REPOST: DVD Review: The Amazing Screw-On Head

Mike Mignola's Amazing Screw-On Head is the exception in this week of looking at men versus machines. He's a robot who works for the good guys, in this case Abraham Lincoln. Screw-On Head is an absurdist steam punk sort of robot who has the ability to screw his metal head onto a variety of bodies in order to protect 1800s America from the likes of zombies and werewolves. There aren't really an regular humans to be found, so it's not really a case of "Man vs. Machine" as much as "Machine vs. Monsters." Which, when you think about it, is really so much cooler, isn't it? Read on for the original review...

How do you characterize Lionsgate’s DVD of The Amazing Screw-On Head? Is it a historical spy thing? Well, it is about a secret agent who works for Abraham Lincoln in 1862, but then there’s also the little matter of him being a robot. So is it sci-fi/spy? Yeah, kind of, but then there’s the zombie and the werewolf. So is it historical horror/sci-fi/spy? Getting closer, but you can’t really label The Amazing Screw-On Head as anything. It’s unclassifiable. But it does have a secret agent hero, so it definitely deserves a review here.

The Amazing Screw-On Head is a twenty-two minute TV pilot that failed to get a series pick-up on SciFi Channel, yet still managed a DVD release. It’s a real oddity, and a bit of a masterpiece.

Based on Hellboy creator Mike Mignola’s brilliant, absurdist one-shot comic book, writer Bryan Fuller (Wonderfalls) delivers a surreal cartoon that captures the spirit of its source material, expands on it, and sets it up as the basis for a series. The plot adheres fairly close to the comic, and there’s barely enough of one to fill the scant twenty-two minute runtime. But there are enough cool characters, gadgets and situations that you definitely want to spend more time with them.

Screw-On Head, voiced by Paul Giamatti, is a robotic secret agent whose head can be screwed onto any number of strange, Victorian mechanical bodies. When the evil Emperor Zombie (David Hyde Pierce) steals a tome from the Museum of Dangerous Books and Paper–and kidnaps the only man capable of translating it–President Lincoln sends Screw-On Head to investigate. The strange trail takes him to Marrakesh (by rocket) to the Mississippi, and brings him into contact with an old lover (Molly Shannon), whom Emperor Zombie has turned into a vampire. Emperor Zombie’s dastardly plot involves freeing a demonic demi-god from a turnip, and then using it to take over the world. Needless to say, Screw-On head foils the plot (with the aid of his trusty valet, Mr. Groin, voiced by Patton Oswalt), but that’s almost inconsequential to the zaniness transpiring onscreen.

Where Fuller has fleshed out the story from the comic, it’s barely noticeable. Everything still feels very Mike Mignola, and it was a good idea to flesh out some characters Mignola only mentioned ("two horrible old ladies and a monkey with a gun") and turn them into additional villains. Where he stumbles slightly is in adding backstory to Screw-On Head and Emperor Zombie, and creating a love triangle between them and the vampire woman. From a character standpoint it works, but in providing any sort of explanation, it diminishes some of the comic’s utter absurdity slightly. Still, it makes for exciting and rewarding viewing.

The animation itself is based directly on Mignola’s artwork, and does a great job of translating his unique, shadowy style. It’s not perfect, but it’s enough to make me really want to see a Hellboy cartoon done like this, even though Tad Stones & Co. recently pulled off an amazing Hellboy animated movie in their own style. (Mignola contractually forbade them to use his look.)

For such a short running time, The Amazing Screw-On Head provides a surprising amount of bonus content. There’s a short storyboard/animatic/finished product comparison, and a behind the scenes documentary that’s as long as the show itself. The featurette covers all aspects of creating the show, and does it really well, even if it misrepresents a few participants’ viewpoints. There’s also an informative commentary track by Brian Fuller and director Chris Prynoski.

Most interesting of all, there’s a sixteen page booklet of production art by Mignola and Concept Artist Guy Davis. There are some great designs here, wonderful additions to Screw-On Head’s world that really make me with the series had continued. In addition to several intriguing alternate bodies for the title character (like "unicycle body" and "cannon body" and "suit of many hands"), there is an enigmatic villain with a potted flower for a face. Only Mignola can pull that off and have it be as spooky as it is funny. He says in his notes that this character would have been a Moriarty-like smooth-talking criminal genius. Ah, what might have been! Perhaps if the DVD sells well enough, there's still a chance of the series being picked up by Cartoon Network or Comedy Central or something...

At the bargain price of $9.99, The Amazing Screw-On Head is a great value. The additional materials ensure that you really get your money’s worth despite the brevity of the main attraction. Fans of the more surreal side of spying, like The Avengers or, particularly, Wild Wild West (or Lucifer Box!) would be well-served to check this out.

Review: The Amazing Screw-On Head

How do you characterize Lionsgate’s DVD of The Amazing Screw-On Head? Is it a historical spy thing? Well, it is about a secret agent who works for Abraham Lincoln in 1862, but then there’s also the little matter of him being a robot. So is it sci-fi/spy? Yeah, kind of, but then there’s the zombie and the werewolf. So is it historical horror/sci-fi/spy? Getting closer, but you can’t really label The Amazing Screw-On Head as anything. It’s unclassifiable. But it does have a secret agent hero, so it definitely deserves a review here.

The Amazing Screw-On Head is a twenty-two minute TV pilot that failed to get a series pick-up on SciFi Channel, yet still managed a DVD release. It’s a real oddity, and a bit of a masterpiece.

Based on Hellboy creator Mike Mignola’s brilliant, absurdist one-shot comic book, writer Bryan Fuller (Wonderfalls) delivers a surreal cartoon that captures the spirit of its source material, expands on it, and sets it up as the basis for a series. The plot adheres fairly close to the comic, and there’s barely enough of one to fill the scant twenty-two minute runtime. But there are enough cool characters, gadgets and situations that you definitely want to spend more time with them.

Screw-On Head, voiced by Paul Giamatti, is a robotic secret agent whose head can be screwed onto any number of strange, Victorian mechanical bodies. When the evil Emperor Zombie (David Hyde Pierce) steals a tome from the Museum of Dangerous Books and Paper–and kidnaps the only man capable of translating it–President Lincoln sends Screw-On Head to investigate. The strange trail takes him to Marrakesh (by rocket) to the Mississippi, and brings him into contact with an old lover (Molly Shannon), whom Emperor Zombie has turned into a vampire. Emperor Zombie’s dastardly plot involves freeing a demonic demi-god from a turnip, and then using it to take over the world. Needless to say, Screw-On head foils the plot (with the aid of his trusty valet, Mr. Groin, voiced by Patton Oswalt), but that’s almost inconsequential to the zaniness transpiring onscreen.

Where Fuller has fleshed out the story from the comic, it’s barely noticeable. Everything still feels very Mike Mignola, and it was a good idea to flesh out some characters Mignola only mentioned ("two horrible old ladies and a monkey with a gun") and turn them into additional villains. Where he stumbles slightly is in adding backstory to Screw-On Head and Emperor Zombie, and creating a love triangle between them and the vampire woman. From a character standpoint it works, but in providing any sort of explanation, it diminishes some of the comic’s utter absurdity slightly. Still, it makes for exciting and rewarding viewing.

The animation itself is based directly on Mignola’s artwork, and does a great job of translating his unique, shadowy style. It’s not perfect, but it’s enough to make me really want to see a Hellboy cartoon done like this, even though Tad Stones & Co. recently pulled off an amazing Hellboy animated movie in their own style. (Mignola contractually forbade them to use his look.)

For such a short running time, The Amazing Screw-On Head provides a surprising amount of bonus content. There’s a short storyboard/animatic/finished product comparison, and a behind the scenes documentary that’s as long as the show itself. The featurette covers all aspects of creating the show, and does it really well, even if it misrepresents a few participants’ viewpoints. There’s also an informative commentary track by Brian Fuller and director Chris Prynoski.

Most interesting of all, there’s a sixteen page booklet of production art by Mignola and Concept Artist Guy Davis. There are some great designs here, wonderful additions to Screw-On Head’s world that really make me with the series had continued. In addition to several intriguing alternate bodies for the title character (like "unicycle body" and "cannon body" and "suit of many hands"), there is an enigmatic villain with a potted flower for a face. Only Mignola can pull that off and have it be as spooky as it is funny. He says in his notes that this character would have been a Moriarty-like smooth-talking criminal genius. Ah, what might have been! Perhaps if the DVD sells well enough, there's still a chance of the series being picked up by Cartoon Network or Comedy Central or something...

At the bargain price of $9.99, The Amazing Screw-On Head is a great value. The additional materials ensure that you really get your money’s worth despite the brevity of the main attraction. Fans of the more surreal side of spying, like The Avengers or, particularly, Wild Wild West (or Lucifer Box!) would be well-served to check this out.

Amazing Screw-On Head Coming To DVD

Speaking of spy shows with unusual historical settings, there’s even more than the setting that’s bizarre about this animated adventure. It’s so bizarre, in fact, that it definitely WAY transcends the spy genre, being more scifi/fantasy, but nevertheless the hero IS a secret agent, so it warrants a mention here.

Amazing Screw-On Head (voiced by Paul Giamatti) is a partially robotic secret agent who reports to President Abraham Lincoln. With the help of his manservant, Mr. Groin (Patton Oswalt), he screws his head onto a different, appropriate body for each mission. Unfortunately, we never got any more missions than the pilot, which aired on SciFi Channel. But presumably, he WOULD HAVE used different bodies for his other missions, since he has a whole collection.

Amazing Screw-On Head is based on a truly unique, truly wonderful one-shot comic book by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. (I STRONGLY recommend that any comics fans check it out if they haven’t already... it’s really one of the very best comics I’ve ever read!) Truthfully, the cartoon pilot doesn’t come close to living up to its printed source material, but it’s still a visually striking, very funny show. Unlike the excellent animated Hellboy movie, Amazing Screw-On Head attempts to translate Mignola’s distinctive visual style to the screen... and does a pretty good job of it! Even though SciFi ultimately passed on the series, its creator, Brian ("Wonderfalls") Fuller is still shopping it around to other networks. Perhaps if sales of the Lionsgate DVD (which streets the same day as the Hellboy animated movie, February 6, 2007) are strong enough, that will help inspire one of them to pick it up!

Bryan Fuller Wants to Reboot The Avengers on TV with Eddie Izzard as Steed

Bryan Fuller, the visionary showrunner behind Hannibal, Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls, would like to reboot The Avengers (the real Avengers, not the superhero team) on television. He told TVLine (via Dark Horizons), "I would love to reboot The Avengers with Eddie Izzard as John Steed. That would be wonderful." That's the full extent of his quote, given in a survey that asked successful showrunners what series they'd most like to reboot. So, to be clear, this is Fuller picking a dream job, not a pilot sale or even a pitch. But it's certainly a provocative notion!

The Avengers is my favorite TV show of all time. It has already been rebooted once, in the Seventies, by Brian Clemens as The New Avengers, and turned into a less than satisfying feature film in the late Nineties. I am not a knee-jerk reactionary against remakes and reboots of things that I love. After the failure of the 1998 movie (at least partly due to studio tinkering; I would certainly love to see a director's cut to judge the film properly), the show could definitely use some rehabilitation in the public's eyes. And I would love to see it get enough exposure that it could reclaim its own name, which has been appropriated by Marvel. Of course I would only want to see a reboot in truly capable hands... but Bryan Fuller's might be the perfect hands. He is both a storyteller and a stylist, a crucial combination for The Avengers. And he's got a decidedly offbeat point of view, which also helps. The sort of quirkiness he's demonstrated in cult favorites like Pushing Daisies or his one prior foray into spydom (sort of), the supremely, deliciously weird Amazing Screw-On Head (a bizarre animated steampunk pilot based on Mike Mignola's exquisitely weird comic book of the same name - full review here) makes him a good fit for the material. I also like that he starts in the right place, by choosing a Steed. Many fairweather fans of the show might pick a new Emma Peel first (and such casting, whichever female partner they went with, would of course be crucial), but Fuller seems to recognize that no matter which partner he was paired with, it was always Patrick Macnee as Steed who held the show together. That's the right starting point, and from there you should look for an actress with chemistry with your Steed - in this case Eddie Izzard. Which I think is another excellent choice. Izzard is on record as being a fan of the series, but also may have a black mark against him in many fans' eyes for his participation in the '98 movie, in which he played a (mostly) mute henchman for Sean Connery's diabolical mastermind. But anyone who's ever seen his standup act knows that Izzard oozes charisma (and, of course, he's got style - and a predilection for kinky boots!), and in my opinion he might just be the one man who could revive John Steed on television. Fuller and Izzard have previously worked together on two other reboots, the Munsters-derived Mockingbird Lane, and Hannibal. Yes, after careful consideration, I quite love the idea of a Bryan Fuller/Eddie Izzard Avengers reboot! Come on, Esteemed Representatives of Television, make it happen!

Fuller wasn't the only producer polled to pick The Avengers. Gabrielle Stanton, executive producer on The Flash, showed similar good taste. "I would love to reboot Space: 1999 or The Avengers – not the bad movie version, the really cool TV version. Both those things would be really great science-fiction genre properties to bring back."

What's Going On With Get Smart?

There have been lots of stories swirling around the web in the last few weeks about Get Smart, some good, some decidedly bad. So what's the truth?

First, USA Today ran a story (along with this great picture) about the start of production in which director Peter Segal (50 First Dates) promises that the movie will be "politically satirical." He says it was a challenge to find things to laugh at in the face of global terror. (I guess he doesn't recall that the original series managed to find things to laugh at at a time people were genuinely afraid of nuclear anhililation, just a few years after America and Russia came head-to-head over the Cuban Missile Crisis...) The solution? "We try to show the disconnect between government agencies as we saw right after 9/11 when the CIA and FBI weren't really communicating." Well, that does sound promising, actually.

As far as updating the characters goes, Segal says, "[Agent 99, originally played by Barbara Feldon] is a little more kick-ass and tougher, more emancipated. She's more the female James Bond, teaching [Smart] the ropes." An obvious choice, but hardly very original. Every modern spy comedy does it. Natalie Imbruglia in Johnny English particularly comes to mind.

Aintitcool reported on the story, and added a few comments of their own. Then the entertainment insider blog Hollywood Elsewhere commented on it, revealing themselves to be rather unfairly predisposed against the movie. Later in the day, they followed it up with a link to a negative script review on a Get Smart fansite (which claims that the script is basically an Americanized remake of Johnny English) and input from someone supposedly connected with the movie. He called the script awful, and chillingly said it "makes Steve Martin's Pink Panther look like genius." The source goes on to reveal that Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, creators of the original series, were unhappy with the very idea of remaking Get Smart, but that Brooks likes Steve Carell and offered his input to the producers. Who, the source claims, not only turned him down, but then attempted to screw him out of his deserved royalties.

So, that's bad.

Luckily, a few days later AICN was saying the situation had been resolved, and not only are Mel Brooks and Buck Henry happy with the new financial arrangements; they've officially signed onto the project as "consultants." Apparently that means contributing jokes, and according to Harry Knowles, Carell has already filmed one. Knowles infuriatingly doesn't credit his source for this information, though, so we have no way of knowing how true it is. You'd think there would be an official announcement about such a big development. For now, all we can do is cross our fingers and hope...

As for myself, the cast alone is enough to keep me extremely hopeful about this film. It's a great batch of actors, and everyone seems perfect for their roles. (Which is more than I can say about most 60s spy TV adaptations--Val Kilmer as Simon Templar, anyone?) The fact that the producers and director were smart enough to recruit such a talented cast is encouraging; it shows that they're thinking. Also heartening is Hollywood Elsewhere's buried bit of news that Carell and his Office co-star/writer B.J. Novak have done a pass on the script since the above-linked negative review. And I think the DVD spin-off is a good idea, too.

For now, Get Smart remains near the very top of my must-see movies for 2008.

Tradecraft: HBO Developing Spy Sitcom

The Hollywood Reporter reports that HBO is developing "a workplace comedy about an elite counterintelligence unit hidden undercover as disgruntled civil servants" called Intelligence. The show is created by Michael Patrick Jann, who recently directed the brilliant Lord of the Rings episode of HBO's Flight of the Conchords. Alias alumnus Bradley Cooper and certified comic genius Patton Oswalt (Amazing Screw-On Head) are both attached to star and co-executive produce along with Jann.

Commencing Collossal COBRAS Crossover Event: Man V. Machine!

It's funny how often spies find themselves fighting robots and super-computers, isn't it? Following our impromptu four-week jam session that grew out of Costumed Adventurer Week back in March, the loose Coalition Of Bloggers wRiting About Spies, or "COBRAS" for those in the know, will attempt a planned-in-advance, honest-to-goodness cataclysmic crossover event, Marvel-style! But, as such things tend to go (even when they are planned in advance), I'm already running behind. Look for my first real Man Versus Machine post a bit later in the week. In the meantime, though, be sure to check out what's already been posted at other COBRAS sites! David at Permission To Kill kicked things off with an overview of the "Man vs. Machine" concept, then launched into reviews of Alphaville (the only Eurospy movie they show you in film school) Colossus: The Forbin Project, and Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. (That's the good Dr. Goldfoot movie, for those who keep track of such things! Apologies to Bava.) Wes Britton followed those up with a lengthy and meticulous history of "Spy-Fi" at the Spy Wise Blog, and Jason at Spy Vibe wrote a fascinating and lavishly-illustrated history of the robot. Finally, Armstrong at Mister 8 reviewed an appropriate episode of Johnny Quest. Whew! I've got some catching up to do! Which will start later today...

Man Vs. Machine Week
Read my review of Attack of the Robots here.
Read my review of Billion Dollar Brain here.
Read my review of The Fantastic Argoman here.
Read my review of The Amazing Screw-On Head here.
Read my article Man Versus Steam-Powered Machines: Technology In The Wild Wild West here.
Read my review of Eagle Eye here.
Read my review of Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill here.