A collection of science fiction film embarrassments

Red Planet Mars

1952 Melaby Pictures

−− political morality play

B&W

A scientist invents a gizmo to talk to Mars. (Or did he steal it?)

A message from Mars says there is a God. Everybody gets religion; commies head for the hills

A sociopath Nazi scientist claims he invented the gizmo, and has been sending the broadcasts.

No sci-fi here: this is a morality tale. It has some good performances, but the script dooms all attempts to keep one’s interest.

Target Earth

1954 Allied Artists Pictures Corp. ABTCON Pictures, Inc. Production

−− vapid space robot apocalypse

B&W

Place: Chicago

A girl wakes up after taking too many pills, finds city deserted. She finds some stragglers. Everybody else is dead. Cars won’t start.

Giant robots with a death ray show up. Or… briefly they’re giant. At first, the robots look gigantic and scary, until the guys knock one down and take it to the lab. Then it becomes just man-sized and clunky. As though… they changed their minds as to how big they were to be, and hoped the audience wouldn’t notice.

The special effects consist of guys in extremely ungainly silver robot suits, and a death ray.

There is an excruciatingly unconvincing chase scene up many flights of stairs. The robot is so clumsy… (it is never shown mounting a step, because it can’t) so slow, but nonetheless catches up with the running people. It makes no sense visually.

Lots and lots of period war machine footage. Everything gets blowed up.

When things get stressy, the cigarettes come out. It’s the 1950s recipe. Often, alcohol, too… or even pills.

This film has far too much dialog for an action film. There are a couple of rough and tough couples, and a bad guy, and the usual array of military guys and scientists. And they all have to yaddada yaddada — otherwise, no film.

The pacing is miserable — amateurs do better work. Do you think they came up with an clever ending? I’m gonna give it away: they jam the robots with big loudspeakers attached to an “oscillator”. It messes with their “cathode tubes”.

Quotes:

The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues

1955

−− dimwit sea monster encounters

B&W

“10000 leagues” has nothing to do with the film. Underwater scenes are all near the coast, reached by rowboat, with scuba equipment.

There is no phantom. Maybe they changed their mind for the script after they came up with the brilliant title, or maybe they were unclear on the concept of phantom.

We’re immediately introduced to the monster, which is a guy in a rubber suit. The arms didn’t fit, so they just flop. (This came out the year after the Creature from the Black Lagoon, whose suit was pretty sophisticated.)

Shot in Malibu.

A bad girl with huge eyelashes, who talks big like Mae West, is evidently a foreigner, but has nothing further to do with the plot.

We know we’re in the morgue because the actors stand in front of a blank wall with a sign on it that reads “County Morgue”.

Jeez, people keep going out on the water — a fisherman, scientists, bad guys — always on exactly the same row-boat.

The script is juvenile and convoluted: there are multiple good guys and multiple bad guys, and multiple romantic interests, and there’s a shower scene.

Is it science fiction? Unfortunately, the monster is cuzza science, radioactivity science. A “radioactive light” ray transforms a turtle into an anthropomorphic monster. So it is really bad sci-fi.

Some veteran actors appear miserably aware of how far their careers have plummeted.

Quotes:

It Conquered the World

1956 Sunset Productions (III)

−− ridiculous alien & effect takeover

B&W

Alien: part of a “dying race” of Venus, a “race born too soon”: somehow it will take “millions of years” for the climate of Venus to “catch up with ours”. Its intellect makes ours look like “that of roaches”.

It’s a child’s rendition of a monster, a guy wiggling arms helplessly in a rubber suit that resembles an artichoke with a cartoonish evil grin.

Vehicles: Sounding-rocket footage, a quick shot of very crude celluloid flying saucer.

The film is primarily an agonized morality play. The dialog is not completely incoherent, but it is mostly sophomoric. There’s even a fairly thoughtful exchange on ethics between the good and the confused scientist.

The alien sends rubbery bat-like “control devices” that “sting” their victims, turning them into happy servants of “Him”.

The confused scientist kills the monster with a hand blow torch, simultaneously committing suicide by holding its claw to his throat.

This film is hardly unique among creature flicks for employing relatively strong actors on an amateurish script, and against a laughably executed monster. It could serve as a poster-child, though.

Corman is second only to Ed Wood in his ineptitude regarding scary creatures. Without the silly monster, it could have been a merely poor film.

The War of the Satellites

1958 Allied Artists Pictures

−− alien takeover by idiotic script

B&W

The film begins with a drama of “manned satellites”. Ten times they’re sent up (“a half a million dollars” each!) only to blow up, killing their crew, as they approach a critical area, an “energy barrier” (signified later by the alien “sigma barrier”, as the aliens know their Greek better).

Many scenes show the satellites and the rockets that launch them. Unfortunately, the models are very small and crude, moving obviously on wires. A satellite interior looks exactly like that of a battleship.

The dialog is very spotty, running from fair attempts at diplomatic speech before a legislative body to corny ’50s small-talk. (The best is the dating couple.) If there is any redeeming aspect to this film, it’s watching these actors do their damnedest with very poor material.

Vehicles: the “satellites”, which the film depicts as spinning doodads bumpily assembled in space after they’re launched. As to where they’re going or how they go there — it’s a thin jumble: something about “solar reactors” — something about achieving “photon propulsion”.

Fancy control panels stock the interior sets, including visual displays that look very much like small modern flat screens. Very comfy, stylish reclining couches protect the crew from the agonies of blast-off.

Some of the sound effects are familiar from other sci-fi, particularly, War of the Worlds and Star Trek.

A cardboard sign marks the door to the “Solar Energy Room”. It flops every time the door is opened. The only thing that happens in the Solar Energy Room is an attack of the girl by the alien and her due rescue by one of the heroes.

The crew look good in their fitted space suits. They communicate with cute throat mikes.

The aliens send a small toy rocket that crashes into the ground near a pair of smooching bobbysoxers. A message reads out from it (in Latin!), a warning that the aliens won’t tolerate the “contamination” from Earth leaving the planet. They reveal themselves as “masters of the spiral nebula Gana (?)”.

The scientists puzzle about why the alien message is in Latin, run through the plausible explanations, only to drop the question for the remainder of the film.

Much debate ensues at the United Nations, which evidently pays for the expedition. Some cool-looking rockets, shown on background screens, represent this “Sigma Program”. (Their toy-on-a-wire blast-offs ruins the coolness immediately.)

Sylvia, the single heartthrob female crew member, is a very serious scientist. Her colleagues question her going on such a dangerous mission, but Van Ponder concludes that she’s “quite capable of reaching her own decisions”.

The dialog makes no distinction between being in orbit around the Earth and flying to another nebula or another galaxy. It’s just a jumble. Lots of silly technobabble freely confuses ‘nebula’, ‘galaxy’, ‘Solar system’. It mentions acceleration, but makes no mention of weightlessness.

The journey degenerates to a murder-suspense-whodunit as the alien, in the body of Van Ponder, acts increasingly weird and humorless, murders some guys with his mind, goes all captain Bligh on the crew, then pointlessly, unconvincingly, inexplicably declares his love for the girl, whom he promptly tries to kill.

Stock alien behavior: he takes the body of a human, duplicates by walking out of his own body, disappears when he gets killed.

They crew have two burials in space — one with a funeral, one not.

À propos of nothing, the crew call back to Earth (on the phone) to say they’re going to Andromeda at the speed of light, the whole universe is their new frontier! (A random selection of space pictures follow.) Fin.

Quotes:

Parables:
Alien messages in Latin are a drag on your date.
Aliens want to kill us for our own good.
Want a fast trip to Andromeda? Get yourself a satellite!
We ARE NOT a contaminant. ARE NOT!

Missile to the Moon

1958 Astor Pictures, Layton Film Productions

−− juvenile joy-ride to the Moon

B&W

I saw a cleaned up and colorized version of the film by accident, overdubbed into German called Bestie des Grauens. I wouldn’t have watched it, if I had recognized it earlier.

The title scene is of a very low-res and cropped clip of rocket launch. It has a spiral black stripe and it looks to have little triangular fins. The shape suggests a Thor-Able rocket, whose launches were frequent at the time.

The makers unfortunately failed to look up the word “missile” in the dictionary. I can forgive the misuse, because space rockets of the time were cobbled together from existing ballistic missiles, and so the conflation of terms was commonplace.

A genius inventor has built an interplanetary rocket in his back yard. He’s a little cagey, and his collaborator argue with a general about whether their project can remain private. Turns out later, he is not what he appears to be (which is, an over-the-hill alcoholic).

A couple of convicts on the lam hide out in the rocket. The inventor curiously overlooks them, and then hijacks them and the rocket, and, unknowningly, his collaborator and his girlfriend.

The sci-fi of this film suffers from no concept of:

• vacuum. in several places, the script confuses the concept of lack of oxygen and lack of pressure;
• lack of gravity in space, or low gravity on the Moon;
• airlessness of the Moon. Lunar scenes show a bright, S. California sky.

Aliens: the Moon-people are just people with fancy eyebrows and pointy ears, who look good in bathing suits.

Monsters: the lunar surface is full of rock-men, just guys with blocks of foam rubber strapped to them, who are very aggressive but ungainly, and look a lot like Gumby. The Moon-ladies unleash a spider-thing that is just a big dumb-looking marionette.

Vehicle: The “missile” is a space rocket. On the outside, it’s just clips of White Sands V-2 launches. There are also scenes showing just the lower parts of a model, which looks nothing like the scenes of it in flight. Inside, it’s very spacious, multi-level, with gadgets.

The crew experiences meteorite problems.

The inventor is killed by a heavy box that falls on him — in space, on the way to the Moon. Turns out the inventor was a Moon-man all along. Couldn’t tell.

On the Moon, the woman passenger immediately becomes an object of salvation.

The crew hide from the rock-creatures a cave, where they deduce that there is oxygen, because a big torch is burning on the wall. They remove their oxygen masks, only to be gassed unconscious.

The Moon people are all voluptuous women. There is some lame story about how the Moon is losing its oxygen.

The leader of the Moon-ladies sits in front of an Aztec calendar, by which we know that things are exotic.

Other Moon dangers: if you step into the sunlight, you burn up immediately.

The script is juvenile, besides showing ignorance of the physical world. The direction is inept — people just stand in front of the camera in a line and say their lines.

Yet… regarding the science: it is worse than juvenile. Any young viewers of this film would have immediately noticed how completely wrong it is about space and the Moon, in so many ways. This was made by aging men who wanted to cash in on a trend, without bothering to learn anything about the subject.

Overall, the production qualities are similar to that of serial movies (that had recently died out), or of children’s TV shows, although it deals (sophomorically) with romantic issues.

I read that this is a re-make of Cat Women of the Moon (1953), which I intend to avoid.

I also read that film was the first to depict an extraterrestrial world whose inhabitants consist of voluptuous women. (The Moon-ladies do explain why there are no more men among them. ) But this is certainly not the first time in film that astronauts have been greeted by throngs of pretty alien women.

The make-up of the Moon women very much resembles that used for the Vulcans of Star Trek. And they hypnotize with their eyes! Yep.

Space-Men
a.k.a (in USA) “Assignment: Outer Space”

1960 Ultra Film, Titanus

− just awful space adventure

color

Date: 2116

Premise: Cocky young reporter Peterson is on assignment with “a routine check of infra-radiation flux on Galaxy M-12”. The script provides no explanation of what the others are doing in space, but they are military, under the guidance of the “high council”.

Vehicles: a cool three-stage rocket ship BZ-88. The film shows its stages separating after launch. Many other intricate rocket ships, space stations, and “space taxis” appear. The rocket models are completely unsuccessful in giving an impression of size. Stock sounding-rocket footage represents flight over planets.

Computer: An “electronic brain” controls things with its “impulses”. It transmits messages by Teletype.

Travel consists of buzzing about the Solar system.

Hibernation “in order to overcome the Earthly gravitation” is “a congealing process simulating an apparent death”. Lots of space walks, whereby cosmonauts just careen from one ship to another. “Weightlessness caused by lack of gravitation” is well portrayed choreographically. On the space station, the narrator explains “gravitational area is similar to Earth’s”, because “all space stations rotate about a central axis”. Meteorites are deadly; asteroids are scenic.

The station “girl”, Lucy, tends things that convert “hydrogen into breathable oxygen”, when she isn’t being a navigator. She is nearly hit by a meteorite, but saved and immediately hit upon by Peterson. He usurps the previous alpha male; she falls in love with him accordingly.

The pilot (and sacrificial hero), Al, is black!

The dialog struggles with particularly confused technobabble, and otherwise very badly poetic and witlessly philosophical. The script delivers loads of dreary moralizing about impertinent issues, e.g. giving people numbers. It shows space men as mostly dehumanized and depressed (evidently, an attempt to set a mood).

The plot is awfully complicated, by multiple savings of cosmonauts, various fearful situations, a love-triangle, and a salvation of humanity.

Atlantis, the Lost Continent

1961 MGM

− mythology with a heat ray

color

Hadn’t seen this since childhood. It’s about the mythical land of Atlantis, which Plato described as being an island, perhaps in the Atlantic ocean.

It gets sci-fi rating on account of some vaguely scientific themes, and a “heat ray” that goes wild, causing destruction.

My main memory was that (to my horror) the rogue ray blasts a guy turning him into a skeleton. But it’s a skeleton from a doctor’s office — with the cut for displaying the inside of the brain clearly visible. Even as a little kid, I thought this was very questionable.

There’s also a nearly engaging theme about the misuse of technology, some crystals, that proves their downfall.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

1961

−− updated atomic sub vs space monster

Direct descendant of 1959 The Atomic Submarine, in which a nuclear submarine battles a space monster.

Differences: instead of atomic subs being every-day things as in the 1959 film, here the sub is a super-secret thing, to get in the popular secret agent angle. The submarine model is much more futuristic, and the small sub now can also fly. Otherwise, it’s pretty much a direct copy.

It was just the pilot for the TV series — not a very good pilot.

Il Pianeta degli Uomini Spenti
“Battle of the Worlds”

1961 Ultra Film - Sicilia Cinematografica

−− miserably confused, boring mess

Premise: a hollow planet, “the Outsider”, has come to visit, boding no good. It launches flying saucers, against which Earth rockets are nearly defenseless.

Aliens: insectoidal masses inside the planet, but they turn out to be dead. All that remains is the “electronic brains” glowing plastic cylinders that control the flying saucers and guide the planet.

A Coke-bottle glasses Claude Raines steals the bulk of the dialog as the crusty “Old Man” Benson. He’s the stereotypical sociopathic inveterate scientist (the movie doesn’t distinguish his specialty), who can’t understand why they don’t just put him in control, after he has put them into their places verbally.

At least three characters, in the first 20 minutes of the movie, utter the line: “Will somebody please tell me what’s going on”. My guess is, the moviemakers hadn’t yet figured this out either. But Benson has, by use of mathematics: “I have one advantage over all of you: Calculus!”

There’s a long sequence on Mars Base 3, and a substantial amount of space flight, and space walking (called “self-launching”), but the effects are very like those in Margheriti’s previous Assignment: Outer Space.

Women are on screen throughout the movie, but often their role is described as “assistant”, and they are explicitly told to fetch coffee. The only non-Caucasian in evidence was a Chinese member of the United Commission.

This is very tiresome. Without for Raines’ performance, it would be chokingly dull, and simply a worse repetition of Assignment: Outer Space.

This movie provides its own parables:
“What importance does life have, young fella, if to live, means not to know?”

Journey to the Seventh Planet

1962 Cinemagic Inc.

−− on planet Uranus. now what?

color

Date: 2001

United Nations is the sole governing body of the Earth. The only goal now is the pursuit of knowledge.

Vehicle: Spaceship Explorer 12: A stock Atlas missile launch, a small celluloid image of the missile serves thereafter to depict it in flight. Inside it’s a big metal cylinder, packed with ’60s electronic boxes, and what may be jet fighter seats. Nuclear engines.

Based on figures they cite, must be traveling at about half the speed of light.

Mission: Survey, land, and investigate the seventh planet, Uranus (with the ‘a’ pronounced as in “father”). Scientists have traced some radiation signal to this planet.

Weapons: ray guns.

Alien: a mind-controlling narrator-creature. His speech strains to be weird and scary, by bragging and threatening childishly. Later, he appears as a glowing, throbbing glob in a hole. Miserable.

Crew: white guys in flight suits. Their accents vary, but some are plainly Danes. (The women in this movie are all mirages.)

The dialog is standard gee-whiz sci-fi fare. It starts off talking about sexual relationships, in a very ‘60s macho way.

Weightlessness is represented by means of a floating apple. Stock sounding rocket video represents atmospheric entry.

As they orbit, the alien narrator entity appears as flashy lights, and announces that it will drain their minds and possess them, etc. etc., and make their world its own. (The crew doesn’t remember this monologue: it’s for our benefit.)

Foliage appearing about a model of the rocket in stop-motion, after which, planet Uranus looks just like a Danish pine forest. (Cuz the alien made it like that.) But the plants have no roots! The crew just jump right out of the rocket, where they get “deja view”. “Has anyone seen anything alive?” they look and see the forest full of trees and flowers, and shrug. (Cuz by “alive” they mean “animal”.)

Suspecting trouble, the crew don blue, yellow, and red space suits, and find a way through a “force field” that takes them out to the true surface of the planet, which is all snowy and icy. They show great concern about radiation.

Further vague stop-motion of landscape, is indicative of… not clear.

A stop-action cyclops rat-mouthed monster appears, which they quickly dispatch by ray guns. A screaming tarantula (a black-and-white scene ripped from another movie) proves more robust, but they out-think it.

The movie was originally shot in Denmark. Most of the cast weren’t experienced actors. The story is, the original special effects were so bad as to be unshowable, so the filmmakers replaced them with scenes ripped out of other sci-fi movies. The result is doubly clumsy.

Battle Beyond the Sun
(U.S. edit of the 1959 film “Небо зовет“)

1962 Filmgroup
(Credits say “A MOSFILM PRODUCTION”)
distributed by American International

−− shame and crime of a re-edit

color

Skip this travesty and check out the Soviet original.

This is one of several superior Russian movies bought by Roger Corman and re-edited for U.S. distribution. This was also the first major work of Francis Ford Coppola, who was hired to do the re-edit.

It was a bit of a question to me, whether to list this as two movies or one. My goal is to compare science fiction and social ideas presented in these things, and the Corman version is a re-write, primarily to alter objectionable political and social messages.

What Corman did here is outrageous on several levels. The edits went far beyond removing Soviet propaganda, to destroy the cohesion of the story line, and confuse or delete the science and engineering aspects of the premise. By all accounts, it was just a fast way to put a movie out, to make cash.

Perhaps the biggest outrage is the complete replacement of the credited actor’s names with the those of the voices of the people who overdubbed them, evidently to mask the movie’s Soviet origin.

It’s telling that, in the first release of the U.S. version, also Corman’s name does not appear — a “Thomas Colchart” appears instead as producer/director, evidently a pseudonym. Small wonder — but I take issue with anybody who calls Corman’s actions “shameless”.

Besides this, the changes abstract the U.S./Soviet distinction to one between “North and South Hemi”, and to change the politically charged motives of the bad guys.

But the most bizarre edit was to drop in some silly, cheap monsters — by all accounts, directly on Corman’s order — making a farce of an otherwise dignified story. This alone was a comment on the intelligence of the U.S. audience.

In a sense, Corman’s actions proved the point of the anti-American propaganda that he cut. This was greedy and foolish, to the point of being immoral.

On the other hand, given the mood in the U.S. at the time, a simple overdub of the original would have been impossible to show. It was a pity: the Soviet attitude portrayed would have been instructive to Westerners — to contrast the silly Soviet propaganda with U.S. propaganda, even at the time.

Instead, what we got was a particularly weirdly confused space/horror(?) movie, with a strange mix of social messages.

The U.S. trailer makes it to be a horror story, emphasizing the monsters and “planet Askar(?)”.

The U.S. version begins with science intro à la Science Fiction Theater, mostly showing clips of NASA models (replacing the corresponding scenes of model Soviet space probes). Calls itself “a Fantasy of the Future”. Good heavens… this is the same intro as to Corman’s later Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. Man, that’s cheap!

Some of the changes can be interpreted in terms of making the content palatable to touchy Western audiences, some in terms of hiding the Soviet origin of the movie. But some defy charitable interpretation.

They altered some scenes gratuitously: in a scene which, in the original, narration described important features of the space station, the ersatz narration doesn’t go into adequate detail. This is very hard to justify. (Weirdly, after the “glorious return” scenes at the end, they added further narration about the glory of science and man, but this time, with a different narrator’s voice.) They renamed the asteroid “Ankor”(?) in the U.S. version,… a funny detail to change.

The U.S. version’s explanation runs:
It’s November 7th 1997. After nuke war, citizens of “South Hemis” plan to land on Mars… To keep is secret from North Hemis, they name the project “Red Planet”. Unknown to them, the North Hemis have their own Mars rocket. In the original, the bad guys are Americans; in the U.S. version, they are North Hemis.

In the original, the Soviet Mars-rocket Rodina (Homeland), has its name painted as “Родины” on its side. In the U.S. version, a logo design covers this up (which, in a few scenes, wiggles suspiciously). The U.S. script refers to the rocket as “Mercury”. Likewise, they removed scenes showing people writing. But was it just too hard to remove the Soviet star from the fins of the first rocket ship? Or did they miss that?

In U.S. version, the cause of TYPHOON’s problems become the magnetic field of the sun, and asteroids, rather than haste and unfortunate decisions due to financial pressures, as in the original. Scenes showing American decadence — neon signs etc. — are gone.

The U.S. version has ugly “creatures”, all slimy with a big toothed, vaginal mouth and eye-stalks and tentacles and snortn’ and growlin’ like a bull-lion; they hop up and down and bump into one another in rage(?) or something? They scare(?) an astronaut to death or something(?). The story provides no connection with the rest of the movie — one might venture to guess that they expected the audience be so stupid as not to require one.

In the original, radiation kills the heroic astronaut. In the U.S. version, although we don’t see it happen, we are told the “creatures” killed him.

It’s hard to make out the rationale for the title. There isn’t anything like a “battle” in it…unless it’s the two silly monsters. And they stuck in some talk about the sun, but… they were falling into the sun at some point, not “beyond” it. It seems to be just random marketing nonsense.

In the overdub, the actors have a great deal of trouble getting their technobabble out, but also with achieving any semblance natural tone or tempo.

The single coolest scene in the movie, that of Mars rising over the asteroid and astronauts, the U.S. version mars with inane dialog:

Quotes:

Here’s another mystery: the “glorious return” ending scene was stupid and immaterial in the original. Why on earth didn’t they cut that?

I can say a single positive thing about the edits: they preserved the overall message that people ought not to be fighting one another.

Again: skip this travesty and check out the Soviet original.

The Wizard of Mars
a.k.a.
Horrors of the Red Planet

1965 Karston-Hewitt Organization

−− confused Mars flight / adventure

color

Date: 1975

Vehicle: a rocket ship Mars Probe One, which we see mostly from its cabin, and from its flaming rear end, heading for the Trifid Nebula. The technobabble starts out making some sense, but pretty boring.

A couple of flaming meteor-like objects fly at them alarmingly, and the crew encounter an object of “monstrous size”, which… interferes with them or something. They’re confused. We’re confused. They jettison the “main stage”.

Just awful dialog and lots of it, solidly banal, often just to inform us of what we have just seen. The filmmakers often provide narrative to explain what they hadn’t managed or remembered to represent, or to repeat what had just been explained in dialog (in case somebody had immediately forgotten).

Never mind acting — characters are stock: the brave captain, the womanly woman, the smart guy named “Doc”, the impulsive, cute young guy.

Scenes are: the inside of the ship, a nice painting of a valley, a “canal” that the crew paddle down in their handy rubber rafts, then a very long series in a cave where they just keep being lost, then inside a volcano, where they continue to be lost. They go on to be lost some more in a sand desert.

After their uneventful landing, they don space suits. At least, someone advises against making any rash decisions, just before they make one.

The narrator keeps telling us that they have a sense that they are being observed by some alien intelligence. Typical 1950s eerie music serves to indicate that it should be eerie.

The crew come upon tiles laid on the ground. They point out they’re too symmetrical to be natural (they are tiles!) and propound for some minutes on the meaning of it all, “just like Troy”.

The woman keeps saying stuff like “in a way, it’s beautiful”

The crew find a “city” that looks like a castle with a glowing dome on it. They go on in, where it looks eerie, on account of the spider webs. (I was relieved that they at least remarked on this.) They find a couple of things that had little to do with anything, and then they find an alien in suspended animation, which they pronounce dead while it is clearly moving. It has huge ears and a visible glowing brain. The crew establish telepathic contact with it. And then they walk away. Next scene.

John Carradine got top billing, but only appears 3/4 to the end of the movie, just as a talking image of a head projected before stock space pictures. He propounds drearily about this and that with an echo for most of the rest of the movie.

Oh dear. It’s so dumb. They stick a key into a clock mechanism that re-starts time, which results in the disintegration of the city — run run run! Outside, now without their space suits… they disappear. And then they’re back on the spaceship, but all dirty, the men with beards…

More dreary, immaterial narration ensues.

OK, where was the promised “Wizard”? Is that what Carradine was supposed to be? Or is it just that the lady’s name is “Dorothy”?

In the titles, it says “John Carradine as”, but doesn’t say “as what”. Maybe they, too, couldn’t decide what he was.

Quotes:

The Island of Terror
“Insel des Schreckens”

1966 Planet Film Productions

−− so awful, so stupid monster

B&W

This is really a horror movie, more than a sci-fi. Maybe it shouldn’t be here.

A cure for cancer goes horribly wrong, producing silicon-based monsters that suck the bones out of their victims.

The monsters are just silly. They look a lot like vacuum-cleaners, and move really slowly. I thought they were dumb when I was a kid, and I still think they’re dumb. The actors have to really strain to hold the monster’s tentacles to their necks!

One of the monsters wraps its tentacle around Cushing’s hand. Judd runs to get an axe, surveys the situation, and whacks Cushing’s hand off. (It seemed to be the reasonable thing to do at the time!)

The doctor proposes giving a sedative to the first victim’s widow, before she has been informed of the death. All the ladies get sedatives eventually. P. Cushing declines sedatives after having his hand chopped off.

Mission Stardust
a.k.a. …4…3…2…1…Morte
a.k.a. Perry Rhodan – SOS aus dem Weltall
a.k.a. Órbita Morta

1967 P.E.A. Cinematografica
Tefi-Filmproduktion Ernst Ritter von Theumer
Attor-Film S.A.

−− action/adventure serious schlock

color

An Italian-German production, based on the Perry Rhodan sci-fi booklet series, (still) popular in Germany.

Premise: Rhodan is a NASA pilot in this story. As to his mission, the government is “keeping the real reason truly secret”. (Oh, something about a fancy metal they wanted to mine — it’s not mentioned again in the movie.)

The production quality is very spotty. The script is dumb; the actors do what they can with it. Most of the music is standard late-’60s fare, but some of the vocals are pretty interesting…

Vehicles: space rocket Stardust in its gantry appears to be a U.S. Atlas missile, but in space is depicted with a combination of models and cellophane paintings. The film depicts rocket staging, but the rocket exhaust pretty cheesy. When the rocket turns around to land, it almost achieves a sort of majesty.

It has lots of elaborate sets, including elaborate lunar scenes: a goofy lunar car has peculiar metal wheels.

Alien craft: cool otherworldly spacecraft. They are supposed to be very big, but their scale is totally unconvincing. In flight, the models are obviously dangling on a string.

Some bla-bla about going faster than light gets nowhere fast.

Alien robots look like suited astronauts with a screwed up face. They shoot lasers from the eye, thereby making stuff disintegrate. (Both effects are conventional, and very poorly executed.)

In all cases, people draw weapons on sight, and usually fire.

Aliens: from Arkon, 35 million light-years away. They are pronounced “medically-speaking identical, but genetically older” than humans, and “degenerate”. They look just like humans — one of them is gorgeous. She promptly announces her intention to procreate, and disrobes suggestively by way of emphasis.

Gadgets: “Gravitational neutralizer” can levitate things. They use a “highly-active field of energy” as a shield.

The astronauts and aliens discuss keeping the aliens’ existence a secret for the protection of humanity, but quickly blow their cover. The alien gets annoyed, and melts a mountain or something with a ray — just to prove that one ought not to mess with them.

There’s a mish-mash of bad guys, and it becomes a who’s-gonna-betray-whom.

The battle finale involves bad blondes with machine guns.

The cast is multi-racial, at least for engineers, and blacks portray officials.

The Green Slime

1968 MGM, Toei

−− space horror gone stupid

color

An uncharacteristically ambitious Japanese attempt at a space movie, fatally sabotaged by an utterly stupid guy-in-a-monster-suit.

It contains pretty good depictions of a space station, space shuttles, and astronauts working in space. Some of the acting isn’t bad.

Had they released it a couple of years before, sans the stupid monster suit, the space scenes would have made the film outstanding. But even if they had somehow improved the monster (or removed it), and even if a vastly better space film hadn’t come out the same year, we would be left with a very poor script. This is another example of how even with some money, and a couple of better production elements, a film can still turn out laughable garbage.

It’s weird that they would spend so much time and effort on the rest of the film, and resort to a cheap prop for the central element of the story.

In an attempt to heighten the monster’s scariness, they zoom the camera in and out, resulting in a ridiculous resemblance to contemporary children’s TV shows.

Something was severely wrong with the production. Perhaps there was some misunderstanding…

Why even mention this movie here? First, I remember, as a kid, seeing ads for it, and wishing that I was allowed to see such scary movies. Also, it does have some fair space content. And maybe it’s worthwhile balance the better films in the list with examples of how bad even higher-budget films can be.

You might get a laugh or two out of it, before your thoughts turn to popcorn or that pizza guy who still hasn’t arrived.

La guerra dei robot
War of the Robots

1978 Koala Cinematografica, Nais Film

−− study in 1970s space robot cheese

color

Premise: platinum blond guys with Dutch boy haircuts in golden suits come to abduct folks. (There are way too many platinum blonds in this movie — at times it’s hard to tell which platinum blonds are the good guys and which are the bad guys — oh — the bad guys are the ones in gold jumpsuits, as opposed to green or yellow jumpsuits.)

Vehicles: alien spaceships are toy-like flying saucers, poorly modeled on those of Space 1999 (which were themselves toy-like).

The almost-cool-looking Earth rocket suffers badly from lazy exhaust smoke that rises faster than the rocket does. It needed a couple more tries to make it not look completely stupid, but didn’t get them.

Weapons: a zapper pistol, pretty much the same weapon being used by both aliens and Earthlings. A light flashes and people fall down, or else they miss, resulting in a ricochet sound. Earthlings are 100% better shots than the aliens. Every time they fire the ship’s ray guns in space, they initiate it with a count-down — all the way from 10 — there are a lot of count-downs. (I lost count of the count-downs.)

The golden Dutch-boy haircut guys bring out light sabers, with a visual effect identical to that of Star Wars — except these go “clang”. Unfortunately for them, they are no better with the light sabers than with their zapper pistols: the Earth crew immediately steal the light sabers, and go on to use them to great effect against their owners.

Computer: represented by a panel of flashing lights that makes technobabble pronouncements in a monotone. The crew doesn’t interact with it or take notice of it at all. Maybe it was a later addition.

Gadgets: Electronic translator for talking to aliens; TV telephones on wrists.

“Anti-radiation space suits” appear to be motorcycle racing suits in pretty colors; they have no helmets to mar facial shots.

The script proceeds immediately to the romantic subplot, which it verbally reminds us about on several occasions. It presents this subplot, clumsily, as the excuse for multiple character’s bad actions.

The Earth crew is mostly female; all pretty. One looks like she might be of Indian extraction, but wears a platinum blond wig nonetheless. The girls participate enthusiastically, but the men are firmly in control (except for the bad guys who pervert the natural order). Oh, dear, there’s a Texan guy (recognizable by his space cowboy boots and twangy accent), who sports a big curly head of platinum-blond hair.

The Earth crew fires upon non-aggressive saucers that are evidently carrying abductees, and rejoices when they blow up without returning fire. (Scenes of rejoicing at death and destruction recur several times. Only near the end does the script reveal that the Dutch-boy haircut guys they had been killing were in fact robots, but that didn’t take any of the fun out of it.)

The only people we actually see abducted by the aliens promptly receive promotions to become empress and top scientist of the alien planet, and become all evil. (Why that happens is unclear... perhaps due to the absolute power handed to them.) The two spend some time in vain rationalization of this wrong-headed twist, then, in exhaustion, fall into a steamy embrace. Maybe they hoped it would make sense on its own. The rest of the movie is a game of “who’s going to be most evil in the end”.

Space walk is extremely poorly done, a person on wires making like a druggie swimming in a withdrawal with a blurry background of lights. (This, 15 years after everybody had seen the real thing.) The suits have a big plastic bubble helmet to make it easy to get lots of great smile-shots.

The tribe of Adar on an asteroid wear old Greek soldier hats and shabby capes, and have puffy eyes because their genetic makeup evolved to let them live in the radiation of their caves. They aren’t very bright, and get enslaved by the Dutch-boy haircut guys.

The Dutch-boy haircut guys turn out to be the robots of an ancient race of people who look ancient, who are called “Anthorians” by the other aliens. Turns out they used science to become immortal but lost the ability to procreate and so need to harvest organs bla bla.

They evidently had a budget, but ran out of imagination early on. Basically, it’s a mish-mash of sci-fi themes stylistically based on Space 1999, taking some elements from Star Wars (released the previous year).

Mostly awful actors stumble tortuously over their technobabble.

The battle scenes are very repetitive and unconvincing. The attempts at romance are inane and unromantic; the sex scenes are clammy and icky. What they try to pass as sci-fi is technobabble-fi. The attempts at serious topics are childish, but the juvenile attempts at humor — often at strangely inappropriate moments — are really hard to watch.

There is lots of jerky hand-carried camera work. (It reminded me of the dreadful new Star Trek cinematography, which is of similar quality.) There are a few dramatic sweeping shots too, unexpected in flicks of this caliber. It’s at least an attempt to provoke viewers.

There is much more ridiculous nonsense than mentioned above. I’m done, though.

The will to make a space flick must be very great.

Pros: bright colors, very ’70s sets. I very much liked the babe with short hair, who was almost like an ’80s thing (which is more my time period). There’s really a lot going on in the movie (mostly really poorly done).

With fewer battle scene repetitions, and countdowns restricted to, say, one, the movie wouldn’t have run nearly 90 minutes.

“It isn’t that we enjoy killing; when our lives are in danger we mustn’t hesitate.”

(But as noted, they express great joy in killing.)

Saturn 3

1980 ITC Entertainment

−− space robot; a big-budget bomb

color

This is a poor movie by most standards. But it’s the only space film 1980 gave us, and probably the best sci-fi feature film of the year — a really bad year, despite the appearance of multiple sci-fi films.

Scarcely a moment of the action is believable. There are stories that bad things happened with the direction of the film.

It had a big budget, and big-name stars. What else was going for it? The interior set design is pretty, and stories of people at Saturn hadn’t been seen before. Let’s see: they mention things about the society on Earth, that could have made a good story. For instance, the people are all bar-coded. The robot is indeed very creepy.

The film has a nice depiction of planet Saturn and its moon Titan. Bunches of boulders floating together represent its rings. (For no clear reason, the space pods skim over these boulders…)

Most of the action happens at Saturn 3 experimental moon research station, evidently on some moon of Saturn. The outside scenes could almost be good, but the miniatures lack any sense of scale. In a big-budget ’80s film, they could have done better.

Vehicles: Nice big spaceship at the beginning. Not much happens with it. Kind of neat Plexiglas and aluminum space pods. A “World Spaceways” ship at the end is taking Alex back to Earth, but again, nothing happens. Some eerie music plays, she looks pretty, nothing happens.

Physics flaws that bugged me: There is no suggestion of low gravity on the moon. But any moon of Saturn would have much lower gravity than that of Earth’s moon. Their moon gets “shadow-locked” for many days behind a moon or something. This is gravitationally impossible in the Saturn system, of course, where everything moves pretty fast.

The film loses no time blowing up Capt. James, thereby informing us who the bad guy is, and how bad he is.

Adam and Alex are shown showering together. We get a wee bit of nudity right off. It’s not an isolated incident. They are a cute little perfect couple: he’s tough and macho, she’s pretty and subservient. For a long time, they are nothing but cute together. Although Adam is close to “abort time”, he shows how spry he is with a jump rope.

Robot: “Hector”, first of the “demigod” series, is an “assistant”. He contains a big canister of human brain tissue, is all tubes on the outside, and has a creepy little proboscis for a head. Hector immediately proves to be completely unreliable and irresponsible (but he understands the bad guy better than Alex and Adam do). He soon goes on a rampage, as he is utterly ineffective at anything but mayhem. He is much too creepy to be believable as an assistant. It doesn’t make a whit of sense.

The music has riffs that are just a tad too close to the introductory theme of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Some scenes clue us in that things are weird by decidedly ’50s weird music. Imaginative — it is not.

Evidently, most of the dialog was dubbed in after — this partly accounts the unnaturalness. The worst is Keitel’s voice, which was overdubbed with that of a different actor. There’s an embarrassing story about that.

Quotes:

Stargate

1994 Le Studio Canal+

− anti-historical military adventure

color

Premise: the Pyramids of Egypt were not built by Egyptians. Rather, aliens came down and founded the Egyptian civilization, using them as slaves, harvesting their bodies as hosts, and building the pyramids as landing pads for their spaceships. They also have “stargates” that allow instantaneous travel across the galaxy.

The movie suggests the Egyptians needed extraterrestrial help to build pyramids, I suppose because the writers think Egyptians are just too stupid to build such monuments themselves, a racist anti-historical fiction which was in vogue at the time. It would be easier to forgive the authors for their mean ignorance, if they hadn’t gotten rich foisting this nonsense on the public.

The first scene is straight out of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The military takes over and puts the clamp down! Cuz that’s what always happens in sci-fi! Right?

O’Neil is on the verge of suicide. Once they’re on the other side, the soldiers’ psychotic tendencies immediately manifest themselves. When under attack, their first instinct is to split up and go around corners in the dark. Who vetted these losers?

The academic, Jackson, is cute as a bug though, and the only watchable character in the whole production. He does many comical, uneducated things, such as trying to talk to the people on the other planet in English.

Places: Egypt, USA, and planet Abydos. There are several moons in the sky of Abydos, all of which are images of Earth’s Moon. This comes under the “couldn’t be bothered” category.

Vehicles: big metal pyramid-shaped ship slips over a pyramid! Alien fighter jets: pretty stock sci-fi single-person planes, based on WWII fighters.

Weapons: aliens have lances that make some kind of energy beam. Their fighter jets have similar cannons. But of course, good old American hand guns (in sufficient quantities) win the day, as per Hollywood edict. Last but not least: the atom bomb is again our friend, blowing the bad guys up in the nick of time!

Aliens: Cute other-world horse-camel thing. Everybody else looks or is human. The evil aliens inhabit human bodies, because without them, they’re too old and crotchety or something. We only get one glimpse of one as it disintegrates in the nuclear blast. (Aliens, evidently, blow up slowly and agonizingly in nuclear explosions.)

Human Gadgets: hand-held tricorder things, instantly analyses substances.

Alien Gadgets: always with fancy puzzle like interlocking parts, always with sort of Gothic stylizations. Evidently very user-friendly — the people never have any trouble using the alien equipment.

Sci-fi-wise, there’s nothing new. The racist anti-historical crap was already published by several con-artist authors. You can expect all the Hollywood junk, including particularly ineffective tear-jerking.

This movie is notable only because it introduced numerous sequels and spin-offs (including a TV show with a less annoying cast).

Event Horizon

1994 Paramount, Lawrence Gordon, Golar, Impact Pictures

−− particularly dizzy space horror

color

Timeline provided in intro:

• 2015 First permanent colony established on Moon.
• 2032 Commercial mining begins on Mars.
• 2040 Deep space research vessel ‘Event Horizon’ launched to explore boundaries of Solar system. She disappears without a trace beyond the eighth planet, Neptune. It is the worst space disaster on record.
• 2047 Now…

We see a giant spaceship (must be Event Horizon) hovering over planet Neptune with dead bodies and very ’90s 3D-modeling.

It depicts a big space station in Earth orbit.

It has lots of sci-fi style elements: gateway to another dimension, going to Proxima Centauri.

The story starts up with a military team, something super-secret, but nothing makes any sense.

They are going to Neptune, because the other ship got stuck there in the atmosphere. Just what the role of planet Neptune is here… why the missing ship should be within the atmosphere of Neptune… how it is, when they’re in Neptune’s atmosphere, they don’t fall… we will never know.

Sometimes, when they’re in space, not apparently in the atmosphere, but there clouds around...

They get into fluid chambers

They give a lesson on relativity… something about “gravity drive”.

They go into the ship, and promptly split up, going into dark spaces alone where there is blood and other creepy stuff. And they aren’t told anything about the ship’s parts until they are looking at them. The story offers no explanation for all this unlikely nonsense.

Gravity is on sometimes, off others, willy-nilly, usually with no explanation.

The movie had of money, and some big actors.

The script is largely awful macho sensationalism.

From the onset, they act like they’re in a horror film. (They should be clued in by all the torture chamber props.)

And they’re having one disaster after another, Oh no! The core is gonna blow… and the air is running out… and decompression… and there are creepy crawl spaces. (As if it weren’t bad enough that they’re in a bad horror movie.)

Much of the style taken from Alien — scary rooms.

There are air fans everywhere, as was the fashion of the time for indicating that things are scary.

The movie steals bits and pieces from wherever. Torrents of blood for no apparent reason from The Shining. People with empty eye sockets. Etc etc. Doodads that look like mechanical puzzles, as were in vogue in the 90s, like in Hellraiser.

The movie has repeated sequences of one person relating what they saw, and somebody else talking over them, denying they saw what they said, not letting them continue. It’s not one person. It’s like the whole crew consists of people with the same personality defect.

Then the repeated sequence safe/nightmare/safe/nightmare. Then the potty-mouth comic relief, where none belongs.

It’s really a slog to get through this.

Evidently, there is a fan base: numerous web pages offer to explain away all these goof-ups and weaknesses.

Independence Day

1996 Centropolis Entertainment

− aliens invade, jingoism prevails

color

Taken as a comedy, this movie is sometimes kind of funny. “Ha” funny, not “Ha Ha” funny. That is the most charitable interpretation. You could laugh. I tried to. But there’s little hint that the intent was comedic. It looks for all the world like jingoistic pandering to a susceptible public.

But the jingoistic idea it promotes is just this stupid: If you piss of the USA, by golly, we’ll blow you up! We’ll send out our brave fighter planes and our genius scientists! There is some jingoistic tongue-in-cheek going on in this movie, but… the jingoistic tongue doesn’t remain in the jingoistic cheek. Could they possibly not be kidding, by the fighters being led by the U.S. President, who is also a fighter ace!?? Or, maybe, could they be pandering to a public that is that dumb?

As sci-fi, this movie has nothing but titanic spaceships which use total overkill to destroy national monuments. Um… Like, it has been done before. And icky evil aliens who just want to conquer. Done before. Was there anything new? OK: they infect the giant spaceship with a computer virus. Technically ridiculous — it’s a strain, but I’ll give them that.

My story: I was working at the time at an outfit that had a bunch of engineers, some physicists and programmers. Some of these people were secretly trekkies, and we had been waiting so long for a great sci-fi movie, and we had all seen the trailers of the huge spaceships. Somebody arranged a group trip to the local theater. This was something new — we had never gone anywhere except to lunch or a bar together.

We left work together, and in bashful excitement made a convoy to the theater.

We watched the thing. I remember squirming. We left the theater, avoiding looking at one another. On the way back, nobody spoke. We never went to another movie together again. Nobody ever spoke of the incident again.

If you want the biggest CGI effects of the time, this is it. If you like disaster movies, you’re in luck! A lot of stuff gets blowed up real good! (Mostly, recognizable monuments. Funny about that… on second thought, not that funny, and certainly not new.)

I give it one point for CGI and blow-em-up action.

In 2013, a sequel Independence Day: Resurgence (by reports, even dumber than the orignal). A “mockbuster” Independence Daysaster appeared in 2013, based on this nonsense. (Evidently, I wasn’t the only one who thought the tongue was insufficiently cheeked.)

Starship Troopers

1997 Touchstone Pictures, Jon Davison Productions

− squeaky-clean military vs bad ugly aliens

color

Date: 2200s

Aliens: “Arachnids” (called “bugs”)

Vehicles: faster-than-light starships

Here are a couple of personal experiences relating to the book and the movie.

I liked Heinlein’s early stories, intended for kids, but the bulk of his stories, certainly his novels, targeted adults. I read most of them as a teenager, and even then found them deeply lacking in human insight. While his early stories often proposed proper science fiction ideas, the later ones tumbled ever deeper into macho superman stuff. Fame had gone to his head.

I read the particular story Starship Troopers shortly after the Vietnam War ended. A young soldier relates the story from his point of view. He does his job of killing “bugs” with a sort of gritty glee. The bugs are nothing but bad, and just need to be killed. Now, that is surely the point of view of many a young soldier, and of course the military has often made sure they thought just that. But this isn’t an army propaganda manual, it’s a novel, whose readership has been in fact young adult civilians.

From beginning to end, I gained no insight whatever into the “bugs” and their motives, or for that matter, into the people’s motives, beyond that the soldier’s buddy got killed by bugs. This just after my country had lost a pointless war, that they got into precisely because they failed to understand the people they were invading. As a teenager, I was very disappointed. I had fully expected to learn something cool about the Arachnids, or to see the soldier learn something about the world. Instead, he just learned to be a mindless, hardened soldier.

Besides that, in contrast to some of Heinlein’s earlier work, there was no new science fiction here. This book was social message.

As an adult, I see a guy who knew how to work a hook, how to sell a book. But his later social science fiction shows a deficient personality at work. He simply didn’t understand much about the world. Women, especially, were for him a blank. In his books, you could replace any female character with a pin-up girl.

Second story: I first saw the movie at a time when things had gotten generally difficult in my life. I snuck out of the craziness for an afternoon to see it. All the gore and destruction and violence were a temporary escape from my real-life craziness.

A few years later, I saw it on TV, and sure enough. It isn’t just Heinlein’s extreme, naive political and social ideas, it was in some ways an amplification of those ideas. They were not just faithful to the original story, they emphasized the squeaky clean militaristic government, and used modern views on sexual roles to make killing bugs not only macho, but sexy as well. The propaganda, including the gory killing of a captive alien to show what they deserve, feels very much like real war propaganda. There is no suggestion in the movie that there might be anything wrong with this.

I will not recommend this thing as a “good movie”. It’s a propaganda piece — propaganda that there are good guys and bad guys, and bad guys are worthy only of extermination, and extermination is what the good guys do, with relish. This is very near the mean rotten heart of fascist thinking.

What does my rating system mean, though? I had hoped to make it a balanced, overall recommendation. Maybe I need a more flexible system.

It’s an entertaining movie. The production values are not bad, even for a big-budget Hollywood job. The actors do their little parts adequately. But the best thing in the movie was the CGI portrayal of the “bugs”. Some of it is very imaginative, and visually believable. The CGI suggests some interesting science fiction ideas. (None of this was in the book, which provides little description of “bugs”.)

To be fair and consistent, I’ll hold my nose and give it one point for the production values and the sci-fi suggested by the CGI bugs. But this is primarily a movie with a message, and the message stinks.

Immortel

2004 Duran Entertainment

−− just whatever seemed cool

color animation

It looked very fancy — a floating pyramid and a beautiful lady with blue make-up.

And it is just such a mess. It probably shouldn’t go in the list, but it does have a load of standard sci-fi stuff in it, and I went and bought it, and somebody should raise a warning. So here we go.

None of the futuristic sci-fi is new here. Maybe they were hoping their audience hadn’t seen Blade Runner or Moebius’ artwork, which accounts for most of the premise and whatever passes for style in this… beginner’s attempt.

The single brain-dead jab at story novelty is to inject Egyptian gods into a sci-fi setting. (No kidding, that’s what the pyramid is.) It sounds stupid — it is stupider than it sounds. A big portion of the script consists of some character or another explaining in a menacing voice how all this somehow fits together, while stroking the writer’s wee ego. Ewww. Yes, ewww.

This movie is entirely in a CGI backdrop, with most of the characters being CGI. It’s not particularly convincing CGI — as of this writing, it looks terribly dated. But it’s miserably overdone, just chock-full of standard sci-fi knickknacks, with not a drop of humor or humanity or even a splash of panache. It’s visual pap.

Mostly, the actors walk around trying their best to be cool and sexy while struggling to pronounce the idiotic drivel they got. I found myself verbally reacting again and again: “Oh, no, you didn’t say that”, “Oh jeez, that was stupid.” Mercifully, the CGI obscures most of the actors’ faces. I would feel sorry for the three principal actors, except, they are partly responsible for this. If any of them had any integrity, they would have walked off.

This movie will not be entertaining to an adult. For a developing personality, it would be inappropriate. Just for an example, many scenes dwell on some pimply-faced kid’s fantasy about rape. I don’t generally advocate violence, but in this case, somebody really needed a spanking, and a referral to a stern counselor.

There isn’t any intelligent adult dialog in this movie whatsoever. For an example of what you will subject yourself to if you elect to watch it, consider this repartée:

Sunshine

2007 Fox Searchlight Pictures, DNA Films

− space action; short story rip-off

color

Date 2057

Vehicles: Icarus I and Icarus II flying giant bombs to the Sun.

Premise: the Sun is dying, so people send out big spaceships carrying bombs to rekindle it. It’s unlikely, sure. It’s also very familiar to me, so familiar, the ending was no surprise.

This movie has good bits and bad bits. The good bits are pretty good. The bad bits are bad in multiple ways: technically, professionally, and morally.

The acting was very good. The actors made even unbelievable scenes almost acceptable.

The special effects and scenes are beautiful, by and large, if often confused and sometimes derivative.

However, the story hung off one cliff, off another, off another, off another, (and another, and another, and another) before finally taking a big plunge. Even with the unlikely premise, yet more unlikely things kept happening. It is as though cliff-hanger and implausibility were the only means of keeping an audience interested.

For instance, the introduction of an evil character halfway through the movie, which just makes their already impossible situation even more impossibler (in search perhaps of impossiblest). Or maybe it was just padding. I call: lack of confidence. It produced a confused, incoherent script.

And although a few situational elements of the story are novel, others are direct rip-offs. For example, a scene of an astronaut being blown out of an airlock explosively, lifted straight from 2001 A Space Odyssey, is not just lifted, but lifted twice.

There I rolled my eyes, and rolled them again.

It’s really a pity. It was totally unnecessary.

I have serious external complaints about this movie. The premise, as well as the central dramatic element, and an ironic twist, are directly lifted from a 1954 short story, Phoenix, by Clark Ashton Smith — and the movie fails to give him any credit.

I recognized the story when I first read a blurb of the movie, and thought it was very cool that somebody would make a movie of that old story. As I watched it, I struggled to remember the name of the author, and expected to see his name in the credits — but, nothing.

One guess would be that the writer read the story, or heard about it, and forgot, and later imagined it was his own invention. That can happen. It is incredible that nobody in the huge staff remembered Smith’s story, though — he was not little-known: he was recognized as a master of his craft. Was the whole staff so indifferent regarding science fiction literature? Something stinks here.

Even as a kid, the story that the Sun would “burn out” like a chunk of coal seemed to me a quaint and uninformed idea. The idea that humans could make a bomb big enough to re-light a star is of course a failure to appreciate scale. I forgave Smith on the grounds that few people in 1954 had been educated as to new Solar science. Physical plausibility aside, it is an original story, very well written, with a sad and poetic ending.

It irks me that, over half a century later, somebody should blow a whack of money on that little story, and fail to have the decency to at least credit the originator of its ideas. But gee, if you’re going to lift the story, couldn’t you at least make the unbelievable parts a bit more believable? Instead, it’s packed with an unbelievable villain and scenes lifted from other movies. This is serial failure of imagination.

I’m ticked off by both the ineptitude and the apparent plagiarism of the story. I am leaving the movie in this list only to air my views on the subject.

Limitless

2011 Virgin Produced, Rogue, Many Rivers Productions, Boy of the Year, Intermedia Film

− super-genius drug action

color

Starts off with already-pretty people made geniuses by popping a pill. The guy who got the girls now gets even more girls. Plays the usual money games, makes lots of money, Why not? becomes a super-fighter too — because he’s smart, you see.

You know you’re smart when you can bla bla big words.

Illicit drugs, murder, gangsters etc ensue.

The protagonist narrates the story. Way too much talk about how great he is: he can do this, he can do that. Five minutes later, we get to hear more about it.

I always tire of the hand-held camera effect. It’s terribly over-used here.

Most super-person stories end either with the person going insane and destroying all they love, or learning to use their super-powers for good rather than evil. This one plays with both possibilities, ends up one of the latter variety. It doesn’t come up with anything new in this regard.

The nature of the narration changes partway through… it feels like it’s setting us up for a sequel. And so it is! (The book makes a cameo in the movie. Ka-ching!)

It’s just a super-person story in the end. And one with a poor moral lesson, at that.

It’s kind of funny in places. Di Niro give it a bit of class. But then it craps out. Just move along, nothing to see here, folks.

Self/less

2015 Scott Free Productions, Kinberg Genre, TSG Entertainment

−− body-swap action-adventure

color

This is the big actor, big action body-swap movie. This one is body swap via a drug in pills, that gradually replaces the body’s personality.

Ben Kingsley still commands the camera amazingly. But his appearance is only window-dressing.

The movie tragically blunders into an action-adventure shoot-em-up, with a super-cute rich guy who gets all the girls but wants more.

So, then, he turns into a valiant guy saving the wife of his new body and wastes no time getting romantic with her.

And then, way more shoot-em-up, mad scientist, car chase while shooting, car crash, flamethrower. And then he becomes a super-warrior for no divinable reason.

Then he has to make a terrible decision. If all the action-hero noise hadn’t transpired, this would have been a nice Hollywood ending.

Instead, the script completely drops the ball that the drug erasing the previous body owner. Where is the big moral conflict, if, when he stops taking the drug, the previous owner comes back intact? We just won’t worry about that.

It is so unnecessary. Just inept.

See Advantageous for a much more thoughtful catch on body-swap issues. (I suspect this is a rip-off of that film.) In the sci-fi theme, it’s essentially the 1966 film Seconds.

A very similar case of superhero-via-drug nonsense: see Limitless.

Original, it is not at all. If you want an action-adventure backdrop at your party, you might turn the sound off and play this film. Paying attention to it is a waste of attention.

Valerian
and the City of a Thousand Planets

2017 Europa Corp.

−− space detective/spy/superhero

color

Date: 28th Century

Aliens: lots. Some very beautiful, some pretty fun.

Vehicles: lots. But I don’t care to list them.

Kind of a space French comic-book detective/spy/superhero thing. More of a space fantasy than science fiction. I struggled with whether to include it in the list. But it contains sci-fi elements.

Starts with an amusing history of Earth space exploration. Then a pretty CGI alien world of essentially people doing fantastical things.

A lot happens — a lot I just didn’t care about.

The characters are repulsive — initially, and especially, the primaries. Their dialog is just juvenile. When they are both on the screen, I wonder if I should go for popcorn, or maybe find a toilet — anything. Unfortunately, they are there for the bulk of the film. You might hope for some character development, but your hopes would be dashed.

In all his dialog, the primary actor bears down to express a voice like Tom Cruise’s — very distracting, and just embarrassing.

Generally, the acting and direction are just miserable, on top of the weak script.

If any of this is intentional, it can only be to target a teenage audience. I strongly suspect that is overly generous, and the real reason is arrested personal development on the part of higher-ups.

A lot of people put a lot of effort into this, and some aspects are executed so well — it’s really a pity. It was sabotaged from the very top.

I saw this with a group of guys who just wanted to get together for some fun. When it finished, it was a struggle to say something positive. Best I came up with: “very colorful. Some of the CGI creatures were cute.” Those guys never got together again, I think.