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Monday, October 13, 2008War of the Robots Release Year: 1978Country: Italy Starring: Antonio Sabato, Yanti Somer, Malisa Longo, Patrizia Gori, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Roberto Bianchetti, Aldo Canti, Enrico Gozzo, Licinia Lentini, Frank Siedlitz, Massimo Righi, Dino Scandiuzzi, Nicole Stoliaroff, Ian Pulley, Venantino Venantini. Writer: Alfonso Brescia Director: Alfonso Brescia Cinematographer: Silvio Fraschetti Music: Marcello Giombini Producer: Luigi Alessi Original Title: Le Guerra dei Robot Alternate Titles: Reactor, Robots, Stratostars When one possesses tastes such as I do, one often assumes that he will find himself standing alone in a vast sea of people who think you are mad, completely mad. If the Internet has taught me one thing other than there are a lot of blogs maintained by people's house cats, it's that you're never so alone as you think you are. No matter how obscure or out of the mainstream your affection for a particular something may be, chances are very good that there are multiple discussion boards, chat rooms, and websites dedicated to defending and celebrating whatever that thing may be. Heck, by Internet standards furries, scat freaks, and people who like to watch monkeys stick their fingers up their butt then sniff them and fall over are mainstream. And yet even in this glorious netherworld where everything is acceptable and nothing is beyond the realm of defense, there are rare occasions when I still feel cold and alone in a world that regards me with a suspicious and disgusted eye. Such is the case when I offer up the opinion that Italian science fiction films are "pretty good." Pretty much every Italian B genre has ample defenders, be it peplum, giallo, violent cop films, or those screwball comedies we only watch because we know Edwidge Fenech gets nude in them. Even the third Ator film has its defenders (am I among those sad individuals? Need you even ask?). And yet when I venture forth with the suggestion that Wild, Wild Planet or War of the Robots are enjoyable movies, I feel like one of those unfortunate guys who mis-times a bodily function in a crowded venue and lets loose the precise moment everyone simultaneously gets quiet for no discernible reason. And the expression on most of the faces around me is no more approving than the faces staring in harsh divine judgment at someone who just cut one in church. "Why?" they ask me as I try feebly to defend my adoration of films featuring Antonio Sabato in a metallic unitard. "Why do you enjoy making baby Jesus cry?" And I when I look to Christ on the cross for reassurance, his gaunt, forlorn visage merely peers back at me in disappointment as he says, "Really, Keith! I was ready to forgive your obsession with big round asses, the visible thong fashion trend, the naughty office lady stereotype, and maybe even Yor, The Hunter from the Future. But Cosmos: War of the Planets? That's too much, even for me."
Luckily, though, I don't actually buy into religion, and I haven't been to church since I was a young teen trying to make time with a minister's daughter. So you know what, Pope Benedict? I don't care if The Vatican disapproves of my appreciation of War of the Robots or bigtitsroundasses.com (Umm, not that I've ever been to that site). And even if there's not a single person out there who will back me up on this one, then I am proud to be the lone voice in the wilderness, howling like a banshee about the merits of a film like War of the Robots. Well, perhaps "merits" is too strong a word. There doesn't seem to be a wealth of research available on Italian science fiction, not the way there is for giallo and horror or peplum. And as I'm not living in Italy and my conversational Italian is limited to "Dove il bagno?" and "Hey! That's a spicy meat-a-ball-a!" I'm probably not going to end up being the trailblazer in proper research of Italian science fiction films and themes, though over the coming months I shall do my best. Someone has to shoulder the burden, right? And Jesus made clear to me that he was willing to die for a lot of things, but Antonio Sabato in a unitard wasn't among them. Heck, I may even go to the library and blow some dust off any books they may have there, perhaps even pretend to read them when really, all I'm doing is looking at the pictures and making up assumptions based on chapter titles. If you ever wonder why the state of journalism is so dreadful these days, it's because of me. But there. I went to an online card catalog for a major American university and found nothing. The few books on Italian science fiction I could find were referring to literature, and not Antonio Sabato in a unitard. Hold on, let me do a search for "Antonio Sabato in a unitard." Nope, nothing except Teleport City. So I guess I have to make it up as best as can for the time being, and rely on subsequent reviews and reader corrections to better whittle down my fantastical assumptions into something more reflective of the truth.
For our purposes here, Italian science fiction is divided into two main eras: the late fifties through the sixties, and the post-Star Wars 70s. Now, let me preface this entire discussion with the admission that I hate discussing sci-fi as inspired by Star Wars. People seem to insist that movies are "rip offs" of Star Wars even when the assertions are more tenuous then the kind of crap I assert. Not that Star Wars didn't have a major impact on science fiction in particular and movies in general, and not that a lot of sci-fi films would never have been made were it not for the success of Star Wars. I'm just saying that it isn't always Star Wars; there were plenty of other sci-fi films in the 70s that the Italians could rip off, and the Italian b-movie industry has never been anything if not egalitarian in where it steals ideas from. Plus, disregarding any of the Campbellian "myth" myth that has been layered on as extra meaning behind Star Wars, it was at heart just a rip-off of old pulps and sci-fi which, in turn, were inspired by the Victorian speculative fiction writers, which in turn...oh, you get the idea, don't you? For me, it's never a question of who rips off what, but of whether or no the rip-off is any good. And the general consensus around a film like War of the Robots is "No, not really." I, obviously, disagree.
You see, in many aspects of life, I am gentleman of refinement and culture, with mature tastes and the wisdom of the ages. You will find me wearing my three-piece velvet suit (don't think I don't own one), sitting in an overstuffed, weathered leather recliner, with a glass of fine single malt or bourbon in one hand and an exquisite cigar in the other, discussing no doubt the history of "the Great Game" during the 1800s or what's to be done with this Taft fellow. In certain other aspects of life, however, I am possessed of the wide-eyed disregard of a child. And so when a film comes to me wrapped in pretty colors and glitter, all full of skintight metallic jumpsuits and blinking lights, I can't help but drop the cigar, spill the scotch (which fills me with a profound sense of sadness beyond the ages), and collapse to the floor, drooling and clapping and laughing "Pretty!" Few things are as candy-colored as Italian science fiction from the 60s and 70s. In fact, that may pretty much be the only thing they are. You certainly can't call most of them intelligent or well-written. You can't call most of them well directed or well paced. Certainly not well-acted. But they are full of pretty colors. Hooray! And no matter how dull and plodding the film itself may actually be to the rest of the right thinking world, I sit there in a hypnotized state, gazing happily at the colored lights and thinking to myself how much I love what I'm watching.
Such is the case with War of the Robots, a film that was most likely scripted on the back of a napkin and filmed in less time than it took to write on that napkin. It comes from the second era of Italian sci-fi, or the Alfonso Brescia era (the first era was the Antonio Margheriti era). This was the era when the swingin' swanky spacecats of films like Wild Wild Planet gave way to the swingin' disco lounge lizards of the cosmos, but the ponderous and meandering pace of the films remained constant. Brescia is the kind of director who has a filmography awful enough that if you told me for six months I'd be allowed to watch nothing but Alfonso Brescia movies, I'd be pretty happy for six months. Like most Italian exploitation directors, he worked the gamut -- peplum and spaghetti westerns in the 1960s; sex, cop, and science fiction films in the 1970s; sword and sorcery and Miami Vice rip-offs in the 80s. Among other things, he directed one of my all-time favorite fantasy films: the bizarre mash-up of Hercules and Flash Gordon that is Conquerors of Atlantis. Although first and foremost a peplum, or sword and sandal film, Conquerors of Atlantis had more than enough mad scientist gear, metallic wizard robes, laser guns, and atomic generators to also plant it firmly within the realm of science fiction. Specifically, it plays like an old serial, one of those where a good-natured cowboy accidentally discovers a lost world of guys in pointy helmets and armed with ray guns. Only instead of a cowboy, it was an ancient world strongman. Given Brescia's familiarity with such material, it's a bit of a surprise to me that he didn't make any straight sci-fi during the 1960s, and that straight sci-fi remained more or less the sole dominion of Antonio Margheriti until later int he 70s, when Brescia took over and Antonio decided to spend his time directing cheap, bloody Vietnam movies.
Come the 1970s, when Star Wars generated new interest in the pulpy, adventure-oriented sort of science fiction that the 1970s had otherwise eschewed in favor of contemplative (if ham-fisted) post-apocalypse films (which were not very much like the post-apocalypse films of the 1980s), Brescia was the man behind the camera more times than not (the most significant "not" being Luigi Cozzi's Starcrash, but we shall come to that in due time). Brescia's films are defined by a few key elements, though if there's any single over-arching theme running through the body of his science fiction output, it's that in the future, most of our time will be spent sitting in front of control panels covered with blinking lights. Other characteristics include his bizarre hybrid of swingin' 60s pop art fashion with sparkling lens flare disco aesthetics and an extreme reliance on gratuitous and functionally useless helmets. He also really likes shots of guys firing flashlights at each other from behind stone formations. Oh yeah, also -- whatever movie you thought you were watching in the beginning ends up getting discarded halfway through in favor of another movie Brescia must have thought up during lunch and figured he wouldn't get a chance to make, so why not cram it into the movie he was already making? In War of the Robots, for example, the movie we start out with is about a scientist (Jacques Herlein, who once appeared in a movie called The Hostess Also Likes to Blow the Horn) and his lovely assistant (Brescia sci-fi regular Malisa Longo, who also had a bit part in Way of the Dragon) who get kidnapped by aliens designed to look like Miles O'Keefe in Sword of the Valiant. The aliens need the scientist because he has discovered the secret of how to create life, presumably with his sexy assistant. I'm not really sure how a race that hasn't figured out how to procreate even managed to become a race in the first place, but whatever. It's the future. Sadly, there's no scene were one of the goofy looking foil-suited aliens insist that the professor hand over the Genesis device, only to be confronted by the professor fondling his assistant and purring, "She's the only Genesis device I need, mister!" However, it's worth noting that the old crank seems to have an entirely unprofessional affection for his young assistant, which he expresses whenever he can by grabbing her bare shoulders and casually brushing against her breasts.
The kidnapping doesn't sit well with Captain Antonio Sabato, who had a thing going with the sexy assistant Lois, or with the rest of the people in the world, since the scientist was apparently running an experiment that, if left unattended, will destroy the planet. And in an incredible feat of planning, the aging old scientist is the only person who knows how to shut down the experiment. So off into space we go with Sabato and his crew, most of whom seem pretty blase about the whole "the world will explode in seven days" thing and more interested in slinging cheesy lounge lizard come-on line sat each other, though mostly at crewmember Julie (Yanti Somer, yet another Alfonso Brescia sci-fi stalwart), because she's the hottest and looks like Brigitte Nielson in Rocky IV, only cute instead of terrifying yet somehow alluring. She has a thing for Captain Sabato (yes, yes, the ol' John Hughes "guy has thing for glamor girl when plucky, hot tomboy sidekick is much sexier and better for him" plot is firmly in place years before Hughes made it his stock in trade), and if you're wondering why we're wasting time with all this dumb soap opera nonsense when we should be tending to rescuing a scientist from some alien pageboys, well you're apparently not going to get very far in Italian space command. Remember that they are a fiery and passionate bunch, those Mediterraneans, and just because you are on a critical mission to save the world doesn't mean there's not time to ooze up next to a crewmate and lay on sleazy lines like, "Baby, why are you still obsessed with the captain? You know he loves Lois. But maybe you could swing by my quarters later, and I'll show you my collection of Anthorian fertility fetishes." En route to the point ("north Pole Earth, 90 degrees west, and 810 north" -- Star Trek wishes it could ride techno-babble this ridiculous) at which their spaceship -- which is kitted out with the world's most advanced rolling space office chairs -- will intercept the aliens, our crew ends up crashing on a planet inhabited by mutants, one of whom looks like Yul Brynner in cheap World of Warcraft elf makeup. It turns out that these people are used by the pageboys as a humanoid (as they say, "we are humanoid but different from you") internal organ farm. The pageboys, it turns out, are the goon squad for a race that can only stay alive by stealing organs from other races. Yul Brynner (Aldo Kanti, actually, as Kuba) is itching for revenge. So Sabato lets him join the crew, on the condition that Kuba trade in his loin cloth and cape combo for a snug, metallic space jumpsuit.
After some more, "So, who do you like? Why does he love her?" banter, we finally arrive at the alien planet, where Captain Sabato discovers the horrible truth -- that the scientist is actually enjoying his new home and accompanying space wizard robes and has no interest in returning to save Earth or even telling the crew how to shut down the stupid experiment he left percolating in the kitchen. In fact, it turns out he and Lois have decided to lead an invading armada and conquer the planet -- which would make you think they'd want to at least help out with stopping the reactor, since amassing an armada to invade a planet that blows up a couple minutes after you leave seems like a poor application of resources. So at this point, someone calls Sabato and is like, "Oh, we ended up figuring out that reactor thing. You can go on to the next movie." So the remaining half of the film is dedicated to the glorious and epic battle among the stars for the very fate of humanity itself. This is realized largely by filming scenes of Antonio Sabato wearing a motorcycle helmet and sitting at a control panel while he pretends to fly a spaceship with scenes from the movie projected behind him, not unlike similar scenes from the Turkish sci-fi epic, The Man Who Saved the World. Other people sit at control consoles elsewhere and do the same. In the end, it seems like an exceptionally one-sided battle despite what we're being told in various snippets of exposition delivered by a woman who forgot to put on the undershirt portion of her space uniform. I mean, on one side is an old man and a bunch of pageboys who turn out to be androids filled with springs, and on the other side are a bunch of hot-blooded Italians lead by Antonio Sabato in a useless helmet. What is a motorcycle helmet going to do for you while you're flying a space fighter? I would think that, even by Italian standards, when you crash a ship in open space, mild head trauma is going to be among the least of your concerns. As is often the case, if you ask me why I like this movie, I'll shrug and mumble something about pretty colors and lights and isn't Yanti Somer cute with her sexy crew cut and form-fitting space uniform? And you'll shake your head, maybe try to explain to me that those are not really reasons of merit to like a film as much as I like War of the Robots. I will respond by putting my fingers in my ears and, in an affected monotone computer voice, repeating "Does not compute!" until you finally lose heart and go off to win the Nobel Prize or something, leaving me in peace to watch War of the Robots and brood about how no one understands me but Alfonso Brescia.
Sabato seems to be on autopilot for this film, but he's still Antonio Sabato, and that means he's cooler than you or me, which is why he has time to juggle two hot space babes while still saving the galaxy from an army of Miles O'Keefe robots. Malisa Longo really gets to chew some scenery with her "lab assistant turned evil space empress of the universe" role, and I guess we can't blame her or the professor for taking the offer, though they might at least have questioned how a race that has perfected android making, interstellar travel, ray guns, and other highly advanced technologies and feats has yet to figure out how not to live in sparsely adorned caverns. Yanti Somer mostly hangs around looking cute with her bad-ass crewcut (I admit it -- dames with crewcuts really appeal to me. Add that to my tally, Jesus). The rest of the cast is pretty non-descript, except maybe the "Texan" who communicates his Texan-ness by wearing cowboy boots with his space outfit. If you happen to learn any of their names, it is purely through brute repetition, and not because anyone turns in a memorable performance. Really, though, none of the faults of this film bother me very much. Or rather, they didn't bother to the point that they outweighed the enjoyment I got from the sheer silliness of everything on display. Even though I opened this review by talking about how I hate when everything is listed as "a rip-off of Star Wars," it's hard to argue against that when Antonio Sabato gets involved in a fight with glowing laser swords. Unfortunately, Alfonso Brescia couldn't afford to have someone draw in animated laser blades in post-production (I don't even think a movie like this has post-production -- I think they just assemble it as they film it, then send it off to theaters later that afternoon by fourth class media mail), so they just use regular plastic swords with reflective tape on them, the kind runners put on their shoulders and shoes in a vain attempt to stop crazed motorists from running them down. But other than that, I think claims of Star Wars rip-offery are greatly overstated. Yes, this movie and the whole series of science fiction films made by Brescia got made because someone wanted their own Star Wars. But opening the floodgate is one thing. The content of War of the Robots is substantially different from that of its big-budget door-opener. It's very much a throwback to the cheap sci-fi films of the 50s and 60s, when the interiors of spaceships were all wide-open and spacious and equipped with folding tables and rolling chairs. And yes, there's a lot of scenes comprised of nothing but people sitting at a prop control panel turning knobs, but there's also a fair amount of goofy laser battles and sneaking around in catacombs while wearing sexy pleather space outfits. If anything, War of the Robots owes more to Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires and even more to Gerry Anderson's British sci-fi television series UFO than it does Star Wars. It is from psychedelic space adventures like these that Brescia seems to be cribbing all his notes (including an alien race that survives by harvesting the organs of other compatible races and putting most of his female cast in platinum bob haircut wigs), and as such, War of the Robots feels more like something that came before Star Wars. Heck, the UFOs in which the aliens travel are basically the UFOs from UFO, only realized with less of a budget than that television show probably enjoyed. A lot of the science fiction in the 70s started striving to create some new, usually depressing realism, abandoning the gee-whiz pop art madness of the 1960s and opting instead for films that were dystopic and, at least in the eyes of those making them at the time, truer to a potential real future. Thus the grim setting of a film like Solyent Green, Ultimate Warrior, or Silent Running. For decades, science and the military had protected us, even when they were also responsible for creating whatever it was we need to be protected from (usually a giant scorpion or giant mantis or giant bald man in a diaper). After the turmoil of the 1960s, science fiction was much keener on appealing to the suspicious and, at times, misanthropic streak running through people. Science was our undoing, rather than our savior, and it was left to the survivor to pick up the pieces as best they could and spend their days waxing poetic about plants and wearing burlap tunics.
Star Wars ushered in a "new" era of science fiction that took the focus off grim prognostications about the future and placed the focus squarely on action and adventure, with films that were as much swashbuckler and fantasy as they were sci-fi. Few kids filed dutifully in to see Star Wars because they were interested to find out what it had to say about the threat of nuclear annihilation or because they wanted to reflect on how Gran Moff Tarkin was an allegory for the Nixon administration. It was meant to be a rolicking good adventure yarn, and for a population perhaps weary of being beaten over the head with the doom and gloom scenarios that filled the 1970s, it struck exactly the right chord. I know there are those out there who will bemoan the fact that science fiction became more about adventure and daring-do and less about speculation and message, but I'm not among them. As much as I enjoy a heavy handed 70s sci-fi film, I also enjoy a good ol' pulpy adventure, and I think the universe is big enough to house them both. War of the Robots doesn't really strike me as having any particular type of message, although one could be forced from it if one was desperate. After all, this is a movie were science gets us in a pickle then flat out refuses to take even the simplest of steps to rectify the situation, leaving the solution to be found by two-fisted adventurers. Somewhere in there is a parallel to the gritty cop dramas of the 1970s, films in which bureaucracy and red tape cripple society, leaving criminals to run wild and free until one man, probably with an awesome mustache, steps forward with a willingness to circumvent the system and box in a few ears. I don't think War of the Robots is trading in that sort of an agenda, though. I think, more than anything else, Alfonso Brescia just wanted to make a goofy science fiction film full of lens flares, metallic jumpsuits, and boopidy-boo-boo electronic music by Marcello Giombini (which I quite like). What you have here, then, is basically what would happen if you mashed the freewheelin' science fiction of the 60s together with the fashion and art design of Logan's Run. It's pretty glorious in that cut-rate way Italian sci-fi production design tends to be. Lots of tight, shiny vinyl, lots of Lycra jumpers, some bulky spacesuits, and perhaps my personal favorite: the crew uniforms that say "Trissi" on them, ostensibly because the spaceship is named Trissi, but in reality because the uniforms are just Trissi brand motorcycle outfits, and the filmmakers didn't have the time, money, or interest to remove the logo from the arm of the outfits.
Other key moments include the realization of space walking by turning the camera sideways and having an actor wave his arms around in front of a starry background painting. Suspending him by wires in front of the starry background would have just been too costly and complicated. Better than that, this is just footage recycled from Brescia's War of the Planets. And even better than that, War of the Robots uses it twice. Then there's the laser gun battle (keeping in mind that there are no animated rays; just flashlights in the shape of novelty ray guns) where they forgot to add sound effects and such, so it's just a scene of the good guys pointing their prop ray guns at the bad guys, who then fall down. At some point, someone said they would probably need some sort of a story or something, so Brescia shrugged and came up with something that was probably a summary of the last few scripts he read. Thus you get space aliens kidnap a scientist, ummm, and then they're going to invade Earth...let's throw a romantic triangle in there for good measure...and look, really, as long as Antonio Sabato is in there wearing a bright red motorcycle helmet and we have a lot of animated ray gun effects (we don't, by the way), we should be good to go. And as long as they had a viewer as stupid and undemanding as me in mind, they were correct. Pretty much the only reason this movie went into production was that someone noticed that had a lot of stuff laying around that was used on Brescia's previous War of the Planets and figured they might as well squeeze another movie or two out of it. And if they were doing that, they might as well hire the same basic cast, since they already fit into their costumes as well as anyone can fit into a pleather jumper. And since some of that model work of space ships and stations was so good the last time around, we might as well get some more mileage out of that. Maybe later we can use it all yet again in, oh, I don't know, an Alfonso Brescia directed space porno or something. Labels: Country: Italy, Director: Alfonso Brescia, Science Fiction, Year: 1978 posted by Keith at 6:45 PM | 7 Comments Saturday, October 04, 2008Battle Beneath the Earth Release Year: 1967Country: England, United States Starring: Kerwin Matthews, Vivienne Ventura, Ed Bishop, Peter Arne, Martin Benson, Peter Elliott, Robert Ayres, Al Mulock, Earl Cameron, John Brandon, Bill Nagy, Sarah Brackett, Paula Li Shiu, David Spenser Writer: Charles F. Vetter (as L.Z. Hargreaves) Director: Montgomery Tully Cinematographer: Kenneth Talbot Music: Ken Jones Producer: Charles Reynolds Availability: Buy it from Amazon  The wonderful thing about Battle Beneath the Earth is that it allows even an underachiever like myself with no college edukation to feel that he has a breadth of scientific knowledge superior to that of its makers. On more than one occasion while watching it I was able to point at the screen and exclaim, "Der, that can't not happen! Har!" For instance, I don't know anything about geology, but I know that molten lava is hot, and that you can't just daintily step over a stream of it as if it were a crack in the sidewalk. Also, if digging a tunnel between China and the U.S. were as easy as this film makes it out to be, China's biggest problem would be the steady influx of six-to-eight year-old American boys constantly emerging from holes hither and yon to excitedly wave their shovels at people. Battle Beneath the Earth strikes me as being what a movie conceived by one of those six-to-eight year-old boy might be like. It's a film that is clearly targeted directly at the kiddie matinee market, and, as such, seems to bypass all adult sensibilities and mainline directly into the brain patterns of a prepubescent Sixties-era male jacked up on war comics, high sugar cereals and violent Saturday morning cartoons. I mean, listen to this premise: The Red Chinese dig a subterranean tunnel from China to the U.S. with the intent of detonating nuclear bombs under our major cities, only to be engaged by the U.S. armed forces--ideally portrayed by a bunch of green plastic army men--in all-out warfare... beneath the surface of the Earth! Seriously, fellows, if that doesn't stir the kid inside, I don't know what would.     Unfortunately, in execution, Battle Beneath the Earth confronts a discrepancy between ambition and means similar to what an eight year-old likely would. As a result, it ends up being a classic example of the type of movie that marries a grandiose concept to modest intentions. "The Chinese" end up being more like some Chinese (and not even real ones, in many cases) and the "battle" ends up being more like a skirmish. Still, the movie has to be given some points at the get-go for its dopey concept and total disregard for maintaining credulity among anyone whose age breaks the double digits. Then again, given that this is a British production pretending to be an American one, it could just be an instance of some smarty-pants English people making fun of us yanks by dumbing themselves down in imitation. (Executive #1: "So how do we make it seem authentically American?" Executive #2: "Well, first of all, we should make it really stupid.") In line with its moderate level of spectacle, Battle Beneath the Earth is the work of a group of professionals who shared a more or less equally moderate level of accomplishment. Before helming the picture, director Montgomery Tully churned out--seemingly at monthly intervals--a large number of competent but unremarkable B crime thrillers, and also worked in British television. Similarly, writer Charles F. Vetter (here credited as L.Z. Hargreaves) was responsible for writing enjoyable genre entries like First Man Into Space and Devil Doll that, while certainly not without their well-deserved fans, are far from considered classics. Star Kerwin Matthews, for his part, was known primarily for playing support to stop-motion monsters in films like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver and Jack the Giant Killer--though it was possibly his work in eurospy films like the OSS 117 series that put him in mind for his role here--and leading lady Vivienne Ventura had a healthy resume of TV work. All in all, a perfectly respectable line-up of talent, but nowhere near a guaranty that what you're going to be seeing will rise above mediocrity.     Our action begins on a British soundstage dressed up to resemble--at least to a grade schooler's exacting standards of verisimilitude--a street in downtown Las Vegas. As a crowd of British extras doing their best to exude American-ness looks on, obviously over-stressed scientist Arnold Kramer (Peter Arne) kneels with his ear to the sidewalk, exclaiming excitedly about some kind of suspicious goings on "down there". Of course, since the movie is called Battle Beneath the Earth, we know that Kramer is on to something, but the Las Vegas authorities, not being afforded such insight, just think he's a nutter and cart him off to the bin. Kramer, of course, protests to the contrary and insures them that the threat he perceives is real. However, like most supposedly sane people in movies who are assumed to be crazy by everyone else, he steadfastly refuses to state his case in clear, simple terms, and instead resorts to vague, metaphorical language that is as close to incoherent raving as possible. Enter Naval Commander John Shore, played by Kerwin Matthews. Since an undersea lab project he helmed ended in disaster thanks to a mysterious underwater earthquake, Shore has been relegated to a test lab where he spends his days hitting brightly colored pipes with a rubber mallet. Fortunately, one of his assistants happens to be over-stressed scientist Arnold Kramer's sister, and she asks Shore, an old family friend, to visit her brother in the brain hospital. Kramer is not much more transparent in his statements to Shore, but does show him a "seismographic drawing"--made as a byproduct of some earthquake prediction research he was conducting--that, according to him, shows man-made tunnels under the U.S.that he believes are entering the country somewhere along the Oregon coast. Later, when news breaks of an unexplained mine collapse in an Oregon coastal town, Shore decides that Kramer's claims merit further looking into.     Part of that further looking into involves Shore visiting his buddy Lieutenant Commander Vance Cassidy at the very clearly labeled "Los Alamos (Underground) Atomic Detection Center". Despite the name, the center appears to be some kind of global listening post. They've got "the entire world bugged", Cassidy tells Shore, and if "a champagne cork pops in the Kremlin", they hear it. That this arrangement is unironically presented as being merely sort of neat is in keeping with Battle Beyond the Earth's kid-like perspective, exemplified in this case by a purely "gee-whiz" conception of both the benevolence of military authority and the sleek efficiency of American bureaucracy. This is, after all, a movie where the sight of a uniformed official puffing out his chest and barking gravely into a bright red phone while standing in front of a wall-sized map is treated as being on an equal level of spectacle to any of the action set pieces, and in which, during the cast listing at the end, each of the characters are listed by full name and military ranking, even though some of them weren't even referred to by name in the film... and none of them are real people (seriously, you feel like you're supposed to stand up as they roll by). The barking of terse commands into red phones is not just noteworthy in itself, of course, but also because it results in important things getting done, and often in remarkable time. At one point, when silence is required in order for the Navy's detecting equipment to identify the locations of the Chinese underground tunnels, Admiral Felix Hillebrand (Robert Ayres) simply picks up the phone and makes a couple of calls, resulting, within just a few hours, in the entire United States going completely silent. All transportation has been shut down, traffic stopped, broadcast signals ceased and all heavy machinery of every kind brought to a halt in every single region of every state in the union. One by one, each of the states checks in with the central command center, letting the brass know that "condition silent" is in effect in their slice of the country--at which point, of course, that state lights up on a giant wall map. These few uniformed men in this room are not just important, Battle Beneath the Earth is saying, but super duper important--so much so that they can toggle the entire country on and off like a light switch.     It's kind of hard to believe that those behind Battle Beneath the Earth meant for any of this to be taken seriously, even by the attention-deficient rugrats at the core of their target audience. This was 1967, after all, and characters such as these were already commonly being presented as either villains or figures of ridicule throughout mainstream entertainment. Most of the military men on display here, with their implied mania for control and obsession with commies, are, in fact, just a few tweaks away from becoming Dr. Strangelove's General Jack D. Ripper. Still, if fun is being made, Battle Beneath the Earth is doing a superhuman job of feigning stone-faced earnestness throughout, never once tipping its hat or giving the audience the slightest glimmer of a wink. Lieutenant Commander Vance Cassidy, by the way, is portrayed by Ed Bishop, who, of all the actors in Battle Beneath the Earth, probably makes the largest blip on the radar screens of Teleport City's readers. Though he was born in Brooklyn, there was something about Bishop--perhaps his weathered farmboy good looks or unaccented TV announcer's voice--that seems to have struck British casting agents as being quintessentially middle-American, because his early career consisted largely of bit parts as token American astronauts, low level military functionaries and mission control operators in a number of British productions. Around the time of making Battle Beneath the Earth, he was providing the voice of Captain Blue in Gerry Anderson's puppet series Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. That would lead, a couple of years later, to him donning a platinum wig and taking the lead role of Commander Ed Straker in Anderson's first live action series, UFO--if not the best, than certainly one of the most stylish science fiction programs of the Sixties.     Anyway, Shore's initial visit to the (Underground) Atomic Detection Center proves unfruitful, as Cassidy's equipment is more attuned to picking up Champaign corks popping in the Kremlin than it is hundreds of Chinese burrowing away right beneath our feet. Undaunted, Shore heads to the collapsed mine in Oregon where, while exploring a disused section, he stumbles upon a freshly made tunnel whose walls have apparently been hewn via the application of extraordinary heat. He also finds a medallion that someone has left behind that has a Chinese dragon on it. This discovery leads to Shore being authorized to return to the mine with a small group of combat soldiers. This second time around, Shore and the soldiers happen upon a big yellow tank thing bearing the same dragon insignia as the medallion, which is in the process of carving a tunnel through the rock using high intensity lasers. (These lasers are portrayed by a couple of extra-bright headlamps--but have no fear; the use of drawn-on cartoon laser beams will be used at later points as dramatic effect requires.) They follow the laser tank to an underground chamber in which a number of Asians in lab coats, as well as a few soldiers, are tending to some large, black, lozenge-shaped things which also bear the same dragon insignia. "Chinese!", exclaims one of the soldiers. "With atom bombs!", exclaims Kerwin Matthew in reply. At this, Shore and company leap from hiding and waste the whole group in a hail of machinegun fire. This tactic, while effective in a very limited sense, leaves quite a few questions with little hope of being answered, such as just who all of these freshly dead Chinese people are working for. As we will soon learn, the answer to that is General Chan Lu, a rogue Chinese officer who has seized his country's plutonium stores and held his government hostage while pursuing his own personal plan to nuke the U.S. to rubble using a system of world-spanning tunnels dug by his private troops over the course of three years. Serving loyally at his side are the evil scientific genius Dr. Kengh Lee and his key military aid Major Chai, both of whom have to compete for attention with his ever-present pet falcon.     Now, as far as I could tell, all of those Chinese military personnel gunned down by Shore and his men, like most of the non-speaking Asian roles in Battle Beneath the Earth, were played by actual Asians, but the door slams pretty hard on race-appropriate casting once we get to the speaking roles. Chan Lu and Kengh Lee, for instance, are played by veteran character actors and British TV stalwarts Martin Benson and Peter Elliott, and they do so in a dispiriting display of the most egregious putty-eyed Orientalism you could imagine. In all seriousness, if there was just one of them it might be easier to get around, but between the two of them they're like a tag team of Fu Manchus trying to out "ah so" one another in a taxing display of excruciating inscrutability. Major Chai, also, is played by a British actor, David Spenser, though in a comparably lower key. It is only Paula Li Shiu, out of all the Asian actors on screen, who gets a speaking role, playing Dr. Arnn, a functionary of Chan Lu's who shows up in one scene to hypnotize a captive Peter Arne using a handheld electric fan. By the way, out of all the actors in Battle Beneath the Earth, Peter Arne is definitely the one most worth watching. For one thing, he's perfect for a comic book movie like this, because he looks like he was drawn by Steve Ditko; his face a collection of anxious lines that looks like just one more stressor could cause it to collapse in upon itself. Furthermore, in a field of stubbornly one-layered characters, his is the one that strives the most toward three dimensionality. Kramer is conflicted, resentful of his earlier treatment by the military establishment, but driven by a sense of duty once he is called upon to rejoin the cause, and Arne brings a twitchy irascibility to his portrayal that makes him the focus of every scene he's in. Arne was yet another fixture of 1960s British TV (I swear, I don't think there's a single member of the cast of Battle Beneath the Earth who didn't make a guest appearance on Danger Man) and I was sad to learn that he left this world under violent circumstances, the victim of murder in 1983. I wish I could pay him better tribute than simply saying that he was the best actor in Battle Beneath the Earth, but there you go. At least I mean it sincerely.     Now I have to mention here that I will be describing things in Battle Beneath the Earth that will sound much more exciting or colorful than they actually appear on screen. To counter this, I suggest that you apply to every mental image conjured by these descriptions a sort of down-sizing formula, reducing the scale of what you see in your mind by a factor of about, oh, eighty percent or so. For instance, when I describe a clash between Chinese and American soldiers, you might think of it as involving actual armies, when in reality there will be no more than a dozen people on either side. This was done, I imagine, not only to save on the cost of employing extras, but also because that is about as many people as the small sets could accommodate. To give some idea, also, of the level of art direction and set design on display, I should call your attention to the command headquarters of General Chan Lu. It appears to have been staged on a single cave set that was redressed and used for the majority of the film's subterranean locations, and is pretty lazily decorated with whatever could be purchased cheaply and easily from a Chinatown gift shop. There are a couple of Oriental rugs slung on the wall, one of those folding screens, some Chinese lanterns and a couple of dragon statues, etc. Pretty shoddy, really, and fully in keeping with the laziness of the stereotypes portrayed by Benson and Elliott (which is the true source of their offensiveness, really: that they're less the result of racism than they are of the filmmakers just not giving a shit). Similarly, the high tech headquarters of the Los Alamos (Underground) Atomic Detection Center is comprised of a surprising amount of exposed aluminum sheeting and, if not for all of those colorful wall maps with all their flashing lights to distract us, might look more like the kitchen in a run-down elementary school cafeteria. Finally, on the prop front, the Chinese laser tank is appealing in a life-sized toy kind of way, but looks like it was probably made out of wood, and when the U.S. makes their own version of the tank, it appears to be just the same prop painted blue. (See, theirs is yellow and ours is blue. Blue vs. yellow. Get it?)     So, with all that in mind, let's return to the business of plot synopsis. After successfully defusing all of those atomic bombs (Matthews' Shore is one of those old fashioned omni-abled sci-fi movie heroes that we here love so much: not just good with the science, but also with using his fists and, if the plot requires, dismantling nuclear weapons), Shore and his small team of soldiers are sent back for another foray into the tunnel. This time Chan Lu's men lead them into a trap which is comprised of a bucket of steam-emitting nuclear waste that one of the Chinese soldiers appears to detonate using a Roadrunner-style plunger. What follows is just one of the movie's instances of people running away from a nuclear blast--though, in this case, with only varied success, as many of Shore's men end up getting killed. This is cold realism in action, of course, because everyone knows that you need at least ten minutes to make egress on foot from the effects of an Atomic explosion, which is the reason why Shore and his crew are later able to jog to safety after detonating several full-sized nukes. You can't overemphasize the importance of lead time. After this failure, team USA gets the jump on Chan Lu thanks to that aforementioned "condition silent" business, and are able to create a brightly-lit wall map showing the locations of his tunnels. Admiral Hillebrand determines that the General's main supply tunnel under the Pacific can be accessed by way of an inactive Hawaiian volcano, and assigns Shore and his men the task of destroying it, while at the same time bringing Kramer back onto the team to create the blue version of the laser tank. It is at this point that we see the eleventh hour introduction of a sexy lady scientist (hey, who let that thirteen year old into the writing session?), Tila Yung, portrayed by Vivienne Ventura. Ventura ends up being a fairly innocuous presence, and provides someone for Shore to mack on during his downtime from saving the world, but she is disconcertingly orange in color, and has a strange vocal inflection that sounds like it's half accent and half speech impediment which I found a little distracting at times.     Anyway, it is in the bowels of the Earth below that Hawaiian volcano that Battle Beneath the Earth's final battle beneath the Earth finally takes place. Of course, the way things work out, it ends up being just Shore, Tila Yung and Sergeant Mulberry (played by Al Mulock, who is sadly probably most famous for committing suicide while in costume during location shooting for Once Upon a Time in the West) holding up our end of the battle. Numbers aren't important, however. What is important is that this battle affords the opportunity for Martin Benson to strut around and make pronouncements like "Our enemies stands naked before us!" and "Logic is the American's god!", and for Shore, Yung and Mulberry to steal some of Chang Lu's soldiers' uniforms and try to imitate Chinese people by speaking English in robot voices, and, finally, for the three of them to stand on a cliff, confusingly looking straight ahead at what is revealed to be an aerial view of a nuclear explosion. For all its failings, Battle Beneath the Earth is a difficult movie to hate. In my case, this is partly due to it having the disarming quality of seeming like it was the result of someone watching me play army men on my bedroom floor when I was six and then making a movie out of it (though, of course, with much lower production values). In fact, it's difficult to even call it a bad movie. What it is, in reality, is a solidly mediocre movie, though one whose mere adequacy is rendered bad when viewed in comparison to its over-reaching concept. Star Kerwin Matthews, director Tully and scenarist Vetter all contribute valiantly to maintaining that level of mediocrity, insuring that our hero will never diverge from a stubborn, slate-like blandness, that no camera composition will be inventive enough to call attention to itself, and that no situation will be novel enough to deliver any kind of actual surprise. Against that backdrop, the pulse-raising moral offense incited by the minstrelsy of Martin Benson and Peter Elliott actually comes as some kind of gift, as does the genuine quirkiness of Peter Arne's performance. The way it cagily intertwines itself with childhood nostalgia also makes Battle Beneath the Earth one of those infuriating films that always seems better in recollection than when actually viewed. There's no harm in that, of course, other than that it encourages repeat viewings, which, believe me, the actual film really doesn't hold up to. It's a pleasant enough diversion on the first pass, but once it's done, it's time to close the toy box and move on. Labels: Science Fiction, Year: 1967 posted by Todd at 1:07 PM | 2 Comments Wednesday, October 01, 2008In the Dust of the Stars Release Year: 1976Countries: East Germany, Romania Starring: Jana Brejchova, Alfred Struwe, Ekkehard Schall, Milan Beli, Silvia Popovici, Violeta Andrei, Leon Niemczyk, Regine Heintze, Mihai Mereuta, Stefan Mihailescu-Braila, Aurelia Dumitrescu, Zephi Alsec Writer: Gottfried Kolditz Director: Gottfried Kolditz Cinematographer: Peter Suring Music: Karl-Ernst Sasse Producer: Helmut Klein Availability: Buy it from Amazon  You'd think that the isolation of Soviet-style communism would have at least shielded the citizens of East Germany from the worst excesses of seventies fashion, but the 1976 space opera In the Dust of the Stars tells us otherwise. Neither, apparently, did it prevent the creatives at the state-run DEFA studio from falling under the influence of such decadent western cultural products as Jess Franco movies and the swinging sci-fi TV series of Gerry Anderson. That this film never saw release on this side of the Iron Curtain is no surprise, given that the vision of a socialist utopia it presents -- marked by free love, frequent casual nudity, and a distinctly lopsided female-to-male ratio -- is one that many healthy young Western men could easily get behind. The resulting sudden spike in defections Eastward would have been truly crippling to national security. DEFA jumped into the sci-fi game in fine style with 1960's The Silent Star, and would return to the genre intermittently over the next twenty years. Director Gottfried Kolditz, who was most known for music-based films and Westerns, (yes, DEFA made Westerns, and I'll be getting around to reviewing those soon), helmed two such films, starting with 1970's Signals: A Space Adventure. Reportedly an East German answer to 2001, Signals was obviously enough of a success to merit returning to the well, and, in 1976, Kolditz both wrote and directed In the Dust of the Stars, a participation with Romania's Buftea studios that, in addition to including a number of Romanian actors in the cast, made good use of Romanian locations such as the distinctly alien terrain surrounding the Berca Mud Volcanoes near the Carpathian Mountains.     Having watched In the Dust of the Stars right on the heels of The Silent Star, it's impossible for me not to compare the two. Though I enjoyed both, it struck me that the later film didn't have quite the same air of moment as The Silent Star. This is understandable, of course, since The Silent Star was indeed momentous: not only DEFA's first science fiction film, but also, in intention, their offering to mark the tenth anniversary of the GDR and, as such, the studio's most expensive production to date. In the Dust of the Stars, though competently crafted, seems a little more routine by comparison, bearing the productions values and narrative scope of an episode of a typical sci-fi TV series of its era -- though one with a surprising amount of completely gratuitous nudity, especially considering this was a production subsidized by a government not known for its permissiveness. The television-scale nature of In the Dust of the Stars' plot should become apparent in the telling, as it concerns a crew of space travelers who find themselves on one of those planets where everything seems just a little too good to be true. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that describe the plot of every other episode of every single one of the Star Trek series? In any case, in this version, an expedition crew -- comprised of four women and two men -- heads out from the planet Cynro toward the unexplored planet Tem 4 in response to a mysterious distress call. Due to the length of the voyage, many months have passed by the time of their arrival, at which point the conveniently humanoid inhabitants of Tem 4 claim no knowledge of the signal. Instead, the Temians go out of their way to prove to the visitors that everything is fine, just fine -- super great, in fact -- and, in so doing arouse the suspicions of the crew.     The leader of the expedition from Cynro is Captain Akala, played by popular Czech actress Jana Brejchova, the closest thing to an internationally-recognized star you'll see in the film's cast. Brejchova starred in dozens of films on both sides of the Communist divide -- including 1961's The Fabulous Baron Munchausen and the West German eurospy entry Operation Solo -- and was married for a short time to director Milos Forman. Her presence here adds to the international flavor of a cast that, despite being a bit top heavy with Romanians, also includes representatives of the acting profession from Yugoslavia and, of course, Germany in leading roles. Among the Cynro astronauts alone you'll find Germany's Alfred Struwe as Suko, Yugoslavia's Leon Niemczyk as comic relief engineer Thob (the comic relief engineer being apparently a staple of the space opera genre no matter what country it originates from), and Romanians Silvia Popvici and Violeta Andrei as crew members Illik and Rall. Now, in addition to their refreshing gender make-up, there are other things about the Cynro crew, only subtly hinted at for the most part, that make them just a little different from what you'd normally expect from the militarily-ranked team manning your average movie starship. I think, also, that these things are meant to suggest the way things roll back on Cynro. For one thing, this gang is just a tad more touchy-feely with one another than the behavior of those serving aboard the Enterprise and its like have accustomed us to. Secondly, Suko, as a not-all-that-in-shape middle aged guy with thinning hair, clearly has the arrangement to beat onboard the vessel, as he seems to be the boy toy of at least two of the female crew members, including the Captain and her blond colleague Miu. Miu, for her part, also might have a thing for the ladies, as one later scene seems to suggest. While all of this implied hanky-panky provides the opportunity for a bit of casual nudity and light petting between the cast members, it's all presented very matter-of-factly, with none of the exploitational hubba hubba you might expect. Wham Bam Thank You Spaceman this is not -- and the tone seems to suggest that the egalitarian ethos observed on this lots' home planet extends to everyone getting an equal piece, not just of the proverbial pie, but of each other, as well.     Miu, by the way, is played by German actress Regine Heintze. Before I could glean the names of either her or her character, I kept referring to her in my notes as "Cherie", because her blond shag, ghostly pallor, stoned expression and penchant for jumpsuits made her remind me of Cherie Currie, the original singer for The Runaways. Cherie Currie was also in Foxes. A few years back, when I was living in L.A., I met a guy who, by way of introduction, told me that he had appeared in Foxes. This was obviously his way of telling me that he was someone worth knowing. Now, keep in mind that this really was just a few years ago, not in the early eighties, when the movie Foxes maybe -- just maybe -- might have had some kind of cultural currency. Still, while it serves as a compelling example of exactly the type of thing that sent me scurrying back to my home in Northern California without looking back, I can't fault the guy, because I certainly can't make any kind of claim of that magnitude. Sure, I was an extra in a Robbie Benson movie once (as "Punk Rocker No. 15" or something), but this guy had a speaking role in Foxes with Jodie Foster and Cherie Currie. That's awesome. Ah, but I digress. Another thing that should be noted about the Cynro crew is their dress sense. And I refer to it collectively, because in most cases their outfits, though changed frequently, all match. In addition to their powder blue flight suits and bright orange astronaut gear, there seems to be a set of his-and-hers togs for every occasion. This includes the rust colored, flare-legged leather jumpsuits they wear for partying, as well as some body-hugging polyester numbers that prove that, no matter how advanced the inhabitants of Cynro may be, they still haven't conquered the problem of cameltoe. When left to their own sartorial devices, the individual crew members' tastes tend to veer pleather-ward, most deliciously in an ensemble I like to refer to as "The Stinger", worn by female crew member Illik: a wet-look, head-to-toe, black-and-bright-yellow affair that she finishes off with a pair of six-inch platforms. Honorable mention should also go to Suko's black leather overalls worn over a red turtleneck. The ABBA-liciousness of all of this makes the crew look more prepared for performing at Eurovision than undertaking an expedition to a faraway planet, and insures that In the Dust of the Stars, while quite homely overall, is at least never dull to look at.     The habilimentary splendor doesn't end at the starship door, however, as the residents of Tem 4 have a lot to offer in terms of improbable costumery on their own. Most of this obviously draws on the same Eurotrash disco futurism you see at play in Italian space junk like Starcrash, but here looks more like the kind of thing you'd see worn in a sci-fi themed musical number from a 70s variety show. There's also the tendency to bare beefy male flesh in all the least flattering ways imaginable, thanks to an abundance of short leather togas and mesh shirts reminiscent of those worn on Gerry Anderson's UFO. Of course, the Temians have every right to be flamboyant, because they are a happy people and, above all, fun, which is a pretty special characteristic for an entire planet's population to share. (I can't imagine anyone ever describing the inhabitants of Earth in their entirety as being "fun" -- but, hey, its something for us, as a planet, to strive for.) Anyway, that is what the Temians' transparently jovial representative Ronk (Yugoslavian actor Milan Beli, who also graced the cast of She Devils of the SS) wants the visitors from Cynro to believe. To this end, he throws a lavish party in their honor, at which no shorthand for decadent excess is spared. Pythons slither among the colorful eur d'oeuvres as couples make love in swings suspended from the ceiling and diaphanously-garbed acrobats perform on a giant trampoline to orgasmic screams of delight from the blearily intoxicated crowd. Meanwhile, the apparently peanut-brained -- but to-a-one blandly attractive -- residents of the planet flatter the bedazzled astronauts with their fawning attentions as a chorus line of women in every stage of undress dance robotically to rinky-tink Casiotone space disco.     And it is at this point that I must address the music in In the Dust of the Stars, because, while the movie is otherwise professionally mounted in every sense, the score has a weird, distinctly homemade feel to it. In fact, the theme song sounds like a fledgling bedroom recording made by two over-earnest pubescent indie girls -- and things actually kind of go downhill from there. A string theme used during the party sequence is actually okay, and there are a couple of fairly anonymous stabs at minimalist electro-disco, but, aside from that, a lot of the rest is comprised of aimless Casio noodling and proggy sounding guitar explorations which are often somewhat muddily recorded. To put a finer point on it: Remember that stoner roommate you had that one time who, while you were at work making a living, spent the day fiddling around with his little home studio set-up? And remember the great lengths you went to never, ever have to "check out" any of the musical products of that fiddling? Well, if you had done, I wager that it would have sounded a lot like the soundtrack to this movie. So, good on you. Anyway, during the course of the party Ronk and his team of toadies (and I use the term "toadies" advisedly: they laugh in unison at all of his jokes) manage to put some kind of whammy on Akala and her companions, and as a result they all arrive back at the ship chattering about how "cheerful" and "fun" the Temians are, just like the people in that old SNL skit who keep saying the hypnotist's act is "better than Cats". This raises suspicion on the part of Suko, who sat the party out -- especially once Akala blithely proclaims that the ship will be returning to Cynro with no mention of their original mission whatsoever. Suko questions Miu on the matter, but, being under the influence of the Temians' brain-addling techniques, she is able to shine little light on the subject. After Suko departs her cabin, she does, however, engage in a protracted and apparently spontaneous display of nude interpretive dancing that is so completely uncalled for by anything that comes before or after it in the film that you just have to stand up and applaud. By the way, after she left The Runaways, Cherie Currie for a while had an act with her sister, who looked pretty much exactly like her, though I don't think they were technically twins. I had a friend who worked at the club where they played when they came to town, so I went to see them. It was pretty terrible.     Determined to solve the mystery behind his crewmates' actions, Suko commandeers one of the ship's shuttle pods and flies back toward the Temian city, where he eventually uncovers the Temians' secret, which is that they really aren't the Temians at all. They are instead an occupying alien race who has enslaved the planet's natural inhabitants -- a race called the Turi -- and put them to work in a massive underground mine. It was, in fact, members of a Turi rebel faction that put out the distress call to which Captain Akala and her crew responded to in the first place. This revelation comes to Suko during one of In the Dust of the Stars' most impressive set pieces, set inside an actual salt mine of staggering vastness. Adding to the spectacular scale of this scene is the sheer number of extras who were recruited to play the Turi slaves. It's the type of "cast of thousands" moment that today would make use of CGI augmentation to save on manpower. This abrupt pulling away of the faux Temians' mask of civility leads to a confrontation between Captain Akala and Ronk's superior, a man referred to only as "The Boss" or "The Chief". "The Chief" is played by German born Ekkehard Schall, by all accounts a respected stage actor whose presence in In the Dust of the Stars was apparently expected to lend it some kind of high culture pedigree. If you think that tells you exactly what to expect, you're right. Within moments of Schall's arrival on screen, you can barely see the scenery for the teethmarks. Schall -- aided by a particularly exuberant wardrobe and hair that is spray-painted a different primary color in every scene -- plays the character as a hyperactive freakshow, going from hammering away on a futuristic synthesizer while panting sexually at one moment, to doing a weird, waddling victory dance in another, all the while displaying a disquieting arsenal of physical tics -- chief among which are the darting, serpentine head movements he does in mimicry of the ever-present pythons that seem to inhabit every corner of Tem 4. It's certainly an entertaining performance, but more interesting is how it affords Jana Brejchova a chance to really display her own acting chops by simply maintaining an authoritative calm while he's doing all of his attention-seeking spazzing out.     Ultimately, the question for Akala and her crew boils down to the very Kirk-ian one of whether they should interfere in the affairs of Tem 4 -- and thus involve their own planet in an interplanetary incident -- or just turn their backs and let matters take their course. After all, as Akala -- who has apparently somehow managed to read Marx while on Cynro -- intimates, the occupiers' system contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. But is it right to, through inaction, condemn the Turi to the amount of hardship they must suffer during whatever amount of time it takes for the inevitable turnaround to take place? I won't give away the answer. I'll just say that the process of arriving at it involves lots of explosions, hundreds of rioting extras, and cheesy-looking futuristic tanks fashioned from old industrial farming equipment. While In the Dust of the Stars' plot is to some extent ideologically driven, I think you'd have to be pro-slavery in order to find its political content at all controversial. After all, who can't get behind freeing the poor Turi -- and, after their life of grueling servitude, would deny that they've earned the right to a utopian existence marked by copious amounts of pleather-clad free love, whether with or without communist overtones? In any case, the movie's function as a political relic is vastly overshadowed by its more important function as a harmlessly engaging slice of cinematic cheese. Or is it? Perhaps buried within the sweaty crevices of all of those constricting, unnaturally-fibred garments is a truth capable of enriching the lives of us all: That truth being that the desire to dress like ABBA and attend clothing optional parties inspired by Jess Franco movies crosses all political boundaries. Maybe the people of the world really can be united in fun-ness, after all.  Labels: Country: Germany, Science Fiction, Year: 1976 posted by Todd at 6:10 PM | 9 Comments Saturday, August 16, 2008The Silent Star Release Year: 1960Countries: East Germany, Poland Starring: Yoko Tani, Oldrich Lukes, Ignacy Machowski, Julius Ongewe, Michail N. Postnikow, Kurt Rackelmann, Gunther Simon, Tang Hua-Ta, Lucyna Winnicka Writers: Jan Fethke, Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Gunter Reisch, Gunther Rucker, Alexander Stenbock-Fermor. Kurt Maetzig, J. Barkhauer Director: Kurt Maetzig Cinematographer: Joachim Hasler Music: Andrzej Markowski Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Who'd have thought, back in the 1960s, that our nation's youngsters were being fed communist propaganda by one of the most mercenary elements within the American film industry? Well, a lot of people, probably. It was a pretty paranoid time. Still, had they known, those people could have at least taken comfort in the fact that it was being done out of only the most purely capitalistic motives. After all, Eastern Bloc science fiction movies presented an irresistible lure to B movie producers like Roger Corman and his ilk. Being that they served as representations of the bright, technologically-advanced future achievable through socialism, these films were often the beneficiaries of relatively lavish government funding, and, as a result, boasted special effects and production design that were well beyond what makers of American sci-fi cheapies could afford. All that remained for these yanks to do, then, was to acquire these films and then strip them of everything that might identify them as being the product of a communist country -- a process of Americanization that often resulted in the original films being disfigured almost beyond recognition. It is this process that resulted in the 1960 Russian film Nebo Zouyot -- which featured a heroic team of Soviet astronauts beating out a markedly less distinguished crew from a certain other country in the race to Mars -- being transformed into the Corman-produced Battle Beyond the Sun, a transformation that in part involved then novice director Francis Ford Copola inserting into it scenes of warring penis and vagina monsters. Corman would similarly recruit a young Peter Bogdanovich to spice up another Russian space travel yarn, Planeta Bur, with footage of Mamie Van Doren lounging around in a clamshell bikini, thus facilitating that film's transformation into 1966's Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. This, however, was only after Corman had initially repurposed Planeta Bur's impressive special effects footage for Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet in 1965, which in that case involved incorporating scenes of a befuddled-looking Basil Rathbone and aging Howard Huges discovery Faith Domergue sitting around the set of Corman's Planet of Blood pretending to talk to the Russian actors via shortwave radios. One example of Eastern Bloc sci-fi cinema that managed to reach US screens in somewhat less bastardized form was Ikarie XB 1, a Czech film based on Polish author Stanislaw Lem's novel The Magellan Cloud, which ended up being released by AIP in 1963 under the title Voyage to the End of the Universe.     To me the most interesting of these films was another adaptation of one of Lem's novels, the 1960 East German/Polish co-production The Silent Star, which Crown International released in a substantially edited, but not entirely re-invented, form as First Spaceship on Venus later the same year. The book that it's based on is Astronauci (The Astronauts), which was Lem's first full-length novel. A work of science fiction situated squarely in the Juvenile category -- and somewhat at odds with the thoughtful, deeply philosophical novels that Lem would later become known for -- the book was commissioned by a publisher who demanded it be written in the prevailing style of Socialist Realism. Lem, who was no stranger to clashes with communist censors -- and who chose the science fiction genre in part because it seemed like the best medium in which to couch his more potentially controversial ideas -- would later disown the book, and no doubt would have been none too happy about those propagandistic elements of it retained within The Silent Star. Still, those political sentiments are not core to the film, and, as such, don't prevent it from being a compelling piece of imaginative cinema, regardless of origin. My interest in The Silent Star stems in part from the fact that I read quite a few of Lem's novels when I was in my early twenties. He wrote a sort of anti-mystery called The Investigation that is still one of my favorite books -- and which hasn't failed to anger a single person I've foisted it upon with its refusal to deliver anything resembling the type of resolution that its genre dictates. To most people he's known primarily as the author of Solaris, which has been made into film versions both George Clooney-free and George Clooney-rich by Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh, respectively. Until fairly recently I was under the impression that those were the only film adaptations of a Lem novel made -- and this despite my repeated, rapt viewings of First Spaceship on Venus as a kid. Given this, the revelation that this Saturday afternoon TV chestnut was actually an adaptation of a book by a favorite author enhanced it with a newfound allure.     Even without this connection, though, when watching the movie today -- even in its English-dubbed form on one of the countless, crappy public domain DVDs on which it can be found -- it's easy for me to see why it held some fascination for me all those years ago. Rather than presenting, as its origins might lead you to expect, a vision of the future rooted within the tangibly achievable limits of technology and dogged human industry, it relies to a surprising degree on the purely fantastic in its visual imagery, seeking first and foremost to engage a sense of wonder over simply instilling pride in the socialist state's potential accomplishments. When viewed in its original scope and richly vivid Agfacolor presentation, you get a further sense of just how much effort was put into presenting this vision. It's a truly terrific looking film, right up there with big budgeted American science fiction films of its era like Forbidden Planet and... well, Forbidden Planet. The Silent Star was the first science fiction film to be produced by East Germany's state-run studio DEFA (in this case, in co-production with Poland's Film Polski), and was also the studio's most expensive production to date. It was originally intended for release on the tenth anniversary of the Germany Democratic Republic in 1959, but was delayed due, in part, to some squabbling behind the scenes. I get the sense that the production was marked by a constant struggle between officials at the studio and the government's cultural ministers over the extent to which the film would be a delivery device for audience thrills or propaganda. Filming even came close to being shut down when higher-ups in the bureaucracy learned that producers were seeking French participation in the project, both in the form of financial backing and in the acting services of Simone Signoret and Yves Montand. (The filmmakers seem to compensate for the inevitable absence of those stars by naming one of the reporters in the movie "Jeanne Moreau".) Ultimately, though, after much rewriting and turnover of personnel, a balance was struck, with the resulting film combining apparently just the right amount of effects-laden cautionary space opera and contrasts between peace-loving, international-cooperation seeking Socialists and suspicious, war-profiteering Americans. (To be fair, the main East German and American characters in the film are presented as having a deep friendship borne of their mutual commitment to peaceful scientific progress, so an obviously conscientious effort is made not to demonize Americans as a whole.)     The movie's story is set in motion when, in the distant future of 1970, a strange cylinder is found in the Gobi desert -- a cylinder which, it is later determined, was ejected from a Venusian spacecraft that crashed in Siberia in 1908 (and which, in turn, was the source of the massive explosion that subsequently became known as the Tunguska Event). The cylinder is, in fact, a recording device, but, unfortunately, a severely damaged one, and it is entrusted to an international team of experts to translate what little remains of the message it contains. (This particular scenario -- of a wide range of international thinkers from various disciplines convening to decipher the meaning of a message from outer space -- was extrapolated upon by Lem in his later novel His Master's Voice.) Unfortunately, the only part of the recording that the assembled brain trust is able to make out is a cataloging of our planet's elements, and it is assumed for some reason that this is the preamble to some sort of message to the people of Earth from the Venusians. Attempts to contact Venus are met with an ominous silence, and so it is determined that a Soviet-built spacecraft originally intended for a mission to Mars, called The Cosmokrator, will be repurposed and sent to Venus with an international crew. At this point the project leader, Professor Arsenyev (Michail N. Postnikow), is asked by a reporter why a fully Soviet crew is not being sent, providing the government-vetted screenplay one of its first opportunities to espouse through him the socialist peoples' dedication to peace and cooperation between the nations. Soon the Cosmokrator, a streamlined piece of phantasmagoria that looks like one of Chesley Bonastell's creations on steroids, is on the launch pad and ready to go, and it is only a matter of the members of her international crew being assembled and placed at the ready. The crew's American representative, the physicist Professor Hawling (Oldrich Lukes), must first, however, appeal to the pack of whiskey-swilling suits from the "consortium" that runs his university to allow his participation. They heap scorn upon the project, preferring that he instead stay behind to help them prepare a competing mission, but ultimately let him go, thanks in part to the urging of an idealistic senior professor who contrasts the nobility of the Venus endeavor with the University's dedication to the American project of developing ever deadlier instruments of war. As Hawling arrives at the launch site, he is joined by the ship's Chinese linguist Chen Yu (mainland Chinese actor Tang Hua-Ta), German pilot Brinkmann (Gunther Simon), African communications officer Talua (Julius Ongewe) and Indian mathematician Sikarna (Kurt Rackelmann). Also arriving on the scene is the ship's Polish engineer Solfyk (Ignacy Machowski), an occasion which provides the opportunity to introduce some of the nifty gadgets that the crew will be taking to Venus along with them. These include a small, tank-like robot called Omega, something called the "Jet Propelled Elasti-copter", and two all-terrain vehicles called the Caterpillar and the Turtle, all of which are represented by fairly impressive-looking, full-sized mock-ups.     The opening credits of The Silent Star boast a cast containing "many actors from different countries", but chances are that you've only heard of one of them, the top-billed (in both the U.S. and German versions) actress Yoko Tani. A French citizen of Japanese descent, Tani never made it beyond supporting roles in major productions, but made quite a living as a star of European B movies throughout the sixties, lending the required touch of exoticism to numerous peplum and eurospy films, as well as turning up occasionally on British spy series like Danger Man and Man in a Suitcase. As the Cosmokrator's onboard doctor, Sumiko Ogimura, Tani is clearly intended to be the emotional center of The Silent Star, coming complete with both a tragic back-story and an ill-fated romantic history with another crew member, and spends a lot of the movie crying and making pained expressions as a result. A lot of what I can find written about Tani seems to make a point of mentioning her modest acting capabilities, but, to be honest, given that she's dubbed in both the German and English language versions, its hard for me to make a determination on that point. But what is obvious to the eye is a refined beauty and graceful, delicate presence that is fully appropriate to the demands that The Silent Star's screenwriters have placed upon her. With the crew finally assembled, the Cosmokrator takes off for Venus with Professor Arsenyev in command. And it is during this long journey that The Silent Star starts to drag its heels considerably, thank in large part to that journey being depicted mostly by having the set-bound actors -- though, admittedly, bound to a ship's interior set that is mighty cool looking -- sitting around and describing their progress as they stare into instruments and out the window. I imagine that not showing the actual ship in flight was a cost-cutting measure, because it's not as if special effects director Ernst Kuntsmann wasn't up to the task. Kuntsmann, during his early career, frequently teamed with fellow effects man Eugene Schufftan, and with him developed the pioneering "Schufftan Process" -- first used in Fritz Lang's Metropolis -- which allowed for the simultaneous filming of miniatures and full-scale action. Kuntsmann worked in Hollywood with Schufftan between 1926 and 1928, and after returning to Germany worked with such figures as Lang, Leni Riefenstahl and F.W. Murnau. Among his accomplishments were miniature effects for the 1943 German film Titanic that were reused for the identically-titled American production made ten years later. His miniature effects for The Silent Star, though used sparingly, approach the level of the work that Eiji Tsuburaya was doing for Toho at the time, and contribute immensely to the film's overall technical sheen.     Finally excitement arrives on board the Cosmokrator in the form of news from Earth that the Venusian recording contains, not a message of friendship, but rather a blueprint for invasion. At this, those aboard take a vote as to whether they should continue their mission, and decide unanimously to do so, resolving to attempt to make peace with the planet's inhabitants. And it is with their arrival on Venus that The Silent Star really kicks into gear. Stanislaw Lem always attempted, in his descriptions of other planets and the life thereon, to depict landscapes and beings that were alien to the point of challenging human comprehension (Solaris's sentient ocean being a good example) and here set designer Alfred Hirschmeirer does his best to stay in step with that vision. Though, given the dictates of socialist realism, the sources he draws upon in doing so are a little surprising, seeing as he seems to rely a lot on the imagery of surrealist painters -- especially Joan Miro, and to a lesser extent Salvador Dali -- for his realization of the Venusian terrain. The astronauts encounter a planetary surface covered with structures and formations that, to their minds, could just as easily be organic as engineered, including a forest of oddly-shaped glass-like protuberances, a mysterious gigantic glowing orb, and a pair of bizarre looking conical towers surrounded by what appears to be a living swamp. Devoid of any apparent sentient life, sheathed in constant, abysmal night, and plagued by perpetual violent storms and an obtrusive, serpentine haze, the picture presented is of an environment singularly eerie and hellish. Along with these vexing landmarks, the crew of the Cosmokrator finds evidence of some kind of devastating catastrophe that has scarred the planet's surface and perhaps ended the lives of the Venusians themselves. Sure enough, once the Venusian archives -- in which weird little metallic insects serve as the vessels for recorded knowledge -- are discovered, it's learned that the planet's masters, in their attempts to develop ever more destructive weaponry for use in their assault upon Earth, created a nuclear disaster that ended up wiping out all life on the planet. In addition, the crew discovers that the strange glass forest they encountered is in fact a component of one of those very weapons, an energy generator targeted at Earth -- and that, in their blind fumblings amidst all this mysterious alien technology, they have inadvertently activated and set that weapon in motion. This leaves them with the task of figuring out what the Venusian version of an "off" switch looks like, as well as of getting their now disabled ship spaceborne again once that task is completed. Both will eventually be accomplished, but only by way of great sacrifice on the part of the heroic astronauts.     Having watched the original cut of The Silent Star, it was interesting to revisit First Spaceship on Venus to see exactly what changes were made for the benefit of the U.S. audience. All of the obvious speechifying is gone, of course, as is the scene in which Hawling pleads his case to the suits. A closing shot of the Devo-like workers at the rocket site clasping hands in solidarity was apparently also deemed too commie for American audiences at the time. In addition to that, a predictable reshuffling of nationalities has taken place, with Captain Arsenyev and Brinkmann recast as Americans, and the rest of the international crew purged completely of its Eastern European members, with the engineer Solfyk granted French citizenship and rechristened Girod. Also -- surprise of surprises -- the black guy's screen time seems to have been shaved a little bit. But the changes that I found the most interesting were those to the character portrayed by Yoko Tani. As presented in The Silent Star, a defining aspect of Ogimura's character is that she is a survivor of Hiroshima. This is a fact that is mentioned repeatedly throughout the film, and every one of those mentions has been excised from First Spaceship on Venus, and not always all that artfully. In one scene, her expression becomes anguished as the crew surveys the planet's devastation, and in response to Brinkmann asking her what she's thinking about, she replies, "Hiroshima". In the American version, this reply is changed to "all the damage", which makes it sound as if she is less concerned with the horrific scale of the catastrophe than she is in whether the Venusians' insurance will cover it. Elsewhere there is a scene between her and the linguist Chen Yu in which she confides in him that her exposure to the bomb's radiation has left her barren, a scene which is cut completely from First Spaceship on Venus. There is, however, one visual reference to Hiroshima that remains in the American cut; an image of the Venusians' shadows blasted onto the walls of their city. But without any of the implicit references that preceded it, that image loses some of its impact.     While Tani's constant dropping of the verbal "H" bomb gets a little heavy handed, its complete removal from First Spaceship on Venus ends up being one of the only cuts that actually undermines, rather than enhances, the movie's effectiveness as a taut work of cautionary sci-fi -- especially given that the removal of the other content relieves it of any propagandistic baggage it might have otherwise carried. Apparently, four years after the original Godzilla suffered a similar fate, American distributors still didn't feel that their audience was ready for the controversial notion that the destructive power unleashed at Hiroshima might be seen as having a bit of a dark side. I suppose we can at least thank them for not leadening First Spaceship on Venus with scenes of Raymond Burr of Brian Donlevy standing around in generically decorated rooms trying to look gravely concerned while spouting pointless expositional dialogue. Still, despite greasing the film's narrative wheels with some of its less troubling editing choices, Crown International ultimately did The Silent Star a disservice by way of its tone-deaf dubbing job and the replacement with library music of the film's original score, which thrillingly combines Andrzej Markowski's thundering orchestral work with otherworldly electronic sounds not unlike those used in Forbidden Planet. In the end, there are things that need to be overlooked in order to enjoy either version of this film. But, in terms of technical achievement, the original version of The Silent Star presents a shining example of exactly the type of handsomely-budgeted space adventure that I wish had been more prevalent during its era. It is simply a visual treat, and the amount of imagination apparent in every aspect of its design is a joy to behold. Furthermore, it has a story that is solid and economical enough in its construction to easily survive those instances of ideological lip service that are awkwardly grafted onto it -- and because of that should not present much of a deterrent to enjoyment for even the most dedicated red-basher. I also like how the film's optimistic presentation of a technologically-driven future is balanced by what seems today like a healthy awareness of that technology's dark potential, an aspect which makes The Silent Star seem somewhat ahead of its time. So, in short, I recommend this film. And if you suffer from over familiarity with its much-circulated American incarnation, rest assured that that will only make your experience of it in its pristine form that much more of a revelation. Labels: Country: Germany, Country: Poland, Science Fiction, Year: 1960 posted by Todd at 12:04 AM | 2 Comments Wednesday, July 16, 2008Mighty Gorga Release Year: 1969Country: United States Starring: Anthony Eisley, Megan Timothy, Scott Brady, Kent Taylor, Gary Kent, Greydon Clark, Lee Parrish, Bruce Kimball. Writer: David Hewitt Director: David Hewitt Cinematographer: Gary Graver Music: Charles Walden Producer: John Hewitt Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us Here's a quick way to make yourself appreciate The People That Time Forgot much more than you might otherwise appreciate it. Go watch The Mighty Gorga. In fact, watching The Mighty Gorga will pretty much improve the standing of any film, no matter how reviled, by comparison. Well, except perhaps White Pongo. But short of White Pongo and maybe White Gorilla and Ultraviolet, pretty much any movie looks good when compared to The Mighty Gorga. But don't get the wrong idea. There are plenty of movies that look better when compared to The Mighty Gorga, but a lot of those movies aren't going to be nearly as enjoyable torturous as this unique tale of a down on his luck showman looking to salvage his business by capturing and showcasing a legendary giant gorilla. Stop me if you've heard that one before. The Mighty Gorga comes from a time in cinema history that will probably never come again. The most tempting comparison is to the world of shot on video DIY horror films, but that comparison doesn't bear close scrutiny. On the surface there are similarities. The Mighty Gorga is a product of an era in low budget filmmaking that ran from the sixties until sometime in the 1970s and traces its roots back to the fast-buck junk films of the 30s and 40s -- like the aforementioned White Pongo and White Gorilla -- and the low-rent sci-fi films of the 1950s. The big difference is that those films, even when awful, were often made by professionals and sometimes under the aegis of an actual production studio. The 1960s saw the rise of a sort of alternate Hollywood, based largely out of Florida but certainly not limited to the Sunshine State. Unlike today's crop of DIY video movies, which are primarily the product of a guy and his friends operating out of their living room, this was an actual industry, and their films played across various distribution circuits back when things like regional distribution areas existed.
Most of these films were cranked out to fill screens at drive-ins throughout the South, and the men who made them were as much carnival hucksters and showmen as they were filmmakers. In fact, in some cases, they were literally carnival hucksters. This era in film produced a number of names that most fans of obscure film don't consider to be obscure: H.G. Lewis, Harry Novaks, Doris Wishman, and perhaps the king of them all, David Friedman. By hook and by crook, these people forged a movie industry totally outside the boundaries of Hollywood, and many would maintain, also totally outside the boundaries of any actual talent. But the fact remains that this was a real industry, producing films for theatrical runs and often employing a core circle of actors who were never very good but always seemed available. The Mighty Gorga is one of the few films of that particular type that wasn't shot in Florida, even though for most of the running time I assumed they were doing location work in the Everglades. But it comes to us courtesy of one of one of the "great" names of the era, David L. Hewitt. Hewitt, like many of the men and women working in this arena, was a jack of all trades, master of none: writer, producer, director, effects supervisor. His early work includes now infamous cult "classics" such as The Wizard of Mars, Monsters Crash the Pajama Party, and Journey to the Center of Time -- one of my all-time favorite movie titles because, frankly, what the hell does it mean? What is the center of time? Noon? Amazingly, his later work purely in the realm of special effects includes some movies even casual movie fans ended up seeing, and some work that was actually good: Willow, Leprechaun (hey, compared to The Mighty Gorga, it's a mainstream film), Shocker, and even Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Of course, there was also Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, which was made like ten years after the first film and yet had special effects that were ten times worse. His work on these films is amazing because his work on all his other films is just so awful. The Mighty Gorga is probably the magnum opus of his self-written, self-directed, self-produced special effects extravaganzas, and watching it, all you will wonder is how the hell the guy ever scored a gig on a film being done by ILM or Disney.
And so we open with shots of a horrifying sacrifice, as a listlessly writhing maiden is chained to an altar while post-production sighs of either terror, protest, or boredom are looped in. In prompt fashion, she is plucked up and eaten by the film's title monster, Gorga, a gigantic ape that is realized by taking a guy, putting him the cheapest novelty store gorilla costume possible (complete with googly eyes), then filming him from a low angle as he peers out from behind some bushes. It's going to be tough to top such a thrilling opening, but Hewitt does his best by cutting to a circus performance that is slightly less listless than the sacrifice. But times are bad at the circus, as some big time corporate circus is going around and buying up all the top acts so they can shut down the independents. This leaves manly-named circus owner Mark Remington (Anthony Eisley) on the verge of bankruptcy, as is explained to us in an extremely long-winded monologue by a clown who is in the process of wiping off his grease paint as he talks to a concession vendor, yet never actually removes any grease paint from his face. The clown, though a relatively unimportant addition to the cast, is played by Bruce Kimball, who does double duty as said clown and as the leader of the mysterious tribe that sacrifices women to mighty Gorga and curses the intrusion of the white man, even though the tribe itself is played entirely by white people or, at the very darkest, a couple Latinos. Mark has a last ditch plan to save the circus from going out of business, at least for a little while. And it turns out that his plan seems to involve spending a whole lot more money than it would cost to just pay off the debts. On the third-hand story of a guy who was talking to a guy who works for a Africa-based big game trapper named either Tonga Jack or Congo Jack, Mark plans to fly to Africa, hook up with Jack, and help him capture a legendary giant ape, so tat Mark can then purchase him to put in the circus as the new headlining act. Mark doesn't seem to understand just how many jugglers and carnival strippers he could hire for that amount of money. So off we go to Africa, which looks a lot like a clean, space age airport that you might find in California, complete with air conditioning and pay phones. I've clocked some hours in third world airports, and I can't imagine how I've always managed to miss the ones that are this nice, instead always ending up in some dingy, hot hellhole with malfunctioning equipment, a guy asleep on the tarmac, and two-week flight delays. I assumed that any airport you fly into in order to meet a guy named Congo Jack would be of similar quality, but I guess that's just my First World snobbery. I also assumed that most Congolese airports would probably be full of black people, or at least contain a few black people. But I was wrong there, as well. It's almost as if this movie isn't filming in Africa at all, but that can't be right, because after some stock footage of planes taking off and landing, Mark walks out the door of the airport and says, "Well, here I am in Africa!"
Once in "Africa," Mark attempts to meet up with Congo Jack, or maybe it's Tonga Jack, but not before he tours a local zoo, which is surprisingly nice. I would guess that, for Africans, going to a zoo full of monkeys and antelope would be sort of like me going to a zoo full of house cats and sewer rats. But they needed to pad out the running time, and this way we get a nice look at all the animals that inhabit Africa. Eventually, Mark heads off to meet Tonga or Congo Jack, but first there's an hilarious bit where he meets one of the three black men in all of Africa and attempts to speak to him in some pidgin form of whatever language they speak in whatever country this is supposed to be. I assume it's The Congo, but only because one of the characters is named Congo Jack. But since "Congo" was often used in crummy movies to mean "pretty much all of Africa, except the parts which are the Sahara," we could really be anywhere. And if the guy's name is actually Tonga Jack, then we're way off the map, because even though my geography doesn't enable me to label every country on an unmarked globe, I'm pretty sure Tonga is not in Africa. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's about as far away from Africa as is physically possible. Anyway, after a couple stuttering sentences in the local tongue, Mark is interrupted by the black guy who says, "I don't understand what you are saying. Do you speak any English?" in a perfect Sydney Poitier accent. That's pretty much the film's one stab at intentional humor, and predictably enough, it's not as funny as any of the unintentional humor. It turns out that the local, George (Lee Parrish), works for Tonga Jack (at this point, I revised my early waffling; they're definitely saying Tonga Jack), but that Tonga Jack is missing, possibly having returned to Tonga. Instead, the business is being run by Jack's daughter, Tonga April (Megan Timothy). April explains that her father disappeared while searching for the legendary Gorga. Also, there is an unscrupulous competitor who keeps trying to force her to sell the business, even going so far as to set her prize water buffalo on fire then show up seconds later going, "I heard your prized water buffalo was set on fire." Empathizing with Rachel, Mark whips out a thousand bucks in cash and a cashier's check for another five thousand, and pays off the woman's debt. Once again, perhaps someone should remind Mark that he's spent probably over ten grand at this point on a scheme to save his circus from bankruptcy. One gets the feeling that Mark could pretty much drive anything into bankruptcy no matter how many giant gorillas and trapeze artists he had working for him.
Mark, April, and George decide to head off into the jungle to capture Gorga and, with any luck, find and rescue Tonga Jack. How exactly three people plan to transport a twenty foot tall gorilla with googly eyes through the jungle, and then later across the ocean to America, is probably not worth wondering about. April's rival, Morgan, has decided that the put-upon trio is seeking some lost treasure, so he decides to shadow them on their quest. Unfortunately, we too must shadow them on their quest, and at this point, the film settles down into a really long series of shots featuring April and Mark (George, being the most competent, stays behind to guard the camp) in their Woolworth safari outfits walking through whatever park they filmed this movie in. And this goes on for a long while. Worst of all, it's not even intercut with any gratuitous stock footage of interesting animals. Every now and then, they'll stop and say, "My God! Those are giant prehistoric mushrooms!" but they never show us any giant prehistoric mushrooms, even though chicken wire and paper mache must have been within the budget of this film, assuming as I do that the budget was roughly equal to the budget we had for building a homecoming parade float my senior year in high school -- and I managed to make a paper mache football player kicking a paper mache eagle on that budget! About the only effort The Mighty Gorga makes to convince us we are in a prehistoric lost world is scattering some tissue paper flowers around the bushes. Things get even worse when Mark and April begin the tortuous mountain climb. This effect is achieved by having them pretend to struggle mightily up what is obviously a very mild incline, only the camera is tilted so as to make it appear much steeper. This goes on forever, with the mind-bending tedium only broken from time to time by the movie cutting to scenes of the high priest jabbering away to Gorga, who shows up in the village from time to time with no real purpose other than to allow the film to use the same shots of "natives" running away a couple times. Actor Bruce Kimball enunciates his lines in a way I can't quite describe. I guess...imagine that you are a first year student in a community theater drama class, and your mentor is a horrible actor who insists that you enunciate with passion and clarity every single syllable. Or, if you haven't the background to know what that ends up sounding like, recall Futurama's Dr. Zoidberg's acting in The Magnificent Three when he says, "GOOD MOR-ning MEE-stir VICE PRES-ee-dent!" It truly is a tour de force.
After what feels like an eternity, April and Mark reach the top of the plateau, and all our hard work watching them make fakey grimace faces while climbing over very small rocks pays off when the two are attacked by a tyrannosaurus rex! Now there are good special effects, and there are bad special effects, and there are awful special effects. But this one...this one transcends all that has come before it and may very well be the nirvana of awful special effects. Mark and April cower helplessly on a projection screen while the screen is menaced by what looks like one of those plastic toy dinosaurs mounted on the end of a stick. You know the ones -- they sell them at museums all the time. It's a crude dinosaur upper body attached to a stick, usually with a trigger so your kid can make the mouth open and close. No exaggeration, this special effect is no more advanced than those toys. That it's incredible size is realized by making it manage a projected screen image of Mark and April shot from a long distance only sweetens the deal. As hard a slog as this film has been up until this point -- and believe me, even i almost bailed out -- this one scene more than makes up for all the horrible scenes of Mark walking around a zoo and Mort the Clown rubbing at his clown make-up. But wait, there's more! Because Gorga shows up to fight the T-Rex! Yes, it really is as beautiful as you'd think. Where as the rest of the film nearly reduced me to tears of bitter defeat and surrender, this scene brought tears of joy to my eyes and made me believe that yes, despite all that is wrong in the world, there is still much that is good and worth fighting for.
From here on out, the movie trucks along at a pretty brisk pace. Well, brisk compared to everything that came before this point. Mark and April are captured by the tribe. They find Tonga Jack. There is talk of sacrifice. It all goes wrong and Gorga smashes things. There's a desperate race through some tunnels where they discover there really was a treasure, and that it's made up mostly of Mardi Gras beads and guarded by one of those skeletons you put in your fish tank. Then a volcano erupts for no good reason other than volcanoes always erupt at the end of lost world adventure films, and there's footage of a cool stop motion dragon from one of the old Italian Hercules films. How they got through this whole sequence without using that footage of the two lizards with fins taped to their backs fighting with each other that appeared in dozens of other cheap films is a great mystery of cinema. Then after all that, the movie remembers to deal with evil Morgan and that there is a competent black character who needs to be killed off. And I guess Mark uses the plastic treasure to pay off his debt or something, because Gorga just sort of wanders back off into the jungle.
What we have here, folks, is a bona fide classic. This is the sort of film that separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls. Anyone can laugh their way through Plan 9 from Outer Space, and most who would read this site can get through far worse. But The Mighty Gorga is a true challenge. Pretty much everyone agrees that it's the worst King Kong rip off ever made, even worse than the 1976 King Kong where the monkey die and everybody a-cry, or that one where Linda Hamilton brings King Kong back to life so he can save the future from the terminators. Pretty sure it was something like that. But forget it. The Mighty Gorga is so much worse than any of those that it's hardly worth mounting a comparison. The is bad filmmaking at its most potent. Bad movie moonshine, if you will. It tests the viewer on every level, really makes you earn that scene where the witch doctor beseeches Gorga and Gorga fights a plastic dinosaur toy. But the reward, should one endure, is not unlike the plastic treasure the cast discovers at the end of the film. In fact, one could argue that The Mighty Gorga itself is an allegory for the trials of watching The Mighty Gorga, making it one of the very first "meta" films that are so common today. Or it could be a movie about a guy in a ratty monkey suit. Let's start first with the acting. To put it bluntly, no one is very good, although Bruce Kimball is at least memorable. But seriously, I've seen better acting from tough actin' Tanactin. Anchoring the film is heroic Mark, as played by Anthony "One Episode" Eisley. Much of his career is comprised of one-time appearances in various television shows. In 1959, however, he appeared in Roger Corman's classic B-movie from 1959, The Wasp Woman. After that, he started spacing out his one-off appearances as minor characters in TV shows with appearances as minor characters in movies, mostly of relatively low profle, though he did manage to show up in some recognizable titles, including the Elvis film Frankie and Johnny as well as The Navy Versus the Night Monster, where he got to act alongside Mamie Van Doren's bombshell figure. So really, not a bad career.
He also started appearing in David L. Hewitt films, including Journey to the Center of Time and the lost world epic The Mighty Gorga. He continued this pattern up until the early 1990s, when he finally retired. Now it's easy to make fun of Eisley, especially based on his performance in The Mighty Gorga. But forget tat. Eisley is the kind of actor I'd really love to do an incredibly long interview with. Between appearing in one episode of practically every TV show ever made and appearing in films from Corman, Hewitt, and Ted V. Mickels, the man has got to be full of stories about the pitfalls of being a working actor. It would be far more interesting than the usual A-list interview where they just gush about whatever awful film they have coming out that month. The directors who make movies like this can sometimes be overly sensitive and pompous about their work (I have no idea if that applies to Hewitt, mind you), but the actors almost always have a good sense of humor about it. And when they pass on, all those stories go with them, never recorded. Eisner's female co-star might not be as interesting, as she apepared in hardly any other films besides The Mighty Gorga. Megan Timothy seems to have no idea what to do, as one minute her character is suspicious of Mark, and the next minute she is wearing a bosomy summer dress and making nice with him, and then the next scene, with no reason at all detailed, she's back to being mean. Huh. Dames. Either way, she gives a pretty horrible performance. Luckily, Bruce Kimball is there to enunciate "Oh Mighty Gorga!" as if he's reciting a foreign language phonetically. Kent Taylor, who plays her father, delivers the closest thing this film has to a good performance, but he's only in the film at the very end, so what's the point? He's another one who would be great to talk with, though. I wish there were fewer biographies of big stars and more biographies of guys who did things like appear in The Mighty Gorga or go make films with Al Adamson in the Philippines.
In fact, The Mighty Gorga, as boring and as incompetent as it is, is the type of film that really interests me -- if not as a viewing experience, then certainly as a subject for discussion. I'm fascinated by the ways in which these films got made. Listening to a guy like David Friedman talk about the old Florida film industry is something I can do all day, and even though it was made in California, I can't imagine that a film like The Mighty Gorga has any shortage of similar anecdotes surrounding it. It does make reviewing these kinds of films hard, though, because my enthusiasm for what happened behind the scenes generally colors my enjoyment of what is actually shown on-screen, infusing the film with more value than one gets simply by enduring scenes of two people stepping over rocks for ten minutes. I mean, Hewitt went on to do visual effects work for some huge movies -- some more successful than others. Was the Gorga versus a T-Rex scene in his portfolio? What was Bruce Kimball thinking? When they wrote all the "white man is evil" dialog, did they know all their African natives were going to be played by white people in Aztec wigs? Where the hell did they find that atrocious gorilla costume? Even I wouldn't claim that The Mighty Gorga is an enjoyable viewing experience, but I found it fascinating never the less, for the same reasons I'm fascinated with films like Death Curse of Tartu or Santa Claus Meets the Ice Cream Bunny or whatever weird stuff Doris Wishman was cranking out at the time. These truly are the heirs of Ed Wood, Jr., filmmakers who forge ahead no matter how ludicrous their solutions to working around their lack of budget and/or talent may be. The results are not always pretty, but they are usually fascinating if you are a scholar of truly obscure cinema. My only regret is that there is no commentary track for The Mighty Gorga. I would love to hear from someone involved in the production regarding what sort of an experience it was and how the film ever managed to see the light of day. So no, The Mighty Gorga isn't a good movie. Except for Bruce Kimball's performance and the monkey versus dinosaur scene, it's not even entertainingly bad. But it's the sort of movie you should have a look at never the less, because it's awful in such an interesting way. Heck, The Mighty Gorga at its worst is still better than most shot on video microbudget horror films at their best. None of them have a guy in a googly eyed gorilla suit fighting a plastic novelty dinosaur. And anyway, as bad as The Mighty Gorga might be, how bad would a film have to be to steal The Mighty Gorga's special effects shots...  Labels: Science Fiction, Series: Lost Worlds and Sunken Continents, Year: 1969 posted by Keith at 4:39 PM | 12 Comments Monday, July 07, 2008The People That Time Forgot Release Year: 1977Country: England, United States Starring: Patrick Wayne, Doug McClure, Sarah Douglas, Dana Gillespie, Thorley Walters, Shane Rimmer, Tony Britton, John Hallam, David Prowse, Milton Reid, Kiran Shah. Writer: Patrick Tilley Director: Kevin Connor Cinematographer: Alan Hume Music: John Scott Producer: John Dark Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us When The Land That Time Forgot ended, it left hero Doug McClure and heroine Susan Penhaligon stranded in the tropic prehistoric lost world of Caprona in Antarctica, fated to wander the strange world of dinosaurs and cavemen while wearing big-ass furs and mukluks. Would rescue ever come? Would their hopeless message in a bottle, thrown into the tumultuous seas at the end of the earth, ever be found, and if so, would it be believed? Well, we know from the first film that the account of the strange adventure to Caprona was found (though how the account, written by one man, could include detailed descriptions of things that happened while he was not around, is a question best left not asked in a movie about a u-boat crew fighting dinosaurs), and two years later, the answer to whether or not anyone would believe it. Unfortunately, the answer came in the form of The People That Time Forgot, a phenomenally boring follow-up that reduces Doug McClure's role to little more than a cameo, kills off Susan Penhaligon in between the two movies, and seems to think that what people really wanted from a sequel to The Land That Time Forgot was fewer dinosaur fights and caveman rumbles, and more scenes of people walking across gravel-strewn landscapes. The inaction begins with Ben McBride (Patrick Wayne, son of John), airplane pilot and friend of Bowen Tyler (McClure, remember -- his character did have a name), preparing to mount a rescue mission after having received word of the message in a bottle account of the events from the last film. McBride encounters relatively little skepticism either from the scientific community, the Navy, or the press. It seems accounts of Caprona have popped up from time to time in the past, and this is their best chance, using the navigation information Bowen recorded from their journey on the German submarine, to pinpoint the exact location of the mysterious land and, if possible, rescue Lisa and Bowen. But unlike the ill-fated experiences of the Germans and Brits who wound up there by accident, McBride is determined to mount a properly provisioned rescue mission, employing the latest cold weather ships, radio equipment, and an airplane. Accompanying him, besides assorted stoic British sailors, are his trusty sidekick mechanic, a biologist, and Charly Cunningham (Sarah Douglas), a reporter for the London Times whose inclusion in the expedition was one of the provisions of the newspaper financing the mission.
Things start off well, both for the film and the expedition. The ship gets McBride close enough to use the plane, and after successfully navigating through the high mountains, the pilot and his crew soon find themselves on the unmistakable outskirts of Caprona. The weather turns warmer, there are a few more trees (though nothing like the lush primordial forests in the last movie), and they are attacked by a stiff, fake looking pterodactyl. Truly we are home. The battle forces the plane to make an emergency landing, and while the mechanic repairs the damaged rudder and makes "comical" comments, McBride and Charly set out on foot in a basically random direction in hopes of finding Bowen and Sarah. They encounter a dinosaur here and there, but for the most part, their trek is exceedingly dull. I can't really put my finger on why, even when there are dinosaurs on screen, it seems like there aren't dinosaurs on screen. I think it's because there's no real sense of interaction with the creatures. The last film had all sorts of crummy looking composite shots so we could see Doug McClure sneaking around dinosaurs. This time, it feels like we're watching stock footage. In fact, yeah. That's exactly it. With the exception of one scene where Sarah Douglas takes a photo of a stegosaurus, the whole film feels like one of those old impoverished jungle adventures, like White Pongo or White Gorilla -- films comprised almost entirely of shots of the cast walking through a set, intercut with stock footage of elephants and giraffes. This isn't stock footage (though I suspect one or two shots of being unused footage from The Land that Time Forgot), but it feels like it. Until the very end, the dinosaurs are little more than parts of the set that cause the cast to make terrified faces, except for Patrick Wayne, who makes the same face he has for the entire film. At the end, they finally fight a dinosaur, but it's really too little too late. This movie needed to be packed with scenes of our heroes fighting dinosaurs, and it's not. Eventually, they begin to reach the more temperate regions of Caprona, here realized by location shooting in an actual forest (the Canary Islands, to be exact). Where as the last movie relied largely on a mix of location work with sets to create a believable if somewhat fantastic jungle, this movie looks like it was filmed in a pretty average clump of trees. Funny how that happens sometimes. The actual tropical island isn't a very convincing tropical island, where as the last film -- which I think was filmed on a set and probably in a London park -- was more interesting looking. Sort of like how The Greatest Story Ever Told was shot in Arizona and Utah, because the filming they did on location in the actual Holy Land didn't look Holy Land enough. However, the location shooting also lends the film a more wide-open feel, though given how little impact that has, it would have been nice if they'd skimped on location shooting and used that money to buy more crummy dinosaur props or a tiny fur bikini for Sarah Douglas.
It's also notable that, from this point on (which means, for most of the movie), the dinosaurs are gone until the very end. Instead, our intrepid trio (one forgets that the biologist is even along for the ride, from time to time) encounters sexy, big-breasted cavegirl Ajor (former David Bowie backup singer Dana Gillespie, who played a similar role in Hammer Studio's 1968 lost world adventure film, The Lost Continent). Ajor is far more advanced and bosomy than the cavemen we saw in the last movie, and what's more, she speaks English! At least that's an improvement over the last film. When faced with choosing between a big-boobed cavegirl who speaks in pidgin English or a thick browed caveman who shrieks a lot, I think the choice is clear. Also, she understands feathering and advanced hair teasing techniques. All of these skills were taught to her, McBride discovers, by Bowen Tyler, who Ajor reveals has been captured by an even more advanced race, the Nagas. It turns out that the Nagas are so advanced that they, completely isolated from all cultural influence in the rest of the world, have evolved to dress and fight exactly like medieval Japanese samurai, right down to the katanas, flag bearers, and big kabuto helmets with gruesome face masks. Despite all those advances, however, they still live in caves and are ruled over by a fat, hooting, grunting dude in a fur loincloth (big Milton Reid, once again). It's as if the nation of Japan decided one day that they wanted to be ruled over ruthlessly by George the Animal Steele. But instead of ripping open a turnbuckle cover with his teeth, Sabbala pencils in Charly and Ajor for sacrifice to the...wait for it...yep, the angry volcano god. Then he throws McBride and the biologist, Norfolk (Thorley Walters), into his skull wall prison. In the prison, McBride is finally reunited with Tyler. And now, with a couple of two-fisted, good ol' American boys on the job, these merciless rulers of Caprona's crappy non-dinosaur infested southern region are primed for a beat-down.
By 1977, England's Amicus Productions was dead. The People That Time Forgot was really not so much a production as it was one of those nervous twitches a corpse sometimes makes. The only thing that even got the movie finished was money from American International Pictures, who had already been propping up Amicus for their last two Kevin Connor directed adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs' adventures. The People That Time Forgot feels much more like an AIP film than it does an Amicus film, and the budget must have dwindled to the point where even Kevin Connor couldn't scrape together enough crappy special effects to fill the movie as he had The Land That Time Forgot or 1976's At the Earth's Core. So almost all the action involves people. Sometimes they are cavemen, sometimes, for some inexplicable reason, they are samurai. There are only a couple of really crummy dinosaurs. It turns out that if your movie has dozens of crappy looking dinosaurs, it's probably going to be pretty cool. But if your movie only has one or two crappy looking dinosaurs, then all you can think about is how crappy it is that you are getting so few crappy dinosaurs. And even if you make your peace with the fact that you're not going to get any dinosaur action, you still have to deal with the fact that there's really not much caveman action either. McBride has a run-in with a tribe that has been chasing Ajor, but it's short-lived and fairly thrill-free. So even if you reconcile yourself to the fact that there is no dinosaur action and precious little caveman action, then you find yourself depending on John Wayne's son versus lost world samurai ruled over by a mostly naked fat guy painted green.
And even then, you're going to be disappointed, because most of the samurai action is restricted to scenes of guys walking back and forth. That they are wearing samurai armor for no good reason doesn't make it any more interesting. Also, I don' think samurai wore their armor 24/7. Like, if you are on guard duty in the cramped caverns of your poorly lit cave dungeon, you really don't need battle armor and a giant helmet with a faceplate. I guess they took the time to evolve the ability to think of Japanese armor, so they decided they were going to get their money's worth. While I imagine samurai armor would help you in a battle against cavemen, it's probably less effective against a T-Rex or any of the other monsters we know inhabit Caprona. Or at least, that inhabited it in the last movie. So maybe this is really the only time they get to break it out and show it off, since even though it's effective against cavemen, they are probably too primitive to admire your craftsmanship. The lack of dinosaurs without anything to fill the void is the film's major misstep. The next major misstep is reducing Doug McClure to a cameo. The structure of The People That Time Forgot is very similar to another colossal letdown, Beneath the Planet of the Apes. OK, so maybe Planet of the Apes was a more prestigious sci-fi film than The Land that Time Forgot, but the overall result for someone like me is the same. Beneath the Planet of the Apes is about a guy who wasn't in the last film, who travels to the mysterious lost world-esque planet of the apes, has some dull adventures, then ends up underground in a jail where he meets Charlton Heston reprising his role in a cameo. And then they break out, there's some fist fights, Charlton Heston dies, and everything explodes.
The People that Time Forgot plays out almost identically. Patrick shows up in Caprona, has some dull adventures, finds Doug McClure in a cave. There's some fist fights, Doug dies, and then stuff explodes. Aping Beneath the Planet of the Apes is not a good move, and reducing your single remaining interesting character to a ten minute cameo at the very end of the film is even worse. Actually, scratch all that. This film's major misstep is that it casts Sarah Douglas in a role, has her character set up to be sacrificed to a primitive volcano god, and never puts her in a skimpy slave girl outfit! Having almost no Doug McClure action is justifiable if you say, "Sorry, but we spent the little money we had on convincing Sarah Douglas to wear this tiny loin cloth. We couldn't afford any more Doug McClure after that." That'd be fine. But no. She stays fully clothed the entire time. A travesty! Sarah Douglas, in case you weren't around at the time, is probably best known either as the evil chick in Superman II or as the evil chick in Conan the Destroyer -- two films in which she was more skimpily clad than she was in this movie, where she was in a land of scantily clad cave people. Still, despite my dissatisfaction with her sacrificial attire, Douglas is the closes thing this movie has to a good performance. She has an easy charm about her -- surprising since I've been taught from all her other roles to be terrified of her.
In her place, the scantily clad chore goes to Dana Gillespie. Gillespie was a former future pop icon. The one-time girlfriend of Bob Dylan, she was supposed to be some sort of folk rock star. That didn't pan out. Some years later, she became David Bowie's pet project after she sang back-up vocals for him during the Ziggy Stardust days. She completed an album, but I don't think it flew off the shelves. She had slightly better luck on stage, appearing as Mary Magdalene in the original run of Jesus Christ Superstar. In 1968, she appeared in one of Hammer's several "lost world" mini-epics, The Lost Continent. It was nearly ten years later when she appeared in The People that Time Forgot, allowing her breasts to do most of the acting for her. Still, it should be noted that her feathered hair is almost as big as her boobs, so it's not like I'm reducing her to a single, degrading aspect of her physical appearance instead of judging her performance more rationally. But then, it's also hard to judge a performance when your only lines are, "Tyler!" and "You are...friend of Tyler?" Given my druthers, I would have had Gillespie and Douglas switch costumes. Oh yeah, somewhere in that mix is Patrick Wayne. Coincidentally, much of his filmography seems comprised of small parts in the films of John Wayne. what are the chances, huh? Well, Patrick Wayne is about as good an actor as his old man, only he doesn't have any of the charisma or macho allure than compensated for the elder Wayne's limited range. In 1977, Patrick had arguably his biggest role, that of Arabian sailor Sinbad (he's even less Arabian than Lou Ferrigno!) in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. In greater scheme of Sinbad movies with special effects by Ray Harryhausen, Eye of the Tiger is a lesser affair, though still plenty of fun. Plus, it features a pretty solid supporting cast that includes Jane Seymour at the height of her hotness (not that her hotness has ever diminished) and scruffy Patrick Troughton (Scars of Dracula, the second Doctor Who, and who, as far as I know, has always been awesome but never had any height of hotness).
That along with a bunch of stop motion monster effects was more than enough to make most people fail to notice how stiff an actor Patrick Wayne was. Thing is, a movie like that needs a stiff in the lead. It needs a piece of petrified wood off which it can bounce all its fantastic stuff. After all, those are Ray Harryhausen movies. Few people remember who directed them, or starred in them. Heck, I was out of college before I even realized different guys had played Sinbad in the various movies. Because everyone remembers the special effects, and everyone went to the films for the special effects. To have some talented lead actor getting in the way would have distracted from the films' appeal. The People that Time Forgot should operate under the same premise. Unfortunately, there's very little fantastic stuff to distract from Wayne's stiffness. With no dinosaurs and minimal caveman action, all we're left to focus on is Wayne's performance. Well, Wayne's performance and Dana Gillespie's boobs. I failed to be sufficiently interested by either (as a scantily clad cavewoman, Gillespie is passable, but she's no Caroline Munro or Raquel Welch). And there's no talented supporting cast to pick up the slack. Sarah Douglas gives it her all, but there's only so much you can do with a script that gives you nothing but "your character walks across a field, then across a gravel pit." Patrick Wayne is a wooden hero with no charisma and no awesome monsters to make you forget he's there. People who knock Doug McClure's one-note performances should take a look at Patrick Wayne to see what stiff really is. McClure exudes an easy sort of charisma and believability. Patrick Wayne exudes nothing. Plus, he looks a lot like Charlton Heston, way more than he looks like his own dad. I have some conspiracy theories about that one, and I consider them at least as likely to be true as theories about super-powered WWII Nazis operating UFO bases at the North Pole.
Some people consider this movie better than its predecessor. I cannot count myself among those people. While I love The Land that Time Forgot, I hate this movie. Well, maybe I don't hate it, but I sure don't like it. I was bored silly through most of the film, and it falls into that rare category of film I say you could give a miss. In fact, it reminds me in many ways of War Gods of the Deep, another surprisingly disappointing film I want to like more than I do and that sounds much cooler in summary than it actually is to watch. I mean, John Wayne's son and the evil chick from Superman II versus samurai cavemen is a good pitch, but Amicus was too broke to deliver even the cheap-ass fun they delivered with The Land that Time Forgot, and AIP seemed to be interested in little more than getting something on the screen and ending their relationship with the doomed British studio. It would have been nice to see Amicus, who had given the world so many entertaining (and entertainingly bad) films go out on a higher note, but then, the same could be said of Hammer, who bit the dust around the same time and with a similarly wretched film to serve as their swan song. If Amicus was the scrappy Hammer wannabe, then The People that Time Forgot is their ode to Hammer going out on To the Devil...A Daughter. In retrospect The Land that Time Forgot would have been a poetic place for Amicus to end -- with volcano erupting, boat sinking, and its stars facing a seemingly hopeless situation. Instead, they decided to show us the aftermath of the collapse, and give us Milton Reid in a skimpier outfit than Sarah Douglas (or Dana Gillespie, for that matter).  Labels: Director: Kevin Conner, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Series: Lost Worlds and Sunken Continents, Stars: Doug McClure, Studio: Amicus, Year: 1977 posted by Keith at 6:14 PM | 11 Comments Saturday, June 21, 2008Santo vs. Blue Demon in Atlantis Release Year: 1969Country: Mexico Starring: Santo, Blue Demon, Jorge Rado, Rafael Banquells, Agustin Martinez Solares, Silvia Pasquel, Magda Giner, Rosa Maria Pineiro, Griselda Mejia, Marcelo Villamil, Carlos Suarez, Juan Garza, Hector Guzman, Olga Guillot Director: Julian Soler Writers: Rafael Garcia Travesi, Jesus Sotomayor Martinez Cinematographer: Heberto Martinez Music: Gustavo Cesar Carrion Producers: Raul Martinez Solares, Jesus Sotomayor Martinez Original Title: Santo contra Blue Demon en la Atlantida Ten years into his film career, Santo had already faced off against zombies, witches, mummies, mad scientists, vampires of both the male and female variety, hatchet-wielding ghosts, homicidal table lamps, and Martians. So it was only a matter of time before the denizens of Atlantis got to the front of the queue. When that time came, Santo would also find himself mixing it up onscreen for the first time with one of his greatest adversaries from -- and I use the term advisedly -- the "real world" of lucha libre. And just who would that adversary be? Well, I could try to be coy about it, but the journalistic specificity of Santo vs. Blue Demon in Atlantis' title would render the effort redundant. By the time of making Atlantis in 1969, Blue Demon had already starred in a series of successful films for producer Luis Enrique Vergara. And Santo, working for a variety of studios and producers -- including, for a time, Vergara -- had chalked up an impressive slate of twenty-plus features (though those, thanks to Santo's apparently indiscriminate practice of just following the paycheck, were wildly varying in quality). So when Sotomayor productions got the notion to team the two together in a film, it must have seemed like a formula for pure box office gold. The only stumbling block, however, was the small matter of a bitter rivalry between the two wrestlers that stretched back some 16 years. The fact that Santo had lost his title to Blue in an ego-bruising defeat back in 1953 was reportedly something that still rankled the Enmascarado de Plata all these years later, and, while he would go on to work with Blue in a series of films, the two would never be what you could call friends. Blue, for his part, may have found equal cause for resentment in the fact that, while he was arguably the superior athlete of the two, he was perpetually relegated to the number two spot thanks to the iconic status that Santo enjoyed in Mexico - a status that was as much due to Santo's roles as a movie star and popular comic book hero as it was to his skill in the ring.     The dilemma for Sotomayor was that, because of this legendary rivalry, fans who paid to see Santo and Blue Demon in a movie together would come with the expectation of seeing them fight one another. The simple solution to this would seem to be to cast one wrestler as the hero and the other as the villain, but the fact that both were presented as heroes both in the ring and in their own movies (though both had earlier in their wrestling careers been rudos, or bad guys) made this problematic. After all, the conceit of lucha movies was that the actual wrestlers who appeared in them were not playing roles, but simply appearing as themselves, and the way that they were presented on screen was meant to carry over into how they were perceived off of it, and vice versa. As I described in my review of Santo and Blue Demon vs. The Monsters, the solution that producer/writer Jesus Sotomayor Martinez, his co-writer Rafael Garcia Traversi, and director Julian Soler came up with would set the tone for many of Santo and Blue Demon's screen pairings to come. And that solution was to have Blue Demon start out the film as a good guy, and then, through circumstances beyond his control, become the slave of some otherworldly force that would cause him to turn against his pal Santo, in turn forcing Santo to repeatedly beat the living tar out of his good chum Blue Demon before, through heroic efforts, effecting his return to normalcy. Once that was achieved, both luchadores could clock out the film's remaining minutes with a united display of good guy derring-do -- until the next film, at which point the process would start all over again. Santo vs. Blue Demon in Atlantis (or, more accurately, Santo contra Blue Demon en la Atlantida) is, in fact, the most honest in its presentation of this arrangement of all the films, as it is the only one to use "vs" in the title rather than the more collegial "and".     In addition to marking the beginning of a successful screen partnership, Santo vs. Blue Demon in Atlantis also serves as evidence of a couple of distinct trends that were developing in Santo's movies as the sixties came to a close. American audiences who are familiar with Santo only through those few films that were dubbed into English by K. Gordon Murray (in which Santo was referred to as "Samson") might understandably consider his customary milieu to be one of B grade gothic horror. And while films like Santo vs. the Vampire Women or Santo in the Wax Museum definitely represent a dominant strain in Santo's filmography, the sheer volume of his output practically necessitated that his cinematic offerings fall within a wide range of genres, including westerns, crime thrillers, science fiction, and even -- ostensibly at least -- comedy (which is to say, the less said about Santo vs. Capulina, the better). In 1966, a new genre was added to this list when, in an effort to cash in on the Bond craze, the studio America-Cima Films teamed Santo with a young pretty boy actor named Jorge Rivero for a pair of spy films titled Operation 67 and The Treasure of Montezuma (or, if you actually want to find them, Operacion 67 and El Tesoro de Moctezuma). Though these films were never exported to the U.S. and remain virtually unknown here today, they are actually among the most well-appointed of Santo's films, blessed with obviously higher budgets than was the norm, and boasting a slick, colorful look that easily put them in the league of the better funded Bond knock-offs coming out of Europe at the time. In addition to introducing Santo to the thrilling world of espionage -- and, presumably, fans of such films to Santo -- the Rivero spy films also effected a marked transformation in the masked one's on-screen persona. Up to that point, the Santo seen on screen had for the most part lived up to his name, as a saintly figure who existed only to help those in need. In fact, 1961's Santo contra el Rey de Crimen, one of the only films to refer to Santo as having any kind of conventional, superhero-type "origin", makes the ascetic aspect of his character fairly explicit. As represented in that film, Santo's mask was not meant to conceal his identity so much as obliterate it, thus removing the incentive for worldly rewards such as fame and personal adoration, and insuring that Santo's good deeds were performed out of only the purest motives. Following along these lines, almost all of Santo's early films positioned him as an adjunct to a traditional romantic lead - one who, when not putting scissor holds on zombies, would spend all of his time tooling around alone in his lab waiting for the call for help to arrive. He never got the girl, or even tried to, nor did he have much interaction in the social lives of the other characters.     Of course, when it came time to retool Santo for inclusion in a swinging sixties spy caper, that monkish demeanor would have to be done away with completely. And so, in Operation 67's opening minutes we were immediately thrust into a world in which a swimming trunks clad Santo necked on the beach with an adoring bikini babe, only to callously dispatch her with a snap of his fingers when duty called. From this point on, the saintly Santo of old was conclusively banished to the past, and no future Santo film would be complete without the masked one being provided with a love interest or a sexy girlfriend -- and would frequently include scenes such as the one in Vengeance of the Vampire Women where Santo can be observed lounging by the pool while being served by his voluptuous and revealingly attired maid. In addition, Operation 67 and its sequel insured that, between battling with the usual vampires and werewolves, every third or so Santo feature from that point on would feature him as an agent of Interpol or some other secret organization, doing battle against the forces of international espionage. This path lead to its logical conclusion in 1973, when Santo starred in an actual Eurospy film, the Spanish-produced Santo vs Dr. Death, which had him rubbing elbows with such genre regulars as Helga Line and Mirta Miller.     Of course, these later spy efforts weren't mounted on anywhere near as handsome a scale as the Rivero films, which brings me to that second trend that was taking hold in Santo's movies as the Seventies dawned. As time went on, it seemed that Santo's film career was increasingly falling into the hands of producers whose primary goal was to create features without providing more than the absolute minimum of original content, a practice that resulted in films heavy with recycled and borrowed footage, as well as endless taxing minutes of soul-deadeningly aimless filler. This practice would become even more pronounced as the decade progressed, and dwindling audience interest in the lucha genre made it the provenance of independent producers and small time production companies who could only turn a profit on the films by churning them out as quickly and cheaply as possible. This resulted in the genre pioneering new lows in film padding, forcing audiences to watch their wrestling heroes performing the type of mundane tasks that are boring enough when one has to do them oneself, and no less so when observed being performed by Santo, Mil Mascaras or Superzan. (Though, granted, the practice did on occasion provide for some wonderful moments of unintentional surrealism.) Not that Santo vs. Blue Demon in Atlantis comes anywhere near that level of slackness in its execution, of course. But the tendency is still well in evidence. And to helpfully illustrate that fact, the film kicks off with a dizzying seven minute montage of repurposed film stock -- including newsreel footage, scenes from an old black & white science fiction movie, that A-bomb test footage you always see in movies from the Fifties, and, most strikingly, a number of Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects shots from Godzilla vs. Monster Zero. Over this a narrator tells us... well, I'm not sure, exactly. To be honest, the currently available DVD of Santo vs. Blue Demon in Atlantis lacks English subtitles, and I don't speak a lick of Spanish. But the gist of things is that some character calling himself Achilles has holed himself up in Atlantis and is firing missiles launched from the Moon, I think, at the Earth, threatening not to stop unless he is made king of everything forever. As one might expect in a film of this type, these events lead to a group of severe looking middle-aged men in crisp suits convening around a large conference table with some flags scattered about. More stock footage is viewed on a projector, and the theory is put forward that Achilles, despite his apparent relative youth, is actually an escaped Nazi scientist who's still hung up on that whole "race of supermen" idea. One of the agents of the international organization that owns the conference table and projector, a scientist named Professor Gerard (Rafael Banquells), is apparently the only person with the know-how to put a stop to Achilles' plan, and it is decided to partner him up with the organization's key operative, Santo, aka Agent X-21.     Scenes from Santo vs. Blue Demon in Atlantis...and also Godzilla vs. Monster Zero A lengthy wrestling sequence follows featuring a match between Santo and Blue. This is a rarity in the Santo and Blue Demon films, because in subsequent films featuring the two, if the two were shown in the ring together at all, it would typically be in team matches in which they fought side-by-side. That said, this match is a particularly brutal one, comprised a lot more of bare-knuckled punches to the face than it is of the wrestling holds or flips you'd expect to see. In fact, though the whole Santo vs. Blue Demon feud may have been played up for drama, I do have to say that the fights between the two stars throughout Atlantis are pretty darn realistic, with both participants appearing, shall we say, particularly motivated. It's hard to imagine that both didn't bring home quite a collection of scrapes and bruises at the end of the shooting day. Another noteworthy aspect of this ring sequence is that it takes place in an actual arena with a live audience, whereas later Santo films would simply feature fights shot on a small soundstage with overdubbed crowd noise and an announcer commenting on the enormity of the crowd, the luxuriousness of the venue, the viciousness of the blows, Santo's fine fighting trim, and anything else that the evidence of the eye might contradict. Anyway, somewhere during the course of the fight, some of Achilles' minions sneak into the arena and switch both Santo and Blue Demon's water bottles with drugged ones. Santo doesn't drink, but Blue does, and goes down like a well-oiled side of beef as a result. Disguised as ambulance attendants, Achilles' men then spirit Blue away to Atlantis, which appears to be in a shallow underwater cave just a few yards from the beach. A couple of shots from Atragon are inserted in an attempt to spruce things up a bit, but we soon see that Achilles' lair is basically just a rocky cavern decorated with some colored curtains and a couple of Roman-style busts on pedestals. Achilles (serial Santo supporting actor Jorge Rado), who looks like a hippy college professor, shows us some more stock footage -- this time of Olympic gymnasts and sprinters -- in an attempt to sell Blue on the whole master race idea. Then he has Blue fight a burly bearded minion in trunks in a scene that makes Santo vs. Blue Demon in Atlantis the closest thing to a peplum in either Blue or Santo's filmography. Still unable to sell Blue on how awesome life in Atlantis is, Achilles settles on simply strapping Blue to a table and hypnotizing him with a disco ball.     Now under Achilles' control, Blue calls Santo and arranges a meeting, saying he has information about Achilles. Santo jumps into his sports car and zooms off to the roadside rendezvous. However, soon after Santo has hopped into Blue's snazzy red Thunderbird convertible, he realizes that all is not right with his burly BFF -- and when Blue refuses to pull over, begins to punch him repeatedly in the head, which is probably not the most advisable course of action given that they are speeding along a narrow and winding road overlooking a steep cliff. Blue finally pulls over and the two pile out of the car for a savage smack-fest that is eventually joined in by a gang of Achilles' henchmen. Just as it looks like Santo is about to have his ass permanently tied up in a nice little bow and handed to him, help arrives in the form of female Agent X-25 (Magda Giner) and her gun. Like most henchmen in Santo movies, Achilles' men came to the party only expecting a little wrestling and hand-to-hand, so when someone introduces bullets into the mix, they are quick to make their getaway with Blue in tow. And then it's time for romance back at X-25's apartment. But first, X-25 must retire to her boudoir to slip into something more comfortable, which provides occasion for an astonishing two minute sequence during which Santo sits on X-25's plastic-sealed couch and stares blankly at her TV while a black & white musical number from an older movie plays out on it. This sequence is actually even more hypnotizingly dull than the very similar "nightclub" scene from Santo and Blue Demon vs. The Monsters, because that later film's recycled musical footage was at least in color, and was of an actual production number, while this is just some rather large woman singing a song -- albeit quite dramatically -- on a sparsely decorated soundstage. Anyway, X-25 finally comes back and the two begin to do a little necking on the couch. After a fade-out, we return to find that Santo has apparently fallen asleep with his face imbedded in X-25's armpit.     That's entertainment!: Santo watches TV Santo, following the path highlighted by Achilles' foot soldiers, dives into the ocean and swims his way to Atlantis in a nice underwater sequence that would be re-used in Santo and Blue Demon vs. The Monsters. (And which is the first bearer of Atlantis' clear message that scuba gear is for pussies, since, throughout the film, everyone who makes the swim to Atlantis has to wear scuba gear to do so, except for Blue and Santo, who can do it in their civvies and wrestling masks.) Soon, with the help of Agent X-25, who is actually a double agent for Achilles (oh, spoiler, sorry), Santo is captured and strapped to Achilles' disco ball hypno-table, by all appearances soon to become yet another pawn of the madman. And, sure enough, we next cut to Professor Gerard's lab, where an evil Santo barges in and starts wrecking the joint. But, wait -- then the actual Santo shows up and -- in just one example of lucha cinema's countless dramatizations of the conflict between man's dual natures -- has it out with his double, finally skewering him on that old standby, the random pointy thing that's sticking out of the wall for no reason. It seems that Santo was rescued at the last minute by one of Achilles' female operatives named Juno, a wise-beyond-her-years pregnant teenager who has fallen for Santo's irresistible charms. (Okay, part of that description is inaccurate, based on me confusing this with another movie, but I don't think that it's the part about Santo's charms being irresistible.)     Finally, X-25 and Blue Demon show up to finish the work that the evil Santo double started, but Juno bitch slaps X-25 in the back with a bullet and Santo easily overpowers Blue. (Juno, by the way, is played by Silvia Pasquel, the daughter of Rafael Banquells, the actor playing Professor Gerard. I so call nepotism!) Professor Gerard then de-hypnotizes Blue by shoving a light in his face while Blue displays a facial expression reminiscent of that worn by a dog being given a bath. Then Juno and her dad -- I mean, Professor Gerard (in scuba gear, natch), along with Blue and Santo (not) hop into the drink and dog paddle their way to the lost continent. At this point it is revealed that the product of the highly specialized scientific knowledge brought to the mission by Professor Gerard is a pretty basic-looking movie time bomb, which the quartet set to explode upon their arrival in the cave/Atlantis/Mu from Atragon. Many of Achilles' henchmen are dispatched by Blue and Santo before Santo engages in a climactic battle with the man himself. Just as Achilles is about to canonize Santo with one of those Roman busts, Blue picks up a nearby javelin (no doubt left behind by one of those Olympic athletes) and impales Achilles with it. As Achilles expires, he undergoes a rapid aging effect that seems to have been achieved by wrapping Saran Wrap around his face. Then Atlantis blows up as Blue and Santo, watching from a helicopter above, smile with the deep satisfaction that can only come from seeing your enemies reduced to flaming pieces of particulate matter.     I've got to say that, while re-watching Santo vs. Blue Demon in Atlantis for the purposed of this review, I enjoyed it quite a lot more than I did the first time I saw it. That said, it still isn't one of my favorites of the Santo and Blue Demon team-up movies -- among which, in my opinion, are some of the very best films in the lucha genre. What is lacking in it for me can be expressed in one simple word: monsters. I think that the makers of Atlantis were aware of that shortcoming, and that, as a result, the surfeit of poorly realized creatures in its immediate follow-up, Santo and Blue Demon vs. The Monsters, can be seen as a a sort of over-reaching compensatory gesture. Still, if you're looking to see Santo and Blue Demon doing what they do best, you couldn't do much better than this one, because the fights are indeed plentiful and intense. (What, you thought I meant acting?) For me, though, I prefer to see Santo and Blue on the same team, despite -- or perhaps even because of -- the much documented ill will between them. It might just be that the fact that they would rather have been tearing one another's heads off provides that element of friction so necessary to the chemistry of all great screen couples. There's that constant feeling of "will they or won't they?" -- though in most other cases that question refers to whether or not the characters are going to kiss, and here it refers to whether they are going to start punching one another in the skull, preferably while in a moving car speeding along a narrow, winding road bracing a steep incline. Whatever. You knew what I meant.     So would I recommend Santo vs. Blue Demon in Atlantis? Predictably, I would. But not without recommending that you first see more accomplished and monster-rich examples from its stars' oeuvre such as Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dracula and the Wolfman, Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dr. Frankenstein, and, of course, Santo and Blue Demon vs. The Monsters. Even without any fantastic creatures, the novelty of seeing Santo and Blue going through their paces on-screen never loses its novelty for me and is enough to get me through any one of their adventures, no matter how lackluster its trappings may be. I think that's the gift that lucha cinema gives to the world. It's simply too deeply weird to ever seem commonplace, and as a result seems to deliver fresh surprises with every return visit. Labels: Action: Luchadores, Country: Mexico, Espionage, Science Fiction, Series: Oceans Against Us, Stars: Blue Demon, Stars: Santo, Year: 1969 posted by Todd at 12:53 PM | 3 Comments Monday, June 09, 2008At the Earth's Core Release Year: 1976Country: United States and England Starring: Doug McClure, Peter Cushing, Caroline Munro, Cy Grant, Godfrey James, Sean Lynch, Keith Barron, Helen Gill, Anthony Verner, Robert Gillespie, Michael Crane, Bobby Parr, Andee Cromarty. Writer: Milton Subotsky Director: Kevin Connor Cinematographer: Alan Hume Music: Mike Vickers Producer: John Dark Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us So there have been a couple reviews now, possibly more, where I've claimed that the crummy movie in question would have been much improved had the two leading stars been replaced by actor Doug McClure and actress Caroline Munro. I figured, then, it's high time I reviewed a crummy movie that did cast McClure and Munro in the lead roles, and when one's talking crummy films featuring either of those stars, it's hard to find one that's much crummier than At the Earth's Core, a low-budget attempt by England's Amicus Studio to bring to life Edgar Rice Burrough's Pellucidar series of novels. Pretty much every pulp fiction writer, from Burroughs to Verne, wrote a hollow earth, adventures beneath the surface of the planet adventure. Burroughs, in fact, wrote several, and these attempts to do Journey tot he Center of the Earth one better comprise the Pellucidar books. Burroughs wrote seven books in total, one of which is actually a cross-over adventure with Burrough's most famous creation, Tarzan. And in 1976, a guy named Eric Holmes, with the blessings of the Burroughs estate, wrote a brand new Pellucidar adventure. He did it again in 1980, though that time, he seems to have forgotten to get permission, and the publishing of the book was blocked by the Burroughs estate until 1993. I've always thought Burroughs' writing seemed to be fairly well geared toward adaptation into film. But for some reason, almost every adaptation of his work ends up being either so different that it hardly even relates to the source material (the Tarzan movies) or is just ends up being a colossal failure. At the Earth's Core, an attempt to adapt the first of the Pellucidar novels, falls into the latter category. Well, it falls into the latter category for the greater portion of humanity. I, however, and probably not surprisingly, happen to enjoy the film. I don't love it, but I am certainly charmed by its offbeat tone, its astoundingly inept special effects, its plot that manages to be both incredibly streamlined and meandering at the same time, and most of all, its game performances from a trio of genre stalwarts who give it their all despite the fact that they must know this movie is, to steal a description from Douglas Adams, a load of dingo's kidneys.
Peter Cushing stars as bumbling doctor Abner Perry, a turn of the century (that'd be the turn of the 20th century, whippersnappers) inventor who has built himself a gigantic drill he intends to use...well, it seems like he mostly intends to goof off with it by boring through a mountain on a bet. But one assumes that there are more visionary applications for the world's most amazing drilling car. Accompanying Perry on the trip through the mountain is American financier and all-around lovable man of action, Doug McClure. Well, technically, his name is David Innes, but when has Doug McClure ever been anyone but Doug McClure? Sound of mind, able of body, good looking in that "lovable lug" sort of way, and just as capable of piloting a magnificent drill-o-kabob as he is punching a caveman in the face. In short, if you are doing anything -- from drilling to the center of the earth to exploring a lost world populated by rubber dinosaurs -- McClure was the man you wanted along for the ride. And it's a good thing Perry brings Innes along, because it doesn't take long for the drill to prove too effective, sending the unlucky duo tearing through the earth's crust and into Pellucidar, a fantastical kingdom that exists within the hollow earth. Hollow Earth theories have been around for...heck, how long? Probably for as long as there have been theories about the Earth. Considering the incredible depths of some of the world's caves, and the often bizarre creatures one sometimes sees issuing forth from their mouths, it's not hard to understand how pre-historic -- end even more recent -- man would have conceived of some source for these creatures, some hitherto unseen world deep below the surface of the known world. In a time before caving technology, lights, and Iron Moles, even the largest of caves was an impenetrable, black abyss, and the surface of the earth itself could be no more than scratched by man. But at times, it would open up in earthquakes, spewing forth smoke and lava (and, presumably, monsters) and swallowing people whole. As such, the center of the earth becomes the location of countless mythological underworlds, from the Greek Hades to the Christian Hell.
As a movement, however, the hollow earth theories really gained steam in the early 1800s, when a cat named John Symmes Jr. put forth the notion that the Earth consisted of a crust 800 miles thick, with massive openings at either pole. Beyond the crust exists a habitable inner surface, with the core of the earth actually acting as a sun. Symmes intended to mount an expedition to one of the poles to prove his theory, but nothing ever came of it. Another expedition was planned by a newspaper editor and explorer named J.N. Reynolds, who actually managed to visit Antarctica, though not the pole itself. When, later in the 1800s, people started actually making it to the poles, the theory that there were openings into the hollow earth, hundreds and hundreds of miles wide, didn't quite pan out. But history is full of beliefs that continue to find adherents long after pretty much every piece of evidence collected has disproven them, with the mantra of "cover up" always being a convenient defense against, "We went to the North Pole and there was no giant hole leading to a world that exists inside the earth." Dismissed by actual science, hollow earth theories found new purchase among the pulp writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. As each subsequent writer took a crack at this world-within-a-world concept, the claims regarding what was actually inside a hollow Earth became more fantastic. Famed science fiction pioneer Jules Verne probably did more to sensationalize and spread the hollow earth gospel than any crackpot scientist or explorer when he published A Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864. Several years prior, in 1838, Edgar Allan Poe used hollow earth theories as the basis for his story , The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. And even before that, in 1825, Faddei Bulgarin wrote Improbable Tall-Tale, or Journey to the Center of the Earth, in which he wove a description of three concentric layered societies existing within our planet. And in 1914, with the publishing of At the Earth's Core, Burroughs seized on the hollow earth idea and used it as the basis for his series of involved and detailed adventure novels.
Despite setbacks in the scientific realm, however, hollow earth theories did not become the sole pervue of the science fiction authors. They enjoyed and, in fact, continue to enjoy sudden flare-ups in popularity from time to time, fueled by the fact that even the deepest hole in the world isn't very deep. The Russians initiated the Kola Superdeep Borehole in 1962, an attempt to reach the point in the earth's composition where the crust meets the mantle -- the "Moho" as it's known. After twenty-five years of drilling, the project was terminated after reaching a depth of 7.5 miles -- about 1.7 miles short of the goal. But even so, it'd take a lean and hungry man to drop down the hole and see what was to be seen, as it's only nine inches wide. Picking up where the Russians left off, and spearheaded by Japan, the international Integrated Ocean Drilling Program seeks a similar goal but made the task easier by starting on the ocean floor, building upon work done by the Deep Sea Drilling Project and the Ocean Drilling Program. A similar scientific expedition was attempted, I think, in the early 1980s, when me and my buddy Robby decided we were going to dig the deepest hole ever. We hiked way out into the woods down by this caves and began our glorious attempt. I think we got about a foot down before we hit bedrock. Shortly thereafter we all saw Red Dawn, and convinced that nuclear annihilation was unavoidable but that we would somehow survive, along with the girls on whom we had crushes, he revived the hole project with the intent of turning it into a bomb and nuclear fallout shelter. It never got any deeper, but we made it wider, covered it with a warped piece of plywood, and stocked it with important supplies, like a pocket knife, a canteen full of water (that had been in the canteen for probably two years), and some Star Crunches. The war with the Russians didn't come, of course. Well, not yet. When it does, I'm sure the shelter will still be there, ready to protect us so that we might emerge from the rubble and build society anew, preferably a society involving sexy cavegirls. The IODP, incidentally, employs the services of one of the largest research ships ever built -- nicknamed Godzilla Maru. There are, obviously, untold secrets yet waiting to be discovered. Psychic pterodactyls ruthlessly oppressing a race of stone age humans may not be among these secrets, but they make for better movies and adventure novels than if we'd had a movie in which Doug McClure extracted core samples from the Kola Borehole and discovered interesting things about the rate at which the temperature increases as one drills through the crust. Yes, fascinating from a scientific standpoint, but more fascinating than Caroline Munro in a tiny loin cloth?
Psychic pterodactyls actually aren't that far off from what some modern-day proponents of hollow earth theory claim exists within the crust of our planet. Some claim that it is the realm of ascended spiritual masters; others say it's where UFOs come from. Atlaneans live there. Some even claim that at the end of WWII, Hitler and the remaining members of the Reich escaped to the hollow earth. Last I heard, the entrance to the hollow earth realm -- which someone decided to name Agartha, since it needs a suitably cornball new age name -- was at Mount Shasta in California. But this could have been updated to Nepal, Tibet, or some other suitably mystical location. I believe according so leading scientific researches, the only way to get there is to astrally project. And although hollow earth theories have persisted for centuries, it is perhaps no big shock to learn that the most ridiculous and new agey "facts" sprung up fully formed in the late 1960s. Back in Pellucidar, however, Innes and Perry have their own troubles to contend with. It turns out that this realm within the earth is populated by all manner of poorly realized prehistoric creatures. As soon as Perry and Innes venture forth from the Iron Mole, they are attacked by dinosaur-like monsters that make the dinosaurs from The Land that Time Forgot seem amazingly lifelike. These creatures are realized by having a man in a monster suit stomp around a jungle set in slow motion, while McClure and Cushing sort of hunch over and dart back and forth for what seems like an eternity. Soon, the two begin to unravel the mysteries of the society that exists in this strange land. The Mahars are a race of psychic pterodactyl looking things, and they rule over a race of stone age humans, including one scantily clad Caroline Munro as Princess Dia. When they handed out princessing duty, Dia got the short end of the stick, being appointed princess of a race of slaves. Keeping the cavemen in line is a third race of pig-faced thugs.
Needless to say, when a couple Victorian-era bad-asses from the surface come to Pellucidar, armed with an umbrella and cigars, there's gonna be a whole lot of whoop-ass and Doug McClure getting the puffy sleeves ripped off his Dr. Frankenstein shirt. Innes and Perry are captured and forced to join the slave march, during which Innes commits a social gaffe that causes him to get on the wrong side of Dia. But you know things are going to work out for them, and until they do, Innes is going to spend his days escaping and punching stuff, and Perry is going to try to unravel the mysteries of the Mahar's power over Pellucidar. And then there's going to be a big revolution. Well, as big as Amicus can ever afford to mount. And probably, a volcano or something will erupt. At the Earth's Core was released in 1976. The next year, Star Wars was released. If ever there was a crystal clear illustration of the quantum leap forward in special effects technology that film represented, this was it. At the Earth's Core is dirt cheap, albeit in a fun and imaginative way. The monsters are man-in-a-suit effects that wouldn't have passed muster in even the cheapest Japanese Ultraman series. Hell, even 1970s Doctor Who probably felt a little bit embarrassed to see what At the Earth's Core had to offer. And yet, it's precisely because they fail so spectacularly that the effects succeed. Coupled with a really weird score by Michael Vickers (who also wrote the ultra-funky theme song for Dracula A.D. 1972), the sets and monster suits lend the movie a completely phantasmagoric atmosphere. At the core (ha ha), it's really a very simple movie, and one we've seen countless times (b-movie stars run around in cave sets until something blows up), but it takes on a completely bizarre, hallucinogenic mood that lends the film far more power to engross than it might otherwise have had. In other words, a movie this bad needs to be this bad. If it had been competent, it would have been dull beyond the point of enduring. But because it fails in such a charming, weird way, it becomes much more than it would otherwise have been. Burroughs' original novel was a sprawling epic, and there was no way Amicus was going to be able to bankroll such a story. However, this movie strips it down to its core (ha ha) while still managing to reach far beyond its means. This is, of course, sort of the defining aspect of director Kevin Conner's filmography. He populates his films with tons of special effects that would have been considered crude if they'd been a movie released ten years earlier. Amicus was the perfect home for him. They were the cheap version of Hammer, and if you know how cheap most Hammer films were, that's really saying something. The big difference was that the boys at Hammer knew how to work within their limitations without looking like they were working within limitations. Amicus aims for the special effects stars and comes back with a paper mache pterodactyl.
Aside from the charmingly inept special effects, At the Earth's Core has a few other things going for it. By this point, it should be pretty obvious that I'm a fan of b-movie and television staple Doug McClure. He gives the exact same performance here that he did in his previous Amicus outing (The Land that Time Forgot) for the same director. I can't claim that there's anything special about McClure's performances. He's just this dude, and when crazy fantastical shit starts happening, he deals with it. He has charisma without trying. And he makes a good paring with Peter Cushing, who turns in a believable if somewhat irritating performance as the proverbial absent minded professor. Perry is somewhere between Will Hartnell era Doctor Who and Grandpa Simpson, with a dash of the Doctor Who character as played by Cushing himself in the two technicolor feature film adaptations produced by Amicus. It can get on the nerves a bit, to be honest, but Cushing does get the films' two best moments: he takes on a dinosaur whilst armed with nothing but his crazy old professor umbrella, and when the Mahars are trying to use their psychic powers on him, he gets to proudly proclaim, "You cannot mesmerize me. I'm British!" If that's not the greatest movie line ever, it's only because Cushing also gets to say, "Monsters? But we're British!" in Horror Express. And then there's Caroline Munro.
OK, yeah. You're right. She doesn't really have much to do in this film other than slink around in a furry micro-bikini while coated in a thin sheen of sweat, but oh is she ever good at it. Who wouldn't punch out Jubal the Ugly One to win her affections? Caroline represents everything that was good and right with starlets in the 60s and 70s. Yes, she brings the sex appeal, but she also brings an affable warmth and agreeability to the proceedings. There's no hint that she feels this material is beneath her (and Munro could certainly perform at a much greater level than demanded of her in this film), no need to sneer or seem above it all. She's in it and having fun, and there's nothing about her that doesn't make her the easiest girl in the world with whom to fall in love. Or whatever emotion governs a reaction to gorgeous cavewoman princesses with killer smiles. Paired with the really weird LSD atmosphere of the movie, the cast simply makes At the Earth's Core a treat despite its many impossible to ignore faults. Many times, I've been able to dismiss a film's short-comings and justify my adoration of it by spinning some yarn about how I saw the movie as a young boy, and blah blah blah. Not so with this one, though. I first saw At the Earth's Core when I was in college. Realizing that i was witnessing something completely weird, I threw a tape into my VCR and recorded about 70% of the film. It became one of the most cherished gifts I ever gave my stoner buddy Ken (the other cherished gift was Young Taoism Fighter). But I can't even play the "dude, I was so wasted" card, because I was stone cold sober at the time. Granted, I hadn't slept in like three days, and I'm pretty sure this was during the time when I was doing an experiment that involved eating Taco Bell for breakfast every morning after not sleeping. Whatever the case, At the Earth's Core succeeds for me when it just as easily might have failed, thanks largely to the freaky feel and an able cast. Sometimes, you just like a bad movie. Well, most of the time, if you are me. Labels: Director: Kevin Conner, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Stars: Caroline Munro, Stars: Doug McClure, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Amicus, Year: 1976 posted by Keith at 5:46 PM | 1 Comments Sunday, June 08, 2008War Gods of the Deep Release Year: 1965Country: United States and England Starring: Vincent Price, David Tomlinson, Tab Hunter, Susan Hart, John Le Mesurier, Harry Oscar, Derek Newark, Roy Patrick. Writer: Charles Bennett, Louis Heyward Director: Jacques Tourneur Cinematographer: Stephen Dade Music: Stanley Black Producer: George Willoughby Alternate Titles: City Under the Sea Availability: Buy it from Amazon Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us If the world was just and kind, then the sentence, "It's a movie where Vincent Price stars as a madman who rules over an underwater society of fishmen prone to kidnapping scantily clad beautiful women," would indicate the existence of probably one of the greatest films ever made. But the world is often cold and heartless and it often enjoys toying with us mere mortals as did the petty and jealous Greek gods of old. Therefore, the sentence, "It's a movie where Vincent Price stars as a madman who rules over an underwater society of fishmen prone to kidnapping scantily clad beautiful women," does not indicate the existence of one of the greatest movies of all time, but instead, indicates the existence of a shocking dull film in which Vincent Price sits in a cave while a couple stiffs run around in tunnels, and then some stuff blows up at the end. This, sadly, is the fantasy world conjured up by the lackluster War Gods of the Deep -- a modestly entertaining film in spots, but a tremendous letdown given the talent in front of and behind the camera. By 1965, the year this film was released, American International Pictures had enjoyed considerable success mining the works of Edgar Allan Poe for a series of films starring Vincent Price (and Ray Milland, once) and directed by Roger Corman. The streak began with Corman's low-budget but lavish looking adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher and continued with The Premature Burial, The Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror, The Haunted Palace, The Raven, Masque of the Red Death, and The Tomb of Ligeia. These films represented something new and relatively risky for AIP, then a studio that specialized in making cheap, fast black and white double features. Corman, inspired by the work that was happening at England's Hammer Studio, convinced AIP to let him shoot in color, a single film, with a bigger budget (though still tiny) and longer shooting schedule (though still incredibly fast). The resulting film, The Fall of the House of Usher, did big time box office for AIP, is considered one of the all-time great horror films, and convinced AIP of a couple things. First, that color films with more money put into them were a worthwhile investment, especially when someone as good as Corman at turning out expensive looking results for pennies was on board. Second, that they should tack Edgar Allan Poe's name onto everything and plumb his works mercilessly.
Although all the films in the first AIP Poe cycle were good, and most of them were great, several of them had very little to do with the Poe poem or short story from which they took their name. The Raven, for example, uses the Poe poem for its opening scene, with Price being plagued by a mysterious raven. But as soon as the raven starts wisecracking in Peter Lorre's voice, you can guess that the Poe material is out the window. The Pit and the Pendulum takes the Poe source material and extends it with a number of subplots original to the screenplay or snatched piecemeal from other sources. And in the case of The Haunted Palace -- one of the very best films in the Poe cycle -- it wasn't based on Poe at all. It was actually based on The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft. But AIP felt that audiences wouldn't know who the hell Lovecraft was. Distributors agreed. And so, despite Corman's protests, it became an Edgar Allan Poe movie. Dubious connections to the source material not withstanding, all of the films were very good (well, I'm not that fond of Tales of Terror, but that's because I don't care for anthology films), thanks to the line-up they enjoyed: Corman as director, Price (and Milland once) as star, and Richard Matheson as the screenwriter (most of the time). Matheson was to AIP horror what Jimmy Sangster was to Hammer horror: consistently wonderful. In 1965, AIP decided to stretch Poe's connection even further, tapping one of his short tales called The City in the Sea as a source for War Gods of the Deep. But other than having Price read some of the story for the opening credits, War Gods of the Deep has very little to do with Poe. AIP would take a similar approach during it's second round of Poe horror films, with The Witchfinder General being retitled Edgar Allan Poe's The Conqueror Worm -- a title justified by having Price read some of the original poem before the film launched off into a plot that has pretty much nothing to do with the poem or Poe. In that case, however, the movie was good. In the case of War Gods of the Deep, the results were...not as impressive. But it isn't for lack of trying. Although Roger Corman wasn't directing, AIp assigned Jacques Tourneur to the film. Tourneur is perhaps best known as the director of such films as Night of the Demon and the Val Lewton produced films Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man. All of them are considered classics, and deservedly so. On top of that, he directed one of the all time great noir films, 1947's Out of the Past starring Robert Mitchum. And then there was the classic Burt Lancaster swashbuckler epic The Flame and the Arrow. By the 1960s, however, Tourneur's best years were perhaps behind him, and he found himself working in television and at AIP, first as director of the Poe-esque Comedy of Terrors which features one of my all-time favorite idiotically hilarious scenes (when awful opera singing causes Vincent Price's undertaker top hat to pop off wit a "boop!" sound effect), and then as director on War Gods of the Deep.
And while the film isn't written by Richard Matheson (most famous for being the author who penned I Am Legend, the book that inspired everything from Night of the Living Dead to Last Man on Earth to The Asylum's I Am Omega), AIP did get Charles Bennett, who was no slouch in the screenwriting department. Among his sundry credits are the very first filmed version of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, the black and white version made as part of the Climax! television series, where James Bond goes by Jimmy and was played by Barry Nelson. Bennett also wrote plenty of classic scripts, including work for Hitchcock (Sabotage, Secret Agent, and Foreign Correspondent), the adventure classic King Solomon's Mines, and Tourneur's own Night of the Demon. He was also frequently tapped by producer Irwin Allen both for movie (The Lost World, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) and television (Land of the Giants, the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea series) scripts. Of course, there are a few turkeys in his resume, including the epic misfires The Story of Mankind (Irwin Allen's attempt to tell in sweeping epic fashion the complete history of mankind, from caveman times to the present and starring pretty much every B lister and has-been ever, from the past their prime Marx Brothers to Cesar Romero, Peter Lorre, John Carradine, Heddy Lamar, and of course, Vincent Price as Ol' Mr. Scratch) and Cecil B. DeMille's sweeping and often dull tale of piracy and romance on the 19th Century Georgia coast, Reap the Wild Wind. On the other hand, that's the movie where Bennett was smart enough to write a scene where John Wayne battles a giant squid, so that counts for something. Still, that's a basically solid resume, especially for this type of film. Despite the presence of Vincent Price and the shaky Poe tie-in, War Gods of the Deep isn't considered part of the Poe cycle, not so much because it wasn't directed by Corman, but more because it plays out less like a gothic horror film and more like the Clif Notes version of a Jules Verne fantasy adventure film. Of course, Disney had already made pretty much the be-all and end-all Jules Verne fantasy adventure film in 1954 with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Anything else was going to pale in comparison to a film that had the benefit of Disney's vast financial resources and Kirk Douglas shaking his bon-bon while singing sea chanties and wearing a jaunty little cap. But that never stopped AIP, or anyone else for that matter. And so, in 1965, Tourneur, Bennett, Price, and AIP took us under the ocean for what we all hoped would be a really cool adventure film.
And things start off well enough. Beautiful Jill Tregillis (Susan Hart, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, Pajama Party) is minding her own business in her castle by the coast bedroom when, all of a sudden, she is attacked and kidnapped by a hideous gillman who looks like that dude who helped Lando fly the Millennium Falcon in Return of the Jedi. Perturbed by the kidnapping of his beloved by this uppity haddock, square-jawed hero Ben Harris (reliable Tab Hunter) and his nebbish, ferret-faced sidekick Harold Tufnell-Jones (Disney live-action film regular David Tomilson) follow in leisurely pursuit. And for some reason, Tufnell-Jones (presumably an ancestor of legendary heavy metal guitarist Nigel Tufnell) insists on bring along his trusty pet: a chicken in a basket. Why exactly, this guy goes everywhere with a chicken is a mystery. Why he is a bachelor, of course, is not. Tufnell-Jones and his chicken are there to provide frequent comic relief. Guess how many times you will laugh at their shenanigans! Ben and the chicken lover soon find themselves in a maze of sub-aquatic (but never the less dry) caves inhabited by a population of long-lived men ruled over by the mad Captain Hugh (Vincent Price). It seems that Price and his men were once smugglers and, while fleeing from the authorities, stumbled upon this network of sub-aquatic caves leading to the remnants of a city constructed by a highly advanced civilization. By the time Price arrived, however, the society was centuries into decline, the secrets of their technology being lost and the former inhabitants being reduced to nothing more than animalistic gillmen. Price and company made themselves at home amid the decaying remains of the city under the sea, and something about the air down there and the lack of exposure to UV light has resulted in them living for hundreds of years. Price commands the gillmen, for they consider him their god for one reason or another (no problem -- I sort of consider him a god as well) and he had them kidnap Jill for the usual reason: she is the exact spitting image of the captain's long dead true love. When our heroes arrive to rescue her, they promptly get captured but stave off execution by pretending to be geologists who can help Price out with the big problem: the volcano. Everyone spends some time stalking around the cave-palace, which like pretty much every undersea kingdom in the history of movies about undersea kingdoms, is threatened by a nearby underwater volcano that is going to erupt any moment now. Eventually, Ben, Jill, and their comic relief load are forced to don unwieldy Victorian-style scuba gear (which, for some reason, demands gigantic helmets into which you can fit a man's head and his accompanying chicken) and flee for their lives with Hugh and his murderous followers in hot pursuit. And by hot pursuit, I mean...well, let me explain this in detail. You see, everyone is underwater. When you are in water, you swim. It's really the best way to get around. That's why all fish do it. That's why pretty much everyone does it except for those sprinters who practice by trying to run underwater. That established, we then move on to the fact that watching people swim in movies is usually boring. The pitfalls of scuba scenes in cinema are well documented. So how could you take a scene -- scuba diving underwater -- that could be really boring even if properly done, and ensure that it's even more boring than you could possibly imagine? Well, instead of swimming, the people could be walking underwater. Yes, indeed. War Gods of the Deep is one of the only movies that thought what people really wanted to see was a foot chase on the floor of the ocean, with people flopping about awkwardly and moving incredibly slowly. But that's not really enough, you also have to make the scene go on for like ten minutes, and pad it out with dialog-free close-ups of Tufnell-Jones and his chicken looking around.
Now keep in mind that I have a pretty big tolerance for underwater scenes, owing largely to my fascination with what Cousteau referred to as "the silent world" and my love of diving. So trust me when I tell you that this underwater foot chase scene is one of the most horribly boring scenes I've ever seen. They try to spice things up by having guys shoot crossbows from time to time, but since no one ever actually gets hit, that never pays off. And every now and then, some of the gillmen swim up and mess around with Ben and the crew, presumably confused by the fact that these humans are walking underwater instead of swimming (thus the ability of the gillmen to swim circles around them). Despite the fact tat the gillmen can swim, breathe underwater, and aren't weighed down by cumbersome iron helmets, they aren't very effective at attacking our slowly fleeing heroes. You can pretty much defeat them by swatting at them in that slow-motion way that occurs when you are underwater. It's a tremendous relief when everyone resurfaces inside some weird temple. The volcano explodes, a giant hand falls on Vincent Price, and a singularly terrifying moment occurs when the heroes put their scuba gear back on. Dear God, no! Please! No more scenes of people awkwardly walking around underwater! This time, however, we're in luck, because the good guys crawl out of the water and the movie ends. I'm not sure what went wrong. Good director, good screenwriter, a good cast. I mean, Tab Hunter is no Doug McClure, but he's fine in this role, even though a lot of people pick on his performance. He's a one-note character, but so is everyone else. And Hunter proves adept at singing the note "stiff straight man." Susan Hart is vapid and has nothing to do, but she does that nothing well. There's no chemistry at all between her and Hunter, and once again, as I did with Arabian Adventure, I can't help but think that this movie would have been greatly improved if our lovers were played by Doug McClure and Caroline Munro. But Hunter and hart are acceptable. Heck, even comic relief guy is unfunny but relatively inoffensive and easy to ignore. To some degree, the blame for this misfire falls on the producer, Louis Heyward, who insisted on monkeying with the script endlessly and much to Tourneur's annoyance. But AIP sided with Heyward in the conflict, and his changes remained despite the protests of Tourneur, Vincent Price (who had great respect for Tourneur and very little respect for Heyward), and original screenwriter Bennett. But that can only go so far in explaining things -- the nail in the coffin of an already flawed work, as it were. And you know, if I'm replacing cast members, we might as well get rid of David Tomlinson and replace him with Terry-Thomas.
Maybe the whole thing played out better on paper, and no realized how boring it was going to be when actually committed to film. Actually, let me alter that. This movie really isn't terrible up until the underwater foot chase. It's no classic of fantasy adventure cinema, but it's harmless enough. But the underwater footage deep sixes the rest of the movie, which just isn't buoyant enough to stay afloat with the dead albatross of the underwater foot chase around it's neck. Is that enough seafarin' allusions for ya? Then let's stop beating that dead seahorse and move on to some of the film's other problems. First and foremost is, and I never thought I'd say this, Vincent Price's performance. We've seen Price play it cool and reserved before to great effect, but the decision for him to play mad Cap'n Hugh with Fall of the Hous eof Usher style reserve was, in my opinion, a tremendous mistake. This movie could have survived its dreadful underwater chase scene if Price had been hamming it up and playing Hugh as crazy and nutty as the script alludes to him being. Instead, Price's Hugh comes off as dull. The script is too thin to lend the character a sense of gravity, so there's no real emotional reaction to him. He's a villain you hate, or love to hate, or relish, or grow to sympathize with. He merely exists on film for a duration of time, and then a big stone hand falls on him. I mean, this is a mad sea captain living in an undersea city that looks like a crumbling Victorian castle and commanding an army of mutant gillmen while giving speeches about the end of the world. Why on earth would anyone think to play that character with quiet reserve? Vincent Price is, as I think I've written before, one of my favorite actors. Quite possibly, he's my most favorite actor. He never gives less than 100%, and he doesn't give less than 100% here. But the character is so boring, and Price plays it so straight, that War Gods of the Deep becomes perhaps the only film in which Price is upstaged by a irritating guy with a chicken in a basket. Speaking of the chicken -- what the hell was that about? It's not like the chicken ever does anything wacky, or like it jumps out and pecks Price on the foot or something. It is simply carried around for the entire movie, having no point at all. Even within the realm of unfunny comic relief, surely no one thinks the mere presence of a chicken is hilarious. A monkey, sure. But a chicken? I don't get it. This was apparently one of Louis Heyward's most important contributions t the script, and it's obvious why everyone else involved with the film thought the guy was a jack-ass. It's just another way to pad out a really threadbare script. It seems like Bennett got a great concept but quickly wrote himself into a corner, possibly because of budgetary constraints -- but I'm not going to buy that considering how many exciting and imaginative films were done with as little or even less money. Not being able to come up with anything for anyone to do, the movie falls back on repetitive dialog scenes in which Vincent Price explains to us that the glowing,pulsating volcano is a threat (because we wouldn't have figured it out after the first warning) or in which Tab Hunter and the guy with the chicken ask other people if they remember how to get to the surface. The sudden presence of a beautiful woman who is to be the sole property of the captain amid an undersea kingdom populated entirely by men lends itself to potential conflict, but that's never bothered with. Or the use of the dim-witted gillmen as thugs and sacrificial lambs who perhaps begin to resent the captain's manipulation of them? But no, it never goes in that direction either. Like the characters in the movie, it just sort of half-heartedly wanders around the same caverns over and over, until the volcano finally erupts.
Still, as dull as this film turns out to be, there are some redeeming qualities. Well, there's one. The sets are really nice. And the gillmen are kind of cool looking, even if they end up having very little to do. Tourneur -- accustomed to working in black and white and employing shadows to great effect -- turns out to be equally adept at manipulating th candy colored Technicolor hues. Although War Gods of the Deep isn't a good film to watch, it's a great film to look at. Tourneur's direction coupled with cinematography by Stephen Dade is gorgeous to behold. And as with the sets, War Gods of the Deep has excellent costumes and the look of a much more expensive production than it actually was. But that's precious little to go on, especially when you could be spending your time with far superior aquatic adventures, like the aforementioned Disney version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or the Japanese film Atragon (from which this film steals some scenes, incidentally). This is also a sad film to end up being the last in Tourneur's career. If only a giant squid had attacked the city or something, but no. That would have been something interesting, and this film is committed to making sure nothing interesting happens. It's all, as I said, a tremendous disappointment given the talented cast and crew assembled. But it's one misstep after another, making War Gods of the Deep the extremely rare crappy fantasy film I actually can't recommend. Well, maybe watch it once...but just once.  Labels: Fantasy, Netflix Diary, Science Fiction, Series: Oceans Against Us, Stars: Vincent Price, Studio: AIP, Year: 1965 posted by Keith at 11:45 AM | 1 Comments Tuesday, May 13, 2008Redline Release Year: 1997Country: Canada and The Netherlands Starring: Rutger Hauer, Mark Dacascos, Yvonne Scio, Patrick Dreikauss, Randall William Cook, Michael Mehlmann, Ildiko Szucs, Istvan Kanizsay, John Thompson, Gabor Peter Vincze, Scott Athea, Attila Arpa. Writer: Tibor Takacs and Brian Irving Director: Tibor Takacs Cinematographer: Zoltan David Music: Guy Zerafa Producer: Brian Irving Alternate Titles: Deathline, Armageddon, The Syndicate Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us There are those in the world who write about the career of Rutger Hauer in much the same way that other people write about the film career of Elvis Presley, the general approach being one of "ain't that a damn shame?" Hauer made a name for himself in America when he appeared in Ridley Scott's seminal dystopian sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner as Roy Batty, the leader of a gang of renegade androids being hunted down by Harrison Ford, presumably because they kidnapped his family or were on his plane without first obtaining the proper permissions. Hauer was already a familiar face to the ten non-Dutch people who watch Dutch films, and among that small population, the five fans of Dutch cinema who would actually watch Paul Verhoven films. When he appeared as a ruthless terrorist in Night Hawks, people started to take notice. Here was something interesting about the guy. And something scary. When a screenwriter told you Rutger Hauer was a murderous madman, you believed them. A year later, Blade Runner catapulted Hauer into even wider American consciousness, and it seemed like he was destined for great things. But Blade Runner wasn't quite the hit then that it has become today. Shortly thereafter, he appeared in the fantasy film Ladyhawke, which while not a blockbuster, certainly earned its fair share of fans and let Americans see Hauer as something more than a scary cyborg who howls, drives nails through his own palm, and spends his spare time catching pigeons and jumping around on rooftops. Hauer went on to appear in a string of modest genre hits throughout the 1980s, including The Hitcher, where he fed Pony Boy severed fingers, Flesh + Blood, where he competed for screen time with the frequently nude Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Blood of Heroes, where he and Joan Chen got to slam dog skulls onto a stick in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. However, while each of these films found an audience, none of them became much more than cult hits. Hauer's intensity, his on-screen charisma, and his scary-yet-hot look seemed to imply that he was going to be big, just as soon as he found the right movie. And then something weird happened.
Exactly when and where, I can't say for certain, though I'm willing to say things started to derail round about Blind Fury, which casts Hauer as a blind swordsman fighting the Mob. The modern-day mob, that is, the one with guns and hand grenades and black Crown Victorias; the one that would probably be able to kill just about any swordsman, let alone a blind one. Couple that with the movie where Hauer played a rogue cop who doesn't play by the rules, battling evil terrorist Gene Simmons, and things really start to wobble. His long-anticipated portrayal of the vampire Lestat (Apparently he was Anne Rice's personal choice) never happened, and by the time the movie was made, Hauer was too old, and the role went to Tom Cruise. Throughout the 1990s, Hauer appeared in a series of misfires coupled with small roles (usually as the villain) in films with cult followings, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which wasn't a hit at the time) and a role in the Most Dangerous Game inspired Surviving the Game, where he got to hunt Ice T. After initial excitement Hauer generated when he made the leap to America, it seems like studios lost any faith in him as a draw. Before too long, he found himself in direct to video film hell, and there he has remained alongside Seagal, Van Damme, and Mark Dacascos (actually, frequently alongside Mark Dacascos), emerging from time to time to appear in a supporting role in higher profile projects like Batman Begins and Smallville.
You could bemoan the state of his career and look at his appearance in things like Dracula III and Scorcher as something to be sad about as you think about what could have been. On the other hand, Hauer is one of that breed of actor who works consistently, averaging four or five movies a year, getting free vacations to whatever location is being used that week, and showing up for small roles in big films at least once a year. Most actors would be more than happy to fail in the way Hauer has failed. Redline, which was originally titled Deathline, has nothing to do with the underground street racing circuit. For a movie about that, you will have to go see Redline -- the one that features a car on the front cover, instead of Rutger Hauer. Both movies feature lots of hot ladies in really tiny mini-skirts. But the Redline we want is a movie that sees Hauer and his partners Merrick (Dacascos, who is Russian this week) and Marina (Yvonne Scio) as a trio of smugglers in the Russia of the near future, running some sort of biotech you would assume becomes central to the plot at some point. It never does, but it does give us an early opportunity for Merrick and Marina to betray Hauer's Wade and shoot him dead, presumably over the lack of judgment he demonstrates in choosing his outfit from the Glenn Fry "Smuggler's Blues" collection at Sears. Merrick then gets to be doubly evil, thus justifying his growing of a goatee, by betraying Marina as well. The corpses are picked up by Russian police, and for some reason Special Prosecutor Vanya (Randall William Cook) decides to use top secret military technology to bring Wade back from the dead. Thus revived, Wade promptly sets out to do two things: see some boobs, and kill Merrick. Wade seems to have very little problem with the first task, as the Russia of the near future is much like the Russia of the present: full of hot chicks in skimpy outfits, dancing to bad techno music. Somehow, among all the aspiring models, porn stars, strippers, and prostitutes that Eastern Europe has to throw at him, Wade ends up meeting Katya (also Scio), who happens to look just like Marina. One would expect that this, a story about a resurrected man on a mission of vengeance encountering the a woman who is the spitting image of his deceased true love, would then go right into Rutger Hauer getting wrapped up like a mummy and doing that stiff-armed swat to the shoulder that has killed so many old British guys who dared disturb the tomb of Amon-Ra. Instead, it just continues with the second of Wade's goals, which is to kill Merrick, who has become a player in the Russian mob, though one whose position seems tenuous. I reckon the Russian mob has a thirty-day trial period like any business thinking of hiring a contractor to a full time position.
Of course, if that was the plot, this movie would be far too simple. So we get layer upon layer of ulterior motives. Why did Vanya bring Wade back from the dead? Why do they keep cutting to random scenes of the Russian president (Agnes Banfalvi) giving speeches? Why is Katya helping Wade? Does Mark Dacascos own any shirts, and if he does, is he capable of buttoning the top few buttons? Is there going to be an ill-advised fight scene between Dacascos and Hauer? On the way to answering these and other questions the movie won't make you care about very much, we get to see Rutger Hauer shoot a lot of people. He also gets beat up by a naked female body builder and a topless female boxer who seem to be hanging out in a mansion-turned-nightclub for no real reason other than all Russian mob meetings include a techno dance party and naked female boxers and bodybuilders, gets to have sex with a couple women in a shower (oh yes -- there will be naked Rutger Hauer), gets to have sex with Yvonne Scio, and probably does it a few more times, but I lost track. So if you've been looking for a movie where most of the running time is devoted to Rutger Hauer shooting and screwing, this is your lucky day. There not much in the way of redeeming factors for this film, but that's never stopped me before. I seem to have a limitless capacity to appreciate dumb direct to DVD movies starring Rutger Hauer and/or Mark Dacascos. Couple that with my previously established weakness for what most of the world considers two-star sci-fi films, and I really had no hope of coming out of Redline as a member of the minority of people who actually enjoyed the film. It's science fiction only in the most bare-boned sense. Hauer and his pals run illegal biotech, but that never matters. There are devices that let you have VR-style dreams, mostly about banging a couple hot Russian chicks in the shower, but we already have the internet, which is full of places where you can go to pretend you are banging two hot Russian chicks in the shower. The future looks pretty much like the present -- which probably isn't that far off from the truth -- and the remnants of Soviet Russia that are littered around lend the film an interesting look. The sprawling mansions, underground dance clubs, and crumbling Soviet-era tenements afford the film a cheap but convincing setting that is a far cry from Blade Runner but better than, say, Flash Future Kungfu.
Hauer's performances can be hit or miss, depending on his mood. He's actually fairly engaging in this movie, even if he spends half of it on autopilot. There are moments when he actually acts, and you get to see a little flash of the magic that Hauer once possessed. He's a little heavier these days than when he played the ultimate combat cyborg and ran around in little black leather biker shorts (obviously purchased from the same store Sting shopped at for Dune), but for a cat in his 50s, he's still doing OK, and he certainly looks to be in better shape for this film that he was in a lot of his previous direct to video outings -- possibly because he knew he was going to be in the nude, as they say, though not as frequently as his female co-star, Yvonne Scio. Scio's a beauty (I'd go with Kylie Minogue beets Anna Falchi), and she's a far better actress than one usually expects from these sorts of films. Redline seems to be her first English language film after a career in her native Italy. Since then, she's appeared in some bit parts, some television shows, and probably most notable to the sort of people who frequent Teleport City, the Sci-Fi Channel original movie A.I. Assault. I quite like her. She has natural charisma and energy, and even though she's from the "skinny ass-kicker" mold I so rarely buy into, she handles the action scenes believably. The final revelation regarding her character is somewhat ridiculous, but then, pretty much everything about this movie is somewhat ridiculous. Plus, she's an actual woman, born in 1969, not a teenager, and she's kept her freckles. Yeah, I dig Yvonne Scio.
Completing the main cast is our man Mark Dacascos, the Don "The Dragon" Wilson of the 21st century. Dacascos got his start back in the 80s, with a series of bit parts and minor television roles. In 1993, he starred in a movie called Only the Strong, which tried unsuccessfully to convince people that a martial arts based danced practiced mostly by dumpy hippy chicks in dirty linen pants and white dudes with dreadlocks and devil sticks was somehow awesome and the preferred style of combat for all vicious street thugs in Rio, who apparently are more than willing to put their bloodlust on hold long enough for the resident dude with a boom box to find a song with the right rhythm for the fight. While that movie may not have been any more successful than Rooftops at convincing us that capoeira would ever defeat gymkata or Tony Jaa with big-ass elephant tusks strapped to his arms, it did convince a lot of people that Dacascos was someone on which they should keep an eye. In the early 1990s, a lot of Americans were discovering Hong Kong cinema and getting caught up in the films of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao (among others). So the folks prone to paying attention to such things wondered if there wasn't an American star who could even come close. Exposure to Chan's hyper-kinetic, stunt-driven action style meant that audiences were no longer going to buy into guys like Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme. The answer from the U.S. seemed to come in the form of one of two people: Brandon Lee or Mark Dacascos. But then Brandon died, and Dacascos just never clicked with audiences. He went on to star in Double Dragon, a movie that asked audiences to believe that Mark Dacascos would play second kungfu fiddle to a guy from Party of Five -- the most unbalanced kungfu match-up since Bruce Lee fought Gig Young. Dacascos then became the go-to guy for direct to video action films now that Don Wilson was slowing down, and they were unable to fit anymore numerals after the Bloodfist title. Even in DTV hell, Dacascos managed to shine from time to time. He starred in both Crying Freeman and Sanctuary, two adaptations of manga drawn by Ryoichi Ikegami. When they adapted The Crow for a television, Dacascos played the role formerly inhabited by Brandon Lee (more or less -- I know they are all supposed to be different Crows, but really -- a vengeful kungfu ghost in mime make-up is a vengeful kungfu ghost in mime make-up). He appeared in the rotten Hong Kong action film China Strike Force, a movie that decided the final fight shouldn't be between Dacascos and Aaron Kwok (two actors who know how to fight on screen), but should instead be between Kwok and Coolio...on top of a precariously balanced sheet of glass, meaning that 1) the fight consists mostly of the guys trying to keep their balance and 2) the fight would have stunk anyway, because it was Coolio versus Aaron Kwok. Shortly thereafter, he reminded people how awesome he could be when he showed up in Chris Gans' Brotherhood of the Wolf as a silent native American bad-ass.
The one true highlight of his direct to video career is a film called Drive, but we'll talk about that gem some other time. Since then, he settled into a comfortable and prolific career in movies only people like us would ever watch, including Solar Strike, The Hunt for Eagle One, Alien Agent, and of more recent infamy, I Am Omega, The Asylum film studio's quickie rip-off of both The Omega Man and I Am Legend (Asylum being the people who gave us such films as Snakes on a Train, The Da Vinci Treasure, and Pirates of Treasure Island, among countless others). Although he usually ends up throwing a punch or a kick here and there, these days he relies very little on his athleticism and martial arts prowess, concentrating instead on his ability to sit in hot tubs, shoot people, and pass for pretty much ethnicity the screenplay calls for. He also seems to appear with shocking frequency alongside Rutger Hauer, making them sort of the Bing Crosby and Bob Hope of crappy direct to video action and sci-fi films. The partnership that began here with Redline continued with Scorcher and not one but two Hunt for Eagle One movies. Here's to wishing them a long and fruitful joint career as the lords of direct to video action films.
Speaking of the lords of direct to video, you can't escape any discussion of Redline -- and lord knows the world is crawling with people who want to discuss a sci-fi action film in which Rutger Hauer gets beat up by a naked female bodybuilder -- without mentioning the director, Tibor Takacs. The man is responsible for at least one film a week that plays on the Sci-Fi Channel. He's perhaps best known for directing the 1987 cult classic The Gate, but since then he's blessed the world with a whole slew of horrible crap that I seem to watch with alarming regularity and joy: Viper, Tornado Warning, Rats, Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep, Ice Spiders, Mega Snake...Mansquito! He gave the world Mansquito, for crying out loud! And somewhere in there, he managed to direct a Sabrina the Teenage Witch film. His relationship with Dacascos goes as far back as Sanctuary and Redline, both in 1997, and they worked together again on The Crow television series. You know, if you told me that as of tomorrow, all films were going to be directed by Tibor Takacs, star Mark Dacascos and Rutger Hauer (and hot chicks in short skirts), and involve fighting giant snakes and/or spiders, my only real regret would be that there would then be no more Uwe Boll films. Come to think of it, why hasn't Mark Dacascos been in an Uwe Boll film yet? Takacs also wrote the screenplay for Redline, along with a guy named Brian Irving who seems to be Takacs' frequent partner in crime. They collaborated together on Rats, Sanctuary, and Nostradamus. Like I said, turn on the Sci-Fi Channel any Saturday, and you are pretty likely to see a film these guys made.
I suppose that this being a work of speculative fiction, one could search for meaning amid all the chaos and scenes of Rutger Hauer killing people. Beneath the sci-fi and action film veneer, this ends up being a political thriller as well, possibly even a spy film. But to read too much meaning into anything is to ignore the greater body of work this writer-director has created. His vision of the future plays like a version of modern-day Russia with a a bunch of Strange Days grafted on to get the film put in the science fiction section. There's absolutely no reason the mysterious Special Prosecutor needs to resurrect a dead Rutger Hauer in order to sick him on the members of a Russian gang as part of some convoluted plot to assassinate the too-friendly and reform-minded president. It seems like his method of planning is to never let anything be done in one step if it can be done in ten. The guy might have even succeeded with his coup had he spent more time figuring out how to just shoot the president, and less time bringing Rutger Hauer back from the dead and hatching assorted schemes with Mark Dacascos, in an attempt to manipulate Dacascos into crossing his mob bosses, so that...oh, really. You know what? Very little of it makes a lick of sense, and if you try and dissect it any further than "Rutger Hauer looks at boobs and tries to kill Mark Dacascos," you are probably going to give up. At least Takacs didn't make the future some totally dystopian Blade Runner meets 1984 (this being before The Matrix) cliche. In fact, I like the whole idea of scifi films set in Russia and Eastern Europe. The 80s and 90s were dominated by the William Gibson-esque assumption that the future would be dominated by Japan, and everything would be controlled by steely-eyed yakuza in black suits, with a tendency to still use samurai swords even though the rest of the world moved on to guns a couple centuries ago. While Japan still enjoys the reputation of happening fifty years in the future thanks in no small part to their love of flashing cell phones and disturbingly realistic robotic love dolls, it turns out that the future is probably going to play out in places like Russia, China, and oh, let's say India even though they don't like science fiction. Russia certainly lends itself to easy sci-fi. You hardly even have to dress the set. Now all we need is a movie where the dejected future samurai corporate hitmen of Japan have to fight for their livelihood against a bunch of future Russian mob corporate hitmen.
So, what have we said? None of it makes any sense, right? The pace is awkward. Not exactly slow, because Rutger Hauer is always killing people or getting it on, or Mark Dacascos is always getting in or out of the hot tub, but there's no real energy to most of the action. It's a Canadian co-production, and Canadian films often have a weird feel tot he pace. But then, Canadian films are rarely this mean and scummy, so that compensates somewhat for the meandering clip. Much of the film feels like running in place, albeit fairly amusing running in place, because Rutger Hauer is walking around blowing the hell out of anything and everyone with almost no consequences at all (eventually, they put a bounty out on him, which delights the bloodthirsty hobo vigilantes to no end) and not the slightest concern. As far as we can tell, he was a smuggler, but not a killer, so for him to suddenly become a nonchalant killing machine who will just haul off and blow away anyone with even the most tenuous appearance of guilt or malice is...well, I guess if you were a dead guy walking around Russia looking to avenge your own murder, maybe that's the sort of thing that makes you put less value on life. Or maybe Tibor Tikacs just didn't give a shit and figured that watching Rutger Hauer shoot like a thousand guys is more fun than watching Rutger Hauer shoot one guy then agonize about the moral implications of his actions afterward. All that negative stuff aired, it's probably no surprise that I actually kind of like Redline. It's a modestly entertaining, largely tasteless exercise in gratuitous sex, sleaze, and violence, and that's usually all it takes to make me happy. Throw in some engaging actors, lots of skimpy outfits, big guns, a ludicrous plot, insane amounts of murder that never seem to attract the attention of the police, and Rutger Hauer getting the sleeper hold put on him by a naked bodybuilder chick, and you have the recipe for a decent if idiotic trip to the near future. Labels: Netflix Diary, Science Fiction, Stars: Mark Dacascos, Stars: Rutger Hauer posted by Keith at 3:03 PM | 3 Comments Friday, April 18, 2008Event Horizon Release Year: 1997Country: United States Starring: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill. Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Richard T. Jones, Jack Noseworthy, Jason Isaacs, Sean Pertwee. Writer: Phil Eisner Director: Paul W.S. Anderson Cinematographer: Adrian Biddle Music: Michael Kamen Producer: Jeremy Bolt, Lawrence Gordon, Lloyd Levin Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us Event Horizon is another one of those movies that I wouldn't review if I wasn't committed to writing about everything I get from Netflix until such time as I see fit to end this third in the series of Netflix Diaries. It's not that Event Horizon isn't the kind of movie I would write about. Haunted spaceships and Sam Neill ripping out his own eyeballs is right up my alley. No, the reason isn't the content, but rather, that fact that this is one of those movies that already has a lot of words spent on it from a variety of sources both in the mainstream and in the realm of cult film fandom. Under such circumstances, it's hard to imagine what i might have to add that is new. In some cases, I can come up with something -- some tiny, meaningless tidbit that is a throwaway line in a movie that then allows me to write endlessly on some idiotic and obscure point. But upon watching Event Horizon, I was left with a distinct lack of ideas when it came to thinking about how I might approach writing about this film with some degree of originality. And now that I've finished the first paragraph, I still have no idea, so with any luck, something will pop up as I stumble along. I didn't see Event Horizon when it was released. I'm not sure why. I mean, it's a gory film about a spooky spaceship. I think, however, in 1997, I saw maybe three film the entire year, and that was when I went out on dates with a lovely Southern belle. Somehow we ended up at a screening of Mortal Kombat II: Annihilation. So shamed was I that I just packed up and left North Carolina for New York, hoping to lose myself in the throng and hide my shameful secret. But the Netflix Diaries experiments have, in a way, become a curious place for dragging my own horrible secrets into the light for all to see, and on the scale of shameful secrets, "took a date to see Mortal Kombat II: Annihilation" is much worse than "burning passion for Catalina Larranaga" or even "took a date to see Wicked City." It's probably not worse than, "invited a girl over, cooked her a crappy dinner, then made her watch Black Devil Doll from Hell," but it's pretty close.
I was also pretty much broke in 1997. Hell, I was pretty much broke in 2007, but I'd learned to stretch a dollar in those ten years. Whatever the reason, I didn't see many movies that year, and Event Horizon was among the ones I didn't see. Heck, I don't think I knew a thing about it back then, because I didn't even have a TV at the time where I could see important commercials informing of the virtues of films like Event Horizon, B*A*P*S, Kull the Conqueror, or any of the other fine films released that year. In the many years that followed, Event Horizon was off my radar and forgotten about, even though from time to time someone would tell me I should see it. That almost always encourages me not to see a film, as very few people seem to understand the complexities of my taste, and so they assume that I will want to be watching Troma films or other intentionally and ironically crappy movies. People just can't grasp my earnestness. But lately, I've been going back and catching up on a lot of the science fiction I missed in the past ten years or so, and after Screamers, Event Horizon was the next film on the list -- though calling it science fiction is sort of like calling Halloween a "coming of age drama." Despite the starships, hibernation chambers, spacesuits, and other superficial trappings of science fiction, Event Horizon is most definitely a horror film through and through, hewing closely to the classic set-up of a group of people in an isolated location, being preyed upon by a mysterious and murderous force. It just so happens that outer space is a slightly more isolated location than usual. In this regard, Event Horizon draws upon a history of science fiction horror that includes films like Alien and Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires and can be traced back even further to the era of pulp fiction and writers like H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, it's Lovecraft's name that is most often invoked when people attempt to describe this film, even though at no point does Sam Neill yell "Yog Sothoth!" Unfortunately for a lot of people, Lovecraft and horror films were not invoked by the advertising for the film when it was released, which marketed it for the most part as a space adventure with some minor overtones of spookiness. People who went in expecting sci-fi space adventure found themselves confronted by hallucinatory images of demon rape, maggots, people being flayed alive, other people vomiting up their own innards or possibly someone else's arm -- at times, the atrocity exhibition is hard to decipher, but the fact remains that it was not what the average sci-fi fan was expecting. I've never quite understood this type of bait and switch marketing, as it only makes people mad. But I suspect that it has less to do with some sinister attempt to trick sci-fi fans into seeing a horror film and more to do with an ad agency that never bothered to watch the movie they were marketing and just assumed that, since it featured a spaceship, it was a science fiction film.
By the time I saw this movie, of course, the cat was out of the bag, so I knew exactly what I was getting into. Even if I hadn't, it would not have mattered much, since I can roll with horror just as easily as I can science fiction. So that's not what bugs me about this movie. What bugs me is that Event Horizon is this close to being a great movie, and that it comes so close but ultimately fails is, fair or not, much worse than if it had just been a crummy movie from beginning to end. At least then, I could have abandoned any care and gone along with things. That's what gets me through The Chronicles of Riddick, Aeon Flux, and the many other two-star science fiction films for which I seem to have an incredible weakness. But Event Horizon was almost so much more, and while I ultimately like the movie quite a lot, I do so well aware of the bitter taste left by great ideas left poorly explored and a resolution that sees the movie collapse in on itself -- which I guess is fitting in a way for a movie that features the a black hole propulsion system. The set-up is not unlike that of a couple other "investigating the mysterious ship" movies. I'm thinking specifically of The Black Hole and 2010. In the year 2047, a group of search and rescue astronauts lead by Lawrence Fishburne when he was allowed to show emotion instead of being an emotionless monotonal Matrix guy, are en route to a secret location known only to aerospace scientist Sam Neill. It is soon revealed that they are on their way to rendezvous with the space ship Event Horizon, an experimental craft with the ability to use a black hole generator to warp space and travel massive distances in the blink of an eye. But the ship went missing seven years ago, and there's been no successful contact with the crew since it suddenly re-appeared near the planet Neptune. Captain Miller (Fishburne), Dr. Weir (Neill), and the crew of the rescue ship Lewis and Clark are to make contact with the crew of the Event Horizon and see what the heck is going on. A rough approach through the stormy space surrounding Neptune results in damage to the Lewis and Clark, meaning that whatever happens on board the Event Horizon, they're going to have to stick around a spell to fix their own ship.
Things are hardly soothing on the nerves once the team boards the massive experimental space ship. The crew is gone, and the only trace of them is a garbled transmission full of screaming -- though eventually Miller and company also discover some hideously mutilated remains splayed across the walls. Although the ship's black hole drive is presumably shut down, it still finds time to activate itself and suck a member of Miller's crew into its vortex, returning him in a coma that is only broken long enough for him to babble hysterically about "the darkness inside him" and the nightmarish things he saw on the other side. On top of that, the rest of Miller's crew starts seeing things -- specifically, hallucinations of their dead loved ones. And because horror on top of horror isn't enough, scans of the Event Horizon begin returning reports of widespread bio signals, inferring that something else is on the ship with them. When one of Miller's officers decodes the Event Horizon log, they are met with perverse images of the crew being ripped apart, raped by hideous beasts (or possibly by other members of the crew), and suffering untold and unspeakable horrors. Miller decides that the ship can go to hell, and they're leaving it behind. But Weir seems to feel that the ship has already been to hell, and that somewhere along it's universe-warping journey, the Event Horizon passed into another dimension, one of absolute chaos and evil, and in doing so became a sentient and highly malevolent living organism. The scans are picking up life forms; they're picking up the ship itself, and the hallucinations and other problems are a result of the ship's immune system defending itself from invading organisms. Or the ship could just be a big ol' hunk of Hell-infused evil. Whatever the case, Miller is as keen on leaving as Weir is on keeping everybody there. As a concept, I think Event Horizon is tremendous. The idea of a ship's experimental drive warping space tot he point where it rips the fabric of the universe and winds up in another dimension humans could best comprehend as Hell is wonderful, and that sort of "horror among the stars" is right out of the old pulp writings of H.P. Lovecraft, who often tinged his horror with elements of science fiction. The universe into which the Event Horizon passed is glimpsed, but only in tiny, tiny portions, and the film relies again on the old Lovecraft trope of a place so completely evil, so thoroughly perverse and malign, that to merely gaze upon it would drive a man insane. Further, the idea that the ship, once returning in some way or another from that universe, would have become a sentient creature as evil as the universe through which it passed is a concept rife with potential. It's also a set of ideas so vast, so complex, that attempting to tackle them in two hours in a sci-fi horror film is almost certainly doomed to failure.
And that's what happens to poor Event Horizon; it is filled with too many good ideas that are too complex, and there's no hope of the film ever being able to satisfactorily unravel it's science, meta-science, philosophy, and religion. In a way, this isn't a bad thing. To present human characters with a situation far beyond their comprehension and thus leave many questions necessarily half-answered or completely unresolved is fine. There is a way to do that. I just don't think Event Horizon hits the mark. It aims. It makes a valiant effort. But int he end, it just can't get it's head around its own central concepts, and the whole thing devolves into an ending that lets the film down. But make no mistake about it -- I like this movie. I like it a lot. I think the things it does right make it more than worth the time it takes to watch. My frustration stems purely from the fact that it was well within the grasp of this film to be even better, and it didn't quite make it. It's like one of those break-aways in basketball where one guy has the ball,sprints the length of the court alone, has everyone cheering and going nuts, but then when he goes up for the slam dunk, he somehow screws it up and misses. You know, if he'd just dribbled down and missed a jumper, no worries. But because there was tremendous emotion and pageantry around the idea of a breakaway and dunk, when the guy blows the dunk, it makes the missed basket way more painful -- especially if it comes near the very end and costs them the game. Event Horizon spends most of its running time building up the freak-out and scares (sometimes with cheap jump scares, but usually through the use of genuine atmosphere), but as Roger Ebert said of the movie, "it's all foreboding and never gets to the actual boding." But let's detach ourselves from disappointment and spend some time talking about what this movie does right. First and foremost is the atmosphere. Although the science fiction setting misled a lot of viewers, it works wonderfully for this type of film. It's basically a slightly more fantastic version of the "old dark house," the remote cabin, or any of the many other locations horror films use to isolate their cast from the outside world -- only more so. Millions of miles from home, on a tiny man-made island, surrounded by an environment that will kill you almost instantly if you set foot outside. That's even more claustrophobic and nerve-wracking than being at some rich weirdo's country manor. And Event Horizon never lets you forget how vulnerable these people are. Their air is running out. One guy ends up outside the ship without a spacesuit. You never lose sight of how fragile humans are in this setting -- something I think could only be replicated by setting your movie in the middle of the ocean. Much of Event Horizon has to do with the concept of tampering in domains man was not meant to see, but while the specific domain may be the Hell Universe, in general it's obvious that even save travel through space in incredibly dangerous, and a tiny mistake or bit of damage can have colossally negative repercussions.
Adding to the ominous air is the Event Horizon itself, which was apparently designed by someone who thought H.R. Giger's stuff was just too cuddly. I'm not sure how practical it is to have a spaceship with such features as a rotating tunnel of spikes and a room full of crawlspaces that are accessed through thorn-covered black panels, but I suspect that few aerospace engineers, even in Russia, are looking to design anything quite this terrifying. Remember when the interiors of spaceships were all white and well-lit? I wonder when the point will come that we decide to move away from that color scheme, and away from various pads and cushions covering stuff, and finally embrace the style that calls for dim, flickering lighting, exposed ductwork and wires, and lots and lots of razor blades and thorns. Practicality issues aside, though, and taken purely as art design, the Event Horizon is magnificent. Production designer Joseph Bennett and visual effects supervisor Richard Yuricich bring an immense amount of experience to the game. Yurichich cut his teeth on films like 2001: A Space Odyssey before moving on to supervise visual effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, and of course, Ghost Dad. Bennett did design for the cyberpunk cult hit Hardware, and one can see the evidence of all their past work (as well as the ever-present influence of old German expressionism and Giger's work on Alien) in the design of Event Horizon. This isn't a terribly big-budget film, but they do a lot with what they have, giving the entire movie the feel of some twisted, horrific opera. Another feather in the cap of this film is the cast. None of them inhabit especially well-developed characters. They operate on the level of recognizable stock -- Fishburne is the tough but fair captain; Neill is the scientist consumed by his obsessions; Richard Jones is the wise-cracking black guy. But even when the characters are thin, the performers still give it their all. You feel like they believe what's happening around them, and while they sometimes make dumb decisions, they rarely make decisions that aren't understandable given the circumstances. The exception, perhaps, would be that after Miller spends a long time explaining that the ship will pick you brain and create hallucinations of suffering loved ones, and after everyone in the crew understands this is what the ship is doing, Kathleen Quinlan's Peters still falls for the trick. I've mentioned it in other reviews, but it always annoys me enough that I feel like mentioning it again anytime it happens (and it happens a lot). The hoary old "evil entity transforms into a loved one" shtick grates on my nerves. I mean, you're in outer space, for crying out loud. Obviously, when you've been told that the evil spaceship ghoul thing will make you see visions of your loved ones and use them to lure you to your doom, and then all of a sudden your son appears out of nowhere in a location he absolutely could not be in, well why the hell would you fall for that? Why would your son be running around on a haunted space ship that just returned from Dante's Inferno? I guess you could dismiss it as some sort of hypnotic effect, or the result of mental breakdown making a character unable to reason, but mostly it just always strikes me as lazy writing.
Still, no one turns in a bad performance, even though they're sometimes given very little to do. The bulk of the good stuff goes to Sam Neill, since he gets to play the characters who goes completely bonkers. If anyone had seen Neill in In the Mouth of Madness, they wouldn't have followed him into space, because they would know that spooky H.P. Lovecraft entities tend to follow him around and drive people mad. If Event Horizon succeeds with any one character, it's Neill's Dr. Weir, who starts off sympathetic enough before he is consumed by the horrible mysteries contained within the walls of the Event Horizon. However, one gets the feeling that his character never becomes omniscient, never actually knows what these mysteries are despite his enthusiasm about them. No matter the speeches he may give about boundless evil, other dimensions, and forbidden knowledge, his Faust of a doctor is ultimately as clueless about what's going on and what's going to happen as everyone else's. Although this is likely the product of the screenwriter not knowing himself exactly what was going to happen, the end result is effective. Neill becomes the acolyte of an unseen "holy man," one who speaks only in riddles and fools his followers into thinking they possess some profound understanding or insight when, in fact, they have been fed nothing but meaningless phrases and garbled imagery. There's a tragedy surrounding Dr. Weir, who far from becoming one with the ship and grasping the universe from which it has returned, instead becomes nothing more than a pitiable dupe. Whether or not screenwriter Phil Eisner meant that to be the case, he should take it. Because the rest of his script is where the concept of Event Horizon starts to unravel. Poking fun at the science is ultimately meaningless -- this is hardly the sort of film you go to for hard facts, and such an exercise would be as futile as poking holes in the space science of Star Wars. Still, it's kind of fun, so why not, provided we remember that stressing fiction over science never kills a movie for me. Heck, one of my favorite science fiction films is Adieu, Galaxy Express 999, and that's about a steam locomotive traveling through the galaxy while a little kid hangs his head out the window. The science of Event Horizon plays out as if it was conceived by someone who was told about Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time by someone else who hadn't actually read the book, but had been around other people discussing it. A Brief History of Time was, of course, one of those great books that everyone bought and no one read, putting it in the rarefied air occupied by other such books: that gigantic Bill Clinton memoir, the 9/11 Commission Report, Ulysses by James Joyce, and The Bible.
Part of what Hawking's book dealt with in its attempt to bring high physics down to a populist level was the topic of black holes. Now I actually read the book, because I'm a nerd like that, and because I had to as part of one of the classes I was taking. It was one of those science classes set up specifically for people who aren't very good with equations, which meant it was mostly full of journalism students and members of the University of Florida football team who would groan anytime the professor tried to relate a fundamental understanding of physics to the act of making a solid pass. Yeah, sure, physics is involved, but it was highly suspect to suggest that Danny Wuerffel spent his time in the huddle scrawling geometry and physics equations into the dirt to figure out how best to get the ball into the hands of wide receiver Reidel Anthony. Anyway, I think that class gave me about as sound an understanding as would be needed to be the guy that Eisner's friend talked to about black holes. Meaning that I could remember that Hawking made allusions to Dante's Inferno when speaking of the event horizon of a black hole -- that gravitational point of no return from which light itself cannot escape. "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," Hawking said, paraphrasing Dante and the sign that hung outside the gates of Hell. He meant, of course, that the pull of a black hole is so great, that if you cross the event horizon, you're not coming back, so you best make peace with the fact that you're dead meat. Now pass that sentiment through me passing it on to someone else, who then tells Phil Eisner that he was drunk at a party the other night, talking about some deep shit like black holes. All of a sudden, that simple quote applied to explain how hopeless it is to escape the pull of a black hole is twisted to mean that a black hole actually could be the gateway to Hell. And poof! Event Horizon's concept is born. It's really not a bad concept, regardless of how misconstrued it may be. Black holes are weird, after all, and the idea that they lead somewhere other than to a horrible death in which you are crushed down to microscopic size by the unbelievable gravitational pressure is hardly new to Event Horizon. And even the best minds are still feeble when up against cosmic phenomena of this scale. So why not? And anyway, the use of the term "event horizon" works in a couple different ways, and it refers as much to a black hole as it does to the Event Horizon itself, which proves to be a flashpoint which, once entered, will not allow the humans to escape. What's more important to the quality of the screenplay is what Eisner does with the concept, and while he starts off strong, he seems to get lost, allowing the movie at times to devolve into a blood and guts horror film (not bad) and a pastiche of other other movies (slightly less forgivable). I've already mentioned some of the films from which Event Horizon draws, but there are plenty of others. In fact, it lifts wholesale the scene of a river of blood gushing forth from an elevator from The Shining. In fact, you could really view this movie as little more than The Shining meets The Black Hole. Sam Neill's character bears a close resemblance to Jack Nicholson's character from The Shining, and the concept of a haunted house (or spaceship) that causes hallucinations and may itself be alive is an idea shared by both films. Many other elements are lifted from the Russian sci-fi film Solaris, yet another "man battles hallucinations" sci-fi tale. One could also invoke the specter of the old Roger Corman Poe films, especially The Fall of the House of Usher, as it too is about a house infused with evil to the point of becoming a malignant being itself, ending in a fiery collapse much the same as we see at the end of Event Horizon. And the idea of the black hole as a portal to Hell was explored -- with equal awkwardness -- by The Black Hole, a film which sends one of its robotic villains through a black hole and lands him standing on a pillar surrounded by a lake of fire and the souls of the damned. n fact, Event Horizon reflects The Black Hole in many ways -- an exploratory crew finds a long lost ship; that ship' screw has vanished or mostly vanished; things are spooky; and then it all falls apart at the end when the movies both realize that they have ten minutes to explain things that the top scientific minds of the word have been grappling with for decades.
In the case of Event Horizon, all the talk of physics versus metaphysics, of a ship powered by pure evil, of a rip in the fabric of space that leads to a Hellraiser universe, lead to an anti-climatic and predictable fist fight between Miller and Weir. Though it is similar to The Fall of the House of Usher, and though it's a suitably horrific and downbeat ending for the decent guy Miller, it seems ultimately to be a resolution that fails the film's attempts at something more complex. I don't need the questions to be answered. In fact, I prefer that they try and fail, discovering that comprehension of what awaits them is simply beyond the boundaries of the human brain. But a fist fight and an explosion seemed somehow to be less than what should have been delivered. It may not be entirely Eisner's fault, though. Apparently some forty minutes was cut from the movie in order to achieve a manageable running time (1997 was a few years too early for genre films to run three hours or more and still get a wide release) and an R-rating (the 90s represented MPAA judges in a reactionary phase as an answer to the gore and nudity soaked anarchy of the 70s and 80s). Fans hoped that the footage would be restored at some point, and that such restoration would smooth out many of the wrinkles that prevent Event Horizon from achieving its ambitions, but so far such wishes have gone unsatisfied. Even when released to DVD, the film was still the theatrical cut. Whether or not it will ever be fully restored is up in the air, but given that we live in an era when almost everything, no matter how obscure or trashy, is getting lovingly reconstructed by some madman, there's still the possibility that a more complete version will emerge and we can re-assess the film based on that. Until then, though, we have to work with what we get to watch, and as presented, Event Horizon is an almost great movie that loses its way and relies on too many scenes from other movies and too many cheap jolts. I do wish horror films would retire that bit where someone is scared, and then someone come sup behind them and grabs them on the shoulder, refusing to speak until the other person and the audience have gotten a cheap scare. Really -- have you ever approached a person in complete silence, from behind, and grabbed them by the shoulder? Yes, you have, but that's because you were intentionally trying to scare that person. In all other instances, no one does this, and yet horror films feature it like every other scene. What makes it frustrating here is that Event Horizon doesn't need to rely on these weak scares. It has plenty of legitimate scares and an over-arching feeling of doom and eeriness. Falling back on juvenile tactics like the shoulder grab is just gratuitous and sloppy. At least they didn't have a scene where a cat jumped out of a box or something.
And really, perhaps I am being like this movie: searching for something that isn't attained, being more serious than I should. Taken as nothing more than a horror film with sci-fi dressing, I really think Event Horizon is a success. It definitely has the feel of an old pulp -- right down to losing track of itself over the course of its running time. Director Paul W.S. Anderson is no stranger to fans of pulpy movies, having directed Mortal Kombat before this (but not Mortal Kombat II), and Resident Evil after, among other things. I have a curious love-hate relationship with Anderson's films in that I love some, hate others, but rarely find myself somewhere in between. Flaws aside, I love Event Horizon. And even more flaws aside, I love the Resident Evil movies, and Mortal Kombat, even (though not Mortal Kombat II). I guess I'm lukewarm on Soldier, so there's one middle ground movie. But I hate with a passion the Alien vs. Predator films, even more than I hate Mortal Kombat II. Still that's a lot of hits any only one real miss for me (granted, I'm not a discriminating viewer), so I guess I like Anderson as a director, and I think Event Horizon is probably the best film he's made and will likely make. At its worst, it is grade-A horror hokum, full of mumbo jumbo and ideas that don't really pan out. And I can deal with that just fine. Heck, like I said, I probably would have preferred if the film was that way from beginning to end instead of flirting with brilliance in spots, only to fold at the last second. But regardless, this is good, gruesome pulp fiction, full of the creeping unknown and vague talk about dimensions of madness and torture that only Cthulhu, Pinhead, and the makers of the Ilsa films can imagine. Anderson's direction is sure-handed, and he and cinematographer Adrian Biddle make wonderful use of the warped madhouse the production team has created for them. So, huh. I guess I did have a lot to say about Event Horizon. Funny the things you learn about yourself when faced with writing about a movie where Sam Neill digs out his own eyeballs. I was pleasantly surprised by it. I didn't expect it to be as good as it was, and even though it's a shame it wasn't as good as it could have been, at the end of the day, I'm happy enough. I'm also happy I didn't see it in 1997, because even though I would have liked it then, perhaps even more than I do now, the fact of the matter is that Southern belle was actually willing to still enter into a relationship with me even after I made her see things like Mortal Kombat II: Annihilation, City of Darkness, and Alien 4. I don't know if that tenuous, early romance could have survived Event Horizon as well, especially considering the fact that she never made me go see Titanic, like every other girlfriend did in 1997. I guess I could have sold Event Horizon with no more or less deception than the original marketing team if I positioned it as "kind of like Titanic, in that it is about people on a doomed ship." Labels: Horror: HP Lovecraft, Horror: Satan, Netflix Diary, Science Fiction, Year: 1997 posted by Keith at 2:43 PM | 5 Comments Sunday, March 09, 2008Golden Bat Release Year: 1966Country: Japan Starring: Sonny Chiba, Hirohisa Nakata, Andrew Hughes, Wataru Yamagawa, Emily Paird, Hisako Tsukuba, Yoichi Numata, Koji Sekiyama, Kousaku Okano. Writer: Susumu Takahisa, Takeo Nagamatsu Director: Hajime Sato Cinematographer: Yoshikazu Yamasawa Music: Shunsuke Kikuchi Producer: Kaname Ougisawa Original Title: Ogon Batto Ogon Batto (Golden Bat) is in many ways typical of the type of films Sonny Chiba appeared in before he became an international action star with the Street Fighter movies. Under a long term contract with Toei Studios, he racked up an impressive slate of low budget B movies during the sixties, a good number of kiddie-themed science fiction films among them. His turn as Iron Sharp in Uchu Kaisokusen (aka Invasion of the Neptune Men), as well as his starring roles in the Toei TV series Nanairo Kamen and Ala-no Shishai, also made him a veteran of the costumed hero Tokusatsu genre of which Ogon Batto is squarely a part--though in Ogon he was, for once, spared having to be the guy in the silly super hero costume (an honor that went to actor Hirohisa Nakata). This might have provided a nice break for Chiba--as well as an opportunity to enjoy a bit of shadenfreude at Nakata's expense--but it also results in a rare instance in which the charismatic and energetic Chiba is rendered relatively low-key by all that is going on around him. For, while Ogon Batto may have little in terms of art that distinguishes it from other such films in Chiba's early filmography, it does have a certain energy to its presentation that clearly sets it apart. Ogon Batto begins with Akira (Wataru Yamakawa), a young amateur astronomer, making the shocking discovery that the planet Icarus has gone off course and is heading rapidly toward Earth. No sooner has Akira made his case to the disbelieving staff at a nearby observatory than he is whisked away by a cadre of Men In Black and taken to the headquarters, hidden in the Japanese Alps, of The Pearl Research Institute, a secret, UN-backed organization dedicated to studying strange space phenomena. Here he meets Capt. Yamatone (Chiba), who promptly asks Akira to join the institute--because, despite being a kid, he obviously knows a lot about science and stuff. Akira accepts, and is immediately introduced to Doctor Pearl (Andrew Hughes) and his granddaughter Emily (Emily Paird), a twelve-year-old child who, in classic Japanese sci fi movie fashion, obviously holds a position of some authority at the institute. Doctor Pearl shows Akira the Super Destruction Beam Cannon, a ray gun with the power of "1000 hydrogen bombs" designed to blast Icarus out of the sky before it can hit Earth. Unfortunately, Pearl tells him, the cannon is not yet operational, because a special mineral is needed to create its lens. No sooner has Pearl said this than the team receives word that an expedition searching for that very mineral has run into trouble and is not responding to contact. At this, the entire staff--man, woman and child--pours into the institute's flying Super Car and takes off over the ocean. Soon the location of the expedition is spotted: It's the lost continent of Atlantis! The team touches down on Atlantis and finds the entire expedition team dead, at which point a giant tower--looking like a mile high drill bit with a squid's head on it--rises up from the ocean and starts shooting cartoon laser beams at them.     This tower is the base of Nazo (Koji Sekiyama), the self-proclaimed Ruler of the Universe, who wants to destroy humanity because "No one else should exist except for me, Nazo!" With Nazo's foot soldiers hot on their heels, the team retreats into a temple, where they find an ornate sarcophagus. On the sarcophagus is an inscription stating that, 10,000 years from the date of that inscription, a crisis would erupt that would necessitate the aid of the Golden Bat, the occupant of the sarcophagus, who could conveniently be resuscitated by just adding water. As the foot soldiers close in, Emily follows those instructions and revives the Golden Bat, a hulking figure in Gold lycra and skull mask, who proceeds to beat the enemy into retreat with his Baton of Justice. With Nazo and his minions gone for the moment, Golden Bat informs Emily that, because it was she who revived him, only she can summon his aid--and with that makes his magic bat mascot affix itself to her uniform in the form of a bat-shaped broach. He also informs the team that, now that he has been revived, Atlantis will once again sink below the ocean. The team makes for the Super Car and manages to take off in the nick of time as Atlantis crashes back beneath the waves. And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: The first fifteen minutes of Ogon Batto. And things don't really slow down much from there. The film may be a pure, hastily made, low budget construction (just how many commercial Japanese features were still being made in black and white in 1966?), but there is one thing of which you can be guaranteed: By the time you reach the end of its seventy-minute running time, you will have seen an awful lot of stuff happen within a very short period of time.     While the Golden Bat is a lesser known Japanese super hero compared to the likes of Ultraman or Kamen Rider, he is no less a venerable one. The creation of one Takeo Nagamatsu, his origin dates back to the early thirties, and is attributed, depending on who you ask, to either pulp magazines or to kami-shibai, a practice of live storytelling with printed illustration cards that was popular with children in that era. Whichever is the case, he would later make the transition to manga, where he would, at one time, be rendered by the capable hands of the master himself, Osamu Tezuka (Tetsuwan Atom, aka Astroboy, and Jungle Emperor Leo, aka Kimba). A year after his feature incarnation in Ogon Batto, he would go on to make his debut in a popular animated television series, making this movie just one stop in his journey toward total Japanese media domination. A live action television series would follow in the early seventies. It is clear that the Bat's manga incarnation is the inspiration for Ogon Batto, and it's one of the film's most admirable qualities that it tries to stay true to the look of that source, even if with mixed results. The Nazo that appears in the comics, for instance, is a distinctly weird creation, sort of an amorphous black shape with bat ears and four-laser firing eyes who has a hovering flying saucer in place of a lower body. There is definitely an attempt to duplicate that look on the part of Ogon's art department, but with the resources they had to work with, Nazo just ends up looking like a man in a big floppy flannel sack--and because the effect of him hovering above the ground with no lower body was hopelessly beyond their means, the actor simply keeps his bottom half hidden within a stationary saucer-shaped control console.     Nazo's tower, on the other hand, really looks like a manga creation given real world dimensions, and it's one of the movie's visual treats. The model is put to its best use during the film's climax, in which the tower suddenly erupts from the bowels of the Earth directly below Tokyo and rises up to loom threateningly over the city's skyline (a scene closely parodied in the 2004 live-action film version of the 70s anime Cutey Honey). In fact, all of the film's models--from the tower to the shark-shaped flying submarine that Nazo's toadies use to travel between it and their various villainous assignations--are imaginative and fun, and none the less so for all the visible wires used to put them in motion. As for the Golden Bat himself, he seems here to be the kind of super hero whose super powers rely mostly on you being repeatedly told by the other characters in the movie just how super powerful he is. His preferred method of combat is running around and clubbing people one-by-one with his baton while stopping to strike highly stylized dramatic poses, which doesn't give the appearance of being that much more effective than the ray guns the members of the Pearl Institute are equipped with. Furthermore, he always announces himself with a laugh that is obviously meant to be ghostly and fear-inspiring, but which sounds more like the kind of chattering, forced laughter that just makes people uncomfortable. Whenever he does this, you kind of expect Sonny and company to start uneasily and halfheartedly laughing along while slipping each other nervous sideways glances. And when he flies it just looks ridiculous. All of this, of course, somehow combines to make the guy actually seem kind of lovable, though I don't think that was the intention.     The practice of striking highly stylized dramatic poses is a popular one in Ogon Batto, and it's not just limited to our titular hero. In fact, the whole cast gets in on that action at one point or other, most memorably when a whole group of them, reacting en masse to some shocking revelation or bit of off-screen business, will do it all at the same time. It comes across kind of like a cross between silent movie acting and Vogueing. I realize that this film was produced in an era when camp was a dominant aesthetic in popular culture. But, as campy as all of that comes across, I don't think that the intention of the makers of Ogon Batto was to poke fun at their subject matter, but rather to use that prevailing aesthetic as carte blanche for them to be absolutely as corny as they wanted to be. The result is a film that's the cinematic distillation of the spirit embodied in the phrase "Gee whiz!" As I indicated earlier, the remainder of Ogon Batto's plot unfolds with much the same breathless pacing as it's prologue, each frantic set piece practically stumbling over the next in the overall rush to cram everything in before the credits roll. Nazo, rallying after the whole Atlantis debacle, sends three of his evil emissaries to infiltrate the Pearl Institute headquarters. This trio includes Jackal, a wolf-man, Piranha, a woman in a scaly fish outfit, and Keloid (Yoichi Numata), a Grandpa Munster look-alike with oatmeal on his face. After a series of frantic ray gun battles and the Golden Bat showing up to run around and club people with his baton, the villains succeed in making off with the Super Destruction Beam Cannon, only to find that it is missing the crucial lens (which, by the way, has now been successfully fabricated by Doctor Pearl and company, thanks to a gem comprised of the necessary mineral being in the Golden Bat's hand when he was found in his sarcophagus at the beginning of the movie).     Taking on the appearance of Naomi (Hisako Tsukuba), another member of the institute, Piranha kidnaps Emily, and soon both Emily and Doctor Pearl are being held hostage by Nazo, with the lens stated as the price of their safe release. This leads to the final showdown between the Golden Bat and Nazo, held high above the streets of Tokyo (and involving, among other things, a dog fight with that cool shark-shaped flying submarine), as the rogue planet Icarus hurtles perilously ever closer to our seemingly doomed Earth. And just where is Sonny Chiba in all this, you may ask? Well, he does have his heroic moments, but the top-billed star seems mostly content to blend into the background and let all of the insanity just happen around him. Which is a very sensible attitude to take with Ogon Batto. It's an easy film to mock, but if you take the time to step back and appreciate just how furiously it's working to entertain you, you'll find that it's equally easy to love. Just don't expect it to be a showcase for the Street Fighter himself. Labels: Action: Superheroes, Country: Japan, Guys Dressed as Skeletons, Science Fiction, Stars: Sonny Chiba, Tokusatsu, Year: 1966 posted by Todd at 1:34 PM | 4 Comments Saturday, February 09, 2008Mr. India Release Year: 1987Country: India Starring: Anil Kapoor, Sridevi, Amrish Puri, Ashok Kumar, Satish Kaushik, Bob Christo, Sharat Saxena. Writer: Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan Director: Shekhar Kapur Cinematographer: Baba Azmi Music: Laxmikant-Pyarelal Producer: Boney Kapoor Availability: Buy it from India Weekly. There is a particular style of courtship presented in Bollywood movies that can be a bit of a tough go-around for Western viewers trying to dabble in that cinema. This courtship begins, predictably, with boy meeting girl. But while boy is immediately smitten by girl, girl loathes boy - because she is either A) a stuck-up rich girl who cannot see beyond boy's modest circumstances, or B) a virtuous village girl who cannot see past boy's frivolous and free-spending ways. In either case, boy does not give up, and instead strives to make himself a near constant presence in girl's life, popping up with a new, even more spirited attempt to ingratiate himself whenever she least expects it. Finally, by dint of boy's persistence and omnipresence, girl's resistance is worn down and she has no choice but to look past her prejudices and see the kind, tender and - above all - mother worshipping heart that beats within boy. Love blossoms. Now, many of us would call this particular type of courtship "stalking". And not only is it widely illegal, but it also proves to have markedly less real-world effectiveness in winning the affections of one's object of desire than these movies might have you think. At the same time, however, the process of winning hearts through attrition that it represents is also, in my experience, the way that Bollywood movies themselves work. For, unlike your typical Hollywood crowd-pleasers--which attempt to "suck you in" immediately by way of brute narrative drive--Bollywood films often seem to throw obstacle in your path, greeting you with a host of elements that are certain Kryptonite to self-considered persons of taste, and then go on, by way of sheer duration and an unflagging eagerness to please, to slowly and subtly chip away at the defenses, until to not fully embrace what's being presented seems like it could only be the result of some dire character flaw. Indeed, many of the Bollywood films that have ended up being my favorites found their initial volleys of goofy artifice and over-obvious appeals to sentiment bouncing right off of the hard, frozen shell of my cynical heart. But at some point--usually right near the end of their second hour--I found that that same resistant heart, without my knowing it, had gradually begun to beat along with the movie's persistent rhythm, and was now being played by it like a well-strung Stradivarius. It is this slow process of seduction, I believe, that makes watching Bollywood films so addictive, the reason that anyone who makes it past the initial hurdles presented by the experience will find themselves irretrievably hooked. Take, 1987's Mr. India, for instance. The film boasts alternately maudlin and jingoistic appeals to patriotism, a small army of aggressively cute children who are shamelessly exploited for cheap pathos whenever the script requires, broad physical comedy of the slide-whistle and bass drum variety, and a corny super hero plot that doesn't even get going until halfway through the film's three hour running time--all elements that would seem lab-tested to make Mr. India hard to love by anyone with a sensible thought in their head. Nonetheless, as much as I tried to distance myself by taking in Mr. India as an inept freak show loaded with overheated propaganda, there came that fateful moment during the second hour, right after one of those child-fueled moments of cheap pathos, when I felt a familiar lump growing in my throat. And with that lump came a strangled, tear-choked voice, urging the hero on to avenge the terrible wrong that had been done: "You get those bastards, Mr. India!" And that voice, as if I needed to tell you, was my own. Mr. India had totally made me its bitch. Mr. India begins with a visit to the vast secret island fortress of Mogambo, a super villain played by the fearsomely-browed Amrish Puri, a frequent Bollywood movie super villain who--as any American reviewer of his movies is required by law to state--is known in the West for his turn as the bad guy in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Mogambo, for seemingly no particular reason, really hates India, and he expresses that hatred by loading the country with illegal drugs, adulterating the grain supply with stones, and generally making life crappy for the average Indian. Judging from the somewhat paranoid tone of Mr. India's nationalistic drum-beating, I'm guessing that Mogambo represents pretty much every country that's not India--but especially that country that's not India whose name rhymes with "Snack-i-stan". At Mogambo's command is an army of foot soldiers so devoted that they will throw themselves into a pit of acid at his bidding just because he thinks it would be funny. He also has in his employ the one and only Doctor Fu Manchu, who is just as risible a stereotype when portrayed by Asians. Mogambo is clearly an object of worship to these various minions, and each greets his every move and utterance with a Hitler salute and a cry of "Hail Mogambo!" In reply--and with a frequency intended to insure you never forget that This Is The Catch Phrase--Mogambo invariably purrs, "Mogambo is pleased". It turns out that Mogambo needs a new base of operations on India's coast to facilitate his import of horror into the country, and it just so happens that the ideal spot is the home of Arun, played by Anil Kapoor (Taal, 1942: A Love Story). Arun is a gentle soul of modest means whose generous spirit makes him apparently unable to resist any orphan, which has lead to his home being filled with an assortment of cloyingly adorable urchins. Arun is also the son of a late scientist who, unknown to Arun, created an invisibility device that Mogambo has unsuccessfully been trying to get his hands on for years. Of course, this fact will not become relevant until much later in Mr. India, since the film's first half is largely taken up by a "save the orphanage" plot arising from Mogambo's repeated attempts--using Arun's unscrupulous landlord as a proxy--to oust Arun and the kids from their home. Amid this business we are introduced to Seema (Sridevi), a reporter whose resonant pluckiness and girly-ness reminds us that the Christopher Reeve/Margot Kidder Superman movies were still being made in 1987. Through a typically convoluted set of circumstances, Seema becomes a boarder in Arun's home--and, as such, comes to be something of an audience surrogate, as Arun and the children's monotonous toothsome-ness and good cheer will come to slowly wear her down from a state of unqualified revulsion to one of exhausted acceptance and ultimately, actual fondness (though the rest of us probably won't go quite that far). It is not until Mogambo's goons resort to actual strong-arm tactics against Arun and his toddler army that the hyperactive machinations of Mr. India's plot see fit to put in Arun's hands his father's invisibility bracelet. It is with this newfound power that Arun becomes Mr. India, a symbol (though, interestingly, an invisible one) of the Indian common man, bent on wiping out all those who would undermine his beloved mother country. In the course of what follows, some of the more memorable examples of Arun's pro-Indian payback include him forcing one of Mogambo's goons to eat a mouthful of the stones used to adulterate the country's grain, followed by him taking the goon's feast laden table from the posh restaurant in which he'd been seated and placing it down in front of a starving family huddled on the street outside. In another instance, Mr. India terrorizes one of Mogambo's associates, a decadent Englishman seeking to trade arms and drugs for Indian national treasures (Bob Christo, a familiar face in Bollywood thanks to his go-to-guy for evil whitey roles status), into kneeling in trembling worship before the Hindu god Hanuman. All of this makes Mr. India quite popular with the public, and it's not long before Mogambo is raising a gloved fist and uttering his name through tightly clenched teeth. Seema, on the other hand, is in love with Mr. India, and lets the world know by way of song (see the number "Karte Hain Hum Pyar Mr. India Se", aka "I'm In love With Mr. India").     Though its plot may sound predictable, Mr. India as a viewing experience is anything but. In fact, if you were looking for an example of classic masala film style, you couldn't do much better. So many disparate elements are thrown out in its eagerness to appeal that it's impossible to tell which way Mr. India will veer next. The experience might lead the uninitiated to wonder exactly who the film was intended for; and its a valid question. For instance, it seems to a large extent to be a children's film, except for when it really isn't. Mogambo, for one--thanks to his ridiculous name and exaggerated bluster, in combination with the cartoonish caricature of military pomp that surrounds him--at first almost comes across like some kind of Doctor Seuss character--something along the lines of The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T's cranky, monomaniacal Dr. Terwilliker. But then, in the film's final third, when Mogambo resorts to some all-too-real-world terrorist tactics--taking countless civilian lives by means of bombs concealed in public spaces--we are starkly reminded that the film has more on its agenda than poking gentle, whimsical fun at authoritarian delusions. Likewise, while Mr. India uses a bunch of cute kids as sentimental window dressing, it's more than eager to put those kids in harm's way when it serves to pump up the outraged sense of injury that energizes it's violent, pyrotechnically-enhanced conclusion. These radical shifts in tone apply just as much to Mr. India's musical numbers, which were composed by the prolific team of Laxmikant-Pyarelal. These, unfortunately, are mostly pretty dreadful, consisting for the most part of Arun's orphans singing about sunshine, rainbows and a brighter tomorrow. Family friendly stuff, to be sure. Less so, but still skirting the borderline, is a mid-film number in which Sridevi is accompanied by male dancers who, at first, sport multi-colored afros and metallic face paint and then, later--and inexplicably--black face. But the real standout is the later number "Kaate Nahin Katte Ye Din", which is steamy in the way that only Bollywood musical numbers featuring two people with all of their clothes on can be. Or, I should say, featuring one person, because Sridevi's partner in this number is the mostly invisible Arun--a situation that is enthusiastically mined for it's erotic possibilities (at one point, the effect of Mr. India's invisible embrace is achieved by Sridevi pressing her ample boobs up against a sheet of glass). As the pumping, tango-like beat of the song turns up the heat, we watch Sridevi chill and tremble to her lover's unseen caresses, punctuated by brief, spectral glimpses of Arun delivering them. It's a real show-stopper, one that ably delivers us into the "anything goes" tone of the film's final third--and it's so deftly handled that it suddenly awakens you to the possibility that Mr. India's construction might have involved more than a dartboard and scraps of cocktail napkin with plot points written on them.     Despite making Mr. India probably an unsuitable choice for a video babysitter, the movie's dramatic shifts have, for me, one inarguable upside. And that is that they once again accomplish that wonderful Bollywood magic trick by which a film that begins as the story of a humble man trying to save an orphanage can end as a giant, James Bond-style conflagration inside a crazy sci fi lair. For all the many Bollywood films I've seen, I can count on one hand the ones whose outset allowed me to accurately predict what type of film they would be at their conclusion. Broad comedy crumbles into tragedy, family melodrama escalates into high octane action spectacle, and, in the present case, an affably goofy super hero yarn suddenly becomes infused with a blood lusting thirst for national vengeance. It's often a head spinning ride--one that, in the best cases, leaves you with no memory of the longeurs and treacle you had to suffer through at the beginning. Which is exactly what makes you get back on again. Mr. India was only director Shekhar Kapur's second film and, surprisingly, he did not choose to parlay its considerable success into a career making cartoonish kiddie sci fi movies loaded with violence and suggestive dancing. Rather--in what I see as a clear failure of creative nerve--he would go on to direct the controversial and critically acclaimed film Bandit Queen, and later such high-profile/middle-brow English language films as Elizabeth, The Four Feathers, and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. For the blockbuster writing team of Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan, however, Mr. India was much more par for the course. The pair had, after all, taken Amitabh Bachchan into similar territory back in 1980 with Shaan. Still, their gift for churning out mind bogglingly weird masala movies might belie the team's importance to the history of their national cinema--for just a few years previous they had been a revolutionary force in Bollywood, virtually creating Amitabh's "Angry Young Man" persona single (or, uh, double) handedly with their masterful scripts for such unparalleled 1970s classics as Deewar, Sholay and Don.     Despite this pedigree--not to mention its commercial success--Mr. India still comes down on the slightly wilder and trashier side of Bollywood cinema (though far from the wildest or the trashiest). Still, just as one needs to seek balance in their overall cinematic diet, one's experience of Bollywood can't be all Guru Dutt and Mother India. For, while those more esteemed films can elicit an emotional response with their more nuanced depictions of the human condition, for a movie as silly as Mr. India to sweep you up in its enthusiasms--getting you to root for an invisible Indian everyman against a jackbooted cartoon straw man called Mogambo--is pretty impressive in its own right. Hail Mogambo! Labels: Bollywood, Science Fiction, Stars: Amrish Puri, Year: 1987 posted by Todd at 3:05 PM | 7 Comments Tuesday, January 29, 2008Space Transformers
Korea/Austraila. Honestly, I have no idea. Joseph Lai produced it though, and do you really need to know anything more?
It's been too long since we last visited the bizarre world of cut-rate Korean cartoons made by a Chinese guy using Japanese robots and characters and marketed toward Australian television, so let us once again steel ourselves for the bad acid trip that is a Joseph Lai produced cartoon. Lai, to bring up to speed those of you who don't know him, was a producer most famous for taking bits and pieces of cheap Hong Kong movies and splicing them together to form a new movie, usually augmented by freshly shot scenes of white people in ninja outfits. The films border on works of absurdist art masterpieces. With titles like Ninja Phantom Heroes, Ninja Demons Massacre, and Diamond Force Ninja, Lai's films -- often created in conjunction with shadowy men of mystery Godfrey Ho and Thomas Tang -- did far more than make no sense at all. They attained a rarefied air of complete and utter incoherence that has remained largely out of the reach of even the most incompetent of filmmakers. In the early 1980s, a series of bargain bin Korean cartoons started showing up on Australian television. Like a snake eating its own tail, one movie would freely and generously recycle footage from the others, allowing what had probably been a couple separate movies to then blossom into six or seven movies. And there, at the beginning of every one, was the name of Joseph Lai, set majestically against a disco light backdrop. Lai had purchased the original Korean movies, dubbed them, and sent them off to unsuspecting Australians, who being trapped on their own island-continent, had nowhere to flee. These films have recently been rediscovered and achieved a certain degree of infamy for a number of reasons.
First, they are just awful. I mean, mind-blowingly awful. The stories rarely make a lick of sense. The animation is beyond crude, making even the flagrant lack of attention paid to the Challenge of the Superfriends seem diligent by comparison. Second, and of more importance to the fans who stumbled across these movies in the dollar bins of Wal-Marts across America or on Australian afternoon television back in the day, although the animation and artwork was original, the robots and characters who populated these films were often copies of more famous Japanese counterparts. Anything from Raideen to Gundam to the Space Battle Cruiser Yamato being piloted by the Voltron crew could show up in one of these things. Playing spot the source material becomes almost overwhelming, so multitudinous are the blatant violations of intellectual property. Since Japanese material was banned from South Korea for a long time, Korean audiences wouldn't know the difference (thank to anonymous poster in the comments section of Space Thunder Kids for filling in some of the gaps in our info). I hope that, as we continue to work our way through the other titles that serve to flesh out this animated Joseph Lai universe, we will continue to pick up bits and pieces of information about the films and how they came to be. At this point, I guess we know they were originally made for Koreans who couldn't watch Japanese stuff, and then were purchased and dubbed by Joseph Lai to distribute in Australia. Somehow, someone got a hold of most of them and put them on DVDs that could only be sold at Wal-Mart.
Of the films in this series, Space Thunder Kids is probably the most mind-blowing, as it was assembled entirely out of the pieces of the other films, presumably by ten different groups working in ten different locations around the world, with no contact between them. It's possible that the various pods and hatches in Lost are actually the hermetically sealed locations where Space Thunder Kids was assembled. So colossal is the ineptitude of this film that it can scarcely be communicated using any human language, though I did my best when I reviewed it a while back. Space Thunder Kids actually ceases to be a movie at some point, and becomes an entirely different form of art so advanced that we humans can't even conceive of it. It is like the high art of advanced race of alien gods, and we have no frame of reference we can use to wrap our heads around it. Short of asking yourself what existed before the universe, "what the hell does Space Thunder Kids mean" is perhaps the most perplexing question of our time. Hot on the heels of Space Thunder Kids came Solar Adventure, a feature that mixes live-action footage with animation and features a number of robots stolen from The Transformers, among others. Many scenes from this movie also show up, within a different context, in Space Thunder Kids, including the evil machinations of a green alien and a dastardly, goiter-sporting communist leader meant to be Kim Il-sung. Now we turn out attention to yet another member of this elite family of animated wonders, Space Transformers, which dares ask the challenging question: is a microscopic giant robot still a giant robot?
As with most of the films in this series, the earth is under attack from sinister, crudely drawn aliens. We meet them at first when they attack an orbiting space platform that looks suspiciously like the Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, or like the orbiting space platform that showed up at the beginning of Space Thunder Kids. These aliens look human and command robots that pilot larger robots that shoot meteors and carry axes. Why you would need to carry an ax if you can already shoot meteors is a bit of a mystery, but then I reckon you need something for close quarters combat. After the attack has begun, the space fleet gets a transmission from Ivy, the world's most special girl, warning them of an eminent alien attack. Her ability to warn people of things that started happening a few minutes before she warned people of them somehow makes her the lynchpin in Earth's plans to defeat the aliens. Exactly how this helps in the fight against aliens or why Asians are always pinning the hopes of the galaxy on twelve-year-olds is never really explained. Unfortunately, evil alien leader Tonga knows Ivy is the Earth's most special girl, and so he sends assassins to earth to eliminate the only threat to his dreams of conquering Earth. Meanwhile, Earth's giant robots seem pretty adept at destroying Tonga's invading fleet. But why root for the giant robots when Ivy could save us all by telling us things that are already happening. Despite being guarded by a crack team of giant robot pilots and scientists, aliens manage to infiltrate the hospital where Ivy is hiding and shoot her, thus ending her threat and dashing the hopes of all mankind. No wait, how silly of me. They shoot her, yes, but rather than just using a bullet and killing her, they use a virus ray that causes her to lapse into a coma as she is slowly killed by the disease with which they have infected her. Luckily, this gives the humans time to devise a plan to save Ivy's life. Eventually, they decide the most logical way to deal with the situation is to shrink some giant robots and their crew down to microscopic size, inject them into Ivy, and let them travel through her body on a mission to destroy the disease and save her life. So basically, it's The Fantastic Voyage but with giant robots and Robin Hood's Merry Men. Oh wait, I didn't get to Robin Hood's Merry Men yet.
But you see, once inside Ivy's body, we learn a number of important things about the human anatomy. For example, we are full of planets and suns and swirling spiral galaxies. Some of those planets are inhabited by suspicious but ultimately friendly medieval guys with monk haircuts. And Keebler elves. Other planets are inhabited by green goblins in loin cloths -- presumably the viruses injected by the aliens into Ivy -- who enslave the good peoples and force them to perform random tasks of physical labor when they aren't throwing them into a pit containing a man-eating octopus. Still other planets are populated by sexy women who like to fly around on space platforms and command giant robots and super deformed Gundams who like to watch her take showers. So begins a series of thrilling battles between giant robots, as well as a scene of a smart-alec little robot (I mean littler than a microscopic giant robot) kicking the hot, evil chick in the butt over and over again, until something completely weird happens in the end which, I think, results in some or all of the heroes dying or something. Or they don't. And then everyone gets out of Ivy, presumably after having usurped the goblin conquest of her internal organs, and the giant robots fly off to beat the alien armada -- without any help or battle plan from Ivy, who they just spent the entire film saving, presumably because only she knew how to beat the aliens. Incidentally, at some point, the aliens go from being human in appearance to being green guys with blue bowl cuts, but at this point in our journey through Joseph Lai productions, this hardly even phases me.
Incredibly, Space Transformers is even more bizarre than Solar Adventure, and while it is more decipherable than Space Thunder Kids, it certainly approaches that film in terms of sheer lunacy. Among other things, it taught me a lot about the human anatomy and what sort of crazy stuff goes on inside the body of a pubescent girl. It is at least as accurate about teen bodies as those old films we watched in middle school, where a boy would think about kissing a girl and as a result, he gets horrid, acid-spewing lesions on his penis. Space Transformers also posits a more hopeful future for human infection, envisioning a future where an infestation of spear-toting goblins and cackling evil hot chicks on flying discs can be taken care of via tiny transforming robots and their sass-talking human crews. Anyway, I can't help but admire the crackpot imagination behind this scenario. I don't know if these fights actually count as "space" battles." I mean, they are battles that take place within a defined space, and the backgrounds are all Milky Ways and Saturn, but technically, we are inside a teenage girl's body -- a statement which is going to mislead a lot of Google searchers. The body as universe is hardly a new metaphor, but I don't know that anyone has taken it quite as literally as Space Transformers, where the human body literally contains a universe, complete with medieval societies, elves, and spaceships. And of course, the asteroid belt surrounding Uranus. Sorry, but there was no way I getting through this review without at least one Uranus joke.
I doubt that anything will ever unseat Space Thunder Kids as the king of the Joseph Lai animated titles, but Space Transformers comes awful close. It's packed with action, as most of the films are, and everything about it is just so weird. And the culmination of the in-body battle is just bizarre. Suddenly, everything gets super melodramatic and full of tragedy, and there's a nuclear explosion, which can't be good for Ivy. Then everyone inside her dies. At least I think they do. Honestly, it's pretty hard to tell what actually happens. And it doesn't really matter since, in the end, Ivy has absolutely nothing to do with the war against the aliens. Still, there's plenty of space battles, or whatever space battles are inside the human body, and plenty of robot fights. It lacks the green alien with the big head and Kim Il-sung with his bulbous tumor, but it replaces that with gut goblins and epic spaceship and robot battles, so I'm good. Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Science Fiction, Series: Joseph Lai Crap Anime posted by Keith at 5:09 PM | 5 Comments Friday, November 09, 2007Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam'in Oglu
2006, Turkey. Starring Mehmet Ali Erbal, Burcu Kara, Deniz Seki, Burak Hakki, Cuneyt Arkin, Burak Sergin, Didem Erol, Ismail Incekara. Written by Murat Boyacioglu. Directed by Kartal Tibet.
*Sigh* I heard numerous times over several years that there was going to be a sequel to Turkish Star Wars. I heard it would have Cuneyt Arkin in it. And I really hoped that those were just fruitless rumors. They weren't. So, with a heavy heart and low expectations, I went ahead and hoped that maybe it was a fitting tribute to the original film. I've now seen it. It's not. And it's really not worth even seeking out to find out for yourself. Coming from a man who owns Zombie Ninja Gangbangers, I think that's saying a lot. Imagine if Empire Strikes Back had been more of a combination of the "witty dialogue" and general emptiness of Phantom Menace, and mix that with the paroxysm-inducing variety show humor and irrelevance of the Star Wars Holiday Special. We'll keep a minimal amount of Phantom Menace's soulless special effects, but nix all of the action sequences and any parts where anything really happens. We won't have a Jar-Jar Binks anymore per se, but we'll dissolve him into a thin slime that just casts a pall over the entire film, so that instead of one odiously unfunny character, we'll just have many awkwardly unfunny ones. From the Holiday Special, we'll be particularly careful to adopt the concept of weak, meaningless cameos, and the capacity to inspire a general sense of outrage in the viewer as (s)he realizes that this has nothing to do with the film that the title refers to. Or, if you'd like a different way of thinking of the film... Imagine a script written so that it winks so hard at the viewer that it's probably tearing connective tissue in its face. A family-friendly script which attempts to tell a very coherent, cliched tale of a long-lost twin brother, unrequited love, and an evil man who seeks to destroy the world (and if the last part sounds like it could force some excitement, don't worry, because we'll keep him offscreen for almost the entire film). All humor, by the way, will be extremely obvious, poorly thought out, and even more poorly delivered, divided between 1) topical humor about such issues as Turkey joining the EU and 2) half-assed attempts at reminding people of how funny Turkish Star Wars was. According to the Internet Movie Database, writer Murat Boyacioglu had never before written a script. I would not be shocked if he never does again, even for community theater or an extemporaneous zombie film involving a few friends, a few bottles of ketchup, and a few bottles of raki or a few cases of beer. Director Kartal Tibet is best known -- to Americans anyway -- for his starring roles in action movies such as the Tarkan and Karaoglan films. It seems like he mostly directs comedies these days... I'm in no position to judge his directorial abilities overall, and I'll still give him the benefit of the doubt in the future, but I don't know what the fuck he was thinking here. Now, to be fair... it's a tall order to write a sequel to Turkish Star Wars. Even taller, I would argue, than writing prequels to the real Star Wars trilogy. What? No, really. I tire of taking potshots at Lucas; I think that no matter what he did, this far into the game he was just not going to be able to satisfy the ridiculously high expectations of rabid Star Wars fandom. The new films weren't going to be as groundbreaking for the general public as the original Star Wars was, and there was no way that he could completely satisfy the niche audience who knows Star Wars trivia better than the backs of their hands. Now, the incredibly horrible dialogue, the creation of Jar Jar, and the imbecilic deployment of James Earl Jones in a vocal cameo that even Satan himself couldn't have designed more sadistically... well, that's a different, and very rotten, can of worms. But Turkish Star Wars over two decades later presents a very different set of problems for the aspiring filmmakers. First off, if you're making the film for mainstream audiences, Turkish or worldwide, you can't steal footage and music from mainstream American movies anymore. That difficulty by itself opened the film up to criticism, as some cult fans of the original film wanted a sequel to do the same, but I don't see a way around compliance with copyright laws these days, especially in a major production. Second, the original film was an unparalleled combination of manic-but-incompetent action, surreal and incomprehensible dialogue, baffling and unidentifiable character/monster/costume design, and a basic approach that answered every question about plot or character development with a swing of Cuneyt Arkin's fists. Even if you don't enjoy Turkish Star Wars -- which, by the way, means that something's depressingly wrong with you -- you have to admit that it's a pretty hard act to follow. To that, you might object that Turkish Star Wars is stranger and more incomprehensible to Americans than to Turks, I suppose...but you'd mostly be wrong, just so you know. The film was as baffling to its original Turkish audiences as it is to anyone who has watched it serial-style on YouTube. The nonsensicality of the dialogue is not a reflection of idiosyncratic Turkish thought; it's just very nonsensical dialogue, and ditto the appropriation of outside film and musical sources, and the costume design, and everything else. Besides, the ensuing couple of decades have changed Turkish filmgoers' expectations in terms of budget, writing, production values, special effects, etc. Whether that's better or worse is up to you to decide, but it's no longer the sort of country where a national release can be made by a couple of guys who raided a janitor's closet for props and costumes. I could go on about all this, but I guess it'd be better to talk about the movie itself somehow. The story has become as follows: the Man Who Saved the World (they got Cuneyt Arkin to play him) is now dead and frozen in a block of ice. He had twin sons; one of them became a captain in the Turkish space program, and the other one was kidnapped by The Man Who Saved the World's eternal enemy, named Uga. Uga's kidnapped stepson is named Zaldabar, and he's a very cocky jerkoff, basically, who wears lots of black and has some sexy female androids running his ship, but he has always wanted to experience true love with a woman who does not simply comply with commands. By contrast, the other son, Captain Kartal, is running a Turkish spaceship on which the crew haven't been paid wages in three months. Kartal's sexy assistant Gonca keeps trying to seduce him, but no, he's only after noble heroism and his mission (Cuneyt Arkin's son my ass...). Comedy on the ship includes references to politics in Turkey, references to wages and concomitant divorce threats, the old woman who just can't stop cleaning, and a "which button should I push to activate the shields?" sketch. In a lot of ways, this movie is more like ongoing, boring, family-friendly sketch comedy that just keeps going on and on. Sometimes you almost even wish you were just watching a bunch of wookies. Anyway, Captain Kartal's mission is to find the astronaut Gokmen, who left the airlock to plant a Turkish flag in space, but then a giant pair of scissors cut his airhose/tether line and he floated away eight years ago. It transpires later that Gokmen landed on the planet Lunatica, where he started to foment rebellion against the portly despot Dogibus. Dogibus is trying to join an interstellar analogue of the E.U., and that plan is contingent upon the capture of Gokmen. To capture Gokmen, Dogibus tries to enlist the help of Zaldabar by promising his daughter Maya to him. However, after inadvertently crossing with Zaldabar, Captail Kartal and crew crash on Lunatica, where the Captain meets up with Princess Maya, who is running away from home to escape her betrothal, and she takes him to Gokmen. Meanwhile, Gonca is now working with Zaldabar, who captured her but at least can pay wages without bureaucratic funding problems. If you don't see where that's going, well, I'm not going to help you with it. Except for the pretty obvious conclusion, that's more or less the entire movie. Now, you might be asking, "But what the fuck does any of that have to do with Turkish Star Wars?" Yes. Well... First of all, they put Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam in the title. So there's that, for what it's worth. Then, there were a few limp-wristed references to the original film, including Uga's revenge monologue in which he describes some of the dialogue and action of the first film, punctuated by his advisor saying "Yes, but... I do not understand... Yes, but I still do not understand..." etc. And they also roped in Cuneyt Arkin for what amounts to a cameo -- although, fittingly, he's the centerpiece of the cover art and the posters. And I guess it was kind of fun to see Cuneyt, whose hair is now stark white, fly into space to save the floating Gokmen...and he very briefly reprises his role in the training scene of the first film, beating up rocks...and they did give him a small fight to participate in. Still, I think his presence was mostly wasted -- especially because the only part he's in which isn't a flashback is a scene where he gives his son explicit instructions on how to use his ship as a "magnet" to send a "bomb" away from the earth. What's wrong with that? Well, the focus on the scene is all about a fearful son learning from his father. And in the end, all he does is flip some buttons and do a U-turn. You might be wondering, "Okay, so when do they start kicking ass?" Well, they never do. The fight choreography is less inspired than your average fourth-grade play, and most of the "heroism" is exemplified by just trying to act nobly, rather than smashing rocks or beating up monsters. No one dies, there is no blood, the evil army's laser guns only stun and don't kill, and the only fight in the film is a really pathetic lightsaber duel which, by virtue of editing and closeups, doesn't give much of a sense of action or energy. So the sequel and tribute to the most action-packed film in Turkish history, if not in world cinema history, ends up being a torpid, character-driven, melodramatic comedy which at its very best is about half as funny as, say, any given Harvey Korman sketch in The Star Wars Holiday Special. This film is sort of like an existentialist hell that, to quote Sartre, "fumbles and gnaws and never quite hurts enough." It's a weird limbo that's not as painful as shrieking wookie pantomime, or as mind-boggling as minutes on end of footage of someone driving, or as earnestly boring as any given monster movie where 80% of the running time is spent watching guys around a table have conferences and meetings and such while we're just waiting for the monsters to come and eat them all. There are no monsters here except the film itself, and its production values are just high enough to keep it entertaining enough that it's just a constant disappointment. If that statement doesn't make sense, just let it go. Don't try to find out for yourself. If you want to see a good, recent Turkish sci-fi comedy, get G.O.R.A., which TSW2 very clearly ripped off stylistically. And if you want to see a good Turkish action movie... well, look for anything that's not this. The following would have made a better, more succinct review, but I figured people would be curious about the actual film. I think this sums it all up, though. I've seen Manos: the Hands of Fate at least five times, and I've watched Night of Horror at least six times. I sat through the entirety of both Zombie Ninja Gangbangers and Zombie! vs. Mardi Gras, and while I relished neither experience, I feel that I at least learned something somehow. But after watching the so-called Turks in Space, aka Turkish Star Wars 2, I mostly just want two hours of my life back. Labels: Country: Turkey, Science Fiction, Stars: Cuneyt Arkin, Year: 2006 posted by Ryan at 4:45 PM | 2 Comments Friday, April 20, 2007Solar Adventure
DIGG THIS ARTICLE. Korea/Austraila. Honestly, I have no idea. Joseph Lai produced it though, and do you really need to know anything more?
Not too long ago, I was sitting on a couch with our friends from the Ninja Consultant podcast, watching the final few minutes of the Mithun Chakraborty Bollywood ninja epic Commando, when Ninja Consultant Erin said that she couldn't believe that, given all the great and important films she still needs to see, she couldn't believe that she watched Commando instead of one of them. Of course, like me, I'm sure you can all see the logical fallacy in her lament: Commando is one of the great and important films in the history of cinema. But still, I understood her point, even if I didn't empathize with it, and tried to make up for making her watch Commando by loaning her Disco Dancer and going, "Here, I swear this one is good." Surprisingly, both she and Noah still consider me a friend, even though this now means I am responsible for them having seen Commando and Disco Dancer (presuming they watch it), AND the first thing I ever did when I met them was give them an extra copy of Space Thunder Kids. As I have never made that many friends in New York City, I am eternally grateful for their continued willingness to be seen with me despite the horrible, horrible things I've done to them and will no doubt continue to do in the future.
I tell you this story primarily to echo Erin's sentiments regarding the time well spent watching Commando (if she feels bad, think about this -- I've seen Commando four times now). In the whole wide world of cinema, I could have followed up watching Space Thunder Kids by watching something really respectable and worthwhile. Even within the genres I love, there are still so many films I haven't seen, especially among the old noir titles. But instead of watching In a Lonely Place or Out of the Past, instead of watching any number of great films, I quietly took the Space Thunder Kids DVD out of my player and immediately inserted Solar Adventure, another Korean cartoon spawned by the same batch of animation commissioned by some Australian company and produced by Hong Kong cheapskate crap film mogul Joseph Lai. The difference, however, between Erin and I is that while she seemed to genuinely regret the short-changing of artistic merit that occurred that night, I went blissfully forward into Solar Adventure without any notion that anything was the slightest bit wrong with my decision. Similar cavalier attitudes flown brazenly in the face of common sense have also resulted in things like me staying in a hotel room with a hole cut in the floor leading to a stucco bucket I was meant to use as a toilet.
Solar Adventure certainly isn't a hotel room with a hole cut in the floor leading to a stucco bucket I was meant to use as a toilet, but it is perhaps somewhat similar to what you might expect to find as the contents of such a stucco bucket. But if Solar Adventure is largely a bucket full of piss, crap, used condoms, and cigarette butts (and I fully expect "Solar Adventure is largely a bucket full of piss, crap, used condoms, and cigarette butts" to be a critics' blurb appearing on the next release of this film), then it's lucky that I have a very high tolerance for such things so long as they are not being rubbed into my hair. And while Space Thunder Kids may set the bar for incompetent glory so fabulously high that it becomes nigh unattainable, Solar Adventure is no slouch in the incompetence field, seeing as how Joseph Lai took his cut and paste style of filmmaking to the next level. As discussed in the Space Thunder Kids review, Lai was the impresario behind a string of movies created by splicing a couple of other movies together more or less at random, inserting some footage of white guys pretending to be ninjas, and calling it a new film. Along with Thomas Tang and Godfrey Ho, Lai created dozens of films out of a mere few, and not a single one of them made a lick of sense. When some Australian company requested a fistful of cheap cartoon filler for, I assume, some late-night or early-morning hole in the broadcast programming schedule, they tapped Lai who, in turn, hired a bunch of overworked Korean animators to crank out a couple film's worth of animation. Lai then proceeded to cut and recut that footage into a half dozen or more separate movies running about an hour in length, save for the epic Space Thunder Kids, which clocks in around 90 minutes.
A couple years ago, these cartoon features started showing up on budget DVDs at Wal-Mart, and daring anime fans mistook them for old Japanese cartoons -- which was an honest enough mistake, since the Korean animators ripped off a whole host of established icon characters of the Japanese anime industry, including giant robots like Mazinger, Raideen, The Transformers, Robotech, and Gundam, as well as space opera fixtures like Captain Harlock and Yamato. Even more confounding, Space Thunder Kids also prominently features characters and animated sets copying the ground-breaking and still under-appreciated live-action scifi-fantasy Disney film TRON. Solar Adventure -- in which nothing happens that would have anything to do with a solar adventure, other than to say that many of the events depicted in the cartoon do indeed occur in the sunlight -- managed to remain unique in its own right among the quilt-work series of films of which it is a part, and this is because it is the only where Joseph Lai goes completely bonkers and splices together the usual assortment of animated bits (fans of Space Thunder Kids' fat general with the weird goiter blob thing on his neck will be overjoyed by his major role in Solar Adventure) but also splices in footage from a live-action, low-budget Korean action film. It's like he got confused at some point at spliced in footage meant for one of his ninja movies.
Sadly, the live-action sequences in Solar Adventure feature no ninjas, but they do feature some ugly, irritating kids and, at some point, a couple guys with machine guns. I have no idea if this footage was shot specifically for Solar Adventure or if Solar Adventure simply came about after Lai found the live-action footage lying around. It's clear one came from the other, though, because of the way the film segues from its live-action footage to the animation. Before any of that, though, we get to enjoy a credit sequence illustrated by lots of surprisingly competent space illustrations like you'd see from visions of the future a la the 1960s. Although none of the locations depicted in these illustrations will ever be employed in the actual story of Solar Adventure, they are still quite nice and prove that at least someone involved with this project had some genuine artistic talent. They just didn't see fit to employ it in the service of Joseph Lai's fly-by-night production company.
The fun proper begins in a Korean classroom, where bored kids are learning about those evil, devious commies to the North. Although the teacher does her best to impress upon the children the gravity of this commie Sword of Damocles hanging over their respectable, hard-working country, the kids seem more interested in farting around. Actually, so does the teacher, because as soon as one of the brats stand sup and says, "Teacher, this is boring. Can we have a nature trip instead?" she immediately agrees and suddenly her a few kids from the class are hiking through the world's ugliest, weed-strewn field en route to a scummy, brackish lake where they will all be camping and sleeping piled on top of one another in a single tent. Truth be told, the grubbiness of the landscape could be the fault of the crummy film stock and lightning. If these end up being the heroes of the film, then we're in pretty sorry shape for saviors here on planet Earth. I wasn't sure if the nerdy kid with glasses and fat, mincing nemesis were ugly little boys or ugly little girls, and it's possible they're a bit of both. Whatever the case, I really wish Asia would stop entrusting the fate of our planet and the competent operation of the world's giant robots to kids like these. Surely there must be some grizzled veteran out there who would be better suited for such tasks, leaving the children free to spend their time instructing the military on the proper handling of various Gamera-related monsters. I mean, I may have really disliked Godzilla: Final Wars, but at least they had the good sense to let their super weapon be piloted by a big, grumpy dude decked out in Joseph Stalin's old hand-me-downs.
When the group learns that there might be Communist agents prowling about the lake, they seem mildly distressed, but not so distressed that they cancel their camping trip just because a lot of guys with machine guns are wandering around. And so, after some "hilarious" hijinks involving a skinny nerdy kid and a fat nerdy kids (all these kids are pretty nerdy) they all pile in for a well-earned night's sleep, during which they'll have plenty of time to ponder the benefits of bringing more than one tent with them next time they all go camping in the field next to the ugly lake. Or, they'd have time to contemplate that if it wasn't for the fact that a space helicopter crashes in the lake. When they hear the ruckus, the kids and their teacher emerge and suddenly, they are all cartoons! They bear vague but fair resemblance to the live-action actors, except that the teacher is a totally different person, and one of the fat kids is now a hulking, muscular he-man. The space helicopter -- and that's what it is, a helicopter that flies through space -- contains two green-skinned humanoid aliens who explain that they have come to the earth to help fight against the evil President, who even now consorts with the North Koreans to take over the planet. And for some reason, they decide to enlist the aide of this completely random bunch of dopes to help them out.
And then we cut to the President and the evil North Koreans, and hey! What do ya know! It's that green dude with the big forehead and the general with the giant neck lump, last seen loitering around during the Dark Emperor's attack on earth in Space Thunder Kids. In that movie, these boobs didn't do anything but sit around and talk about maybe launching an attack. Then the blob neck general shot the green dude and drove his tanks into a tunnel, never to be seen again. This time, they stand around in the same room, using the same animation, only with a lot more scenes of the two of them drinking martinis, which is pretty cool. If a green alien came down and said he was going to conquer Earth in between martinis, I'd roll with it. As if going to be the case in pretty much every one of these Joseph Lai produced cartoon abominations, the only thing standing in between The President and conquest of the universe are a couple of the Earth's giant robots. At first, The President thinks he can just steal the robots and use them for his own nefarious schemes, but it turns out you need some secret emotional soul key bullshit to make them go, so The President just decides to melt them down and do something else with the metal, like make more tanks or something. The kids from the camping trip somehow get recruited to pilot the robots, because once again, there's nothing you want more as your last line of defense than giant robots piloted by ten-year-olds who spend most of their time slapping each other in the head. I suppose, really, the kids are about an even match for The President and the goiter neck general. When last we saw these two, they never really got around to accomplishing much, and this time around, it looks like more of the same. Their whole plan for conquering the Earth seems to hinge on running around in the woods around that lake, then attacking the people who own a couple giant robots. I'm no military genius sipping martinis with my green-skinned alien accomplice, but I say launch an attack on a city somewhere, then let the robots come to you. It's gotta beat a systematic attempt to conquer the world based on the conquest of South Korea's least attractive state parks and camping grounds.
As you would expect ten-years-old to do, they leap into battle and immediately get their asses kicked, so Solar Adventure is nothing if not completely and totally realistic. Luckily, one of the kids manages to escape by hiding in a barrel that magically changes dimensions depending on what angle from which it's being drawn. He gets over to one of the robots and begins the movie's stand-out sequence, in which a gigantic metal robot sneaks silently through the North Korean military base, stopping from time to time to squash soldiers in amusing fashions. He manages to free the other children, and then some serious robot fight action breaks out, and we discover that the good guy robots can combine into a super weapon. What is the super weapon? An even bigger robot? A giant spaceship? A huge cannon? No. You're not thinking outside the box. The heroic robots combine to form a...camera. Of course, the camera shoots a laser beam out of its lens. If you have some sort of logical problem with giant robots piloted by children, and the robots combine to form a camera, and then the one remaining robot has to press down on the shutter button -- which is the head of one of the other robots -- and that causes the camera to shoot a laser beam out of the lens (and, presumably take a photo), then maybe you just aren't open-minded enough for the non-conformist, convention-challenging avant-garde art of Solar Adventure.
Once the big robot ass kicking is delivered, the movie suddenly cuts back to the live action footage, as the kids wake up and clamber out of their tent. It was all a dream! Or was it? Whatever the case, the movie loses interest and so cuts to some footage of some dudes in camo shooting some other dudes, and then all the kids skip behind their teacher as they hike along a hilltop in the one thing that really makes this film special: a direct rip-off of the final shot of Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal. Now that, my friends, is Joseph Lai at his finest. This one isn't nearly as wacky as Space Thunder Kids, but it's pretty good once it gets rolling. The live-action shenanigans go on for way too long, but once the aliens show up and robots start squishing North Koreans, things pick up. The green guy President drinks a lot of martinis in this one. In fact, in almost every scene, he's drinking a martini. And then he gets shot by the general, who betrays him again as the movie recycles that same footage we saw in Space Thunder Kids. At least this time we actually see the general's tanks get destroyed.
With a running time of right about 60 minutes, there's no real time to get overly bored once the animation kicks in, though I can see the live-action intro losing a lot of people right off the bat. But if you soldier through that, you get to watch robots squash people, then turn into a camera which shoots a death ray for no good reason. I mean, each of the three robots was already armed with assorted lasers and death rays, so changing into a camera death ray that has to be operated by the final robots means your reducing your total number of death rays form three or four to one. This is sort of like how Megatron in the Transformers was a giant robot with a huge fucking cannon on his shoulder, but he'd always transform and turn into a little gun that then had to be fired by another Transformer.
All in all, this is a more coherent movie, with more consistent animation. We don't switch crews or robots from one frame to the next, and while the dudes still don't draw humans very well (what is the deal with the teacher? I'm not even fazed by the general's weird elongated, pot-bellied, hunchbacked, goitered appearance at this point -- after all, that's what evil communists look like anyway), we still get lots of giant robot fighting action, a chase scene between two space helicopters (not exactly thrilling), and that green dude sipping martini after martini. The only real continuity error is that his martini changes colors pretty frequently, but I just assumed that's because he was finishing so many and pouring himself another one, probably because he was having a hard time looking at the horribly malformed North Korean general. Why didn't this guy pick a better earthly agent? The robot designs this time around shirk ripping off the famous Japanese giant robots and instead focus primarily on the Transformers. Speaking of transforming, the main robot, while he doesn't change from one robot to another from shot to shot as we got from so many of the robots in Space Thunder Kids, still manages to exist as a fine example of the total lack of interest on the part of the filmmakers in anything relating to continuity. One second, he's got a little yellow "W" on his chest, and the next shot, there's a big white "W" on his chest, and then later on, there won't be any letter at all, and he'll have wings on his calves, or maybe not.
These are pretty minor, though, considering what we saw and will continue to see from other films in this outstanding series. The robots themselves look like some weird blend of Transformers, Go-Bots, and probably something out of some other cartoon I've never seen. I do know that when the heroic robots are basically Reflector, the evil Decepticon camera from The Transformers. Funny thing is, although this time he's a good guy, the camera gets to kill a whole lot more people than the evil original version. I'm sure other people better versed in assorted robot designs will spot other stolen designs. Solar Adventure is fun. It's not Space Thunder Kids fun, but few things in this world are. As with pretty much everything in this series, it's well worth the dollar, even if for no other reason than that "sneaky robot crushes people" scene and all the shots of the evil guys sipping martinis. What crazy animated adventure will Joseph Lai have up his sleeve next? We can't say for sure, but you can bet that, between Space Thunder Kids and Solar Adventure, you've probably already seen most of it. Labels: Anime and Animation, Science Fiction, Series: Joseph Lai Crap Anime posted by Keith at 6:50 PM | 7 Comments Wednesday, April 18, 2007Space Thunder Kids
DIGG THIS ARTICLE. Korea/Austraila. Honestly, I have no idea. Joseph Lai produced it though, and do you really need to know anything more? You know, some people would sit down with pen in hand and engage in multiple viewings of a great and respected movie, taking meticulous notes pertaining to various aspects of said film that would promote intellectual dialog amongst high-minded luminaries in the field of film criticism and analysis. I, on the other hand, did much the same thing with Space Thunder Kids, and by "high-minded" I mean low-brow, and by "meticulous notes" I mean drunken ranting, and by "pen" I mean bourbon.
Trust me, a bottle of bourbon is all that's going to get you through the brain-frying glory of Space Thunder Kids, a film so utterly confounding, so dazzlingly inept in every single way imaginable, that it achieves an undeniable aura of the sublime that glows so brightly it threatens to blot out the rest of existence. And if you are worried that, perhaps, drinking an entire bottle of bourbon during a single movie could be detrimental to your health or to your comprehension of what you are watching, I say to you, "Have no fear, for Space Thunder Kids defies comprehension, and by the end of it you will be mopping up your own brain, which will have melted and oozed out the corner of your eyes as you vomit up your own intestines Lucio Fulci style." The bourbon only makes it hurt less. Now if that isn't a good review, I don't know what is.
Truth be told, I did sit through multiple viewings of Space Thunder Kids, and I did do it with a pen and paper and a dedication to taking notes. I wasn't taking notes because Space Thunder Kids was so full of meaning and subtext that it demands to be studied. I was taking notes so that I could have running documentation of every completely bizarre moment in the movie, of every Japanese robot and anime character that appears via a cheap knock-off simulacrum, of every time the movie becomes a completely different movie, with different characters and robots, and without any explanation whatsoever. I was doing my best to keep up, sweating furiously as I scribbled out page after page of mind-boggling insanity. And then the dudes from TRON showed up, and I decided to thrown in the towel.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning, or as close to the beginning as I've been able to trace. It all started one innocent, carefree day when an email from my friend Bill showed up, urging me to get out to Wal-Mart and pick up a copy of a movie called Space Thunder Kids. He also mentioned that he moved to Korea, which would eventually turn out to be an important piece of synchronicity, if indeed synchronicity comes in pieces. I replied that I had not seen Space Thunder Kids, and that I generally avoided movies with the word "Kids" in the title, because I almost always don't like them -- Ninja Kids being the big exception since it contains no kids but does have a bunch of full frontal hooker nudity in it before Alexander Lou puts on a little button-down cap and kicks the shit out of some ninjas. And besides, I wrote, this is New York City. We don't have a Wal-Mart here, because they are an evil corporation that destroys the small-town, mom-and-pop quaintness that is so important to a city like New York, where there are no evil corporations.
A few days later, Bill wrote back and, after praising the commitment of young Korean women to miniskirts even when the temperatures were well below freezing, he urged me once again to do all I could to get a copy of Space Thunder Kids. Ebay it if I had to, or pester friends, or just drive upstate to the nearest Wal-Mart. Eventually, I broke down and decided to mount a quick search for the movie. A dollar and a week's shipping time later, I had a copy, along with two similar DVDs: Defenders of Space and Protectors of the Universe -- or as it's known in its own opening credit sequence, Protectors the Universe. All three titles, along with a couple others I got later thanks to my buddy Todd in Atlanta (Hotlanta to you), showed up a couple years ago on the racks of Wal-Mart's discount dollar DVDs, alongside the usual assortment of Max Fleischer Superman cartoons and old Amos 'n' Andy shorts. Although these types of DVDs get sold in all sorts of places (much to the delight of people like me, who enjoy the occasional Flash Gordon serial or movies where Julius Harris is the main star), it seems these particular anime titles were only available at Wal-Mart. The initial assumption is that these are just old Japanese cartoons dubbed and dumped on the market for peanuts. Indeed, flipping the DVD over and looking at the artwork on the back would seem to support this assumption. Isn't that Mazinger, after all? So these must be old Go Nagai cartoons or something, like that Robo Force thing I got on VHS a long time ago. But wait, I thought as I continued to peruse the snapshots on the back of the Space Thunder Kids DVD -- isn't that guy in the picture below him one of the Transformers? And is that the Space Battleship Yamato? And is that...is that Sark from TRON?!?!?
It turns out that Space Thunder Kids and the rest of the titles in this esteemed collection were actually made in Korea -- where my friend Bill had to go before he was allowed to tell me about them, as if on some Space Thunder Kids pilgrimage. All of the animation is original. Well, sort of original. Some anonymous bunch of Koreans drew it all (their names have been replaced on the credits), but they used existing icons of the Japanese animation industry as "models," sometimes putting one character's head on another's body, sort of like those cheap bootleg toys down in Chinatown where you get things like Spider-Man's head on a Power Ranger's body, with Batman's cape. In a way, I guess this is really no different than when porno movies feature someone with a name almost like some famous celebrity's name. So the Space Thunder Kids robot is to Mazinger what, say, Britney Spheres is to Britney Spears, though maybe that's a bad example since, at this point, it would be hard to guess which one is the respectable person (it's Spheres, in case you were wondering, even if that's not an actual porno star. She should be, is all I'm sayin').
Space Thunder Kids is full of moments when one movie stops and a completely different movie begins (sort of like the piecemeal bodies of the robots in the movie), complete with different film stock, grain, and art style. This is largely because Space Thunder Kids is assembled Frankenstein style from various bits and pieces of the other films in the series -- which themselves borrow scenes pretty heavily from one another. Trust me, if you watch all of these movies, you are going to become really familiar with the evil general (sometimes he's Chinese, sometimes he's North Korean, sometimes he's from space) with the giant goiter or roll of fat or whatever the hell that is supposed to be hanging off the side of his neck. But unlike any of the other titles, only Space Thunder Kids was willing to put the guys from TRON in it. Now, I may dismiss this simply as "batshit insane" filmmaking were it not for the fact that the very first credit to appear when one sits down to experience Space Thunder Kids proudly proclaims it to be a Joseph Lai production, accompanied by grand music and some crazy disco lighting.
Anime fans, who seem to be the bulk of the people who have stumbled across this lost work of art, may not have any idea who Joseph Lai is. They wouldn't even think to suspect that having his name attached to a project is in any way significant. Ahh, but we fans of old kungfu B-movies -- we know better, don't we? And we can impart our knowledge to the purely anime fans who have not ventured into the dark realm of crappy slapdash ninja films. Lai forms a mysterious triumvirate along with Thomas Tang and Godfrey Ho -- indeed there are those who swear the three men are actually the same man, or are some sort of super-being that can split a single consciousness into three separate entities with, I assume, cheesy 1970s pencil-thin mustaches and Amber-vision sunglasses. Lai (and when I refer to Joseph Lai, I am by default also referring to Thomas Tang and Godfrey Ho) Is best known for coming out of relatively nowhere to produce an unheard of number of movies in an extremely short period of time. Binding these films together was the presence of ninjas. And there's no doubt that they are ninjas, even if they're white guys (most often, Italian b-movie staple Richard Harrison) because they often wear headbands that say "Ninja!!!!" on them, in that jagged "Oriental" font. The Tang/Ho/Lai uni-mind was able to produce, direct, and distribute so many films because their style of filmmaking was to buy up a couple cheap Hong Kong or Filipino films, splice them all together, then inject some new scenes of white guy ninjas and try, via dubbing, to tie the whole thing together into some sort of story that might flirt on occasion with coherency without ever actually committing to the concept.
The movies they used were almost always dirt cheap nonsense, though from time to time I have seen one of their ninja movies and recognized at least one of the films that served as the source. Aside from splicing films together, dashing off a new script, and inserting random scenes of white guys in shiny metallic purple or red and yellow ninja outfits into the proceedings (and all movies could benefit from such insertions), they'd also steal music cues from whatever movie happened to be popular -- which, to be fair, was hardly unique to the poverty row Lai/Tang/Ho operation, as even big budget films from Hong Kong during the 80s were known to lift cues and entire musical scores from other films. But while some films, say John Woo's The Killer or Hard Boiled, lifted scores people might not recognize (save for the ten people in the world who rushed out to buy the Red Heat soundtrack). The cheaper films usually just used Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Mix all these ingredients together, and you literally have a nearly endless reservoir of movies than can be made, quite literally, in a few days. And so the world is blessed with titles like Ninja Phantom Heroes, Ninja in the Claws of the CIA, Ninja Diamond Force, and countless others. You could probably write a thousand-page tome by doing nothing but reviewing these ninja films, for their numbers are so great.
That Lai saw fit, for a brief spell, to turn his attentions to anime, or at least to animation, isn't really surprising, given what I have to assume was a keen sense of how to make a fast buck. The results also aren't surprising. From what I can tell, Lai basically made one or two movies, cheaply and sloppily animated by a bunch of Koreans chained to their desks, and then cut and recut those movies into eight or nine separate movies. All of the films rely on the popularity of giant robot animation from the late 1970s and early 1980s, though they hardly restrict themselves to it. And like the ninja films, it seems that these movies were produced largely for a foreign -- as in Western -- market, to be dumped cheaply onto home video or to fill late-night television programming holes. The majority of these cartoons actually make some rudimentary type of sense. The plot is almost identical in each of them -- a belligerent alien race, most likely blue or green in color and sometimes both from one shot to the next, depending on who w | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
