Showtime, as has become its penchant, has released the pilot of PENNY DREADFUL for all to see, a couple weeks in advance of its premiere date (the show airs Sundays at 9 PM, beginning on May 11^th). The following analysis contains A BOATLOAD OF SPOILERS FOR THE PILOT, so consider yourself warned, as we delve into the demimonde, the place in the shadows, a world inbetween what we see and what we fear, or the setting in which much of PENNY DREADFUL takes place.

PENNY DREADFUL is dripping with pedigree. The series is created by John Logan, the screenwriter of THE AVIATOR, GLADIATOR, THE LAST SAMURAI, HUGO and SKYFALL, with Sam Mendes (SKYFALL, AMERICAN BEAUTY) on board to produce. The pilot and several subsequent episodes are directed by J.A. Bayona (THE IMPOSSIBLE, THE ORPHANAGE and will be tackling WORLD WAR Z 2). And the material that Logan and company are plumbing is even more star-studded, as PENNY DREADFUL seeks to be a dark mishmash of all the great gothic horror literature. Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.” Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”  All these and more have been referenced by Logan and others when news of the project materialized, all likely to be adapted for the bloody, gruesome small screen in some manner.

It’s been so mysterious thus far…but now that the pilot is available, we can begin to see what Logan and company have in store for us.

The horror and genre fan in me loves it…but it all kind of seems familiar, stale, been there-done that. NBC already has/had a DRACULA show. There’s VAMPIRE DIARIES, THE ORIGINALS, THE STRAIN. The American BEING HUMAN just ended, but the British one is still going. Of course, there’s more going on than just vampires in PENNY DREADFUL, and none of those shows might not be done as well or as purdy and stylized as Showtime’s dreary tone. After watching the first episode, this is ONCE UPON A TIME with gothic literature, gifted with an AMERICAN HORROR STORY like vibe where sex and blood is par for the course. This is Alan Moore’s “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.”

I was ready to slam this pilot, or at the very least, extoll skepticism that the show will hold my interest, but I realize it already has, thanks to all my speculation about the characters and what’s to come.

Part of the mystery (or the only thing that had me captivated) in the opening episode is figuring out who is who in the convoluted tapestry that John Logan is weaving. The character’s names, before the pilot aired, appeared innocuous, all-new, and not especially linked to the books Logan kept name-dropping in interviews (save Dorian Gray). Was it a ploy to keep guys like me off the trail? Or are the monsters and the heroes going to be bit players, or side characters to the action; is this going to be AGENTS OF H.O.R.R.O.R., creating brand new characters in a well-known world? It appears that it’ll be a little bit of everything, as it’s clear that there are more to these characters than meets the eye, and several are no longer a secret.

Josh Hartnett plays Ethan Chandler (any time I see the name Chandler, I assume it’s a reference to Raymond Chandler), a con man, an actor, who poses as a swashbuckling, roguish cowboy who survived Custer’s Last Stand, using his tall tale to swindle the charmed Brits. The fact that he uses the term tall tale seems to hint that his true identity may be found in one of them. He certainly doesn’t seem like Paul Bunyan, though Hartnett could totally pull off Babe the Blue Ox. Is he Davy Crockett? Johnny Appleseed? Pecos Bill? Or is he a famous cowboy, a Buffalo Bill? Wild Bill Hickok? Billy the Kid? Another cowboy named Bill? Vanessa Ives claims that there’s more to him than he puts out there.

Ethan is our entry to the story, as he’s approached by Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) to help her and her employer (Malcolm) with some “night work” (the name of the pilot), which naturally involves killing monsters.

Who exactly is Vanessa Ives? She’s seen worshipping to a cross several times, having an unhealthy relationship with spiders, whether she summons them, or they just hate her prayers. She’s a fortune teller, a spiritualist, the kind of lady who will totally tell you to pick a Tarot card from her deck. I got nothing on her right now, though I’m sure it’s staring me right in the face. Anyone have any theories? I want her to be the crazy gypsy woman from WOLF MAN, but that isn’t right.

Timothy Dalton is great as Sir Malcolm, a wealthy explorer searching for his daughter, who’s been kidnapped by blood-cursed beasts. Can we call a spade a spade here and just admit they’re vampires? It’s unfortunate that vampires are the biggest focus in the first episode, since we’re about running out of new ground in that particular mythos. It’s clear, even before we learn that Malcolm’s full name is Malcolm Murray, that his daughter is Mina, or Mina Murray/Harker, Dracula’s biggest infatuation. More interesting is that they present Sir Malcolm as an explorer of Africa who’s lived untold adventures and happened upon a myriad of secrets. He certainly has shades of H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, the star of “King Solomon’s Mines,” a book that is credited with creating the “Lost World” genre. Quatermain is the godfather of Indiana Jones and whatever Noah Wyle played on TNT.

Considering Malcolm has a servant named Sembene, who’s clearly from “the dark continent,” (their words, not mine), it’s likely Sembene was found/rescued during his travels in Africa. I’m not overly familiar with Haggard’s novels, but I’m sure they’re filled with potential characters he may be (Umslopogaas? Ignosi?). Ousmane Sembene is a notable African filmmaker from the independence era, which certainly doesn’t seem like an accident, and indicates that Malcolm/Quatermain perhaps freed Sembene from slavery.

After Malcolm, Vanessa and Ethan traipse around, stumbling upon a vampire nest, they bring a body to a doctor, a man singularly consumed with life and death. It doesn’t take a genius to realize we’re seeing a young Dr. Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), even before his identity is revealed (you’ll be screaming at the screen long before he says his name). He isn’t interested in any other avenue of science, blinded by arrogance and purpose. Malcolm wants to hire the Doctor for their quest to find Mina, but even though Victor’s clearly in need of the money, he doesn’t want to dilly dally with anything else but his experiments.

Which happen to bear fruit by the end of the episode, as we see Logan and company’s version of the “It’s Alive!” scene, which is thankfully a lot different (and effective). In Mary Shelley’s classic novel, once Victor achieves his goal, he’s terrified of the demon he created, and runs away from the Monster. Then he realizes he must kill him, and consumed by madness, travels around the globe to try and catch him. The Monster, despite his ugly features, is an eloquent figure, abandoned by his father, and seeking a place in an unjust and mysterious universe, only wreaking terror and death because Victor kind of deserves it for being a self-absorbed ninny. In PENNY DREADFUL, the two wonder at each other…the Creature (Rory Kinnear) not particularly big or imposing, both of them touching the other’s face. There’s certainly sexual vibes going on (was he a lover of Victor’s before he died?).

In the waning moments of the pilot, Malcolm is greeted by the presence of his dear daughter, Mina (Olivia Llewellyn), who it appears, is no longer human. She’s been turned, which, while tragic news to Malcolm, is good news for us as an audience, because we don’t have to go through that storyline again. More interestingly, Malcolm and Vanessa have committed some transgression that led to Mina’s condition, a guilt that they’ll always have.

While the vampire stuff is mostly pat…Dr. Frankenstein unearths an interesting wrinkle, when he splits open a dead vamp’s exoskeleton, revealing hieroglyphics tattooed to the man’s skin. Malcolm and Vanessa go see a Mr. Lyle, an eccentric Egyptian scholar at the British Museum, who reveals that the tattoos indicate the man has a “blood curse,” and that the images come from the Book of the Dead. Of course it does. To the best of my knowledge there is no Mr. Lyle in any of the Universal Mummy films, but I do like that everything seems to come from Africa, and are related to one of Malcolm’s expeditions.

Oh, and because it wouldn’t be London in the 19^th century without him, it appears that Jack the Ripper is back, having butchered a woman into all kinds of pieces. Is Jack the Ripper a vampire, or something else (Dr. JACK-yll and Mr. Hyde)? Or is Jack just back from a holiday? Or is it Dracula/some vampire, doing the murders, and it just looks like Jack the Ripper? Considering how much blood was left at the scene of the crime, it certainly doesn’t feel like vampires.

So after one episode: we got vampires, Mina Murray with the promise of Dracula to come, some version of Jack the Ripper, Dr. Frankenstein and his “Creature” (not his Monster), and an Allan Quatermain stand-in. We haven’t even been introduced to Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney), though he’s coming.

PENNY DREADFUL’s pilot wasn’t terrific, but it obviously had a ton of elements and seeds, and depending on how they’re teased out, and blossom over its first season, it may very well prove that vampires, monsters and the like aren’t so dead after all. Plus, we haven’t even met Billie Piper’s Brona Croft (an irish immigrant trying to escape her dark past), with even more puzzles to come.

STREAM THE PILOT NOW:

http://youtu.be/_GMZBirzYAY

Until last night, TIME AFTER TIME merely meant one of the greatest songs of all-time. Now, after watching the gloriously cheesy, dated but vigorously acted and hilarious 35th anniversary screening of TIME AFTER TIME (1979), it’s alongside BACK TO THE FUTURE as one of the most delightful time travel movies ever made.

In the LA-based Landmark’s ongoing Anniversary Classics series, film critic Stephen Farber puts the spotlight on overlooked gems, bringing in fantastic guests to do a Q&A after the fact. Last night, Malcolm McDowell of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, ENTOURAGE and 229 (!) other credits, paid a visit to talk about his life and career. I’ll get to that, after I revel in discovering TIME AFTER TIME.

TIME AFTER TIME was a hard sell to studios, but Nicholas Meyer, the writer-director of the film, had written “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” a 1974 bestseller that combined Sherlock Holmes’ world with that of Sigmund Freud. Convinced by that novel’s success, Warner Bros. stepped up to make this film a reality, which was based on a novel by Karl Alexander (below).

Stephen Farber argues that he thinks TIME AFTER TIME would be a harder sell today, but a movie about H.G. Wells tracking Jack the Ripper in modern day San Francisco sounds exactly like the kind of high-concept crossover movie studios want to be making these days.

WB was hesitant to cast Malcolm McDowell in the role of the romantic lead and hero (H.G. Wells), thanks to his acclaimed role as Alex, the nutjob from Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, that had typecast him (and would continue to do so). They eventually succumbed to Nicholas Meyer’s wishes. When McDowell got the script, it was a Godsend, “I’m not insane,” after all. He was thankful for not being made to play the role of Jack the Ripper.

That task went to David Warner, one of the greatest British thespians of all-time, who’s been in TRON, TITANIC, TIME BANDITS, THE OMEN and innumerable other gems, including indisputable career highlight Professor Jordan Perry in TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES II: THE SECRET OF THE OOZE. Here, Warner chews up scenery deliciously, as the creepy John Lesley Stevenson (or “Jack” to his friends), who opens up a creepy music box that never appropriately unnerves his forthcoming victim…right before slashing their throats. Also, if you ever wanted to see Jack the Ripper in a jean jacket…TIME AFTER TIME cures that long-held desire that many of us never knew we had.

Then you throw in Mary Steenburgen, who I’ve mostly only known as the curiously hot older woman (in ELF, STEP BROTHERS), as the hot and foxy younger woman who is super appealing, or Herbert’s love interest. She’s a career woman (in banking), who divorced her husband because he wanted her to be a doting housewife, and is all about the women equality movement, which tickles H.G. Wells to no end, since he trumpeted the cause back in the 19th century. TIME AFTER TIME is Mary’s second film right before winning an Oscar for MELVIN AND HOWARD, but this one is also notable because her and Malcolm fell in love, leading to marriage and two children. It didn’t last unfortunately, and now she’s married to Ted Danson. Here’s to you Mrs. Steenburgen!

Overshadowing everyone else though, is “Boy at Museum,” played by the one, the only…Corey Feldman, right before booking a role on THE BAD NEWS BEARS TV show.

TIME AFTER TIME was critically beloved, but never found the mainstream audience that WB had hoped, thanks to shamelessly publicizing the film as a “Jack the Ripper” movie. It didn’t hurt Nicholas Meyer’s career though; his next film was STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (he also would direct STAR TREK VI). You might have caught that one.

The trumpeting opening, in which the titles zoom toward the screen with altogether too much alacrity, indicates a movie from another age, even dating the late 70’s film, as if we’re stepping into a Universal horror movie. It’s a fantastic introduction to Miklos Rozsa’s soaring presence. The legend won 3 Oscars for film scores, including SPELLBOUND, A DOUBLE LIFE and…BEN-HUR. He was nominated 10 other times, and he’s still got it here, in what was his final film.

In case you couldn’t figure it out from the poster or the trailer, TIME AFTER TIME is a time traveling caper/love story, in which H.G. Wells follows Jack the Ripper into the future to stop him. How do we get there?

In 1893, H.G. Wells has a big announcement to make to his closest friends, waiting for Dr. John Lesley Stevenson’s arrival. He’s late, of course, busy murdering a hooker in an alley somewhere. When he arrives, Wells announces that he’s made a time machine, and intends on using it, though he hasn’t worked up the nerve to do so yet.

When the cops arrive, searching every house in the area, and stumble upon John’s bag, filled with incriminating evidence, Stevenson is gone. To the future. Thanks to plot, the time machine returns home (because H.G. Wells had the homing key, or something), and Wells is forced to follow Jack the Ripper into the future, believing that he’s unwittingly sent a murdering psychopath into a utopia. Instead, he happens to land in 1979 San Francisco, a place that Jack the Ripper feels more at home than H.G. Wells does…until our resourceful hero runs into a horny young banker desperate to exchange foreign currency (that’s a euphemism, but also her job).

With the setting 1970’s San Francisco, I thought that perhaps they were going to link Jack the Ripper and Zodiac Killer, but the timeline would be messed up, not that we wouldn’t have forgiven that. It’s a time travel movie after all.

From there, we get many scenes that BACK TO THE FUTURE either borrowed, stole or paid homage to, blowing my mind, and possibly rupturing the space-time continuum in the process.

Consider this scene, when H.G. Wells outs himself as a time traveler to Amy:

It’s very much reminiscent of when Doc Brown comes clean to Clara in BACK TO THE FUTURE III. Take a deep breath…CLARA IS ALSO PLAYED BY MARY STEENBURGEN, who proves a lot madder the second time around, probably because Mary Steenburgen is tired of falling for liars/raving lunatics with awesome hair. Of course, the “second” time technically happened in 1885 in the Old West, eight years before she ultimately travels back to London with H.G. Wells (oh, spoilers). Is Clara/Amy an evil mastermind, collecting awkward time travelers? Is BACK TO THE FUTURE a spin-off to TIME AFTER TIME? “This is heavy, Doc.”

The date that Wells and the Ripper go back and forth on is November 5th, which is in fact one of the dates used in BACK TO THE FUTURE, as we can see from the following chart:

A newspaper from the future is even used as a key plot device in several scenes. There is no Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, unfortunately.

Whenever H.G. Wells’ silly time machine travels through time, it’s akin to LSD-laced/PTSD-like flashbacks from when you were a kid and you stared at those psychedelic kaleidoscopes too long, with rainbow colors splashing across the screen willy nilly. Considering the time machine is littered with rainbow orbs like the friggin’ Infinity Gems, it makes sense.

While TIME AFTER TIME is clearly a science fiction movie, it’s more heavily rooted in rom-com territory, thanks to the overarching romance between Herbert and Amy, as they fall in love on the eminently fall-in-lovable streets of San Francisco.

The pair of them are so adorably awkward, and so clearly hot for each other, that you’re begging them to mash genitals after the first scene. When they do finally start kissing, Amy even admits that she’s practically raping him. This is after she said she wasn’t a dyke and asked if there were a lot of A-rabs in Britain (her co-worker wanted to marry into oil). Visual evidence:

Either way, it’s nice to see a woman take control, giving bumbling geniuses with girl problems a break.

In many ways, H.G. Wells is like Ichabod Crane of SLEEPY HOLLOW, doddering around, stumbling upon astounding new inventions like the electric toothbrush, garbage disposal, and escalators. You already knew McDowell was a genius, but in TIME AFTER TIME, he shows off his slapstick and comedy skillz. It’s impossible not to chuckle at him following a woman in saran wrap (?), whilst taking notes:

There’s a lot to write about, there. Oh, and check him out trying McDonald’s (referred to later as a “Scottish restaurant”) for the first time, a few of the more blatant product placement opportunities that don’t feel as manipulative as they should:

Early in the film, it’s established that Stevenson and Herbert are the type of friends that always play chess, and that Stevenson ALWAYS wins, a face-palm metaphor for the cat and mouse game that is to come. The best scenes in the film, except when I’m fantasizing about Mary Steenburgen’s frizzy hair and chuckling at H.G. Wells’ “oh, dude in the past” antics, are when David Warner and Malcolm McDowell share the spotlight, going mano e mano:

TIME AFTER TIME is one of those movies that gets better with age, because its jokes are just as funny, and so many other lines become unintentionally hilarious. Plus, it’s a time travel movie, and time travel movies are the best subgenre there is. If you haven’t seen it, it’s high time to rectify that mistake, like I just did.

Besides, if there’s justice in the world, there will be a sequel, since Karl Alexander wrote one to his book. Behold:

Bwahaha.

OPTIONAL MINI-DRINKING GAME:

-Drink every time H.G. Wells touches his glasses.

-Drink for every bank you see.

If you want to cough up $1.99, you can watch Time After Time on YouTube here. Or, buy the DVD on Amazon for $5.99. It’s well worth it.

MALCOLM MCDOWELL ANECDOTES:

Afterwards, McDowell got to talk about his astounding life and career. Anyone who can tell stories that include Laurence (“Larry”) Olivier, Alan Bates and Helen Mirren (for ONE PLAY) has won. He recounted his age of debauchery with the Royal Shakespeare Group in England, where he tried to get fired (and filled his off-time with drinking, gambling and women). While he clearly missed the stage once he got going about it, he characterized himself as “a stage actor, but I escaped.”

While he loved and trusted Stanley Kubrick, and had to for his role in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, he mentioned that Kubrick screwed him out of money for the movie. This was an ongoing theme, as he told a story about when he met Gene Kelly (who he paid homage to in the infamous Singing in the Rain sequence from CLOCKWORK), who looked him up and down, and stalked off without a word. 40 years later, Gene’s widow would tell him that he wasn’t mad at McDowell, but at Kubrick, because he hadn’t gotten paid.

His favorite actor of all-time? James Cagney (WHITE HEAT, SCARFACE). For him, there has never been someone more unpredictable, possessing his unique brand of energy.