Sci-Fi Films of the 1970s

The Love War

1970 Thomas Spelling Productions

OK alien invasion

color, made for TV

Aliens: from planets Argon and Zynan, look just like people unless you put on special designer sunglasses (but we only get one quick glimpse).

Weapons: fairly cool ray guns.

Alien gadgets: very cool body-disintegrator device, a “visualizer” (that is now pretty dated).

The aliens, in human form, do a ritualized battle for control of Earth. One of the aliens meets a drifting woman, down on her luck. They take a liking to one another — it makes limited sense.

The sci-fi content, as well as the script, is pretty thin. The idea of a ritual war isn’t a new one, especially in sci-fi. And of course, aliens taking human form has become the norm.

It’s the actors that make this work well.

It was just filmed around California, with no fancy sets at all. But instead of seeming cheesy, the absence of sets, and the limited special effects, come off as sparse and classy.

I saw this little gem around the time it first came out, and was surprised to have stumbled over an actual sci-fi movie. I was touched and moved.

Quote:

I’m the sum total of every woman who’s ever lived!

Na kometě
[On the comet]

1970 Filmové studio Barrandov, Krátký film Praha

+ fantasy of a trip to a comet

color live, cut-out animation, puppetry

Czech

Premise: Somehow everybody ends up on a comet, cities and all. The joke is that most people just carry on as before.

Done in sepia colors, like tinted black and white, to resemble Victorian postcards.

This is a lovely satire of Victorian colonialism.

Date: Verne’s present (apparently).

They see the comet coming, and then there’s a big earthquake, and we see buildings fly apart, then fall back together again. They only slowly realize they’re not on the Earth anymore.

Life on the comet is scarcely distinguishable from life on Earth, until the dinosaurs come traipsing up. What’s to do but send the cavalry?

The dinosaur animation is curious, but done with considerable artistry: They’re hand puppets! It’s that Czech animation magic!

They find a carboniferous rain forest, where they witness the “evolution of species”, as a fish comes out of water, and starts walking on its hind legs, then becomes a swine. I don’t think this is in the Verne story — it’s a parody of a modern misconception.

Verne’s story is so outré, it’s hard to imagine anything like a faithful film rendition. Zeman found a fanciful way. The romance story, for instance, is just a 20th-century insertion. On the other hand, Vašáryová had a face difficult to forget, and the thread of the romance with a post-card lends some sense to an otherwise difficult story.

“I am a citizen of the universe!”
“Britain is strongly opposed to anarchy, sir!”

THX 1138

1971 American Zoetrope

+ dystopian future

color

It’s a highly organized, antiseptic future world, where everybody has to be productive, safe and happy. But THX is suffering from “severe sedation depletion”.

Robots: chrome “officers”.

Gadgets: masturbation machine (for male), automated confessional, hologram TV channels.

Vehicles: animated scenes of transportation, cool jet cars.

It’s replete with odd unexplained images, including strange creatures: a lizard with antennae, a huge scorpion, mutated baboon-like creatures on the fringes.

The automated, corporate religion is just precious. The 3D TV channels are wild and disturbing. The heated but prescribed legal proceedings are very funny. The white desert detention center is a blast.

What doesn’t work is the representation of a future world of technology using technology that is glaringly 1960s: punch cards, line printers, libraries of magnetic tape reels, reel-to-reel audio tape recorders, low-resolution, distorted, black and white TV.

The image of NASA control rooms and distorted radio reception and technical talk must be the director’s idea of something scary and inhuman… whereas to me, it seems very human, very much like intelligent people willfully cooperating.

Finally, two fugitives lock themselves in a room with a regular cheap 1970s house doorknob. Come on…

The robot officers are everywhere in the film, and play a major part, but the swaggering, athletic young actors playing them convey no sense of automatons whatever. They look like swaggering young guys with chrome masks. In fact, they’re very polite, and show warmth to people and to one another. I’m not sure what the director was trying to get at here, but it doesn’t work for me. It requires too much imagination of the viewer to make it creepy.

The main two characters, THX and LUH, are just shell-shocked or drugged out, and don’t develop much but a sexual and romantic relationship. The supporting actors, on the other hand, really shine, especially Pleasence and Wolfe, with Waiting-for-Godot contemplations, and Colley, as a genial helpful guy who thinks he’s a “hologram”.

Not a little of Woody Allen’s Sleeper is poking fun at this film.

What we have here is a very ambitious attempt at hard social science fiction, with lots of great ideas and delightful scene montages and great actors, but with serious flaws in direction and scenery that detract from the message. It’s possible to wink at all that, and enjoy what they got right.

The Andromeda Strain

1971 Universal Pictures

++ extraterrestrial organism gets loose

color

Date/Place: contemporary, U.S.A.

Premise: a space probe comes back to Earth, and lands in a little town, whereupon almost everybody dies very quickly. The U.S. government assembles a team to investigate. They use an existing secret high-tech biological facility.

Vehicles: a very small space probe called Scoop, USAF F-4 jets.

Alien: there is an alien life form; they give it a code name “Andromeda”. They suspect from the beginning that it’s something alien, but it takes them a while to say much about it. I don’t want to give more away.

Gadgets: too many to list, all of it is plausible 1970s technology. Much of it is quite real, being supplied by big technical companies. If you like fancy medical gadgetry, this is your baby.

The film depicts animal deaths, and they look awfully real. It worried me. But the titles state “animal sequences filmed under supervision of The American Humane Assn., W.M. Blackmore, D.V.M.”

This is excellent science fiction, and the production is the best you’ll see anywhere. The characters are all very realistic — people in a bad situation, who don’t know quite what is going on. The high-tech environment and detective work are just one visual surprise after another. The cast is very strong, and the acting is just superb. Tension is palpable throughout. The characters are imperfect, and make mistakes, any of which could result in many deaths.

The Ωmega Man

1971 Walter Seltzer Production

OK apocalyptic vampires

color

Premise: a biological weapon has infected the population of the world, leaving them albino and super-sensitive to light and maybe crazy. Very few people are unaffected, and the affected hate them.

The zombies in this one have formed a little society advocating pre-wheel technology. They’re crazy and homicidal, but Neville is homicidal, too, and this comes into the story line.

Here, a TV announcer has become leader of the society of vampire zombies. Except that they have funny colored hair and skin and blemishes, they are nothing but religious fanatics. They actually have a point that he has been murdering them.

Neville is struggling with hallucinations brought on by isolation, zooming around in L.A. As far as this part of the movie goes, it’s pretty good, at least as good as its predecessor.

One of the better moments: he cranks up the projector at a cinema and plays a certain current movie.

Much of the story unfolds as flash-backs. This and the horn-band music lends to a made-for-TV feel.

Weapons: he uses various automatic weapons on the Family. (They’ll have to pry those out of his cold dead hands!) The fanciest has an infrared scope so he can shoot the bad guys when they think he can’t see them. The Family mostly eschew firearms, but one goes his own way with a handgun, only to be out-gunned by the good guy’s automatic weapon. Although the Family won’t use the wheel, they aren’t above the trebuchet or bows and arrows.

He meets up with badass Lisa who talks ’70s jive. This was pretty groundbreaking at the time: it’s a mixed-race situation, and also, a portrayal of a woman who can fend for herself.

She forces him at gunpoint to drive in a completely gratuitous motorcycle chase scene, where they motor down stairs and jump cars. (It’s unclear to me how this supported the plot. But even worse, the whole ride looks patently unsurvivable.)

She takes him to a whole community of unaffected people, mostly kids. They’re all infected, but only slowly getting symptoms. He is immune because he immunized himself. He goes on to work on a immunization for the others.

Neville and Lisa quickly domesticate one another.

The script introduces a bunch of characters, yet only develops four of them at all. It gets pretty soppy in parts, and the ending looks like a setup for a TV series sequel. (I hate that.)

This is another adaptation of the book I am Legend, which was the basis of the 1964 film The last Man on Earth. Compared to that adaptation, it would be hard to choose. Some production values are better in this one, but the grit of the situation really takes a turn for the sappy once he finds the unaffected community. While the 1964 version had obvious budget problems, this one has script and direction problems. And the main actor is great in both.

Another adaptation appeared in 2007 under the same name as the book. If you’re looking for the best of these, well, that one had both the budget and less stumbling direction.

Silent Running

1972 Universal Pictures

++ eco-disaster & robots in space

color

Premise: the worst possible case scenario, wherein people have automated the world, and done away with the environment. As an afterthought, they have preserved the remains of Earth’s forests on giant spaceships — but very few people care anymore.

It’s about who’s crazy in a crazy world, and about isolation.

Vehicles: three giant ships run by American Airlines(!) orbiting planet Saturn. Each contains six(? at a guess) whole forests, in giant domes. Action takes place in the Valley Forge. Below its name, it reads further

	Southeast Sub-Tropica
	Bahia-Honda

The on-board electronics is stock 1970s computer and electronics equipment. Interior design derives directly from existing NASA equipment.

Robots (drones) are very inventive, and one of the best parts of the film. Lowell names them “Hewie”, “Dewie” and “Lewie”. They’re not just lovable, they portray a sort of artificial intelligence. Bilateral amputees play them — a marvelous story itself.

The depiction of Saturn’s rings is a sort of light show… I’m not sure what they were getting at here. (Well, this was years before the Voyager I spacecraft gave us the first close-up information of the nature of the rings. So their speculation is as good as anybody’s.)

The premise is very extreme, yet, despite repeated allusions to it, we get no picture of how things could have gotten so bad, how people on Earth could continue to live under the circumstances. Something is missing in the story there… but I have no idea how they could have improved it.

Bruce Dern never skips a beat. He makes his part in the far-fetched story absolutely believable. This is one of the best space movies of the 1970s.

Slaughterhouse-Five

1972 Vanadas Productions

++ time travel social commentary

color

Aliens: “Tralfamadorians”, who see time as a physical dimension, so humans look to them like branching worms.

Dates/Places: “Tralfamador” (we only see the inside of his cage there), WW II Germany (Dresden, especially), and Pilgrim’s childhood and later life in the U.S.A., in the recent past and perhaps present.

Premise: soldier Billy Pilgrim hops in time uncontrollably and in both directions, from the time leading to his death, and his captivity as a zoo animal on Tralfamador, to the horrors of his survival as a prisoner in Germany in World War II, and the firebombing of Dresden. The order of the events is immaterial: past and present are equally apparent to him.

This is a rare example of a sci-fi movie that does justice to its source novel. And that was no mean trick: Vonnegut’s novel is pretty complicated, and touches on very difficult subjects. The film couldn’t catch the verbal hilarity of the book’s narrative, without the narrative — but it does catch the horror, pathos and absurdity.

The characters are great, and life is heartrending, and the interactions with the aliens are a hoot! Vonnegut is a hoot! Read the book! Then get this movie!

My personal story is that I stumbled across the movie staying up late, bored out of my brains at my parents’ place, on a college break. I had read the book, had never heard of the film, but recognized it quickly, and couldn’t believe my fortune to find such a thing, albeit torn to shreds by late-night commercials.

“Po-tee-weet! Soldier Johnny has come unstuck in time.”

Солярис
[Solaris]

1972 Mosfilm

++ alien sentience deep encounter

color

Russian

I rented this film decades ago. I found it slow and very confusing. I wasn’t paying attention. Since then, I have read Lem’s novel, which is pretty remarkable as a work of science fiction, and of speculation of the human condition. I watched the film again, expecting another disappointment.

The way to take this film is to expect a long, slow development that has a deep story, and pay attention to the dialog, which explains some of the strange elements. I took the easy way out, by reading the book first. I think it is possible to understand it well enough by simply paying attention. The movie is a fair adaptation of the book, imperfect, but very well crafted.

By way of development of the backstory, the film starts with very beautiful scenes by a country house on Earth. The photography is gorgeous. You want to be there.

The dialog explains the situation of the planet Solaris, primarily in a B&W film of an inquest into a pilot who witnessed strange things. In the film, the pilot has seen the sea doing strange things, and committee members doubt him, and calls his observations hallucinations. But they mostly accept that Solaris’ ocean is alive, and possibly somehow sentient. Then they suggest cutting exploration of the planet off.

Well, a little of that is in the book, which uses first-person narrative.

Alien: There is this ocean on the planet Solaris, which constitutes a single very powerful, somehow sentient entity. It manifests itself to the people in incomprehensible and painful ways.

We find out from the dialog that the station is in orbit of Solaris. (Minor point: in the book, the station floats over the surface of Solaris, rather than orbiting it.)

Gadgets: They have 2-way TV, with which they converse while one participant is in the car. The car is evidently self-driving!

Vehicles: The film does not directly depict the means of inter-stellar transportation. We do see a thing like a rocket (resembling an ICBM) later on.

The cars are 1970s cars that sound like they have turbine engines as they pass. (It’s scary how much 1970s Moscow looks like Seattle of the mid-2000s.)

The depiction of space flight is minimal — something like a bubble coming through the stars. Fair enough: how should it look?

The depiction of the station is excellent. It appears as a complicated structure with a couple of rings. Sunlight flashing off its windows as he approaches it. The sense of scale is very nearly perfect!

Inside the station is a mess, electric wires torn out. But it’s made to look as if it had been sort of pretty, in an aeronautical, 1970s way.

The representation of the ocean as a roiling fluid isn’t bad. It does manage an ominous atmosphere. (The fantastical emerging structures described in the book may have been technically impractical at the time.)

There is a silly scene with Kelvin in the same room where a large rocket is launched; his clothes get singed. Oh well — Lem, too, had little sense for practicalities, and something like this happens in the book.

Tarkovsky indulges in scenes whose point eludes me:

• A long sequence of clips of driving (I guess in Moscow), just shows 1970s city traffic.
• Home movies from the protagonist’s past (home movies, if you are Tarkovsky, and have a very fancy zooming camera). This seems to be to introduce his mother, who appears briefly in later scenes (but which itself an addition by Tarkovsky.)
• A long pan around Bruegel’s famous painting, “The Hunters in the Snow”.
• The famous weightless candlestick scene, with the flames continuing to burn “up”. This whole thing may have been meant as a space ballet, to emphasize that they’re in space. Despite the exquisite camera work, it’s badly unconvincing, as now we’ve all seen people in weightless conditions…

None of these is in the book, and mostly I couldn’t figure out what they had to do with the story. They are gratuitous.

There is a great deal of philosophizing. Well, Lem also went on for many pages.

There are two main things going on in the story. First, is the nature of the ocean itself: is it trying to communicate with them, or torture them? What sort of intelligence does it have? Second, the encounter with the ocean’s manifestations is terrifically painful for the men emotionally. They find themselves doing things that might be morally reprehensible, things that force them to face their own weaknesses and traumas of their past.

Tarkovsky emphasizes humanistic philosophy. The script was weak on the discussion of the science fiction topic: the nature of the alien entity and its relation to humanity.

The film closes with a scene that was also not in the book, but which works well, providing a sort of ending. (The book ended all threads loose.)

Cinematically, it’s gorgeous, if a bit indulgent. Thematically, it’s close enough, shows enough of the big idea of contact with a being that is very different from us, to qualify it as being great sci-fi. Thrill seekers may find themselves waiting a long time between thrills.

Lem’s book has seen two other adaptations: a 1968 TV movie and a 2002 Hollywood re-make. I have only seen the latter — while it is well-made, it really is a re-make of this Tarkovski film rather than a new adaptation of the book, and departs even further from the book, reducing the sci-fi theme of Solaris’ ocean almost to background.

Soylent Green

1973

+ dystopian future cop whodunit

color

Date/Place: 2022, New York

Social premise: they’ve got 40 million people in New York City alone, they’ve got “greenhouse effect”, few have eaten fresh food in decades, and even the very rich have trouble obtaining meat. So most people eat “Soylent” products, which come as dry wafers of different colors. The advertisements say it’s made from ocean plankton…

Plot premise: a guy breaks in to a rich dude’s apartment and whacks him. Whodunit? Thorn the cop finds out more than he hoped.

The interpersonal relations in the whole film are just odd. It is definitely intentional.

People know their place in this film. Everybody is just politely corrupt. It’s expected.

The first assassin is a curiosity: he performs a very athletic break-in, and behaves quite civilly to the guy he’s sent to kill, politely explaining everything before doing his job.

The crowd was warned: the scoops are on their way! The crowd control scene is famous, one that stuck with me.

The euthanasia center is just wonderful. I saw this when it first came out, on the big screen, with good stereo. It moved me — well, it’s Beethoven.

The sense of overcrowding is often pretty convincing, in the street crowds, piles of people sleeping in stairwells and a church. Unfortunately, they lose this sense in many scenes, so they can also have a lonely, suspenseful atmosphere of conventional cop movies. I guess that’s my main complaint with the film.

The film is pretty dated in many ways, but in others, it’s so outlandish that it doesn’t matter. The women’s fashions didn’t quite make it into the ’70s… but only the call girls are wearing those. The rich dude buys his girlfriend a video game, which looks so ancient.

The popular music is very odd, like two or more tracks played simultaneously. Sometimes jazz and a calliope and what? bossa nova? but somehow playing together. It works sometimes, even if it’s a little muddy.

Unfortunately, the sound quality isn’t great. Often, it sounds like the actors are right in your ear.

Charlton Heston does well in this piece, playing an everyday dirty good cop.

Besides some of the best supporting actors, this film used some great actors, including Edward G. Robinson, and Celia Lovsky, both of whose final film roles were here.

Westworld

1973 MGM

+ entertainment robots amock

color

Starts a with great tongue-in-cheek advertisement for the vacation company Delos.

Medievalworld, Romanworld, Westworld — the latter being a playground emulating cowboy movies that represented the American frontier of 1880.

Date: near future.

Vehicles: a “hovercraft”, which is very spacious, inside, and evidently very fast, seen only partially on the outside.

Weapons: six-shooters supposedly avoid shooting anything warm, end up shooting largely at the wrong time.

Robots: is what it’s all about. Do they malfunction or revolt? Besides robotic people, there are robotic horses and snakes.

Great scenes in the pilot’s sunglasses. Starts out looking like the U.S. space program, complete with mission control. (At least the monitors are in color…) The sound made by the hovercraft at the beginning is a little overwhelming. It was very unnecessarily loud in the theater where I first saw it, like maybe they had just installed new audio equipment.

The humans are pretty objectionable, even the comic relief guys are doing bad things, and the good guys really aren’t good — you can’t help feel some sympathy for the robots.

Yul Brenner doesn’t get a lot of lines (1 word), but his intensity is the scariest thing — and he squeezes in one little mean smile. His performance is far and away the best part of the movie.

And… the way he just keeps coming… think Terminator. (My sister reminded me that I had remarked: “If that thing gets up one more time, I’m out’a here!”)

The cowboy fun is silly, but it doesn’t play well with the cold professionalism of those who make the fun happen. It’s an odd disjunction, and doubtless intentional, but it amounts to a lot of comic relief to a story that should be unrelentingly scary, or something.

The sign “Leaving Westworld” is in Chinese, Russian, French, and German.

Robots turn out to be very flammable. (Well, it was the 1970s. Polyester, you know.)

And then… it just ends. Cue music, cue credits.

La Planète sauvage
Fantastic Planet

1973 Les Films Armorial, Ceskoslovenský Filmexport

OK emancipation on alien world

color cartoon

This is a straight story of escape from enslavement and debasement, told on a surreal alien planet.

Aliens: “Draag”, humanoid, blue, hairless, with big round red eyes and fish fin ears. The females have breasts and round bottoms, though. The Draag do all sorts of incomprehensible things. They are several times as tall as the humans, whom they call the “Oms”. (French hommes.)

Places: Ygam is the planet of the main action. Toward the end, we learn that “Fantastic Planet” refers to a moon of Ygam... but the script never fleshes that location out.

The planet Ygam is full of Bosch-esque animals.

Gadgets: The Oms get educated from a telepathic learning device stolen from the Draag. The Draag make use of numerous material objects in strange ways, most of which remain unexplained. There’s a recognizable low-tech extermination device that disperses poison tablets. Little floating reconnaissance rockets leave spots of light on things they look at.

Weapons: Oms use various things for fighting, mostly knives and hooks, apparently made of biological objects. The only explicit weapon is a “fighting animal” strapped to combatants.

The animation is very weird and beautiful, to me. It’s at least novel.

Warning: the film wraps up prematurely, like they ran out of time and money. Pretty disappointing.

Sleeper

1973

++ dystopian future spoof

color

Premise: a n’er-do-well jazz player (no disguise for Allen himself) is frozen after a catastrophic failure of a routine medical operation, to wake up in the future.

Date: 2173

Robots: butlers, dog

Computer: Bio Central Computer 2100, Series G

Weapons: brain destroyer pistol, rifle ray gun more dangerous to wielder than target.

Bioengineering: giant vegetables plugged in to outlet, giant chicken

Social: mental re-programming, Our Leader, the resistance (called Nazis by Allen),

(Note: the image of Our Leader is that of Timothy Leary.)

Vehicles: police vehicle looks like a boxy delivery van with jet engines attached. Self-driving cars (maybe running on a rail?) with frosted windows. An ancient VW Beetle (one of my favorite gags is that it still runs.)

other gadgets: flying pack with propeller, “orgasmatron”, a recreational drug “the orb”

cloning: starting with nose

Allen pokes fun at everything in sci-fi and idealist politics, but mostly at sex. I regard this as one of his best films, and the single funniest sci-fi spoof of all time.

My story: I was up late at my parent’s place on some break from college, flipping channels, not expecting anything. I had never heard of Sleeper. By fantastic accident, I stumbled on it right at the beginning. I almost died, saved only by the awful late-night commercials.

“I think we should have had sex, but there weren’t enough people.”

“My brain? That’s my second-favorite organ!”

Zardoz

1974 John Boorman Productions Ltd.

OK flake dystopia, badass in panties

color

Date 2293

Zed’s an exterminator, wiping out the pestilent “brutals” at the behest of a god, Zardoz, that manifests itself as a flying stone head.

This is about as flaky as it gets, flaky with a vengeance unencumbered by brassieres, flaky taking itself awfully seriously. (Don’t feel too bad — the flakiest get what’s coming to them.)

It’s silly sex and violence, random shooting and ravishing and piles of guns and ammo pouring out of the god’s mouth.

Many scenes are so strange, and so out of place, viewers find themselves scratching their heads in frustration. Some of it does later fit together. But there are scenes that nobody, including the director, has ever managed to explain.

A couple of the male characters at least don’t take it all seriously and are mildly amusing. The female characters, unfortunately defenseless against flakiness and overwhelming virility, manage nonetheless to put on a good show (especially the splendid Charlotte Rampling).

As difficult it may be to hold back horking your wurst, this thing is worth watching, if for nothing else: because it’s really different. The flakiness is extremely inventive — there is nothing remotely like it.

From the gooey mix of artsy-fartsy crystal spiritualism, these science fiction themes emerge:

• anti-gravity
• various force fields
• genetic modification
• telepathy
• eternal life by body regeneration
• a crystal that stores information in its infinite internal reflections
• space travel (they got bored with it)

You gotta like the outfits! Connery in orange shorts glory the whole time! (Except when he dons the white bridal gown.)

Zed’s “the One”. (Just like Neo in The Matrix! One of several things the two films have in common!) He can get an erection and punch his way through plastic bags!

The interior decoration is like a ’70s teenager’s bedroom.

Most of the musical soundtrack is very odd, ethereal, and inventive. A trend of the time was to insert classical symphonies into soundtracks. A cheap way to bring pathos and majesty into a silly jumble is to fall back on Beethoven’s 7th. A cheap way to bring wonder of nature and love of life into a bumbling confusion is via Beethoven’s 6th. They shoveled in passages from these great symphonies here and there, to mask shortcomings that weren’t expunged by simple editorial hygiene.

“I bred you, I led you!”

Dark Star

1974 Jack H. Harris Enterprises, University of Southern California

++ interstellar spaceflight spoof

color

Vehicle: very cool spaceship, the scout ship Dark Star, that has great lines, travels by “hyperdrive” (with very innovative special effects).

Mission: destroying “unstable planets”. Maybe side-mission: finding intelligent life, whatever.

Aliens: a naughty beach ball with webbed, clawed feet; some glowy lights that merely annoy Pinback. The “phoenix asteroids”… not clear if they’re alive or what.

This was a very low-budget movie, but for the time, the special effects stand up very well. Multiple views depict the exterior of the ship, showing much more detail than most sci-fi of the ’60s and ’70s. The matte stellar backgrounds are the same prop used in Star Trek, while the detailed models and space walks are very similar to those in 2001.

Besides that, this movie has:

• sexy computer voice
• meteor storm bound by electromagnetic forces (?)
• interstellar ennui resulting in mumblypeg, goggly glasses
• lasers with pleasant safety precautions
• cryogenic suspended animation
• crash course in phenomenology for a sentient bomb
• space walks
• jet packs

Quotes:

“Don’t give me any of that ‘intelligent life’ stuff — find me something I can blow up!”

The Land that Time Forgot

1974 Amicus Productions

OK dinosaurs and cave men

color: live-action and puppets

Date: June 3 1916

Premise: a confrontation between a WW I British merchant ship and a German U-boat results in the damaged U-boat being manned by a mixed but antagonistic crew. They put in at an uncharted island somewhere in the South Atlantic, which they quickly find to be inhabited by creatures of different past epochs, including dinosaurs, various creatures from the Pliocene, and humans.

(None of the early writers Verne, Doyle, or Burroughs was very cautious regarding the plausibility of the combinations of animals they described in their adventures. But I read that Burroughs provided an excuse, in later novels of the same series, that this island had a funny variant of the evolution of species that happened in the rest of the world. There is some hint of this also in the movie.)

Compare with the 1925 film The Lost World, which was based on the similar, earlier, Arthur Conan Doyle story.

The Stepford Wives

1975 Palomar Pictures

+ body-replacing robot horror

color

Robots: androids, visually indistinguishable from people. There are almost no special effects here.

I don’t want to give the plot away. You’ll figure it out pretty quickly.

What’s more important is to watch how our protagonist figures it out, how one woman after another starts talking as if she’s in a TV commercial.

The best kick is the few unaffected women — it’s fun while it lasts.

The film is just so 1970s. It’s intended as a dark parody of contemporary consumerism and sexism, but it goes far beyond that. From the styles to the quality of the filming to the way the credits are printed, it resembles more contemporary TV, than contemporary film.

This had three TV movie spin-offs in the 1980s and a 2004 re-make.

A Boy and His Dog

1975 Third L.Q.Jaf Inc.

++ apocalyptic tongue-in-rosy-cheek

color

Date: 2024 AD, after World War IV.

The boy and his dog are Vic and Blood. They communicate telepathically. Blood is the adult in the room. Vic doesn’t like Blood to call him “Albert”. Blood doesn’t like Vic to call him “poodle”.

Blood wants them to find the “Over-the-Hill”. That’s the premise.

Vic is always looking for a “female”, and Blood helps him find them. But the one that seems too good to be true, is just that, and much worse. She lives “down under”, which is a place the scary people on the surface fear, for good reason. And down under… is a hoot.

For sci-fi, we have unexplained, universally feared monsters, “screamers”, which evidently glow green and are poisonous. We never see one. And then there’s Michael, a salt-of-the-earth android.

Be warned, this movie is pretty rough: our hero is quite an anti-hero.

The story is straight dog smells girl, boy meets girl, boy threatens girl, girl uses boy, girl springs boy from situation, boy… well, is your stomach ready for it?

Parables:

“Politicians had finally solved the problem of urban blight.”

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

1975 Michael White Productions

++ thorough musical look at sci-fi

color

Aliens: from the planet “Transsexual” in the galaxy “Transylvania”, look much like humans, but play different roles in different scenes.

Vehicle: the scientist’s mansion turns out to be a spacecraft. The guests celebrate its means of travel in dance: the “Time Warp”. A command is given to prepare a “transit beam”… but we see none of that.

Creature: “Rocky”, with blond hair and a tan, carries the Charles Atlas seal of approval. He was created by Frank, who announces that he has found the “secret to life itself”.

Weapons: ice pick, chainsaw, laser ray gun. A switch-blade knife gets mention.

Gadgets: “medusa transducer” immobilizes guests, so they can be made up for the play.

The actors are all just glorious, and the outfits are just fabulous, and the tunes are all earworms.

“So come up to the lab, and see what’s on the slab!”

The Man who Fell to Earth

1976 British Lion Films

− odd alien visitation

color

Bowie as a Howard Hughes figure who’s secretly a Martian: he’s perfect for the part.

The film a very tiresome period piece that struggles with the ethical and aesthetic issues of the early 1970s, but cannot break free.

It doesn’t do justice to the novel.

It contains very little sci-fi, beyond Bowie stripped of his human prostheses.

There is lots of sloppy sex (often involving Rip Torn). There is some very nice peeing.

Parables:
Mars is dying.
Martians are sad, sensitive geniuses.
Lots of ’60s hip mumbo jumbo… does that count as parables?

Logan’s Run

1976 MGM

− dystopian future; failed TV pilot

color

Date/Place: 2274, near what used to be Washington, D.C.

Premise: explained in the opening text.

“Sometime in the 23rd century…
the survivors of war, overpopulation and pollution are living in a great domed city, sealed away from the forgotten world outside. Here, in an ecologically balanced world, mankind lives only for pleasure, freed by the servo-mechanisms which provide everything. There’s just one catch: Life must end at thirty unless reborn in the fiery ritual of carrousel.”

Inhabitants who don’t buy it often try to run away, to become “runners”. The job of chasing and killing them is that of the “sandmen”, of which Logan is a gleeful one.

Weapons: a sort of ray gun with flame suppressors that shoots flames to four sides, is mostly effective in burning things other than the target. Runners have lances with glowing tips, which shoot gas that causes pain, provided the lance is held right under the victim’s nose.

Vehicles: cute cars zoom around in tubes over miniature gardens. (Elaborate — but the models succeed only in looking fun to play with.) Clean-up crews arrive on floating platforms they use to dissolve the bodies of terminated runners.

Robot: “Box”, a guy on a roller, all covered in aluminized plastic. You can clearly see the actor’s mouth under the mask. It launches immediately into self-praise, and despite bristling with weapons, proves quite incapable of defending itself. It’s a study in aluminized cheese.

Gadgets:

• baby incubation chambers,
• “the circuit”, a combination dating service and teleporter for the sexually active, an exploding ball of psychoactive gas for kicks, lots of flashy lights that might indicate a computer,
• a contraband-disintegration device,
• a glowing crystal on the palm of each person’s hand, that indicates how old they are, and when they have to snuff it,
• an automatic plastic surgery machine appears only as an instrument of grisly death.

The film shows pretty miniature cities under domes… but the camera shouldn’t have zoomed in on them… the effect of size is completely lost. They put so much effort into making elaborate models, then blow it with ineffective photography. Pity.

Inside the city, it looks like a shopping mall… exactly like a shopping mall. If you hang out in shopping malls, this movie feels like home.

One nice special effect depicts “Carrousel”, a spectacle whereby inhabitants can “renew”, which means, evidently, not die. People fly through the air, and explode a lot. It’s not clear how this activity is supposed to “renew” them. Maybe it doesn’t… (Spoiler: It turns out pretty quickly that nobody is really getting renewed.)

Logan dials up a pretty girl on the circuit, and she steps into his apartment, but she’s having existential questions, and doesn’t want to have sex. Logan finds this perplexing, but he respects her, so she becomes his girl.

Spoiler: the computer sends Logan on a mission to seek out and destroy “Sanctuary”, which it thinks is the runners’ destination.

Logan and the girl want back into the city, so on a hunch, they dive into a water inlet thing, where they swim through big well-lit pipes, find a couple of grills that they can easily pull off, and being underwater only a few minutes, they happen to find themselves inside. Lucky, eh? Stupid. Formulaic.

They strap Logan down and try to read his mind about what he saw outside. As near as I can tell: because his experience was not what they expected, the computer blows up along with the building it’s in, and then all the other buildings and domes blow up, and let all the people out, and it’s a new re-birth for humanity! Crap.

This is no ending at all. There is a reason for this.

There is plenty of color, but the direction is dismally stiff and unnatural — sort of like the scenery.

The interaction between stronger and weaker actors is terribly unbalanced: York overpowers any of the other young actors so badly that they look like cardboard when he’s around. Then Peter Ustinov completely (and surely, unintentionally) upstages York. This is a direction failure.

Overall, the production values are those of made-for-TV movies. There is a reason for this: In fact, it was intended to launch a TV series. (They made a few episodes, but it didn’t take off. Failed crap.)

The computer sums it up with a terminological goof:

“The answer does not program.”

Zítra vstanu a opařím se čajem
[Tomorrow I’ll get up and scald myself with tea]

1977 Filmové studio, Barrandov

OK time-loop comedy

color

Czech

This is the earliest time-loop film that I am aware of.

In this one, the time machine takes the form of a rocket, which intentionally, but by unexplained means, travels in time. It’s meant for tourists, but this time, bad guys are going to use it.

The twist is: the bad guys’ pilot is a twin, who chokes on a roll before their flight, to be replaced by his brother, who is not such a bad guy.

Vehicles: rockets, that look more like a stupa than any rocket I ever saw. There is a full-sized model on the ground and celluloid paintings in space. They also take off and land at a painting of a spaceport.

Gadgets: a black gooey detergent that completely dissolves grease and dishes and all, a spray can that turns people dark green and immobilizes them, and a hand-held movie projector, which, I am pleased to say, is only slightly bigger than ones on sale today.

Women are primarily objects of romance and/or scandal in this film.

Silly rumba music plays every time they go into space, and at the end.

Overall, the premise is no sillier than that of other time-loop stories, and the story of how our hero will figure things out is no worse. As a comedy, well, it’s silly for sure. Of course, verbal comedy doesn’t translate well, and I can watch the thing only with subtitles, so I can’t judge how funny the dialogue is.

Star Wars

1977 Lucasfilm Ltd.

++ space action

color: matte effects

Date/Place: “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

Vehicles: part of what made this movie so much fun for us buffs is the sheer population of space vehicles and aliens. “Corellian corvette”, “star destroyer”, a life pod, “sandcrawler”, “speeder”, Millennium Falcon (a light freighter), Death Star, “TIE Fighters”, “X-wing fighters”, “Y-wing fighters”. The Millennium Falcon travels faster than light… the “jump to light speed” was novel to most viewers. (But not quite original: see Dark Star.) The space docks in the Death Star have no physical door. (Dialog mentions a “magnetic field”.)

Weapons: Besides ray cannons used by spacecraft, there are: a ray gun, “blaster” (which have a “stun” setting), a “light saber”, an “ancient” weapon of the Jedi knights. And then, there’s the planet destroyer ray from the Death Star.

Robots: called “droids” are everywhere, sometimes in heaps, but our two protagonists are the chatty C-3PO “protocol droid” and the resolute but speech-impaired R2-D2.

Computers: don’t appear as such.

Aliens: species that are named include “Jawas”, “Sandpeople”, and “Wookies”.

Then there’s the bar scene in Mos Eiseley spaceport, where there are more aliens than you could shake a stick at (and it would be a bad idea to do so).

A blue bounty hunter named Guido bargains with Han Solo. And then there’s a worm thing in a garbage compacter.

Places: desert planet Tatooine, the doomed Alderan, capital of the Republic, and a Rebel base on the forested moon Yavin 4.

Premise: a peaceful Republic rules the Galaxy, but an evil emperor, and his henchman “Darth Vader”, mean to destroy it and replace it with the Empire, using the planet-destroying Death Star and hoards of storm troopers.

A Rebel alliance opposes them, and one survivor, Princess Leia, of the old Republic, and a survivor of the old Jedi knights, Obi-Wan Kenobi, together with the innocent but driven hero Luke Skywalker and the swashbuckling smuggler Han Solo and his hairy sidekick Chewbacca and of course the two droids, maybe things aren’t so cut-and-dried for the Empire. It’s a busy cast.

That in itself could be an extension of a 1940s sci-fi film serial.

And well known to Obi-Wan Kenobie and Darth Vader, what is really driving things is the Force, and its “dark side”… a dimension that would have been a bit heavy in the ’40s.

This is a good-guys vs. bad-guys movie, an action-romp. We find out very quickly who the bad guy is, in no uncertain terms. And he’s very bad, all right.

Just to maintain conventional good guys momentum, the last fight is a direct transposition of a WWII Pacific War scene, with dogfights and battleships.

It makes little effort at physical realism. Weightlessness never comes up. The vacuum of space is full of noisy spaceships and explosions.

There is just so much going on in this movie, yet the filmmakers managed to make it feel somehow genuine, while preserving a 1940s Saturday serial atmosphere.

It jump-started the stalled space sci-fi genre, besides launching the Star Wars franchise, and dozens of bad imitations.

An alien mentioned in the original, “Jabba the Hut”, didn't make the original cut, but appears in the re-master of the film, which features a richer menagerie than the original.

Some of the sequels and prequels aren’t bad entertainment, but they go in the direction of layered CGI action-adventure, at the expense of the innocence, charm and surprise of this original.

“These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.”

“The force can have a strong effect on the weak-minded.”

“Sorry about the mess.”

“I’m getting a bad feeling about this.”

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

1977 EMI Films

++ alien arrival

color

Vehicles: a variety of beautiful, glowing shapes that move in strange ways. A mother-ship that plays music.

Aliens: appear as two kinds, both of the popular “gray” alien type. One is tall and spindly, like a spider, the other moves more like a dwarf. Nothing comes of this distinction.

The film pulls together many of the tabloid-paper strange stories, including:
– disappearance of some WWII fighters
– UFO sightings (with the usual nonsense that nobody will report them).
– government conspiracies
– little gray men

But the aliens do come, and it’s joyous. I cannot complain about that!

Electrical toys all turn on mysteriously. Household appliances go nuts.

Great kid! This is a sign of excellent direction.

Some very cute ideas, such as music as a universal language, and the implantation of an image.

Mixed in are less cute ideas: Hand signs for musical notes (as if they were universal). Aliens send longitudes… in degrees-minutes-seconds figures.

I never understood what Truffaut was doing in the cast. He is out of place (beyond merely being French). Maybe Spielberg owed him a favor?

Funny, when the aliens come for their official visit, the equipment does not go all haywire, although it does during all the other visitations.

“They can fly rings around the Moon, but we’re years ahead of ’em on the highway.”

Полигон
[Polygon]
aka. ”Firing Range”

1977

+ mind-reading tank

color cartoon

Russian

Mind-reading tank weapon. Unusual animation technique.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

1978 Solofilm

+ alien invasion and paranoia

color

I had difficulty with this film, because I had decided not to review any film re-makes here, and this definitely is a re-make of the 1956 film. At the same time, it is explicitly an adaptation of the same book as the earlier film, which I had decided to allow. What breaks the tie is that this film is both an improvement on the earlier adaptation, and a tip of the hat to one of the better films of the ’50s.

For instance, the man running down the street hollering “they’re coming, you’re next!” is Kevin McCarthy, who played the leading role in the first film. And I read that the taxi driver is Don Siegel, the director of the first film.

It’s no surprise that the effects in this film are a jump up from those of the first. They had a bigger budget, and they could just do more 22 years later. Fair enough, but fancier effects aren’t reason enough to re-make a movie, in my opinion.

The 1956 film ultimately fails at the end to convey the hopeless terror of the story, because the studio added scenes to show the viewers how their government would protect them and good would prevail. This was artistic vandalism. In a sense, this film corrects that misdeed.

This is Nimoy’s biggest and best role after Star Trek. But what’s that partial glove he is wearing on one hand? He made a statement that it was an attempt to make the character “distinctive”, and that he meant it to suggest a covering, as of an injury. Hm.

We see right away in some nice space effects that some gelatinous critters have somehow taken flight from some planet and wound up on Earth. Then lots of pictures of wet plants, where gelatinous stuff starts sending out tendrils. Flowers bloom where there should be no flowers — this manages to be creepy. Making pretty flowers creepy is no mean trick.

Nobody notices the garbage trucks filling up with fibrous gray material, dutiful citizens bringing their garbage cans full of the stuff to the trucks.

Ha! the guy in the mud bath is reading Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision.

The acting is generally quite good, the characters are believable, the camera work is sometimes great. I have a little problem with the sound… I don’t know what it is, but it’s like they tried to make it more intimate, or something. But I feel like they’re all talking in my ear.

Alien

1979 Brandywine-Ronald Shusett

++ monster in space

color: matte and transparency paintings

Vehicles: the Nostromo, a huge space freighter, its big landing vehicle, and an escape pod; a crashed alien starship, an apparent alien escape vehicle.

Aliens: besides the monster, called a xenomorph, we see the mummified remains of a creature, presumably among the crew of the crashed starship.

Computer: The crew refer to the ship’s computer as “mother” — a small room full of lights.

Robot: The crew doesn’t know that there is an android on board, until it becomes evident that its interests are not the same as theirs. Once revealed, its technology is very surprising.

As far as the sci-fi goes, we have interstellar flight, suspended animation, alien planets and planetary landscapes, a very strange alien ship, an android, an artificial biological weapon, all done inventively and exquisitely.

The overall design of the xenomorph and of the alien ship is due to Giger — there had never before been anything like it in cinema. Only the electronics look a little dated — but at least they were gussied up to look like something beyond the ’70s.

A very nice twist is that the xenomorph isn’t the only monster the crew has to deal with. The script opens a further question as to who the worst monsters are — which provides an entry point to the sequels. The crew is working for a heartless company — we don’t know how heartless.

The script is socially modern: women are in positions of responsibility here, and one ends up being the strongest character.

This is a great movie overall — everything is top-notch. Even though it is primarily a monster movie, it abounds with excellent sci-fi.

This is the space monster movie to end all space monster movies. And man, the first time I saw it, I was gripping the arms of my chair — which I don’t do very often. The vast majority of space monster movies since are direct derivatives. The chest-buster scene alone has become a staple of bad monster movies since.

I have a couple of reservations: even when first watching it, I was aware of manipulation: everything is dark and drippy, then, toward the end, a strobe light is flashing in a way to produce epileptic fits, occasionally showing bits of the alien, and when Weaver strips down to her undies to get into the space suit, I think I actually uttered “oh, come on!”. I was terrified, but I felt that throwing a scantily-clad pretty lady at me when I was in that condition was beyond necessity.

Of course, this is the progenitor of the Alien franchise, which is unusual in that some of the sequels are pretty good on their own, and carry the original’s feeling of dread very well. I especially enjoyed Aliens and Alien³.

In 2012, Ridley Scott made a sort of culmination, Prometheus. It had a huge budget, and expectations were high. I watched it three times, trying to understand it and like it, to no avail. It’s a muddled mess, a jumble of ideas, a clumsy collection of weak sub-plots, way too many characters, way too much going on, way too much that doesn’t make sense, that just doesn’t work. It has lots of pretty special effects, pretty actors, yet, as a story, it’s a big flop. Clearly, whatever Ridley Scott had with the first film, he had lost by the time he made the sequel. This is interesting in itself.

Parables:
Sure, I’ll walk backwards into a dark, drippy room when I know there’s a bloodthirsty creature around!

Сталкер
[Stalker]

1979 Mosfilm

OK good filming, weak sci-fi

color

Russian

The movie is a cinematic work of art, the acting is terrific. And it’s supposed to be sci-fi, but it only hints at the sci-fi focus of the book.

OK — not my movie. Nonetheless, I was disappointed. For me, the book is about one thing, and the movie is ultimately about something else. The something else is an old topic in film. Had the movie simply remained faithful to the main topic of the book, it would have been groundbreaking sci-fi.

The book by the brothers Strugatski is a straight-up sci-fi, focusing on the effects of a “visit” by aliens on society and on individuals. For all the good stuff in the movie, it is almost completely drained of science fiction content.

The mood of oppression that is so strong in the book, comes through well in the film.

The book is about personal and social struggle in the face of a very real menace, and very real human greed, and about how devastating chance interaction with another culture can be. In the book, the Zone often kills or strangely maims those who enter it, even if they know what they’re doing. It is about what happens when a totally alien culture interacts with a modern human culture — there is nothing like this in the film.

There is some mention of an alien visit at the beginning of the film, but the dialog immediately calls its reality into question. While the stalker’s constant concern is the dangers of the Zone, the film shows absolutely nothing dangerous. Instead, characters repeatedly question the stalker’s sanity. The movie is about existential angst and personal struggle.

The screenplay pointlessly alters even the effect of the Zone on the stalker’s daughter: in the book, she starts out with eyes that are totally black, with no whites, and then she gets weird. In the movie, she’s missing legs, but her eyes are OK. The only evidence in the film of something unearthly involves the kid, and it has no resemblance to anything in the book, and it isn’t clear that it has anything to do with aliens.

I don’t know what to recommend here. It is possible to appreciate the book and the film independently. But if you want hard sci-fi, read the book.