The end of the world as we know it: ‘The World’s End’

Edgar Wright, who might someday be known as the director of “Ant-Man,” has over the past decade given movie fans often-funny, often-touching glimpses into the lives of a few misfits and outcasts in the UK, from the dead-end zombie fighters of “Shaun of the Dead” to the small-town coppers of “Hot Fuzz.”

Now comes Wright’s “The World’s End,” which seems to cap this summer’s moviegoing (and end of the world-depicting) experience.

What Wright jokingly refers to as the third film in his “Cornetto” trilogy – named after a popular ice cream treat that shows up in all three movies, yes that’s how offbeat Wright’s humor is – is actually two movies in one: A “growing up is hard to do” reunion of old chums movie and an end-of-the-world comic thriller.

Needless to say, spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen the movie, which opened wide yesterday.

Two of Wright’s regular collaborators, Simon Pegg (Shaun as well as Scotty from “Star Trek”) and Nick Frost are among a group of friends who get together more than two decades after one of the most awesome but frustratingly incomplete nights of their lives: In 1990, before they went their separate ways and left their hometown of Newton Haven, they attempted an epic pub crawl that entailed drinking a pint at each of 12 pubs.

In fact, Pegg’s character, Gary King, only gets his four friends to join him by lying to them that the others have already agreed to meet to try to complete their challenge. That’s not enough for some, notably Andy (Frost’s character), who not only stopped drinking but holds Gary in contempt for his actions (only gradually revealed) that night. Andy comes along only after Gary tells him he needs the flashback to recover from the recent death of his mother.

Nevertheless, Pegg and cohorts played by Frost, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan and Paddy Considine return to Newton Haven and attempt the feat. Along the way, they run into Rosamund Pike as Freeman’s sister, who hooked up with Gary that night long ago.

The quest begins with a couple of disappointments for the hilariously self-centered Gary – played with gusto by Pegg – in that Andy no longer drinks and no one in their old town seems to remember them.

Those anomalies are resolved, however, when at one stop King impetuously confronts one of the townspeople and the fivesome is shocked to discover many of the residents of Newton Haven have been replaced by robots.

The rest of the movie plays out in a comic rush as the group of friends tries to get away without being absorbed and assimilated by the robots and their alien overlords – even while Gary, increasingly drunk, determined and frustrated, tries to complete the pub crawl.

Parts of “The World’s End” are laugh-out-loud funny and parts are poignant. There are some bizarre shock value special effects and a funny final encounter with the invaders who’ve turned Newton Haven into a bland lab experiment.

Driven by Pegg’s bravura performance and the propulsive “must get to the next pub” plot, “The World’s End” is a fun capper to Wright’s Brit-rich series of comedies.

Random observations:

Wright likes casting former James Bond actors in his movies. Timothy Dalton was in “Hot Fuzz,” while Pierce Brosnan is on hand here. I’m looking forward to Connery, Moore or Lazenby in “Ant-Man.”

The director gives us “call backs” to favorite moments in the earlier films, but none more obvious and beloved – it’s even in the commercials – than Pegg attempting to jump a fence.

It’s been a big summer for the end of the world, from “World War Z” to “This is the End” to this. It’s odd that the two more humor-inclined movies seemed to work best.

End of the world or not, “The World’s End” owes as much to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” as to any other story.

Here’s a big spoiler alert, for discussion of the ending:

I was startled by it. When the little village of Newton Haven melts down thanks to the alien invaders and an electromagnetic pulse shoots out, the lights go out everywhere. I mean, around the globe. The final montage of scenes, narrated by Frost’s character, depicts the disparate members of the group living out their lives in the post-apocalypse. Most appropriately, Pegg’s Gary King is a wayfaring adventurer, moving across the wasteland as the now-teetotalling leader of a group of robotic duplicates of his friends’ younger selves. It feels like a climax that teases a sequel or spin-off film, but it’s really all we need to see to enjoy that premise.

Classic comics: ‘They’ll Do It Every Time’

When I began reading newspapers in the 1960s, I was an exhaustive reader of newspapers. I was always the type of kid – and still am now, as an adult – who usually checked out every page of a book, every second of the credits of a TV show or movie and, yes, every story and ad and illustration in the newspaper.

It goes without saying that I studied newspaper comic books closely and was puzzled and fascinated by “They’ll Do It Every Time.”

Unlike “Peanuts” and strips from the time that felt contemporary, “They’ll Do It Every Time” felt like a holdover from an earlier day. And it was.

“They’ll Do It Every Time” was created in 1929 (!) by cartoonist Jimmy Hatlo, who first drew his complex, gag-filled strips first for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco papers. But by the time I was seeing the panel (rather than multi-panel strips) it appeared in more than 600 papers.

Stop and think about that for a moment.

I’m a lifelong lover of newspapers, and it’s where I have made my living. But while the influence of newspapers has moved from print to online in recent years and the heyday of newspaper comic strips ended with “Calvin and Hobbes” and “The Far Side,” it’s impossible to overstate the impact of a daily comic strip in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

Everybody, every member of the family, read the newspaper, or at least part of it.  And nearly every member of the family read the comics.

Hatlo’s comic entertained and puzzled me. With its sarcastic assessment of the foibles of mankind, the strip was, as the comic strip history website Hogan’s Alley noted, an early practitioner of observational humor.

My favorite element of the strip was the Hatlo “Tip of the Hat” to a reader each time. Hatlo accepted ideas for strips, refined and expanded on them, and then thanked and credited the reader who gave him the idea.

It was unlike anything else in comics before or since and I thought it was fascinating.

Hatlo continued the strip until he died in 1963, so it’s likely the strips I saw were reruns or some done by his successors, Al Scaduto and Bob Dunn. Amazingly, the comic ran until February 2008.

‘SharkNado,’ ‘Ghost Shark’ and great exploitation movies

I still remember my expectations when I saw “Screamers” at a drive-in theater in 1981.

They were pretty damn low.

After all, “Screamers” was sold with the catchphrase “Be Warned: You Will Actually See a Man Turned Inside Out” on the poster. When a movie is sold on that kind of pitch alone you know it’s got problems.

When that scene doesn’t even happen in the movie, you know the suckers who paid admission have problems.

Anyway, “Screamers” – which was actually an Italian movie called “Island of the Fish Men,” made two years earlier, then released with some footage added by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures – was pretty weak stuff.

It’s appropriate that the universally liked Corman has, in recent years, produced cheap sci-fi movies for the SyFy channel, home of “SharkNado,” a huge hit on SyFy a few weeks back, and inspiration for “Ghost Shark,” which aired Thursday night. Neither were Corman productions but might have been. That’s because the mix of inspiration and desperation that went into the writing, filming and marketing of these movies was vintage Corman.

“SharkNado’s” best marketing tool was one that couldn’t have been planned or bought by SyFy. The Twitter reaction to the movie the evening it aired added greatly to the movie’s impact on the pop culture landscape.

When SyFy aired “Ghost Shark” – an inferior movie to “SharkNado” but one with some funny and audacious scenes – the channel seemed to try to prime the Twitter pump by superimposing lame “Tweets” in the upper left corner of the screen.

Didn’t work.

I often wonder how modern technology and social media who have affected the plots of movies that predated their invention. In the case of “Screamers” back in 1981, I can only imagine how my friends and I would have digitallly picked the movie apart there from our drive-in vantage point.

Movie classic: ‘Francis in the Haunted House’

More than a half-century later, it’s hard to imagine a movie studio building a series of films around the exploits of a talking mule and his human sidekick.

Yet Universal, home of classic monsters and classic funny/scary movies, released seven pictures about Francis, an Army mule voiced by veteran character actor Chill Wills (in the first six) and accompanied by straight man Peter Stirling (Donald O’Connor in the first six flicks).

The movies were based on a book and were sent into theaters beginning in 1950 mostly as a post-war military comedy. Francis and Peter went to West Point, joined the WACs and the Navy. Inevitably, Peter got into some kind of jam, Francis dispensed wise-cracking good advice and nobody believed that the mule could talk. Until he did.

My introduction to the series was a 1960s showing on an Indy TV station of the last film in the series, “Francis in the Haunted House,” released in 1956.

My view is no doubt skewed by the fact that this, the first in the series that I remember seeing, had a different star – Mickey Rooney – and a different voice – veteran voice actor Paul Frees – replacing Wills as the voice of Francis.

But for a kid who grew up loving not only Universal monster films, including “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” I found the mix of laughs and chills perfect.

In the movie, David Prescot (Rooney) meets Francis and, after the initial surprise at the fact this is a talking mule, they set off on an adventure. The two try to help a woman win her inheritance by staying in a supposedly haunted mansion.

In a formula that became familiar through “Scooby Do,” the haunting is being staged by crooks who want to win the mansion and Prescot is a patsy in more ways than one.

There is, however, a foe that Francis and Prescot can fight together: A ghostly knight on horseback.

It’s no doubt true that the Francis formula was more than a little tired by this point. O’Connor bailed from the series before this entry was made and was widely quoted as saying he knew it was time to go when the mule got more fan mail.

But there’s a lot of pleasure to be found in the final “Francis” movie. It’s perfect for “Abbott and Costello” fans.

RIP Elmore Leonard, king of hardboiled crime

Sad news today: Elmore Leonard, author of such crime novels as “Get Shorty” and “Glitz,” has passed away at 87 after recently suffering a stroke.

I won’t pretend to be an expert on Leonard. I’ve read a few of his books – I reviewed his final book published before his death, “Raylan,” in February 2012 – and I appreciated his knack for making his bad guys as interesting as, or more interesting than, his good guys.

I also appreciated Leonard’s nurturing of “Justified,” the FX series based on his short story “Fire in the Hole,” about Raylan Givens, a deputy U.S. marshal working in Kentucky.

As he finds himself up against meth dealers and murderers, Raylan was cool and compelling, especially when dealing with lifelong antagonist Boyd Crowder.

Leonard didn’t have  a lot of love for movie and TV versions of his work, but he liked Graham Yost’s “Justified” and had some kind of synergy going with it, contributing story ideas and writing an episodic novel (the aforementioned “Raylan”) drawn from the same setting.

We’ll miss you, Mr. Leonard.

‘Longmire” hews closer to Johnson’s books

When I wrote about the first season of A&E’s “Longmire” in June 2012, my natural inclination was to compare the books and TV series. I’d been enjoying the books for a couple of years and hoped for the best for the series. The best I could say – I mean that sincerely – was that the show captured the characters and flavor but not the plot integrity of author Craig Johnson’s mysteries, set in a rural Wyoming county.

I noted some differences between the series and the books. The series omitted a few characters – Sheriff Walt Longmire’s predecessor in office,  crusty old retired sheriff Lucian, notably – and added a few, including Lucian’s nephew, ambitious deputy Branch Connally, who wants to unseat Walt in an election.

Missing was the forged-in-Vietnam bond between Walt and pal Henry Standing Bear, leaving the Bear’s motivations sometimes in doubt.

Also absent were a Philadelphia connection – deputy Vic is from there, and it is home to Walt’s daughter Cady’s law practice – and the sense of the mystical and spiritual, as Henry nudges Walt toward a deeper connection with the Native American spirits of the Wyoming countryside. Also absent, to some extent, were the Crow and Cheyenne supporting characters that filled the books.

Maybe the most egregious variation from the books is how the series has dealt with the death of Walt’s wife. In the books, she died before the first story began after a battle with cancer. Martha Longmire likewise died before the TV series began, but it’s implied she died at the hands of a drug dealer in Colorado and Walt (and perhaps Henry) then killed her killer.

I’m glad to say, most of the way into the second season of “Longmire,” that the series has greatly improved.

Sure, star Robert Taylor and supporting cast like Katee Sackhoff were always good. But the second season – perhaps with input from Johnson himself, perhaps from a realization on the part of show creators Hunt Baldwin and John Coveny that Johnson gave them excellent material to work with and they should take advantage of it – has seen the show capture the spirit – and sometimes the letter – of the books.

The first episode of the second season, “Unquiet Mind,” echoed the “prisoners on the loose in mountainous countryside” plot of the seventh book, 2011’s “Hell is Empty.”

The third episode of this season, “Death Came in Like Thunder,” explored the Wyoming Basque community that’s a big part of the books. One of the characters omitted from the TV series is Basque deputy Santiago.

And the second season even returned to two major plotlines of the books: Cady Longmire’s serious injury at the hands of an attacker – although in the books it happens in Philly, where’s she’s practicing law – and deputy Vic’s history on the Philly PD.

The Native American spiritualism that seemed so missing from the first season was greatly felt in the second, climaxing in a scene where Walt – to atone for the killing of his wife’s killer – hooks his chest in “Man Called Horse” style and suffers in the blazing sun.

And although I haven’t seen it yet, I’m told an episode even features the TV series version of Lucian.

I can’t think of a recent TV series that improved so markedly from the first season to the second. I think if you’re a fan of the books, you’ll find more to like than just the character portrayals and tone this season. If you’re not a reader of the books, you’ll find an enjoyable crime drama unfolding on a weekly basis.

‘The Bridge’ – Murder from both sides

We’re living in a golden age of cable TV. Starting with “The Shield” and continuing through “The Walking Dead,” “Breaking Bad,” “Justified” and other series, what was once “basic” cable has in recent years given us serial dramas that rival novels for their depth, complexity and characters.

“The Bridge” is the latest episodic drama that fits that mold.

Based on a Danish/Swedish series, the FX series plays out on two sides of the Bridge of the Americas, between Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas.

An El Paso detective, Sonya Cross (Diane Kruger), and a Chihuahua detective, Marco Ruiz (Demian Bichir), are called in when a body is found in the middle of the bridge. To their horror, they discover it is actually two bodies: One half is Mexican, the other American.

In service of its gruesome plot, the series launches into a mix of politics and murder, with a serial killer who seems to relish making statements about the disparities between American and Mexican life and justice as much as he enjoys killing.

The cops struggle to keep up as they deal with not only political considerations but a killer who sets out to shock. One episode puts the detectives in a race against time as they try to find a woman staked out in the desert, her slow death being shown via a webcam.

Kruger’s character is especially interesting: She has Apserger’s Syndrome and is prone to tactless pronouncements. Ruiz is a family man who, nevertheless, goes astray from his moral roots.

There’s a good supporting cast, particularly Ted Levine (the killer from “Silence of the Lambs”) as Cross’ crusty cop superior. Annabeth Gish – looking very different from her “X-Files” days – is good as a widow with a secret.

The promos for the series were dark and macabre, focusing on gravesites and dark alleyways and remote haciendas in the desert. The promos sucked me in.

And the series followed through on that imagery. Each week, the story moves back and forth from the mansions of Texas to the seedy streets of Juarez to the dusty desert expanse. The tourism boards from El Paso and particularly Juarez can’t be any more thrilled with this depiction of the area than the chamber of commerce from Lexington, Kentucky is thrilled with the endless parade of meth heads, hookers and small-time criminals on “Justified.”

“The Bridge” is a little more than halfway through its first season and the early episodes are available online and on demand. It’s definitely worth the effort to try to catch up.

‘Fool Me Twice’ carries on Parker tradition

With 70 books to his credit, masterful crime writer Robert B. Parker passed away in 2010. It might have seemed, for a few moments anyway, that classic detective characters like Boston PI Spencer, tough investigator Sunny Randall and New England small town police chief Jesse Stone might have died with him, along with the leads of other Parker series.

Then the Parker estate picked crime writer Ace Atkins to continue the Spencer series and Michael Brandman, a writer and producer who worked with Parker on adapting the Jesse Stone stories into a successful series of appropriately somber TV movies, was tapped to continue Stone’s adventures.

Brandman’s second Stone book – titled, somewhat unwieldingly, “Robert B. Parker’s Fool Me Twice,” takes us back to the small town of Paradise and not one, not two, but three storylines for Stone to unravel.

Stone, a recovering alcoholic and former LA cop, has settled into his job as small-town police chief but isn’t any less anti-authoritarian. Stone clashes with town council members as well as other law enforcement officials on a couple of the matters he faces here. Paradise is host to a movie production company and its troubled lead actress, Marisol, who is being menaced by her estranged husband; there are also complaints by town residents that their water bills are mysteriously high; and Stone butts heads with a rich family and their privileged teenage daughter.

Brandman is a writer gifted at telling his tale in Parker’s voice, and he does so quite well here. One of the plotlines feels kind of abrupt and another – Stone’s response to the troubled teen – is familiar to fans of Spencer, who showed the value of tough love to a couple of errant young people in that series.

As with all of Parker’s creations, the heroes are more than capable – so much so that there’s very little credible threat to their safety or their plans.

But Brandman, like Atkins, knows what Parker fans want: A strong but soft-spoken hero who can handle any number of tough guys and guys who think they’re tough.

In Brandman’s hands, I’m hoping Jesse Stone will be around for years to come.

Classic schlock: ‘The Brain That Wouldn’t Die’

Believe it or not, I hadn’t seen “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die” in its entirety until just recently.

It is, after all, one of those classic schlocky horror movies, those cult drive-in classics, that everybody is familiar with even if you haven’t seen it. It was the first Mike Nelson “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” for pete’s sake.

Yet I managed to never see more than random clips until I sat down to watch it on DVD the other day.

And what a treat.

Filmed in 1959 but not released until 1962, the movie’s original title was “The Head That Wouldn’t Die,” who was probably more accurate.

The movie stars Jason Evers – a familiar face from the “Star Trek” series episode “Wink of an Eye” – as Dr. Cortner, an arrogant surgeon who is secretly experimenting, Frankenstein-style, on creating life after death. He’s been saving random body parts and assembling a creature that’s kept in the laboratory closet downstairs in his family’s summer home.

Early in the movie, even Cortner’s surgeon father criticizes his lack of humility and unpleasant ambitions.

Then Cortner and girlfriend Jan are in a auto accident and Jan is decapitated. Jan is beheaded in the kind of car crash that is usually found in low-budget movies: Lots of shots of the car careening along a country road, then quickly approaching a guard rail. The crash itself isn’t seen. Neither is Jan’s head, which Cortner wraps up in his sportcoat and rushes from the scene (with as much footage of him running, bunched up jacket in his arms, as there are shots of the car speeding down the road).

So Cortner put’s Jan … in a pan … at least her head … in his basement lab. Then he begins scouting out a replacement body.

The movie certainly seems to have inspired scenes in “The Re-Animator,” with its head in a pan motif. And “Jan in the Pan” is apparently the nickname for the female lead once she’s … in a pan.

Every cheap horror movie needs a monster and a woman’s head in a pan just wasn’t going to cut it. Hence … the stitched-together monster in the closet.

The creature, the result of Cortner’s previous experiments, is played by seven-foot, six inch Eddie Carmel, subject of a photo by renowned photographer Diane Arbus that depicts Carmel as “The Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents.”

As Cortner goes to a burlesque house to pick out a new body for Jan, he doesn’t seem like a tortured soul looking to save his girlfriend. He seems to be enjoying the view a little too much.

Adding to the overall aura of sleaze: Two dancers get into a catfight, boobs jiggling. Cut to drawings of two cats and a dubbed meow.

Jan, meanwhile, wakes up – well, her head wakes up – and she immediately begins talking to the still-unseen monster in the closet, talking up their mutual need for revenge.

There’s some choice dialogue:

“An operating room is no place to experiment.”

“Very well. The corpse is yours.”

Said during operation: “I’ve been working on something like this for weeks.” Well, tons of research then.

“I love her too much to let her stay like this.” Well, a disembodied head in a pan, yeah.

“The line between scientific genius and obsessive fanaticism is a thin one.”

“Horror has its ultimate … and I’m that.”

And cackling by Jan in the pan. Lots of cackling.

The end credit slide on the copy that I watched still had the original title: “The Head That Wouldn’t Die!”

Great comic book covers: Avengers 57

Behold, a beautiful cover.

From time to time here, I’ll note some of my favorite comic books covers. They’re not necessarily the covers of milestone comic books. They’re just covers that I loved.

By default, most of the covers will be from the 1960s and 1970s, when I was actively buying, reading and collecting comics. They had their maximum impact on me back then.

I’ll start off with this one, Avengers 57, from the Marvel comic of my favorite superhero group, introducing one of my favorite characters, Vision (or the Vision, to some). The cover date was October 1968.

The android creation of homicidal robot Ultron, Vision was sent to kill the Avengers but, maybe improbably, became part of the team.

To this day, the cover by John Buscema sets the standard for comic book covers. Striking composition? Yes. Heroes in peril? Yes. Mysterious and undeniably important new character causing chaos? Yes.

I couldn’t spend my 12 cents fast enough for this one.