TV Diary

Today’s weird piece of pop culture detritus available for viewing on YouTube is the Firearm movie. Those of us who didn’t get to have much sex in the ‘90s might remember Malibu Comics, one of a handful of ambitious companies that, like Dark Horse and Image, appeared in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s with the goal of challenging Marvel and DC’s hegemony in the superhero market. Firearm was one of its more not-completely-uninteresting titles. Created and written by a pre-Starman James Robinson, its hero is a retired Special Forces guy working as a private detective in a Los Angeles overrun with super-powered criminals. Like Robinson himself, he’s British. I like to imagine that he was conceived as a native Angeleno but Malibu changed him to an expat after the editors got the script for the first issue and calculated how long it would take them to change it every time he called someone a git or a prat or expressed his concern that someone might be taking the piss.

The film in question is a half-hour video that was created as a promotional gimmick for the comic. It was packaged with the premiere issue--not as a digital download, for this was 1993, but as a goddam VHS cassette. I do not entirely blame myself for now seeing something vaguely charming about a time when a commercial tie-in could be that clunky. Robinson wrote the screenplay, a decade before he wrote and directed the self-hating feature film Comic Book Villains and did the script for the much-derided League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie. (Sample line: “I should have acted sooner, maybe, though with an invulnerable demon, surprise was all the edge I had.” That’s what Robert Mueller never understood.) The hero is played by James Jude Courtney, a hulking stuntman who played Michael Myers in David Gordon Green’s Halloween movies, and did you know there were three of those fuckers!?

It is bad, and I wasn’t expecting it to be good. But I thought it might be a little fun and crazy and hang-loose, in the way things sometimes get to be when they were made by people working far from the center of action on something it was assumed nobody was going to see. No, the people responsible were clearly trying to be good soldiers and deliver a product of the same quality as a basic-cable original that premiered at one in the morning between infomercials for Soloflex and BluBlocker sunglasses. The acting is dreadful, not in the way of a trained performer like (say) Eric Roberts or Jennifer Jason Leigh trying to climb to the stars after too much blow on an off day, but in that amateurish “This is an important line, so I’d better scream it. Come to think of it, all these lines are important!” way.

There is, of course, voiceover narration. The director has a checklist in his head of things he thought looked cool when he saw them in movies made be people who had mastered the bare basics of staging and composition, like the dazed-by-exhaustion-and-grief hero suddenly hearing a remark he doesn’t care for and snapping his head in the direction of the speaker to the accompaniment of a “Shit just got real!” musical sting, or the cameraman walking in circles around him while he listens to a message on his mobile phone. The fact that he’s even using a phone while standing in a parking lot is obviously a pretty serious mind blower. Did I mention it’s 1993?

I read the comic book thirty-plus years ago but can’t remember how closely its events tied in with those of this filmed entertainment. It’s not as if people getting possessed by invulnerable demons who were up to no good was an uncommon occurrence in 1993. I think I saw it happen once to Niles on Frasier.

The Hunting Party is a serial-killer-of-the-week procedural about a team of investigators working to round up the world’s worst serial killers, who all escaped from a secret prison for the worst of the worst. It has no critical rep or cult standing that I know of, but NBC and its streaming channel, Peacock, promote it relentlessly, and because I am only human, I finally got curious about it. It is godawful, but I'm glad I watched some of the most recent season finale, because the special guest villain, an evil biochemist named "Xander Wax"—the character names are great—is played by John Corbett. (The character began his career as a murderer in college, when he smeared frog venom all over a condom packet and waited for his roommate, in the course of performing the act of love, to rip it open with his teeth. Anyone who remembers sitting in their lonely room harvesting frog venom while listening to the sound of their roommate’s bed in the next room banging against the dividing wall will feel seen.) The heroes whose job it is to track him down watch footage of him talking to a prison psychiatrist, babbling about chaos and human arrogance while sketching out his nihilistic world view, using the same spinning-finger hand gestures he's used in other roles. I guarantee that if you watched Northern Exposure, and if you ever wondered what the hunky hipster DJ Chris would sound like when he finally went totally around the bend, this will be the funniest thing you've seen in weeks.

I also watched an episode where the special guest villain was Kelsey Grammer (as death-cult leader "Noah Cyrus"). There are scenes where he's alone in a void-like white room: he flails about wailing, crying, laughing, screeching, posing for Edvard Munch, does all the feels. I couldn't tell at first whether this was intended to be a flashback to his time in the experimental prison for super-duper-predators or an attempt to depict what his psychosis looks like inside his head, but I know that if he doesn't win an Emmy for it, he's going to be telling podcast hosts that it's the latest proof that the woke mind virus still has Hollywood in a stranglehold.

R.I.P. Ted Turner. You may well have been a great man, and you were damn sure an entertaining one. I was pretty mad at you forty years ago about the colorization thing, but I got over it. Turner Classic Movies is a gift and a great national resource, and I’m not just saying that because you and my grandmother had the same favorite movie. Which the channel now shows preceded by trigger warnings, which I will happily take over them not showing it at all.