Day 38: Introducing... Casey Jones *Updated*

Tonight is the screening of the Casey Jones movie I mentioned a few posts ago. I'm not really sure what to expect, I just hope that it's fun. I'm not really a purist when it comes to any kind of adaptations or reinventions so I won't be looking to pick apart this movie. I'd rather just enjoy watching someone else's vision of these characters.

The wife and I are going in costume because it just so happens that we dressed as Casey Jones and April O'Neil for Halloween last year. She's actually fixing her hair for her costume right now and I'll be putting on my sweatpants and cut-off jean jacket in just a little bit to head down the to the theater.

Here's a pic of what we looked like on Halloween. I made the mask out of corrugated plastic, covered it with white paper, used a sharpie to make the lines then added elastic to hold it on. It's not super comfortable, but it was cheap and gets the point across.

In honor of the character I drew Casey Jones and Raph in the style of how they looked when they met in the original live action movie. I always loved that a giant anthropomorphic turtle becomes totally inconspicuous in New York City as long as he's wearing a trench coat and a fedora. Seems reasonable. Also Casey Jones has one of the more bum-like super hero costumes of any comic book character I've ever seen.

I'll probably update this post later with my review of the show, but for now I'll just leave you with the trailer again.

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 The Casey Jones movie. Where to begin? First of all the wife and I went in costume and we got there waaaaay early. No one was even at the theater yet so we killed some time at Half Price Books. In costume.

We headed back to the theater about an hour before the show and the lobby started filling up pretty quickly. We get some compliments on our costumes and met another Casey Jones. We took some pictures with people which was cool but soon enough it was time to head into the theater.

The movie itself wasn't very long. I believe the run time was somewhere around 30-40 minutes. I wasn't quite sure what to expect at first. The trailer makes it look pretty gritty, but there was some obvious comedy to the film. I liked Hilarion Banks' Casey Jones a lot. He did an excellent job portraying Casey as a somewhat cocky hot-head who just gets tired of getting pushed around and decides to stand up for himself and make a difference for those who can't.

Things did take a surprisingly (and enjoyably) dark turn after he suits up for the first time. This Casey Jones is not about mercy. He has no qualms about killing some street thugs--including a kid who looks an awful lot like Danny from the original film (though he would be much older now)--to make his point.

Michelangelo shows up part of the way through Casey's night of vengeance and they sort of parody/reenact the introduction scene between Raph and Casey in the original film. It was a lot of fun and one of the coolest things was that they got the original voice of Michelangelo (from the 1990 film) to reprise his role.

Although none of the other turtles are ever seen (except for a pair of hands) you do hear voices and I thought they did a really great job with the Turtles' dialog and voice work. There were a lot of "in-jokes" ("That's just Raph. You'll have to excuse him. He's cool, but rude"). One voice in particular I want to mention was Polaris Banks--who also wrote and directed the film--as Donatello. Corey Feldman has a very distinct Donatello voice (at least to me) and I was convinced they either somehow got him to read for the film, or cobbled together lines taken from the other films because his voice was so spot-on.

I could go on with a spoiler-filled rant about all the things I loved about this film, but instead I'll just hit a few highlights.

The stunt guys and fight choreographers did an excellent job. I liked the use of both the Purple Dragons and the Foot Clan. The fights were lengthy, entertaining and at times pretty brutal.

During one of the fight scenes we were treated to the biggest WTF moment in the movie. I won't spoil it except to say a character I would have thought extremely unlikely to make the jump to live-action makes an appearance.

We were also treated to a bright-yellow-suited April O'Neil giving news-story-narration, some amazing art pieces for the credits, the original film's theme reused during this movie (to great nostalgic effect) as well as a great new single by Johnny October called "Goongala!" during the credits.

The film premieres on the internet September 17th at CaseyJonestheMovie.com so go check it out. Seriously. It's fuckin awesome.