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mst3kproject · 3 years

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The Navy vs the Night Monsters

Of course, it’s not like bad things stop happening now that 2020 is finally over… we just get to start counting again from zero. Kind of like how I’ve started counting thirty-six Episodes that Never Were per year, beginning with this one. It was co-directed by Wyott Ordung from Robot Monster and features familiar faces like Russ Bender and Mamie Van Doren, the latter for once not playing a teenage delinquent. It also has one really obscure MST3K connection: it was based on a story by Murray Leinster, which the sharp-eyed will remember as the name of the ship attacked by Evil Count Zarth Arn’s lava lamp weapon at the beginning of Starcrash!

A plane carrying specimens of Antarctic flora and fauna makes a rather rough and unexpected landing at a naval base on remote Gow Island in the south Pacific. There appears to be nobody on board except the pilot and a few penguins – the former is in a catatonic state, and the latter are... well, penguins... so what happened to the rest of the passengers and crew is a complete mystery. Did the pilot go mad and kill them? Did the penguins? Or did it have something to do with those mysterious ancient trees discovered growing around a geothermal spring in the heart of the frozen continent?

The first ten minutes of this movie are spent trying to be a comedy. Before we get anywhere near the plot, we first have to listen to the guys on the plane try to be funny about their lunch and their tastes in women. Then on the island, we watch a guy who can’t seem to figure out how to inflate a balloon, followed by a dude talking to his dog, and then a really icky bit where two women convince a man he had sex with both of them, which he buys because he was too drunk to remember. Only then do we finally establish what’s actually going on. The impression one gets from this beginning is that The Navy vs the Night Monsters is going to be peopled entirely by Jackass Comic Relief characters, and I actually turned the film off and sat on it for a couple of days to psych myself up to watch the rest.

When I finally turned it back on, to my relief the movie turned out not to be quite that bad, but it’s still pretty damned bad. The dull and unfunny opening is followed by an abrupt shift of tone, as a man maddened by terror jumps from the plane to his death! The only thing set up by the opening that turns out to be relevant is Spaulding the meteorologist’s crush on Nora the nurse, when she’s in love with the base’s second in command, Lieutenant Brown.

I complain frequently about useless love triangles in movies. This one is very useless, and all the more so because the script totally forgets to resolve it. Spaulding hates Gow Island but stays because he’s in love with Nora – he wants her to go back to Miami with him and marry him. When he puts this idea to her, however, it becomes obvious that Nora can’t stand him, and it’s clear enough why: Spaulding is an asshole and he treats Nora not as a partner but as a possession. Never does he show any sort of tenderness towards her. Every time they speak to each other, he seems to end up shouting, and his jealousy of Brown repeatedly leads to violence.

Brown, on the other hand, treats Nora with respect and actually shows vulnerability around her. He’s been left in charge while the base’s commander is on the mainland attending an important meeting, and he’s really feeling the pressure as the base is surrounded by tree monsters in the dark. He talks about his anxiety and Nora comforts him, and the audience rolls their eyes because it’s perfectly obvious which of these guys she’s going to pick. And sure enough, at the end she’s in Brown’s arms… but nothing about the whole situation is exactly resolved.

Brown and Spaulding did get in a fist fight, though it wasn’t explicitly over Nora, but nobody ever talks about the problem. Spaulding never realizes that he’s treated Nora badly, and it never seems to even occur to him that she might prefer Brown over him, or even that she has emotions or preferences at all. He definitely never seems to understand that he’s lost. Brown and Nora seem to feel a need to hide their love affair from the other base staff, but we’re never given a reason why (although I guess ‘Spaulding’s a dick’ is reason enough). Nora never tells Spaulding that she prefers Brown… maybe she’s afraid he’ll assault her? I hate everything about this situation, but nothing more than the fact that as the movie progresses we get hints that Nora may be warming up to Spaulding, as if she’s supposed to consider these two guys equal contenders for her affections! Fuck everybody who wrote this, seriously.

It’s kind of sad to see Mamie Van Doren in a role like this after meeting her in things like Untamed Youth and Girls Town. Those movies were gross and exploitative, but Mamie’s characters were central to their plots and she filled those shoes reasonably well. She wasn’t Oscar material but for what the films were, she was enough to carry them. The Navy vs the Night Monsters is a little closer to being a ‘real movie’, but in this respect it represents a step down for her, as she is relegated to being something for two men to fight over. Furthermore, Silver from Girls Town and Penny from Untamed Youth were both characters who required some range – Nora the nurse mainly spends the whole movie being annoyed with the men in her life. Van Doren could have done much more if anyone had bothered asking it of her.

Let’s see… what else do I hate about this movie? I hate Private Chandler, the guy who stays a Jackass Comic Relief character once that opening is over. Shockingly, The Navy vs the Night Monsters actually kills him off, but he’s not nearly as annoying as Dropo or the guy from Outlaw, so his death merely feels mean rather than having any entertainment value. The guy was just about to actually get laid by one of the women who’d made fun of him earlier – though she, like Spaulding, showed no sign of being sorry for past jerkitude.

I hate the monsters. Normally I have a soft spot for plant monsters. They’re a cliché in their own way, I guess, but they’re a fun idea. The ones in The Navy vs the Night Monsters kill and digest people with acidic sap, and a character theorizes about how and why such a thing would evolve, which is cool. The execution, however, sucks. While the poster for the film shows us a humanoid Treebeard-looking thing, the actual monsters in the film are dumb-looking stumps that waddle along like a couple of guys trying to move a piece of furniture corner-by-corner because it’s too heavy to lift. The result reminds me of The Creeping Terror, in that you have to want to get eaten by these things. At one point a guy walks right up to one, inspects it, and escapes its clutches merely by backing away slowly!

The trees reproduce using insect-like larvae that are, themselves, lethally venomous. This is also a neat idea which is, once again, ruined by the execution. The tiny ones are being pulled along the floor by a sometimes-visible string, and then they grow into stumps that look like they should be stools around a boy scout campfire, which move even slower than the adult trees! There’s a scene where the characters are holed up in the base under an onslaught of these, with planes arriving to napalm them just in time, and it is ludicrous in its attempt to feel threatening.

I do like that Gow Island is a bleak middle-of-nowhere rather than a tropical paradise. The landscapes kind of remind me of the Falkland Islands, though the weather on Gow is evidently better. You can see why some of the characters hate it here, surrounded by barren scrub inhabited mostly by ten thousand smelly, raucous seabirds. Unfortunately this backdrop makes the ‘comedy’ opening seem even more out of place, though it’s also kind of nice that they didn’t give us any stereotyped ‘natives’ as either comedy or monster fodder.

As for a theme… well, The Navy vs the Night Monsters is clearly about an invasive species. The biologist, in suggesting how the tree monsters evolved, points out that they are suited to the hostile environment of Antarctica in ways that make them nearly unstoppable anywhere else. We’re told that they devoured all the penguins the scientists were bringing back for study, and as well as eating the people, they wreak havoc among the Gow Island seabirds and reproduce out of control. The parallels to things like cane toads in Australia, or housecats just about anywhere, are obvious.

This isn’t something the characters care about, though, even the ones who profess to be scientists. At the end, enough of the trees are destroyed that the humans can safely evacuate, and what happens after that is clearly Gow Island’s problem, not humanity’s. I really would have liked to see the script go into this a little more, but then, The Navy vs the Night Monsters is not a movie that wants to go into anything, even stuff it sets up in some detail.

At the end, The Navy vs the Night Monsters feels pretty half-assed. Somebody wanted to make a movie, and then put in the bare minimum effort possible to have all the parts present. They clearly understood how movies work, but they didn’t have the money and didn’t want to go to the trouble. The result is deeply mediocre. There’s a few laughs out of the dumb stump creatures, but mostly it’s just bad.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #the navy vs the night monsters #tw: abuse #humanitarian vegetables #60s

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actutrends · 4 years

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Orlando Magic arena host Cori Yarckin just wants you to smile

ORLANDO, FL – AUGUST 11: Mike Conley of the Utah Jazz speaks with the media during the Boys Jr. NBA Global Championship on August 11, 2019 at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando, Florida. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and/or using this photograph, user is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. Mandatory Copyright Notice: Copyright 2019 NBAE (Photo by David Dow/NBAE via Getty Images)

Cori Yarckin brings a lifetime of experience singing and performing to the Orlando Magic game operations team, working on making every night a special one for their fans.

The fuzzy mascots of abstract origins — one red, the other blue — hunch forward as Cori Yarckin goes through the steps one more time before the buzzer sounds. She has their rapt attention, even if there’s no way of knowing if they understand. “G-Wiz” and “Freddy Fever” tower, googly-eyed and expressionless, over the 4-foot-11 Yarckin. When the horn blares, she springs like a housecat on four-inch heels, her voice clear over the arena’s sound system. The listless crowd half-turns to Yarckin and her bumbling entourage, then returns to looking bored.

That is until she raises her voice, just as she has done for concertgoers and television audiences and celebrity judges, and asks the question guaranteed to raise the spirits of even the dourest attendee. “Who…wants…a…free…t-shirt?” she yells each word on pitch, the last syllable held with a smile as the cheers rain down.

Yarckin is at the Jr. NBA Global Championship in Orlando. The event, in just its second year, is open to the public but the playing field consists of teenagers from the U.S. and around the world that most basketball fans have never heard of. The sparse crowd largely consists of those friends and family fortunate enough to attend. “I always have energy,” says Yarckin when asked if the quiet audience is a challenge to work with. “But when you yell, ‘Make some noise!’ and it’s crickets out there, it’s disappointing. You always want to feel like you’re doing a good job.”

She presumably is, just as she has for the Orlando Magic since 2013. Still, it’s a recurring concern for Yarckin, that things go smoothly and that she’ll keep getting the call for opportunities like this. Her efforts might get lost in the endless cacophony of a live sporting event. But Yarckin has long heard those cheers as a singer or entertainer or something in between. They may rain down for her or that size x-large souvenir but it doesn’t matter as long as the job, any job, is a good one.

Photo by John Parra/WireImage for NARAS – Miami

She began writing music in high school and fronted a band. They were good, she insists, feeding off her boundless energy, playing shows that can still be found as grainy footage on YouTube. “And if you remember it, I was really big on MySpace,” she says through nervous laughter about the social media site that still exists, albeit very differently from when it was once the largest of its kind. She was one of the top unsigned artists on the site, one of everybody’s “Top Friends,” and even appeared on MTV’s Total Request Live, when the network’s programming included more music than shows about pregnant teens and Jersey shores.

She had all but retired from music when she decided to return home to Orlando and tried out for the Magic, the team she grew up following, as a dancer. She was older than the average woman trying out, but she had grown up dancing, too, and had friends at college that were Magic dancers. She auditioned, partly out of boredom and partly because she wanted to see if she could make it, all the while believing she never would. Somehow, she did.

She caught a break when the team wanted to use dancers as in-arena hosts, and so Yarckin joined a four-person rotation that worked in both capacities for the Magic. The next season, after auditioning as a dancer again, that rotation was down to two. Before trying out a third time, she realized she didn’t want to dance anymore, had seen it as just another stop on her nomadic résumé. “Plus, my body couldn’t take it,” says Yarckin, still as petite and thin as she was seven years ago. “I didn’t want to wear half tops anymore.” She asked around with some Magic staffers to see if the hosting position could be available separately from the dancing role. “It just so happened — maybe Magic-ally — that it did,” she says with a wink. “It’s been awesome.”

The work isn’t full-time, so Yarckin still hosts events around the city, concerts and festivals. Sometimes, she gets to sing a little, all eyes on her belting out rock-n-roll covers that best fit her vocal range. She has to book these gigs months in advance, not knowing if there’ll be a conflict with the NBA schedule that isn’t released until just weeks before the regular season begins. But the Magic have been understanding if she needs to take a game off here or there and Yarckin insists they can handle it without her. “But I’m not recommending it or anything,” she laughs.

One gets the sense that Yarckin likes to keep her options open, anxious about the day when she won’t have any to choose from. Much like the athletes that work for the same team she does, there’s a shelf-life to being an entertainer. She hates to talk about her age, says she won’t ever tell it as she describes a career that has accomplished much, if not long-lasting success.

Yarckin looks down sheepishly as she talks about those videos that can be found on YouTube. It’s hard to pin down if the embarrassment is real or contrived, and downplays their quality because technology was so limited back then. But there she is, color-streaked hair flowing over a bedazzled denim jacket, the lights shining on her as she beams onstage. She’s good, or at least that’s how it appears to me. But at least in this regard, she might not have been good enough.

There are pangs of missed opportunity that fuel her underlying doubt. Yarckin talks about her time on MySpace and wonders if things would have been different today when social media influencers are legion. “I was kind of one of the firsts, y’know?”

Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

After her singing career stalled, she dabbled for a cable network, a bundle of energy in front of the camera at red-carpet events, press junkets, and movie premiers. She had moved to Los Angeles to be a singer but found herself doing a job she didn’t like. She mentions a saying, one about doing something for 10 years just to master it but she didn’t want to devote a decade to something she clearly didn’t enjoy. “LA was cool but it’s a hard place to live. I just woke up one day and said, ‘I’m done.’” She decided to move to Orlando — “Not exactly the ‘Land of Opportunity’” for an entertainer — almost eight years ago.

Before she came back home, perhaps to stay, she got an opportunity to be on a televised singing competition. She looks down again as she mentions the show’s name, expecting me to recall it with perfect clarity, and acts with feigned disappointment when I do not. She was mentored by Gloria Estefan, Yarckin says proudly, and explains that she had never considered trying out for competitions because she thought she wasn’t good enough. The experience was terrifying, of having to sing “in front of millions of people,” but she brings up another piece of paraphrased advice, of facing your fears head-on because when you come out the other side you can look back and say you survived. “And, yeah, I didn’t win, but that’s okay because I sang in key, I didn’t forget the words, I didn’t fall down. And I think I looked pretty good!” she says with a laugh, “That was a good way to end my music career. I feel good about myself,” she says almost believably.

She talks about current television shows about songwriting and about how great it would be for other performers to sing her songs, all those words she’s been writing off-and-on for nearly two decades. And there’s her work for the Magic, which she absolutely loves doing. She gets to offer creative input on the in-arena competitions — “activations” she clarifies — and is part of a great team, that includes the Stuff, the Dragon, the “best mascot in the world.” Sometimes she even gets noticed as she walks through the Amway Center. She has opportunities in the sports world, she notes, like the Jr. NBA and the All-Star game, which she has worked for the past two years.

Almost on cue, a NBA executive, the man responsible for hiring Yarckin for league tournaments and events, struts by the interview. He notices the recorder in my hand and says firmly, “Cori’s the best! She’s my go-to!” as she lowers her eyes and laughs. They talk shop, lament the small crowd, and take turns sounding confident that things will get better. “But things are going so much more smoothly this year,” says Yarckin before adding, slowly, “Don’t you think?”

Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

In August, she talks optimistically about the upcoming season. She thinks of herself as a part of the team, refers to the Magic as “we.” They both made the playoffs last year, for the first time since she joined the team. Yarckin is looking forward to building off that momentum. She loved that energy, that feeling of a city on the verge of something exciting and bigger. The coolest job in the world, she says, would be that much cooler if we were always winning. It’s why her dream job, she says, is to be Kelly Ripa.

She likes Ripa because she’s fun and quirky. She doesn’t take herself too seriously, says Yarckin, and it’s hard to tell if she’s talking about herself or the diminutive talk show host that serves as her inspiration. But Yarckin does take her job seriously, believes truly that the team makes memories for people. “I have the power to pull out a person and bring them to the court and make it extra special for them,” she says. Every game could be a child’s birthday, or someone’s first basketball game, or a couple’s first date.

“We call them legendary moments. That’s our goal. We always want you to leave with a smile on your face,” she says through a gleaming one of her own. “Or at least a free t-shirt.”

The post Orlando Magic arena host Cori Yarckin just wants you to smile appeared first on Actu Trends.

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