“Wolf Man”: The Entropy of Lycanthropy

Woman with pricey hairdo and flannel shirt in a dark room viewed through a werewolf's perspective so the colors are weirdly red and blue around the shadows.

Life viewed through the eyes of a werewolf — warped colors and very few survivors.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Leigh Whannell’s reinvention of The Invisible Man was my favorite of the four whole films I saw in theaters in 2020 and smartly updated James Whale’s original mad scientist into a millennial tech-bro stalker who just wanted to dominate a single fed-up ex rather than the whole unwieldy world. Though Universal Pictures claims they’ve given up on their plan to reboot their classic monsters in an all-new shared universe (with or without a vaudeville act to string them together again), it wasn’t exactly counterevidential when they let Whannell take another crack at the catalog.

The next title on his checklist is The Wolf Man, but he’s dropped the “the” (it’s cleaner!) and adapted it to another modern metaphor rather than perpetuate the whole “gypsy curse” origin that would invite the wrath of the Romani on social media. The metaphor suits a smaller, more intimate thriller, a phrase that might not appeal to the millions who love their Universal Monsters big ‘n’ broad, or to fans of Twilight or Underworld who were hoping to see an entire team of vulpine antiheroes fighting a horror-fantasy gang war.

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“Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire”: Back to Basic Behemoth-Bashing

The yellow-and-black IMAX movie poster for "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire". The title monsters are running in shadowed profile. Tiny fight jets zoom alongside them. The 'A' in "IMAX" is replaced with a Pyramid thinner than any real Egyptian Pyramid.

Bad beasts, bad beasts, whatcha gonna do?

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: the MonsterVerse is a thing! Once enough time had passed since Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla and Peter Jackson’s King Kong, the blockbuster peddlers at Legendary Pictures decided America was ready once again for rude giant animals to crush everything in their paths and possibly dominate theaters. Their Avengers-style interconnected saga began with 2014’s recycle-titled Godzilla, which delivered one truly mighty monster melee after two hours of ordinary humans reminding us what we didn’t like about the previous five decades’ predecessors. Pop culture’s most popular overtall simian returned in 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, a period-piece prequel that shamelessly embraced kaiju camp, OD’d on steroids and let its creatures run amuck through Apocalypse Now backdrops and chase some of the best character actors in the biz. The humans were suspiciously more entertaining and having way more fun than usual, as monster toe-jam ingredients go.

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Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” End Credits

Godzilla King of the Monsters!

Turn on your heartlight! Let it shine wherever you go!

Previously on the Godzilla and Friends Cinematic Universe: in 2014’s Godzilla reboot we got seven (7) minutes of Our Hero and two hours of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch hiding and moping. 2017 brought us Kong: Skull Island, the big ape’s cheesy yet awesome comeback that delivered on its promises of MONSTERS FIGHT! though any human actors who didn’t arrive tongue-in-cheek looked pretty lost.

Now it’s sort of a trilogy as Legendary Pictures perpetuates the American GFCU with Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Hopefully this time Toho isn’t ashamed of what our country has done to its favorite native superlizard.

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Yes, There’s a Scene after the “Kong: Skull Island” End Credits

Kong Skull Island!

“COME AT KONG, BROS.”

New rule: anyone who was in line opening day for the King Kong reboot Kong: Skull Island hereby relinquishes all rights to complain about too-soon Spider-Man reboots. Peter Jackson’s 2005 cover of the original Kong isn’t dead and buried yet. The return on its $250 million investment wasn’t as robust as the studio would’ve hoped, but considering its Tomatometer rating tops Skull Island‘s (84% vs. 78%), I wouldn’t call it a failure that needed to be erased — unlike, say, Spider-Man 3.

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If Godzilla Won’t Rush to Appear in His Own Film, Why Rush to Write About It?

Elizabeth Olsen!

Elizabeth Olsen plays the obligatory Concerned Wife role and has more screen time than the King of the Monsters. Her agent must be one tough negotiator.

I saw the new Godzilla reboot over Memorial Day weekend, but we’ve had so much going on here at Midlife Crisis Crossover over the past few weeks, from my birthday road trip to the Indy 500 Festival Parade to Indy PopCon 2014, that its writeup remained relegated to the MCC reserve-topic list until those events were past. (Mostly, anyway. Officially I’m not done with one of them.) Four weeks into its American theatrical run, I figure why not get on with it.

So, monsters, then. Eventually.

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So There’s a Scene During the “Pacific Rim” End Credits

Gipsy Danger, Pacific Rim

Midlife Crisis Crossover calls Pacific Rim the Best Men’s-Adventure Film of the Year!

So far, anyway. I’ll admit my opinion is skewed because I don’t watch every theatrical release. I certainly didn’t see 6 Fast 6 Furious, which might or might not be a five-star men’s-adventure flick for all I know, but the 6F6F trailers showed a sign of weakness: two female characters sharing a scene, even though it was a scene of angry pummeling. Not counting extras or one-line background fillers, I counted four female characters in all of Pacific Rim: two robot drivers; one of those drivers as a young girl; and, with 95% certainty, at least one of the monsters. None are onscreen at the same time, spaced apart by several men and minutes, just as you’d expect from an awesome boys-club tale of manly-man heroics.

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