INSTALLMENT 21:
In Which You And A Large Group Of Total Strangers Are Flipped The Finger By The Mad Masters Of Anthropomorphism

If this afternoon you are walking down the street and some geek in a window three storeys above you decides to be cute, and s/he dumps a paper bag full of turds into the abyss, and as you pass beneath you get slimed from head to toe with ka-ka, and you look up and scream at the sonofabitch, and s/he gives you the finger, I'd be willing to make book that you'd register about 9.6 on the Pissed-Off Scale.

If you picked up today's paper and read where Reagan and his cronies had managed to push through a hundred and fifteen million to aid the Contras, but were trying to reduce the aid to retarded children from 9% (which is what it is, though it was supposed to have been 14% and then go as high as 30%, but they never quite got around to doing it) to 7 ½%, and they tried to con you by telling you we had to do it because of the Domino Effect in Latin America that would permit the Communist Menace to gain a toehold in this hemisphere, I'd put good money on your responding with outrage and a verbal explosion of naughty words.

If you go out to dinner tonight and a car full of no-neck spuds pulls up alongside you at a traffic light, and the feeps inside look across at the one you love, sitting beside you, and yell, "Hey, that is the ugliest piece of crap I've ever seen, I hacked up something prettier than that when I got drunk on Friday, it looks like something I fished outta the sink disposal this morning!" I'd bet my paycheck for this column that your first instinct would be to deck it as you leave the light and centerpunch those dirtballs into a better life.

Yet by the time you read these words many of you (and many of your friends) (and a large group of total strangers all across these great Yewnited States) will have shelled out as much as six bucks a head to sit through Flight of the Navigator (Walt Disney Pictures), and I'll take odds not one of you took sufficient offense at having had your intelligence insulted, at having been flipped the bird by Disney's head of production, Michael Eisner, by director Randal Kleiser (the man who gave you Grease, The Blue Lagoon, Summer Lovers and Grandview, U.S.A., four of the dreariest films of the past eight years, despite having made indecent amounts of money, thereby guaranteeing Mr. Kleiser unlimited shots at your insipience threshold), and by a trio of writers named Baker, Burton and MacManus whose first names ought to be Larry, Shemp and Moe, that you rose up in wrath and demanded your money back. Go ahead, tell me that you felt so damned affronted by Flight of the Navigator that you nailed the poor theater manager's head to the candy counter. Tell me you felt as used as you did after seeing The Secret of Al Capone's Vaults; that you knew to the core of your being that once and for all you weren't going to have the Hollywood Crap Mill stick it to you and break it off inside. Go to it; tell me: I'll believe anything; hell, I'm just a critic, not one of the Great Wad that goes to these abominations and doesn't understand that it's had its pockets picked. And then I'll tell you that pigs can fly, and we'll start even.

What I'm trying to say is that Flight of the Navigator is just awful. It has absolutely nothing to recommend it. From a plot that has approximately half as much logic as a Creationist tract to a nauseating passion for anthropomorphizing every machine that they can flog across the screen, this no-brainer is an insult to anything crawling across our planet with the vaguest scintilla of a claim to sentience.

Navigator combines the worst elements of Explorers, Short Circuit, Goonies and The Last Starfighter, with treacly homages to those early Disney True-Life Adventures in which all manner of flora and fauna were imbued with human characteristics.

No.

I've had it.

I can bear no more. This time I was going to inveigh once again about the juvenilizing of our beloved cinematic art-form, lamenting the horrors visited upon Ridley Scott's Legend and comparing it to Labyrinth (which, like Return to Oz, was never given a fair shake by the press or the critical apparatchiks); I was going to conclude with stunning summation the theses advanced in the last two or three columns, using as ghastly examples The Manhattan Project, Ladyhawke, Sword of the Valiant (aka Gawain and the Green Knight), Space-Camp, D.A.R.Y.L. and all the limping, lurching, broken-backed, blind in one eye illogicalities I've savaged here these past months, from Gremlins to Young Sherlock Holmes . . . but I'm simply not up to it. I've been receiving letters from many of you, pleading for respite. Agreeing, with sobs and defeated expressions, that this has been a period of assault on our tolerance for the imperfect unparalleled in moviemaking history; an assault that makes the dreadful indulgences of Pee-Wee Herman (whose voice, you will learn here for the first time, was used as that of Max, the sentient spaceship, in Navigator) seem by comparison to be of a stature with the thespic joys of Sirs Gielgud, Olivier and Richardson. Pleading for a brief break from the shrieks of anguish I let out every time one of these spikes is driven into my critic's perception. And at last, finally, I agree. I can say no more for a while. There is apparently no bottoming-out of this trend toward imbecile filmmaking. Every week brings new and more loathsome product; and at last even I am unhorsed.

So I will toss out all my notes on those films.

Happily will I heave a sigh of relief (and do I hear an echo from out there where you lie on your back gasping for surcease?) and let those earwigs, maggots, cockroaches and gnats live their brief lives in your theaters, never again to be available for swatting if you are smart and don't watch them on cable television.

I will go to another insect, with high recommendations. I will tell you that if you missed David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly (20th Century Fox), you missed one of the most exciting motion pictures of the year. Unlike Invaders from Mars, which began with dreck from its first version in 1953, and was recently remade in an updated, equally as dreckoid version, The Fly uses lovingly-remembered but nonetheless trivial material—the 1958 "Help me! Help me!" version and two abominable sequels (1959 & 1965)—to form a basis for Cronenberg's latest installment in his celluloid tract on the concept of the New Flesh.

What's that? A new filmic philosophy? Something we can buzz a word at? Oh, ripping, we all say . . . lay it on us, Oh Observer of Pop Art.

And I will. Next time. I want to discuss Cronenberg at length, because I've been sorta muttering for several years that of all the wise guy directors currently assaulting us, only Cronenberg has the intellectual virility and talent to become sui generis. In Scanners, The Brood, Videodrome and now The Fly, Cronenberg has leapfrogged his own triumphs and failures to become a director/writer with a voice and a view of the world that could be as important, in its own bizarre way, as that of Hitchcock, Ford, Wilder or Woody Allen.

But I need space for such a discussion, and next time I will allocate that space for myself, The Omnipresent Ferman permitting.

And until then, go to see Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married (Tri-Star), written by Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner, which is what Back to the Future wanted to be. It is almost exactly the same story, told from the viewpoint of a woman, rather than that of a simpy, affected, smartass Michael J. Fox; it is time travel and wish-fulfillment treated maturely, rather than simplistically and for yocks; it is adult and sincere and entertaining and everything right that Back to the Future did wrong. When I sat in that Hugo awards audience in Atlanta last Labor Day, and saw Back to the Future beat out Brazil for the statuette, I felt my heart sink. It was a travesty, and in that moment I hated those of you who voted for best film, condemning you in my mind to nothing better than Back to the Future. Ever!

But even the most benumbed of you must gleam in the eye of the universe, for you have been given a chance to see the error of your ways. It has been given to you, the possibility of actually comparing what-was with what-might-be. You can go to the theater and see Peggy Sue Got Married, waltz up the street to the video shoppe to rent Back to the Future, take it home, and compare—while the memory of Peggy Sue is still fresh—idiocy and counterfeit emotion and cheap laughs and adolescent bullshit with a mature dream entertainingly spun at proper length.

I cannot recommend Peggy Sue Got Married highly enough. I only hope when you make the comparison, that you have not been so hornswoggled that you cannot perceive the quantum leap in excellence and honesty between them.

Having now attempted to do some social work among the artistically impoverished, I go away to regain that sweetness of nature I once possessed, before having been slimed by ka-ka for what seems an eternity.

Hoping you are the same . . .

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/February 1987