Continuing my recovery with a mixture of steroids, light gardening and sick bay cinema here at Moonbase readers.
*
I've been enjoying a mini-fest of Miguel Ferrar. You'll recall Miguel as the OCP VP in Robocop. He always played a good baddy: rough, raffish, brash and unhinged.
Last week I saw Miguel in Stephen King's The Night Flier, a neat story about a vampire with a pilot's licence. Why turn into a bat when you can fly a plane!
Miguel plays a desperate journalist who's also a pilot. He becomes obsessed with the monster, the Night Flier and follows him in his plane to dark remote airfields across America. Things don't go well and many flights are cancelled!
I really enjoyed this film. Miguel was convincing and the vampire was dentally memorable. Stephen King has that canny knack of mixing everyday American life with monsters who loiter just off the page and he did it many times over.
*
My latest Miguel Ferrer outing is another King story, which I've neither read nor seen on the screen: The Stand. Its on You Tube in 3 or 4 parts. I'm about to start part 2 and I like the basic storyline a lot, a a new twisted leader emerging from a plague-ravaged world.
Anyone else seen the series?
*
Sadly Miguel died in January, just five years older than me.
RIP.
*
Another actor who plays unhinged characters well is Gary Busey, whom I caught this week on a DVD of Hider in the House.
A grimly fascinating tale of a psychopath, one Mr. Busey, who manages to build a hidden room in the attic of a huge American villa before the swish owners move in! From the comfort of his cubby hole Busey becomes unhealthily interested with the lady of the house played by yummy mommy Mimi Rogers.
Its a scary notion that there maybe secret rooms in houses, where someone else is living. I will check my loft this week for odd lights glowing behind air grilles!
It reminded me a bit of the much older Black Christmas, the king of all 'hider' flicks.
Hider in the House had a tortuous journey in the cinema, being hardly shown anywhere when it was released. Even more unlucky was Gary himself, who suffered brain damage in a terrible motorcycle accident shorty after. It's good to know he recovered to play that lazy shambling style he has in many more films including memorable stints in Lethal Weapon and Under Siege.
*
This morning I was reminded of a bit of my own juvenile geekery when I saw Amok Time on the box. Its that famous episode of Star trek where Spock suffers the Pon Fa, burns with the blood fever and gets married.
On the way to the church he has to fight Kirk with a large crescent axe.
When I saw this as kid I was so excited as we had the very same 'weapon' in the garden shed! A lawn edger! I had it out whirling round the lawn before you could say T'Pau's A Singer.
It looked like this and I've not seen one for years. Maybe they're all on Vulcan!
*
More geek salad to be tossed soon.
I too was saddened by Miguel Ferrer's passing. I loved him in "Robocop" and I actually got to work with him on a SF TV pilot called "Badlands 2005" which filmed in Australia back in 1989... I built a prosthetic robot chest cavity for a sequence where his cyborg character was malfunctioning. Unfortunately I used real circuit boards for the general structure and didn't think about the fact there were some screw holes in them. -That's until the FX crew laced it up with squibs for short-circuit effects and a spark slipped through to Miguel's skin. Most embarrassing. Despite that I had a good working relationship with both him and Gus Mercurio, who are now both sadly no longer with us.
ReplyDeleteHey that's so cool that you got to work with Miguel Lewis. That's a superb story too - I'm sure worse has happened on set! - a story for the book you should write! Speaking of Australian FX I caught FX: Murder by Illusion on the Tv the oother night. I love that film and Bryan Brown does a great job as FX man on the run Rollie. Do you like that movie too Lewis?
Delete