Three Films Make A Post: Working here can be murder.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017): In another example to disprove the curiously much-vaunted nonsense that Marvel’s superhero movies don’t leave space for their directors to express their individuality, Taiki Waititi’s Thor movie is very much a Taiki Waititi Thor movie, featuring exactly the style and tone of humour you’d expect from the director. While I would have preferred someone to actually succeed at a Thor movie going for the big and operatic tone the best of the source material tends to have and actually succeed with it, I take a fun, fast and brilliant to look at SF action comedy with pleasure, even though I don’t enjoy it quite as much as James Gunn’s Marvel SF action comedies, which feel just a bit warmer to me. Which is to say that I had a lot of fun with Ragnarok’s loving and silly plundering of Greg Pak’s fine Hulk and Walt Simonson’s transcendentally brilliant Thor runs.

The Cradle Will Fall (1983): In a very different time, medium, and budget bracket, often great TV director John Llewellyn Moxey shot this adaptation of a Mary Higgins Clark potboiler about a brilliant assistant DA with tragic past-based commitment issues (Lauren Hutton) coming head to head with a mad scientist doctor (James Farentino). This certainly isn’t one of Moxey’s best movies, mostly thanks to a script that never quite seems to be able to hold tone and focus, a problem that’s further exacerbated by the need to shoe-horn various character from the soap “Guiding Light” into minor roles. From time to time, Moxey gets the opportunity for one of his patented classical suspense scenes, but much of the film seems fixated on the elements of the plot that are the most conventional and least interesting. Despite a spunky turn by Hutton and some joyful scenery chewing by Farentino, the whole thing never really comes together as a suspenseful narrative.

The World Beyond (1979): Staying in US TV movie land, this is the second of two abortive TV pilots about the adventures of Paul Taylor (the brilliantly named Granville Van Dusen), who is commanded by visions of dead people to protect the victim of the week (here portrayed by JoBeth Williams) from supernatural forces.


The plot sees Van Dusen and Williams fighting a mud golem on an island off the coast of main. Director Noel Black does some pleasantly atmospheric work with the locations, and seems to enjoy the sort of macabre little events that warm my heart too, so you bet there’s a mud golem hand staying active after having been cut off, an occult dabbler causing the whole affair, and some simple yet pleasant moments of classic suspense. There’s no depth to it, of course, but as an hour of spooky entertainment, even in the badly looking version recorded from TV and dubbed from what I suspect to be an EP VHS tape that’s the only way it is making the rounds, is well worth one’s time.