Reel Thrills (#127)

Oh, good. It’s been a while since I’ve read a Hardy Boys book where Frank and Joe mingle in a glamorous entertainment field …

Oh, wait, that’s right — they were bodyguards for the leader of a boy band in the last book I read, Mystery with a Dangerous Beat. In Reel Thrills, Frank and Joe are thrown into the glamorous world of B movies. (Chet’s impressed, at least.) When someone blows up movie producer Mort Tannenberg’s yacht at the Bayport Marina, Tannenberg consults Fenton Hardy. Fenton says he met Mort at a party, although I’m not sure what kind of party both a producer of schlock movies and the world’s most famous private detective would both be attending. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised: if reading Hardy Boys books have taught me nothing else, it’s that Fenton knows everyone. I mean, Dangerous Beat started because Fenton went to college with a prominent manager for musical acts.

Fenton, of course, immediately fobs the case onto his sons and Chet. He’s too busy for the King of B Movies because he and Laura are leaving for Paris. Ooh la la! When Mort meets with the boys, he reveals that not only did his yacht go boom, but props left on the dock indicated the explosion was supposed to mimic the shock ending to one of Mort’s not-yet-released films. This leads the boys to surmise that the villain was working on the film, which, maybe not, but if we assume someone else got ahold of the script, Frank and Joe’s suspect pool would be so large it would drown them.

Since twist endings are Mort’s trademark, he feels extra threatened. He sends Joe to his company offices in New York to snoop around as a gofer, while Frank begins work as a P.A. on Total Annihilation, Mort’s newest film. I was shocked — shocked! — when accidents started happening on set. When has that ever occurred in a Hardy Boys story? (Every time. Yes, I know.) As part of the on-set menace, the author uses the oldest cliché: a sandbag that nearly falls on Lisa’s head. (A sandbag! For Gertrude’s sake, how hackneyed can you get?)

(Also: I mentioned in Dangerous Beat that crawling through office ductwork was the only movie cliché as old as the “tampering with the brakeline” bit. In Reel Thrills, Joe has to escape from a locked room by crawling through the ductwork.)

Frank finds it interesting that if Lisa were injured, the movie would have to stop filming. This line of thinking gets him so worked up that when he sees Lisa grappling with a man, he rushes forward to help, only to get an elbow in the chest from Lisa, who’s just rehearsing.

That night, Mort throws a party, and he has the Hardy boys work as waiters as “free labor.” This is a bit confusing; is Mort not paying anyone for having Frank and Joe do detective work? If so, that’s a sweet deal! If not, he’s not getting free labor. He’s probably getting incredibly expensive labor. At the party, Mort gets gaslighted by someone, with his dead wife showing up and replicating the end to another of Mort’s films before disappearing. Frank and Joe (presumably) get grass stains on their tuxes jumping twelve feet out a window to pursue her.

A few days later, someone sneaks into Mort’s home, breaking into his safe in imitation of the ending of Mort’s unreleased Blood in the Streets. How did the thief guess Mort’s security code? Because he uses the same code that was used in Blood in the Streets. (This is not quite as dumb as President Skroob’s luggage combination. But it’s close.) The break-in worries Mort so much he eventually agrees to Frank and Joe’s suggestion to hire Chet as a house sitter. Mort also asks Frank and Joe to stake out the location where he plans to shoot the most important scene in Total Annihilation … and Frank and Joe head back home after giving the auditorium a cursory glance. Good work, boys!

Suspect pool time!

• Mort himself. Frank and Joe think he might be trying to pull an insurance scam and attempting to hide it by hiring the Hardys to cover up his own complicity, but since the crimes revolve around things he would like to keep secret, Frank and Joe have to rule him out.
• Cindy “Poison Pen” Langly: Mort fired her as a writer for revealing “trade secrets,” and now she writes stories that defame him for a trashy tabloid. She even accuses him of destroying his own yacht — for publicity purposes — in print. On the other hand, Langly thinks Mort is hoping for “BIG BOX OFFICE BUCKS,” which is absurd. It’s a B-movie: a large gross at the ticket office is a longshot. He’ll probably get more money from video and cable TV rights.
• Danny DiNuccio: He has no real motive, but he’s Joe’s boss, he acts mean toward Joe, and he’s does vaguely suspicious stuff. That’s enough for Frank and Joe Hardy! He’s also miffed he suggested the twist ending to Blood in the Streets but received no credit for it.
• Lisa Summer: A teen star, she is concerned about what Mort’s movies are doing to her career and probably wants out of her contract. (Joe thinks she’s sexy when she’s sad, which is a little creepy.) She’s probably not wrong; in Blood in the Streets, her role is “a ruthless ninja safecracker expert named Raven Blue.” I’m not sure if she’s an expert on cracking safes, an expert on safecrackers, or an expert on ninja safecrackers — if it’s the latter, Raven certainly has the field to herself.
• Peter Rizer: The assistant director of Total Annihilation. He’s mostly incompetent at overseeing things on set — lights go out, ammonia is placed in the fog machine ... You know, the usual stuff. Rizer is more important because he dates the author, who was most likely was a young lad (or she was a young lass) while Reiser played for the Brooklyn Dodgers (1940-2, 1946-8).
  

  (Also dating the book: Frank’s confrontation, during broad daylight, with three muggers in a New York City parking garage. Ah, pre-Giuliani New York, how we miss thee.)

As it turns out, Langly and DiNuccio are innocent of wrongdoing, unless you count DiNuccio being Langly’s inside source as a crime. (I wouldn’t, although I sometimes admit my legal compass does not match up with the Hardys’.) Rizer is, as I mentioned, merely incompetent. Summer and her trainer are behind the worst of the on-set accidents in an attempt to get Lisa out of her contract. (She wants to exercise a safety clause, but after Frank and Joe confront her, she realizes she’s stuck with Mort.)

The real culprit of the crimes that imitate Mort’s films is Sid Renfield, Mort’s executive producer who got kicked upstairs after directing Mort’s movies for years. Evidently he doesn’t discuss this slight with Mort, because he and the Hardys are shocked when they discover who is behind the plot.

Despite not doing any real investigating, Frank and Joe seem like a big enough threat that Renfield tries to murder them with a Jeep before launching his coup de grace against Mort. But the Hardys are — barely — ahead of him, having figured out how he planned to kill Mort. Joe remove the detonator that would destroy Mort’s brakes (*sigh*) and puts sand in Renfield’s gas tank, forcing Renfield to accept a ride from Mort or admit what he’s done.

Renfield incriminates himself, and Frank and Joe are victorious again. I’d actually declare this a clear win for Frank and Joe, unlike Mystery with a Dangerous Beat; nothing was really destroyed, no one (except Joe, who suffers a vicious concussion when a flat from a set drops on him) is really injured, and the plan to get the villain to incriminate himself is actually kinda clever. Nice job, Frank and Joe (and Franklin W. Dixon)!

But my goodness, lay off some of the clichés next time, OK?

Ghost of a Chance (#169)

Plot: Frank and Joe get jobs as assistant animal handlers on the set of a movie about “Jumper” Herman, but when the star is harassed and dangerous sabotage is occurs, the Hardys investigate.

“Borrowing” from the past: Frank and Joe serve as assistants to animal trainers who work with a bear and a puma. In original Clue of the Broken Blade, they worked with the carnival, with Frank feeding elephants and Joe working the snake tent. In The Clue of the Screeching Owl, they were fascinated by Col. Bill Thunder, who was a puma trainer. Joe acts as a stuntman in the movie in the revised Broken Blade. Chet had a job as an extra in Mystery of the Desert Giant.

Joe has a confrontation with a puma, during which he manages to slowly retreat to safety while someone else hits it with a drugged dart. There was a time when Joe would have taken the puma out himself; in Hunting for Hidden Gold, the brothers shot wolves, and Joe himself kills a tiger with a rock in The Disappearing Floor. Hardcore.

Nice work if you can get it: Weirdly, Frank and Joe don’t have an explanation for why they get the prime job of working as assistant animal handlers for a motion picture. No one mentions how Fenton saved their employers’ lives or got back their Aztec treasure; there’s no mystery to be solved (at least at the beginning). They’re just “friends of the Hardys.” (Maybe they’re “friends” from back when Gertrude was popular.) Some guys have all the luck, although given the huge amount of coincidences with the Hardys, it shouldn’t be surprising that they are the lucky ones.

Based on a true story: The movie the Hardys are working on, Dropped into Danger, is based on the fictional “Jumper” Herman. From the details in the story — Herman steals an archaelogical treasure in Canada, then flies across the border into America where his plane crashes and he and his treasure are lost for years — Herman calls to mind the infamous D.B. Cooper, who hijacked a plane out of the Pacific Northwest, threatening to blow it up unless he got a ransom and enough parachutes for him and the flight crew (the other passengers were allowed to leave). He parachuted from the passenger jet somewhere near the Columbia River and was never seen again, assumed dead.

With a name like that, she has to be a villain: Ghost of a Chance features a professor of folklore named “Sassy Leigh,” who is behind most of the chaos in the book. I’m sure the name was meant to evoke “Southern” in the readers’ minds, but … Sassy? Really? I mean, it’s an awful name — a sure sign of villainy — but it’s no Pierre Pierre or Slicer Bork. It’s not even Cadmus Quill, another academic type villain.

She has to be a villain, though, because she’s an awful folklorist. She claims an open mind is the hallmark of a “great” folklorist, because God knows, literal truth is what you’re supposed to be getting from these stories, rather than what the folk tales say about the society that tells them.

Other name-related follies: Of course, Jumper Herman is alive, and because he’s in a Hardy Boys book, it’s revealed he’s been living under an alias that is an anagram of his real name. Somehow — despite their experiences with the great Pedro “Zemog” (Gomez spelled backward) in The Jungle Pyramid — the Hardys don’t routinely run anagram checks on new acquaintances. Sure, that would be paranoid, but it would save so much time.

Why couldn’t Chet’s new hobby be cryptozoology?: There’s a Bigfoot in this story. I know: they hedge their bets, dance around it, but it’s there … and it, like everyone else, takes its turn beating up our favorite teen detectives, slapping Frank to the ground with a casual backhand. I believe the next step after being casually swatted by a creature that probably doesn’t exist is getting beat up something from folklore, so I fully expect Joe to be pummeled by an Elf lord later in the series.

There’s a time for G Ratings, and this isn’t it: When a stunt goes wrong and an actress injures her foot, she says, “Yikes, I think it’s broken.” Even if its only sprained — as it turns out to be — that is admirable (or foolhardy) linguistic restraint. I’m not talking about breaking out the four-letter Anglo-Saxon words, but ... well, screaming always helps, I find.

Opinions: There’s a big of everything in this one, and of course, that’s never a good thing. A movie, a sasquatch, a legendary criminal who has really nothing to do with either of those ... the Dixon du jour wasn’t at the top of his game here. I think the most disappointing is that no one knows or cares why the Hardys get such great jobs. Maybe they’re actually interested in a movie career, and Fenton, to make them realize it isn’t as glamorous as they think, gets them a job cleaning puma droppings for a summer? Maybe. Can you think of a better explanation?

He does manage to make Dropped into Danger sound like a troubled production. There are at least two rewrites: one to incorporate the lead actress’s sprained foot, and another to drop in the Hardys wrapping up the mystery. Frankly, it doesn’t sound like that good of a movie (there might be a reason no one’s done a big-budget D.B. Cooper story, no matter how cool it sounds), and the rewrites, sabotage, injuries, firings, and disruptions on the set would make any real movie studio very nervous. And think of what the bloggers would make of it? “Pictures from the set seem to indicate a pair of teenage boys ruling the set. This is going to be a disaster.”

Grade: C-. And the movie gets a thumbs down.