoubtedly) kickass ammo… hitting nothing. Its ok, i bet everybody misses sometimes, right? Wrong. She misses again. And again. And again. And you get the idea. She can’t hit anything. Rampaging mammoths go unchecked and there’s nothing she can do about it. She becomes a second tier magic user, right next to the 5 year old princess. *Sigh* Another brilliant character wasted because of inability to use her own weapon… but wait! In the dump you uncover an item. Artemis’ Cap, a piece of headwear that is supposed to “Raise to-hit chance” and appears to be exactly Momo’s prescription strength. She starts being able to hit things. Then all of a sudden she’s a useful character again, and its about time. Now where the hell is that little purple-haired bastard that we’re looking for…

So Artemis’ Cap gets 5 stars. It honestly changed how i played an entire character, and thereby an entire game. For the few hours i used it, it was undoubtedly the most useful item i had heretofore uncovered that didn’t radically change one of my main characters forms.

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And here we have a fairly interesting and fairly enjoyable “jump out and spook you” horror movie. I did like alot of it. The Book of Evil is probably the best tome i’ve seen since the Necronomicon Ex Mortis. The actors themselves are well-chosen for their roles (more or less. As the children are fairly good saccarine children, the black chick is a fairly good sassy black chick, that guy who reminds me of Boone is a fairly accurate representation of Boone, etc). The ghosts are fairly creepy archetypes, and the house itself is creepy. “If you love it so much, why don’t you marry it?” You ask… well, it has a drinking problem, and it beats me (but only because it loves me).

Whatever else it is, at its core Thirteen Ghosts is Scooby Doo. Think about it. Tony Shaloub is Fred, the black chick is Daphne, Boone is Shaggy, the Spritual Reclaimation person is Velma, and the kid who is always getting himself lost is Scooby. Boone is constantly trying to run away from the titular Ghosts, and Tony Shaloub ignores the creepiness of the house and of his uncle, then suggests that the group split up in an undead filled basement, getting half of the group trapped. Not in a net, mind you, but damn close.

There are a few (glaring) (annoying) issues with the movie. Half the ghosts don’t do anything. Not that i’m expecting a brace of showtunes from the Torso, or some improvizational dance on the part of the Great Child, but we only really have contact with the Withered Lover, the Juggernaut, the Hammer, the Torn Prince, the Jackal, and the Angry Princess. This leaves the Torso (which twitches), the Bound Woman (Who giggles and jerks), the Dire Mother/Great Child (who sits in a chair), the Firstborn Son (Who stands in one place), the Pilgrim (who i didn’t even remember until i checked the webpage a second ago), and another which honestly slips my mind at the moment, though i guess the Great Child and the Dire Mother count as two. So yeah, they are kinda creepy in a Tool video sort of way, but they lack a certain something.

For example, the amorphous Evil in the Evil Dead were creepy because of the Lovecraftian overwhelmingness of faceless evil, while these have to be 12 certain and “personal” horrors. This misses because of one incorrect confluence of scenes. There is a “Spiritual Reclaimation Expert” who shows up to set the ghosts free, and she brings the Tome of Evil with her (along with a healthy amount of the exposition), and tells us all about the Black Zodiac and its 13 symbol-spirits which infest the house. Then the Boone-esque guy has a seizure and tells us that the ghosts were “Hand-picked” and specifically designated to be the 12 of 13 in the house. Then they go off on a tangent and never explain who the ghosts are, why they are handpicked, and what they are doing in the house. This makes the ghosts only scary when they are doing anything, rather than adding any dimension of creeping horror. (The movie becomes more of a “AH! Look, he’s got a bat or something, and he’s a ghost so that’s scary!” rather than “Holy god look at that basement, i hope something doesn’t come out of nowhere, like that one half bloody serial killer who used to wait in ambush for people when he was alive… AH!”)

Other than that it was a really solid little three star movie. Really middle of the road, and i got exactly what i was expecting when i went in. Atleast i thought so until i talked to someone who had seen the original in theatres. Apparently the audience was given 3d glasses with the flick. The actual actors weren’t in 3d, but the Ghosts were. The ghosts and only the ghosts, and if you took the glasses off, you didn’t see anything. I can honestly say i have no idea how that was done (Research commencing… now). But it sounds very cool. There is only one way to redeem this… a killer dvd, and i know exactly how to do it. Packaging. I’m sure everone has seen the Basic Instinct DVD. Ice clear packaging with an icepick pen jammed in it makes it instantly recognizable, even to someone who was bored to tears by the film and wants badly to forget its existance. Here’s how we package the 13 Ghosts DVD. Clear plastic slipcover with only the title of the movie in embossed ink on the cover. The slipcase slides off to reveal a smaller mock-up of the Tome of Evil from the movie. The Tome is actually a book with some parchment-filled pages of runes, the Black Zodiac, and the House’s floorplan. The last few pages are hollowed out as in the movie to house the DVD, where the Tome was hollowed in the flick to hold spells on reel-to-reel. I actually think its one of my better ideas, and i may grab a dvd case and some parchment, make a mockup, and send it to the film people to see if they’d like it. Here’s hoping they wouldn’t screw me like Sony screwed that Aibo Guy.

So 3 stars. If you remind me of the presentation of the original, 2 1/2 or even 2 depending on how i’m feeling about originality.

And who has more acting credits than anyone but F. Murray Abraham? C. Ernst Harth. The Great Child, an obvious typecast

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