Entertainment
R-Rated Apocalyptic 80s Thriller Is A Frantic, Real-Time Race For Survival
By Robert Scucci
| Published
There’s no better way to depict the beginning of the end than to show exactly how it might happen in real time, like in 1988’s Miracle Mile. The story is a simple one about a guy learning that a full-blown nuclear war is about to kick off, and how he needs to not only convince everybody around him that he isn’t crazy, but also find the woman he just met, who may very well be the love of his life, so they can escape the apocalypse and live to see another day.
There’s not much you need to know about Miracle Mile to be sold on its premise other than the fact that this movie goes hard. Once its conflict is established, it becomes a race against the clock, resulting in an unthinkable amount of collateral damage brought on by mass hysteria.
If Only He Didn’t Pick Up The Phone
The fatalist in me has taught me not to engage in certain behavior, especially after watching too many thrillers to count. For example, if a random payphone outside of a diner rings, maybe don’t pick it up. If you don’t know what you don’t know, you can just grab a cheeseburger, not knowing it may be your last.
Picking up the phone is exactly what Harry Washell (Anthony Edwards) does after trying to reach Julie Peters (Mare Winningham), a woman he only just met earlier in the day while visiting the La Brea Tar Pits. Harry promises to meet Julie at her late-night bartending shift after the two hit it off so well, oversleeps, and wakes up at 4:00 a.m. He makes his way to the local diner and leaves Julie a voicemail apologizing for missing their date. The second he hangs up, the pay phone rings again. He answers, and he’s greeted by a distraught man named Chip, who warns him of an incoming nuclear launch that will decimate the city.
Before Harry can extract any more information from Chip, he hears the man get shot dead, only for another man to pick up the phone and tell him to forget anything ever happened. Rightfully disturbed by the exchange, Harry enters the diner and tells everybody what he heard, which is met with understandable skepticism. When a businesswoman named Landa (Denise Crosby) all but confirms his suspicions, she makes arrangements for an evacuation via private jet, an offer that every patron immediately jumps on.
Harry, on the other hand, stays behind so he can track down Julie and meet up with them later. If the end times are kicking off on the same day he meets the woman of his dreams, he might as well rescue her. After all, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take, even if the world as you know it is about to end.
A Frantic Race Against The Clock
While Miracle Mile obviously uses filmic time to seamlessly get you from point A to point B, the whole thing plays out as if it were unfolding in real time. The entire second and third acts involve Harry scrambling to find Julie and fill her in on what’s happening. If he’s successful, he can catch up with everybody from the diner and get out of the city before the bombs start dropping. While the streets are overrun with panic and bedlam, we’re still not sure if Chip’s warning is legitimate or if it simply triggered a mass panic over nothing. All signs suggest that something catastrophic is about to happen, but Miracle Mile’s on-the-street, “we don’t know what’s going on,” energy is frenetic enough to keep you guessing.
If you’ve ever had the displeasure of attending a densely populated event that suddenly needs to be evacuated, you’ll know exactly the feeling I’m talking about. It doesn’t take long for something as simple as a teenager pulling a fire alarm at a convention to be blown way out of proportion as the people living through it assume the worst. Here, the stakes are high enough, and you’re drip-fed enough clues from the story, to surmise that this could very well be the real deal.
When the going gets tough, though, Miracle Mile is not without levity. My favorite sequence involves Harry running into an all-night gym and asking every single spandex-wrapped meathead if any of them know how to fly a helicopter. What makes it so funny is that he finds exactly what he’s looking for, making you think, “Well… how convenient?”
That is not to say that Miracle Mile is a comedy. It is very much a thriller. At 87 minutes, it’s relentlessly paced and doesn’t waste a single minute of its run time. It’s also the adventure of a lifetime. At the very least, I can’t think of anything more thrilling than running through a city on the verge of destruction, saving the girl, and then jumping into a chopper while everybody below you gets reduced to ash.
To find out Harry and Julie’s fate in Miracle Mile, you can stream the film for free on Tubi as of this writing. If you’re looking for a mean and lean thriller to fill your evening, it doesn’t get much better than this.
Entertainment
Moon phase today: What the Moon will look like on July 18
After days of almost complete darkness, the Moon is finally illuminated enough to spot some features on its surface once again. What can you see when you look up tonight?
What is today’s Moon phase?
As of Saturday, July 18, NASA’s Daily Moon Guide tracker tells us the Moon phase is in Waxing Crescent phase, with 19% of its surface visible.
Without any visual aids, tonight you can spot the Mares Crisium and Fecunditatis. With binoculars or a telescope, you’ll also add the Endymion Crater to your view.
When is the next Full Moon?
The next Full Moon will take place on July 29.
What are Moon phases?
The Moon completes one full cycle around Earth in about 29.5 days, moving through eight different phases along the way, NASA explains. Although the same side of the Moon always faces our planet, the amount of sunlight reflecting off its surface changes as it travels around Earth. This changing angle of illumination is what makes the Moon appear to transform throughout the month, from a thin crescent to a half-lit Moon and eventually a fully illuminated Full Moon, before starting the cycle again.
New Moon – The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).
Mashable Light Speed
Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter – Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.
Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon – The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous – The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)
Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) – Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
Entertainment
Forgotten Stephen King Sci-Fi Series Is One Of The Most Fun Shows Of The 2010s
By Jonathan Klotz
| Updated
Stephen King and “light-hearted sci-fi procedural” don’t sound like they go together, and honestly, Haven, a SyFy original series, is only loosely based on a King novella, The Colorado Kid. The book is about a mysterious death in a small town in Maine investigated by two local newspaper reporters, while the series includes a mysterious death but surrounds it with a town full of supernatural events that defy explanation.
If Buffy and NCIS got together and had a kid, it would be this show, which is impossible to take seriously but is one of the lightest, breeziest binge-watches available today.
The Troubles
The town of Haven has been beset by what the residents refer to as “The Troubles,” a sudden burst of paranormal activity that manifested in strange powers taking hold of citizens. A typical “Case of the Week” format centers around something strange, from mysterious murders in the dead of night to an earthquake or a pyrokinetic on the loose. Investigating these cases is the new-in-town Audrey Parker (played by Emily Rose), joined by local officer Nathan Wournos (Lucas Bryant), and starting in Season 2, WWE Hall of Famer Edge aka Adam Copeland, and what starts simple (for a strange outburst of superpowers) quickly spirals into a generations-spanning mystery.
It takes a while for the big picture to become clear, and by then, the show has gone wildly off the rails into secret organizations, different dimensions, and the same people playing their own evil twins in the most soap opera twist possible. Yet even The X-Files and Battlestar Galactica ended up losing the plot in their final seasons, and at least with Haven, it’s a fun ride to get to the end.
The Last Of Its Generation
And there is an ending. Haven aired for five seasons on SyFy, telling a complete story between all of the “Case of the Week” episodes, bottle episodes (an early one paying homage to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is a standout), and a parade of guest stars. Among the familiar faces that pass through the town are Colin Ferguson (from the SyFy series Eureka), William Shatner, Edge’s best friend forever and world’s greatest Dad, Christian, aka William Reso, 90s heartthrob Jason Priestly, and Battlestar Galactica’s Michael Hogan.
I was a sucker for this generation of SyFy originals, from Eureka and Warehouse 13 to Sanctuary and Haven, for being light, easy watches that don’t demand much of the viewer. The equivalent of a bag of potato chips, none of these shows will fill you up or have deep, philosophical messages to get across, but what they are is incredibly entertaining from start to finish. Of course, as SyFy originals, the crew had to get creative with their budgets, and the shows can look a little … cheap … compared to the million-dollar streaming shows of today, but that’s part of the charm.
You can’t compare Haven to a straight Stephen King series adaptation like Rose Red, Castle Rock, or The Stand, even though it is filled with small references to his vast catalog of work, but it’s also still better than The Langoliers and Under the Dome. If you’re in the mood for a new sci-fi show to binge, you can stream it for free on several platforms, including YouTube, Pluto TV, Amazon Prime Video, and The CW. It’s also streaming ad-free on Peacock if you have a subscription.
Entertainment
The 70s Sci-Fi Cult Classic Student Film That Accidentally Created A Massive Franchise
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
John Carpenter is known today as the Master of Horror, but he got his start with Dark Star, an offbeat sci-fi comedy that started as a student film while he attended the University of Southern California. He also happened to be friends with Dan O’Bannon, who helped him write the script for the film. While Carpenter would go on to make Halloween and The Thing, O’Bannon was inspired by the reaction to their low-budget sci-fi comedy to write a sci-fi horror that you might know: Alien.
Dark Star may be a cult classic today, but when it was upgraded from student film to feature film and released in 1974, audiences had no idea what they were watching, and most of the humor was missed. O’Bannon noticed this and shared his thought process in later interviews, “If I can’t make them laugh, then maybe I can make them scream.”
Once it was available on VHS, the film found its audience, including Quentin Tarantino, the creator of the Metal Gear games, Hideo Kojima, and Doug Naylor, the creator of Red Dwarf. Fittingly given Carpenter’s musical talents, multiple bands have used voice samples or paid tribute to the film in their songs.
Cabin Fever INNNN SPACEEEEEE!!!
The connections between Dark Star and Alien are apparent from the very beginning, with both films taking place on ramshackle spaceships that share the same retro-futuristic style, and the crews are composed of characters that don’t fit into the typical sci-fi hero mold. Dark Star, as a parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey, cranks the crew’s personalities to 11, which somehow works. As a result, it feels like frat bros trapped in space together, and they don’t get along, but they have to.
The crew’s mission is to find potentially dangerous planets and blow them up, but the catch is that after a massive malfunction, a thermostellar bomb develops a personality and tries to blow up ahead of schedule. The captain of the Dark Star, a former surfer, has to talk the bomb into not blowing up.
It’s a fantastic parody of sci-fi that engages in deep philosophy, and was purposely designed to be a parody of HAL. That’s part of the humor that O’Bannon was frustrated with, which went over the head of the audience, but it’s the bizarre beach ball alien that became the proto-Xenomorph.
The Comedy Routine That Became Alien
Working under tight budget restrictions, the alien in Dark Star is a painted beach ball with floppy claws loosely attached to it. Sergeant Pinback, played by O’Bannon, tries to keep the alien contained in a storage room, but it keeps escaping and attempts to murder him, and eventually, Pinback accidentally causes it to pop and explode. The entire sequence, played here for laughs with some absurd physical humor, is what directly inspired Alien.
Replacing the adorable but slightly murderous prankster beach ball with the H. R Giger design of the terrifying, very murderous Xenomorph but maintaining the similar setting and feeling of claustrophobia provided the recipe for a genre-defining hit. Dark Star, it should be noted, is also rated “G,” which gives you an idea as to the level of physical humor that O’Bannon brought to his role. Yet, given how the film ends, it’s only suitable for kids if you want to inflict a NeverEnding Story level of trauma on them.
If you’ve never seen Dark Star, it is well worth your time, even today, because it’s an absolutely bonkers take on sci-fi that nails the exact tone they wanted. It’s streaming for free on Tubi, Pluto TV, YouTube, and Plex, and is also part of Amazon Prime.
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