Wnky's Horse (2005)

Every once in a while, I will sit in an endless nothingness, attempting to find a small kernel of an idea of what to write.  I don’t mean creative, fictional writing, though that is a difficult thing to find talent in.  When I watch movies, I sometimes have trouble pulling something out of them that I feel comfortable writing about.  Some kernels pop, but I can’t find the butter to make them delicious.  I’m left thinking that the idea is too repetitive or that I don’t have the knowledge required to properly discuss a topic.  This pseudo-block that I encounter can sometimes lead to good things and sometimes the worst.  What will it be this week?

The movie that had my brain jumbled this week was a 2005 children’s movie from Norway that was titled Winky’s Horse for North American audiences (though I’m sure that the audience in North America was nearly non-existent).  This lackluster children’s tale was about a girl obsessed with getting a horse for Christmas, even though there was nowhere for her to keep the horse.  Surprisingly, I was having trouble trying to figure out what to write about the movie.  I had a few ideas; however, they didn’t feel like the right thing to do with this movie.  And then it hit me like a flyswatter hits a housefly.  I should just write about the movie.  Who cares if I try to only review newer movies so that people will pay attention to those movies?  This is a movie that has a lot of things that I want to point out, so I should point them out.

The first thing that you need to know about Winky’s Horse is that it has some of the worst voiceover narration that has ever been put to film.  I’m sure that it may have been because I was watching an English dubbed version of the movie.  That is the only version of the movie that I could find.  Perhaps the original Norwegian version didn’t have the narration.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that the voice I was hearing was not that of the six year old who was supposed to be narrating.  It sounded like someone older, softening their voice in an attempt to sound six, and not entirely succeeding.  That lack of realism was only half of the problem with the narration.  There was no enthusiasm behind the voice.  It felt like the person speaking didn’t want to say any of what she was saying, or just plain found it boring.  It was abundant throughout Winky’s Horse and only made the experience of watching it feel more drawn out and painful.  That’s all I have to say about the narration.

Adding to the awfulness of the narration is the story of the main character.  I briefly touched upon it by saying that Winky was obsessed with getting a horse.  Now I want to go deeper into the idea and explain what happened before, during, and after the start of the obsession.  The movie begins with Winky and her mother moving to Norway to be with her father who owns a Chinese restaurant there.  She has a hard time making friends at school and ends up befriending a horse she met on the street.  Somehow, while this 6 year old girl was riding around the countryside by herself, she found where the horse lived.  Winky then begins telling everyone that she has her own horse.  One girl at school is interested in the horse and wants to see it.  When Winky takes her to see it, they discover that the horse needs to be put down.  And thus begins Winky’s obsessive desire to find a new horse to be her friend, even though the girl from school is now her friend.  Saint Nicholas gets the brunt of her obsession as she keeps trying to give him her drawing of a horse so that he’ll know what to get her.  It all culminates in Winky stealing Saint Nicholas’s horse, believing that he brought it for her.  The whole movie is about Winky wanting a horse for a friend even though she has a friend that she isn’t paying attention to.

Speaking of Saint Nicholas, the one good thing I can say about Winky’s Horse is that the portrayals of this character are well done.  Well, mostly well done.  His helpers were a little scary, but I’ll get into that in a minute.  There were two different interpretations of the character in the movie.  One was a mall Santa version, who looked believably fake.  There was a little bit of facial stubble showing from under his Santa beard, and he looked like a guy in it for the quick money.  The other portrayal was of a man becoming Saint Nicholas because he cared about the children.  He makes sure that all of the details are just right, and shows interest in each and every child.  The only problem with the portrayal is the helpers that I mentioned before.  They have one of the worst cases of blackface that I have seen put to film this side of Birth of a Nation.  In a modern age where the only semi-acceptable place for people to use blackface is period acting, it seems rather upsetting to see it used so freely in Winky’s Horse.  Maybe that’s my perspective because I live in North America and have grown up surrounded by a history built on racial inequality.  Knowing about injustices against other races has made people in North America (at least, the people I know… I realize the police are making an argument for the other side) more sensitive to blackface than other cultures.  It is probably a culture thing.  I still find it disturbing.

Winky’s Horse was a movie that I had a lot of trouble sitting through.  The painfully awkward, dull narration and the irritatingly self-absorbed story made it hard to be interested in the story in any way whatsoever.  The insanity of seeing the blackface so casually thrown into the movie was rather frightening.  All I really got out of the movie was this post, and I guess I’ll have to be fine with that.  The most lasting impression that the movie will leave with me will probably be the fact that the poster you see at the top of this post has a white girl, when the main character is Chinese.  Talk about bad poster art.  However, the movie apparently did well enough in Norway to warrant a sequel.  Whether or not I watch that sequel can only be told by time.  I don’t think I have a copy of it yet.  Who knows, though?

There are obviously a few notes that I have to give before we head out:

• This movie is from a box set similar to those that included A Car’s Life, Backwoods Bloodbath, Old No.587: The Great Train Robbery, Evil Bong, Evil Bong 2: King Bong, Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned, The Legend of Sorrow Creek, An Ant’s Life, and Roxanne’s Best Christmas Ever.
• Other movies with dubbing that I watched included Infra-Man and Dig Your Grave Friend… Sabata is Coming.
• Have you seen Winky’s Horse?  Have you even heard of it?  What do you think of blackface?  I’ve got a comments section.  Feel free to use it.
• The comments section, as well as my Twitter and email (sundaybadmovies@gmail.com) can be used to mention movies that you would like me to watch for future Sunday “Bad” Movie installments.
• Next week, I will be writing a post based on watching the two Transmorphers movies.  That right, Transmorphers, not Transformers.  I’ve seen them before.  I’m ready to see them again.  See you next week.

Cowboys, Samurai, Pirates, and The Ice Pirates (1984)

As I have watched more and more movies throughout my nearly twenty-five years of life, I have noticed three different subgenres that are completely different on a surface level, but very similar when you actually pay attention to them.  The three types of movies are westerns, samurai films, and pirate films.  There is something about the portrayals of these types of characters (cowboys, samurai, and pirates) that seem very similar while also different.

Cowboys and westerns have gone back about as far as film has existed.  One of the earliest movies was The Great Train Robbery which was a western about cowboys robbing a train.  The name already says that, but I felt the need to pound that into your skulls.  Through the forties, fifties, and sixties, westerns were popular in theaters and on television.  There was something about a good ole cowboy stopping some bandits from doing bad things that captured audiences.  The way that a cowboy could stroll into town and change it for better or worse was enthralling.  Clint Eastwood and John Wayne are still some of the most famous people ever making their names in westerns, and Gunsmoke is still one of the longest running shows to ever be on television.  That’s how big westerns were.

The same could be said for samurai.  They were essentially the Japanese counterpart to the Wild West cowboy.  They would come into towns and do the same sort of things as the cowboys in westerns.  The similarities between the two character types led to many samurai films, particularly those of Akira Kurosawa, being remade as westerns.  Seven Samurai was remade into The Magnificent Seven, and Yojimbo was remade into A Fistful of Dollars.  The stories worked for both genres, which is telling as to how alike the two character types are.

Pirate movies are a little different than the other two.  Instead of the hero being that good guy, or at least a guy fighting against the bad that he encounters, pirate movies are about loveable misfits who compare more to the bandits of westerns and samurai films than the heroes.  They may not be as evil as the bandits in those other movies, but they are bandits all the same.  The whole purpose of a pirate is to steal and plunder goods from other people.  For some reason, they still sort of feel like the western archetype by way of water.  It is a feeling, but when it comes to movies, feelings make a big difference.

The reason I bring up these three archetypes is because of The Ice Pirates, a movie about space pirates in the future.  It takes the concept of pirates, but instead of putting them on the seven seas, it puts them in space where water is a treasure.  Or, more specifically, ice is a wanted item.  Everyone wants ice.  The pirates are out to get some ice.  There’s swashbuckling galore as the pirates fight with swords while swinging from platform to platform in spaceships.  It feels like an old-style Robin Hood or pirate movie.  It’s delightful.

It got me to thinking about other movies and television shows that have taken pirates, cowboys, or samurai and placed them into futuristic settings.  Of course, the first two that came to mind were from television.  One of them is a beloved show that was ended long before its time.  The other is a more recent show that lasted two seasons and had some problems with its focus that lost it a lot of viewers.  I would venture to say that both worked as solid entertainment.

The first of the two is the one that most people will know about.  Firefly was a Joss Whedon created show that only lasted one season on FOX in the early 2000s.  It combined aspects of westerns with the science fiction of space.  Mal Reynolds was your basic hero gunslinger with a Whedon twist to him.  There were gunfights, brothels, and standoffs.  It was a futuristic western on television.  If only people had watched it when it was on.  Mind you, it did end up getting a follow-up movie in Serenity.  The movie tied together enough plot points in the show to make it a satisfying conclusion, though I, like most people, would have loved to see more of the characters and their Wild West above the sky adventures.  The most interesting part of the movie is that the villain was a samurai-like character placed into a western setting in a way that felt perfectly natural.  It showed how the two types are interchangeable.

Revolution is the other show that I wanted to mention.  It was a show in which all electrical power disappeared.  This caused people to revert back to swords for fighting and horses for travelling.  The first half season of the show was all about living in a world without power, which worked quite well.  There were swashbuckling fights with all of the swords and swinging and jumping around that you could want.  It lost focus when power was introduced halfway through the season.  The second season removed the power again, and went full western.  Small town, a bad group of people coming in, and the hero being much like a gunslinger or samurai character.  It was well done and underseen.

Both of those television shows utilized their future or post-apocalyptic setting with their western/pirate/samurai qualities.  But there are a few movies that do this kind of thing as well.  Let me give you two examples in which Akira Kurosawa’s films were adapted into science fiction films.  Why?  Because science fiction tends to be futuristic and the Kurosawa films that I’m going to use as examples are two samurai movies.  Thus, the samurai are brought to a futuristic setting.

I guess the first isn’t really futuristic since it is set a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.  Yes, Star Wars is loosely based on a samurai film, and it shows in that the movie feels sort of like a science fiction western.  You know, because westerns and samurai movies have a similar feel to them.  Star Wars was partially inspired by a Kurosawa movie called The Hidden Fortress.  The new movie had open lands, much like westerns.  It had lightsabers in place of swords.  Luke Skywalker was basically a kid who wanted to be a samurai, and Han Solo was an experienced gunslinger.  The whole movie had its roots in samurai and western movies, making them feel more futuristic with the science fiction elements.  Though set long, long ago, the technology feels much more advanced than anything we had at the time.

Another movie that fits into the science fiction western type is Battle Beyond the Stars.  It is a take on Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, taking the defending to a distant planet.  Like the other versions of this story, a small town (in this case a planet) is being tormented by a bandit who wants to steal their goods.  Seven defenders are brought in to ward off the bandit and his underlings.  Battle Beyond the Stars even casts Robert Vaughn as a character similar to the one he played in The Magnificent Seven, the western remake of Seven Samurai.  For the most part, the story works in this new setting.  It is as entertaining as the other versions, though it may not have been as well made.

As you can see, the idea of samurai, cowboys, and pirates in a futuristic setting tends to work fairly well.  There is something about the advanced time and regressed character types.  The blending of the past and the future makes for good entertainment.  There are many more cases in which this kind of blending has happened in film and television, but, to be honest, I don’t have the time to write too much more on the subject.  As I’m writing this sentence, it is Sunday afternoon and this post has to go up later today.  I only have so much time in which to finish it.  What I can say is that each of the movies and shows that I have mentioned are worth checking out.  If you like westerns, samurai films, pirate movies, or science fiction, you should take a look at movies like these.  They’re just all around entertaining movies.

There are notes that I need to toss in here before I go:

• The Ice Pirates was suggested by @McNastyPrime.
• The director of The Ice Pirates, Stewart Raffill, would go on to direct another movie I have featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  That movie was Mac and Me, which I featured a few weeks ago.
• Richard Young was one of the actors in The Ice Pirates.  He was also in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning.
• If you’ve seen The Ice Pirates, you may have noticed John Carradine.  He was also in a movie called Monster in the Closet.
• According to IMDb, Max von Sydow had an uncredited role in The Ice Pirates.  He was also in the film adaptation of Flash Gordon.
• And going back to Mac and Me, an actor named Gary Brockette appeared in both that and The Ice Pirates.
• Have you seen The Ice Pirates?  Have you seen any of the other movies I mentioned?  Do you like when the past and the future are blended in movies?  Do you like cowboys, pirates, or samurai?  The comments section is where you can discuss all of this stuff and more.
• If there’s a movie that you think I should watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, feel free to mention it in the comments.  Or you could contact me on Twitter or send an email to sundaybadmovies@gmail.com.
• Next week’s movie is a movie called Winky’s Horse.  It’s on one of those bad movie sets that I have, so I’m going to watch it.  I have no idea what it is about other than a horse.  I’ll let you know next week.