Category: Movies

Last autumn, I read Back to the Future and Back to the Future Part II. Back then, I said:

Unfortunately, I don’t think I have the third novelization of the movie (although I do have the trilogy of movies, which this book encourages me to watch). And I want it.

Well, I didn’t have to go to Ebay or anything since it turned up serendipitiously at a school rummage sale I attended last week. So I jumped into it as soon as possible. The novelization is from the same guy who did the second one, so he still overuses the question marks and the exclamation points. But he does neat things to cover visual effects, such as the Eastwood Gorge sign change in the end. In the film, it’s a visual effect, and the author seamlessly has Marty notice it. Other times, though, he seems to bang it a little bit.

The movies are very visual experiences, and some of it is lost. But a good nostalgic read never the less.

I thought this book would be a movie tie-in book because it has the actors from the movie arrayed on the front cover, and it has action stills in the photo section in the middle of the book. Oh, but no. Instead of being based on the script for the film, it is truly just an abridged form of the book (which I read in its entirety last year).

So it lacks some of the more campy humorous bits that the film had. It’s a pale version of the complete book and unrelated at all to the movie, but I suppose it does distill some of the plot points that the film captured from the original book. However, some scenes I recall from both the book and the movie (breakfast at the seige of La Rochelle) have been abridged from this edition entirely.

Probably not worth the read unless you’re a fan of Readers’ Digest Condensed Books, but might be worth your time if you’re into treatments of Dumas.

One of the best things about movie tie-in paperbacks, aside from their brevity and probable familiarity with the storyline, is the speculation within them. Did they work from a treatment? An early version of the script? Or the actual movie?

This book dealt with an early version of the script, so it doesn’t actually jibe with the movie that well. In addition to the extra depth that the authors add to the interior lives of the characters that you don’t get out of dialogue, this book has completely different scenes than what appears in the film. Some are missing, too, such as the original beginning scene (Marty with the big guitar amplifier). Ergo, this book is sort of like a weird alternative-universe version of the movie.

An interesting artifact if nothing else.

You know, I kind of knew the premise of the book. The sort of thing I like: a mystery involving a big ship and whatnot (such as Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama, and so on). I didn’t see the movie because I heard it was a bit of a gorefest in space with an ultimately weak premise.

I had some hope when the thing began; however, it hit the pivotal climax with disturbing imagery (here, recounted in word, but that’s disturbing enough). The bodies start dropping, and random characters survive. The premise, of course, is that the ship has wormholed through Hell or something and it has become possessed by an intelligence that wants to kill people. A sad, weak premise, ultimately, and not up the the hopes I’d had.

But if you go into the Hyundai dealership looking for German engineering, you’re bound to be disappointed, but at least you’ll be disappointed cheaply.

You remember the movie with the L.A. Law guy? No? Damn kids. This is the novelization, essentially a recasting of the Perseus myth with a bit of modern (ca. 1981) costumery.

I like Alan Dean Foster, as you know, and he got a lot of this sort of work. He adds some allusions within the text not found in the movie, but some of the off-script scenes sound completely different, as though a couple pages of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead were accidentally grafted into Hamlet.

Still, it serves its purpose: reminding me I need to watch the DVD of the film I bought some years ago. Actually, I think the real point was to make me go buy something related to the film to add to its bottom line, but I don’t think the lunchboxes still add to MGM’s bottom line 30 years later.

As you might remember, I just read First Blood recently and liked the first part of it, but didn’t like the ending. I’d bought this book, but later bought that book and read it first so I could follow the story. Not that “the kid” from First Blood, who died at the end, and a character played by Sylvester Stallone would have much in common. This book follows the movie from First Blood.

Well, what can I say? It expands a bit on the movie, giving some interior world to the stock characters from the movie, but it also sexualizes the violence a bit, and Morrell must have worked from an incomplete script, because it doesn’t follow the movie exactly. Still, it was 250 pages, and I read it in 3 hours, so it’s not as though I spent weeks on it. It was a good break between outings in pre-Victorian English novels.

The author’s forward provided a bit of a bright spot. In it, the author said, “Yeah, he died in the first book. But here’s where you can buy the cool knife, bow, and arrows from the movie!” Also, another amusing bit occurred when I read about Rambo gearing up for his insertion into Vietnam. I misread a passage, and snorted. “He’s putting .45 rounds into an AK-47,” I told my beautiful wife. “Everyone knows AK-47s take 7.62mm rounds.” “How do you know,” she asked, almost like she challenged me when I mocked Spare Change. I mean, I’m a man, aren’t I?

I bought this book recently because I already had Rambo: First Blood Part II, the novelization of the movie, and thought I should read them in order. Also, it was cheap. I knew the book differed from the film (mostly in that Rambo lives for a sequel in the movie). So I picked it up as an intermission from a longer piece of classical literature that I’m only half way through.

At the onset, I loved the book. Morrell creates the situation and makes both Rambo and Teasle, the police chief who runs him out of town a couple times without true rancor and with only a dash of Respect My Authoritah! Ergo, the confrontation takes on the dimensions of a natural disaster, albeit one at which one simultaneously wants Rambo to get away (even though he snapped and killed a cop) and wants Teasle to capture him.

Unfortunately, about halfway through, the book stalls. Suddenly, Rambo turns back to slaughter more of the cops. Then the injuries start to accumulate, and both Teasle and Rambo get 18/00 constitutions and great feats of holding their poor bodies to keep in the novel. Yes, I know you cannot get 18/00 constitutions (or you couldn’t in Second Edition rules, which is when I quit shelling out money for D&D), but Morrell invents it for the book. The climax carries on for 50 pages or so, dabbles in mysticism and the hunter and the hunted, whichever the order is, and then ends poorly.

I’ll have to take another look at the film to see which I prefer; however, although I leaned toward the book at the beginning, I’ll probably end up preferring the movie.