Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of the 1970s
Author: John Kenneth Muir
Date: 2013-10-23 04:00:00+00:00
Description: Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of the 1970s by John Kenneth Muir is a detailed history and analysis of more than 100 genre films produced between the span of 1970 - 1979. The book looks at the historical context of dystopian, post-apocalyptic, and outer space movies of the day, and reveals how these movies are both a look at tomorrow and a product of their times.
Publisher: The Lulu Show LLC

Also by John Kenneth Muir

Horror Films FAQ (2013)

Music on Film: Purple Rain (2012)

Horror Films of the 1990s (2011)

Music on Film: This is Spinal Tap (2010)

The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film and Television (2008)

Horror Films of the 1980s (2007)

The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007)

Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (2006)

Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company (2004)

The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (2004)

Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre: The Films of Tobe Hooper (2003)

An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith (2002).

Horror Films of the 1970s (2002)

Terror Television (2001)

The Films of John Carpenter (2000)

Wes Craven: The Art of Horror (1998)

Exploring Space:1999 An Episode Guide and Complete History (1997)

SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

FILMS OF THE 1970s

John Kenneth Muir

©The Lulu Show LLC., 2013

Muir, John Kenneth 1969 –

Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of the 1970s/John Kenneth Muir

Includes bibliographical references and index

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recroding, or by information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

Cover Photograph: the Brutals of John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974).

All photographs appearing in this book are from the personal collection and historical archive of John K. Muir, and are utilized here for purposes of illustration, historical value, and scholarship under the aegis of the Fair Use clause.

This book is dedicated with love to my son, Joel, and my wife Kathryn, both of whom demonstrated remarkable patience with me as I re-visited, at length, the SF cinema of the 1970s.

Also, for Johnny Byrne, a guiding force in my professional life, a mentor like no other, and a dear friend much missed.

Table of Contents

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away:” An Introduction              11

“Your Art, Your Science, it was all a Nightmare. And Now It’s Done:”

The History of Science Fiction Films in the 1970              18

“Time can only be fully understood by an Observer with the Godlike Gift of

Infinite Regression:”

Reviewing the Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies of the 1970s              47

1970

Beneath the Planet of the Apes              50

Colossus: The Forbin Project              56

Gas! – Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It              60

The Mind of Mr. Soames              62

No Blade of Grass              65

Trog              67

1971

The Andromeda Strain              72

Diamonds Are Forever              76

Escape from the Planet of the Apes              79

Glen and Randa              84

The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant              86

The Omega Man              88

Punishment Park              91

THX-1138              95

1972

Beware! The Blob              103

A Clockwork Orange              105

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes              108

Godzilla vs. Hedorah              114

Silent Running              116

Solaris              121

Slaughterhouse 5              125

The Thing with Two Heads              127

Z.P.G.              130

1973

Battle for the Planet of the Apes              137

The Crazies              142

The Day of the Dolphin              145

Fantastic Planet              147

Invasion of the Bee Girls              149

The Neptune Factor: An Undersea Adventure              151

Sleeper              154

Soylent Green              157

Ssssssss              163

Westworld              166

1974

The Final Programme              173

Flesh Gordon              177

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad              179

The Island at the Top of the World              182

The Little Prince              184

The Man with the Golden Gun              187

Phase IV              189

The Terminal Man              192

Zardoz              194

1975

A Boy and His Dog              202

Bug              205

Dark Star              207

Death Race 2000              211

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze              216

Escape to Witch Mountain              221

The Giant Spider Invasion              223

The Land that Time Forgot              225

Rollerball              229

The Stepford Wives              233

The Ultimate Warrior              236

1976

At the Earth’s Core              241

Doomwatch              243

Embryo              245

Food of the Gods              247

Futureworld              249

Godzilla vs. Megalon              253

King Kong              255

Logans’ Run              260

The Man Who Fell to Earth              265

Shivers              267

1977

Close Encounters of the Third Kind              272

Damnation Alley              276

Demon Seed              280

Empire of the Ants              284

End of the World              286

Godzilla vs. The Bionic Monster              288

The Incredible Melting Man              289

The Island of Dr. Moreau              292

Kingdom of the Spiders              295

The People That Time Forgot              297

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger              300

The Spy Who Loved Me              302

Star Wars              305

Starship Invasions              311

The War in Space              313

Wizards              315

1978

The Alien Factor              320

Alien Prey              321

Blue Sunshine              323

The Boys from Brazil              324

Capricorn One              327

The Cat from Outer Space              330

Coma              332

Deathsport               335

The Fury              337

Invasion of the Body Snatchers              341

Laserblast              346

The Lord of the Rings              348

Message from Space              351

Return from Witch Mountain              353

Superman: The Movie              355

The Swarm              360

1979

Alien              365

Battlestar Galactica              370

The Black Hole              373

The Brood              380

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century              382

The China Syndrome              385

Goldengirl              387

Mad Max              389

Meteor              394

Moonraker              397

Parts: The Clonus Horror              400

Prophecy              402

Quintet              405

The Shape of Things to Come              409

Stalker              411

Starcrash              414

Star Trek: The Motion Picture              418

Time After Time              426

Unidentified Flying Oddball              429

The Warriors              430

Conclusion: “When You Wish Upon a Star”              436

Appendix A: Conventions of the Genre              439

Appendix B: The Science Fiction & Fantasy Films of the 1970s Hall of Fame              444

Appendix C: Movie Tag-Lines              446

Appendix D: The Five Most De-Humanizing Rituals of the 1970s Dystopia              450

Appendix E: Then vs. Now              453

Appendix F: The Ten Best Science Fiction Films of the 1970s              454

Selected Bibliography              455

Index              456

The poster art for Soylent Green (1973), a seventies film about over-population and cannibalism.

“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

An Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of the 1970s

As a literary format, science fiction has frequently been termed the genre of imagination, or more broadly, the genre of ideas. Specifically, science fiction literature attempts to conceive of the philosophical or moral parameters of a human world re-shaped by new science and technological innovation.

By comparison, the science fiction film is expressly the visualization -- within a narrative and symbolic 20th century art form -- of those re-shaped worlds or dimensions.

In brief, one might conclude that the science fiction film is a form obsessed with speculation about the design and face of tomorrow’s world…today.

The science fiction film answers a crucial question: what will tomorrow bring for the human race?

Will it bring war or peace?  Will it bring dystopia or utopia?  Will it bring space exploration, sea exploration, or some exploration of the inner self? Or will tomorrow bring total annihilation?

Although the science fiction film genre extends right back to film’s humble beginnings in the early 1900s, the decade of the 1970s represents a major turning point for the genre’s development on the silver screen due to choice in subject matter and advances in visual techniques.  The science fiction films of the 1970s also reflect the cultural, economic, political, and entertainment frissons of the age, as all movies most certainly reflect their historical context.

But more precisely, the seventies represent a downright schizophrenic time in American history, and the 1970s’ science fiction ventures reflect that sense of duality…and madness.

The Irish poet and science fiction author, Johnny Byrne (1935 – 2008) who served as story editor for the first season of Space:1999 (1975 – 1977) and was a dear friend and mentor of this author, described the decade of the 1970s in this fashion: “It wasn’t a hippie trip. It was a wake-up after the dream.”

In his book The 1970s (Infobase Publishing, 2006, page 4) author Neil A. Hamilton recounts a very apt, very detailed description of the decade in like-minded terms.  He writes that the 1970s represent:

“…a terrible period filled with everything the 1960s could offer as backwash: the defeat in Vietnam with the horrible scenes of Vietnamese refugees trying desperately to flee their county; Watergate with the resignation of President Richard Nixon and the subsequent distrust of government that came from it…; economic problems that ranged from an oil embargo (and escalating oil prices) to stagflation…; polarized views as conservatives derided the countercultural excesses and liberals derided mainstream hypocrisy; presidential ineptitude as Jimmy Carter struggled mightily and with much failure to deal with a demoralized society; war in the Middle East as Arabs and Israelis went to battle…”

That litany sums up the difficulties faced in the span 1970–1979 quite respectably. Notably, the societal problems were wide-ranging and totally collapsed what author James Stuart Olson in The Historical Dictionary of the 1970s (Greenwood Press, 1999, page 2) trenchantly terms the four pillars of American national identity, thereby spurring a “collective identity crisis.”

As identified by Olson, these four pillars are: the belief that the American political system is fair; belief that the political system is above corruption or abuse of power; belief in capitalism and America’s economic strength; and finally, belief in America’s capacity to act meaningfully for good in the world.

So right down the line, as Olson notes, the 1970s hit America where it hurt the most.

British Secret Agent James Bond, Agent 007 (Roger Moore) returned in 1970s films such as The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), but this time the context wasn’t the Cold War…but rather the Energy Crisis.  Here, Bond attempts to acquire the “Solex Agitator,” a device to help the West achieve energy independence.

Regarding the first pillar, the Civil Rights, Indian Rights, and Women’s Rights movements of the seventies all pointed out that in terms of equal opportunity, equal pay, and equal justice before the law, America had a long way yet to travel towards the ideal of justice. It was still a white man’s country, and many glass ceilings had yet to be shattered.

In terms of the second pillar, which involves abuse of power, the Watergate Scandal revealed to the American populace that the Commander-in-chief could not be trusted, had acted deliberately and knowingly in a criminal fashion, and even considered himself above the law’s reach.   President Nixon’s resignation in 1974 came not long after the resignation of the Vice-President, Spiro Agnew.  So the top two men in the country had been exposed as corrupt and unfit to serve.

The third pillar of American self-identity, involving the economy, also crumbled in the age of the Bee Gees and Disco.  In the 1970s, the so-called “misery index,” a score measuring unemployment plus inflation hits its highest mark in American history up to that point. Nixon’s two-terms raised this index a whopping nine points, and Carter’s single term lifted it another seven points beyond that. These were America’s “malaise days.”

During this span, the United States also dealt with the Energy Crisis and the so called “Oil Shock” not once but twice.  It did so first during the Oil Embargo of 1973, and then again after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Unemployment in the decade also topped out at over 9.25 percent.

The mismanagement of the Vietnam War and America’s subsequent defeat in that conflict shattered the nation’s fourth and final pillar, the belief that America stood unmatched astride the world stage. More than 33,000 American soldiers died in the conflict, a total higher than the number of American casualties in the previous conflict, the Korean War. The war was also deeply unpopular, especially with students, and the 1970s was the decade of the Kent State shootings, wherein innocent college students were gunned down on campus by the National Guard while protesting the U.S.’s involvement.

Another, perhaps fifth pillar of American certitude and belief also crumbled during the 1970s years.  Respect for and faith in science took a body blow when nuclear power was dramatically proved unsafe in the Three Mile Island incident of 1979. Had fate been only slightly different, that nuclear accident would have resulted in a catastrophic radioactive meltdown in the very heart of the industrial East Coast.

Similarly, NASA’s Apollo space program came to an end in the 1970s, and man’s journey to the stars seemed, if not stopped cold, then at least stalled.

There are, perhaps, two distinct ways in which a person (or a country) can deal with an identity crisis like the one that gripped and seized America in the turbulent, chaotic 1970s.

In the first case, one can dwell on the bad or negative, and begin to develop a kind of bunker, “end of the world” mentality.  Indeed, a pop-culture icon of the 1970s was named Archie Bunker because of his belief that the America he cherished was being replaced by something eminently less worthy.

The second way to handle an identity crisis of such magnitude is simply to ignore the problem completely, and instead focus entirely on self, or on hedonistic pleasures.  If the world is going to end, why not have a “nice day” and enjoy the death spiral?

The non-fiction best-seller lists of the 1970s reveal that Americans coped by splitting the difference. They chose both Option A and Option B.  Those best-seller tallies were decorated with titles such as The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), The Final Days (1976) and How to Prosper Before the Coming Bad Years (1979), as well as those such as The Sensuous Woman (1971), Open Marriage (1972), and The Joy of Sex (1973).

In perhaps overly broad terms, the science fiction films of the 1970s followed this pattern, and evidenced the same remarkable schizophrenia.  The films produced and released in the first half or so of the decade were often obsessed with dystopian and apocalyptic visions of man’s future.

To wit: humanity would be replaced at the top of the food chain by intelligent, talking apes in the films of the continuing Planet of the Apes saga (1970–1973), driven to cannibalism by overpopulation (Soylent Green [1973]), returned to pre-industrial age barbarism by world-wide famine (No Blade of Grass [1970]), and face a limited life-span in a computer-controlled, totalitarian paradise (Logan’s Run [1976]).

If he survived the apocalypse, man would face a world of giant cockroaches (Damnation Alley [1977]) and deadly radioactive “flash” winds (Deathsport [1978]) too.

Dangers rose up from every corner of the globe and in every conceivable aspect of life imaginable in the 1970s.  Killer bees were going to migrate from South America into the American Southwest (and they did in The Swarm [1978]). A new ice age was going to render man virtually extinct (and it did, in Robert Altman’s Quintet [1979]). And a planet-destroying asteroid was on a collision course with Earth in Meteor (1979).  Conservative historian David Frum noted these strange fears and concluded that the 1970s were “strange feverish years” in his monograph, How We Got Here: The 70s’ – The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse).

After airing on network television, Glen Larson’s Battlestar Galactica (1979) was released in theaters. The film featured space battles, an element that became a de rigueur ingredient after Star Wars.

But the paranoia about man’s future ran deeper than even Frum’s accurate description accounts for.  Many science fiction films of the 1970s focused also on man’s scientific and medical advancements, and the way they were making the world less safe and less humane.  The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970), A Clockwork Orange (1972), The Terminal Man (1974) and The Brood (1979) all gazed at “innovations” that only took away a man’s freedoms, or otherwise diminished him.

By pointed contrast, approximately the last half of the decade followed the example of the sex-oriented best sellers. Mainstream SF films by and large turned away from the environmental, technological, economic, political, cultural, and social problems plaguing America.

With the release of George Lucas’s Star Wars in 1977, the spirit of the decade’s films shifted almost entirely towards swashbuckling, escapist fare, films that seemed designed exclusively to take one’s mind off the doom and gloom of the era.  Star Wars was a pastiche and deliberate call-back to the romantic Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials of the 1930s, and thrilled audiences on the basis of its innocence and simplicity.

Instead of focusing on cynical anti-heroes, like Planet of the Ape’s misanthrope, Taylor (Charlton Heston) or Soylent Green’s Detective Thorn (Heston again), Star Wars excavated and raised up ancient mythology, and the shape and flow of the Heroic Journey, also known as the Monomyth.

The opening card of Star Wars established the time and place of the action as a “long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” a very direct notice that concerns about such contemporary problems as riots (Conquest of the Planet of the Apes [1972]), race relations (Battle for the Planet of the Apes [1973]), the war of the sexes (The Stepford Wives [1975]), and pollution (No Blade of Grass [1970]) could be checked at the theater door.

Other films of the latter-half of the decade followed closely on this escapist pattern, and opted for stories of mysticism and self-realization over social critique. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) involved an American man, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) who found that interfacing with advanced aliens visiting Earth could help him fulfill and realize his true self, and allow him to leave the humdrum rat race of suburban 1970s existence. As the song, When You Wish Upon a Star pointedly conveyed over the end credits the Spielberg movie was about a personal fantasy rendered concrete or real.

In a similar vein, Superman: The Movie (1978) presented an incorruptible hero who, like President Jimmy Carter, stated with a straight face that he “would never lie” to those who trusted him.  And like Woodward and Bernstein, the same character moonlit (as Clark Kent) as a heroic reporter.

The Richard Donner film also featured stunning Norman Rockwell-styled visualizations of Midwestern America that provoked nostalgia and appreciation. Overall then, Superman: The Movie totally eschewed the cynicism that had dominated the nation throughout the decade.  The film’s famous tag-line concerned, importantly, finding a way to believe again. “You’ll Believe a Man Can Fly,” went the slogan.  But it could have been, simply, “You’ll Believe in America Again.”

If we contextualize the “schizophrenic” nature of the 1970s science fiction film, it doesn’t seem incorrect to note that first half of the seventies (again, broadly speaking) embraced the historical context of the times, including the Vietnam War, The Watergate Scandal, and the Energy Crisis of 1973, and then constructed often incendiary polemics that took them into consideration.

Meanwhile, (roughly) the last half of the decade aggressively sought to paper a yellow smiley-face sticker over the difficult issues occupying the national attention.  The latter half of the disco decade was about remembering the things that had made America great in the past, whether or not they still happened to be true or relevant in the present.

Another way to describe this dynamic is that up to 1977 or thereabouts the genre concerned what America saw when it gazed into the abyss.  After 1977, the genre was about the country retreating, full-speed from that abyss, and purposefully directing its gaze and attention elsewhere.

I mean to imply no judgment on either facet of the decade, or either coping mechanism.  Sometimes it is good to face a problem head on with full-force of mind, and at other times the mind benefits from a brief respite; from a step away from the crises of the day.  The 1970s offers both kinds of science fiction films, and ones that are, on retrospect, extraordinary.

Importantly, some science fiction films of the 1970s seemed to break all the accepted conventions and rules of movie decorum of their age.  One such effort was 1979’s Alien from director Ridley Scott, which was the first film to feature the biomechanoid artistry of H.R. Giger (1940 - ), a one-of-a-kind, surrealist painter.  The film not only broke down traditional sex roles by making its hero a highly-capable, independent woman, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, but Alien also gave the cinema an alien life form beyond anything ever witnessed before, one in constant, and blood-soaked flux.  The inability to identify and understand the alien represented America’s uncertainty about its place in the world. The country, like Scott’s alien, was in flux, and becoming…what, precisely?

The following work gazes at over one hundred genre films released in American theaters between 1970 and 1979, and takes special care to note why these films look like they do, and how they conform overall to decade trends.

Uniquely, many of the films covered in this text have been remade, pre-quelized, sequelized or re-booted in recent years, a fact pointing to the highly-influential and resonant nature of the 1970s science fiction and fantasy cinema.

So grab your mood ring, slip on your bell-bottom pants and boogie shoes, turn up the Bee Gees, and let’s get “truckin’.”

Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) reckons with the unknown and the terrifying in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).

“Your Art, Your Science, it was all a Nightmare. And

Now It’s Done:”

The History of Science Fiction Films in the 1970s

Because America was contending with problems on many fronts, domestic, and foreign in the 1970s, its science fiction and fantasy films fall into several groups or sub-types.  The following history of the decade is organized by those sub-types, for easy reference. In other words, the movies are discussed below according to topic or subject matter.

As the 1970s began, the genre was still on a sort of “high” from two cinematic SF landmarks of the previous decade.  These were Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which featured amazing visuals of highly-detailed spaceship interiors and exteriors, and Franklin Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968), a blazing social critique that opened up a whole new world of make-up artistry thanks to the efforts of John Chambers.  As the 1970s, commenced, however, it seemed that Planet of the Apes’ approach would prove more immediately influential and new movies concerned meditations on apocalypse, future societies, and the end of mankind.  The 1970s saw four sequels to Planet of the Apes produced early in the decade, and that’s where this chronicle of the decade picks up.

A Planet Where Apes Evolved from Men?

One of the biggest hits of the 1960s was Planet of the Apes (1968), a critically-acclaimed film that combined action, intelligent science-fiction and a Twilight Zone-styled surprise ending.

Almost immediately, 20th Century Fox, the studio which had produced the film, began thinking about ways to pursue the property, which had originated as a 1963 novel Monkey Planet, by French novelist Pierre Boulle. The initial stumbling block to producing a sequel, however, was the first film’s star. Charlton Heston was very vocal about his lack of desire to make a second film, fearing that it would merely become an adventure with monkeys, and not a legitimate work of art like the original.

An accommodation was eventually reached that saw Heston return for the sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), for brief, book-end sequences.  And just to make certain that he wouldn’t be called back again, Heston demanded that his character die at film’s end this time.  His Colonel George Taylor did die in the film’s incendiary finale. Armando (Ricardo Montalban; left) counsels patience as Caesar (Roddy McDowall; right) sees how apes have becomes slaves of the human race in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.

And more than that, his character took the whole world with him by detonating a 20th century era Alpha-Omega Bomb in the midst of a war between the talking Apes and New York’s subterranean mutants. Thus, the Planet of the Apes saga was primed to go out with a literal and bang.  What could go wrong?

For starters, Beneath the Planet of the Apes proved almost as popular as its predecessor had, and so a third film was commissioned, but again, a problem loomed.  How do you continue a film series when the previous entry in the franchise destroyed the Earth and everyone living on it?  The answer was highly ingenious, and actually turned the Apes saga into a complex, five-piece time loop, a saga that has no equal in the sf cinema.

In Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), audiences learned that ape scientists Zira (Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (Roddy McDowall), along with a new character, a genius called Milo (Sal Mineo) had repaired Taylor’s spacecraft before the destruction of the planet, and consequently traveled back to the 1970s…to the dangerous era of mankind.  The plot-line of Escape from the Planet of the Apes, also saw Zira give birth to a baby chimp named Milo, later known as Caesar.  Although a G-rated picture, this sequel was both incredibly violent and cerebral-minded, as it focused on the ethics and possibilities inherent in time travel.

The next sequel, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) revealed Caesar -- Roddy McDowall in a new role -- fully-grown and capable of speech like his famous parents, discovering that apes have been enslaved in the human cities of the 1990s.  He orchestrates a rebellion against a fascist governor, Breck (Don Murray) and his brutal Ape Management.  The film ends with a violent ape riot as the human city is overthrown and the “planet of the apes” is born.

The final film in the cycle, Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) was a low-budget affair that continued the story of Caesar on moral and philosophical terms.  In battling a city of mutants, Caesar had to choose what kind of world he wanted to forge. He could create the world that Taylor destroyed, with apes dominant and humans subjugated, or bring humans into the fold and share power with them in hopes of fostering eternal peace.

Following Battle for the Planet of the Apes, the Planet of the Apes franchise migrated to television, and a series starring Roddy McDowall as an inquisitive chimp named Galen ran on CBS for fourteen episodes. In 1975, the franchise’s last gasp was a Saturday morning cartoon, Return to the Planet of the Apes.

Although production values diminished with each feature film entry, the Planet of the Apes saga remains far more than the sum of the individual parts.  When taken together, the five films form a loop, taking the action from the end of the world, to the beginning, to a chance for a new hope. Each of the five chapters, regardless of particular highs or lows, reveal a crucial element of the high-minded tale, which tackled time travel, racism, race hatred, and even the use of violence in social movements.

Behind the scenes, making the dystopian film A Clockwork Orange (1972). Stanley Kubrick (right) shoots a violent scene with Malcolm McDowell (center, in the codpiece) and Adrienne Corri.

Big Brother is Watching You: The 1970s Dystopias

A dystopia is a society that is frightening or upsetting in some important way, and thus the very opposite of a utopia. The 1970s represents the great era of dystopian science fiction films, and movie after movie released during this span features some negative example of a future society.

In many, but not all cases, the scary dystopias of the 1970s are socialist ones in which the State has usurped freedom from the individual and substituted its own will.  This wide-ranging critique of socialism may be viewed as a backlash against the development of the 1960s Great Society in America, or as a fearful commentary on the mounting power of the counter-culture left in the Vietnam Era.

If most dystopias of the era were left-wing in nature (demonstrating state-control of sex roles, labor, and living conditions), the obscure Punishment Park (1971) took the opposite tack.  The film from Peter Watkins worried about a fascist take-over of the United States by President Nixon. Watkins imagined Nixon exploiting the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, and naming all protesters of the Vietnam War -- and political dissenters of any stripe -- enemies of the State.  They were then remanded to military tribunals, where they could either face long-term incarceration in Federal Penitentiaries, or opt for a run through “punishment parks,” where they would be hunted by police officers, presumably for law enforcement training purposes.  Virtually all the accused selected the punishment park option, unaware that it was a stacked deck, and that they would all be killed for resisting authority on the field of play.   The film involved a British film crew’s discovery of this grim truth, a facet of the story which makes Punishment Park perhaps the very first movie of the now-popular “found footage” format.

Before he changed the face and feel of science fiction film forever with Star Wars, director George Lucas created a dystopian film called THX-1138 (1971) which concerned a future, subterranean city where love was illegal, sex differences were minimized with shorn locks and unisex costumes, and the State monitored every citizen infraction through a religious-styled one-person “confessional.”  The State in THX-1138 was patrolled by unsympathetic robot policemen with chrome faces, so instead of countenancing a person when they needed help, those who required aid from the police could see only their face reflected back, a visual representation of the State’s fearsome power.   The film’s story told of one worker, THX-1138 (Robert Duvall), who went off his meds, fell in love, and sought to escape the rigid, emotionless society. He did so only when the State ran out of funding for the pursuit.

Shot in the San Francisco area in 1969, THX-1138 was shot in approximately three-dozen days. After a year of post-production, the film was complete, but distributor Warner Bros. was upset with the film and demanded changes, which necessitated a re-edit. When the film was finally released, it received mixed reviews and failed to make its money back.

Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange premiered in the United States in 1972 and it also featured a near-future dystopia, perhaps one existing after Russia had won the Cold War, given the Russian vibe of the film’s language, particularly its slang.

In this future world, crime was rampant, and gang members called “Droogs” ruled the night. Citizens lived in impersonal government housing “blocks” (like prison cell blocks), and tried to make ends meet.  A new right-wing government took over during the film’s action and attempted to reduce the crime rate with an experimental therapy technique, the Ludovico Treatment.  This “therapy” is tested on the film’s central character, an ultra-violent young man named Alex (Malcolm McDowell), and after submitting to it he becomes a model citizen.  But has Alex lost something crucial to man’s nature by being neutered in this fashion?  Unfortunately, the answer to such a philosophical question was largely lost because critics focused on A Clockwork Orange’s on-screen violence rather than its actual message.

Based on the Harry Harrison novel Make Room! Make Room! Soylent Green (1973) was about the dystopian society that had arisen in a world of famine, global warming, and overpopulation.  Here, police were poor and corrupt, women had only their bodies to ensure their survival, and were known as “furniture,” and the government was hiding a dark secret.  Food had run out, and the popular protein wafer Soylent Green was not made of plankton as had been assumed but rather the city’s corpses…dead humans.  The state also facilitated “production” of this food supply by operating, all hours of the day and night, a euthanasia facility where the old, infirm or merely hopeless could check in, watch a movie on the equivalent of an IMAX screen, and die peacefully following a lethal injection.

Soylent Green was the last film for Hollywood legend Edward G. Robinson, who died shortly after completing his role as Sol, a knowledgeable old man, or “Book,” who remembered how things used to be.  Charlton Heston starred in this “tech noir” as the detective who learned the State’s dark secret.

Another dystopian, polluted world was featured in Z.P.G.(1972). The film starred Geraldine Chaplin and Oliver Reed as a couple dwelling in a future world where child-bearing was illegal. Young would-be parents had to make due with life-like, animatronic “dolls” in the absence of real offspring.  The film not only exploited “the Uncanny Valley,” that feeling of revulsion humans feel when reckoning with an object that looks almost life-like, almost real, but anticipated some aspects of China’s “family planning policy” of the late 1970s.  Although primitively-rendered in terms of special effects, some of the scenes of the future metropolis forecast similar landscapes in Blade Runner (1982)

Zardoz (1974) was another critique of the leftist counter-culture, this time from British director John Boorman.  His film envisioned a world where “Eternals” could live forever in their futurist commune, but had lost their humanity and sex drive.

Sean Connery starred as a “Brutal” named Zed who brought sex and death back to the community, in that order. The film ended with the destruction of the Eternal Commune, and Zed taking a former Eternal, played by Charlotte Rampling, as his wife. In time-lapse photography, the final scene depicted their traditional lives as husband and wife, as they bore a child, grew old, and lived and died as nature had intended. Made for less than two-million dollars, the film was beautifully photographed by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, and dazzling in its presentation and themes.

Logan’s Run (1976), based on the 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson was an even bigger mainstream hit.  The movie took the famous counter-culture slogan “never trust anyone over thirty,” and brought it into a dystopian culture where the edict was the law.  “What Logan’s Run is about is a society that tries to exist without old people, and thereby loses its sense of continuity.  It takes wisdom to survive,” reported Nolan in a Filmfax article (April/June 2008, page 112) he penned.

In Logan’s Run, in the City of Domes of the 23rd Century, youth and hedonism reign, while a computer maintains the city’s population balance. Fascist law enforcement officials, Sandmen, enforce the rule of “Carousel,” a ritual of “Last Day.” Those who refuse to participate are called Runners, and are hunted down and shot.

Logan’s Run was filmed in 1975 in Hollywood, on a whopping nine sound stages, as well as in Fort Worth, Texas.  Some scenes were lensed inside a futuristic-looking shopping mall in the latter location, which provided the film some very original and timely visuals.  MGM was so enthusiastic about the film that almost immediately, a follow-up was under discussion. While working on the set on a 40-page treatment for a sequel to be titled Logan’s World, however, writer William Nolan learned that CBS had purchased the rights to the property as a TV series.

“My preference was to do three films and build the franchise,” Nolan informed me in an interview for Cinescape. “Nobody wanted to do a series. Not [producer] Saul, not me. Only CBS.”

The movie starred Michael York as Logan and Jenny Agutter as Jessica, and earned two Academy Award nominations, as well as a Saturn Award for best picture. The follow-up TV series (starring Gregory Harrison and Heather Menzies) lasted just one season, and was largely eclipsed by the release of Star Wars. A silver-screen remake has been announced for many years, but one has not yet been forthcoming.

The real star of Damnation Alley (1977): Dean Jeffries’ amazing “Landmaster.”

After the Fall: Post-Apocalyptic Movies

A post-apocalyptic film is one that “concentrates on survivors of a catastrophic event struggling to re-establish a livable society,” according to the definition by film scholar Charles P. Mitchell, in his monograph, A Guide to Apocalyptic Cinema (Greenwood Press, 2001, page xi).  It is also a film type which takes audiences “after the end,” and “shows the signs pre-figuring the end, the moment of obliteration, and aftermath,” according to author James Berger in After the End: Representations of Post Apocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 1999, page 6).

The Planet of the Apes sequels, notably Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1974) are also post-apocalyptic films, and fit into this sub-type of seventies science fiction film.  Both films pit culture against culture, ape against mutated remains of humans, and depict destroyed urban centers of a former, lost age.  The mutant culture of Battle develops over time to become the one seen in Beneath, which worships the atom bomb as its God, the civilization’s very creator.

Outside the successful Planet of the Apes franchise, other films tread into post-apocalyptic territory.  Roger Corman’s low budget Gas! (1970) was a comedy set in the immediate aftermath of an apocalypse, when everyone over the age of twenty-five was killed by the accidental release (by the military) of poison gas. Scattershot and trippy, the film underwent constant rewrites before, during, and after production. Director Corman later expressed that his film, originally filled with black humor, had been wrecked by interference from distributor American International Pictures, and that its tampering resulted in the film’s economic failure.  For one thing, AIP cut out all references and scenes in the film to an important character: God.

“They took every questionable or controversial point out of the picture,” Corman reported in Roger Corman Interviews (Constantine Nahr, University of Mississippi, 2011, page 77), “and that’s what the picture was all about. So it became an extremely innocuous and slightly meaningless picture.”

Another unusual low-budget post-apocalyptic film of the era was Jim McBride’s Glen and Randa (1971), which was saddled with an X-rating because of the nudity featured in the film’s first scene.  Shot for under 500,000 dollars by McBride, an underground filmmaker out of NYU, the film concerned the Adam and Eve of the post-apocalypse world, Glen and Randa, as they left their “garden” (a Howard Johnsons’ parking lot) and went out in search of a new Eden, the “Metropolis” that Glen had read about in superhero comic books.  The McBride film was loosely-structured, episodic, and enhanced by its unconventional approach to the material, a veritable post-apocalyptic slice of life that did not overtly push or preach a didactic message.

If Glen and Randa pushed the culture’s limits in terms of sex and nudity, the English picture No Blade of Grass (1970) did the same in terms of violence. In this film, a worldwide famine was killing off whole populations, and a group of survivors in Britain trekked across the countryside to reach what they hoped would be a promised land.  The film featured the (on-screen) rape of a suburban mother and her teenage daughter (Lynne Frederick of Phase IV [1974]), and also witnessed the “heroes” murdering other innocents for nothing more than a loaf of bread. Based on the 1956 John Christopher novel, The Death of Grass, the film was Cornel Wilde’s seventh as director, but got lost in the distributor shuffle, hardly promoted at all by MGM.

Also mostly forgotten is The Ultimate Warrior (1975), another film about famine and starvation in the post-apocalyptic world. In this case, Yul Brynner’s street fighter (and Kung-Fu expert) was tasked by Max Von Sydow’s Baron with saving the seeds of the future, both in terms of literal seeds, and his grand-daughter’s (Joanna Miles) baby.

The film’s evil gang leader, played by William Smith and the sense of anarchy outside of the sanctuary both forecasted the violent intensity of The Road Warrior (1982).

The Omega Man (1971), the second silver screen adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, starred Charlton Heston as the sole survivor of a biological virus, and pitted him against mutant albinos called “The Family,” referencing Charles Manson’s cult. Author Mark Gallagher wrote that The Omega Man proposes “militant masculinity as both the cause of and solution to international and local conflicts” (Action Figures: Men, Action Film and Contemporary Adventure Narratives, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006; page 104), but the film may actually best be understood as the origin story of a future society.  In the film’s much ridiculed ending, Heston adopts a crucifixion pose while his blood -- which can save the human race -- flows like a well-spring.  Thus, his Neville is the messiah of a future age, and this film represents the very story of how he died so that the human race could live again, freed from the virus and the sins of 20th century military-industrial complex.

Another post-apocalyptic film of the era was Damnation Alley (1977), based on the 1969 novel of the same name by Roger Zelazney. The literary work was, befitting its time, an anti-establishment one, with a man named “Hell Tanner” tasked by a totalitarian state with delivering a plague vaccine through difficult territory – “damnation alley” – many years after a catastrophic nuclear war.  The film instead made Air Force officers (played by Jan-Michael Vincent and George Peppard) the protagonists, and had them traversing the United States to reach Albany, a place where the recent nuclear war had not yet damaged the environment.   The film was shot in July of 1976 in the Mojave Desert, and the real star of the picture was not a man or woman, but a vehicle.  Specifically, Dean Jeffries designed and built the amazing “Landmaster” in ten weeks for $350,000.00.  The vehicle made such an impact on screen that in post-production 20th Century Fox allegedly demanded more shots of it in action.

Although intended for a summer release, post-production problems on Damnation Alley delayed its release for ten months. In its summer slot another science fiction film was distributed instead: Star Wars.  Damnation Alley, made for eight million dollars, didn’t premiere until October of 1977, and failed to make back its investment.

In 1978, Roger Corman produced Deathsport, a kind of unofficial follow-up to the dystopian Death Race 2000, but this time set in a post-apocalyptic world.  The film starred David Carradine as a mystical wasteland warrior called a “guide,” but like Damnation Alley before it, the film failed to find traction in the post-Star Wars milieu.

Julie Christie is about to conceive a child…with a computer as father in Demon Seed (1977).

Medical Malpractice: Science Goes Awry

Broadly defined, bioethics is the field of study brought about by innovation in medicine.  The term bioethics was coined in the 1970s, and came to include not just ethics within the medical profession, but global ethics about ecology, pollution, and other aspects of human and animal life.

In other words, bioethics is an umbrella term which ponders morality regarding such topics as abortion, animal rights, cloning, euthanasia, eugenics, medical malpractice, abuse of psychiatry and so forth.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, all those subjects were broached in the science fiction films of the disco decade.  Medical advances and ethics were a topic of concern in the culture for a number of reasons. The year 1973 saw the Supreme Court decide Roe v Wade, which made abortion legal nationwide.  And in 1974, the National Research Act was passed, which tasked government officials with identifying the basic principles of medical ethics.  The 1970s was also the decade of the first test tube baby (1978) and of new vaccines for chicken pox, rubella, pneumonia, and meningitis.

In terms of technology, the span from 1970–1979 also introduced CT scans, cochlear implants, and even soft contact lens.  And if science fiction films are visualizations of tomorrow’s world today, then the 1970s “medical malpractice” films concerned the bioethics of the present and the future as new technologies dawned, and new philosophies to govern them had to develop seemingly on the fly.

The one man most responsible for the bioethics science fiction films of the 1970s is the late Michael Crichton (1942 – 2008), who had been educated at Harvard Medical School and who, for a time, worked at Boston City Hospital.  Unusually, Crichton was also both a best-selling author of science fiction in the 1970s and a director of science fiction films.  On the former front, Crichton wrote The Andromeda Strain (which was adapted to film in 1971) and The Terminal Man (adapted in 1974).  The former film involved scientists working to identify and understand a deadly contagion from outer space.  The latter film was about a medical implant designed to prevent brain seizures and epilepsy, but which, in the end merely spurred more violence.

Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain took tremendous pains to explore the wide gulf between man and his machines as scientists sought to save the world from what looked like a new disease, the aforementioned alien organism.  Doctors had to determine the ethics of withholding information about themselves (such as a diagnosis of epilepsy) and weighing possibly catastrophic responses to the spread of Andromeda, including a nuclear detonation.

One character in the film, a single white man played by James Olson was also tasked with responsibility for the research facility itself.  If the Andromeda germ was released, he alone held the key to prevent a self-destruct mechanism from activating.  Because he was unmarried, it was presumed he would be more even-handed and rational than others about making a decision that could save or destroy many lives.

One reason The Andromeda Strain succeeded so ably was the fact that its story seemed based on reality. “Some scientists have even pursued the pertinent question of what might happen if such an organism survived a hitch-hike to Earth, took to its more-benign climate, and multiplied at a runaway rate,” director Wise told The Calgary Herald on August 2, 1971. “The Andromeda Strain has a statement to make about such matters and it makes it in a very positive way.”

In 1978, Crichton directed Coma, a film based on a best-seller by Robin Cook.  The film was set in a metropolitan Boston Hospital, like the one where Crichton himself had worked, and involved a young doctor, Susan Wheeler (Genevieve Bujold) learning of a conspiracy. Specifically, a cabal of wealthy doctors was initiating comas in healthy young patients so as to harvest and sell their organs on the black market.  Wheeler discovered the truth, and again the question raised was one of medical ethics.  In a brave new world of transplants, how was the organ supply to be procured? And what would the rich do to ensure their survival?  Would they be willing to exploit the very bodies of those less affluent than they?

This very notion was also explored in another film of the era, 1979’s Parts: The Clonus Horror. That film involved a “clone farm” where clones were raised in ignorance of their real purpose: to be living donors for the political and material elite of America.

Also outside Crichton’s considerable output in the decade but right in line with the subject matter was The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970), a British picture shot in 1969 that concerned a patient who had been asleep since birth, for thirty years, before being awakened as a grown man.

Unfortunately, John Soames (Terence Stamp) had no way to cope with suddenly awaking in a physically mature body, and his doctors didn’t seem to understand that their goal was not to make him a productive member of society, but merely to nurture and protect a lost soul.  Soames awoke into a world of learning and responsibility, but no love, and was nearly destroyed by that world in one of the most haunting films of the decade.

As mentioned in the dystopia sub-header, A Clockwork Orange also concerned a (state-sponsored) medical cure for violent behavior, one based on the premise of taking away the freedom to choose.  Was the Ludovico Treatment ethical?

Two weird SF films of the 1970s explored a less cerebral question. The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1971) and The Thing with Two Heads (1972) delved into the possibility of a surgery which added a second head on the body of an unwilling subject.  In the former film, a simpleton had the head of a serial killer grafted onto his neck.  In the second, a racist played by Ray Milland saw his cranium transplanted to the neck of an African-American convict played by Rosey Grier.  On the latter case, a relevant issue -- bigotry was broached, even if the filmmakers seemed more interested in showcasing car crashes than social problems.

Another movie, Embryo (1976) starring Rock Hudson, meanwhile, involved the frontiers of genetic science, and whether or not it was right to “speed” up a human’s physical development merely because growth-hormones made such acceleration possible. The film explored the issue of nature vs. nurture since a fully accelerated person, in this case played by Barbara Carrera never had the experience of being socialized.

Both The Boys from Brazil (1978) and Goldengirl (1979) concerned themselves with eugenics as well.  In The Boys from Brazil, Dr. Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck) attempted to usher in a Fourth Reich by creating ninety four identical Adolph Hitler clones.  And in Goldengirl a German scientist experimented on his daughter, Goldine (Susan Anton) to push forward human evolution and transform her into the perfect athlete.

As was the case in Embryo, The Boys from Brazil raised the nature vs. nurture debate. The film wondered whether a Hitler clone raised in another time could be an exact copy of his historical model, or, via a new social context, prove to be something different all-together. Goldengirl satirized the world of professional sports, the idolization of athletes, and the win-at-all-costs mentality, which might prove physically harmful in the long run, but win contests in the short run.

Demon Seed (1977), based on another best-seller, this one from Dean Koontz, explored a super-computer’s attempts to mate with a human female, played by Julie Christie, and the ethics behind his capture and rape of the woman.  The computer in the film, named Proteus (and voiced by Robert Vaughn) was insightful enough to realize that man could not survive the rape of the Earth (via under-sea mining that he refused to condone), but not enough to recognize his deliberate violation of a sentient, independent being.  The film deliberately explored a woman’s right to choose how her body was to be used.

Two of David Cronenberg’s science fiction films of the 1970s dealt with bioethics.  Shivers (1976) concerned a man-made, sexually transmitted parasite, while The Brood (1979) focused on the mind-body connection, and the idea of psychiatric therapy physically manifesting a patient’s emotional “rage.”

Box, the out-of-control robot servant of the City of the Domes, from Logan’s Run (1976).

Rise of the Machines: Super-Computers and Rampaging Robots

The science fiction films of the 1970s saw a dramatic uptick in technophobia, or what Isaac Asimov called The Frankenstein Complex, a fear of artificial men.

Inspired in part, perhaps by the HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1970s filmmakers imagined a terrifying future in which robots and computers revolted against their biological masters. Perhaps the fear of the machine came about during this span because of increased automation in factories, the office and even in the home in the 1970s. Automation, while notable for increasing productivity and efficiency also has a way, historically-speaking, of costing blue collar workers their jobs.  Machines can work faster, for longer hours, and for no salaries, bonuses or pension.

Or perhaps the fear of robots emerged in the 1970s simply because Americans, in difficult economic times, perceived their increasing dependence on social programs.  And robots, as tools, only offered another form of dependence.

Whatever the cause super-computers and evil robots proliferated in the 1970s.  In the case of the former, the decade opened with a film called Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) which showcased a computer taking over all America’s defense and military apparatus. Once the machine did so, he became the most powerful being in all of human history, and used this power to enforce peace -- or a computer’s version of peace -- on a frightened world.  What remains ironic about Colossus is the fact that, in taking over the world and enforcing peace, he was actually fulfilling the programming mankind had given him.

Another super-computer, Duel, possessed the ability to create an evolved superman in The Final Programme (1973), thus ending the Dark Ages and opening up a new era in human history.  In this case, however, the machine created a monster, a Humphrey Bogart-imitating Neanderthal comedian who thought the planet looked “tasty.”

In Logan’s Run, Logan and Jessica encountered Box, a mad servant of the City of Domes who had transitioned from freezing and storing food for the city’s denizens to capturing and killing Runners.

Demon Seed (1977), meanwhile, gave the world Proteus, a computer who wanted to mate with a human so he could become immortal.

Two additional super-computers finished off the decade.  Alien (1979) featured “Mother,” a computer that hid vital facts from the human crew, and was a tool of her corporate masters at Weyland-Yutani.  And Star Trek: The Motion Picture highlighted V’Ger, the ultimate in machine intelligence.

Once merely a NASA space probe, V’ger (or Voyager 6) had during its space journey fallen into the sphere of an A.I. planet.  The intelligent machines there rebuilt V’ger as a living machine and sent it back to Earth with the capability to destroy the entire planet.  But V’ger, much like Proteus or Colossus, couldn’t be said to be completely evil.  Like Proteus, it wanted only to evolve, to continue in some form, and thus needed to join with a human to help it believe in the possibility of an afterlife.

Westworld (1973) and its sequel Futureworld (1976) concerned robots at an amusement park called Delos that begin to operate independently, and became increasingly aware of the concept of servitude.  The android gunslinger, played by Yul Brynner, was a relentless foe that had tired, perhaps, of playing second fiddle to humans, and one day decided to make a change. In many ways, this seemingly-unkillable robot seems like an early version of The Terminator (1984).

Star Wars changed the direction of robots in the 1970s science fiction cinema.  After that film depicted kindly droids R2-D2 and C3PO, the evil super-computers and rampaging robots were largely replaced by cute sidekicks such as V.I.N.Cent in The Black Hole (1979) and Twiki in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

It’s Not Nice to Fool with Mother Nature: Pollution, Over-Population and Payback in the 1970s

A famous TV commercial from the early 1970s depicted an adult Native-American male paddling his canoe through the polluted waters of modern America. As he arrived ashore, the Indian spotted garbage strewn on the land.  As he reckoned with a modern highway, teaming with cars, he also saw drivers thoughtlessly throwing litter onto the side of the road. He then turned to the camera, as if accusing the audience and a single tear ran down his cheek.

A generation of children has never forgotten the searing imagery of that anti-pollution advertisement, and its idea of garbage or pollution turning a natural paradise into a nightmare.  The 1970s was also the decade that America’s green movement, commenced, and the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) was established.

Pollution wasn’t the only concern of the era, either. In 1968, a Stanford professor’s book, The Population Bomb became a national best-seller and warned about a future of environmental disasters caused by man’s proliferation on the Earth, including famine and population die-offs.  Paul Ehrlich’s book predicted the end of humanity as we know it as early as the 1970s and 1980s.

Accordingly, the science fiction films of the 1970s concerned themselves both with pollution and over-population, and Earth’s response to man’s unwise “growth” in the decade.

No Blade of Grass suggested that nature would rebel against man’s spoiling of the environment by unleashing a deadly plague of sterility, one that would kill every wheat-based crop in the world and lead to the extinction of livestock and eventually man himself.  Soylent Green (1973) charted a not-very different future. There, man’s industrial age led to rampant pollution, global warming, and finally a catastrophic food shortage.  Set in a similar world, Z.P.G (1972) depicted world governments forbidding new births for a period of thirty years to help stem overpopulation and pollution.

In 1972, Douglas Trumball’s Silent Running (1972) pictured a future in which the Earth had been entirely de-forested, and orbiting spaceships sheltered the last trees in existence.  One day, the horrible order came to destroy the forests because maintaining them was too expensive, but one man, Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) refused to heed the call to destroy that which nature had created.

A slew of 1970s films specifically involved monsters created by man’s treatment of Mother Nature. In Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1972), a sulfuric-acid spewing monster was born out of rivers of sewage to combat the world. Born from filth, it also fed on filth, and one spiky image in the movie showed the “smog monster,” Hedorah, sucking toxic fumes right out of a factory smoke-stack.

Doomwatch, a 1972 film not released in America until 1976 (though based on a 1970 British TV series…), concerned a toxic spill that mutated and turned violent the inhabitants of a quaint rural island in Great Britain.

The insect world also rebelled against man in several cases. Phase IV (1974) revealed ants developing a new form of intelligence and beginning their takeover of the world.  Bug (1975) involved a new breed of insect, possibly belched out from the bowels of Hell, to punish man for his sinning ways, and Empire of the Ants (1977) centered on a radioactive spill that turned ants gigantic, and organized.  These ants could brainwash humans, and bend them to their iron will.  Arachnids also got into the act in Kingdom of the Spiders, a film starring William Shatner which revealed how overuse of pesticide had upset the food chain and turned normal spiders into aggressive pack hunters.

Rats and other creatures also grew to enormous size in Food of the Gods (1976), a Bert I. Gordon film which saw a new, natural; “growth” substance fountain up from Mother Earth to subvert humanity’s role as dominant life-form.

The warning set forth in all these films was explicit and direct: mankind could influence the shape of life on Earth, and if his influence was negative or disruptive, Mother Nature would strike back with a vengeance, making the Earth unlivable for him.

Not the surface of Mars, but an incredible simulation. The movie-making of a hoax and conspiracy is seen in Capricorn One(1978).

Conspiracy and Cover-up

From mid-July 1972 to mid-August 1974, America lived with a cover-up and conspiracy that went to the very top of the country’s leadership, to the presidency itself.  The Watergate Scandal divided the country, took down a President who had been re-elected in a landslide, and seems to have forever destroyed America’s faith in its own leaders. Every ensuing scandal in American history, whether Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky, Valerie Plame, or Benghazi, has been described, often in hyperbolic terms, as being “as bad as Watergate,” though few actually fit the bill.

The 1970s science fiction cinema, which traded on concepts of untrustworthy States or governments in many dystopian films, also featured “conspiracy”-styled stories, especially in the latter-part of the decade.  The good news, however, is that where there was a conspiracy and cover-up, there was also often a dedicated reporter or cameraman bent on discovering the truth, and exposing it to the American people. Invariably, this reporter was based on Watergate’s Washington Post crusaders, Woodward and Bernstein.

Capricorn One (1978), a film from Lord Lew Grade in England, explicitly involved a conspiracy inside the U.S. Government, inside NASA to be precise. The film involved a faked landing on Mars, and the effort to kill the astronauts (James Brolin, O.J. Simpson and Sam Waterston) before the truth could leak to the public. Investigating the hoax was a reporter played by Elliott Gould.

Incredibly, officials at NASA reportedly cooperated with the filmmakers on the five million dollar film, despite the negative portrayal of their agency and its leader (Hal Holbrook) in the drama.  The film proved a huge hit in 1978, and many historians actually see the film as being one of the key instigators of the continuing “moon landing hoax” conspiracy theory.

The remade Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) also posited a strange conspiracy and cover-up in San Francisco: an alien plan to replace human beings with emotionless pods.  The conspiracy highlighted in this film from director Philip Kaufman uses government resources and garbage men (rather than Watergate’s plumbers) to get the dirty work done, foul-up lab results, and foster the invasion from every possible angle.  The film assiduously builds an atmosphere of dread and paranoia, the fear that everyone knows a secret that you don’t.  In terms of its relationship to Watergate, there’s a moment in the film that suggests the hero’s (Donald Sutherland) phone is being bugged by the pod people.  The film also works on the basis that rationally-speaking, a conspiracy like the one depicted in the film shouldn’t be possible, and is therefore a figment of overactive imagination.

One of these men is in on a conspiracy. From left to right: Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), Bennell (Donald Sutherland) and Jack (Jeff Goldblum) in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).

In a clever bit of casting, Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek’s emotionless but loyal voice of logic and reason, plays one of the subversive pod people.  Because of our extensive familiarity with Nimoy as Spock, we are conditioned to accept his explanations for the cover-up, when in fact he’s an enemy.  The Invasion of the Body Snatchers proved a gigantic hit, and two further editions of the mythos have followed in its franchise, 1994’s Body Snatchers, and 2007’s The Invasion, starring Nicole Kidman.

Coma, as mentioned earlier, involves a conspiracy and cover-up regarding a black market organ harvesting project.  Here, the wealthy doctors at a Boston hospital are the conspirators.  And in The Boys from Brazil, a neo-Nazi conspiracy plots to create 94 Hitler clones, mimicking not just the Fuhrer’s genetic make-up, but his upbringing or “nurture” as well.

The China Syndrome (1979) from writer/director James Bridges concerned a partial nuclear meltdown at a nuclear reactor in California, and the ensuing conspiracy to keep it quiet engineered by corporate executives who didn’t want their stocks to fall, and didn’t want to lose a contract to build another reactor.

Spearheading the effort to get the public the truth was Jane Fonda as a newspaper reporter, and Jack Lemmon as a whistleblower.  Budgeted at almost six million dollars, the impressive film grossed roughly ten times that amount, and premiered only shortly before the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, a grotesque example of life following art much too closely.

The China Syndrome won multiple Academy Award nominations, for Lemmon, Fonda, and Best Screenplay Written for the Screen.  Like all good conspiracy films, The China Syndrome also scared the hell out of its audience for its all-too-possible narrative about flaws at privately-run nuclear plants.

The fearsome Klingon battle-cruiser of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

The Space Race

The big turning point in 1970s science fiction cinema came unexpectedly on May 25, 1977.  With little fanfare or hype, a new film from former USC student George Lucas (THX-1138 [1971], American Graffiti [1973]) called Star Wars premiered in a measly 32 theaters nationwide…and soon broke every box office record in cinematic history.

The film concerned a “galaxy far, far, away” and a farm boy, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) who joined the galactic resistance against an “Evil Empire” and its deadly battle against the Death Star.  Along the way to a final battle with that orbiting super weapon, Skywalker met colorful aliens galore, piloted fantastic spaceships, palled around with cute robots called “droids,” rescued a perky princess (Carrie Fisher), and learned the ways of an ancient order of regal knights called The Jedi.  The film was the perfect space age fairy tale, and a perfect escape from mid-decade’s doldrums. It was a call-back to an earlier age in Hollywood history, and a different kind of entertainment, and that was the point.  “I wanted to make a kid’s film that…introduces a kind of basic morality,” Lucas was reported to have said (according to Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls), “Everybody’s forgetting to tell the kids, ‘Hey, this is right and this is wrong.’”

Made in 1976 in Tunisia and London for just eleven million dollars, 20th Century Fox’s Star Wars quickly became the highest grossing film of all time (displacing Jaws). It grossed 460 million dollars in the United States alone. The entire country went Star Wars crazy, and lines to see the film stretched for blocks. Many kids saw the movie three times, just in one day.  And soon, the droids, Chewbacca, and other aliens were everywhere, even making TV appearances on popular programs such as ABC’s variety show, Donnie and Marie (1976 – 1979). When toys from the film were released by Kenner, they flew off the shelves, and a new age of “action figures” had begun.

This happy ending must have been a relief for Lucas, who has often reported the making of Star Wars as an exhausting and difficult process.  Specifically, it took over two years to perfect the screenplay, and during shooting Lucas grappled with his British director of photography, Gil Taylor, over his preferred “informal” shooting style.  In post-production, he also had trouble with his first editor over the final cut of the film. And finally, Lucas even had to create his own special effects company in 1975, Industrial Light and Magic (or ILM) when he learned that 20th Century Fox had shuttered its SPFX division.

At ILM, John Dykstra spearheaded the special effects for the movie, an effort which earned him his first Academy Award.  Much of Star Wars’ stirring space action was the result of new motion-control techniques which permitted for control of camera movement, an important factor when compositing multiple elements in a single scene.  “Raw enthusiasm was the fuel,” that drove Dykstra while creating Star Wars’ visual effects, he told The Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Louie Camino (May 13, 2002, page A28).  In the same interview, Dykstra added that he remembered the film for “friends working together in selfless collaboration, ignorance of the impossible task before us, and one king-size run of luck.”

If the space battles, “used” universe-look and bright flashy lasers of Star Wars were unforgettable, the film also introduced the world to a gaggle of new alien life-forms, from the Bigfoot-like Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) the “wookiee,” to the diabolical cyborg Darth Vader (David Prowse). One of the most popular scenes in the film was set in a cantina on Tatooine, a watering hole where alien life forms gathered by the dozen.  The

One of the strange aliens of Star Wars (1977).

alien designs in the film were created by Stuart Freeborn (1914 – 2013) and Rick Baker.  The overall effect of this single scene was stunning because most movies centered their narratives on a single alien.  Star Wars featured hundreds, and furthermore, utilized them as a sort of “throwaway” detail on the edges and in the backgrounds of frames. Thus the reality of the Star Wars universe was incredibly enhanced.

Star Wars proved a game changer at the box office, but also a game-changer in the culture, because it eschewed the dark anti-heroes of the era and characters such as Dirty Harry.  A film of great innocence and yet great, knowing humor, Star Wars revealed that the audience for outer space adventure was huge.  Accordingly, the franchise has existed in one form or another ever since 1977.

John Dykstra, special effects guru of the 1970s, stands by the miniature of the Galactica from Battlestar Galactica (1979).

After Star Wars, the “outer space race” at the box office began in earnest, with filmmakers racing to be the first to cash-in on the film’s success. Japan’s Toho and Toei Studios were among the first out of the gate, with the efforts like War in Space (1977) and Message from Space (1978), respectively.  Meanwhile, Italy offered Lewis Coates’ Starcrash (1979), and Canada released the space adventure The Shape of Things to Come (1979).  The latter was loosely -- as in hardly at all -- based on a work by H.G. Wells.

In America, Glen A. Larson re-purposed his TV space opera Battlestar Galactica (1978 – 1979), another initiative featuring special effects from John Dykstra as a theatrical film (in Sensurround).

The film concerned the in-vogue Von Daniken Chariot of the Gods theory regarding “ancient astronauts,” and postulated “brothers of man” existing out in the universe, challenging a sinister robotic race known as the Cylons.  The movie version of the adventure featured a different ending for the TV series villain, Baltar, played by John Colicos. On television, Baltar was spared execution by the Cylon Imperious Leader so that he might track down the film’s heroes, the human Colonials.  But in the film, Baltar’s neck met the tip of a Centurion’s sword.

Meanwhile, George Lucas and 20th Century Fox sued Battlestar Galactica for the similarities they perceived to the popular film.  This suit came in spite of Lucas’s comment (recorded for posterity on the Star Wars laserdisc jacket “Behind the Scenes” section) that he made Star Wars “so everyone will copy it. Then I can go see the copies, and sit back and enjoy them.”  When it all shook out, however, Star Wars ultimately lost the case.  The judge hearing the argument declared in his decision that the “two films were very different when viewed as a whole.” (“Galactica wins the War,” Starlog #41, December 1980, page 10).

Beyond Battlestar Galactica, Glen A. Larson also produced Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, an update of the famous 1930s space hero.  Although made by Universal Studios for television consumption, the pilot film ran in theaters, nabbed strong critical notices, and grossed an astonishing twenty million dollars during its theatrical run.

One infamous scene in the film showcased Buck (Gil Gerard) doing a disco dance, or “boogie” with a gorgeous alien princess, Ardala (Pamela Hensley) while his robot sidekick Twiki (voiced by Mel Blanc) decided to “get down” nearby. This moment felt sacrilegious to fans of the space hero, but to modern audiences weaned on Roger Moore’s James Bond of the 1970s, the Larson film was a thrilling roller-coaster ride. After Buck Rogers’ theatrical release, the TV series ran for two seasons and three dozen hour-long episodes on NBC.  It received only middling ratings before a second season format change and eventual cancellation.

The evil Maximillian of The Black Hole (1979).

Soon, Walt Disney Studios also entered the Star Wars sweepstakes, in the process releasing its first ever PG rated motion picture: The Black Hole (1979). This adventure film set in deep space starred Yvette Mimieux, Robert Forster, Maximillian Schell, Anthony Perkins and Ernest Borgnine, and played very much like a futuristic adaptation of Jules Verne’s literary masterpiece, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, albeit with some new, ghoulish touches.

Director Gary Nelson delivered the picture after a grueling twenty-two week shoot, and for seventeen million dollars. Legendary effects artist Peter Ellenshaw (1913 – 2007) forged The Black Hole’s remarkable “haunted house in space,” the imposing U.S.S. Cygnus, as well as its Gothic-looking evil robots.  “This will look unlike anything any of the other studios manufactured,” Ellenshaw promised in an interview for the periodical Horizon (September 1979, page 62), and he was accurate in his forecast.

The Black Hole’s controversial ending, meanwhile, involved a trippy journey into the event horizon and beyond, and the strange visions there of Heaven and Hell, hardly the kid’s stuff Disney fans were used to.

The Black Hole premiered December 21, 1979, just weeks after Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and failed at the box office. Despite this fact, a remake has been announced for 2014 or 2015.  Like Star Wars and other “space” films of 1979, The Black Hole was heavily merchandised, including a line of action figures from Mego.

Virtually every single one of these “space race” films, in the tradition of Star Wars, features cute robots, giant spaceships, and plenty of whizz-bang action.  Even James Bond got into the sci-fi act with Moonraker (1979), a film that saw the durable secret agent (played by Roger Moore) battling villains in orbit aboard a secret space station.

Another important science fiction film of 1977 although technically not a space adventure, also thrilled audiences and furthered America’s fascination with all things related to aliens. Director Steven Spielberg, who had directed the blockbuster Jaws (1975) presented Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film about mankind’s first contact with non-human intelligence. The production shot in California, Alabama, Wyoming and Khalapur, near Mumbai.  It starred Richard Dreyfuss as an over-stressed middle class American driven to distraction and perhaps insanity by a “close encounter” with an alien flying saucer.  The film dealt with many trends of the decade, from an interest in the Bermuda Triangle to alien abduction.

The twenty million dollar film was advertised with the tag line “we are not alone,” and possessed a unique narrative structure that seemed to mimic the nature of the 1970s.  The first half of the picture was almost a horror story, replete with alien abductions and conspiracy overtones, while the latter half of Close Encounters, particular the astonishing, climactic set-piece set at Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower, was a special effects extravaganza depicting the optimistic first meeting of man and extra-terrestrial.

This remarkable valedictory sequence spotlighted a gigantic alien “mother-ship” which many film critics compared to a fully-lit chandelier.  The incredible visual effects were directed by Douglas Trumball, of Silent Running (1972) fame, and the spindly, dome-headed aliens were created and built by Carlo Rambaldi.

Close Encounters proved almost as popular as Star Wars, and grossed nearly 350 million dollars at the American box office. Once more, science fiction proved to be big business.  In 1982, Spielberg returned to the SF format with E.T., a film that out-grossed both Close Encounters and Star Wars.

The alien “space chandelier” of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters (1977).

By the time of Star Wars’ phenomenal success, a return of the popular Star Trek (1966 – 1969) TV series had long been in the works. In fact, much effort had already been expended building the sets for a TV series called Star Trek: Phase II, which would have aired on a new Paramount Network.

When Star Wars proved a blockbuster, however, the decision was made to make a film instead and scrap the idea of Trek as a network flagship.  Robert Wise, the director of The Andromeda Strain (1971) was hired to helm the picture.  His first task was to make certain that Leonard Nimoy, who played the half-Vulcan, pointy-eared Mr. Spock, would return to the fold.  Nimoy, who had opted out of Phase II, agreed, and the movie reunited Nimoy with fellow cast-mates William Shatner, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, George Takei, Grace Lee Whitney, and Majel Barrett.

Since a full decade had elapsed since the original series, and the film’s budget ultimately topped forty million dollars, the decision was made to update costumes, sets, and even spaceship designs, all while remaining faithful in spirit to what had been seen on NBC years earlier. The U.S.S. Enterprise itself received a dramatic and beautiful upgrade in the form of a large-scale miniature that reportedly cost one-hundred thousand dollars.  Series creator and movie producer Gene Roddenberry was very happy to revisit the details of the beloved starship, and to visualize it with the scale he had always intended.  “For the first time ever, we’ll give an idea of the size and complexity of this craft,” he told Science Digest (December 1979, page 70).

Designer Andrew Probert was tasked with upgrading and refurbishing the great Starfleet vessel, an act which consisted of  “…rounding out some of the corners, smoothing it out and making it more streamlined….We also designed thrusters located around the saucer and the engineering hull and the two operate independently,” the designer told interviewers. J. Blake Mitchell and James Ferguson (Fantastic Films: “An Exclusive Interview with Andrew Probert, November 1980, page 18). Probert also designed a space station seen in Earth orbit in the early portion of the film, and the sinister-looking upgrade for the Klingon Empire’s K’tinga class battle cruisers, depicted in the film’s show-stopping opening sequence.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) premiered on December 7th, 1979, and divided fans and critics.  Long-time Star Trek fans and writers complained that the narrative, which concerned an incredibly powerful space probe returning to Earth in search of its creator, rehashed popular Trek episodes such as “The Changeling” and “The Doomsday Machine.”  Others, however, were enthralled with the film, and the fact that Star Trek universe looked more believable and realistic than ever before.  Similarly, many critics acknowledged that Roddenberry might have made a Star Wars knock-off and nobody would have blamed him, but instead told a humanistic story about man’s relationships with his machines, and the primacy of “human emotion” in any being’s psychological gestalt.  Despite reservations of critics and fans, the film proved a colossal hit at the box office, and paved the way for a movie franchise that continues in 2013 and beyond.

One other “space race” film of the 1970s was Ridley Scott’s Alien, which concerned a sort of space “tug-boat,” the Nostromo, launching an impromptu rescue mission on a planet at the edge of the galaxy in response to a mysterious distress call.  The “truck drivers in space,” blue-collar crew discovered a hostile alien on the surface, and inadvertently brought the shape-shifter back to the stars with them.  The film made a star of Sigourney Weaver, who played the action hero, Ripley.

The visual effects for Alien were crafted by Brian Johnson, director of special effects on Gerry Anderson’s Space: 1999 (1975 – 1977), a popular genre TV series of the decade.   Johnson reported in an interview with this author that he became involved with Alien “in the really early stages,” and was contacted by Fox’s Peter Beale “to supply all the special visual/model effects.” He took the majority of his Space: 1999 effects crew with him to work on the film, and recalls his effects budget as close to 2 million dollars for “all the effects,” but that the budget jumped once Scott came aboard.  Johnson further describes Scott as “very much a hands-on director, and very rewarding to work for. His enthusiasm rubbed off on everyone, especially as the main unit dailies started.  The script was the most exciting I had ever read.  You could see the drama unfold page-by-page. Ridley took the whole project and added an extra dimension.”

Johnson also reports that he visualized the realm of space differently in Alien than he had for TV’s 1999.  “In Alien, space was infinite, lonely and terrifying. The whole idea, in terms of

Sigourney Weaver plays Alien’s (1979) hero and “final girl,” Ripley

special effects, was to emphasize the depth and isolation. Our effects shots merely put the interior main action zillions of miles from hope.”

Johnson was responsible for building the Nostromo, based on the conceptual sketches of Ron Cobb, and Scott’s modifications.  “While we dressed the exterior, Ridley demanded more of everything,” Johnson remembers. “Nostromo grew accordingly, in dimension, but also in weight. It was moved with a fork-lift truck.  The antennae were one of Ridley’s favorite bits. He just kept adding them to it.”

Johnson also had the opportunity to meet and get to know H.R. Giger, the artist whose bio-mechanoid designs were responsible for the strange, unsettling look of the alien.  “He and his lady were always around, and he was a really nice guy,” Johnson says. “He played a mean jazz piano and loved red wine. His first wife’s bones were nailed up on his living room’s beamed ceiling.  It puts a new slant on ‘living’ room, doesn’t it?”

Alien became notorious for one scene, the “chest-burster” sequence which, as its name suggests, saw astronaut Kane (John Hurt) “deliver” an alien baby in a busy common area aboard the Nostromo.

Audiences responded strongly to that scene and the film in general, and like many other films of the space race type, Alien begat many sequels, cross-overs, and even a prequel in 2012.

Bowen Tyler (Douglas McClure; rear) battles a prehistoric beast in the The Land That Time Forgot (1975), one of the 1970s' "lost worldsof fantasy" movies.

Lost Worlds of Fantasy

The fantasy films of the 1970s largely fall into one category: “lost world” adventures.  A lost world might be defined as an eco-system or environment geographically (or even temporally) removed or isolated from mainstream civilization, and thus a representation of another age or another belief system.  Often, but not always, the lost worlds of the disco decade feature some prehistoric component and even giant, now-extinct creatures, either dinosaurs, or beasts resembling dinosaurs.  In the course of the lost world films, some force from modernity (usually the early 20th century) ends up re-discovering the land, and facing its out-of-time dangers.

One early lost world fantasy of the 1970s was The Island at the Top of the World, a Walt Disney movie that saw a rich aristocrat played by Donald Sinden search for his son in the Arctic, using an advanced dirigible prototype, the Hyperion, to conduct the quest.  Based on the novel by Ian Cameron (a pseudonym for Donald Gordon Payne) with a screenplay written by Joss Whedon’s grandfather, John, the story is set in 1907 and contrasts the new age of modernity with a “lost world,” an ancient Viking community called Astragard.  Oddly, the film also starred a news-caster, David Hartman as its lead character.  Like many “lost world” fantasies of the epoch, The Island at the Top of the World ends with at least one modern man remaining behind in the out-of-time realm.

Two 1970s film franchises also traded on the concept of the lost world.  The first was the continuing Ray Harryhausen Captain Sinbad saga, which had begun in 1958 with the beloved The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, but which picked up again in 1974 and 1977, respectively.  Hailing from the world of the Middle East, and Baghdad, Sinbad is a famous and dashing sea captain. The cinematic Sinbad stories tell of his dangerous quests to combat evil sorcerers and their wicked curses.  Both The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger send Sinbad to mythological lands, Lemuria and Hyporborea, to complete such heroic missions.  Along the way, evil magicians place obstacles in his path, including living statues, and giant insects.  Sometimes, Sinbad also encounters survivors of an earlier geological age, like Eye of the Tiger’s friendly troglodyte or fierce saber-toothed tiger.

In all cases, throughout the Sinbad saga, the dynamic monsters (or obstacles, as it were…) are presented via the auspices of Ray Harryhausen’s meticulous stop-motion animation, a special effects approach that fell out of favor in the early 1980s, and today has been entirely replaced with CGI or computer-generated imagery.

The second franchise that adopted the “lost world” template arose from Amicus Studios in Great Britain, and focused on adapting to the screen the beloved literary fantasies of Edgar Rice Burroughs. From 1975 to 1977, three films were produced in the Burroughs cycle starring Doug McClure, with the first and last, The Land That Time Forgot and The People That Time Forgot set in the always-evolving lost world of Caprona, and the second film, At the Earth’s Core (1976) set in subterranean Pellucidar.

In this franchise, puppets and men in suits were deployed to represent monsters rather than stop-motion animation, much to the chagrin of many monster movie fans.  All three films were directed by former editor, Kevin Connor. In an interview with this author, he notes that the productions “were always set on the “puppet” concept, but the idea of shooting on Vista-vision plates for rear projection was fairly new…so the approach was a combination of live action and hand-puppets.”

The Land That Time Forgot (1975) was the first and best of the three films, and it shot largely on H. Stage at Shepperton Studios.  The film’s bookend scenes were shot on location, at the Island of Skye, with an aerial cameraman capturing the images of a lost world “survivor,” Bowen Tyler (McClure) hurling a letter in a bottle (or canister) into the sea in hopes that someone would learn of his story.  The Land That Time Forgot also reflected the real life political context of 1970s Détente -- an age of cooperation between East and West. The film focused on British and Americans working together with the crew of a German submarine in World War I so as to survive life on the prehistoric Caprona.

The second Amicus adaptation, At The Earth’s Core featured a script that Connor acknowledges “wasn’t the greatest” and eschewed location work all together.  Instead, the filmmakers created an impressive colorful lost world in the studio.  “With the D.P. Alan Hume, we devised a color scheme for Pellucidar, which was a mauve-orange backdrop. Most of the film was on one huge stage at Pinewood and therefore the color was very controllable.  I think the budgets had risen to 1.2 million at this point,” notes Connor.

It was also during this second film in the cycle that monster suits were added to the special effects mix, along with the aforementioned puppets and rear projection. “With the production designer Maurice Carter, we decided to try and put humans into our monster suits. This worked well for some of them, and not so well for others,” Connor recalls. “The Mahars,” the film’s monstrous villains “were stuntmen in suits suspended by wires, and we were limited as to their trajectory.” He further reports. “I think these were the most successful creatures in the picture, especially with the soundtrack that was created by the brilliant Jim Atkinson.”

The third film in the Edgar Rice Burroughs cycle, The People That Time Forgot was shot on the Canary Islands but nonetheless featured a less epic tale than its predecessors. “Economics really guided the story to a less fanciful adventure,” Connor notes. Still, one of the film’s undeniable visual highlights involves a stegosaurus being recruited as a living winch to move a downed airplane, the only means of escape from Caprona. “We had a wonderful special effects crew under the aegis of George Gibbs, and with a combination of tow ropes, a full-size plane, and stegosaurus tail, we managed to pull this off on location,” notes the director.  “We never had big bucks to make these movies. There was always an element of inventiveness. Action sequences were worked out in detail and storyboarded in advance, so there were few hiccups.”

Although Connor eventually directed a fourth “lost world” movie in the 1970s starring Doug McClure called Warlords of Atlantis, The People That Time Forgot did not meet with the same financial success as the earlier Burroughs entries, and was largely eclipsed at the box office by the release of Star Wars the same summer.

“Our distributors didn’t want to spend any large amounts promoting the film, and neither did the backers want to go into huge-budget pictures,” Connor reports. “They said there was no money in kids’ films. How wrong they were…”

Dwan (Jessica Lange) gets a bath, courtesy of a giant ape, in King Kong (1976).

Perhaps the biggest-budgeted lost world fantasy of the 1970s was the remake of the 1933 giant gorilla picture, King Kong (1976). This “energy crisis” era update of the story found the Petrox Explorer hunting oil in the South Pacific and discovering Kong’s island, which had remained hidden behind a fog bank for decades. Once the island was reached, the crew hoped for a gusher, but found Kong instead who -- like the monsters of At The Earth’s Core -- was depicted using a man (Rick Baker) in a suit. An animatronic fifty-foot tall robot was also built by Carlo Rambaldi, but the elaborate machine failed to look convincing or real on screen and can be seen in the finished, three-hour film only in a few brief shots.

As the robot behind-the-scenes story indicates, no expense was spared to make King Kong’s return to the silver screen a momentous occasion and even the Skull Island wall which kept the mighty king of the jungle at bay cost a whopping million dollars to construct, standing nearly fifty feet high and five-hundred feet long.

The arrival of the new King Kong for Christmas 1976 was feted in Time Magazine in a cover story called “Here Comes King Kong.”  The article went behind-the-scenes of the film’s production to interview producer De Laurentiis and ingénue Jessica Lange. The piece complimented the new Kong, essentially, as being “good trash.”  The same piece offered the priceless and absolutely accurate description of the 1933 Kong fans as a “testy, loyal” cult.

Meanwhile, the film was accompanied by a merchandising blitz.  The Mego toy company participated in what became known as Kong Mania with the manufacture and release of Plush King Kong stuffed animals, a King Kong Bop Bag (or punching bag), and a model kit of “Kong’s Last Stand” at the top of the Twin Towers in Manhattan. Meanwhile, Topps released an impressive set of King Kong trading cards and stickers. There were 55 cards and 11 stickers in the entire set, and the cards could be gathered together and assembled as a puzzle.  King Seeley released a Kong themed lunchbox with thermos and Colorforms also got into the act by releasing a Kong playset. The weirdest movie tie-in, however, might have been the “King Kong” cocktail from Jim Beam.  This blitz was all important because Kong, in many ways, was a test case for movie/toy synergy, as Star Wars was to prove a year later.

The superhero movie Doc Savage (1975) also featured a last act in a “lost world” of fantasy, this time a valley in the southern hemisphere where molten gold just bubbled up out of the Earth. Instead of preserving this natural resource, the film’s hero, Savage (Ron Ely) decided he would use it up for his own evil-fighting missions.

Any discussion of the lost worlds of the 1970s cinema would not be complete without a mention of independent animator Ralph Bakshi, who directed two animated fantasies during the decade, Wizards (1977) and the first big-screen adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1978).

The earlier film, Wizards, is set in a distant, post-nuclear future where magic has replaced science, and has been described by Bakshi as a metaphor for the Holocaust and the subsequent founding of the Israeli state, per interviewer James Delson (Fantastic Films, February 1979, page 48).

Lord of the Rings, Meanwhile, is set in the “lost world” of Middle Earth, and involves the quest by a fellowship of heroes to destroy a dangerous ring sought by the forces of darkness.  Impressively, the animated film includes all the material from Fellowship of the Rings, and the first half of The Two Towers.  A Tolkien fan since 1956, Bakshi acquired the rights to adapt the literary work from Saul Zaentz after director John Boorman’s efforts failed.  Bakshi’s film features renowned English voice actors, including Anthony Daniels (C3PO) as Legolas and John Hurt (Alien) as Aragorn.

Although so many aspects of the animated epic are impressively wrought, the use of the controversial rotoscoping process -- in which animators trace over live-action footage -- for the battle sequences only scuttles many potential exciting moments in the film due the obvious visual mismatch.  Bakshi shot his live-action extras, reportedly over 900 of them complete in costume in Spain and then rotoscoped their movements to make the transition to animation, but nothing could alter the fact that such moments appeared piped in from another movie all together.

Jor-El (Marlon Brando; left) sentences three criminals (left to right) – General Zod (Terence Stamp), Non (Jack O’Halloran) and Ursa (Sarah Douglas) - to the Phantom Zone in Superman: The Movie (1978).

Larger than Life Heroes

Ian Fleming’s secret agent, James Bond, 007, was the great pop culture/movie icon of the 1960s. A “superhero” in the Cold War Era of espionage and international intrigue, Bond’s film appearances had begun to shift heavily towards science fiction in the 1960s’ later entries like You Only Live Twice (1967) concerning a plan to intercept rockets, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service revolving around a deadly “germ” that could render the world’s crops sterile.  By the 1970s, Bond’s link to the science fiction film genre was even more pronounced, and the character ended the decade not on Earth, but in Earth orbit.

What seemed legitimately up for grabs in the 1970s Bond films was not the subject matter, necessarily, but the tone.  On Her Majesty’s Secret Service had played as a very straight, grounded, and realistic tale, with limited gadgets to help Bond out during his scrapes, and even a tragic ending to his short-lived marriage. That film had also starred a new actor as Bond, George Lazenby, but to poor results.  For the 1970s’ first Bond adventure, Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Sean Connery was lured back to (secret) service with the promise that his salary, 1.2 million dollars, would be paid to his favorite charity, involving education in Scotland. Guy Hamilton, the director of the most popular Bond film, Goldfinger, also returned for service on the new film.  Hamilton acknowledged that: “There have been so many imitators that we had to play for something fresh and outrageous.  007 has to be greater than anything else; any movie hero and even life itself.”  (Lee Pheifer and Philip Lisa, The Incredible World of James Bond, A Citadel Press Book, 1992, page 64).  This new approach meant, essentially that Bond was no longer merely a very dashing, very skilled secret agent, but a larger-than-life superman, or hero.

Diamonds are Forever, shot for United Artists in Las Vegas and Palm Springs thus showcased a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor beyond that witnessed in any previous entry.  This new light-hearted tone resulted in many funny quips, but also a sense that the series was satirizing itself.  The genuine tension of the earlier films was replaced, by and large, with incredible stunts and rollercoaster-like thrills.  This became the template for the series throughout the 1970s.

Roger Moore replaced Sean Connery as James Bond in Live and Let Die (1972), a film that for the most part eschewed any science fiction concepts.  But Moore’s second outing, The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) was heavy on genre elements.  In this adventure, Bond’s first since the Oil Embargo of 1973, he sought the Solex Agitator, a solar energy device.   Like Diamonds Are Forever, the film possessed a humorous tone, and even took time out to re-introduce a supporting character from Live and Let Die, Sheriff Pepper, for the express purpose of comic relief.  Christopher Lee portrayed the film’s villain, Scaramanga but most of his scenes seemed devoid of tension or menace, as if he was having too good a time “playing” a villain to actually inhabit that villain’s character.  The film was a low-grossing entry in the Bond saga, and so it was time for another course correction.

That adjustment came in the form of The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), the first Bond film to use a Fleming title, but not its storyline. Roger Moore returned as James Bond, and this time battled a villain out to complete some very violent “social engineering.”  In particular, Stromberg (Curt Jurgens) wanted to start a global nuclear war so that only his chosen survivors would continue to exist…in an undersea colony of his design and construction.  Made for a then-whopping 13.5 million dollars, this Bond film took no chances and went epic at every opportunity. A symbol of its shock and awe strategy was the pre-title action sequence, which saw stuntman Rick Sylvester jump off Asgard Mountain (in Canada) and free fall hundreds of feet before opening his Union Jack parachute.  The tone was again light, with Bond battling a steel-toothed giant named, appropriately for the decade, Jaws (Richard Kiel).  The film proved a blockbuster, and was released during the same year as Star Wars.

James Bond (Roger Moore; left) and Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles; right) evade capture in Moonraker (1979)

Thus, for his final act of the 1970s, James Bond went to outer space.  In the 30 million dollar production Moonraker, 007 battled a nemesis named Drax (Michael Lonsdale) who, like Stromberg before him, wanted to destroy the majority of the human race and preserve only his “chosen” supermen for a new world order.  Where Stromberg saw the ocean as man’s future, Drax imagined a destiny in which his space station would be a symbol in the night sky of law and order.  The film featured comedic nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters, but also drifted into ridiculous, over-the-top humor.  Moonraker also showcased stunning, state-of-the-art special effects from mastermind Derek Meddings.  Although Bond purists found the film to be the nadir of the film series, Moonraker became the highest grossing Bond film of all time up to that point.

Another “larger than life” character that saw tremendous popularity in the 1970s was the giant Japanese lizard Godzilla.  Toho Studios’ leviathan starred in three films during the disco decade, including the environmentally conscious Godzilla vs. Hedorah (or Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster), Godzilla vs. Megalon, and Godzilla vs. The Bionic Monster. Although the kaiju monster had begun his silver screen life as a fearsome symbol of searing atomic fears, by the 1970s Godzilla had become a dog-faced guardian of mankind, heroically battling pollution, aliens, and a race of subterranean conquerors.

In America, Godzilla vs. Megalon was a huge success, in part because it sought to “ape” the 1976 King Kong in its advertising (which pictured Godzilla and Megalon astride the Twin Towers), and in part because of a prominent NBC airing of the film in 1977, hosted by Saturday Night Live star John Belushi.

The greatest larger-than-life hero of the 1970s, however, may have been Superman, the Man of Steel.  In 1978, Superman: The Movie took the world by storm, and depicted the origin tale of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s famous American superhero.  After Guy Hamilton had to bow out of directorial responsibilities, Richard Donner (The Omen [1976]) took the helm and re-directed the effort away from any unfortunate camp elements.  Tom Mankiewicz was retained to rewrite the script by Mario Puzo and David and Leslie Newman, and production began at Pinewood Studios in England. Derek Meddings worked on the special effects while Dennys Coop toiled to develop a new visual approach to Superman’s flying abilities.

Headlining the film were Marlon Brando as Superman’s father, Jor-El, and Gene Hackman as the villain, Lex Luthor.  A young unknown, Christopher Reeve was cast as Superman and Richard Donner once noted to interviewer Richard Meyers in Starlog (#20, March 1979, page 46) that “He knows what it is to fly, he feels it – his movements, his expressions, his instincts – the flying is as beautiful as it is because Christopher brought it to life.”

When the film premiered in 1978, audiences agreed -- and cheered -- and the fifty million dollar film proved a blockbuster.  The film was lifted not only by its star’s heartfelt performance, but by John Williams’ heroic soundtrack, which captured beautifully the very essence of the character.  Reeve’s Superman would return in three more films in the 1980s.

“Time can only be fully understood by an Observer with the Godlike Gift of Infinite Regression:”

Reviewing the Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies of the 1970s

This section of the book reviews the genre films of the 1970s in greater detail, featuring credits, narrative details, and a full analysis of each film. Length of analysis depends greatly on the nature of the film reviewed, and can be brief, or several pages long.

In terms of format, it should be noted that the films are organized in this section by the year of American theatrical release.  They are not organized by copyright date or year of production simply because audiences don’t remember movies on that basis.  Instead, audiences remember when and where they saw movies, and this book attempts to reflect that fact.  Therefore, a film like Doomwatch which was made in 1972, but released in America in 1976, will be found according to the U.S. release date, in the bicentennial year.

Each entry in this section of the book features several parts, including a “critical mass” section, which briefly excerpts -- under the terms of fair use -- of other critical estimations of the particular film under discussion. Again, this material is included for scholarly and historical purposes: to help the reader better understand a particular movie’s context and reputation.  My voice or analysis is not the only one of significance or importance, obviously, and “critical mass” is therefore an acknowledgment of the wider critical response to these films of the 1970s.

Each entry also includes a detailing of behind-the-scenes personnel, for easy reference, and a story and review section, both of which are self-explanatory.

The sub-section on “influence” suggests what role a film plays in the larger context of American pop culture, across the decades.  For the seventies, this is particularly important.

Finally, each year of the 1970s opens with a look at “the real world,” so readers can more easily connect historical events to the films of their time.

The films are all rated, quality-wise one to four stars, with one meaning “bad” and four meaning “great.”

See you on the flip side…

On the march to war: General Ursus (James Gregory) leads the troops in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970).

1970

The Real World: 1970

April 1:              President Nixon bans cigarette sales on television by signing the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act.

April 10:               Paul McCartney announces his departure from The Beatles.

April 13:               An oxygen tank on Apollo 13 explodes in space, forcing the crew to abort the mission and return to Earth.

April 22:               The first Earth Day is celebrated in the United States.

April 29:               The U.S. invades Cambodia as part of the continuing, escalating Vietnam War.

May 4:              Four students are shot dead and nine others injured at Ohio’s Kent State by national guardsmen for protesting the invasion of Cambodia.

September 7:               The Valley Forge, PA anti-war rally is held. Among those present: future Senator, presidential candidate, and Secretary of State John Kerry.

September 18:               Jimi Hendrix dies.

October 4:               Janis Joplin dies.

October 5:               PBS begins broadcasting.

October 12:               President Nixon announces plans to withdraw 40,000 troops from Vietnam by Christmas.

November 3:               Ronald Reagan is elected governor of California. Jimmy Carter is elected governor of Georgia.  The two men will meet head-to-head in the Presidential election of 1980.

December 2:               The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is established

Colonel Taylor (Charlton Heston; right) mourns the unnecessary death of Nova (Linda Harrison; left), an innocent, in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970).

Beneath the Planet of the Apes * * *

Critical Mass:

“This sequel to the 1968 smash, Planet of the Apes, is hokey and slapdash. The story [by Paul Dehn and Mort Abrahams] and Ted Post’s direction fall far short of the original.” – Variety, December 31, 1969.

“..a more streamlined and action-oriented film than its predecessor….like the first film, Beneath’s lack of hope seemed to mirror the social anxieties at large.” – Gary Westfahl, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Greenwood Press, 2005, page 1208.

“This is the best of the four sequels to the enormously successful Planet of the Apes (1968) despite the fact that the script coarsens the original conception.” – Phil Hardy, The Overlook Encyclopedia: Science Fiction, The Overlook Press, 1994, page 280.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: James Franciscus (Brent); Kim Hunter (Zira); Maurice Evans (Dr. Zaius); Linda Harrison (Nova); James Gregory (General Ursus); Paul Richards (Mendez); Victor Buono (Fat Man); Jeff Corey (Caspay); David Watson (Cornelius); Natalie Trundy (Albina); Don Pedro Colley (Ongaro); Tod Andrews (Skipper); Gregory Sierra (Verger); Charlton Heston (Taylor).

CREW:              20th Century Fox Presents Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Director of Photography: William Creber. Original Music: Leonard Rosenman. Film Editor: Marion Rothman. Visual Effects: L.B. Abbott, Art Cruickshank. Produced by: Arthur P. Jacob. Written by: Paul Dehn. Directed by: Ted Post. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 95 minutes.

Story:

After Taylor (Heston) disappears in the Forbidden Zone under strange circumstances, Nova (Harrison) makes a return to civilization to seek help.  Along the way to Ape City, she meets up with John Brent (Franciscus), another human astronaut who has followed Taylor's trajectory through space in hopes of rescuing him, but also crash landed.

Nova and Brent visit Ape City, and find that charismatic but belligerent General Ursus (Gregory) is plotting a "military adventure" into the Forbidden Zone to stake claim to new territory where the apes can grow crops.  Dr. Zaius (Evans) is not happy about going along on this excursion, fearing "the unknown." He visits Zira (Hunter) and Cornelius (David Watson) to share his concerns, and also to recruit them to fulfill his duties in his absence.

Nova and Brent are captured by apes and are to be used "for target practice," but Zira helps free the duo from a prison wagon.  Brent and Nova escape into the Forbidden Zone and seek sanctuary from the Apes in a cavern.  There, they unexpectedly find the remnants of a 20th century subway system.

Brent and Nova explore the cavern, and discover the ruins of the New York Stock Exchange, the Public Library, and Radio City Music Hall. The denizens of this subterranean metropolis are mutated humans, survivors of the nuclear war who have developed the powers of the mind.  These mutants claim they are peaceful, and that their only weapon is "the power of illusion."  But they are not being completely truthful in this description.  They also possess a fully operational atomic bomb, the Alpha Omega Bomb, which is capable of burning to a cinder the planet Earth.   The mutants worship the bomb (and "the holy fallout") and plan to use the device to defeat the aggressive Apes.

Brent and Taylor join forces to prevent the bomb's detonation, but Ursus's gorilla army arrives and decimates the mutant population. After Nova is murdered by an ape soldier, Taylor loses his belief in the mission and -- fatally injured -- activates the Alpha Omega Bomb himself, putting an end to the planet's hatred and conflict once and for all.

Review:

Only a handful of sequels in cinema history have managed to live up to, let alone surpass, the quality of the first film in a prospective franchise.  We all know the parameters of this debate -- and also the examples --very well: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Aliens (1986), The Godfather Part II (1972), and perhaps The Road Warrior (1982).  You'll notice that Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), the first sequel to 1968's Planet of the Apes, doesn't make that short list.

To be certain, Beneath is not a bad film. Perhaps, given a little perspective, it's even a pretty good one.  But in terms of the franchise, director Ted Post's sortie simply can't live up to the memory created by Schaffner's watershed, landmark original.

Where Planet of the Apes was sprawling, brawny, and intricate in visual presentation, Beneath the Planet of the Apes feels mundane and rote by comparison.  Where Apes shocked and awed us with its amazing, special-effects presentation of an original new world, Beneath is largely satisfied, at least in its first half, to stage a simple return trip to Ape-ville.

This critical assessment does not mean, however, that Beneath the Planet of the Apes is a less than valuable piece of the five movie cycle.  It is valuable indeed.  The second film introduces to the franchise a dedicated enemy for the apes: the underground mutant dwellers of NYC.  And with the introduction of gorilla General Ursus, the film more fully diagrams the Ape culture's caste system.  The gorillas did not play a very prominent part in Planet of the Apes, but here they take their rightful place in the hierarchy as the militaristic, aggressive drivers of ape politics and policy.

So perhaps the sense of disappointment Beneath the Planet of the Apes invariably provokes may simply result from the fact that it had a very, very high benchmark to surpass.  Regardless, the two most obvious concerns with Beneath the Planet of the Apes are these: first, in direct contrast to the original, the action scenes in Beneath are underwhelming and poorly staged.  And secondly, the sequel simply does not lead with its strongest material.  Instead, the film takes a good forty-or-forty five minutes to get to the real meat of the tale: a war between two species which both believe that they are God's chosen.  Up to that point, the movie plays a little like what original star Charlton Heston feared a sequel might be, just a few more (amusing) adventures with the apes.

The absence of Heston, actually, is at the very root of the second problem.  Since the actor would only agree to book-end appearances in the sequel, the inventive writer, Paul Dehn, had to conceive a new human hero in James Franciscus's astronaut Brent.  Introducing Brent to the audience, and also introducing Brent to the world of the apes, however, effectively sets the movie back about thirty minutes.   Instead of literally taking off at the Statue of Liberty, the audience returns to square one as another human astronaut meets Nova, visits Ape City, meets Zira and Cornelius, and is hunted by the gorillas.  After another escape, it's back to the Forbidden Zone -- where Planet of the Apes ended -- and finally the story proper seems to commence with the introduction of the mutants.

Also, it's very clear that this should be Taylor's story, not Brent's, though Franciscus does an admirable job of bringing life and distinction to his not-very-well-delineated character.  The movie never quite gets over the perception that Brent is a fill-in character for Taylor.

All this criticism established, Beneath the Planet of the Apes demonstrates some remarkable sci-fi ingenuity in its final act, pitting Brent and Taylor (and the apes too...) against mutated humans who live underground, in the ruins of 20th Century New York City.  These mutants are gifted with psychic capabilities and worship a most unusual deity: the Alpha-Omega "Doomsday" bomb.  This strange set-up provides the filmmakers plenty of opportunity to make social commentary on the nature of religion, and on the nature of man too.   And indeed, this commentary very nearly (or perhaps fully, depending on your perspective), redeems the whole enterprise.

In particular, Beneath the Planet of the Apes reveals how two species (simian and human) use religion and "God's will" as cover for military conquest and aggression.  This is very much in keeping with the anti-war tenor of the 1968 Apes film, but Beneath the Planet of the Apes pushes the theme as far as it can absolutely go.  Notably, the film ends on a distinct but extremely gutsy "down note:" the destruction of the planet Earth itself.  Bloodier and more brutal even than its predecessor, Beneath of the Planet of the Apes thus goes out on a note of high inspiration, even if it is notably dark inspiration.

In its best moments, Beneath the Planet of the Apes sets up a fine comparison between the conquering ape army and the under-dwelling mutants of bombed-out NYC. Both races express the notion that they are God's select; that God is talking explicitly to them. In Ape City, Ursus's speech notes that it is the "holy mission" of the apes to plant their flags and guns upon new territory.  What Zaius considers a "great crisis," Ursus views as an opportunity for fulfillment of his destiny.  The apes -- chosen in the image of the Almighty -- shall expand their power, and Ursus shall have the opportunity for glory; to exercise his highly trained militia.  His campaign to the Forbidden Zone is even described as a "holy war" in one instance.

It is the general's faith in God's blessings that allow him to so readily dismiss and disband a peace protest in the streets of Ape City.  There, a group of young chimpanzees (read: liberals) stand in the way of the mobilizing cavalry, and are brutally swept away by gorilla authority.  The protester's street signs -- urging peace -- are trampled underfoot by the marching militia. Shot in hand-held fashion, the gorilla disruption of the chimpanzee peace demonstration is highly reminiscent of both Civil Rights and Vietnam protests of the time; making the point that a civilized nation's entrenched establishment -- buttressed by armed authority -- will always win out, even over courageous citizen activism.  Although the protest is anti-war (recalling Vietnam) in nature, it simultaneously falls along caste or race lines: Gorillas sweep away pacifist chimpanzees and their concerns.

This is just one instance and one scene where the Planet of the Apes saga proves abundantly rich in allusion and metaphor; able to comment readily on more than one matter roiling Nixon's America.

Later in the film, Dr. Zaius witnesses the terrifying image of The Lawgiver bleeding, an illusion created by the mutants, and once more, he speaks in terms of religious fanaticism, and of some imaginary divine preference.  "We are still God's chosen," he insists "This is a vision...and it is a lie.”  His words and the religious underpinning of the war make plain that this is not just a war, but a crusade.  What is at stake for the apes is their vision of their own superiority.

Meanwhile, in the wreckage of Manhattan, the mutants also view themselves as God's champions.  They are "Keepers of the Divine Bomb," and the bomb itself is a "holy weapon of peace."  Again, the mutants are deluding themselves about their true (violent) nature, and using religion as a shield; a shield by which they can do whatever it is that they please.   For instance, the mutants use their fearsome mental powers to make their enemies fight one another, to make Taylor and Brent fight.  But the mutants repeatedly exonerate themselves from responsibility for this action because they are not the ones actually picking up physical weapons, or throwing punches.  But of course, they are every bit as blood-thirsty as the apes are.

Where Planet of the Apes pointed out the role of religious hypocrisy in the suppression of truth and the suppression of science, Beneath the Planet of the Apes utilizes the notion of dueling religious viewpoints, and suggests that such incompatible visions of the Divine (and the Divine's wishes...) very often serve as the root cause of  international conflict.  If God tells you to conquer...you conquer, right?  If you think God is on your side, it's easier to drop bombs on your enemy. Given the incompatible viewpoints of the ape leadership and the mutant leadership, it is no surprise that the film ends as it does.  There can be no peace between those of such diametrically opposed viewpoints.  Taylor seems to understand this dead end, especially after Nova's meaningless death.  "We should let them all die...look what it comes to.  It's time it was finished."

Nova's death, in some ways, concerns the idea of collateral damage.  She is a total innocent, a person of no ideology or particular belief, who gets caught in the crossfire when two ideological states (ape and mutant) go to war.  She is the people of Vietnam, perhaps, caught between warring ideologies of capitalism and communism.

And finally, Taylor does finish things.  He activates the bomb and brings to an end both the apes’ and the mutants' delusions of God's favor.  It's a notably dark ending to the film.  It's actually more than dark, it's downright nihilistic.  The universe is better off with man and monkey dead than at each other's throats.

In the film's last frame, Earth is left a cinder, and a narrator announces (in solemn voice over) that a "Green and insignificant planet is now dead."  Notice the use of the word insignificant.  What the omnipotent narrator's choice of words suggests is that the apes and the humans ultimately lived and died by delusion and hypocrisy. They built themselves up as important and beloved in the eyes of a mythical Supreme Being, when in fact...they were no such thing.

All of their toils and battles went unnoticed in the universal scheme of things.  The apes and the men were fools...and they died as fools. They lived an insignificant existence on an insignificant world.

When Beneath the Planet of the Apes adheres closely to this theme of dueling cultures and clashing religious viewpoints, it proves rather impressive.  And the mutant civilization, down to the presentation of the ruined city and the ghoulish make-up, is every bit as impressive as the special effects work in the original Planet of the Apes.  The moment here in which the mutants reveal their "innermost" selves to their God, the bomb, is more than bracing.  It's macabre.  The unmasking of the mutants may not equal the psychic jolt of the Statue of Liberty revelation in Planet of the Apes, but it certainly rivets the attention, and visually brings forth the horrific toll of nuclear war upon both the human flesh and the human visage.  It also assures that this sequel contributes some real visual "punch" to the franchise.

On the downside, Beneath the Planet of the Apes certainly raises some questions of series continuity.  In Planet of the Apes, Taylor's ship crashed in 3978.  In Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the year is established as 3955 instead, and that's the date utilized going forward into Escape and the other films.

Also, Dr. Zaius regards Cornelius and Zira and notes the "two" chimpanzee psychologists.  Of course, only Zira is a psychologist. Cornelius is an archaeologist.

Again and again, the film seems to bizarrely misremember the specific details of Planet of the Apes.  Cornelius even notes that Brent doesn't want to end up like Taylor's two friends, stuffed and mounted in the "Zaius" museum.  Of course, only Dodge ended up stuffed in the museum; Landon was lobotomized.    This sequel was created before VCRs made films widely available for review and research, but it seems that someone should have screened the original Apes film on the studio lot before crafting the detail of the sequel.  Just a few minor tweaks and all of these problems would have been easily resolved.

The film's action scenes are also rather underwhelming.  The worst scene in the film is likely Brent and Nova's escape from an ape prison wagon.  The scene employs terrible rear-projection, and features cross-cutting between exterior long shots that don't seem to match the close-ups.  Worst of all, there's no soundtrack at all during this lengthy, would-be-tense sequence, so the whole scene just kind of sits there, about as flat as could be on an emotional or excitement level.

Additionally, the scene in which Brent and Nova are chased across a grassy hill, and captured by the apes, is a very pale shadow of the intricate, brilliantly cut corn-field hunt in the first Planet of the Apes film.  The location is dull, there are relatively few ape soldier extras in pursuit, and the scene is underwhelming both in terms of shot selection (mostly long and medium shots) and the unimpressive editing.  Moments that should generate anxiety and suspense fail totally to engender those emotions.

David Watson does his best to imitate Roddy McDowall's Cornelius here, but several of the scenes between Zira and Cornelius play as silly or inconsequential.  And during Ursus's big speech to the Ape Council, it's obvious that many of the citizen apes are simply wearing crude pull-over masks.  Again, there's the feeling that with a little more time and care, some of these moments could have been avoided, or at least downplayed to a certain extent.

On the matter of General Ursus, however, there can be no debate.  James Gregory gives a terrific, swaggering performance as the "glorious" leader of the apes. He delivers a stem-winder of a political speech too.   Although his words are (deliberately) racist and barbaric, the strutting performance is nothing less than rousing. Gregory's Ursus -- right down to his uniform and hat -- is every bit as interesting a villain as Dr. Zaius or any other ape character featured in the film and TV series.  Evidence of this is that all succeeding generations of ape stories (the TV series, the cartoon, and the re-imagination...) have provided a substantial role for a militaristic gorilla general.  Ursus or Ursus knock-offs (Urko, for instance) are part of the very gestalt of the franchise now, and it is Beneath the Planet of the Apes that introduces the character and the template.

In some ways, Beneath the Planet of the Apes appears a truly schizophrenic film.  The first forty minutes are a mildly amusing retread of Planet of the Apes highlights, but the last hour or so is a daring, ably-presented descent into utter darkness and despair.  The introduction of the mutants and their divine bomb is a brilliant, inspired facet of the film

From the author’s personal collection: A Power Records “book and record set” adaptation of Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

(and reflected in the final stage of the five-strong film series, Battle for the Planet of the Apes).  But more than that, Beneath the Planet of the Apes earns its artistic stripes by not kowtowing to sequel conventions or audience demands for happy endings.

In the last several moments of the film, Brent is shot in the head and we see it in close medium shot, Ursus is gunned down, and Taylor is mortally and bloodily wounded.  Then, just when you think the movie can't possibly descend further into despair, Taylor destroys the Earth.  It's gruesome and yet somehow also pure. Nobody gets out of the Planet of the Apes alive.

Well, almost nobody, as Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) quickly reveals...

A colossal computer installation, in Joseph Sargent’s sci-fi thriller, Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970).

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“…an intelligent, literate film that works on several levels… [I]t is a thriller, an exploration of humanity’s relationship to its technology, and an inquiry into the nature of freedom and responsibility.” – Kenneth Von Gunden, Stuart H. Stock. Twenty All-Time Great Science Fiction Films, Arlington House, 1982, page 222.

“…above average science fiction (1970) directed in functional hysteric style by Joseph Sargent…the script…is literate and discreet but lacking an effective ending.” – Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader.

“It’s a crisp, well-crafted movie that achieves its effects by calmly stating the facts, with the bare minimum of histrionics. It speaks volumes that one scene, in which two super-computers develop a common language, even manages to imbue the times table with a sinister charge…” – Ian Berriman, SFX Magazine, 2010.

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Eric Braeden (Dr. Charles Forbin); Susan Clark (Dr. Cleo Markham); Gordon Pinsent (The President); William Schallert (CIA Director Grauber); Leonid Rostoff (Russian Chairman); George Stanford Brown (Dr. John Fisher); Willard Sage (Dr. Blake); Alex Rodine (Dr. Kuprin); Martin E. Brooks (Dr. Johnson); Marion Ross (Angela Fields); Dolph Sweet  (Missile Commander); Lew Brown (Peterson); Sid McCoy (Secretary of State); James Hong (Dr. Chin); Paul Frees (Voice of Colossus).

CREW: Universal Pictures presents Colossus: The Forbin Project. Director of Photography: Gene Polito.  Original Music: Michael Colombier. Film Editing: Folmar Blangsted.  Art Direction: Alexander Golitzen, John J. Lloyd. Produced by: Stanley Chase. Written by: James Bridges. Based on the novel by: D.F. Jones. Directed by: Joseph Sargent. M.P.A.A. Rating: M. Running time: 100 minutes.

Story:

Inside the massive, multi-story Colossus complex in the Rocky Mountains, scientists celebrate as a Kennedy-esque president (Gordon Pinsent) makes a profound announcement to the American people. With the U.S. still locked in Cold War competition with a dedicated enemy, The Soviet Union, the Commander-in-Chief has handed over the entire defense of the U.S.A. to Colossus, an advanced computer system created by Dr. Charles Forbin (Eric Braeden), a cool-as-a-cucumber scientist.

Computers, the President informs the citizenry, do not act out of emotion or impulse of any type. Not out of hatred, anger, envy, or love. Machines understand only facts. The activation of Colossus will ensure a new world of peace, security and prosperity for all.

Once activated, however, things don't go quite as planned.  Colossus opens contact with a Russian counterpart, Guardian, and doesn’t appreciate being interrupted when authorities try to stop it.  When Colossus threatens nuclear annihilation, the United States and Soviet Union quickly permit Guardian and Colossus to re-link. Colossus and Guardian then order the Russian creator of Guardian murdered by the KGB. Forbin, Colossus's "father" is spared, but put under house arrest and 24-hour videotape surveillance by Colossus. Those operating against either computer are shot by firing squads. And if anyone fails to obey the orders of these powerful computers, then the machines jump right to the nuclear option. Meanwhile, Colossus quickly draws up plans to gain control of nations in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America.

In the end, Colossus defeats Forbin's last desperate gambits to destroy the machine. Colossus then informs the human population of Earth that there will finally be world peace, just as the President wanted.  "I bring you peace," Colossus claims. "Obey me and live. Or disobey and die." Colossus then reports that he will not permit new wars. He will instead "restrain" mankind and devote himself to eliminating famine, overpopulation, and disease. It is the dawn of a New Age…the Age of Colossus.

Review:

Permit me to introduce you to your new Computer Overlord...

Colossus: The Forbin Project, a sharply-crafted and utterly fearless techno-thriller is based on the 1966 novel by Dennis Feltham Jones. Like the literary work, this film concerns the activation of the American supercomputer Colossus, as well as the ensuing changing-of-the-guard as the machine achieves something approaching sentience and concludes that it should rule the Earth.  The computer's final message is a chilling one: "We can co-exist.... but only on my terms."  Colossus also informs the humans, including Forbin (Braeden) that one day they will love and worship him; that they are not losing freedom so much as their pride.

End Transmission.

A meditation on man’s technology run-amok, the film deliberately and pointedly references Frankenstein twice, and that leitmotif (of a father and his monstrous, rebellious creation) runs throughout the movie.  For Colossus is surely a strange, mirror image of his human dad, a mechanical reflection of his progenitor. Consider that Forbin is a preternaturally cool customer. His icy personality is devoid of emotion and slow-to-anger or panic. He is utterly reasonable, and until the film's conclusion when he realizes he is defeated, Forbin never seems to break even a sweat. He's a quart low on anxiety, to coin a phrase, and Forbin possesses the analytical mind of a computer himself. His artificial child also possesses all of these qualities.

Notably, Colossus may also boast Forbin's biggest flaw: vanity. Both man and machine, both father and son, are confident in their abilities to the point of arrogance. Forbin has created the ultimate computer and yet seems entirely blind to the dangers Colossus poses. He is excited, not concerned, when Colossus exceeds the parameters of his programming. What should be a warning sign or wake-up call is instead an opportunity for papa's pride.

The father/son relationship of Forbin/Colossus also follows closely the trajectory of human father/son relationships. At first, the young son is deferential, inquisitive and seeking a role model, learning from his father (via heuristic analysis in this case) and gathering information. Then the son grows, and gathers other influences (in this case, Guardian, his Russian opposite). Next, the son establishes a sense of self -- a sense of independence -- and defies the father; an act of adolescent rebellion. Finally, the child surpasses the father both in intellect and achievement. The cycle moves even further ahead as Colossus seeks to create his own son, an updated computer system that will operate on the Island of Crete and render him, someday, obsolete, just as Colossus has rendered Forbin obsolete.

At one point in the film, young Colossus grows adamant about getting his way on some matter, and Forbin determines that the Computer must learn who is "master." In other words, the child must learn that the parent is always in charge. This is not an easy lesson to teach, yet it is an absolutely essential one in terms of practical parenting. As a father, Forbin is a distinct failure because he cannot transmit this lesson successfully, but also because he has found no way to program his machine with the crucial human quality of empathy. And ego without empathy creates a monster, or at the very least, something inhuman.

Another theme is also brilliantly illuminated in the film. In particular, it involves the fact that Colossus - as a supercomputer - "deals in the exact meaning of words." Anyone who issues Colossus an order must be extremely careful to know exactly what he or she is requesting. Yet who can deny that much of our human vocabulary and interaction relies heavily on personal interpretation? Ironically, by film's end Colossus has indeed fulfilled his stated programming: bringing to America and the entire human race -- for the first time -- "unity" and "peace." Those are the very things that the President of the United States sought. Of course, Colossus has made these things happen in a way that, as liberty-seeking, human individuals, we find anathema.  But in a very cold, calculating sense, every step Colossus takes in the film leads to fulfillment of his programing: unity and peace on Earth. It is possible that what we perceive as vanity in Colossus is merely our human capacity to anthropomorphize that which is not human.

By reckoning with this notion, we must ask an important question: is Colossus actually a villain at all? Or has he simply done his job in the only way he could conceivably do it, by taking matters of war and peace, life and death out of our irrational, human hands? In a few short months following his "world control," Colossus could very well end hunger, stop overpopulation, curb disease, and bring an end to war. In return, the people of the Earth simply have to follow "his" orders, a reversal of the usual user interface, wherein computers follow our orders.

Is domination by Colossus too high a price to pay for world peace? Consider that in this technological, atomic age, one push of a button by a senile, impulsive, or temperamental president could result in nuclear apocalypse. With Colossus, that horrible possibility will never ever occur. So how badly do we really desire world peace? What would it cost us to achieve it? Would we be willing to pay that cost if it meant we had to put an "other," non-human in charge? In Colossus: The Forbin Project (a product of the Cold War, pre-Detente era) those questions are deliberately raised, but we're given no trite or easy answers.

Colossus: The Forbin Project takes place almost entirely in control rooms and political briefing rooms. There are no major action scenes. How would that translate today? I'm afraid the answer is, not so well.   In vetting this material, director Joseph Sargent teaches a lesson in economical, effective filmmaking. He makes the 1970 film visually compelling with his gritty, almost cinema-verite-style sensibility. Much of the action seems caught on the fly, as if the events are happening spontaneously and unscripted. Refreshingly, this naturalistic style feels very real in an easy, unforced way. It's not exactly documentary-style (not with all the various and sundry insert shots and montages of outdated computer technology, but whatever you call it, it’s effective.  We’re like a fly on the wall during a great emergency.

One of the best and most amusing sequences in the film involves Forbin's attempt while under 24-hour surveillance to open a line of communications with another scientist on the Colossus team, Dr. Cleo Markham (Susan Clark). The only way he can achieve this end is to convince his wayward creation that his co-worker is actually his mistress and that they require privacy away from the prying ears and ears of the supercomputer to make love. What follows is a funny, sharp exchange of counter punches between man and machine as each tries to gain the advantage. “How often do you require a woman?” asks Colossus. “Every night,” answers Forbin. “Not want; require,” says Colossus. “Four nights a week.” Forbin relents, and Colossus agrees, while demanding certain concessions.

When Cleo and Forbin finally meet for the first time (and remember, they are actually merely co-workers, not intimates), Colossus forces them to strip naked in front of his cameras and in front of each other as well before retiring to the bedroom, which is awkward for the humans, to say the least.  Forbin's plan is crazy and uncomfortable, perhaps inspired, but he knows that it is the only way to outwit the computer, and the movie has some kinky fun with this unexpectedly human situation.

Colossus: The Forbin Project is a ceaselessly intelligent film about the brinkmanship between man and machine, and between a father and son.  But outside the Frankenstein paradigm, the film is such a special one because it makes clear that mankind gets exactly what he asks for from Colossus:  an end to war, and an end to the specter of global destruction.  While there is certainly an element of “be careful what you wish for,” here, there is also a sense, perhaps of relief. Is it so bad to relinquish control to a saner head?  Even if that saner head belongs to a computer?

Gas! – Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970) * ½

Critical Mass:

“For the most part, the fantasy of "Gas" is simply heavier and less absurd than the reality it means to demolish.” – Vincent Canby, The New York Times, March 27, 1971.

“What makes the film so exhilarating is Corman’s playful transformations…and his willingness to parody his material as he goes. If the resulting film is too excessive to be accessible, in the process Corman produces a welter of vignettes that never fail to amuse.” –Phil Hardy, Editor. The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction, The Overlook Press, 1994, page 292.

“This, Corman's next-to-last directorial effort and one of his few money-losers, is an excessive film, but one well worth seeing.” – TV Guide.

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Bob Corff (Coel); Elaine Giftos (Cilla); Bud Cort (Hooper); Tally Coppola (Coralee); Ben Vereen (Carlos); Cindy Williams (Marissa); Alex Wilson (Jason); Lou Procopio (Marshal McLuhan); Phil Borneo (Quant); Alan Braunstein (Dr. Drake); Jackie Farley (Ginny); David Osterhout (Texas Ranger); Juretta Taylor (Zoe); Mike Castle (Burroughs); Alan DeWitt (Dr. Murder); Bruce Karcher (Edgar Allen); Raye Birk (Mort Catafalque); George Armitage (Billy the Kid); Abe Santilanes (Na Wanka); Gary Caplan (Raincoat Harry);

CREW: American International Pictures, Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson present Gas! Director of Photography: Ron Dexter. Original Music: Barry Melton. Film Editing: George Van Noy. Art direction: David Nichols. Produced by: Roger Corman. Written by: George Armitage. Directed by: Roger Corman. M.P.A.A. Rating: GP. Running time: 79 minutes.

Story:

The U.S. government accidentally releases a gas that kills everyone in the world over the age of twenty-five.  A rag-tag group of young college students survive the disaster in Texas and head west to New Mexico to start over.  Along the way, they encounter bandits, rockers, hippies, a town of militant golfers, and even a mysterious, truth-speaking Oracle.  When the group finally settles down in an Indian pueblo town, its members realize it is time to start things anew, with no more war, weapons, destruction, or even macho posturing.

Review:

According to Gas!, an end of the world comedy from horror director Roger Corman, the trademark sound of the 1960s was “gunshots,” and given the historical context, there’s adequate reason to suggest this perception is accurate.

After all, the 1960s saw the assassinations of a sitting President, civil rights activist Martin Luther King, and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy the (unsuccessful) prosecution of the Vietnam War, and other notable outbreaks of violence.  Matters didn’t look much brighter, either, as the 1970s commenced.  The Kent State shootings occurred on May 4, 1970, only months before Gas! premiered.  Perhaps not coincidentally, much of the film’s early action occurs on a college campus where tensions run high between left-wing students and right-wing authority figures.

Gas! is deliberately a “psychedelic” counter-culture comedy, and it opens with a cartoon of a U.S. General who sounds like John Wayne. He sings the praises of the nation’s right wing and the military-industrial complex, so the film pretty clearly operates in an anti-Vietnam, anti-Nixon mode. It criticizes the “Silent Majority” for its willingness to obey authority figures that use violence to carry out an agenda.  Right wing figures are also equated with Nazis at one point, and speak with awkward German accents.  So the approach here isn’t exactly nuanced or even-handed.

Gas’s! critique of violence and America’s bloody history of violence is perhaps the film’s strongest point. The film draws a straight line between America’s obsession with football (“the only thing that counts is winning!”) to the nation’s aggressive actions overseas, where it uses its vast military might to, again, attempt to win.  In the post-apocalyptic world following the release of the deadly gas, football jocks rule one town, and their motto is “two, four, six, eight - who we do annihilate?”  The message seems to be that no matter what changes, things stay the same. Violence is in our blood, at least until someone actively tries to change that basic fact of human nature.

Gas! doesn’t let off the young people -- or even the counter-culture heroes -- for this pervasive bloodlust and violence either.  One relatively amusing if goofy scene early in the film is a shoot-out staged to play like a traditional Hollywood western.  The heroes shout-out the names of Western silver screen and TV heroes as they fire their weapons at each other.  “Gene Autry! Tom Mix! Jim Arness!”  Once more, the idea transmitted is that our culture serves up a steady diet of violence, murder and death in its entertainment.  Worse, the culture champions that violence, and suggests that gun fights are a valid way to settle differences, to bring about resolution.

The Oracle’s answer to these crises in the film is “just to keep looking” for a new answer, but by film’s end the counter-culture survivors, living in a Native American town have come to their own conclusion.  They decide to replace the legends of violence (featured in the Western format) with a new “ancient legend,” one in which conflict can end without gunfire.  “There’s no violence, only love,” one character declares of the new order, further stating that they can all give this edict meaning if they “live by it.”

Presented with comedic flair and at the height of the unpopular conflict in Vietnam, these ideas are meaningful and idealistic, but they notably lack any sense of practicality or connection with real-life experience.

The problem of war results largely from the fact that there always seems to be some “other” party opposed to peace, and willing to kill to get what another tribe owns.  In those instances, the peaceful tribe -- the ones living on love and peace -- are eradicated by the physically violent ones.  Gas! doesn’t really grapple meaningfully or honestly with this idea. All of humanity would have to spontaneously give up arms for the new edict to work.  Perhaps that wonderful day will come as we evolve away from violence and brutality, but even the end of the world as featured here doesn’t seem like the place to do it.   At some point the question must become: do you fight for your ideas of love and peace, so they go forward to the next generation, or do you die for peace, and let those ideas die out with you? Choose the latter option and the world will not be a peaceful one, because the advocates for peace are annihilated.  Choose the former course of action -- violence in defense of a principle -- and one becomes accused (as Nixon is) of being a killer and an aggressor.

Gas! is first and foremost a comedy, and so a strict adherence to reality isn’t required, necessarily.  But the film fails to persuade on many issues of internal logic.  A deadly gas (released accidentally by Nixon and the U.S. military) kills everyone over twenty-five, and yet the cities, roads, towns, and shopping centers are not piled high with rotting bodies.  Instead, all the corpses of the dead have just disappeared, rendering the new land of the young a veritable virgin paradise. Where have all the bodies gone?

Secondly, the film’s characters deliver jokes, punch-lines, and slogans with staccato regularity, but never seem real or consistent as individual personalities.  There’s no one here to really care about or get behind because the film is more interested in gags than coherence.

And lastly, Gas! makes a number of jokes about rape, which is downright distasteful.  How can a film that abhors violence and sees it as the root of our national self-destruction simply turn around and make so many jokes about sexual assault?  So even considered on its own terms, the movie is internally inconsistent.

Gas! is probably best viewed as a time capsule of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when the Generation Gap was at its apex, when every issue seemed to divide the nation between the young and the old, and between the counter-culture and the Silent Majority.

One character notes in the films that “we all have our inconsistencies, but that doesn’t stop the revolution, does it?”  That motto might be the best way to understand the movie today.  Attempt to accept its inconsistencies, and note that, in some sense, they are the inconsistencies not just of Gas! but of an entire cultural moment in American history too.

The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970) * * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“It drags in spots and is occasionally self-conscious. Yet this is more than compensated for by Alan Cooke’s low-key direction and the strong performances of Terence Stamp, Nigel Davenport, and Robert Vaughn.” – Kenneth Von Gunden, Stuart H. Stock, Twenty All-Time Great Science Fiction Films. Arlington House, 1982, page 209.

“A good, offbeat British science fiction film that might well have been even better…” – Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times, November 11, 1970.

“What finally fails The Mind of Mr. Soames is the mindless dramatic inspiration overlapped on a basically workable idea: the development of the thought processes inside…a mature shell.” – Kevin Kelly, The Boston Globe, October 21, 1970, page 17.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Terence Stamp (John Soames); Robert Vaughn (Dr. Bergen); Nigel Davenport (Dr. Maitland); Christian Roberts (Thomas Fleming); Donal Donnelly (Joe Allan); Norman Jones (Davis); Dan Jackson (Nicholls); Vickery Turner (Naomi); Judy Parfitt (Jenny Bannerman); Scott Forbes (Richard Bannerman); Joe McPartland (Inspector Moore); Pamela Moseiwitsch (Girl on Train); Billy Cornelius (Sgt. Clifford).

CREW: Columbia Studios Presents an Amicus Production, The Mind of Mr. Soames. Director of Photography: Billy Williams. Film Editor: Bill Blunden. Original Music: Michael Dress. Production Design: Billy Constable. Produced by: Max J. Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky. Written by: John Hale, Edward Simpson. Directed by: Alan Cooke. M.P.A.A. Rating: GP. Running time: 92 minutes.

Story:

In England, at the Midland Research Institute, Dr. Maitland (Davenport) and a surgeon, Dr. Bergen (Vaughn) embark upon a unique experiment. John Soames (Stamp) has been in a coma since birth, and never once opened his eyes.

Now a new surgical technique allows Bergen to awaken the thirty-five year old man for the first time. The experiment is a success, and before the eyes of a curious camera crew, Soames enters the world. Maitland enrolls this grown “baby” into a rigorous instructional program, attempting to teach him all the knowledge and important lessons of life in a mere six weeks.

Soames soon stops thriving however, burdened by the cold, loveless life demanded by Maitland. Bergen attempts to teach Soames how to have fun, and how to play, but the lesson goes awry when John escapes from custody and into the world at large, a world he is ill-prepared to understand.

Review:

The Mind of Mr. Soames is a thoughtful, lugubrious film that wonders about what it means to be human, and in particular, what happens to a human being who has never been really nurtured, and never known love.

In the film, a cold-hearted, unemotional man, Dr. Maitland (Davenport) takes professional responsibility for an adult coma patient who has just awakened for the first time in his entire life.  But Maitland is not able to contextualize himself as a parent rather than as a professional and thus provide the patient, John Soames, with the one thing he needs most: affection. Instead, Maitland nearly “teaches Mr. Soames to death” according to a more kindly doctor, Bergen.

Because Mr. Soames is trapped in a loveless, sterile, and rigid life, director Alan Cooke often composes shots of the naïf behind bars or other barriers, providing a visual sense of his entrapment. Early in the film, there’s a shot of his face braced between the slats of a bed’s guard rail.  The same shot repeats near the climax, when Soames is seen posed behind the guard-rails of a busy road-way.  These shots and angles indicate that John is eternally apart or separated from other people because of his odd life, because he has been raised, essentially, in a petri dish.

There’s also some social commentary here about the modern media, which views Soames as fodder for entertainment, or worse, a freak show, and proves a vexing, ubiquitous presence throughout his life. When Soames first opens his eyes, for example the video camera is present, poking into his face and terrifying him.

Later, when Dr. Bergen attempts to bring John back from the outside world, the camera’s blinding lights suddenly activate at just the moment he is about to surrender, and thus cause John to experience a dangerous fit (which wounds Bergen).  The Mind of Mr. Soames seems to suggest then, that John is doubly cursed.  He lives a loveless life under the care of not a mother or father, but before the eye of the camera as nothing but fodder for the masses.

In some very strange way, The Mind of Mr. Soames follows very closely the structural conceit of Trog (1970), a film about the discovery of the missing link in England, and its failure to assimilate into man’s modern world, as well as its friendship with a scientist (Joan Crawford).  There, Trog is found in a cave, trained to be docile, and then, once freed, considered a dangerous threat to society at large.  Soames’ post-coma life in this film follows the same rough outline.  He awakes, is taught to be a civilized man by Maitland, escapes from custody, and is likewise judged a menace to society.  Trog is killed however, perhaps because of his non-human nature, whereas The Mind of Mr. Soames ends non-committedly with Soames back in custody, trying -- through a clasp of the hands-- to reach out emotionally to anyone willing to connect with him.  He has a long journey ahead of him, and if any film ever deserved a sequel, it’s this one. It would be an incredible thing to revisit Mr. Soames after he has spent thirty years trying to assimilate, trying to conform to a society that so clearly and abundantly fears him and his “alien” nature.

The Mind of Mr. Soames seems dated a bit, in part because no sane or rational person, and certainly no psychologist, would today undertake the education and socialization of John Soames in such a fashion as is depicted in the film. Maitland is evidently and patently a priggish bastard.  He refers to Soames like an animal specimen, saying to guards things like “You can put him back now.”

Certainly someone in authority would stop Maitland and realize that the man-child needs to be adopted by a mother or father, someone with a clear and vested interest in him as a person and not just as an experiment.  All the problems with John arise from Maitland’s inability to contextualize him as an individual and not a test-case for his rapid educational program.

Furthermore, Soames is never adequately socialized in the film, and never really connects to anybody, because Maitland expressively forbids it.  This seems highly unrealistic, since today we understand much more about what children require to mature in a healthy fashion.

Terence Stamp stars as John Soames and delivers a brave, unforgettable performance as an infant and child in a man’s body.  We watch him open his eyes for the first time, take his first steps, eat his first meal, and see his first girl.  There’s something haunting and lonely in Stamp’s eyes, and some audiences may be reminded of Charly (1969), a film which saw another innocent, played by Cliff Robertson, attempting to interface with normal society.  The problem is, of course, that normal society can be so damned shitty at times.  Here, a twitchy girl on a train accuses John of attacking her, when he does no such thing.  He is just trying to be nice to her in his own uninformed, innocent way.

In part, the film suggests, Soames will never be normal or integrated in society simply because society simply won’t have him.  He is more interesting as headline fodder (“can this baby kill?” reads one newspaper headline) or as television subject than as a human being.  So if Maitland has failed to provide Soames an adequate mother, society has similarly failed to provide a nurturing community around him in which he is free to fail, and free to learn.

Robert Vaughn also delivers the finest performance of his career here as the kindly Dr. Bergen.  Because he shows John so much kindness (and buys him Major Matt Mason toys…), one expects more from him than of the cold fish, Maitland, and is consequently more disappointed with him for not doing better by John.  I suspect a lot of mothers suffer from this syndrome.  Almost a priori we expect them to demonstrate patience and love and support for their young, so when they come up short, they are easily blamed or tagged as failures.

Traditionally, however, a father who does anything “extra” for his children tends to be lauded by society, because expectations for his investiture of time and energy were much lower to begin with  Once more, the film has something to say about parenting, and about how society sees parents.  Bergen is a better man than Maitland, but we expect him to do better by John because he knows what it means to have a family.

The Mind of Mr. Soames is a very emotional film, but it not, oddly enough, a particularly sentimental one.  There’s much restraint in its cerebral approach, and so the film’s issues of nature vs. nurture come naturally to the forefront. Upon countenancing the case study of John Soames, one can only deduce that a little more nurture, a little more love, would have gone a long way towards making him a whole and healthy person.

No Blade of Grass (1970) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“..one of the most terrifying movies I have ever seen…It has a gut-searing quality of the truth that makes this film uncomfortably real. Not all pleasant, but something that should not be missed.” – Jacob Siskind, The Montreal Gazette, February 20, 1971, page 38.

“…made no concessions to humour as it depicted, in harsh terms against some attractively photographed British locations, the effect of anarchy in a society reduced to fighting for survival after the pollution of the planet looses a crop-destroying virus…well-realized, although much of the film’s scientific content was obscured by director Cornel Wilde’s realistic use of violence.” – Alan Frank, Sci-Fi Now, Octopus Limited, Ltd., 1978, page 32.

“Aside from some tedious flash-forwards and occasional bouts of sermonizing, this is a tense and provocative film.” – Paul Simpson, The Rough Guide to Cult Movies.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Nigel Davenport (John Custance); Jean Wallace (Ann Custance); John Hamill (Roger Burnham); Lynne Frederick (Mary Custance); Patrick Hold (David Custance); Anthony May (Pirrie); Ruth Kettlewell (Fat Woman); Michael Percival (Constable); Tex Fuller (Mr. Beaseley); Anthony Sharp (Brenner); Simon Merrick (TV Interviewer); George Coulouris (Sturdevant); Wendy Richard (Clara); Marx Hartnell, John Lewis (Soldiers); Norman Atkyns (Cassop); Nigel Rathbone (Davey); Christopher Lofthouse (Spooks);

CREW: Theodora Productions Presents No Blade of Grass. Director of Photography: H.A.R. Thomson. Original Music: Burnell Whibley. Film Editing: Eric Boyd-Perkins, Frank Clarke. Produced by: Cornel Wilde. Written by: Sean Forestal, Cornel Wilde. Based on the novel by: John Christopher. Directed by: Cornel Wilde. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 96 minutes.

Story:

An unidentified virus begins killing grass, white, rice and barley in Asia, and then rapidly spreads across the globe, causing a famine of vast proportions in the civilized world.

One family -- the Custances -- decides to abandon London when there is news that China has bombed its urban population in a last-ditch attempt to save “the Chinese nation.” John Custance (Davenport), his wife Ann (Wallace) and their daughter Mary (Frederick) make a survival run through the English countryside for the farm of John’s brother.  The family is joined en route by a man named Pirrie (May) who is good with a gun, but prone to instability and violence.

On their way to hopeful sanctuary, the Custances face the total collapse of law and order in England, and fight rapists, motorcycle gangs, and other hazards.  Finally, when John meets up with his brother, he finds that even the bonds of family can’t overcome the fear and dread surrounding the famine and burgeoning apocalypse.

Review:

Now here is a hard dose of reality, and a blunt-faced acknowledgment of human nature.  No Blade of Grass is a cutthroat post-apocalyptic vision which forecasts films such as The Road Warrior (1981), and which deals meaningfully with the idea that our civilization is fragile, and based on an easily compromised premise: the satisfaction of a full stomach.  When there is no food, there is no society, no civilized behavior.

In this adaptation of John Christopher’s 1965 novel The Death of Grass a man named John Custance sees the end of that premise or social contract dawning as one-hundred million people die of starvation worldwide.  A famine is destroying grass and wheat. And without wheat, livestock is dying.  And without livestock, humanity is jeopardized.  With anarchy blossoming, Custance attempts to save his family at any cost.  Yet John’s quest is only partially successful.  His wife and young daughter are savagely raped on the road by other travelers, and he murders another innocent family for their food stocks, which amounts to no more than a loaf of bread.

All along, the film forecasts just how bad things can get by flashing forward to -- in blood-red imagery -- upcoming violent confrontations.  Just when the family has overcome one life-or-death crisis, another one is signaled in shades of scarlet terror.  Although I remain unconvinced, generally, of the efficacy of fast-forwards in a narrative structure, they possess an appropriate place in No Blade of Grass.  The flash-cuts suggest the end of optimism and hope.  Future days will be no better than these days.  In fact, they may very well be worse. If the present seems bad, the movie promises, the future will be much, much worse.

Before No Blade of Grass is over, Custance and his family members have murdered soldiers, nations have bombed their populations to oblivion to keep a few handpicked survivors fed, and a brother has launched a war for resources against a biological brother.  In tactless, brutal terms, the film depicts total, utter anarchy, and the collapse of decency.  We witness a live birth on camera (and you can see the baby’s head crowning…), and generally the film spares its audience no indignity, no terror, no hard truth.  When civilization goes, so will modern medicine, so will electricity, so will grocery stores, so will mass transit.  The film suggests these taken-for-granted modern conveniences are all but fragile dominoes, falling one after the other after the other.

“Everything’s different now, boys…we have to fight to survive,” one character states in the film, and indeed that’s true.  The “old law” evaporates and the law of the jungle reigns supreme.  Those who can’t adapt quickly to the New World Order die quickly instead.

Accordingly, one of the most disturbing moments in the film finds Custance’s teenage daughter, Mary, leaving behind her former, civilized, and gentle boyfriend in favor of the sociopathic murderer, Pirrie.  Despite the fact that he killed his own wife in a fit of rage, and is obviously unstable, Pirrie’s “strength” makes Mary feel safe.  She knows he will protect her. Ardent feminists will not appreciate this moment in the film, to be certain, but so many of today’s constructs, including, equality of the sexes, simply would not survive all-out, universal anarchy.  Women like Mary, in the film’s blunt terminology, carry “a survival kit” between their legs.  Sex becomes one of the few tools they can use to assert power, or find protection.

No Blade of Grass is also caustic and sharply observed.  One scene reveals an abandoned Rolls Royce on the side of the road, but a voice-over from an old TV commercial accompanies the imagery so that the moment suggests just how utterly meaningless the old conventions are in the New Order.  What role is there for luxury transportation when there is no food, anywhere?  No gasoline? No restaurants to drive to?

Another, equally brutal moment intercuts a report of children dying of starvation in China with images of avaricious restaurant diners eating gourmet food in an upscale London restaurant.  The unmistakable point is made in the contrast. It is easy to observe other people’s children dying of famine and do nothing about it. Pass the salt…

The cause of the civilization-destroying virus in No Blade of Grass is, in true 1970s fashion, mankind himself.  A (dated) folk song opens the film and establishes how little mankind has done to “save the Earth.”  This funereal composition is accompanied by a montage of images of real-life pollution.  We see documentary-like footage of spewing tail-pipes, traffic jams, smog hanging over cities, brown water, dead fish, crop dusters, nuclear reactors, factories spewing chemicals and other late 20th century horrors that somehow we manage to put out of our minds, and imagine can’t harm the planet.  But according to No Blade of Grass: “one day the polluted Earth couldn’t take it anymore.”

Chilling and in-your-face, No Blade of Grass is one of the most unforgettable science fiction films of the 1970s. It is made more so by the fact that its protagonists -- whom we are meant to identify with -- are ultimately no better or nobler than anyone they encounter on the road.  The Custances prize their survival above all else, and take steps to assure it that we, as civilized people, should abhor.  They are murderers.  But who could say that you or I would choose differently given such anarchy?

That folk song in the film that I mentioned earlier features a lyric that goes “It’s the end of love.”  In No Blade of Grass, that’s an understatement.

Trog (1970) * * ½

Critical Mass:

“The beast himself, rather obviously known as Trog, looks something like an escapee from The Planet of the Apes.” – Neil Mitchell, The Age, December 16, 1971, page 18.

“…a routine “King Kong” affair, not particularly well-done…Miss Crawford cannot do much with dialogue which sounds like “Quick, the hypo gun!”…but valiant performer that she is, she sure does try.” – Bernard Drew, The Evening News, November 7, 1970, page 18.

“…a fairly lively British whatsit (instead of whodunit) and some scenes of dinosaurs are even worked in…the plot is predictable.” – Dominque Paul Noth, The Milwaukee Journal, October 6, 1970, page 5.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Joan Crawford (Dr. Brockton); Michael Gough (Sam Murdock); Bernard Kay (Inspector Greenham); Kim Braden (Anne Brockton); David Griffin (Malcolm Travers); John Hamill (Cliff); Thorley Walters (Magistrate); Jack May (Dr. Selbourne); Geoffrey Case (Bill); Robert Hutton (Dr. Richard Warrren); Simon Lack (Colonel Vickers); David Warbeck (Alan Davis); Joe Cornelius (Trog).

CREW: A Herman Cohen Production, Trog. Film Editor: Oswald Hafenrichter. Trog Designed by: Charles Parker. Make-up: Jim Evans. Director of Photography: Desmond Dickson. Original Music: John Scott. Written by: Aben Kandel. Story by: Peter Bryan and John Gilling. Produced by: Herman Cohen. Directed by: Freddie Francis. M.P.A.A. Rating: GP. Running time: 93 minutes.

Story:

Three spelunkers in rural England discover an unexplored cave that miraculously houses a living troglodyte.  One man is killed by the scared missing link (Cornelius), but the primitive ape-man is eventually captured and brought to the Brockton Research Center, where Dr. Brockton (Crawford) attempts to learn from the creature, and help him adapt to life in the twentieth century.

A man named Murdock (Gough), however, sees the existence of Trog as an affront to God, and will do anything to sabotage Brockton’s efforts and see the missing link destroyed.  When Trog breaks free from captivity, he gets his chance.

Review:

The make-up looks dated and bad, and one scene involving the imaging of a troglodyte’s memories is positively cringe-inducing for its lack of scientific accuracy. But despite these deficits, Trog (1970) is actually an intriguing film in terms of the theme it attempts to enunciate.  In particular, the film from Freddie Francis diagrams a battle between modernity and progress, and tradition and the past.  This battle arises in the courts and person-to-person too over the discovery of a Troglodyte in a subterranean cave in rural England.

Representing science, rationality, modernity and progress is the film’s protagonist, Dr. Brockton (Crawford).  She is zealous, yet her zealousness is neither personal nor selfish. Dr. Brockton believes that Trog is the missing link, and that the whole world can benefit from learning the secrets of his life and prehistoric existence.  “Did it walk upright?  Did it crawl?”  She asks with awe as she prepares to meet the creature for the first time.

Brockton, the author of Social Structures in Primates believes that Trog can be handled safely, and thus teach modernity about an era long gone.  She is not irresponsible, either, as are many cinematic “mad” scientists.  Instead, Brockton cares for Trog on a personal level, and takes precautions so that he and others cannot be injured.  Her efforts are undone through no fault of her own, but rather through deliberate sabotage.

Representing tradition and the past is Murdock (Gough), an officious, cynical man who uses the Bible and the law like a bludgeon to legitimize his feelings of hate for anything that he deems different.  In this case, “that which is different” includes Trog.  Murdock classifies Trog as a monster, and uses Scripture (the Book of Genesis) to validate his desire to kill him.  Murdock’s hate extends to Brockton as well.  He is a sexist and would rather see “a dignified man” in her position, running the clinic.  He complains that when discussing science, Brockton talks the talk of “a heathen.”

This is the battle between superstition and reason, religion and science, and it is one that continues to rage to this day, at least in America, regarding the teaching of evolution in high school, and also in terms of race relations and sex roles.

Despite the 1970s make-up the film thus speaks trenchantly to today’s issues.  Whenever there is an outburst of progress, there always seems to be someone who wants to apply the brakes; someone who wants to call up the worst instincts of man -- jealousy, hatred, ignorance -- and summon up religion as the motivation for those emotions.  In a sense, the movie is not about Trog, who is really a pawn, but about the conflict represented by Brockton and Murdock, that conflict between moving into the light or remaining in ignorance in the dark.

Yet much of the good-will Trog engenders throughout its running-time is squandered by the ridiculous scene in which Trog sees his memories of prehistoric life visualized for Dr. Brockton and the audience.  The film displays scenes of a stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus duking it out on an ancient landscape, beneath a raging volcano.

From a film point of view, the scene doesn’t work because the imagery is supposed to be originating from Trog’s memory and eyes, yet the effects sequence (really stock-footage from another film) is not lensed in a point-of-view fashion.  The way it is presented, right down to the editing, is not indicative of a personal experience, which is what the image is supposed to represent.

From a science point of view, the scene with the dinosaur battle is absolute nonsense.  Primitive man never shared space on this Earth with dinosaurs.  Indeed, that’s a fallacy of the extremely ignorant and often extremely religious…men of Murdock’s ilk. It undercuts the film’s argument about science to feature this sequence, which is so blatantly and obviously inaccurate.  It is there, it seems, only to pad the film to feature length.

To some extent, Trog is also reminiscent of King Kong (1933).  Here, Trog is taken from a “lost world of fantasy” (prehistory; his cave) and dragged into modernity, where he becomes the pawn of human agendas (either Brockton’s or Murdock’s).  There, he is mistreated badly, and goes on a killing rampage.  To survive in safety, civilization has no choice but to destroy him.  Both stories are really tragedies, ones about a noble beast mistreated in a world he was never meant to see, and which he is incapable of understanding.

Although not a great film, perhaps, Trog certainly is a product of the 1970s, a story about the “missing link” in evolution, which was a hot-topic in the era.  TV series such as Land of the Lost (1974 – 1977) featured a missing link, and Space: 1999 (1975 – 1977) even had an episode called “Missing Link.”  The idea of there being a “bridge” between ape and man was a popular one of the time, though now discredited.  Regardless Trog is memorable today not only as Joan Crawford’s last film, but as a science fiction effort that engenders sympathy for its title character.

Influence:

In the 1980s, a more big-budget variation on Trog was made; 1985’s Iceman. It was much more scientifically accurate, though perhaps equally haunting.

Earth’s first space crisis: Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain (1971).

1971

The Real World: 1971

January 12:               All in the Family, Norman Lear’s sitcom about a blue-collar bigot, Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) premieres on CBS.

January 25:               Idi Amin becomes the president of Uganda following a coup.

February 8:              The Nasdaq index is established.

February 15:               The United Kingdom switches to decimal currency.

April 9:               Charles Manson is sentenced to death for his 1969 murders, but the sentence is eventually commuted to life in prison.

May 1, 1971:              PBS airs America’s first “reality show,” An American Family, a peek at the life of the Loud family. It quickly proves a national sensation.

June 13:               The New York Times publishes the Pentagon Papers.

June 17:               President Richard Nixon declares the U.S. “War on Drugs.”

July 3:                            Jim Morrison is found dead in Paris.

August 15:               President Nixon imposes a 90-day freeze on wages.

October 1:               Walt Disney World opens in Orlando, Florida.

October 14:               Greenpeace is founded.

November 24:               A skyjacker, D.B. Cooper parachutes from a plane in the air after stealing two-hundred thousand dollars, and is never heard from again.

Gazing into the face of alien terror: Dr. Stone (Arthur Hill; foreground) and Dr. Leavitt (Kate Reid; background) examine the microscopic space entity called Andromeda in Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain (1971)

The Andromeda Strain (1971) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“Director Robert Wise didn’t miss a trick. His actors…are solid performers all. His sets are superb and thoroughly convincing, his photography is striking, and the story, based on the best seller by Michael Crichton is gripping, intelligent and frightening.” – Jeff Rovin, A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films, Citadel Press, 1975, page 193.

“…director Robert Wise, adapting Michael Crichton's best-selling 1969 novel, handles the tech stuff matter-of-factly, albeit in a detailed way that's earned the movie a reputation as overlong. Things start cooking when Wise gets into his (underappreciated) specialty — creating excruciating, real-time suspense — once it's revealed that the alien killer hasn't been contained in the small New Mexican town where the satellite landed.” – Glen Kenny, Entertainment Weekly, “Epidemic Proportions,” August 4, 1995.

“…the tone tends to give way to flashing computer lights and overly intense acting…the climax, in particular, is painfully overdone…” – Larry Lempert, The Michigan Daily, February 2, 1973.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: James Olson (Dr. Mark Hall); Arthur Hill (Dr. Jeremy Stone); David Wayne (Dr. Charles Dutton); Kate Reid (Dr. Ruth Leavitt); Paula Kelly (Karen Anson); George Mitchell (Jackson); Ramon Bieri (Major Manchek); Peter Hobbs (General Sparks); Kermit Murdock (Dr. Robertson); Richard O’Brien (Grimes); Eric Christmas (Senator from Vermont); Mark Jenkins (Lt. Shawn); Peter Helm (Sgt. Crane); Ken Swofford (Toby); Frances Reid (Clara Dutton).

CREW: Universal Studios Presents a Robert Wise Production, The Andromeda Strain. Director of Photography: Richard H. Kline. Original Music: Gil Melle. Film Editors: Stuart Gilmore, John W. Holmes. Production Design: Boris Leven. Special Photographic Effects: Douglas Trumball. Produced by: Robert Wise. Written by: Nelson Gidding. Based on the novel by: Michael Crichton. Directed by: Robert Wise. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 131 minutes.

Story:

The U.S. Military’s Scoop project goes badly astray when a satellite carrying an alien micro-organism crashes in Piedmont, New Mexico, and proceeds to kill all but two denizens of the town.

The U.S. quickly marshals an emergency response, and two scientists, Jeremy Stone (Hill) and surgeon Mark Hall (Olson) explore the contaminated town in bio-hazard suits.  They rescue the two survivors: an old drunk, and a crying baby.

Later, at a state-of-the-art, subterranean scientific facility called Wildfire, Hall and Stone are joined by other scientists including Charles Dutton (Wayne) and Ruth Leavitt (Reid), and together the group attempts to determine if the strange alien micro-organism could threaten human life throughout all of America and indeed the world.

Studies reveal that the alien, termed “Andromeda” is only 2-microns in diameter, and that it transmits itself by air.  Possessing a crystalline structure visible only under electronic microscope, the ever-mutating Andromeda can also grow in a vacuum, and its development is accelerated by energy discharge.

Bad news soon reaches the base about their newly discovered “bug”: a super-colony of Andromeda has formed over the Pacific Coast and is growing larger by the moment. It could kill millions.

The scientists race to avert a nuclear strike that they recommended and that was subsequently ordered by the President of the United States, realizing that the energy involved in such a detonation would only impel Andromeda to grow even larger.

Meanwhile, Dr. Hall studies his patients – the old sterno drinker and the crying infant – and determines that Andromeda can only survive in a narrow range of pH levels.

Before this knowledge can be applied to destroy Andromeda, however, Wildfire is contaminated, and the base’s computer initiates a timed self-destruct sequence.  Now Dr. Hall must race through the many, self-contained levels of the complex to avert total disaster.

Review:

Mankind enters the “future age” of ascendant science in director Robert Wise’s impressive techno-thriller The Andromeda Strain, and the film ultimately proves that technology and scientific know-how can battle a deadly space “bug” to a stand-still.

Accordingly, Wise and his film itself -- an adaptation of a Michael Crichton best-selling book -- seem to worship at the feet of machinery, medicine, and science, not to-mention provide a reverent near-religious litany of techno-talk.  In this world, ordering up a computer test is more like quoting Scripture.

The film’s assessment of mankind, however, may seem less gracious. Here, mankind’s failings get in the way of progress, slow-down the process of stopping Andromeda, and nearly destroy the entire world.  The film’s final message, diagrammed in a computerized “601 Error” is that machines are ultimately only as good as their users.

In other words, we’re the weak link. If computers fail, it’s because of us.

From The Andromeda Strain’s opening credits, Wise takes pains to present new technology as a vivid brand of modern art. The colorful credits reveal overlapping, multi-colored images of schematics, inter-office communiques, top-secret documents, and the like.

These seemingly non-romantic dispatches are cut together and blended into new patterns (via superimposition) for the dynamic montage.  These swirling and dazzling images are also accompanied by Gil Melle’s machine-like electronic score, and the final effect is both staggering and thematically daring.  We might very well be watching a computer program’s artistic vision.  This imagery conveys the idea that machines aren’t just tools, but capable of moving into a terrain man has long reserved for himself: artistry.

In assembling the blueprints, maps, graphs and other images for the purposes of this artistic montage, the film’s opening credits take a step beyond Jackson Pollock, forging heretofore unseen, unconnected patterns out of dot matrix scans and the like, in the determined synthesis of something new and bold.

The implicit message: technology is your friend.

This pro-automation approach runs deliberately counter to one of the most common ideas of 1970s science fiction cinema, as related in films such as Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) or Demon Seed (1977), that technology will prove man’s undoing.

Instead, The Andromeda Strain’s dialogue reinforces the notion of a world in which science will save the day.  The film is dominated by tongue-twisters like “Red Kappa Phoenix Status,” and the scientists eat “Nutrient 2-5” while ordering up a test called a “7-12.”

Although these phrases seem like meaningless jargon in simple human terms, in this world they are vital signifiers of man’s ascent to a more evolved plateau.

The science-talk reflects Wise’s uncanny ability (also seen in Star Trek: The Motion Picture) to forge a documentary-like or “realistic” tone in science fiction, but also suggests that in the first space age emergency, space age lingo is a necessity.  Advances in computers, science and medicine will change the world, and they will also change how we talk, the film indicates.

It’s difficult to deny that this is actually the case, and in 2013, laypeople talk about “wireless routers,” “diagnostic updates,” “system restores” and other once arcane-seeming phrases with the enthusiasm and knowledge of the scientists portrayed in The Andromeda Strain.

The tools used by the scientists in The Andromeda Strain are often the focus of Wise’s intent sight, and electron microscopes, computer scans, “electronic diagrams” and other visuals are regularly highlighted by the camera.  The idea, of course, is that in the dawn of a new age, machines will make the difference between life and death on planet Earth.  Robert Wise even once called his film’s setting --the Wildfire Base -- the real star of the movie.

And of course, he’s right. Without the resources of this subterranean base, man would not be able to stop the spread of Andromeda.

Wise’s treatment of man himself is far less generous in The Andromeda Strain.  Dr. Ruth Leavitt is an epileptic, and she hides that vital knowledge from her co-workers and hence from the computerized databases in Wildfire.  So when an important computer screen transmits its data to her in red-blinking lights, Leavitt cannot receive it.  She seizes instead, and has no memory of having seen the data.

Again, no one can blame this series of unfortunate events on the computer, which accurately tagged the “no-growth” medium for Andromeda that Leavitt sought. Instead, user error -- human error -- is the culprit.

Similarly, the scientists at Andromeda order a nuclear strike at Piedmont before they have all the facts.  They make an assumption that a nuclear blast will wipe out an alien organism, and this is proven catastrophically wrong.  In fact, the opposite would have been true.  A nuclear blast would have spread a super-colony of Andromeda across the entirety of the North American continent.

In this case, the scientists are prevented from causing global-scale catastrophe only by a machine failure: a paper jam in a printer-like device.  So again, even inadvertently, the machines of The Andromeda Strain save man from himself.

Other Wildfire denizens seen in The Andromeda Strain are not much smarter than Leavitt. Trained scientists panic and flee when they believe that Wildfire is contaminated with the alien organism. They do not act rationally and attempt to help Hall, who has dangling around his neck in the form of a key the capacity to save everybody from nuclear apocalypse.

But the screaming ninnies don’t consider this fact.  Instead, they run around like chickens with their heads cut-off, and any higher-reasoning seems short-circuited.  After all, if the base is contaminated, as they fear, then it is going to self-destruct, and no amount of running or screaming is going to get them to minimum safe distance following a many-megaton blast.

There may be some viewers who watch The Andromeda Strain and look for a more human-centered story about resolving the first biological crisis of the space age.  But the film’s glory is that this is not the story it told.

Instead, Wise tells the story of man’s machinery solving the problem, and this is a creative, counter-intuitive approach to the material.  It is also, in its own weird way, optimistic.

After all, who built all these great machines in the first place?

Agent 007 (Sean Connery) tees off on a replica of the lunar surface in Diamonds are Forever (1971), a James Bond film with a space theme.

Diamonds Are Forever (1971) * *

Critical Mass:

“Exhausting, but ample money’s worth for Bond fans.” – The Sydney Morning Herald, December 19, 1971.

“James Bond still packs a lethal wallop in all his cavortings, still manages to surround himself with scantily-clad sexpots. Yet Diamonds Are Forever doesn’t carry the same quality or flair as its many predecessors.” – Variety, December 31, 1970.

“…as big a bunch of junk as the Bond producers ever threw together…the Bond movie that really lays the ghost of Ian Fleming to rest.” – Christopher Bray, Sean Connery: A Biography. Pegasus Books, Chapter Eight: “You’ve Had Your Six.”

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Sean Connery (James Bond/007); Jill St. John (Tiffany Case); Charles Gray (Ernst Stavros Blofeld); Lana Wood (Plenty O’Toole); Jimmy Dean (Willard Whyte); Bruce Cabot (Saxby); Putter Smith (Mr. Kidd); Bruce Glover (Mr. Wint); Norman Burton (Leiter); Joseph Furst (Dr. Metz).

CREW: MGM/UA Presents Sean Connery as Ian Fleming’s James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever. Director of Photography: Ted Moore. Original Music: John Barry. Film Editors: Bert Bates, John W. Holmes. Production Designer: Ken Adam. Produced by: Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. Written by: Richard Maibum, Tom Mankiewicz. Directed by: Guy Hamilton. M.P.A.A. Rating: GP. Running time: 120 minutes.

Story:

James Bond (Connery), Agent 007, scours the globe for his arch-enemy, S.P.E.C.T.R.E.’s Blofeld (Charles Gray), and when he finds him, he kills him with glee.

Sometime later Bond is assigned to a case by his superior M (Lee) that involves a diamond smuggling ring.  The investigation takes Bond to Amsterdam, where he meets a beautiful smuggler Tiffany Case (St. John).

Through an elaborate series of connections, however, Bond learns that the diamonds are actually connected to the reclusive American millionaire Willard Whyte (Dean), who lives in a penthouse apartment in Las Vegas.  Bond then finds that the real Willard Whyte is being held captive, and that Blofeld -- having created multiple decoy duplicates of himself including the one Bond killed -- is impersonating the tycoon so as to (mis)use his fortune.

Blofeld’s new plan is to utilize a diamond-ringed, laser-equipped satellite to blackmail the world.  Bond pursues Blofeld to his new headquarters, on an oil rig at sea, and with Tiffany’s help, attempts to stop Blofeld once and for all.

Review:

Bloated, overlong, and edited with a feeling of lassitude and resignation, Diamonds Are Forever marks James Bond uninspiring entrance into the 1970s, and Sean Connery’s last turn in the iconic role until 1983’s Never Say Never Again. Meandering and labyrinthine, the film suffers from its steadfast refusal to clarify some important points about James Bond’s mission this time around.

Specifically, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) starring George Lazenby as James Bond, Blofeld (Telly Savalas at that point…) killed Bond’s new wife, Tracy (Diana Rigg) in cold blood.  Accordingly, Diamonds Are Forever starts with Bond searching the world for Blofeld, attempting to murder him, but never makes any explicit connection or any mention of the events of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

So we have a different actor playing Bond, pursuing a different actor playing Blofeld, and the context of the pursuit is totally unclear.  Is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service being ignored and treated as non-canon?  Are audiences just supposed “to know” why Bond is angry?  Certainly, one would think that in one of Bond’s multiple confrontations with Blofeld in this film, he might mention Tracy by name, or exhibit some kind of personal hatred for Blofeld over the killing of his wife, but it doesn’t really happen.

In fact, Bond kills Blofeld (he thinks) in a mud-bath in the film’s pre-title sequence and then just quips like its old times as the opening song begins. He doesn’t seem driven by personal rage.

Additionally, Sean Connery looks unkempt, overweight, and bored as James Bond in Diamonds are Forever, and is barely able to muster interest in the convoluted, over-complicated plot-line about stolen diamonds being used as components in a deadly satellite.  And the climactic battle, set atop a real life oil rig, is a debacle from a visual and narrative standpoint.  Bond shakes Blofeld around in his submersible by a crane, but there is no discernible sense of Blofeld being defeated, or Bond’s revenge quest coming to a meaningful end.  Indeed, Blofeld shows up alive in 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, but at least that film has the decency to name-check Tracy (on her tombstone) on the anniversary of her death. Here, Blofeld’s oil rig also takes a lot of explosive hits, but never seems to get truly damaged.

The science fiction aspects of Diamonds are Forever involve the aforementioned satellite and its death ray capability.  One of the most enjoyable aspects of the film finds Bond infiltrating Willard Whyte’s subterranean space program facility, wandering onto a recreation of the lunar surface, and then stealing a lunar buggy for an extended chase across the desert.

Outside of the space age plot, this Bond film also features one of the best fight sequences in the entire Bond cycle.  Specifically, 007 goes up against jewel smuggler Peter Franks (Joe Robinson) in an extremely tight setting: a cramped elevator compartment.  The setting is so tight, actually, that almost each time a character pulls back to deliver a punch, an elbow shatters glass on the windows or hits a button, accidentally making the doors open and close, and the elevator rise and fall.  This unpredictable fight scene features broken light bulbs and shattered glass panes, and at one point Franks picks up a shard of jagged glass and attempts to stab Bond with it.  There isn’t a lot of quick cutting during this scene or much change in camera position or angle, just two men --

From the author’s personal collection: a worse-for-wear (shaken not stirred?) Diamonds are Forever record album

Connery and Robinson (and their stunt-men no doubt) -- slugging it out brutally, sometimes for long stretches.  This is one of the meanest, most down-and-dirty hand-to-hand grudge matches in the long-lived franchise, and one of the best.  A fight like this belongs in a much better Bond film, and is an out-of-step high-point in what seems a listless and life-less entry.

Influence:

Diamonds are Forever was Connery’s final Bond film of the 1970s, and Roger Moore took over the role in 1972’s Live and Let Die, a film that keyed in on the Blaxploitation aspects of the pop culture, rather than science fiction.

Out of time, and in the hands of the enemy. Zira (Kim Hunter; left) and Cornelius (Roddy McDowall; right) face a government inquisition in the 20th century in Escape from the Planet of the Apes.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) * * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

Don Taylor's direction seems composed in equal parts of efficiency and tact, and with this material alone he earns his place among the just for every easy irony he avoids. There are certain remarkable moments (for example, the first shot of the chimpanzees' hotel room, especially prepared for their welcome to Los Angeles), but more often there is a sense of decent professionalism un-attracted to spectacular devices.” – Roger Greenspun, The New York Times, May 29, 1971.

“"Escape" looks more like a made-for television movie than anything else. The first half, in fact, might pass for a situation comedy in which people are amused at apes who act like humans… Kim Hunter and to a slightly lesser extent. Roddy McDowell, manage to register as personalities in spite of the simian suits they wear.” – Tony Mastroianni, The Cleveland Press: “This Movie Apes Its Betters,” July 9, 1971.

“Escape from the Planet of the Apes is an excellent film, almost as good as the original Planet of the Apes. Arthur Jacobs’ production is marked by an outstanding script, using some of the original Pierre Boulle novel characters; excellent direction by Don Taylor; and superior performances from a cast headed by encoring Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter.” – Variety, December 31, 1970.

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Roddy McDowall (Cornelius); Kim Hunter (Zira); Bradford Dillman (Dr. Lewis Dixon); Natalie Trundy (Dr. Stephanie Branton); Eric Braeden (Dr. Otto Hasslein); Ricardo Montalban (Armando); William Windom (The President); Sal Mineo (Dr.Milo); Jason Evers and Albert Salmi (Operatives); John Randolph (Commission Chairman); HarryLauter (General Winthrop); M. Emmet Walsh (Aide); Norman Burton (Army Officer).

CREW: 20th Century Fox presents Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Director of Photography: Joseph Biroc. Original Music: Jerry Goldsmith. Film Editor: Marion Rothman. Producer: Arthur P. Jacobs. Written by: Paul Dehn. Directed by: Don Taylor. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 98 minutes.

Story:

Ape-o-nauts Zira (Hunter), Cornelius (McDowall) and Milo (Mineo) escape the destruction of the Earth in 3955, and time-warp back to early 1970s America.

There, after Milo is accidentally killed by a primitive gorilla in a military zoo, they find the human population quizzical and amused by their presence. Very soon, the talking apes become pop culture celebrities and even make appearances on television.

But the President’s advisor, Dr. Otto Hasslein (Braeden) is concerned about them. A couple of verbal slips from Zira have made him aware that their world -- a world in which apes are masters and humans are dumb -- is Earth of the future.

When Hasslein learns that Zira is pregnant, his fears skyrocket and he requests permission to execute the kindly chimps. With a help of a kindly physician, Dr. Dixon (Dillman) and a sympathetic circus owner, Armando (Montalban), Zira and Cornelius go into hiding.  But Hasslein pursues them relentlessly, with murder -- and the future -- on his mind…

Review:

Some movie critics have described 1971's Escape from the Planet of the Apes as the most light-hearted film in the original five-strong Ape film series.  This is so because the film treads deeply into fish-out-of-water humor as ape-o-nauts Zira (Hunter) and Cornelius (McDowall) attempt to fit in with 20th century human, celebrity culture.  But that welcome sense of humor doesn't survive the film's finale: a blazing, go-for-broke valedictory gut punch.  Specifically, at the film's climax, the audience is exposed to a number of truly disturbing, truly scarring images.

First, kindly chimpanzee psychologist, Zira (Kim Hunter) is shot in the back several times while running away from her assailant and clutching her helpless baby.  Next, a villainous scientist, Otto Hasslein (Eric Braeden) empties his gun into the body of Zira's baby (presumably), and we see the bullet-ridden, bloody blanket in close-up view.  Then, Cornelius (Roddy McDowall), Zira's beloved husband -- standing atop a high deck on a rusty ship -- kills Hasslein and we see the blood erupt out of his chest as a bullet strikes him.

In short order, a police sniper shoots Cornelius too, and we watch in agonizing close-up as this beloved character, this pacifist chimpanzee, gasps repeatedly for air, plummets from his perch, and smashes hard onto the deck below. He lands with an unforgettable thud.

The most disturbing portion of this death scene is the close-up of McDowall's character after he is shot: Cornelius's lungs have been punctured, and we see him register, shock, confusion, and pain as the terminal nature of his wounds take effect, and he struggles for air.

Finally, the bloodied Zira -- after dumping her baby's corpse into polluted-looking water -- crawls desperately to her husband's side and quietly dies beside him. Then there's a dramatic pull-back -- the cinematic equivalent of a "Holy Shit" exclamation -- as the camera retracts in horror from this orgy of violence perpetrated against, inarguably, the franchise's most beloved and gentle characters.

And yes, this move is Rated G for "General Audiences."

Escape from the Planet of the Ape’s ending is tough sledding because Cornelius and Zira are such kind, innocent, loving beings and throughout the film, they almost literally wear their hearts on their sleeves. This quality of sincerity makes them very open with strangers ("I like you," Zira tells one of their captors, the kindly Dr. Lewis [Bradford Dillman]). Yet their openness makes them impulsive too. This quality of total honesty and openness means Zira doesn't know any better than to tell her human captors everything about her work in the distant future, including her experimentation on dumb and mute humans. And Cornelius also reacts impulsively but protectively when Zira --following a torture session by Hasslein -- is insulted by an orderly. Cornelius kills the boy in an instant of fleeting rage. He is immediately regretful about his outburst, but it is too late.

Considering the events of the last act, the humor of the early part of the film is damned deceptive.  The fish-out-water humor and funny gags only serve to enhance audience connection to Zira and Cornelius, to reflect on how two strangers in a strange land seem so willing to embrace humanity despite everything they know about it.

Yet what some viewers may not have taken full notice of, perhaps, in their viewings of the film, is just how skilled and indeed how artistic the film remains in support of such a rather bleak tale. Director Don Taylor makes remarkable use of the rectangular movie frame in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, forging a number of impressive compositions in the process.

One of the finest examples of his work opens the film.  We start with a landscape view of a timeless ocean, bracketed on the left by a jagged mountain. This image plainly recalls the post-apocalyptic Forbidden Zone’s rocky shore-line and Statue of Liberty-ending of Planet of the Apes. But before we can contemplate this particular and familiar seeming vision for too long, a contemporary helicopter unexpectedly juts into frame from the left, making audiences aware that we have returned to our Earth of the present. This is a great tie-in to the previous films; one of remarkable visual consistency for the series. It's exactly the opening shot we would expect of a Planet of the Apes sequel...but with a unique twist. The shot connects the future to the present.

In terms of visualizations, Taylor's direction also makes a case for our eyes that the human world (soon to die in a nuclear conflagration...) is already half-dead. The apes from the future are welcomed to this world as heroes and celebrities, but are soon tortured and mistreated by agents of the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Accordingly, Zira and Cornelius go from staying at luxurious hotel rooms to utilitarian military bases, finally to a forgotten, rusted ship-yard that represents the wasteful, ruined, industrial infrastructure of a bloated human society living on borrowed time.

Zira attempts to nurse her baby inside an abandoned ship there, and the vessel is a total wreck. What the film suggests visually, then, is an odd conjunction of birth and dying in the same rectangular frame.

In terms of visual aplomb, Taylor also evidences a real preference for images which note the apes' entrapment and encroaching doom here in our 20th century culture. A preponderance of shots reveal the endangered apes through bars, window frames, door-frames or other enclosures that suggest, at least implicitly, their snare. Even the film's final shot of an intelligent chimp baby behind bars adopts this stance; an appropriate touch since it occurs at the prehistory of ape enslavement in human culture. The film also adopts the high-angle perspective frequently, and in film grammar, that shot is also a signifier of doom.

Thematically, Escape from the Planet of the Apes structure is also admirable. It functions as deliberate blow-for-blow mirror-image of the original, one that carefully flips the ape/human dynamics of Schaffner’s 1968 effort. Three astronauts travel through time in both stories. Kindly "animal" psychologists tend to the astronauts in both stories -- in direct contradiction to the rules of the prevailing, cruel society -- and there are also early casualties amongst the space travelers in both Escape and Planet. In Escape's presidential commission or "panel of inquiry," there's even a resonance of Planet of the Apes' famous "See/Speak/Hear No Evil" Tribunal composition.  For a film that cloaks itself, at least initially as a comedy sequel, this mirror-image approach proves downright crafty and illuminating.

Perhaps what's even more commendable about Escape from the Planet of the Apes is the film's central theological and philosophical argument. Hasslein discusses the nature of time and destiny. "Time is like a freeway, a freeway with an infinite number of lanes. All leading from the past into the future. However not the same future." He informs the audience. "It follows that a driver -- by changing lanes -- can change his future."

But then, in a conversation with the President of the United States, Hasslein admits that he wonders about his next course of action. Apes will take over the world if Zira and Cornelius are allowed to raise their baby. Hasslein thus wants to sterilize the parents and abort the baby. But as he aptly puts it "which future has God -- if there is a God -- chosen for our future?" In killing the talking apes, is Hasslein an instrument of God's plan, or an enemy of God's plan?

In response, the President brings up the famous Hitler time-travel conundrum. Would we kill Hitler in the womb, knowing what we know of the man and his war crimes? Would he kill his remote ancestors? Finally, the President's answer is one of practicality and political buck-passing. When told that talking apes will dominate Earth's future, he notes sardonically, "I doubt that we shall still be in office by then."

Hasslein’s attempt to affect the shape of destiny sees a deliberate reflection in a character introduced in the final act, the circus owner Armando (Ricardo Montalban). Armando states that he despises those who try to intervene in destiny, and act against God's plan. And furthermore, that if it is man's fate to be dominated by intelligent apes, he hopes those apes are as kind as Zira and Cornelius have proven to be.

So essentially, the film provides two opposing points of view: pre-determinism (Armando) vs. free will (Hasslein).

Or to put it another way, Hasslein desires to "change lanes" in order avoid a terrible future for human beings. Armando prefers to believe that we're not even driving the car; that God has everyone on cruise control of sorts. Changing lanes is futile, if it isn't in God's scheme.

Interestingly, the very words of Zira and Cornelius, regarding "future" ape history, inform us a bit more about the shape of this argument. The two kindly chimps insist that, according to their Sacred Scrolls pet apes went from doing tricks to performing services in two centuries. And that they turned the tables on their human oppressors in another three centuries.

Thus in the world that Zira and Cornelius arise from (and which Col. Taylor visited in the original) it takes 500 years for harried apes to develop the power of speech and become conscious to the philosophical concepts of slavery and freedom, unity and corporate action. This long period of "dawning realization" may have occurred because there was no real intelligent leader of the movement. Insurrection, revolution and a new order must arise through the crucible of experience; through evolution and learning, and through generations of slavery.

But by "changing lanes," by traveling back in time, Zira and Cornelius have altered destiny and their own history. Now, their child -- an intelligent ape -- will bring about the same pro-ape revolution in decades, not centuries.

So the future has indeed been changed. It has been hastened.

But the irony of this is Hasslein's role. He acts to kill the baby of the talking apes, and the world believes he has succeeded in his quest. Thus the hunt for Zira and Cornelius's child ends permanently...at least until a paranoid governor named Breck picks it up twenty years later when it is too late. By acting to destroy the threat now, by arrogantly believing he can "change lanes," Hasslein has also hastened the very future he hoped to avoid (the pre-determined future?). The apes will take over his world; and they will do it much sooner than they would have without his witch-hunt. Perhaps God has played a trick on the vain scientist. The outcome was never in doubt; only the scheduling of it.

Intriguingly the final film in the original five-strong movie, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, returns to the theme enunciated so well in Escape from the Planet of the Apes.  There, a kindly chimp Virgil (Paul Williams) also suggests that there are multiple paths or lanes to different futures.   This is important to Caesar -- as we shall see -- because he wants to avoid the end of the world that Zira and Cornelius witnessed at the ending of Beneath. But unlike Hasslein, Caesar attempts to manipulate the future through an act of love and kindness, not violence.

Critics are always quick to note the pointed social commentary in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, and indeed, there's much to note. Zira gives a bra-burning speech to a Bay Area Women's Club, striking a feminist chord right at the time that second-wave feminism was really entering the American bloodstream. "The marriage bed is made for two," she declares to rousing applause, "But every damn morning it's the woman who has to make it."

Similarly, Cornelius attends a boxing prize fight, and is horrified by the overt brutality of the event. By pointed contrast, the humans don't seem to be horrified by this violence in the slightest. They cheer as the fighters pummel one another.  Yet oppositely, and hypocritically, the humans do take great exception to the violence Zira inflicts on human experimental subjects...in the year 3955 AD.

The same humans who decry Zira's lab experiments in the distant future are also, importantly, the first to decide on her draconian personal disposition: sterilization after a state-enforced abortion. Given this scenario, Escape from the Planet of the Apes very much involves human hypocrisy. Or as Zira notes” "We've met hundreds of humans since we've been here. And I trust three."

There's also much underlying commentary in Escape from the Planet of the Apes about the American media and pop culture, and how it often proves fickle. At first, Cornelius and Zira capture the hearts of "the voters" as the President states. For a while, they are even the toast of the town. Why, they even go to Disneyland to dedicate a "new boat" in the "jungle cruise."

Within a few weeks, however, the apes are spirited to an undisclosed location, and eventually murdered. The culture that worshipped them has apparently forgotten all about them; moved on to different bread and circuses. The message: souls as honest and gentle as Zira and Cornelius get snuffed out in this media "circus" (as opposed to Armando's more compassionate circus, a place of authentic sanctuary).

Ultimately, Escape from the Planet of the Apes serves as a sturdy bridge between the first two films in the series and the last two. It is the only entry not set in the future. It is also the movie, in a sense, that makes the entire Planet of the Apes series possible, since it "resurrects" characters from a destroyed Earth of the future and delivers them (and young Caesar...) into the 20th century timeline where the ascent of the apes will soon occur. For all these reasons, Escape from the Planet of the Apes is a strong entry -- and a necessary one -- in the five-strong franchise.

And on a personal note, I still find the film intensely traumatizing. Cornelius and Zira are golden hearts, to appropriate a descriptor from director Lars von Trier. We have witnessed their decency and humanity in Planet of the Apes, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and here in their last film too. To kill off such sweet, beloved characters in such brutal, unblinking fashion is almost sadistic.

But the point about the cruelty of the current human culture is effectively made. In truth, the enduring power of Escape from the Planet of the Apes probably arises from that vivid, bloody ending. This is a fin de siècle film, period. The human world is ending; a rusted, industrial nightmare of decay and bloat, and soon to degenerate even further (the death of pets by space plague is just ten years off in this time-line, for instance). Even the film's final image is haunting, and a little surreal. A baby ape -- the real child of Zira and Cornelius – is seen behind bars at Armando's circus, shouting plaintively; calling unheeded for his "Mama."

So Escape from the Planet of the Apes is not exactly a barrel full of monkeys

Glen and Randa (1971) * * *

Critical Mass:

“I rather like the way the film eschews dramatic climaxes, as if reflecting the barrenness of the emotional lives of Glen and Randa, but this leads to an awful monotony that neither the meaning of the film nor the performances can relieve.” – Vincent Canby, The New York Times, September 20, 1971.

“An eccentric pre-Mad Max vision minus violence and bloodletting.” - John Stanley, Revenge of the Creature Features Movie Guide, Creatures at Large Press, 1988, page 126.

“…uneven but worthwhile effort.” – Scott Von Doviak. If You Like The Terminator…, Limelight Editions, 2012.

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Steve Curry (Glen); Shelley Plimpton (Randa); Woodrow Chambliss (Sidney Miller); Garry Goodrow (Magician); Roy Fox, William Fratis, Richard Frazier, Martha Furey, Laura Hawbecker, Mary Henry, Talmadge Holiday, Robert Holmer, Alice Huffman, Charles Huffman, Leonard Johnson, Lucille Johnson.

CREW: A Sidney Glazier production, Glen and Randa. Director of Photography: Alan Raymond. Film Editing by: Jack Baran, Mike Levin. Production Design: Gary Weist. Produced by: Watson James. Executive Producer: Sidney Glazier. Written by: Lorenzo Mans, Rudolph Wurlitzer and Jim McBride. Directed by: Jim McBride. M.P.A.A. Rating: X. Running time: 93 minutes.

Story: In a post-apocalyptic world of no technology and no organized civilization, two young people in love, Glen (Curry) and Randa (Plimpton) explore their world with curiosity.

One night, their camp is visited by an old magician (Goodrow) in a camper who shows them some of the miracles of the pre-apocalypse world, including comic books, maps, and photographs.

Glen is completely taken with the comic-books, which depict a world of civilization and a great city called Metropolis, and he and Randa subsequently leave home and head towards the coast to find it.

They journey over several seasons, even while Randa deals with pregnancy.  At the coast, they meet another old man, Sidney (Chambliss), who has not seen another human being for twenty years. He helps deliver Randa’s baby, but tragedy strikes.

Review:

Glen and Randa is a rambling, unstructured and yet nonetheless impressive post-apocalyptic slice-of-life.  As such, it remains one of the most memorable science fiction films of the 1970s.  Importantly, Glen and Randa does not concern itself with issues of war, obsess over man’s pollution of the Earth, or even focus on villains who might threaten the film’s heroes.  Instead, it concerns only two naïve, uneducated youngsters, and their attempts to interface with a baffling, incomprehensible new world.

Jim McBride’s film, which was rated X upon release for its excessive nudity, opens with Glen and Randa in the forest, completely naked.  At first, it appears that they have descended to the level of pre-stone-age men, not even bothering to wear animal skins to protect themselves against the elements.  Soon, however, we see that Glen and Randa and those in their tribe do wear clothes, and survive by foraging off the land.  In this case, the tribe’s new home base is a deserted Howard Johnsons parking lot.  Of course, none in the tribe have any idea what a Howard Johnsons is.

In terms of Glen and Randa’s education and knowledge, however, they are indeed not much more advanced than the cave-men you might imagine. They lack the critical knowledge to survive in this futuristic wasteland, and are baffled by all the symbols and left-overs of the technological world.

And yet still, Glen is drawn to that which he doesn’t understand.  He believes fervently in a distant Metropolis in which everyone wears white, and can fly.  He sits in front of a broken TV without realizing it should be displaying images, because an old man informs him that this is what civilized people did. They watched the TV.  By contrast, Randa is much more practical.  She wonders what will happen if Glen uses up all their matches before they reach Metropolis.  Will he be able to start a fire without them? She is very patient with Glen as he repeatedly fails to make good choices regarding their survival, and ultimately she is the one who pays the price.

Glen’s belief in the dream of a perfect civilization may represent part of the movie’s core point about the human race.  Too often, humanity has concerned itself with things like that comic-book vision of Metropolis which, while shiny and pretty, ultimately don’t matter in the here-and-now of this post-apocalyptic world.  Glen is easily distracted by the “dream” when reality could use his focus instead.  And because this world possesses no modern medicine, Randa dies in child-birth.  Obsessed with his quest, Glen hardly takes pause at this juncture before loading the baby, the old man, and a goat into a boat and treading into the ocean to find the mythical Metropolis.  He can hardly process that Randa, the woman he loves, is gone forever.

Glen and Randa was filmed entirely out-doors in some very scenic locations, and the movie doesn’t push its points or lessons.  It just…is.  There’s not a whole lot of dialogue, and the film’s story structure is loose to say the least, and there is no antagonist whatsoever.

Today, our genre cinema requires much more strongly-structured narratives, ones featuring a predictable three-act build, and a nemesis to interfere with the hero’s journey.  But Glen and Randa is a breath of fresh air for eschewing this kind of tiresome and conventional thinking…as if dramatic or narrative structure has been obliterated in this world along with the rest of mankind’s advancements.

Why stick to rules that, after the end of the world, don’t mean anything? The movie’s form thus reflects its content.

Original and compelling, Glen and Randa is an unforgettable film.  The movie’s images will take up permanent residence in your imagination, and make you think about the important things in your life.  Glen and Randa interface with a world of Playboy, Doris Day, Wonder Woman, and Mick Jagger, but they have no idea what those things represent, or why they were important to those who have died.  Their world and their understanding of it are almost like the innocence of the Garden of Eden all over again, but with signifiers of sin (in the dead civilization) all around them.

As a chronicle of a post-apocalyptic time and place, and Glen and Randa is nothing less than captivating.  It’s like the book-end response to the Biblical story of man’s creation.

In the Beginning, we meet Adam and Eve.  In the end, we meet Glen and Randa.

The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1971) *

Critical Mass:

“…directed in listless fashion by Anthony M. Lanza, the film also features Berry Kroeger as Dern’s mad medic assistant and Casey Kasem as a credit to the A.M.A. who helps unravel the amateurishly raveled plot. Technical credits for the most part are fairly good.”- Edgar Driscoll, The Boston Globe, May 6, 1971, page 48.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Bruce Dern (Dr. Roger Girard); Pat Priest (Linda); Casey Kasem (Ken); Albert Cole (Cass); John Bloom (Danny); Berry Kroeger (Max); Larry Vincent (Andrew); Jack Lester (Sheriff); Jerry Patterson (Deputy).

CREW: AIP and Mutual General Corporation present The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant. Directors of Photography: Glen Gano, Paul Hipp, Jack Steely. Film Editor: Anthony M. Lanza. Original Music: John Barber. Make-up: Gloria Betrue. Produced by: John Lawrence. Executive Producer: Nicholas Wowchuk. Written by: John Lawrence and James Gordon White. Directed by: Anthony M. Lanza. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 87 minutes.

Story: A dedicated scientist, Roger Girard (Dern) works obsessively in his at-home laboratory to transplant second heads onto a variety of animals, including monkeys, rabbits, and snakes.

After a crazed murderer, Cass (Cole) escapes from an insane asylum and attacks Roger’s house and wife, Linda (Priest), the scientists decides to take his experiments further, and transplants the criminal’s head on the body of a local simpleton,  Danny (Bloom).  The experiment is a success, but the criminal quickly takes control of Danny’s body, and becomes a great threat to the community at large, as well as Roger’s family.

Review:

A woefully low-budget enterprise in which Casey Kasem plays both an on-screen character and an announcer on the radio, The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant is a complete waste of time.  A story of the “mad scientist” genre, the movie from Anthony Lana is almost completely scuttled by a completely inappropriate jazz score which accompanies any and all action, and baffling editing choices, including flash-cuts of random moments in the story that have not yet occurred in the narrative.

And although Bruce Dern delivers his patented nutty performance-style as the mad scientist, the actor playing Cass, Albert Cole, is absolutely unwatchable throughout.  He spends the movie leering with wide eyeballs and sticking his tongue out for no apparent reason.

More genuinely damaging than any of these factors is the fact that The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant never decides why Dr. Girard should go down the road he chooses, illicitly utilizing a human subject for his bizarre experiments, and then, finally, committing crimes (against his very wife, no less…) to preserve the pointless experiment’s outcome.

In the film, Girard decides to do the transplant on essentially a whim, and this makes no sense, since one of the men, Danny, is an absolute innocent.  In other words, Girard suddenly decides to save a mass murderer, and irrevocably harm a simpleton just to prove he can.  I’m not insisting that a scientist couldn’t make such a choice, only that a movie about him ought to grapple with the character’s motivations. The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant doesn’t grapple with much of anything.

By the end of the film, Girard is keeping his wife captive so she doesn’t go to the police, and even imprisoning her in a cage in his lab.  The point, though unexcavated, may be that he is as absolutely insane as Cass.

Although The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant might be gazed upon as a kind of prehistoric version of The Human Centipede (2010) -- a film also about a scientist who commits atrocities against fellow humans simply because he can -- it makes no convincing case even about Girard’s particular brand of madness.  Sometimes he is led about by the nose by his assistant, and sometimes he seems fully in charge.  Instead of focusing on motivations, the film wants to feature an encounter with a motorcycle gang, or scenes of police pursuing the two-headed monster.

Finally, the film ends with the scientist and the monster dying in a cave-in, and his wife insisting -- again bafflingly -- that her husband’s memory as a genius be preserved, and the truth be buried with him.  She’s a saint to pursue this course, particularly after her husband’s lousy treatment of her.

But if he were such a genius what led him down this road of madness?  The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant never forms even the beginnings of a rudimentary answer about Dr. Girard, and his desire to expand the boundaries of science and human knowledge.  And on top of that, the movie is occasionally unintentionally funny, especially when it focuses on cute little two-headed bunnies, or two-headed foxes.

A second “two headed” movie followed this one, and although not great, The Thing with Two Heads (1972) proves a distinct improvement over the original model because it’s actually about something: institutionalized racism.  That movie also has the added benefit of knowing that it is ridiculous, and proceeds accordingly.

The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant’s problem is that it needed  a few more heads involved in crafting a meaningful story about the possibilities and pitfalls of science’s push into a new age.

Neville (Charlton Heston) goes in search of “The Family’s” Hive in The Omega Man (1971).

The Omega Man (1971) * * *

Critical Mass:

“…the climax is as florid and phony as it can be.” – Howard Thompson, The New York Times, August 14, 1971, page 13.

“…A totally wasted opportunity.” – Alan Frank, The Horror Film Handbook, 1982 page 108.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Charlton Heston (Neville); Anthony Zerbe (Matthias); Rosalind Cash (Lisa); Paul Koslo (Dutch); Eric Laneuville (Richie); Lincoln Kilpatrick (Zachary); Jill Giraldi (Little Girl); Brian Tochi (Tommy); DeVeren Bookwalter, John Dierkes, Monika Henreid, Linda Redfearn, Forrest Wood (Family Member).

CREW:  Director of Photography: Russell Metty. Original Music:  Ron Grainer. Film Editing: William Ziegler. Art Direction: Arthur Loel, Walter M. Simonds. Produced by: Walter Seltzer. Written by: John William Corrington and Joyce Hooper Corrington. Based on the novel I am Legend by: Richard Matheson. Directed by: Boris Sagal. M.P.A.A. Rating: GP. Running time: 98 minutes.

Story:

Colonel Robert Neville (Heston) survives a biological plague that, in March of 1975, wiped out the vast majority of mankind. Now it is the year 1977, and Neville -- living a life of unending isolation -- devotes his days to discovering the location of "the Hive;" the hideout for The Family, a menacing gang of neo-Luddite, photophobic mutants.  If Neville owns daylight in this metropolis, the Family owns the night.  And every midnight, the Family surrounds his urban dwelling and calls Neville out, hoping to destroy this last remnant of technological man.

The Family's leader, the loquacious Matthias (Zerbe) believes that the plague was God's punishment of man; judgment on his dependence and belief in science and technology.  Now, he and his "Family" devote their lives to burning books and works of art, and destroying all evidence of 20th century technology.

While out one day in the city Neville unexpectedly encounters a fellow survivor named Lisa (Cash).  She is allied with a brilliant med-student, Dutch (Koslo) and several small children.  All of them are currently unaffected by the still-rampant plague, but could "turn" at any moment.   When Neville realizes that mankind could have a future again in this small group, he re-doubles his effort to produce a vaccine for the germ that destroyed almost all life on Earth.  He realizes that the key to destroying the plague involves his own untainted blood...

Review:

The Omega Man is the second silver screen adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1954 landmark novel, I am Legend. The first version starred Vincent Price and was called The Last Man on Earth (1964).  The third, I am Legend (2007), headlined Will Smith.  The Omega Man has often been termed the least faithful of the cinematic bunch, yet in many ways it's also the best film of the three, neither ultra-low budget in execution nor saddled with dated and ridiculous CGI effects.

In some respects, the first portion of The Omega Man -- with Heston's Neville alone in a vast urban jungle of glass, cement and metal -- remains the strongest and most memorable portion of the film. Neville continually drops one-liners, to an audience of one: himself.  "Another day, another dollar."  "There's never a cop around when you need one."  And -- during a viewing of Woodstock (1970) -- "They sure don't make pictures like that anymore." All these jokes are determinedly trite, and yet these familiar turns-of-phrase from before the apocalypse also seem poignant because they no longer carry their original meanings. Rather, they call attention to Neville's loneliness.

Another day another dollar?  Money is worthless.  There's never a cop around when you need one?  There's nobody around.  Period. They sure don't make pictures like that?  In fact, no new movies are being made now. Neville's sarcastic running commentary reveals just how pointless and empty his life has become; and how impossible it is to forget the past, and the dead.

Another exemplary scene early in the film finds Neville hunting down the Family in the empty Hotel Premiere.  He passes through a fancy hall with a grand chandelier, and then moves into a dining room where a long dinner table is still set with the finest china and linens.  Again, table settings, fancy dishes, frilly gold curtains, and ornate light fixtures seem damned unimportant in the face of extinction.  The visuals in this scene get at that idea; at the notion of man as having gone the way of the dodo or the dinosaur; with only these empty forms and shapes left behind.

Many such moments early in the film practically tingle with this electric idea of a fully-decorated but unpopulated world, as well as Neville's seething, caustic anger about his fate.  For instance, there's a moment when he spies a pin-up calendar on a car dealership wall, and has to take it down.  He can't bear to look at it; to be reminded of the fairer sex.  It's just too much to bear. And the scene in the movie theater, with Neville lip-synching the words to hippie dialogue in Woodstock (1970) represents some kind of twisted genius.  It gets to the tension inherent in casting right-wing Heston in a role such as this one. Heston's Neville doesn't give a flying hoot for the hippies or their counter-culture belief system.  But here he is, alone at the end of the world, and, well, he'll settle even for a hippie's faux profundity as company.

By having Neville accept and repeat the words of Woodstock, the movie knowingly puts this guy in the role of humanity's defender.  Messy humanity's defender, I should note. Neville is there celebrating it; mourning his people.  It's the equivalent of George Clooney playing Neville after the apocalypse, lip-synching to a Rush Limbaugh recording, or a Bill O'Reilly show.  There's a tension to it; an irony, and poignancy too.

The Omega Man also thrives as a good old fashioned action film.  There's an exhilarating motorcycle escape in a football-stadium, scored heroically by Granier, and culminating in a slow-motion jump.  It's sort of refreshing and eye-opening how basic and well-staged it is, with no digital effects or CGI backgrounds or herky-jerky camera work and editing.  To quote Neville, "they don't make pictures like this anymore."

I suppose most of the ire and brickbats directed at The Omega Man over the years involve the film's ending.  The climax finds Neville speared to a modern art fountain outside his apartment.  As he dies in a pool of his own life-saving blood, Neville slips into a Christ pose; of Jesus Christ on the cross.   This ending really upset critic Howard Thompson at The New York Times, who called it "phony" and "florid."

On the contrary, this ending is set up throughout the film, and thus represents an organic conclusion, structurally-speaking. Early on, a young girl gazes at Neville admiringly and asks, "Are you God?"  If that's not a clear set-up for the quasi-religious denouement, what would be?  But on more basic terms, what's intrinsically wrong or wrong-headed with the comparison of Neville to Christ?  Both men die for the sins of the world; and both die giving humanity a second chance.  In John 1:7, it is written “and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.”   In the case of Neville, his blood will also cleanse humanity of the plague; the sin of germ warfare made manifest in flesh.

Additionally, a critical part of Matheson's original novel is the mythologizing of Neville as a kind of bedtime story for the vampires, a bogeyman.  Though The Omega Man de-mythologizes and de-romanticizes the tale to a considerable degree, this ending brings it all back in.  This movie's events serve, in a sense, as an origin story of how mankind got a second chance.   That line of Scripture quoted above actually begins with the words "If ye walk in the light, as he is in the light..." and consider too that throughout the film, Neville is dramatically associated with the light; just as the Family is associated with the dark.  Neville only operates in the day time, and he preserves also the light of knowledge: of literature, art, medicine and science.  In the case of the latter two things, those are the very things which enable Neville to share his life-giving blood.

So the Crucifixion pose not only functions thematically; but it works in terms of the literal story and what these characters witness and will come to remember.  This is especially true of the children, particularly that little girl who asked if Neville is God.  She will grow up and tell her children about the man whose blood saved the human race. To some -- especially as generations pass -- Neville will indeed seem as a God, or at least a Savior. The ending of The Omega Man is not sacrilegious or profane, or even overly florid but rather the perfect and valid ending to Neville's particular story. After having spent years in the "wilderness" of Los Angeles alone, he returns to humanity and finds redemption both for himself and his people.  He has gone from being "hostile" and "not belonging," to saving the human race.  Furthermore, the casting of Heston, whom many associate with religious imagery because of Ten Commandments, lends further validity and credence to a religious or mythological interpretation of Neville's life.

Finally, the religious angle helps to contextualize what is at stake. The film depicts not just life after the fall of man, but a new and terrifying order, a "Family" (in the style of Charles Manson's) that wants to burn and destroy everything of value, from art to literature to sculpture.  This Family would leave the Earth in a new Dark Age without beauty, without imagination, without past and therefore without potential. That's the "Hell," so-to-speak, that Neville delivers the world from.  And that's why he earns his valedictory crucifixion, and recognition as man’s messiah.  It’s sort of churlish to complain that Neville can’t be compared to the messiah when he redeems himself, and his blood manages to redeem the species…

Punishment Park (1971) * * * *

Critical Mass

Shot during the post–Kent State "law and order" election of 1970, Punishment Park can seem so outrageous as to verge on camp, but few other movies capture so painfully the rhetoric and desperation of the times.” – J. Hoberman, The Village Voice: “The Man Tortures the Hippies,” May 11, 2010.

…“you might find it compelling for three reasons. The first is its absolute accuracy about the political divisions of the time--an effect Watkins achieved through the careful casting of nonprofessionals in all the roles, as dissidents, tribunal members and cops....The second thing that's compelling about the film is Watkins's astounding mimicry of television news coverage and BBC special reports. Few people had used this strategy before him; none since have done it better. The third reason for watching Punishment Park today? It's called Guantánamo, or Abu Ghraib, or names yet unknown to us. It took thirty-four years, but the near future of Watkins's movie has now become our present.” – Stuart Klawans, The Nation: “The Best Intentions,” December 12, 2005.

“America's involvement in Vietnam looms large in the movie, bringing to mind the debate over more recent conflicts. It's impossible not to see a parallel between Punishment Park and Guantanamo Bay. On top of that, the film evokes the sadistic rituals of reality TV, with Watkins' verite technique having hardly dated at all.” – Matthew Leyland, BBC. July 1, 2005..

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Carmen Argenziano (Jay Kaufman); Katherine Quittner (Nancy Smith); Scott Turner (James Kohler); Stan Armsted (Charlie Robbins); Mary Ellen Kleinhall (Allison Mitchell); Mark Keats (Chairman Hoeger); Gladys Golden (Mary Jurgens); Sigmund Rich (Professor Hazlett); George Gregory (Keagan); Paul Rosenstein (Paul Reynolds); Fred Franklyn (James Daly).

CREW: A New Yorker Films Release, Punishment Park. Original Music: Paul Motian. Directors of Photography: Joan Churchill, Peter Smokler. Film Editors: Terry Hodel, Paul Smokler.  Produced by: Susan Martin. Written and Directed by: Peter Watkins. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 88 minutes.

Story:

Following the Kent State shootings and the continuing escalation of War in Vietnam and Cambodia, President Nixon invokes the 1950 McCarron Act to arrest and try dissident American voices in draconian military tribunals.

Those found guilty of sedition face a choice: decades in a maximum-security prison, or three days in the Punishment Park system.  If they choose the latter, these unarmed citizens must brave 110 degree desert heat and race 50 miles to a freedom zone around an American flag.  All the while, armed officers of the law will pursue and attempt to apprehend them.

A British documentary film crew documents the Punishment Park system, filming Group 638 on its survival run, and Group 637 at it faces a military tribunal, or kangaroo court.

Review:

On May 4, 1970 as The Vietnam War escalated, the Kent State shootings -- sometimes called the May 4th massacre -- horrified a divided nation.  The context for this massacre was a student demonstration on the Kent State campus which protested President Richard Nixon’s newly-announced Cambodian bombing campaign. Members of the Ohio National Guard fired nearly seventy rounds in just over ten seconds, killing four university students and wounding nine others.  Two of the students killed during the incident weren’t even protesters; they were kids just walking to class when bullets began flying.

The Kent State shootings and their aftermath form the partial basis of the 1970s dystopian film Punishment Park from British director Peter Watkins.  In fact, the shootings are mentioned in the film specifically, especially the fact that innocents, not protesters, were among the dead.  Because of its relevant and hot-button subject matter, this science fiction film was all but banned from wide-release in America in 1971, but was released on DVD in 2004 at the height of the War on Terror, another era of unpopular war and protests about diminishing civil liberties.

Another crucial aspect of this “alternate reality” science fiction film of the 1970s also arises directly from the details of American history, in this case the Internal Security Act of 1950, also known as The Subversive Activity Control Act, or the McCarran Internal Security Act.  This law was enacted over President Harry Truman’s veto, who warned that the law made a “mockery” of America’s Bill of Rights.

Specifically, the McCarran Act required all communists to register with the Attorney General, established a “Control Board” to investigate citizens suspected of being subversives, and authorized emergency detention areas where citizens would be detained permanently if “reasonable ground” existed to suggest they were seditious or otherwise a threat to National Security.

In brief, American citizens under this law could be held at the whim of the President -- and without approval of Congress -- at internment camps.

Punishment Park imagines a world, immediately following the Kent State Massacre in which Nixon’s America becomes a brutally-repressive police state, and where dissidents exercising their First Amendment Rights to protest government action (specifically the Vietnam War) are treated as traitors.  Accordingly, these men and women are tried before merciless military tribunals, and then universally remanded to “Punishment Park,” a chaotic training ground for law enforcement officials.

At the punishment park established in the California desert, for instance, those individuals found guilty of treason must cross nearly sixty-miles of inhospitable terrain and, to secure their freedom, reach an American flag.  If they fail to reach this goal post, they are ostensibly re-captured and their original and draconian prison sentences (decades in a maximum-security penitentiary) are re-instated.

But what the film suggests in its final moments is that the Punishment Park system is actually a trap and a sham.  In reality, there is no way to out-run armed guards who can utilize vehicles to traverse the desert, and every suspect on the field is treated not as a prisoner in the care of the state, but as cannon fodder.  Worse, the environment itself, a brutally-hot desert, squashes prisoner hopes of survival.

The film’s final merciless twist is that armed, angry guards actually surround the goal line, Old Glory, and shoot anyone who attempts to reach it.  Accordingly, there is no beating the Establishment.  The Punishment Park system is thus a stacked deck, or a rigged game, an opportunity for the government to legally murder those who question its rule, its decisions, and its methods.

One quality that remains so intriguing about the film is its implicit commentary on the optimism of the dissidents.  Each one chooses Punishment Park over incarceration because he or she believes that there at least there is a possibility for freedom.  Yet since the establishment controls the park, and the Bill of Rights is essentially suspended in them, the opposite is actually true.  The dissidents would be safer in prison, but on some level, they still trust the system enough to be a part of it, to “choose” Punishment Park.

The format of Punishment Park is that of a pseudo or “mock-documentary.”  It is a very early example, then, of a found-footage film, a popular horror sub-genre of the 21st century.  All the film’s action is filmed by a British TV crew making a documentary for the American networks on the subject of “current domestic disorders.” The film thus universally adopts a cinema-verite approach, meaning that the action appears to be unfolding live before the cameras, without rehearsal, and without the distancing filter of well-known actors or obvious special effects.   The cinema-verite approach, managed by the exquisite camera-work of Joan Churchill and Peter Smokler (This is Spinal Tap [1984]) succeeds in making the film feel more immediate and indeed urgent than a conventional, constructed narrative.

In terms of its narrative structure Punishment Park cross-cuts between two groups of incarcerated dissidents, 637 and 638.  Group 638 undergoes a harrowing military tribunal during the course of the film, and consists of figures that represent, among others, surrogates for Abbie Hoffman and Joan Baez.

Group 637, by contrast, faces the environmental hazards of Punishment Park during the course of the film, and it is the equivalent of a three-day summary execution.

By splintering his attention between society’s judgment of dissidents and its disposal of them, director Watkins is able to focus both on the intellectual basis for freedom (enumerated in America’s Constitution), and the violence that perpetually prevents America from realizing that freedom and becoming a “more perfect union.”

In fact, much of Punishment Park dwells on the idea that America has always been awash in blood and violence, from slavery, to the wars against Native Americans, right up to foreign wars including the conflict in Vietnam.  This view will not find favor with many who consider themselves part of Nixon’s law and order “Silent Majority,” but their viewpoint is also represented fairly in the film.  Both sides explain their beliefs, though often at the top of their lungs.

The ideas explored in Punishment Park are not inherently more inciting or dangerous than in any other dystopian film of the 1970s, but two factors render Watkin’s work of art more controversial than the likes of THX-1138 (1971), Z.P.G. (1972) or Logan’s Run (1976).  The first is the film’s visual presentation as a documentary of the cinema verite-style, which makes the action seem absolutely real (so much so that some audiences in Europe believed the film was a real documentary.)

The second and perhaps more important factor revolves around another consideration of viewer distance from the material.  Films such as Silent Running, THX-1138, No Blade of Grass, or Z.P.G. occur in a distant future, even though they specifically concern issues of the 1970s such as pollution and overpopulation.

Punishment Park sets its action metaphorically only five minutes into the future, and pinpoints that Richard Nixon is still the President of the United States when this draconian system of punishment is established.  The fact that Nixon is tagged as the dark overlord (with his portrait hanging ominously in the military tribunal tent…) may be a misstep on Watkins’ part, since it permits some forces who don’t like the film’s message to mistake a political film for a partisan one, and thus ignore its message concerning repression.

Just as liberals would blanch if President Obama were featured (on-screen) in a film about a new police state, conservatives look askance at Punishment Park and its categorization of Nixon as another “Hitler.”

Accordingly, Punishment Park has been called a “paranoid fantasy” and with forty-years of hindsight, one can make the claim that such a descriptor is accurate.  President Nixon never incarcerated -- let alone systematically murdered -- Americans who disagreed with him philosophically, though he did resign his office in disgrace before finishing his second term.

Similarly, other war presidents, including George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, also never went so far either, even with the legal cover of the McCarron Act, or the Patriot Act of 2001.  Thus the Watkins film presents a fascinating “what if” scenario about the possibility of fascism in America, but one that is, by its very nature, paranoid given the historical facts.

Today, history proves the film wrong rather dramatically.  Had Punishment Park been set in 2055 and featured a different President, it might today look prophetic, especially in the post-War on Terror Age, instead of incredibly dated and incredibly wrong in its prediction of a Nixon Era dictatorship.

Certainly, the film’s heart-felt commentary about concentrated wealth in the hands of the few, or entrenched racism in America are on point and valid, and one can argue that the nation is on a slippery slope of becoming a police state given recent revelations regarding NSA surveillance and so forth. But the fact is that in forty years -- and with successive Presidents of both political parties -- America has never quite so dramatically launched a war against its dissident citizenry, whether liberal or conservative.

It’s not wrong or disloyal to imagine how power could be misused, however.  Indeed, that’s the bread-and-butter of the science fiction dystopia film, and so Punishment Park’s marginalization by the very authority it criticizes is a tremendous shame. The film deserved to be seen in 1971, and deserves to be seen now.

Punishment Park’s most dead-on criticism might be the one involving the media’s lack of objectivity, and complicity in serving the establishment of both parties.  At one point in the film, a citizen on trial at a military tribunal notes that the violence of the establishment is minimized by the press, while the violence of dissidents is highlighted, thus creating the impression of widespread lawlessness and a danger to law and order.  This brand of media manipulation has been a fact from the Hippie Movement to the Tea Party rallies of 2010, right up to the Trayvon Martin case in 2013. A corporate-run press, serving its masters in government and big business, certainly possesses an interest in seeing the establishment maintained, and those often brave voices that speak against it are easily marginalized and made targets of citizen fear.

All Americans -- whether liberals or conservatives -- should watch Punishment Park at least once, since both sides have envisioned conspiracies and takeovers by leaders of the opposition party.  The film is terrifying, realistic, and brilliantly-wrought.  And just because it didn’t happen here under Nixon (or Bush, or Obama…) doesn’t mean that such a thing can’t happen in America in the future. As in 1971, tyranny today seems just one president and one Act of Congress away…

The robot police, the enforcement arm of a totalitarian state, are on the hunt in George Lucas’s THX-1138 (1971).

THX-1138 (1971) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“…a puzzling, suspenseful thriller…a fine example of imaginative and inventive filmmaking by a remarkable new talent.” – Charles Champlin, The Los Angeles Time, April 15, 1975, page O4.

“The most boring section of the film takes place in a white-on-white prison for people who refuse to be part of the machine-like society. These individuals express their individuality through ticks of personal expression, but because Lucas's direction of surfaces is more inventive than his direction of actors, his characters' ticks seem too calculated, too mechanical to be really personal. The film gains momentum toward the end, however, with the first introduction of some humor in the form of a hologram who decided to come to life…and melodramatic excitement in the form of an extended car-and-motorcycle chase…” - William Paul, The Village Voice.

“Masterpiece? I’d hazard to say so, for as much of what it says to what it leaves to the viewer. Seeing this film is much more satisfying on every level than putting yourself through one of the previous two “Star Wars” prequels, and the release of this cut into theaters makes one wonder what happened to this incredibly talented filmmaker who at one point did have important things to say, but then kind of faded…” – Mark Bell, Film Threat, September 12, 2004.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Robert Duvall (THX); Donald Pleasence (SEN); Don Pedro Colley (SRT); Maggie McOmie (LUH); Ian Wolfe (PTO); Marshall Efron (TWA); Sid Haig (NCH); John Pearce (DWY); Irene Cagen (IMM); Gary Alan Marsh (CAM); John Seaton (OUE). Eugene I. Stillman (JOT); Raymond J. Walsh (TRG).

CREW: Warner Bros and American Zoetrope present THX-1138. Directors of Photography: Albert Kihn, David Myers. Original Music: Lalo Schifrin. Film Editing: George Lucas. Art Direction: Michael Haller. Produced by: Larry Sturhahn. Executive Producer: Francis Ford Coppola. Written and directed by: George Lucas. M.P.A.A Rating: GP. Running time: 88 minutes.

Story:

In the future, man has moved underground to a vast, overpopulated metropolis, and is under the thrall of not Big Government, but Biggest Government.  This government keeps the populace on drugs at all time. To be sober and drug free in this world is a crime called "criminal drug evasion."

The State also keeps tabs on its citizenry with video surveillance monitors, knowing everyone's location and activity at every moment.  There are even cameras mounted behind bathroom medicine cabinets.

Meanwhile, citizens toil in robot-making factories and at other mundane tasks seemingly around the clock.  They are entertained at home by strange, pornographic holograms produced by "The Fantasy Bureau."  Their sexual needs are fulfilled individually, by what can only be described as masturbation automatons.  Additionally, the citizenry are constantly encouraged to shop in their spare time.

One of the Government's mantras is "Buy more and be happy."   In this world, the Government has actually replaced God too, and workers confess their sins to Big Brother in the attractive, artistically-rendered personal confessional booths dotting the city.  "Blessings of the State" are offered by this personal confessional kiosk...but just don't expect any privacy.  Every word, every idea is closely monitored.

One day, a female worker in this dystopia, LUH-3417 (McOmie) goes off her meds and realizes that she is in love with her roommate, THX-1138 (Duvall). She gets him off his meds too, and THX-1138 eventually reciprocates the powerful emotions.  The duo begins a sexual relationship, but sexual relations are strictly forbidden by the state....which is controlling the population level.

When the State grows aware of LUH and THX's personal rebellion, LUH is replaced at home by SEN-5421 (Pleasence), and THX grows angry, wanting to know what has become of LUH.  He is then imprisoned in a vast white holding cell -- one with seemingly no walls.  There he sees LUH again, and she claims she is carrying his child.

Finally, THX escapes and attempts to flee the city after he learns of LUH's death. In close pursuit are the ubiquitous, faceless police robots that keep the citizenry in line and patrol the streets. In the end, THX-1138 escapes to the surface, not because of his own resourcefulness, but because continuing the pursuit would cost the government too much money.

Review:

George Lucas remains both the God and Devil of sci-fi film enthusiasts.  A God, because he gave the world the blockbuster Star Wars in 1977, and in the process changed both science fiction movies and Hollywood filmmaking forever.

A Devil -- at least according to some -- because Lucas also transformed his Star Wars Empire into a merchandising platform, and then made three prequels that quite a few critics don't believe measure up to his original vision for the franchise.

Also, Lucas has endlessly and fruitlessly tinkered with the Original Trilogy (see: Greedo shoots first or CGI Jabba in the Star Wars special edition).

Intriguingly, the Blu-Ray release of THX-1138 "The Director's Cut" (first released on DVD in 2004) provides ample ammunition for anyone seeking to pigeonhole the controversial Lucas as either a cinematic deity or film demon. What this means in simple terms is that THX-1138 remains a staggering and beautiful vision -- a film experience unlike any other -- but that it has been unnecessarily compromised by the obsessive tinkering of latter-day Lucas.

So the once austere, low-budget, and wholly impressive THX-1138 now bizarrely features computer-generated critters, CGI landscapes, and other digital flourishes that not only seem unnecessary; but actually detract from the movie's abundant raw power and sense of unfettered ingenuity.  A film that Lucas once aptly described as a critique of "unbridled consumer culture" is now merely a product itself, seeking a slice of the market with the very latest in digital wizardry.

Oddly, Lucas's continued insistence on attempting to paint away the decades in his films -- the cinematic equivalent of the Peter Pan Syndrome -- makes ignoring his changes virtually impossible.  The result is that THX-1138 is a great science fiction film that has been compromised by its own creator, at least in its latest incarnation. But don't let that stop you from seeing THX-1138 even in this new, bastardized form.  The original film thoroughly deserves the descriptor "classic," and, Lucas's vision still retains much of its power to startle with unconventional visuals.

Lucas embodies the world of the future, the world of The State, using a potent combination of good editing, excellent camera work, insert shots and also alien-sounding jargon or dialogue. In conjunction, these facets of the film's presentation render it an almost overwhelming sensory experience.  This mechanized, impersonal world never feels faked or phony.  It is believable in a most disturbing fashion, and in some ways, THX-1138 is very much a mood movie.  The overall impression of visiting this grim future world is as powerful or more so than the character interaction or specific details of the narrative.

Most interestingly, Lucas non-conventionally and routinely breaks up the frame space of his characters by focusing obsessively on close-ups of computer print-outs, insert shots of sine-waves, and minimalist sets.

All of these high-tech shots enhance the impression of a world that has lost touch with nature; with Mother Nature herself, and human nature too.   As we seek to identify more and more with THX-1138, that quest is often stymied -- intentionally -- by insert shots of technological gobbledygook, by shots of numbers, or read-outs, or electrical impulses coruscating on screens.

And the dialogue is a stew of futuristic nonsense, both unintelligible and deliberately inhuman.

"Don't use the 714," "Wait for 32," "Skip the 1114," "See Index 24-941," and so on.

The obvious conclusion -- enhanced by the ubiquitous presence of robot police enforcers -- is that machines have overtaken this world, and human nature is being snuffed out by drugs, by conformity, by the tyranny of technology itself.

Ironically, Lucas makes this tyranny rather beautiful by the use of holograms, sine-waves, surveillance camera footage, and close-ups of read-outs.  The only thing I can compare his approach to here is Robert Wise's use of similar high-tech imagery in The Andromeda Strain (1971).  In both cases, an artist's eye is applied to the machine world, and a strange, surreal sense of non-human beauty is fostered.

THX-1138 also visually transmits the ideas of humans as being unimportant in their own world by applying a consistent white-on-white color palette.  Only the black robots and the flesh of bald human heads stand out from the washed-out, immaculate, computer-perfect background.

This is one reason why I object so much to Lucas's twenty-first century revisionism.  In the new version of the film he layers on lush coloring (particularly gold) and this alteration diminishes the movie's visual transmission of his theme that humans have become background noise in their own culture.

One of THX-1138's most beautiful and emotional scenes -- the sex scene between THX and LUH -- reverses the overarching color scheme, and for the right reason. Here, shades of human flesh dominate and Lucas provides beautiful, extreme close-ups of passionate, remarkable human faces and also bodies intermingling.

This heightened, human moment represents the very antithesis of the world largely portrayed in the film, and so it's right -- and clever - that Lucas reverses techniques to depict it.  The love scene becomes much more powerful this way, almost a grand rebellious statement against society's rules and regulations.  This selection of technique is that of an artist who understands both the frame and the power of film in a potent way.

There's some beautiful paranoia in THX-1138, and it contributes a suffocating tension that drives the film.  Individual rights have been taken away to such a degree by this overbearing Big Government that a beautiful woman, LUH, is replaced by a man, SEN, as a roommate, and Duvall's character is supposed to have no feelings about that change whatsoever.

Although homosexuality is never broached explicitly in the film, Pleasence's effete performance adds another layer of interest to the proceedings.  SEN seems as obsessed with THX as LUH was, and we aren't sure that sex isn't on his mind, either.  The message isn't anti-gay, to be sure, but anti-freedom, or anti-individual.  In this world, you can't choose who you co-habitate with; and the government could just as easily hook you up with a man or a woman, and expect you to quietly conform. Your orientation is just another privilege to be taken away.

THX-1138 is also clever in the fashion that the screenplay stresses how the surface appearance of individuality actually reduces the overall sense of human connection in the future metropolis.

Here, there are no churches where communities can gather to listen to sermons or lift collective voice in hymns.  The confessional kiosks, pointedly called "unichapels," determinedly seat only one; meaning that the communal aspects of spirituality have been deleted from the culture.

It's very much the same story with sex in the film.  By offering pornographic home holograms and masturbation robots, the State has also made sex a single-serving, one-person activity.

Again, what's lost in this? Essential human connection; the most intimate physical link with another being.

The mantra about shopping -- about conspicuous consumption (buy and be happy) -- also makes the citizenry focus on self; not community.  What do I want to buy today?  What would please me?  The most important thought isn't "how can I make the world better," but how can I make my life better.

There also appear to be no families in the film. The Government has thus removed community and human ties to such a degree that the individual has only one meaningful connection in his or her life: to the goods-selling, religion-spouting, sex-providing State.

Visually, THX-1138 is undeniably stunning.  Late in the film, Lucas imagines a prison with no walls.  It is just an endless vision of white...nothing.  This is a canny image that again undercuts convention and buttresses the movie's theme.  If a person is trapped in a jail cell with walls and bars, he knows that there is an outside; an escape.  If a person is trapped in a jail cell that seems infinite -- with no end and no beginning -- there is no hope of escape; no possibility of a way out.

In microcosm, the prison thus symbolizes the State: it is so all-encompassing in the lives of its citizenry that nothing else is visible.  There is no hope on the horizon.  There is nothing else.

Even if the narrative resembles, in some way, Orwell's 1984, Lucas's visualization of this dystopia grants the material a unique aura.  This really is a one-of-a-kind sort of science fiction movie, and one that continues to have resonance today.  For instance, we have been told explicitly by our own government to go out and shop (after 9/11).  Our government has re-authorized the Patriot Act, which allows the government expansive powers of surveillance without sufficient judicial oversight.  And in an attempt to reduce discrimination (always a good cause...), we have often been told that men and women are exactly the same, and THX-1138 reveals the logical end point of that belief: sex differences are hidden, and made unrecognizable in public so no prejudice can exist.

Even the idea of a society wacked out on drugs isn't so far off either, since we have been called a "Prozac Nation," from time to time.  Similarly, our society's way of dealing with unruly children is also to prescribe behavior modification drugs like Ritalin.  Again, THX-1138 spells out a future where such trends continue...and overwhelm us.  Today, there is wide ranging discussion, debate and anger about what constitutes a "Nanny State" and how much government is too much government.  That idea too, is broached in George Lucas's first feature.

Given the immediately apparent strengths of THX-1138, it is bizarre how the Director's Cut undercuts them.

In the original THX-1138, the film's trodden-upon hero, THX (Robert Duvall) escapes from a totalitarian society in the last act, and in the super structure of his future megapolis encounters a rat.  In the Director's cut, he encounters a CGI scorpion instead.

In the original THX-1138, THX also runs into some strange surface dwellers while attempting to escape captivity. Today, those raggedy men have been transformed into hairy humanoid creatures that resemble the Lycanthropes from the Underworld film series.

The film's climactic chase scene has also been touched up with digital FX work to make it appear more modern, pacey and spectacular; and there also are plenty of new "vistas" of the underground city that would not have been possible to forge in the early 1970s.  Digital people have been inserted to make the world seem more populated than before.

It's all as if, for some reason, George Lucas is obsessed with one-upping Logan's Run (1976).

But here is the real problem: These special effects "upgrades" make THX-1138 neither fish nor fowl. Those viewers who would find THX-1138 a fascinating enterprise are likely not in it for the monsters or creatures; not in it for the chases or special effects.

And those looking explicitly for such superficial qualities won't have the patience for the rest of the film anyway, which is a thoughtful meditation on freedom and love, not a fantasy cartoon set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

There was simply no need to update THX-1138 in this fashion, and indeed, to do so violates the text of the film in some crucial way.  The new cut is re-packaged in a way that the film's Big Brother would heartily approve of; making the sublime obvious and unnecessarily removing the austerity of the piece.  Our imagination once did the heavy lifting in THX-1138, augmented by a director's powerful artistic choices; now it's just ILM flexing its imaginative chops with a big budget.

Another inescapable fact: this is a vision of the future as imagined in the early 1970s. THX-1138 is a product of that time, down to every last decision Lucas made in terms of editing, wardrobe, camera movement, sound effects etc.   Why, Lucas even calls it in the special features, a "parable of the year 1971" and careful listeners may recognize President Nixon's speeches informing some of the dialogue.  That's the context of the picture according to the director himself.

So to insert a rich and warm golden filter over several sequences of THX on his job at the assembly line, for instance or to expand beyond the restrictive sets for expansive digital vistas, only muddies the thematic waters. Lucas can add new special effects till he is blue in the face, and this will still be a film he made in 1971.

Why? You can't untangle a film from its creation, from its historical context, no matter how hard you try. All you're doing is re-vamping it with the latest fad. This isn't artistry. This is some kind of desperate need to have your work perceived as "current" or "contemporary." In ten years, THX-1138 will require another special effects paint-job, if all one cares about are the latest special effects.

Or more simply put, what was so wrong with the 1971 rat?  Why is a CGI scorpion better?

All of this four-decades-later tinkering is immensely troubling, and THX-1138 "The Director's Cut" is a textbook example of how Lucas's latter-day choices actually cloud and compromise his prodigious, natural skills as a filmmaker.

So to put the matter succinctly, I remain incredibly impressed with what Lucas imagined and delivered on a limited budget in 1971.  But the 2004 version is an unnecessary revision of a great work of art.

Somewhere, in the glittering gold spanking new special effects of THX-1138, you can almost hear a little voice -- perhaps that of Lucas himself -- urging us "Buy more now.  Buy and be happy..."

The last forest: Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) contemplates Saturn, and his own future, in Douglas Trumball’s Silent Running (1972).

1972

The Real World: 1972

February 18:               California voids the state’s death penalty.

February 21:               President Nixon embarks on his historic diplomatic trip to China.

March 10:               Pioneer 10 is launched from Cape Kennedy.

March 22:              The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is sent to States for ratification.

March 24:              Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather premieres in the U.S.

April 16              Apollo 16 is launched.

May 15:               Alabama Governor George Wallace is shot at a political rally.

May 26:              The SALT 1 Treaty is signed in Moscow by President Nixon and Russian Premier Leonid Brezhnev.

June 17:              Five White House operatives are arrested for burglarizing the offices of the Democratic National Committee, thus instigating the Watergate Scandal, a national crisis that ends with Nixon’s 1974 resignation.

June 28:              President Nixon announces that no more draftees will be sent to Vietnam.

June 29:              The Supreme Court rules that capital punishment is unconstitutional.

August 12:              U.S. ground troops are withdrawn from Vietnam.

September 1:              Bobby Fischer defeats Boris Spassky and becomes the first American world chess champion.

October 13:              An aircraft carrying a rugby team crashes in the Andes.  Survivors are not rescued for over two months, and by that time have resorted to cannibalism.

November 7:              President Nixon wins a second term in the White House and defeats Democratic Senator George McGovern. The election is a rout: Nixon wins with sixty percent of the vote, and 520 electoral votes.  The election is also the U.S.’s lowest in terms of turnout.

November 29:              Atari releases an arcade version of Pong.

December 7:               Apollo 17 launches.  This is the last manned-flight to the Moon.

Bobby Hartford (Robert Walker Jr.) attempts to escape the slimy grip of the blob in an ice rink, in Larry Hagman’s Beware! The Blob (1972).

Beware! The Blob (aka Son of Blob) (1972) *

Critical Mass:

“It’s just plain stupid, and so are the characters that a decent ensemble is asked to perform...Without redeeming social values, and with mediocre special effects, the blob is a slob.” - John Stanley, Revenge of the Creature Feature Movie Guide, Third Revised Edition. Creatures at Large Press, 1988, page 24.

“The best moment occurs when the Blob (what is it made of?) takes over a bowling alley, then an ice-skating rink. For the rest, assorted guest stars are trundled on to do unfunny turns before getting eaten.” – CR, Time Out. http://www.timeout.com/london/film/beware-the-blob.Lo

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Robert Walker Jr. (Bobby Hartford), Gwynne Gilford (Lisa Clark); Richard Stahl (Edward Fazio); Richard Webb (Sheriff Jones); Shelley Berman (Hair Stylist); Godfrey Cambridge (Chester); Larry Hagman (Young Hobo); Burgess Meredith (Old Hobo); Carol Lynley (Leslie); Dick Van Patten (Scoutmaster); Cindy Williams (Randy’s Girl).

CREW: A Jack H. Harris presentation, Beware! The Blob.. Director of Photography: Al Hamm. Original Music: Mort Garson Film Editor: Tony de Zarraga. Special Effects: Tim Barr. Produced by: Anthony Harris. Executive Producer: Jack H. Harris. Story by: Jack H. Harris, Richard Clair. Written by: Jack Woods, Anthony Harris. Directed by: Larry Hagman. M.P.A.A. Rating: GP. Running time: 91 minutes.

Story:

A crew working on a pipeline up north finds a sample of a frozen alien life-form, a single-celled creature or “blob.”  The sample soon ends up in the refrigerator of a pipeline worker named Chester (Cambridge), and when thawed-out, begins a new reign of terror.

First the blob kills Chester’s kitten, then his wife, and then Chester himself.  The Blob then moves into town, terrorizing sewer drains, barber shops, and finally an ice skating rink, where locals Bobby (Robert Walker Jr.) and Lisa (Gwynne Gilford) re-freeze it.

Review:

Also known by the title of Son of Blob, Beware! The Blob is actually a trippy head movie masquerading as a science fiction picture.  Alas, like a lot of head movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Beware! The Blob is constantly in search of a script, and the result is a woefully loose narrative that fails to drive the action, elicit suspense, or engender sympathy for the characters.  In the end, Beware! The Blob plays more like an amateur improvisation troupe’s first big show than it does a legitimate movie. In short, it’s an embarrassment.

Indeed, the overall feel of the loosely-held together Beware the Blob is of an over-long Saturday Night Live (1975 - ) skit with the blob as the guest host of the week, showing up only occasionally to do his shtick, which in this case means eating a man, Cambridge, in his easy chair, or showing up to swallow another character after emerging from a barber’s sink.

One suspects that things are off to a bad start as early as the opening credits, which involve an endless montage of a cute kitten, Samuel, playing in the grass.  Little Sammy doesn’t get killed in this montage, or even encounter the blob at all.  He just sits there frolicking in nature, looking adorable.  What is the purpose of this scene?  Why is it an efficient and notable lead-in to a story about the blob?   A more useful opening sequence might have been a replay of The Blob’s (1958) final moments, where the alien monster was frozen solid.

But of course, to feature such a scene, the film’s director, the late Larry Hagman of Dallas (1978 – 1991) fame would have had to answer a question his film never addresses.  Is this a sequel to 1958’s The Blob, or just a comic put-up job?

Astonishingly, the film tries to have it both ways.  Beware! The Blob opens with the alien life-form unwittingly retrieved from the Arctic…exactly where it was left at the end of the first film.  This “continuation” of the Blob’s story suggests a sequel.  But only a few scenes later, however, the original movie is seen playing on Chester’s TV during “the late show.”  So is this movie a parody? A follow-up? Or is it just a groovy meditation on blobbiness?

If these complaints about the movie’s lack of cohesion aren’t plain enough, let me put a finer point on it.  The real problem with this film is a surfeit of self-indulgence.  Character actors such as Larry Hagman (yes, the film’s director…) and Burgess Meredith show up and are permitted to turn their cameos as blob victims into interminable sequences of improvisation where nothing of significance happens.  These blind-alleys grind the film’s momentum to a halt, despite the fact that Robert Walker Jr. makes a serviceable lead, and seems game to take the whole affair seriously.

Even today, the original The Blob is a pretty good film, and one worth watching.  The 1988 remake is solid too.  Both iterations of the franchise showcase a fundamental respect for the property and its associated material, the notion of a single-celled monster invading and consuming a middle-American town.

By contrast, this 1972 film wants only to showcase the (mostly TV…) “actors” as great comedic talents.  They are so great, apparently, that they don’t require the services of a writer, a script, or a directorial strategy to support their efforts.  Accordingly, they just stand up before the camera and wing it.

The results are both disastrous and moronic, and that’s a shame, because many of the special effects in Beware! The Blob hold-up, and even today appear mighty impressive.  One scene, with the blob oozing into a bowling alley, still carries a strong ick factor.

Influence: A remake of the original The Blob followed in 1988 and wisely ignored any connection whatsoever with this undisciplined misfire.

Can this man be cured?  Should he be cured? Meet Alex (Malcolm McDowell), a “Droog” in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1972).

A Clockwork Orange (1972) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“Kubrick's contributions are his wit and his eye. The wit, too much at times, is as biting as in "Dr. Strangelove," and the production, while of another order, is as spectacular as in "2001." – Gene Siskel, The Chicago Tribune, February 11, 1972.

“…an SF film of immense power. The passage of time has not dulled its bite or its message…” – Kenneth Von Gunden, Stuart H. Stock. Twenty All-Time Great Science Fiction Films. Arlington House, 1982, page 236.

“The story is really celebrating the triumph of the individual over the forces that seek to control him. Some feel the picture is unfair because the audience has no choice but to sympathize with a despicable character. But this is missing the point. Kubrick and Burgess are saying that man’s potential for evil is preferable to an aversion therapy that leaves him no choice but to be good.” – David Zinman. Fifty Grand Movies of the 1960s & 1970s. Crown Publishers, Inc., 1986, page 215.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Malcolm McDowell (Alex); Patrick Magee (Mr. Alexander); Michael Bates (Chief Guard); Warren Clark (Dim); John Clive (Stage Actor); Adrienne Corri (Mrs. Alexander); Carl Duering (Dr. Brodsky); Paul Farrell (Tramp)’ Miriam Karlin (Cat Lady); James Marcus (Georgie); Aubrey Morris (Deltoid); Godford Quigley (Chaplain); Sheila Raynor (Mum); Dave Prowse (Julian).

CREW: Warner Bros. presents a Stanley Kubrick Production, A Clockwork Orange. Director of Photography: John Alcott. Original Music: Walter Carlos. Film Editor: Bill Butler. Production Designer: John Barry. Based on the novel by: Anthony Burgess. Written, produced and directed by: Stanley Kubrick. M.P.A.A. Rating: X. Running time: 137 minutes.

Story:

In an unspecified future dystopia, a droog (or gang member) named Alex (McDowell) recounts his strange story.  In particular, he reflects on his life of ultra-violence, and the circumstances which led him to prison for murder.

Once in prison, however, Alex willingly submitted to a new “cure” for anti-social behavior called the Ludovico Treatment. The treatment involved exposing him to violent imagery, and coupling those visions with a drug that would provoke nausea.  Thus, the feeling of illness and the very sight of violence would be forever coupled in his mind.

Once released from prison, Alex found he no longer could commit violence acts without becoming physically ill, and in fact, could no longer “choose” to behave in certain, violent ways.  This fact quickly made Alex the perfect victim to those who would abuse him, including his former gang members, and former crime victims too…

Review:

Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is a tough, hard-minded movie about a totalitarian or near-totalitarian State’s insidious impact on the individual.  As the negative reviews of the day make plain, it was all-too easy to forget that thematic point in the early 1970s when the film’s “ultra-violence,” in some way cloaked the pro-social message.  Today -- with such violence being a staple of the cinema and therefore no longer a distraction -- Kubrick’s message comes to the forefront much more easily.

A Clockwork Orange examines whether any government, in the name of law-and-order, boasts the right or responsibility to change an individual’s thought processes, even if that individual happens to be a convicted criminal.

Here, do-gooder scientists and political forces ally to make a safer society by destroying personal freedom, by destroying choice.

Bluntly, but not without reason and debate, the film concludes that a civilized culture is freer -- and therefore better -- when it tolerates the likes of Malcolm McDowell’s Droog, Alex.  It is better to accept a few Alexs -- a few monsters in our midst -- than a million programmed sheep that can’t choose for themselves.

Kubrick denied any particular politically-motivated message in A Clockwork Orange, and noted that the politician seen in the film is clearly right-wing or fascist while the do-gooder scientist is left wing/socialist in nature.

But outside modern partisan concerns, it’s virtually impossible not to read this early 1970s film as a critique of a technologically-advanced, totalitarian country which seeks to control every facet of the individual’s life.  A priest in the film worries about this tendency of the State to usurp the individual’s right to choose, and notes that “good” cannot be a possible outcome if a person doesn’t have the opportunity to select it for him or herself.

Instead, that person is merely proving obedient, and that’s quite different from being good.  A State benefits from obedient citizens, perhaps, but what about the individual? What does he or she lose when his responses are programmed ones and not natural ones?

In A Clockwork Orange, much of the admittedly-extreme violence is portrayed as performance, or specifically dance.  In the famous home-invasion sequence, Alex sings “Singin’ in the Rain” while savagely drop-kicking and beating a writer and his wife.  At another juncture, Alex and his Droogs battle a group of Nazis, a rival gang, and the backdrop is, appropriately, an old theater or stage.

Thus, Kubrick deliberately and visually connects the perpetrating of violent crime with artistic freedom of expression in this near-future world. Alex may be a hideous, horrible, monstrous person, but he is also utterly free to express himself in these moments.  And that fact, Kubrick seems to state, is ultimately better for a nation than a status quo in which people are drugged, shut-down, and unable to express the demons or “devils that get inside you,” to pull a quote from the film.

If taken too far, Kubrick’s point is questionable, perhaps.

For instance, are mass shootings also merely expressions of personal freedom?

Must total freedom also come with total disregard for the law and the rights of others?

Kubrick’s film doesn’t quite get that far, no matter how brilliantly-visualized it is, and this is the reason why some critics tagged it as reactionary and fascist.

Dig a little deeper, and A Clockwork Orange features a unique tension regarding too much freedom and too little freedom, and the rights of the individual.  Alex clearly lives in an extremely permissive, sexualized, material culture.  His on-the-cusp-of-old-age mother dons the clothing of a teenage streetwalker without shame or comment, for example.  And the bar the Droogs frequent every night features milk-dispensers that are molded in the shape of naked women.  The film’s Cat Lady, a wealthy elite, displays the sculpture of a giant penis in her home.  And Alex has a weird, profane Christ sculpture in his bedroom.

Furthermore, when not beating people up, Alex shops at a nearby mall, buying things, or engages in meaningless sex with a group of other bored teens he finds wandering the promenade.  That sex scene -- featured in fast-motion and scored to The William Tell Overture -- suggests an utterly meaningless, mechanical, and ephemeral act.

In this context, Alex is only able to find meaning in his life through his nightly home invasions, rapes, and ultra-violence.

So is the message of A Clockwork Orange actually that a too-permissive society ultimately gives rise, in response, to a too-restrictive one?

This up-is-down, down-is-up leitmotif applies to Alex’s entire odyssey.  First he’s a leader of his gang, then a despised outsider.  Later, he’s a convicted murderer, then a symbol of a law-and-order political administration. Finally, he’s a man of the people, representative of the State’s overweening authority, and deemed a hero for pointing out bureaucratic malfeasance.

Thus, Alex ping-pongs from extreme-to-extreme and represents different ideological flaws at different points in the film.  At either end of the spectrum, Alex is victimized by those who would use him. Therefore he could be either a symbol of the society’s permissiveness and lack of law and order, or a symbol of the State’s domineering desire for control.  You choose.

Alex is an odd and unconventional protagonist, to be certain, but whichever way you come at it -- left or right  -- he is fortune’s (and the State’s) fool.  He is constantly acted upon in ways that encroach on his freedom, and that may be Kubrick’s ultimate point.  What matters isn’t the political bent of Alex’s masters, but the fact that a free man has masters at all.

Auctioned off to the highest bidder, Caesar (Roddy McDowall), the son of Zira and Cornelius, gets a good look at human ugliness in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972).

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“…a smashingly good movie…[it] maintains its high technical quality, its sharp, wry edge of humor, and the bright intelligence of script and direction that made the three previous films so thoroughly enjoyable and at the same time perceptive about the weaknesses of mankind.” – George McKinnon, The Boston Globe, July 13, 1972, page 15.

“The revolt seems to go on forever with apes marching this way and that. The movie has the apes being trained rather quickly in the use of modern weapons, and then they rush around with guns, flame throwers and cans of kerosene or gasoline that pour all over the concrete to set it afire. In making 'Conquest' someone forgot the premise of "Planet of the Apes," that man destroyed himself and the world with atomic devices clearing the way for the evolution of a new species.” – Tony Mastroianni, Cleveland Press: “Latest Apes Picture is a Dog,” July 15, 1972.

“As civil unrest swept the real-life globe, the film portrayed ape shoeshine men and waiters refusing to perform their tasks as their underground brethren gathered weapons to take over a cold, concrete city of the near-future (actually a then-uninhabited Century City, CA). What was uncomfortable for privileged Americans to talk about at the dinner table returned in the form of a matinee nightmare.” – Keith Phipps, A.V. Club, March 26, 2006.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Roddy McDowall (Caesar); Don Murray (Governor Breck); Natalie Trundy (Lisa); Hari Rhodes (MacDonald); Severn Darden (Kolp); Ricardo Montalban (Armando); Lou Wagner (Busboy); John Randolph (Commission Chairman); Asa Maynor (Mrs. Riley); David Chow (Aldo); John Dennis, Paul Comi (Policemen); Gordon Jump (Announcer).

CREW: 20th Century Fox presents Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Director of Photography: Bruce Surtees. Original Music: Tom Scott. Film Editors: Marjorie Fowler, Alan Jaggs. Produced by: Arthur P. Jacobs. Written by: Paul Dehn. Directed by: J. Lee Thompson. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 88 minutes.

Story:

Caesar (McDowall), the progeny of the intelligent apes from the future, Zira and Cornelius, visits a human city in the early 1990s with his mentor, gentle circus-owner Armando (Montalban). He is horrified to learn that apes are not pets in the community, as he believed, but slaves.

After Armando is captured by the police for apparently participating in a riot, Caesar is forced to seek sanctuary. He hides at a loading dock of new ape arrivals from Borneo, and is soon assimilated into the cruel ape training process.

At auction, Caesar is sold to Governor Breck (Murray), a paranoid, anti-ape fascist and presidential-aspirant who is obsessed with the idea that the child of Zira and Cornelius still lives.

Breck’s aide, MacDonald learns Caesar’s secret, even as Caesar plans the beginnings of an ape revolution.

Review:

The fourth film in the Planet of the Apes motion picture cycle is also the most overtly violent and controversial entry in the classic, five-strong franchise.

Schaffner's original Planet of the Apes (1968) offered an anti-nuke, pro-peace message to top them all with that trademark, shocking Statue of Liberty climax. The fallen, rusted Lady Liberty was a tragic visual reminder that man had ruined himself and his posterity over clashing fleeting political ideologies (CCCP vs. U.S.A.). "God damn you all to Hell!"

Even Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) -- the sophomore series entry which ended in the Earth's final obliteration -- was anti-violence in thematic thrust. The first sequel gazed at the polarization between races, in this case simian and mutant races, and suggested that if we didn't all learn to "get along" (and get over our naive belief that our team is God's Chosen...) our world would become but a burned-out, lifeless cinder. The film even featured the equivalent of college-age, Vietnam War Era, pro-peace protesters. Only in this topsy-turvy world, they were intellectual chimpanzees.

By contrast, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, written by Paul Dehn and based on characters by Pierre Boulle, is dramatically different in both tone and theme from these cinematic predecessors. The best of the four sequels to Planet of the Apes -- and a great science fiction film even as a stand-alone venture -- director J. Lee Thompsons' film suggests in unblinking, brutal terms that in the case of subjugation, oppression, slavery and injustice, violent revolution is the only solution to rectify the problem.

In the words of the film, despotic masters won't be kind until they are "forced" to be kind. To force kindness, your people have to be free. To have freedom...you must possess power.  To possess power, “you must revolt.”

This notion of violent revolution as panacea to matters of social inequality in America didn't just arise from the ether. Like all great works of art, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, released in 1972, strongly reflects the time period during which it was produced. And from 1965 through the early 1970s, the United States suffered a number of debilitating, disturbing and violent race riots in many of its most populous urban areas. Some African-Americans took up arms, looted merchants, and destroyed property in an attempt to express their grievances with the social injustice they witnessed and endured.

The Watts Riots occurred in Los Angeles in the year 1965, and 4,000 rioters were arrested by the police. Thirty-four rioters were killed, and over 1,000 were injured. A political commission convened after the riot judged that the outbreak of violence had been caused by the following conditions: racial inequality in Los Angeles, a high jobless rate, bad schools, heavy-handed police tactics, and pervasive job and housing discrimination.

The LAPD chief at the time of the lawlessness didn't exactly help calm things down either. He referred to the rioters as "monkeys in the zoo," according to Social Problems, 1968, pages 322-341. As silly as that may sound, that very description -- of rioters as simians -- is literally translated in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.

The Watts Riots did not represent an isolated incident, either. There was also the Washington D.C. Riot of 1968, the Baltimore Riot of the same year, and the Chicago Riot too. And -- perhaps most dramatically -- there was the so-called "Detroit Rebellion" of 1967 which lasted for five days during a hot July and saw 7,200 arrests, 40 million dollars of property damage, and over 2,000 buildings burned to the ground.

The root causes of this violent spree were -- again after the fact -- deemed the same as those that had been observed in Watts. Unemployment by blacks doubled that of whites (15.9% to 8%) in Detroit; the community had little access to adequate medical facilities; there was distinct "spatial segregation" in the city; and 134,000 jobs had been lost over the previous decade-and-a-half. In toto, half-a-million people were involved in the various race riots of the late 1960s.

To contextualize that sum total, this number is equivalent to the number of American soldiers serving in the War in Vietnam. (Planet of the Apes as American Myth, Eric Greene, 1998, page 79). This huge figure alone should put truth to the lie that the riots were but isolated incidents, or somehow only involved career criminals.

Clearly, this was a social movement.

From this turbulent era of violence, riot and protest was formulated Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, a sci-fi film which projects an ape slave uprising in technological North America in the far-flung future year of 1991. As also suggested by author Greene (on page 16), the film's text is actually "key for re-reading the Watts Riots as a justifiable reaction to intolerable oppression, rather than just an outbreak of lawless abandon." In Dehn's script, the rebelling apes are even specifically referred to as "rioters."

Shot on the futuristic-looking campus of the University of California at Irvine, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is set in "the future," in an America that has transformed itself into a rigid, fascist state. Nightly curfews are enforced rigorously. Heavily-armed police officers patrol the streets. American citizens are subjected to torture by the State (via a device called an authenticator) without any respect to due process of law. Announcements to citizens by the "Watch Commander" play regularly in the background on the heavily-guarded city streets...the ubiquitous voice of Big Brother. Labor demonstrations and gatherings are ruthlessly put down by military police.

Because all dogs and cats have died -- killed by a space plague in 1985 -- apes have replaced these beloved animals, first as pets, but now as slaves. These slave apes are "conditioned" to obey human masters, and are punished via "conditioning" when they fail in their tasks or simply don't perform fast enough.

A populist human movement resists the enslavement of apes...because the simians are (involuntarily) taking away their jobs. GO HUMAN, NOT APE, reads one placard. SLAVES ARE SCABS reads another. UNFAIR TO WAITERS screams one more. We saw signs and visceral protests like this in the recent District 9 (2009) too: a nativist fear that ethnic "newcomers" are here to steal jobs, depress wages and tax our already overburdened system.

In Conquest of the Planet of the Ape's dynamite, extended opening sequence -- shot entirely in the shadow of 1970s "futurism" architecture -- the viewer is introduced to the rules and locales of this cold, fascist, dystopian world. Apes are trained en mass in the public square, running a gauntlet of tasks at the bidding of armed, uniformed masters. They are constantly instructed and disciplined in cruel terms. "Go!" "No!" "Do!" It is the ape's job to serve, but not to question. The slaves are also forced to breed, but not allowed to maintain families.

In keeping with the overarching metaphor of the race riots in America, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes further contextualizes the apes' 1991 slavery in terms of the historical African-American experience in our country. We see, for instance, a racially-charged image of prejudice: a slave ape obediently shining his master's shoes.  He’s a shoeshine boy. We also see apes transported from their native habitats (Borneo) against their will to serve in the United States, via ships. Again, this is an echo of Ghana's "Gate of No Return," and the involuntary journey of many slaves from Africa to our shores, as prisoners. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes even depicts slave apes in neck shackles, and auctioned off in a public square to the highest human bidder. If you've ever toured the Old Slave Mart in Charleston, SC, you'll recall that such auctions are not fiction; and that Conquest of the Planet of the Apes does not exaggerate the plight or treatment of slaves in our history.

Conquest of the Planet of the Ape's screenplay draws specific parallels to the African-American experience, not merely with these resonant images, but also in the presentation of an African-American character named MacDonald (Hari Rhodes) who serves as the aide to Governor Breck. MacDonald is sympathetic to the ape cause and Caesar (Roddy McDowall) notes that McDonald "above all people," should understand him. "Above all people" is an explicit verbal reminder of MacDonald's racial identity and status as the descendant of a black slave.

Later, one of the oppressive aides in Governor Breck's dictatorial regime notes that the compassionate MacDonald must be an "ape lover." This is a deliberate variation of the ugly epithet "nigger lover." Another aide replies caustically (about MacDonald), "Don't it figure?" Again, these are veiled, bigoted references to MacDonald's skin color, his heritage as a black man, and his sense of brotherhood with those who have been oppressed. Governor Breck even terms MacDonald a "bleeding heart," equating him with the position of the 1970s civil-rights-promoting "liberal" in this battle.

The villain of the piece, Governor Breck (Don Murray) finally informs ape leader Caesar why he hates apes, and his detailed explanation is one built on the backbone of racial hatred: a belief that the "other" (black man or ape...) is inferior to him. Breck calls Caesar "the savage who must be shackled in chains...You poison our guts. When we hate you, we're hating the dark side of ourselves."

As engaged viewers, our question becomes: is Breck referring to the "dark side" of human nature (which certainly doesn't seem to fit the kindly, innocent apes; especially those like Lisa...), or is the governor actually making another coded statement about skin color. "The dark side" might actually be interpreted to mean dark-skinned.

What remains rather audacious about Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is that most audiences -- white, black, what-have-you -- register the subjugated apes (and Caesar) as the unambiguous heroes of the piece; as the wronged party, even though it is the entire human race that stands to lose in any violent revolution.

Perhaps such reflexive identification with the underdog, with the exploited, speaks to the inherent goodness and fairness of the American people. Intellectually, we immediately reject racism and oppression, and so therefore easily sympathize with the put-upon, subjugated apes.

Yet, ironically, that's not at all what happened regarding the real life riots of the 1960s. Nixon's "Silent Majority" found it easier to disregard the rioters as lawbreakers and opportunists than to acknowledge them as fighters against injustice; fighters for equal rights in American cities of considerable social disparity.

Of course, a movie allows us to experience things that we don't see or understand in real life. As viewers, we see in Conquest torture, degradation, inequality, and other moral sins. But how many of us went to Watts to live? Or to Detroit?

At 88 minutes, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is a short, fast and brutal film, but it is also one of the most effective and direct science-fiction movies of the era. Many of the visuals reinforce the pervasive theme of governmental subjugation. One artful shot visually "entraps" Caesar and his kindly master, Armando (Ricardo Montalban) within the parted, uniformed legs of an armed soldier. The image tells us how the State surrounds and dominates the characters.

Also well-handled is the manner in which the inspirational Caesar wordlessly transmits his message of total resistance (and then rebellion...) to his kindred ape slaves. Caesar simply appears on the scene (sometimes in close-up; sometimes in medium shot), and then there's a quick pan and zoom to a slave ape...and then the slave ape very actively rebels; dumping garbage, dropping books, even starting a fire. This brand of cause-and-effect composition is repeated again and again in the latter half of the movie, and it's a perfect visual signifier for the notion that you can't kill a powerful idea. Of course, Caesar can't literally be everywhere at once; but his message of freedom and liberty transmits at light speed across the slave population. The visual approach reveals how powerful and widespread the idea of liberty can be in a population that lacks it.

The final sequence of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes depicts the specifics of the ape uprising. It is a clash between riot police with shields, guns, and helmets and armed, screeching, enraged apes. This extended and very violent sequence diagrams "the slave's right to punish his persecutor."

The sequence ends with mankind fallen, and Caesar assuming command, ironically, from the pulpit of the human civic center. Behind him -- in the background of the frame -- skyscrapers burn out- of-control.

Again, given the context of the Detroit Rebellion or the Watts Riots, this image is meaningful. People watching the nightly news during those real-life conflagrations had also witnessed "the night of the fires" as Caesar called it, and wondered: would order be restored? Or was this the dawn of a new order? The order of the oppressed....

20th Century Fox apparently grew concerned that Conquest of the Planet of the Apes was too overtly a political film and took steps to de-fang the social commentary it offered. In the original, scripted ending (available now on Blu-ray), Caesar announced, basically, that apes would now rule the world just as cruelly as man had ruled it. But a last minute bit of post-production editing changed the tenor of Caesar's pronouncement.

Instead, after his anger is released Caesar relents and notes that even the inhuman (the apes...) can prove "humane" in their domination over mankind. It's a quick philosophical turnaround and doesn't entirely work in terms of the film. In fact, your head may spin from the shift. But still, one can understand the compromise. The studio didn't want Conquest of The Planet of the Apes -- in the environment of race riots -- to be interpreted as an incitement to real-life violence.

Still, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes ends on a haunting, unforgettable note. Flames consume a futuristic city, and the planet of the apes is born. And as the end credits roll, the screeching of the victorious apes continues unabated. No closing music softens this shrill sound. The night of the fires continues into an unknown future.

So, is Conquest of the Planet of the Apes really pro-violence? Or is it simply pro-slave? In an interesting sense, the answer is undeniably affirmative: it is pro-violence. Thomas Jefferson once explained that "experience hath shown, that even under the best forms (of government) those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” We see that tyranny clearly depicted here: the America of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes exists for the glorification for the rich and powerful at the expense of liberty and freedom for all. Breck's administration is positively despotic (and he's running for President!).And Thomas Jefferson's prescribed cure for tyranny was not unlike Caesar's in the film; the steadfast belief that "every generation needs a new revolution."

So Conquest of the Planet of the Apes re-interprets the Watts Riots and other race violence of the 1960s as one possible and even legitimate response to entrenched racial inequality in America. Caesar tells Mr. McDonald that the only means left to him and his people (the apes) is, indeed, revolution. "We cannot be free until we have power. How else can we achieve it?" MacDonald then insists that Caesar's attempt at revolution is doomed to failure. "Perhaps, this time," Caesar replies, indicating that this initial riot will not be the last attempt. This response further contextualizes the race riots in America: they exist not as separate, individual, isolated incidents of rampant lawlessness...but as organized, necessary steps along the pathway from slavery to freedom, to total equality.

It is no doubt controversial to equate a science-fiction film about "apes" to the Black experience in American history, yet that's precisely the comparison Conquest of the Planet of the Apes forges, as these contextual examples reveal. The result is an incendiary, subversive and endlessly intelligent film; one that asks us to gaze at what Caesar calls a myth: "the idea that human beings are kind."  Conquest of The Planet of the Apes judges man by the way he treats those populations he controls or dominates, namely the slaves, the minorities, the immigrants, or the ethnic "others."

In the film’s social commentary, there's an implied warning to entrenched power. The tables can be turned.

Or worse, over-turned.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1972) (a.k.a. Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster) * * *

Critical Mass:

“Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster” is a relatively dark film for this series, not just in its eco-social concerns but also in its style: much of the monster action takes place at night and some of the scenes are so poorly illuminated that it is hard to determine who is winning the brawl. Godzilla himself is a bit meaner this go-round, disemboweling Hedorah to ensure that creature doesn’t return.” – Phil Hall, Film Threat, November 4, 2006.

“…there may be something undeniably silly about a film that climaxes with two men in rubber suits wrestling on a miniature train set, but the eco-disaster that frames the action is notably ahead of its time. Long time Godzilla fans may cry foul when it’s revealed that the big guy has been keeping them in the dark about his ability to fly over the years (he propels himself with his atomic breath), but I get a kick out of the reveal every time. Regardless of its initial reception, nobody could argue that the film’s heart is in the right place.” – Unkle Lancifer, Kindertrauma, November 26, 2008.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Akira Yamauchi (Dr. Toru Yano); Toshie Kimura (Toshie Yano); Hiroyuki Kawase (Ken Yano); Toshio Shiba (Yukio Keuchi); Keiko Mari (Miki Fujiyama); Yoshio Yoshida (Gohei); Haruo Suzuki JSDF Officer); Harou Nakajima (Godzilla); Kengo Nakayama (Hedorah).

CREW: Toho Company, Ltd., presents Godzilla vs. Hedorah. Director of Photography: Yoichi Manoda. Original Music: Riichiro Manabe. Film Editing: Yoshitami Kuroiwa. Special Effects: Shokei Nakano. Art Direction: Yasiyuki Inoue. Executive Producer: Tomoyuki Tanaka. Written by: Kaoru Mabuchi, Yoshimitsu Banno. Directed by: Yoshimtsu Banno. M.P.A.A. Rating: GP. Running time: 87 minutes.

Story:

A dreadful creature called Hedorah from “a sticky, dark planet far away” is spawned and grown in the pollution, sewage, and detritus of Earth’s 20th century civilizations.  The blob-like entity with red eyes grows and grows through three distinct stages, proving a menace to human life, especially in Japan. When Hedorah flies overhead, he excretes deadly sulfuric acid.

Meanwhile, one boy, Kenny, dreams of his hero, Godzilla, and believes that only the giant atomic lizard can save the world from this terrible new threat.

The giant green dinosaur soon shows up, and engages in a battle to the death with the smog monster.

Review:

Perhaps the easiest way to understand and appreciate the Godzilla movies of the 1970s is to interpret them as, essentially, the Japanese equivalent of James Bond-styled movie adventures.  Each Godzilla outing features a different and colorful villain and the same, dependable hero, Godzilla, who faces this new threat or challenge.

Furthermore, films such as Godzilla vs. Hedorah open with a memorable pop tune, and this one is sung by an attractive woman at that….also harking back to the screen legacy of 007. There are also the expected almost stand-alone set-pieces, the ones in which the protagonist first confronts the antagonist, and is defeated, and the climactic encounter, wherein good finally prevails.

Continuing down this road of comparison further, the best way to judge or critique a Bond film, largely, is to categorize the elements in terms of their antecedents and determine whether the ingredients in the current entry stack-up. Is the new movie as good as past entries? Does it throw in some surprises to go along with the elements an audience expects to see?

In terms of Godzilla vs. Hedorah (or Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster as it is known in America), the answer is undeniably affirmative.  Hedorah makes for a dangerous, original, and grotesque villain, not just in terms of his ever-changing appearance -- which enables him to wreak havoc on land, sea and in the air -- but in terms of his abilities.  When the airborne Hedorah strafes his human prey and sprays a toxic chemical, humans below are dissolved to bone instantly, and it’s a frightening effect.

Secondly, the film finds some new subtext and social critique material for the long-standing franchise.  Historically, Godzilla has been parsed as an avatar for atomic power. He owes his very existence to human nuclear testing, and so forth.  In Godzilla vs. Hedorah, however, the series gives him a villain who also symbolizes an important element of the 1970s zeitgeist: pollution.

As seen in films such as Doomwatch (1976) and No Blade of Grass (1970), environmental pollution proved the great bugaboo of the age, and here, the alien seed that is Hedorah sprouts from sewage and garbage strewn into the ocean.  The opening scenes in the film depict smoke stacks, factories, and filthy brown water.

From this hot-house of detritus emerges something awful: the crimson-eyed menace from another world.  One scene later in the film even depicts Hedorah sucking smoke out of a factory stack like it’s a giant bong and the powerful point is made with visuals: we’re actually feeding the vehicle of our own destruction when we pollute the Earth.

Commendably, the Godzilla series has adjusted with the times to remain relevant and interesting.  The nature of “the monster” has changed (from nuclear power to rampant pollution and environmental damage), but the overall premise hasn’t been altered at all.  The fact is, state these Japanese films, mankind’s behavior and irresponsibility are jeopardizing everyone on the planet.

What makes Godzilla vs. Hedorah such a charming and worthwhile film, however, is not necessarily the polemical aspects of the drama. Contrarily, the film takes up the viewpoint of a child, who sees the pollution and wishes for some miracle to stop it.  That miracle, in this case, is named Godzilla.  “Godzilla would get really angry if he saw this. He’d do something,” the child, Kenny, declares upon musing over pollution.

In this case, he seeks an answer to a problem, and hopes for a person (or creature) brave enough and bold enough to take action.  The film actually creates a kind of link between this boy and Godzilla, suggesting that Godzilla can hear his hopes and thoughts, and thus comes to the rescue of humanity. Kenny hopes that Godzilla will fix by might that which man chooses not to address.

Furthering the idea of the film as originating from a child’s viewpoint, Godzilla vs. Hedorah often cuts to a cartoon representation of the sludge monster, perhaps in an attempt to maintain the whimsical aspects of the tale, especially in counter-balance to some of the gruesome special effects.

Finally, the film even features a great (if idealistic) answer to the problem of pollution: “if everyone pulls together, we can defeat it.”  If we can just do that one thing, Godzilla will not gaze down upon us with such disapproval in his eyes, as he does in the coda of this particular outing.

Although it is always funny to make man-in-suit jokes in regards to kaiju films such as Godzilla vs. Hedorah, the fact is that this film is beautifully shot.  The compositions make full use of film’s rectangular frame, and some vistas -- even those featuring an obviously mini-metropolis and dueling men-in-suits -- remain visually impressive.

Perhaps some of the ideas here -- like a peace march to stop pollution -- seem dated in the cold light of the 21st century, but Godzilla vs. Hedorah, with its child-like innocence and focus on a real 1970s “monster” works just about as well as any Godzilla movie ever made.

Near Saturn, a lonely robot attempts to repair the Valley Forge, home of Earth’s last forests in Silent Running (1972).

Silent Running (1972) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“…highly simple-minded. It’s terribly sincere, somewhat slow and a fake that’s all the more obvious because of its glossiness.” – Edward L. Blank, The Pittsburgh Press, May 18, 1972.

“…a passionately committed piece of ecological science fiction.” – Scott Eyman, The Miami News, June 18, 1988.

“The world’s first and only outer space ecology movie…Silent Running may not be subtle, but it’s compulsively interesting. Dern does well and the film’s subtext about loneliness has a nice Twilight Zone feel to it.” Richard Burkholder, The Gainesville Sun, April 7, 2000, page 16.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Bruce Dern (Freeman Lowell); Cliff Potts (John Keenan); Ron Rifkin (Marty Baker); Jesse Vint (Andy Wolf); Mark Persons, Steve Browns, Cheryl Sparks, Larry Whisenhunt (Drones).

CREW: Universal Pictures and Trumball/Gruskoff Productions present Silent Running. Director of Photography: Charles F. Wheeler. Original Music: Peter Schickele. Songs performed by: Joan Baez. Film Editing: Aaron Stell. Produced by: Michael Gruskoff and Douglas Trumball. Written by: Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino. Directed by: Douglas Trumball. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 89 minutes.

Story:

Aboard the space freighter Valley Forge, gardener Freeman Lowell (Dern) lovingly tends to the last surviving forests from planet Earth.  At some point in the past, all the world's forests were transported into space aboard such ships with monikers such as Sequoia and Berkshire. Lowell has been patiently waiting for the day when man will realize the errors of his ways, redeem the Earth, and recall the forests.  Lowell even harbors hopes of becoming the director of a new "Parks and Forests" system, since he alone among his shipmates appreciates the living forests and the fruit they bear.

However, when an announcement arrives from Earth authority, it is not what Freeman had expected or hoped for.  Instead of reclaiming the forests, the terrestrial governments have decided on "cutbacks."  The forests will be launched from the freighters and destroyed in nuclear detonations.  Nature itself is to be abandoned by the human race.

Lowell protests this final solution to his shipmates, but they are young, callow souls, who only want to return home, and could care less that the last forests on Earth are not "disposable" like so many elements of mankind's technological world.

While watching forests explode in terrifying nuclear blasts, Lowell makes a rash decision: he protects one of his forest domes from a shipmate...killing the crew man in the process.  Then Lowell repeats that fateful decision, trapping the last two crew men inside one of the Valley Forge's geodesic domes as it launches into deep space and is destroyed.

Now a murderer three-times over, Lowell goes on "silent running," and takes the Valley Forge through the turbulent rings of Saturn.  During the escape maneuver, one of the Valley Forge's small maintenance drones, number 3, is destroyed.

Separated from his home world and his fellow man, Lowell begins to lose his grip on sanity.  He re-programs the surviving drones, re-named Huey and Dewey, to keep him company.  They learn to play poker with him (and promptly beat him...) and they even become gardeners under Lowell's ministrations.

When Earth authorities finally catch up with Lowell, he realizes he has one last chance to save the sole surviving forest.  He tasks Dewey with tending to the forest -- for eternity -- and launches the forest dome on a trajectory for deepest space.  Alone and guilty over his violent actions, Lowell then destroys himself, the malfunctioning Huey, and the Valley Forge itself.

.

Review:

Douglas Trumball's 1972 environmental space film, Silent Running opens with a series of gorgeous, extreme close-up views of colorful flowers in bloom, and the diverse animal life surrounding these plants: a snail, a turtle, and a toad, in order.  As the camera pushes in towards the red, pink and yellow blossoms, we detect that the petals are wet and glistening with translucent water drops. What Trumball's probing camera gazes at -- in extreme proximity during the film's inaugural and majestic angles --  is a thriving ecosystem; an inter-connected biological system in perfect and serene balance.  The considerable size and prominence of these plants and animals within the frame successfully make audiences feel as if they are witnessing a whole planet in microcosm, a world in its multitudinous, assorted entirety.

The remainder of Silent Running, in a more nuanced fashion than it has often been given credit for by critics, audiences and ideologues, concerns another biological system too, that belonging to technological man aboard the American Airlines Space Freighter, Valley Forge.

Specifically, this futuristic ecosystem undergoes imbalance due to the acts of one man, the symbolically-named "Freeman" Lowell (Bruce Dern).  In short order, Lowell makes a life-and-death choice entirely consistent with the "Conservation" Pledge he has sworn to uphold, but it is a decision that he cannot possibly live with as a  moral human being

So while many critics and audiences seek to pigeonhole Silent Running alternately as a conservative warning against rampaging eco-terrorists (presumably Lowell in this case) or a bleeding heart, liberal ode to "tree hugging," the truth is, predictably, much more complicated.  What Silent Running truly concerns is a man who does what he passionately believes is the right thing...and then almost immediately regrets the imbalance he has initiated in his own life, his own psychology, and aboard his ship.

There's something very realistic and poignant in both Lowell's capricious actions and his guilty reactions to them.  Seldom in life are such grave decisions made and executed without real consequences for the decision-maker, and Silent Running is Lowell's tale in that regard.  He achieves something wonderful in one very important, nearly cosmic sense, the preservation of the Earth's last forest, but the price for his actions is his own sanity, and even more than that, his belief in himself as a moral and "good" human being.

Silent Running paints a not very pretty picture of our immediate future, and thus qualifies as a dystopian vision.  On Earth, man has apparently populated the world to such a degree that two things have (presumably) occurred.  In the first case, there is no room for plant life on the surface. In the second instance, plant life apparently can't even survive or thrive on the planet anymore because of factors such as pollution, or littering.  Thus space freighters carry the surviving forests to the stars with human custodians aboard.  Freeman Lowell, one such custodian, recalls the Presidential announcement that gave birth to the Valley Forge's mission during a voice-over flashback:

"On this first day of a new century we humbly beg forgiveness and dedicate these last forests of our once beautiful nation to the hope that they will one day return and grace our foul earth. Until that day may God bless these gardens and the brave men who care for them."

Although we never see Earth in the film, Silent Running's dystopia isn't all-together foreign to those of us living now.  We detect in the film's fictional future the end game of an environmental battle being waged on Earth and in America right now.  On the one hand, there are those who want to preserve our planet's natural landscape.  These people believe that human beings are tasked -- in our short time here on Earth -- with responsibly maintaining that which God, or Mother Earth, has given us.  We are mere shepherds of the land until we can hand off this important care-taking duty to our children, the next generation.

Then there are those who want to mine the land, drill the land, log the land, and extract from nature everything of possible value for business and personal profit.  These folks usually want to undertake such invasive action in the cheapest, quickest way possible, which ultimately equates to a disruption of the wild.  The goal is to make our lives more comfortable, and less expensive, but the means are destructive.

If you couple this latter approach of environmental management to the increasingly-real idea of a plastic, disposable culture, you arrive at the world imagined so powerfully by Trumball and Silent Running.

The astronauts aboard Valley Forge have never eaten real fruit or vegetables; depending instead on "synthetic" substances for sustenance.   They also don't see any value in the forests.  In an early scene, the crew men playfully and loudly ride motorized buggies into the garden domes, disrupting the habitat without a care, or even a thought.

Lowell attempts to remind his less insightful crew mates that the decision to nuke the forests because of budgetary shortfalls is not one that mankind can come back from.   Unlike the synthetic food supplies stacked in the ship's cargo hold, the forests are not replaceable.  Once the forests and their wildlife are gone, they're gone, and man is only left with what the president called "the foul Earth."

When Lowell decides to preserve the last forest at the expense of his shipmates' lives, he is committing murder to be certain, but he is also, we should remember, upholding his sworn duty.  Not long ago, the President was asking God to bless "the brave men" who protected the gardens, and he honored their mission of conservation, even begging forgiveness for destroying the planet's natural beauty.

More than that, Lowell in particular has sworn a very specific oath, "The Conservation Pledge," which reads: "I give my pledge as an American to save and faithfully to defend from waste the natural resources of my country -- its soil and minerals, its forests, waters, and wildlife." In some sense, Lowell is honoring his word and the service he selected by rescuing the Earth's last forest preserve.

Yet to fulfill that oath, he commits the murder of his fellow man, and that is, simply, an immoral act.  In upholding his sworn duty, Lowell has violated another, equally as critical moral law.   His awareness of this violation begins to drive him crazy, and occasionally, Trumball jump cuts to images of the Lowell's dead crew, jump cuts that are meant to signify Lowell's memories veritably attacking his mind; reminding him of his culpability, of his inescapable guilt.

I believe that many viewers -- especially ideology-minded ones -- face a difficult journey with Silent Running because it proposes two ideas that we assume contradict each other, but don't, actually.  These are, A: the last forest should be saved, and Lowell is right to save it.  And B: it is wrong for Lowell to kill his crew mates to save the forest.

Both A and B are true, and exist side-by-side in the film.

Lowell accomplishes a good...very badly, if that makes sense.  And he is not just a wanton murderer, as his expressions of guilty conscience reveal.  Rather, he is a fully-dimensional character who both commits a great right and a great wrong.  He is a flawed, fallible human being. Life is often this complex, but movies rarely are.  Silent Running asks viewers to countenance a man who wants to save the last forest of Earth, and does so, but pays too a high a personal and moral price to achieve that noble end.

Silent Running is remarkable because it also reveals how Lowell unbalances his own ecosystem -- the Valley Forge -- by his rash decision-making; just as the choice to nuke the forest domes was rash.

Before long, he's the fellow driving through the empty ship in a buggy -- in a pointed reflection of the earlier scene of his crew mates doing so -- and he wreaks just as much havoc as the other men did.  Not by running over the grass and the woods of the forest, but by colliding with and seriously damaging one of the expressive little drones.

Another drone, Luey, also pays the price for Lowell's actions.  Lowell steers the ship through the rings of Saturn, and the drone is lost...killed, when yanked from the ship's hull.  With Luey dead, only two drones remain to maintain the ship.  The ecosystem of the Valley Forge is -- again -- unbalanced by Lowell's choices.  He then keeps programming and re-programming the surviving maintenance drones to better serve his personal needs.  To serve as his doctor or to play games with him, or to garden for him.  This is a metaphor for man's treatment of nature: it must service us and adapt to us, even as our needs change and evolve.  Lowell is thus no better and no less capricious than the men down on Earth who were begging God for forgiveness one day and then nuking the last forests the next.

I've often discussed Silent Running with people who wonder what the last half of the film, involving the drones, really has to do with the first half of the film, about Lowell's decision to save the forest.

The answer is plain and straightforward: the last acts of the film reveal Lowell to be as mercurial and controlling of his available resources (including the drones, ostensibly life-forms) as the people of the Earth were.  But in at least one instance, he certainly committed a "good" by saving the forest. I thus submit the film is morally complex, rather than simple-minded or facile, as many reviews have argued.  Silent Running is not anti-technology either, because in the end, it is a man-made drone tending the forest, inside a man-made, technological shell.

The forests would have died long ago without man's technology.  In some senses, that's the example of harmony man should and could emulate: building and re-building eco-systems in balance.   From its first evocative shot of nature in extreme-close-up harmony, Silent Running concerns the way that man balances or unbalances his environs, whether on Earth or aboard the Valley Forge.  That's the takeaway message.

Written by Steve Bochco, Michael Cimino and Deric Washburn, Silent Running is one of those early-1970s, pre-Star Wars treasures that, unencumbered by blockbuster expectations, moves freely and imaginatively to tell its unique story in its own individual way.  The movie is basically a one-man show, with Dern interacting, sometimes wildly, with the drones and the forest.  Silent Running boasts its own sometimes-mellow, sometimes-hysterical rhythm too, a rhythm augmented by Joan Baez's musical performances of ""Rejoice in the Sun" and "Silent Running."  I can't recall many times that folk music has accompanied grand outer space vistas (outside of the ironic use of "Benson, Arizona" in Dark Star [1975]), but the musical compositions and lyrics strike just the right note of individual personality, sadness and wistfulness.  The songs ably support the film's episodic, elegiac, and eccentric story-telling style and structure.

Given Trumball's incredible talent and experience on 2001: A Space Odyssey, it probably goes without saying that the special effects sequences in Silent Running are extraordinary.  This effects work brilliantly holds up today, and the Saturn's ring sequence remains a highlight of the film.  Perhaps most importantly, the exterior views of the film's central location, Valley Forge, remain totally convincing, and totally realistic.  These sequences were later used -- over five years later -- in Battlestar Galactica.

In the end, Silent Running concerns man's lack of wisdom controlling the world and creatures around him.  That stance applies equally to nature and technology, given the film's narrative details.  And the movie even ends on a poetic apex, one not easily forgotten.  Freeman Lowell -- just minutes before committing suicide -- describes a youthful experience placing a note inside a bottle and tossing it into the ocean; wondering if anyone will ever find it and read the note.

As the film makes plain, Lowell has done the same thing on Valley Forge, but on a much grander scale.  He has sent a forest in a bottle of sorts, across the void of space...hoping someone will find it, and treasure it.

It's up to future man -- hopefully on a better, more balanced track -- to find that lonely, lost bottle and remember the gift he has foolishly rejected and actively sought to destroy.  The emotional folk songs sung by Baez speak of "sorrow running deep" at the loss of a great treasure, and the film concludes on the lonely image of a solitary drone -- with watering can -- tending to mankind's forsaken wards.  It is an image that suggests environment and technology going on and on, but without man to interfere with them.

So Silent Running is a film about a world of "no more beauty," and "no more imagination," in which "nobody cares" about what God or Mother Nature gave us to care for.  But the film leaves open the possibility of hope that it won't always be that way.

Or, as Freeman Lowell says, "Don't you think it's time that someone should have a dream again?"

Solaris (1972) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“Tarkovsky doesn't script so much as paint and compose; his work is a collection of living paintings, or visual symphonies, rather than narrative movies. Though "Solaris" is one of the late director's most plot-coherent and accessible films, its plot is still a mere conduit for mood, atmosphere and philosophy. With cinematographer Vadim Yusov's deft eye, Tarkovsky also creates some incredible images, such as the opening shot, in which underwater reeds undulate with such hypnotic grace that they seem to be directed, or the breathtaking shots of the surface of Solaris. His pictures, and his sounds -- such as the symphonic drip of raindrops in a wooded pond -- tell more than just the immediate story; they rejuvenate the mind.” – Desson Howe, The Washington Post, June 1, 1990.

“Based on Stanislaw Lem's brilliant novel, this towering 1972 allegory takes place mostly on a space station near a mysterious planet that may be a living, thinking entity capable of sending phantoms from the past into its visitors' minds. Some of the uncanny power surging through this visionary epic comes from changes Tarkovsky made to divert the attention of Soviet censors. The triumph was all his.  Along with his astonishing "Stalker," this stands with the greatest science-fiction movies ever made.” – David Sterritt, The Christian Science Monitor, October 18, 2002.

“The electronic music score by Edward Artemyev is highly effective in creating a subtly disquieting sci-fi ambience, and the film is artfully photographed by Vadim Ysov.” – Paul Meehan, Tech-Noir: The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir. McFarland, 2008, page 135.

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Donatas Banionis (Kris Kelvin); Natalya Bondarchuk (Hari); Juri Jarvet (Dr. Snaut); Vladislav Dvorzhetskiy (Henri Berton); Nikolay Grinko (Kelvin’s Father);  Annatoliy Solonitsyn (Dr. Sartorius); O. Barnet (Kris Kelvin’s Mother); V. Kerdiumn (Andre Berton’s Son); O. Kizilova (Gibarian’s female guest); Bagrat Oganesyan (Professor Trajet); Sos Sarsgyan (Dr. Gibarian); Yulian Semyonov (Chairman);

CREW: Creative Unit of Writers & Cinema Workers, and Kinostudiya ''Mosfilm'' present Solaris. Director of Photography: Vadim Yusov. Original music: Eduard Artemev. Film Editing: Lyudmila Feiginova, Nina Marcus. Production Design: Mikhail Romadin. Produced by: Viacheslav Tarasov. Written by: Fridrikh Gorenshtein, Andrei Tarkovsky. Based on the novel Solaris by: Stanislaw Lem. Directed by; Andrei Tarkovsky. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 167 minutes.

Story:

In the future space age, a psychologist named Kris Kelvin (Banionis) is tasked with visiting the strange alien world Solaris, and investigating what has happened to the space station crew observing it.

If he finds the planet dangerous to human life, Kelvin can either remove the station from orbit and cease all “Solaristic” research, or bombard the strange alien world with radiation in hopes of negating its strange powers and influence over the human mind.

After saying goodbye to his father on Earth, Kelvin journeys to the space station and finds the scientists there bedeviled by strange “guests,” physical manifestations from their human memory.

Kelvin’s own guest soon appears too: his long-dead wife, Hari (Bondarchuk).  Her presence threatens Kris’s sanity but also his very sense of morality.  Are these guests created by Solaris actually living people, shadows of half-forgotten memories, or some other heretofore unexpressed element of human conscience?

And why has Solaris sent them?

Review:

On the surface, the brilliant, open-ended, Russian science fiction epic Solaris concerns mankind’s reckoning with an alien world, and its coruscating, planet wide ocean.

Scrape the surface, however, and the Tarkovsky film revolves around humanity’s total inability to meaningfully reckon with something truly alien, something truly unlike us.

Humanity’s steadfast inability to understand something “different’ is a result of a peculiar brand of selfishness, Solaris suggests.  When mankind gazes upon any object or person, people see only echoes of themselves and their own lives, their own experiences. Thus, we are intrinsically self-centric beings. This notion is expressed in a line of dialogue in the film which suggests “We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror.”

How then, can we contextualize something that originates far away, and boasts a psyche or soul utterly unrelated to us?

Solaris suggests that such communication between human and alien is not truly possible. This conclusion about man’s inadequacy in the face of alien discovery is borne out in the film’s dialogue.  “Everything has been confusing or incomprehensible,” says one scientist.  “Everything we know about Solaris is negative,” concludes another.  Even in the scientists’ attempt to understand Solaris, personal, human assumptions sneak in.  “It has something to do with conscience,” concludes Gibarian.  That’s his conclusion, based on his feelings of conscience, isn’t it?

Quite simply, man is ill-equipped to countenance a world or universe that does not include him at it its center.

Instead of truly broaching communication with the unknown, the different, or the alien, man instead seeks to destroy that which he doesn’t understand, or somehow make it a reflection of himself, thus destroying its essential “otherness.”  Kelvin’s actions in the film support this theory.  Part of his mission involves, essentially, lobotomizing Solaris with radiation if it proves to be dangerous to mankind.

And at film’s end, Kelvin broadcasts his brain encephalograms at Solaris, and it quickly re-shapes itself into a vision from his past, his home.

Islands of Kelvin’s memory ascend from the planet-wide sea in patterns that conform to his (apparently subconscious) desire to return home.  Again, the truly alien is replaced by something human-oriented, something familiar.  Kelvin has gotten his mirror, and yet he still can’t accept it totally, because his psyche can’t understand its nature.

What makes the events on the space station so terrifying to Kelvin and the others is that there is no way of deducing Solaris’s intent regarding the appearance or manifestation of the human-looking “guests.”  Man’s science can’t determine the agenda, or the nature of these guests.  Are Hari and the others alive in the sense that Kelvin is alive?  Even if they are formed only by the colored, personal memories of those who knew them on Earth, do these beings have souls, and therefore the spark of life?

If so, Kelvin is a murderer, because he dispatches the first “guest” version of Hari in a space pod, consigning her to eventual death in space.  Again, the notion arises that man is so afraid of something he doesn’t immediately understand that his first response is to kill that thing.

Viewers learn in the course of Solaris that the guests began to appear when the station first bombarded the planet with X-Rays.  And secondly that the “guests” are made of neutrinos -- not atoms -- held stable by some force on the planet Solaris.

Again, one might conclude that Solaris sought contact after being contacted first (with the X-Rays) by man, and did so in a manner it thought would be comprehensible to humans.  But the “guests” represent an imperfect or cracked mirror, and what they reflect upon the human characters is the unsettling sense that it is impossible for a human being to really know another human being.

Therefore, Hari is not Hari, but a simulacrum originated in Kelvin’s (perhaps faulty) memory of her.

Such ideas get to the very heart of what it means to exist, to be sentient, and to boast an individual soul. Can an alien being reproduce those things which man holds to be the product and providence of divine creation?

When confronted with such questions, Kelvin and the others want to look away, or squash that which is different and threatening to their self-centric beliefs about humanity and the universe. If Solaris can recreate us, down to our souls, of what use have we for God?

And what use would God have for us?

Eventually, Kelvin comes to realize and accept that he can have Hari back in some form, but again, more questions arise from her presence.  Can Solaris take away loss and give back love?  Or is it providing only a facsimile of love? Is loving Hari a meaningful and true act, or a willful act of self-delusion?

“Man needs man,” one character asserts in the film, and that conclusion is simply another way of stating that we don’t belong exploring space, at least not when our imaginations are so limited, and so dominated by feelings of fear.

So what Solaris really explores is the idea that in observing something natural, beautiful and beyond our understanding, we actually change, and perhaps destroy that very thing.

Bolstered by lyrical visuals, Solaris doesn’t possess much in terms of stereotypical science fiction imagery.  Beyond the corridors and environs of the space station, there is very little in the film that one would recognize as conventional special effects or space age technology and imagery.  Yet Tarkovksy provides unique, symbolic imagery which substitutes for this kind of de rigueur brand of sci-fi presentation.

For example, the film opens with a shot of green plants waving and swaying in placid water. The plant-life, coruscating ever gently but constantly suggests tendrils reaching out to touch something else, and that’s not a bad metaphor for the planet Solaris, in the film.  One gets the sense from this visual of something alive, but also something diffuse and eternal. The waves don’t stop lapping around the plants, and as the plants move, they don’t appear to possess an overt sign of individual intelligence or sentience.  But there is some indication there, in the repetition of the waves and the movement of the plants, of some scale of non-human order.

Later in the film, there is a long and apparently pointless scene of the astronaut Berton -- who has been to Solaris -- returning to the city.  Tarkovsky’s camera follows his car through a conventional, labyrinthine, modern highway network at the foot of a major metropolis.  The scene goes on and on, beyond reason, and is accompanied by weird sci-fi sound effects. Berton’s car darts through the darkness of long tunnels, and then comes into the light for several intervals.

This scene may prove baffling or be considered unnecessary to some, but in another, symbolic fashion, it seems to represent the ultimate unknowability of another person (or entity’s) mind, or sense of “truth.”  There are occasions of light, punctuated by occasions of dark, and neuronal synapses (represented by the cars) seem to fire and move about at random, heading for unknown and unknowable destinations.

Perhaps the opening image, of the almost serene, eternal water represents the planet Solaris, and the busy, complex light-and-dark highway represents the human mind, always on the hunt for answers, always looking for another route to understanding or knowledge.  One can see how these images, and these thought processes -- eternal vs. busy – contrast one another

No matter the particular interpretation Solaris, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem, is a dazzling and memorable science fiction film, and one of the ten best genre movies of the 1970s.  While many great films imagine what the future will bring, or convincingly portray space battles in another galaxy, Solaris reminds us that when we go to outer space, we will still be human, and therefore saddled with all the same questions of morality and existence that we face now.

In other words, in the space age we will travel a very long way to meet alien life, but when we finally countenance it, we will still want to see only ourselves in it.  We will still desire that mirror…

Influence: A remake of Solaris (2002) starring George Clooney was released in the twenty-first century, and though it told a more personalized version of the story -- thereby risking “turning a scientific problem into a common love story,” per the first Solaris’s dialogue -- it nonetheless grappled meaningfully with many of the same important questions as its predecessor.

Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks, left) and movie star Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine; right) gaze out into the universe from their zoo cage on Trafalamdore in Slaughterhouse 5 (1972), the film adapation of Kurt Vonnegut’s beloved novel.

Slaughterhouse 5 (1972) * * *

Critical Mass:

“…captures some of the novel’s humor but misses its ideas, especially the horror of the Dresden firebombing.” – Robert L. McLaughlin, War and American Popular Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999, page 304.

“…at the very least one expects a trade-off between the merits of page and screen, which is just what happens to make Slaughterhouse-Five almost as good a film as it is a novel, albeit that convention serves the movie in place of the innovation necessary within the book.” – Jerome Klinkowitz, Take Two: Adapting the Contemporary Novel to Film, 1994, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, page 52.

“This very faithful adaptation is a visually stunning and emotionally satisfying trek in time which captured Vonnegut’s irreverence, novelty and irony.” – TLA Video and DVD Guide 2004, TLA Publications, 2004, page 557.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Michael Sacks (Billy Pilgrim); Ron Lealman (Paul Lazar); Eugene Roche (Edgar Derby); Sharon Gams (Valencia Marble Pilgrim); Valerie Perrine (Montana Wild hack); Holly Near (Barbara Pilgrim); Perry King (Robert Pilgrim); Kevin Conway (Roland Weary); Friedrich Led bur (German Leader); Nick Belle (Young German Guard); Sorrell Booke (Lionel Marble); Roberts Blossom (Wild Bob Cody); John Diner (Professor Rumford); Gary Wayne smith (Stanley); Richard School (Howard W. Campbell Jr.); Gilmer McCormick (Lily Rumford); Stan Gottlieb (Hobo); Henry Bum stead (Eliot Rosewater) Lucille Benson (Billy’s Mother); Tom Wood (English Officer).

CREW: A George Roy Hill/Paul Monash Production of a Universal Picture, Slaughterhouse Five. Director of Photography: Miroslav Ondricek. Original Music: Glenn Gould. Film Editing: Dede Allen. Production Design: Henry Bumstead. Produced by: Paul Monash. Executive Producer: Jennings Lang. Written by: Stephen Geller. Based on the novel by: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Directed by: George Roy Hill. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 104 minutes.

Story: A man named Billy Pilgrim (Sacks) becomes unstuck in time, and trips unpredictably through various time periods. He experiences life as a prisoner of war in World War II Europe on the eve of the Dresden Fire Bombing, as a married man in 1970s American suburbia, and even as an abductee on the distant planet of Tralfamadore.

Review:

George Roy Hill’s celebrated cinematic adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s award-winning 1969 novel is solid, laudable work, though, in some important sense, one sabotaged by the very nature of film itself.

Movies are -- very much like Billy Pilgrim -- capable of being unstuck in time and moving backward and forward without transition, without explanation, and without preamble.  Indeed, flash-backs and flash-forwards (often linked to a character’s internal thoughts…) are a staple of the cinematic form.

Accordingly, to some extent, the oddness and spectacle of Billy’s unusual life -- ping-ponging back and forth between realities and time-periods and even planetary environments -- seems a lot less intriguing or singular an affair on film than it does while countenancing Vonnegut’s words.

Acknowledging this fact is not a dig at Hill’s sturdy work here or a critique of Vonnegut’s talent or ingenuity, only an acknowledgment that the 1970s movie doesn’t quite boast the impact of the book, through no fault of its own, based simply on the nature of film as an art form.

At the core of the book and the film adaptation is the idea, indeed, of non-linear time, of what quantum physicists would no doubt term “the eternal moment of now.”

The Tralfamadorians in the film don’t live in linear time, essentially, but through all time-periods simultaneously.  Because of this fact, they see through the human “illusion” of free will, and face everything -- even the end of the universe itself -- with equanimity.  Nothing surprises them.  Nothing overjoys them, either.  If you are alive in all time periods simultaneously, after all, why worry that at one juncture you should die?   You are alive everywhere (every-when…) else, right?  “There is no how.  There is no why,” according to the aliens, “the moment simply is.”

The film contrasts the eternal, non-plussed Tralfamadorian aesthetic with our own, perhaps romantic, human one.  Whatever their failings, humans seek to act and make choices that will impact the course of history, or fate.  Fighting the Nazi evil for instance is one such choice.  Or getting married and having children. These are decisive acts executed on the belief that human will can re-shape the planet and yes, the universe’s future.

We are anchored to a time and place and therefore must invest in that time and place in a way that the Tralfamadorians, or even Billy, do not.  Is it any wonder that we buy into the “illusion” of free will? It’s a primal scream asserting our value and purpose in the cosmos.  Without it, we’re merely adrift.

Cinematically-speaking, a concern with Billy Pilgrim as an effective protagonist is that he is constantly acted upon by others but doesn’t initiate much action himself.  He is a passive hero, especially on film, where we are privy to less internal information. If Billy has no free will, then he has no role to play in choosing his career, his wife, or even telling his stories.  All those things are pre-ordained and he’s just…a passenger.  Therefore, in some powerful sense Billy is disconnected from everyone in his life. He is a man alone, essentially, and his odyssey is a demonstration of life’s absurdity.

That of course, is Vonnegut’s very point, that “the world is a collection of moments….strung together in random order,” and that we are deluded to try to ascribe meaning to it.  But life is meaningless to us if it goes on forever, has no purpose, and we are but puppets for God-like beings to move around or abduct.  Billy Pilgrim’s journey may be about self-knowledge and acceptance, but it is also one that absolves him of any bad decisions or mistakes he makes.

There’s nothing wrong with Slaughterhouse Five’s philosophical argument, but the film simply doesn’t make for a very engaging viewing experience, in part because Billy just constantly accepts his lot, whether this means being a prisoner of war or a prisoner on another world.  He never really protests or makes the affirmative case for humanity’s point of view.  The film, like Billy, is kind of passive, kind of funny, and kind of absurd.  It’s an intellectual exercise, and a good one, but Slaughterhouse Five just doesn’t move you the way that a truly great movie should.

Billy may be unstuck in time but the film is stuck permanently in its own absurdist mind-set.

The Thing with Two Heads (1972) * *

Critical Mass:

The most incredible thing in "The Thing with Two Heads" is not the head transplant…but what happens next. Within hours after Milland's head has been screwed on, the two-headed escapee is on a motorcycle and being chased by no less than 14 police cars. Every one of them is destroyed during the chase, a process that takes so long that seven, or even five, squad cars might have been enough.” – Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times, October 10, 1972.

“…outrageous and transgressive…One could view The Thing with Two Heads as a threat to white and black constructs; after all, if two heads can be in one body, this forced co-existence potentially threatens the categories of both white and black.” – Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Bad: Infamy Darkness, Evil and Slime on the Screen, State University Press of New York, 2005, page 51.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Ray Milland (Dr. Max Kirshner); Rosey Grier (Jack Moss); Don Marshall (Dr. Fred Williams); Roger Perry (Dr. Philip Desmond); Chelsea Brown (Lila); Kathy Baumann (Patricia); John Dullaghan (Thomas); John Bliss (Donald); Bruce Kimball (Policeman); Jane Kellem (Miss Mullen); Lee Frost (Sgt. Hacker); Wes Bishop (Dr. Smith); Rick Baker (Gorilla).

CREW AIP and Samuel J. Arkoff present The Thing with Two Heads. Director of Photography: Jack Steely. Original Music: Robert O’Ragland. Film Editor: Ed Forsyth. Executive Producer: John Lawrence. Produced by: Wes Bishop. Written by: Lee Frost and Wes Bishop. Directed by: Lee Frost. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG Running time: 93 minutes.

Story:

A dying surgeon who also happens to be “a bigot of the highest caliber,” Dr. Kirshner (Milland), wants his head transplanted to a healthy young body so his scientific experimentation can continue.

The only available donor, however, is an African-American convict, Jack Moss (Grier) who has been sentenced to death for a crime he claims he didn’t commit.  When Jack awakes, post-op, to find the white racist’s head lodged on his body, he realizes that he is soon to be killed, and engineers an escape, with the police in hot pursuit…

Review:

Not that this recommendation is particularly significant, but The Thing with Two Heads is clearly the two-headed monster movie to see, and better (by a neck?) than 1971’s The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant.

The reason that this 1972 film from Lee Frost merits a more positive review is simply that it is actually about something -- namely bigotry -- and its characters behave in a way that suggests, at least, some borderline sense of reality. In The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, it was unclear why the experiment was undertaken, and why it was undertaken in the way it was.

Ray Milland is effectively caustic here playing a mean old bastard, a man who hates African-Americans with a vengeance, but then, in an irony worthy of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, he is forced to make a bodily accommodation with one.

“I never allow colored people to work on my staff” he barks early in the film, when confronted with the brilliant but black Dr. Williams (Marshall).  And when Williams finds reasons to be upset with that statement of principle, Milland’s Kirshner acts like the black man is the one with the problem.  “Why is it that you people always put yourself into a situation where you don’t fit?”

The answer -- which Dr. Williams can’t voice if he hopes to keep his job and professional reputation -- is that men such as Dr. Kirshner believe that African-Americans fit nowhere…except in jail, or living out of sight in some ghetto somewhere.  Of course, Kirshner is much easier on himself.  “Genius must be preserved,” he notes with a fine sense of self-appreciation.  In other words, he is part of the 1%, and Moss just another of the undistinguished 99%. Kirshner believes he deserves not just the good life, but life-everlasting, even if he must circumvent the laws of man and science to make it happen.

The racial component of The Thing with Two Heads, arriving during roughly the same span that All in the Family appeared on CBS, suggests that such issues were really roiling the culture. And like Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), The Thing with Two Heads takes the side of the oppressed, not the oppressor.  Hatred, once seen for what it is, becomes harder, and then impossible to defend.

Unfortunately, once the movie gets going, the director seems more interested in staging car chases and car wrecks than in really examining the state of race differences in America of the era.

After the first half of the film, with its racist language and a villain you immediately love to hate in Milland’s Kirshner, the movie descends into a kind of a campy Smokey and the Bandit Meets Frankenstein-style.  Before the film ends, a whole fleet of police cars have been demolished, but what has been learned, or even expressed by the vehicular hijinks?

Just as disappointingly, The Thing with Two Heads seems to care not a whit for the basics of a being with two heads.   How does the two-headed thing eat? Which mouth do you feed?  And why does one cranium (Kirshner’s) gain strength over the other after just a short time?  And when Jack and his girlfriend have sex, how does Kirshner feel about that?  Since his head is wired to Jack’s body, does he feel the pleasure Jack feels?

Overall, the movie might have been more satisfying for viewers if it eschewed some of the lengthy chase scenes and simply focused on what it means to have a man constantly on your back (a metaphor, again, for the white man looking over the black man’s shoulder).

At some level, The Thing with Two Heads seems to understand this notion, and it begins with great flourishes of meaning and social commentary before descending into a thoroughly uninspiring run-around.  The movie is the better “Two Headed” effort of the 1970s, but in the final analysis, that just isn’t saying much.

Carol (Geraldine Chaplin; left) and Russ McNeil (Oliver Reed; right) welcome a child, but disobey society’s Zero Child Edict to do so, in Z.P.G. (1972).

Z.P.G. (1972) * * *

Critical Mass:

“…grim but stylish.” – David Bleiler, TLA Video and DVD Guide, 2005, TLA Publications, 2005, page 698.

“Intriguing, detailed set-up becomes uninteresting melodrama.” – Blockbuster Entertainment Guide to Movies and Videos, 1999, page 1320.

“Sci-fi tale with style but no class.” – Leonard Maltin, Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide, 1996, page 1498.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Oliver Reed (Russ McNeil); Geraldine Chaplin (Carol McNeil); Don Gordon (George Borden); Diane Cilento (Edna Borden); Eugene Blau (Baby Shop Salesman); Belinda Donkin (Daughter); Birgitte Federspiel (Psychiatrist); Anne-Lise Gabold (Mother in Baby Shop); Michel Hildesheim (Thief);

CREW: Director of Photography: Michael Reed, Mikael Salomon. Original Music: Jonathan Hodge. Film Editing: Dennis Lanning. Production Design: Anthony Masters. Produced by: Tom Madigan. Executive Producer: Frank De Felitta. Written by: Frank De Felitta, Max Ehrlich. Directed by: Michael Campus. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 97 minutes.

Story:

In an unspecified future, "The Society" and the "World Deliberation Council" announce over a smog-filled metropolis the inception of the "Zero Birth Edict."

For thirty years, no women will be allowed to bear children.  Women already pregnant are to be registered with "The Department of State Security." If, during this thirty year ban on child bearing, a woman does become pregnant, she has two options.  She can report to an "Ab Lab" (an Abortion Lab), or have a home abortion courtesy of a new bathroom appliance installed in all houses. In the latter case, the pregnant woman need only press her swollen uterus against a kind of belt-like radiation device (glowing red) and hit the "abort" button.

If, however, a woman should illegally choose to go to term and is discovered, she and her husband (and the child too...) are captured, then suffocated inside transparent, mobile tents in full view of the disapproving community-at-large.

Those citizens who report such "criminals" are rewarded with bonus food rations, for in this world, child-bearing is "the gravest crime" imaginable.

But one young couple, Russ McNeil (Oliver Reed) and Carol McNeil (Geraldine Chaplin) breaks the Zero Birth Edict and decide to conceive a child.  They do so without really thinking out the consequences for their baby.  Because of the Society's law on children, Carol must give birth in an old civil defense bunker.  And worse than that, the child can never leave that bunker, for fear of discovery.

After the baby is born, the infant develops a fever, and Russ and Carol's neighbors, George (Don Gordon) and Edna (Diane Cilento) discover what the McNeil's are hiding. Now these also-desperate, would-be parents want to "share" the McNeil baby, and their demands on Russ and Carol just grow and grow…

Review:

In 1968, author Paul R. Ehrlich had an unexpected best seller with a book titled The Population Bomb.  It sold over two million copies and yet was vociferously derided by the forces of the extreme right and the extreme left in America.

The controversy arose from the author’s thesis, which suggested that if birth-rate trends continued unabated, over-population would cause mass starvation and country-wide die-outs in the 1970s and 1980s.

Since we survived those years and decades without any such famine or mass-deaths, it is tempting to gaze at The Population Bomb today as just another 1970s end-of-the-word scenario that didn't come to pass.

At the time of publication, critics widely termed The Population Bomb "alarmist" for what they termed the author's wild "predictions." But political agendas, and critiques aside, The Population Bomb remains an initiative that contains at least some kernel of currency in our world today; the idea of Earth's "finite capacity to sustain human civilization," as the author himself put it in a defense called The Population Bomb Revisited, available in The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development.

In some ways, Z.P.G. was just as casually dismissed by critics of the day as had been The Population Bomb.  Even in science fiction circles today, Z.P.G. is rarely discussed or debated, despite the fact that it is an intriguing and forward-looking sci-fi film.  A grave atmosphere of despair hangs over the entire picture, and the film by director Michael Campus paints an unforgettable portrait of a totalitarian society that controls every aspect of the citizenry's day-to-day life.

Most importantly, however, Z.P.G. is worthwhile for the main questions it zeroes in on.  What sacrifice is too great to save the planet?  And secondly, should a single generation be the one to carry that enormous burden?

One of the best and most horrifying scenes in Z.P.G. involves a shop called Babyland, and the desperation of prospective parents as they meekly accept plastic automatons as their "children."   These child dolls -- who make whirring, mechanical sounds when they turn to look at you -- are the stuff of nightmares. They walk, they talk, they demand attention, and their eyes are as dead as you can imagine.

There’s also, sadly, a prophetic aspect to the scene.  In Japan in 2005, a market opened for elderly people seeking companionship of grandchildren.  These lonely adults turned to human-like dolls, not entirely unlike the ones featured in Z.P.G.

The birth scene in Z.P.G. is also crafted artistically, if in grim fashion.  It is a natural birth, since no doctors can be present.  The director, Campus, charts the delivery entirely by focusing on the silhouettes moving over the bunker's stone wall.  It's like a weird cave birth from man's prehistory, a strange futuristic book-end to a long-forgotten and humble beginning.

There's also a terrific shot in the film of Russ and Carol -- looking defeated -- inside that civil defense bunker.  Their world is now tiny; they are visually, metaphorically, and literally trapped, even as they seek to escape The Society's Zero Birth Edict. This passage of Z.P.G. is a truly horrifying look at human nature.

George and Edna resort to blackmail.  They let Russ and Carol know that they could report them to The Society at a moment's notice if the parents don't cave to their demands. This is ugly but also strangely believable behavior. Refusing to give up or share their child, Russ and Carol make a last ditch effort to escape their neighbors and the rules of The Society, but there isn’t much hope for them long-term.

There's not a single action-sequence or consequential effects sequence in Z.P.G., save for establishing shots of the city and the overhead vehicles that patrol it and catch law-breakers.  Yet this film is fully engaging because of Carol, the character played by Geraldine Chaplin.  She is desperate to be a mother, but her society has determined that no woman in her generation will be permitted to play that role.  There are no do-overs in life. We all get one shot on this mortal coil, and yet Carol -- for the sake of the planet -- is asked to give up her child-rearing years; her only shot.  She is in her late twenties and will be too old in thirty years, to become a mother.   The joy of being a parent is thus something forbidden; never for her to experience.

This situation raises all kinds of moral questions. Does the good of "The Society" and the need for the human race to endure outweigh the personal dreams and aspiration of one woman, or one man, for that matter?

And secondly, why is it so hard for Carol to share her joy -- her baby -- with one other couple, once she has staked out her position of defiance?

Make no mistake, the movie lands firmly on Carol's side: she is right to reject the inhuman State that dominates her life; but there's another side too, that the movie subtly hints at: a social critique of socialism.

As parents, they deserve to raise their child as they wish, and not in a forced communal fashion, with input from everyone else.   Perhaps what it all comes down to is that Carol and Russ are just regular married folks, even in this crazy, Orwellian future.  They want to live free, as they wish, and want to experience what we all do, particularly parenthood. They aren't fantasy heroes, or larger-than-life icons.  They're just regular folk. They make some big mistakes in the movie, but that fact only makes them all the more human, and therefore touching.

There are times during the film you will grow infuriated with Carol and Russ for their decisions -- and for their lack of planning -- but you also understand their deep desire to be a family.

Z.P.G. is a forward-looking film, and in several ways, it predicts the future world of Blade Runner (1982).  For instance, the opening scenes of the film involve a slow, hovering craft that makes governmental announcements to the populace far below.  In Blade Runner, it was a blimp that advertised "off world opportunity" but the image in Z.P.G. is very much a primitive version of the one in Scott's film.

In terms of our society today, we've already seen some of strange things come to pass in the last decade, and Z.P.G. is very prophetic. The idea of citizens turning in and spying on fellow citizens in Z.P.G. is oddly reminiscent of the Bush Administration's proposal for "TIPS" the so-called "Terrorism Information and Prevention System" of 2002.   This (aborted) program was designed to help “every American become active in the homeland security effort,” much in the same way that the Society uses informants to report violators in the film.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are scenes in Z.P.G. during which citizens are indoctrinated by movies that describe how poorly previous generations selected their diets and portion sizes.  In other words, "The Society" of the film tells people exactly what to eat and how much to eat.  And, of course, there are those on the right side of the political spectrum who feel that the current Obama Administration has taken the first steps down that same road of socialism in terms of how it approaches the problem of obesity in school-children.

So there's ample fodder here to read the film both as a critique of right wing excess, particularly in the depiction of the companies that profit from of the misery of Zero Birth Edict and left wing excess, namely in the depiction of a Nanny State gone berserk.  But beyond questions of left and right, and of today and yesterday, Z.P.G. is fascinating because of the questions it raises about community vs. the individual.  What would you give up to save the planet?  Would you surrender your right and your biological imperative to become a parent?  Furthermore, what would you give up for the pursuit of your liberty in general?  And if you pursued that liberty, what if you risked the very future in the process?

Z.P.G. isn’t always smart or knowing about the answers to such questions, but it raises them in a fascinating and frequently terrifying way.  Most of all, I'd describe the movie as haunting.

Late in the film, there is a montage of Carol, Russ, George and Edna playing with the "illegal" child.  The images are joyous: the realization of a dream, of an aspiration.  But the montage is scored with sinister, nay diabolical music that grows more and more unsettling as the sequence reaches its crescendo.  Family life has been criminalized.

In microcosm, this scene gets at the problem of our human condition.  We want our species to survive, but we also want the freedom to live life our way.  Carol and Russ want a baby, period; they don't think about the future.  There is no sense of balance, of weighing immediate gratification versus long-term stability.  What kind of life will that baby have in this world, especially if other parents make the same choice as Carol and Russ?  Then the world would end; the planet couldn't sustain everyone.  And yes, that would mean an end to the corrupt, Big Brother-esque Society, but also an end to love, and to all future generations of children.

I also appreciate how the film adopts the perspective of the (judgmental) future in several important, satirical scenes set at a museum.  On display in one such sequence is a 1971 gas tank and automobile, utilized as an object lesson for how the 20th century culture used up resources without any thought to the future.  A later scene terms industrial leaders "inept" and even "criminal" for fostering the destruction of our environment, and the wholesale extinction of so many species.  Is that, I wonder, how our children, or our grandchildren, may someday look upon our generation?

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that the science fiction of Z.P.G. inched closer to science fact in 1979, when China adopted its “one child” policy, a population-control measure which is believed to have prevented over 250 million births.

Machine Intelligence: A look at the inner workings of the Gunslinger in Westworld (1973).

1973

The Real World: 1973

January 20:              President Nixon is inaugurated to a second term.

January 22              The U.S. Supreme Court, in the decision Roe v. Wade, overturns state bans on abortion.

January 27:              The Paris Peace Accords end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

February 13:              The U.S. Dollar is devalued by 10%

March 29:              The last U.S. soldier leaves Vietnam.

April 4:              In Manhattan, The World Trade Center opens. It stands until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

April 30th:              In the continuing Watergate Scandal, Nixon aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman resign.

May 3:                            The Sears Tower construction is completed in Chicago.

May 12:              The First Senate Watergate Hearings air on TV.

May 14:              Skylab -- America’s first space station -- is launched.

June 25:              Former White House Counsel John Dean testifies before the Senate Watergate Committee.

July 1:                            The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is founded.

October 10:              Spiro Agnew resigns the Vice-Presidency over 1967 income tax evasion.

October 17:              The Arab Oil Embargo commences, spurring an Energy Crisis in the West, including in Europe, America and Japan.

November 20:              President Nixon orders Archibald Cox, special Watergate prosecutor, dismissed. His Attorney General, Elliott Richardson and Deputy Attorney General, William Ruckelshaus resign in protest rather than comply with the power grab.

November 21:              An 18-minute gap is discovered on White House tapes, moments presumably related to the Watergate scandal.

November 27:              Gerald Ford is confirmed Vice President of the United States.

December 28:              The Endangered Species Act is passed.

The Lawgiver (John Huston) discusses the past and the future yet to be in the preamble to Battle for
the Planet of the Apes (1973)

Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) * * *

Critical Mass:

“The most depressing aspect of this final cinematic stab is how unnecessary it feels. The series could have ended successfully with "Conquest" and probably should have done. In the meantime, "Battle" is worth watching for completists, but few others will find much to interest them.” – Tom Coates, BBC, August 10, 2001.

“…the series was obviously running out of ideas and steam, and the film wisely sought to bring the saga full circle, seemingly describing events leading up to the scenario of the first film.” – Gary Westfahl, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Volume 3, 2005, Greenwood Press, page 1208.

“The movie is incompetently made, which is something of a surprise considering that it was directed by an old and good hand, J. Lee (“The Guns of Navarone”) Thompson. Transitions are ragged, a lot of the dialog is inaudible and the rest is listless, and the apes spend a lot of time sitting around discussing abstractions. The battle footage looks cheap. And the story is painfully thin.” – Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times, July 10, 1973.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Roddy McDowall (Caesar); Claude Akins (General Aldo); Natalie Trundy (Lisa); Severn Darden (Kolp); Lew Ayres (Mandemus); Paul Williams (Virgil); Austin Stoker (MacDonald); Noah Keen (Teacher); France Nuyen (Alma); Paul Stevens (Mendez); Bobby Porter (Cornelius); Michael Stearns (Jake);

CREW: 20th Century Fox presents Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Director of Photography: Richard H. Kline. Film Editors: John C. Horger, Al Jaggs. Produced by: Arthur P. Jacobs. Written by: John William Carrington and Joyce Hooper Carrington. Directed by: J. Lee Thompson. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 93 minutes.

Story:

Some years after the ape rebellion and a global nuclear war, the King of Ape City, Caesar (Roddy McDowall) struggles with civil rights in his metropolis.  The humans there are second-class citizens, but some apes, including the treacherous General Aldo (Akins) would prefer to see them dead.

When Caesar's human aide, MacDonald (Austin Stoker) informs the ape leader that the world is headed for disaster if the breach between humans and apes isn't repaired, Caesar asks for evidence of this assertion.  MacDonald suggests that Caesar watch visual tapes of his own father, Cornelius, stored in the archives of the old city, which confirm his tale of Earth's destruction in 3955.

With his scientific advisor Virgil (Paul Williams) and MacDonald in tow, Caesar visits the old city, now flattened by a catastrophic nuclear exchange.  Inside the radioactive city, the new governor, a "malformed" Kolp (Severn Darden) spies the interlopers, and attempts to capture them.  After seeing the tapes of his own father, Caesar escapes with his friends from the City, but the damage is done.  Kolp plans to launch an all-out war against Ape City.

Upon his return home, Caesar makes preparations for war with the mutants, even as his beloved son, Cornelius (Bobby Porter) dies following a fall from a high tree branch.  Virgil and MacDonald suspect the death was no accident: that Aldo himself killed the boy.

The mutants under Kolp's command lay siege to Ape City even as Caesar mourns the loss of his only son.  Meanwhile, General Aldo plans for a future in which he is the king, and all the humans are dead.

Review:

The fifth and final film in the Planet of the Apes saga, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, has long been saddled with the title as "worst" entry of the series.  Unfortunately, there are several solid reasons for this assessment.

First and foremost among such reasons is the fact that Battle was made by 20th Century Fox for a pittance.  It's a very low budget effort, and one that resolutely lacks the sense of scope and epic background that made the 1968 original such a landmark genre film.  This is not a spectacular film in any sense of that word, and so disappointment is undeniably fostered.  The Apes saga deserved an ending befitting its imaginative, brilliantly-stylized beginning.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes is also frequently edited in exceedingly sloppy fashion, particularly in the underwhelming climactic battle, in a tall tree, of all places between Caesar (Roddy McDowall) and his own simian Brutus, General Aldo (Claude Akins).  There are several instances during this fight when a viewer can actually see that close-ups of both Aldo and Caesar from an earlier scene (a stand-off at the corral...) have been inserted.  Without any difficulty, you can actually make-out the gorillas and other apes standing behind them, which doesn't make any sense in the context of the tree fight, high above the ground.  So Battle for the Planet of the Apes is a sloppy presentation.

But all the news is not bad. While it's undeniably true that Battle for the Planet of the Apes is not great filmmaking by any standard, the sequel is nonetheless an eminently watchable and entertaining film. And what Battle for the Planet of the Apes clearly lacks in budget, scope and editing, it largely makes up for in terms of intimacy, characterization, and even rhetorical flourish.

This last quality is clearly the most significant.  Battle for the Planet of the Apes has enough on its troubled mind for a full three entries in a science fiction franchise, and explores ably the idea of the ape culture's "fall from grace," as well as the possibility that one (dark) future need not be written in stone.

Also, the J. Lee Thompson film nicely squares the circle in terms of series continuity, bringing the final film right up to the beginning of the first film. Battle opens in 2670 AD.  That's roughly the same time that Colonel Taylor (Charlton Heston) makes his recording from outer space in Planet of the Apes regarding the denizens of Earth.  In that log entry, he wonders if he is speaking to a "new breed."  With this film, we have our answer.  The five-strong saga becomes, essentially, a loop or circle.

As the film’s co-writer Joyce Corrington has aptly described it, Battle for the Planet of the Apes is a story about the apes' expulsion from Paradise.  Here, Ape City is a kind of agrarian Garden of Eden, and the apes, though intelligent, are also clearly innocent.

The Serpent (in the deadly form of the firearm) is locked away and protected by Caesar's "conscience," an orangutan named Mandemus (real life pacifist Lew Ayres), and all the apes live by a sacred edict: Ape shall never kill ape. When Aldo violates that law, however the apes sacrifice their innocence.  It's not merely the story of Cain and Abel revisited, it's that, as MacDonald states, the apes have finally "joined the human race."

Notably, the treacherous Aldo's demise involves his fall from a great height, and therefore recalls, at least subtly, Lucifer's fall into the pit, even as it also directly references the death of young Cornelius.  At one point, Caesar even tells Aldo that he is headed for “a great fall,” though the warning is ignored.   Again, and again, Battle for the Planet of the Apes seems to grasp for connections to Biblical stories, and it's an intriguing leitmotif.

After killing Aldo, Caesar asks Virgil if it is right that one murder should be avenged by another, getting at the fact that both man and ape are, at their core, violent creatures.  This is another thematic through-line in the film, well-expressed.  The mutant Mendez, similarly, confronts Kolp over his war preparations and notes that "this bloody chain reaction has to stop."  Kolp does not heed his advice.  In fact, he's willing to destroy the world for his cause.

In yet another instance, the film cuts to young Cornelius and a blond-haired human boy playing at "war" using sticks as makeshift guns.  The game is innocent and harmless, and yet it begs the question: is there just something about the mammalian brain that is drawn to death and destruction?  Why are even the best of us wired to play at these violent battles for supremacy?  Is that the fatal flaw in man and ape?  Years later, in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Cameron would stage a similar scene, using children playing at "war" to make the same point.

When Battle for the Planet of the Apes meditates on such interesting questions about human nature, the film works rather nicely, if modestly, as a morality play or futuristic parable.  And it draws a great distinction between the apes and the humans in the destroyed city.  Virgil explicitly notes that human "leaders" had the capability in their hands to destroy cities and whole populations, but that no one was there to mind their "conscience."  Caesar, at least, has Mandemus to prevent him from acting impulsively, or in the role of a madman.  This seems an entirely wise and prudent restriction on absolute power.  The flattened city is a potent reminder of what happens when a leader does not consider those he leads, or the future of the planet.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes gazes at these issues of innocence and self-destruction through the rubric of the "future."  Specifically, can we make the future anything we wish?  Virgil suggests that it is possible, and certainly, the last scene in the film, set in 2670 and a classroom for human and ape children, suggests as much.

Importantly, the Lawgiver (John Huston) here is not the fire-and-brimstone, rabidly anti-human preacher of hatred that Ape Doctrine (the Sacred Scrolls) makes him out to be in Planet of the Apes.  Rather, he seems to very actively preach peace between the species. He does so primarily, it seems, based on Caesar's modeling of that principle by releasing all the humans from the corral and inviting them to live in peace in Ape City as equals.

For the first time in a Planet of the Apes film then, the audiences sees a statue of an ape that is not the Lawgiver.  It is a statue of Caesar himself, indicating, perhaps, that the wise chimpanzee has usurped the role of the draconian Lawgiver in this timeline.  We can extrapolate then that it will be the teachings of peace and equality that march forward into the future of 3955, not the teachings of hatred and bigotry.

Thus, when Taylor arrives to judge the world he finds in this timeline, he will find -- we hope -- two species living together in peace.  If that's the case, he won't need to destroy the world with the Alpha-Omega Bomb.  That's the ardent hope that we leave the Planet of the Apes film series with.

This time, it can be different, and the valedictory visual of Battle for the Planet of the Apes series involves a close-up of the Caesar statue as it sheds a single tear.  Perhaps Caesar cries because his dream of peace has finally been realized.  His example has paved the way for the planet's eternal survival.

Contrarily, Caesar's single tear may be interpreted to suggest that the future is ever unwritten; that war is still easier than peace; that hate is still easier to come by than love.  It is, after all, a long way to 3955.  Caesar weeps, perhaps, because human and ape natures remain unchanging, even if a temporary detente is forged.  This reading of the film is supported by the imagery of an ape and human child teasing one another in the Lawgiver’s natural classroom.

Although some might consider this final visual of the series -- a crying statue – rather trite, there is a sense of majesty and beauty to it.  It is ambiguous enough to provoke debate and alternate readings.  And also, the imagery provides a strong contrast to the Lawgiver statue we saw in Beneath crying blood.   There, the draconian edicts of the Lawgiver created an environment of acrimony and hate and war, and the bleeding eyes suggested this fact very ably.  In Battle, the tears of Caesar are much more "human" somehow, a reflection of the fact that peace is a fragile and ephemeral thing.

In the restored Blu-Ray cut of the film, Battle for the Planet of the Apes also reveals how the mutant survivors in the destroyed city ultimately select life over death, just as Caesar does.  Though Kolp has ordered the launch of the Alpha Omega Bomb upon his defeat, Mendez (Paul Stevens) and Alma (Frances Nuyen) make a better choice.  At Mendez's urging, the duo decides to "respect" and even "venerate" the bomb because one of its ancestors made them what they are.  If the bomb were activated, Mendez argues, they would simply become "nothing."  So this Adam and Eve choose life, after a fashion, and also begin to establish the mutant culture we see thriving in NYC in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970).  This is a remarkable scene of continuity with the earlier film, and a nice tying together of thematic, historical threads, though I always (perhaps erroneously) assumed Conquest took place in California, not New York.  I'm glad this important scene was restored to the film.

Another aspect of Battle for the Planet of the Apes that is enjoyable is the writing and presentation of the character, Kolp.  He's not your average villain, and comes off as strangely quirky.  Take his line, "we're irradiated, but we're still active," which should be the slogan, I submit, for all big screen mutants. Kolp actually seems to launch the war against Ape City more because of his own personal boredom rather than because of any strong ideological bent.  It's almost like he's offended that Caesar didn't drop by to chat with him.  Again, if the movie as a whole concerns the idea of advisers keeping their leader's conscience in times of conflict, then Kolp is the perfect example of what happens when that safeguard doesn't occur (or when it is ignored).  He is willing to destroy the world just because, it seems, he has nothing better to do.

Sadly, the mutant vs. ape battle featured in the film is pitifully small scale, but in some ways, the meager forces involved in the conflict also play directly to the movie's thematic point.  There's hardly anybody left alive on the planet, and now it's come to this: about a dozen mutants carrying rifles, following a school bus, a station wagon, and a jeep through an irradiated desert.  Kind of a sad commentary on humanity, no?

Even with his world almost entirely destroyed, all man can think about is wreaking more destruction and death. In one great shot during this mutant march, the audience can actually see one of the mutant soldiers collapse and fall to the ground.  These guys are sick...and they're all that's left.  That desperate aesthetic and some of the picturesque shots of the small-time, automobile caravan moving across the desert definitely forecast the direction of post-apocalyptic cinema in the 1980s.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes also works to at least some degree because of the closely-observed characters. Caesar, of course, is a great hero, and he loses a beloved child in a scene that plays as genuinely sad.   He's a wise ape, but not an infallible one.  He's constantly questioning and groping for the right solution to problems.  MacDonald, Virgil, Mandemus, Abe, and Lisa also come across as more than cookie-cutter characters.  In short, they seem like real people/apes, and are interesting enough to follow, even if the film doesn't provide them an epic tapestry upon which to act.  Even Aldo -- who, like Kolp could be a very two-dimensional monster -- seems to boast deeper layers than you might expect.  When he is branded for breaking ape law, and cowers in the tree, for instance, you can see that he is weeping.  Aldo cries for all that he has brought upon himself; for all that he has lost, and will lose next.  Again, a more conventional but less interesting approach would have seen him continuing to be a "strong" bad guy and posing a more potent physical challenge to Caesar for the big fight.

Many viewers may count it as a drawback, but the fact of the matter is that there are no "strong" bad guys in Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and I submit that's part of the film's point. You end up feeling a little sorry for both Kolp and Aldo by film's end.  Through their quirks and humanity (or ape-manity) we can actually see that they are people too.  If Battle for the Planet of the Apes is about ending conflict, hatred and blood-shed, then it makes sense that both these characters resonate in terms of their individuality.  It allows us to understand these "villains" rather than simply demonize them.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes is nobody's favorite "ape" movie. It seems sloppy and like small potatoes compared to Planet, or Conquest.  It lacks the pointed social commentary and sharp humor of Escape and the balls-to-the-wall, go-for-broke, searing surprises of Beneath.

Yet on its own small, almost TV-sized scale, Battle for the Planet of the Apes is an enjoyable and worthwhile effort.  It is probably a lot better than the film's reputation indicates. As Virgil might remind us, Battle for the Planet of the Apes -- even with its lack of significant production value -- "reverts to type," and offers the thinking viewer much to ponder.  It asks us, specifically, if our desire for peace can ever overcome our penchant for self-destruction.

For an answer to that question, take a look at Caesar's statue and arrive at your own conclusion.

The Crazies (1973) * * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“The Crazies speaks more radically about the American love-hate relationship with authority than any film of the Nixon era. And like all of Romero's home runs, it ends on a note of blasted rue.” – Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice, October 28, 2003.

“The symptoms of Romero's plague are almost invisible given the political insanity of the era, a notion Romero bluntly drives home with repeated references to real-life atrocities committed in the name of what its perpetrators considered to be political clarity. Young townspeople stand off against troops in the same manner as students did at Kent State. A group of citizens seeking sanctuary in an unassuming country church are liquidated by gun-toting grunts….If Romero's political recreations seem a tad obvious now, they are also unmistakably the work of a man genuinely disturbed by his environment.” – Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine, February 22, 2010.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Lane Carroll (Judy); W.G. McMillan (David); Harold Wayne Jones (Clank); Lloyd Hollar (Colonel Peckman); Lynn Lowry (Kathy); Richard Liberty (Artie); Richard France (Dr. Watts); Harry Spillman (Major Ryder); Will Disney (Dr. Brookmyre).

CREW: Lee Hessel presents The Crazies. Director of Photography: William Hinzman. Original Music: Bruce Roberts. Film Editor: George A. Romero. Produced by: A.C. Croft. Written by: George A. Romero. Based on a screenplay by: Paul McCollough. Directed by: George A. Romero. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 105 minutes.

Story

A U.S. military plane crashes near the town of Evans City, PA and releases a deadly chemical agent, Trixie.

While the government contemplates nuking the town, Trixie -- actually a bacteriological weapon -- infects Evan City’s families, and people began to act mad, committing rash acts of unbelievable violence including arson.

A local fireman (David) and his pregnant girlfriend, a nurse named Judy (Carroll) attempt to escape from the escalating madness, but martial law is established and soldiers round up the populace as the madness spreads and spreads…

Review:

Even thirty years after its debut, George Romero’s The Crazies remains an unrepentant taboo-breaker, one that violates the established decorum of Hollywood movies of its era in powerful and deliberately upsetting fashion.  The film involves a deadly chemical agent, Trixie, and its horrific effect on normal, small-town American citizens.

The film’s tone turns from dread and disbelief, to an acknowledgement of the absurd, of life as a sometimes cruel or meaningless comedy.  As The Crazies closes, a cure for Trixie is discovered by a scientist but the military mistakes him for one of the infected, and the cure is forever lost.

As Trixie works its way through the populace in The Crazies, the infection causes one man to murder his wife and children and burn down his house.  Then it causes another man to engage in sexual intercourse with his own biological daughter.

And in one blazing, unforgettable scene, an American priest immolates himself in the town square. This particular image alludes to a real incident with a Buddhist monk in Vietnam, thereby equating the Army's actions in Evans City with the War in Vietnam.  This is a leftist and incendiary implication, certainly, in terms of the "The Silent Majority" that had just re-elected Richard Nixon in a landslide.  But that’s the film’s point.  This George Romero film appears to suggest that by choosing Nixon (often called King Richard by his enemies), the Silent Majority would get what it deserves, security in exchange for liberty. The police state would grow, and eventually turn against the very citizenry that was demanding safety. And here, indeed, that citizenry is treated like the enemy at home and in the town square.

Today, the frenetic The Crazies loses none of its visceral punch.  In terms of visuals, the movie thrives on rapid-fire quick-cuts which add to the sense of a dawning, escalating crisis, and the film's nihilist bent is especially evident in the conclusion, during which an infected pregnant woman (and the film's heroine), Judy (Carroll) is murdered by the occupying military force.

Meanwhile, her fiancé, a fireman named David (McMillan) learns that he is immune to the contaminant. But rather than aid the bullying military (and his fellow man too), David keeps his mouth shut...and lets the apocalypse spread. He does so out of revenge, perhaps, or just because he believes that humans aren't worth saving. Given what he has endured it is hard to blame him for losing hope, and yet the film’s commentary is caustic.

It’s funny -- or perhaps just strange -- to consider it, but in the early 1970s (and in like-minded films such as Punishment Park) it was the left end of the political spectrum that feared a presidential power grab, and the use of America’s military against its own people.  Today, the politics have switched sides and it is the right that largely fears government intrusion or invasion.  The Crazies can thus play as either paranoid right wing or paranoid left wing nightmare at this juncture.

Certainly, the film showcases multiple compositions in which armed soldiers in bio-hazard suits break into private American residences and shoot down American citizens.  The soldiers loot from shops and steal wallets too, revealing themselves as thugs and thieves.  The point is that America is just one Executive Order away from dictatorship, and its heavily equipped army would be virtually impossible to defeat if set loose upon its wards.

Going back to the priest who immolates himself, The Crazies also functions as an out-and-out allegory for the upset of the Vietnam War. American military might lands in a backwater (Evans City, not Vietnam) and the Army deploys quickly, killing all the locals who are show signs of non-compliance, or insanity.  Only in this case, insanity could be interpreted as a stand in for Vietnam’s ascendant communism.

In whatever way one ultimately chooses to interpret or contextualize the violence in The Crazies, the bottom line is that things like this aren’t supposed to happen in America.

This nation is not supposed to possess secret weapons like Trixie, and it is not supposed to wage war upon its own people.  The release of Trixie might be a legitimate accident, sure, but in the end that doesn’t matter a whit.

This film is about the terrifying idea of a Pandora’s Box being opened right here in America, in our very communities.

Influence:

In 2010, The Crazies was re-made as a far more conventional horror film, but it met with great box office success.

Dr. Jake Terrell (George C. Scott) lectures about dolphins in The Day of the Dolphin (1973).

The Day of the Dolphin (1973) * * * ½

Critical Mass:

“The most expensive Rin Tin Tin movie ever made, with a gimmick the Rin Tin Tin pictures never stooped to: the dolphins here are dubbed with plaintive, childish voices and speak in English. Mike Nichols directed this elaborate exercise in anthropomorphic tearjerking…” – Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies, Holt Paperbacks, 1982, page 175.

“A critical and commercial failure upon release, this spy film succeeds on the level it strives for: a big budget glossy entertainment, no more, no less…” – Paul Mavis, The Espionage Filmography, McFarland, 2001.

“This absurdly earnest Hollywood freakazoid is never mentioned when the '70s are hallowed, and for good reason: What is it? Post-hippie eco-thriller, ludicrous sci-fi camp-out, or irrational, sunburnt dream parody of espionage narratives? Now we can decide how we feel about George C. Scott grimly exchanging dialogue with squeakily dubbed yapping dolphins about love and loyalty.” – Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice, August 12, 2003.

Cast & Crew:

CAST: George C. Scott (Dr. Jake Terrell); Trish Van Devere (Maggie Terrell); Paul Sorvino (Curtis Mahoney); Fritz Weaver (Harold De Milo); Jon Korkes (David); Edward Herrmann (Mike); Leslie Charleson (Maryanne); John David Carson (Larry); Victoria Racimo (Lana); John Dehner (Wallingford); Severn Darden (Schwinn); William Roerick (Dunhill); Elizabeth Wilson (Mrs. Rome); Phyllis Davis (Receptionist); Pat Zurica (First Mate); William Myers (Stone).

CREW: Janus Films and Joseph E. Levine Present a Mike Nichols film, The Day of the Dolphin. Director of Photography: William A. Fraker. Original Music: Georges Delerue. Film Editing: Sam O’Steen. Production Design: Richard Sylbert.  Produced by: Robert E. Relyea. Executive Producer: Joseph E. Levine. Written by: Buck Henry. Based on the novel The Day of the Dolphin by: Robert Merle. Directed by: Mike Nichols. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 104 minutes.

Story: At a secret, privately-run research facility by the sea, a team of scientists led by Dr. Jacob Terrell (Scott) attempt to teach the first dolphin born into captivity, Alpha, to speak.

When Alpha grows uncooperative and bored with his learning, a female dolphin, Beta, becomes his companion.  As Dr. Terrell grows closer to announcing his breakthrough in human/dolphin communication to the world, however, a conspiracy is hatched in secret.

The dolphins are captured and taken away from the facility.  On the sea, they are trained to plant mines on boats…a task that will be used in an assassination attempt targeting the President of the United States.

Review:

Many science fiction films of the 1970s deal with humanity’s changing relationship with animals, those fellow creatures with whom he shares the Earth.  I wrote that the relationship is “changing,” and that process of change involves the boundaries of man’s science and knowledge.  As he better understands himself and the world, his understanding of animals also changes.

The Planet of the Apes films of the 1970s directly involve mankind’s uneasy relationship with a close mammal cousin, and the fight for dominion. Mike Nichol’s The Day of the Dolphin concerns another highly intelligent inhabitant of the Earth, the dolphin, and asks the question: is dolphin-kind better off learning from us at our current stage of development, or should it remain far, far away from 20th century human beings?

The Day of the Dolphin centers on a character played by George C. Scott named Dr. Jake Terrell.  As the film opens, we see him lecturing about dolphin intelligence and communication to a rapt audience, and later, we seem him playing God, of a sort, at his marine research institute.  There, he is the father figure for Alpha, the first dolphin raised in captivity.  He makes the decisions for Alpha, teaching him linguistics and semantics, and demanding obedience.

When Alpha won’t obey, Terrell separates him from his mate/companion, the dolphin Beta, and the film features a heart-breaking scene of Alpha banging at a door plate, attempting to reach her.  Finally, realizing that humans hold all the cards, Alpha obeys Terrell’s edicts. He submits.

As the film continues, however, the audience detects a change in Terrell.  When he encounters those who would more cruelly exploit Alpha and Beta -- for purposes of political assassination, no less -- he sees the error of his ways.  “We should become like them…instinct and energy,” he muses at one point, wondering explicitly why he has sought to re-cast the dolphins in terms of human standards and learning.  Furthermore, he realizes what a disservice he has done them.  “They trust us more than their own instincts,” he realizes.  “They’ve never been lied to…”

The Day of the Dolphin climaxes with Terrell making the ultimate parental sacrifice.  He is cruel, on purpose, to the dolphins, and thus knowingly drives them away….never to see them again.  He knows they will be used badly by mankind, and can’t let it happen. But they do not understand why he rejects them now.  They have no basis for understanding, and are without guile. The last several minutes of the film will make audiences weep as the dolphins call after Jake in despair, and it takes every ounce of courage and resolve for him to reject and ignore their entreaties.  In this case, as Jake realizes, the dolphins are better off without human interference, better off hating humans, even.

Even outside the commentary on humans and how they treat animals, the film works as a metaphor for parenting, for children and adults.  At some point, the children must walk (or swim) alone, and indulgence or assistance will do no further good.

The Day of the Dolphin dramatizes its emotional tale with a minimum of obvious fakery, and the scenes of affection between Scott and the dolphins feel incredibly real, and therefore touching.  The scenes of Terrell and Alpha together, learning from one another, showing each other affection, represent the best angels of human nature: mankind’s capacity to reach out to other beings in peace and love.

In keeping with the Watergate context of the era, however, the film also offers a yang to that yin.  The movie very deliberately charts a conspiracy, and notes that it is no longer possible to “trust the good old establishment.”

On the contrary, the establishment here resorts to bugging the marine research center (clear shades of Watergate) and stonewalling the public about real intentions.  The final end game for this group of conspirators is the murder of the President of the United States.  The dolphins are but mere pawns in such a plot.

At its most basic level, The Day of the Dolphin emotionally explores the simple interrogative that Terrell asks of Alpha.  “Why is man good?”

One possible answer is that man, as in the case of Jake, has the ability to step back from his self-centered, petty concerns, learn from his mistakes, and make good decisions.

But oppositely, The Day of the Dolphin also suggests that the “good old establishment” is always going to exploit new science and new technology for anti-social reasons, and that those caught in the middle are, often, complete innocents, like Alpha and Beta.

The Day of the Dolphin didn’t win many great reviews on its release in theaters in 1973, but it nonetheless impresses.  Not only as a time-capsule of the Watergate Era, and the dawn of conspiracies in the science fiction cinema, but as a film that intelligently ponders human nature and behavior.

If we can’t treat the dolphins well, how are we ever going to deal with alien life?

Fantastic Planet (1973) * * *

Critical Mass:

“Laloux's vision of a Dali-meets-Krazy Kat alien landscape populated by twisted creatures is quite striking, even if the film's psychedelic elements haven't exactly aged well.” – Joshua Klein, The A.V. Club, March 29, 2002.

“…clearly involves human or humanlike characters – yet the mode of presentation eschews historical fill-ins, and many of the events are hallucinatory rather than realistic.” – Istvan Csicsery-Ronan Jr, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Wesleyan University Press, 2008, page 258.

“One of the weirdest sci-fi movies to be found is the pseudo-surrealistic animated French film Fantastic Planet…Nothing quite makes sense in the film, but in a story designed to evoke feelings of confusion and of being lost, that only adds to the effectiveness.” – Robert C. Ring, Sci-Fi Movie Freak, KP/FW Media, 2011, page 194.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Barry Bostwick (Narrator); Cynthia Alder, Mark Gruner, Marvin Miller, Monika Ramirez, Hal Smith, Olan Soule, Janet Waldo,

CREW: Argos Films presents Fantastic Planet. Directors of Photography: Boris Baromykin, Lubomir Rejthar. Original Music: Alain Goraguer. Film Editing: Dick Elliott, Rich Harrison. Executive Producers: Simon Damiani, Andrew Valio-Cavaglione. Written by: Roland Topor, Rene Laloux. Based on the novel by: Stefan Wul. Directed by: Rene Laloux. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 72 minutes.

Story:

On a distant alien world called Ygam, humans are but diminutive pets known as Oms and cared for by giant blue creatures called Draags.  One especially intelligent Om named Ter breaks free from captivity, and using his knowledge of Draag domestic life and history, joins up with a band of humans to free his people from their permanent enslavement.

Ter’s escape, however, only confirms the Draags’ biases about the tiny (Earth) creatures, and a pogrom of genocide is launched.

Review:

As it did in Planet of the Apes (1968), mankind finds himself kicked to the bottom of the food chain in Fantastic Planet (1973), an imaginative animated film from France about a future alien world where humans are nothing but lowly pets who belong to giant blue aliens.  Thee aliens focus exclusively on meditation and other matters of the intellect, while the humans worry about physical survival on a daily basis.

The Oms in the film are descendant of humans on Earth, but it is reported that they destroyed their own civilization (as was also the case in Apes).

The film follows one rebellious human “pet,” and the manner in which his education in a Draag home make him the perfect leader of a resistance movement.

Fantastic Planet is filled with amazing visuals of another world.  Tiny humans like Ter occupy only the ground level of this world and make their homes and communities wherever they can, amid unearthly flora and fauna. One scene of ritual combat involves the Oms strapping fierce lobster creatures to their chests as they duel.  These and other visuals are genuinely impressive, and the vehicle of animation permits for a colossal sense of scope not possible in 1970s live action.

A special point is made in Fantastic Planet of noting that the Oms have no schools and therefore no real freedom or understanding of freedom.  As a result, perhaps, of this absence the Oms are afraid of knowledge and consider it “evil.”  They see it as something else that the Draags “own.”

Importantly, the Oms’ journey towards independence in the film comes only when Ter can convince his fellow fighters that knowledge is the answer that will free them.  This point is underlined by the finale, which finds the humans taking possession of a rocket, flying to another world, and there unlocking the strange secret of the Draags as well as the secret of their own self-destructive history.

The best science fiction films in any decade are those that are able to make audiences feel like they are living a different life, one in someone else’s shoes.  Fantastic Planet proves very effective in the way that it handles the concept of slavery, or even owning pets, since it makes us consider how we would feel to live at the whim of a thoughtless giant.  Masters may not knowingly be cruel, but all creatures -- including slaves and pets -- have feelings, and a right to things we take for granted as absolute, like family.

The first scene in the film is especially terrifying in its depiction of this idea.  A mother Om and her baby run from the Draags, but are separated and then used as playthings, ones without destiny, self-determination, or any other rights.  Ter survives, his mother does not.

Fantastic Planet also proves intriguing in its depiction of the aliens.  At first, the Draags don’t seem so bad.  They simply seem unaware that their little pets, the Oms, are sentient creatures with the right to be free.  But as the Oms start to rebel, the “evolved” Draags behave very badly indeed.  They refer to the Oms as “vermin…that reproduce at an appalling rate” and launch a campaign of genocide against them.

Once more a comparison to Planet of the Apes is merited.  In both cases, the ruling culture is savage to humanity, but that savagery is, in some fashion, justified by humanity’s behavior.  Would you allow to develop unchecked a population of beings that, under its own auspices, destroyed itself?

Fantastic Planet is an involving movie because it asks that question.   After a race has all-but destroyed itself, it may no longer boast the right to be free, or determine its destiny.  It may even merit all the cruelty and fear demonstrated by the Oms.

Of course, the opposite side of the coin is that it is wrong to blame individuals living now for the behavior of people that lived generations earlier.

But can mankind change?  Or must he be forced to change?

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973) * *

Critical Mass:

“My favorite was a sort of Redi-Whip cocoon that not only turns the girls into queen bees, but gives them a facial and a hairdo at the same time.” – Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times, June 20, 1973.

“…a faultless juxtapose of low budget horror, sex, violence, bold-printed polyester fashions, and a plot designed to give Alfred Kinsey a wet dream.” – S. Michael Wilson, Monster Rally, Idea Men Productions, 2008, page 30.

“…this movie is actually brilliant in the way it takes its ludicrousness so seriously…” – Amy Wallace, Del Howison, The Book of Lists: Horror, Harper, 2008, page 141.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: William Smith (Neil Agar); Anitra Ford (Dr. Susan Harris); Victoria Vetri (Julie Zorn);  Katie Saylor (Gretchen Grubowski); Cliff Osmond (Captain Peters); Wright King (Dr. Murger); Ben Hammer Herb Kline); Anna Aries (Nora Kline); Andre Phillippe (Aldo); Sid Kaiser (Stan Willliams).

CREW: Sequoia Pictures Presents a Centaur Release, Invasion of the Bee Girls. Director of Photography: Gary Graver. Film Editor: H and R Editorial Services. Special Effects: Joe Lombardi. Make-up: Ron Foreman. Music: Charles Bernstein. Written by: Nicholas Meyer. Directed by: Denis Saunders. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 85 minutes.

Story:

In the town of Peckham, two men are discovered dead -- apparently from coronaries -- after experiencing intense sexual intercourse.

A government agent, Agar (Smith) investigates these deaths, and soon stumbles on an epidemic of similar heart attacks. With the help of a scientist named Julie (Vetri), Agar learns that several women in the area are taking on the unusual characteristics of bees because of an experiment conducted by Dr. Susan Harris (Ford).

Unfortunately, the hybrid bee/women are sterile and because of that fact, driven to repeat the fatal mating cycle again and again…

Review:

The killer bee craze of the 1970s is responsible for a lot of bad science, a lot of bad cinema, and a lot of bad television.

In short, a full-blown media panic occurred in the disco decade that Africanized killer bees were going to invade America from the south and murder us all in their seething, buzzing swarms.  The behind-the-scenes story behind this panic was that honey bees were apparently transported from Africa to Brazil in 1956, but then cross-bred…and made more dangerous.

A few of the new, more deadly Africanized honey bees escaped from captivity in Brazil and were thus making their relentless way for the Texas border. The legend went that if the killer bees reached our country, America would survive only another ten years before Bee-mageddon happened.

Given this creative backdrop, the 1970s quickly proved the great era of killer bee movies and TV movies, including The Killer Bees (1974), The Savage Bees (1976) and Irwin Allen’s epic fail, The Swarm (1978).

On television, The Starlost (1973-1974) featured an episode about killer bees called “Beehive,” while early in its run, Saturday Night Live featured a recurring comedy skit involving the “Killer Bees,” really John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in bee costumes.   Meanwhile, Superman and Aqua Man raced to stop killer bees from attacking a helpless African village in The All New Super Friends Hour episode “Attack of the Killer Bees,” in 1977.

Working off the same “B”-movie/”Bee” playbook is Invasion of the Bee Girls, an old-fashioned exploitation movie written (with chagrin, no doubt), by future Star Trek director Nick Meyer. The film is mostly an excuse to stage sequences of bee women (normal women wearing sun-glasses that visually represent compound insect eyes…) seducing unwitting but horny male scientists.

Meanwhile, William Smith plays a kind of Clint Eastwood-esque agent researching the bee women, and romancing a hot scientist. The subtext, in keeping with the era, is government overreach and possible malfeasance, here extended to mad scientists, as well as an assertion of women’s rights, especially in the bedroom.

Although the movie is undeniably a basic male fantasy (of being “balled” to death, in the film’s vernacular), Invasion of the Bee Girls is also about women’s lib.  It concerns an emerging “social pattern” in which women reign supreme.

But the movie tips its exploitive hand in its most elaborate and sustained scene, one in which a female Peckham resident is stripped down, smeared with white “bee crème” and transformed into a bee-woman, one of the femme-fatales.  She emerges a fully made-up knock-out, ready to mate (or, again, “ball”) until she kills her partner.

Invasion of the Bee Girls wins few points for its scientific accuracy.  At one point in the film, the Bee Women are compared to black widow spiders, which famously mate and then kill.  Of course, spiders aren’t actually insects, but arachnids, so the comparison is hardly on point.

The film also fails the “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” test.  All the Bee Women are unfailingly gorgeous, but all their partners/victims are old, overweight, balding scientists.

The eye candy here is for one sex, and one sex only and that fact probably tells you all that you need to know about Invasion of the Bee Girls.

Of man and fish: MacKay (Ernest Borgnine; left), Dr. Jansen (Yvette Mimieux; center) and Commander Blake (Ben Gazzara; right) contemplate mysterious giant sea creatures in The Neptune Factor: An Undersea Odyssey (1973).

The Neptune Factor: An Undersea Odyssey (1973) * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“The clichés abound…and the sea creatures supposedly 100 times their normal size look like guppies…A dull man-against-the-inner-elements saga which gave family films a bad name. Dimwits down below.” – Jay Newquist, The Montreal Gazette, December 29, 1973, page 23.

“…satisfied no one and reflected little credit on Canadian production.” – Gerald Pratley, Torn Sprockets: The Uncertain Projection of the Canadian Film, Associated University Press, 1987, page 109.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Ben Gazzara (Commander Adrian Blake); Walter Pidgeon (Dr. Samuel Andrews); Ernest Borgnine (Don MacKay); Yvette Mimieux (Dr. Leah Jansen); Donnelly Rhodes (Bob Cousins); Chris Wiggins (Captain Williams); Michael J. Reynolds (Dr. Hal Hamilton); Mark Walker (Dave Moulton); Leslie Carlson (Brigs); Stuart Gillard (Phil Bradley); Ed McGibbon (Dr. Shepherd); Ken Pogue (Thomas); David Renton (Warrant Officer).

CREW: 20th Century Fox presents Sandy Howard’s Production of a Quadrant Films Ltd. Film, The Neptune Factor: An Undersea Odyssey. Music: Lalo Schifrin. Director of Photography: Harry Makin. Film Editor: Stan Cole. Production Designer: Jack McAdam, Dennis Lynton-Clark. Make-up: Bill Morgan. Special Effects: Warren Keillor. Produced by: Sandy Howard. Executive Producers: David M. Perlmutter, Harold Greenberg. Written by: Jack De Witt. Directed by: Daniel Petrie.M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 98 minutes.

Story:

A laboratory on the sea floor is unexpectedly lost at Muir Seamount Rise during an earthquake, and three aquanauts go missing.

Aboard the exploratory vessel Triton above, associates of the lost men attempt a dangerous rescue mission.  Stern Commander Adrian Blake (Gazzara) travels to the site with his new mini-sub, Neptune, but is reluctant to commit the submersible to a rescue attempt he feels is doomed to failure.

But the bride-to-be of one of the aquanauts, Dr. Leah Jansen (Yvette Mimieux) is determined to save her betrothed, and convinces Blake to try.

Leah joins Blake aboard the Neptune, and they travel down to a deep sea trench where the sea life has grown to colossal -- and dangerous -- size.

Review:

The ocean-based fantasy or science fiction movie, like Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969) The Land That Time Forgot (1975) and even The Spy Who Loved Me (1976), were a staple of the disco decade.  On TV, producer Irwin Allen followed up his Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964 – 1968) success with TV movies such as City Beneath the Sea (1971).  Similarly, audiences at home in the Nixon and Ford years thrilled to the real-life adventures of oceanographer Jacques Cousteau (1910 – 1997) and his ship, the Calypso, on The Undersea World of Jacque Cousteau (1968 – 1976).  Another wet pop culture phenomenon of the era was The Man from Atlantis (1976 – 1978).  To paraphrase the opening of the 1990s underwater series SeaQuest DSV (1993 – 1996), many believed in the 1970s that the future rested not only with the exploration of outer space, but of the Earth’s oceans too.

This bit of history helps to explain a sci-fi movie like The Neptune Factor: An Undersea Odyssey (1973), which involves a rescue operation on the ocean floor and the nifty submersible that manages it.  Unfortunately, the film doesn’t prove a very good inducement for continued exploration of the seven seas as it features one of the dullest, most uneventful first acts in motion picture history.

As the movie opens, there’s sparse dialogue, and all of it technological jargon such as the exclamation “look, there is no dopple effect!”  The Neptune Factor is also heavy on long, lingering shots of the sea and sea-tech.  What the movie needs to thrive as an authentic “undersea odyssey” is some sense of danger and personal involvement, and the film doesn’t manage either very successfully.

Meanwhile, The Neptune Factor’s last act involves stars Mimieux, Gazzara, Borgnine and Rhodes staring endlessly out of the Neptune’s cramped control room window at large fish specimens, which are depicted with slow-motion photography to make them seem more impressive.

Movie critics of the time (in periodicals such as The New York Times) noted accurately that these real-life aquatic animals -- magnified so as to appear huge -- seemed to have been filmed in a home aquarium or sea tank.  The choice of animals is baffling too.  Lion-fish doubling as a giant underwater menace?!

It is very anti-climactic it is to send a submarine into a dangerous, bottom-of-the-sea trench and then, once there, depict only defenseless-looking, magnified lion fish as the primary “jeopardy” of the film.  While it’s true that two eels menace Borgnine’s character as the movie winds down, the appearance of two measly eels, after 90 minutes of tech-talk and navel gazing is still underwhelming.

The Neptune Factor highlights some beloved actors, but none of these performers are given much compelling to do. Mimieux, playing a desperate bride-to-be, acts impulsively to save her would-be-husband at one point (releasing a “bridle”) and jeopardizes all of her shipmates.

Still, she fares better than Pidgeon, who throughout the film sits at his desk and answers the telephone.

Gazzara plays the film’s lead, Blake, and does a good job of seeming thoroughly unlikable.  Blake is reluctant to commit resources to the rescue, doesn’t want Leah to come along for the journey, and when she does, he barks at her in a male chauvinist tone.  “Why don’t you try looking at this situation with a scientific detachment?”

Unfortunately, Blake’s mode of communication isn’t one of scientific detachment but of absolute arrogance and dismissal.   .

When one considers undersea films of real imagination, scope and inspiration, like Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), or in later decades, James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989), The Neptune Factor looks underwhelming indeed.  Still, the film’s (real-life) sea rise has a great name -- Muir -- doesn’t it?

Miles (Woody Allen; left), a man from the twentieth century, attempts to escape a police state with his captive-turned lover, Luna (Diane Keaton; right) in the dystopian comedy Sleeper (1973).

Sleeper (1973) * * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“"Sleeper" has plenty of bald spots, lacks the inspired silent comedy of "Take the Money and Run," but, these days, comedy beggars can't be choosers. Woody Allen is about all we've got. And Woody, please stay healthy.” – Gene Siskel, The Chicago Tribune, December 21, 1973.

“…a slapstick triumph, an intelligent and effective parody of the SF genre…While making us laugh, Allen manages to provide some cutting remarks about America of the time…” – George Mann, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, St. Martin’s Press, 1999, page 1993.

“…essentially an Allen stand-up show that just happens to be set in the middle of a fascistic, architecturally stunning future society - is no less seminal for its slapstick ebullience: a lesson that the pursuits of making art and making a complete idiot out of yourself are not mutually exclusive.” – Tom Cox, The Telegraph, June 2005.

Cast & Crew:

CAST:              Woody Allen (Miles Monroe); Diane Keaton (Luna Schlosser); John Beck (Erno Windt); Marya Small (Dr. Nero); Susan Miller (Ellen); Mary Gregory (Dr. Melik); Dan Keefer (Dr. Tyron); Peter Hobbs (Dr. Dean); John McLiam (Dr. Aragorn); Chris Forbes (Rainer Krebs); Brian Avery (Herald); Douglas Rains (Evil Computer).

CREW: A Jack Rollins-Charles H. Joffe Production, Sleeper. Director of Photography: David M. Walsh. Original Music: Woody Allen. Film Editor: Ralph Rosenbaum. Produced by: Jack Grossberg. Written by: Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman. Directed by: Woody Allen. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG Running time: 89 minutes.

Story:

20th century clarinetist and health food store owner Miles Monroe (Allen) awakens from involuntary “cryogenic immersion” two hundred years in the future only to find that America is a police state and its people, mindless sheep.

Masquerading as a robot butler, Miles ends up in the home of lovely Luna Schlosser (Keaton), who sees nothing amiss in 2173’s “American Federation.”

Soon, however, Miles becomes involved in an organized rebellion to stop America’s Leader, who is plotting something nefarious called “Project Aires.”

When Miles is brainwashed and made to live a normal life in this new century, it is up to Luna -- now part of the rebellion -- to save his life and help defeat the Leader.  Their opportunity comes when the Leader needs surgery, and they masquerade as doctors.

Review:

Although today Woody Allen is best known for his brand of highly verbal humor, his 1973 dystopian comedy Sleeper is a slapstick physical comedy, one that determinedly re-casts the stories and characters of science fiction yesteryear in a new and very funny light.

From Buck Rogers (1939), Sleeper adopts the premise of a man who goes to sleep in the 20th century and awakens hundreds of years later to find himself in a brave new world.  The twist on this old formula is that Allen’s hero, Miles, is no pilot or astronaut, just a jazz musician and health-food nut. So an everyman, not a hero ends up in the distant future in order to save the day.

From Orwell’s literary 1984, Sleeper takes its central plot structure, that of a man operating in a technological surveillance state that features ubiquitous imagery of “The Leader,” and experiencing an illicit and forbidden romance.  And Miles, like Orwell’s hero, Winston Smith, undergoes a brainwashing by the State to remove his quarrelsome behavior.

In Winston’s case, of course, the rebellion was deliberate and considered…brought on by love.  Miles in Sleeper is far more hapless and confused in his mischief. He’s a walking tornado and force of mass destruction.

Finally, one other fun sci-fi touch is that Sleeper’s evil computer is voiced by Douglas Rain, the talent who voiced the HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Outside of genre traditions, Allen’s film reaches back deliberately to another touchstone: the silent era of film comedy. In one extended sequence here, he masquerades as a white-faced household robot (or “domestic service unit”) that must constantly serve his demanding human masters.

Without speaking a word, and walking consistently in a quasi-mechanical, robot-like gait, Allen’s character causes a cavalcade of chaos, the likes of which haven’t been seen in a major film since Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin were silver screen stars.

The Allen verbal sense of humor is present as well.  Throughout the film, Allen offers comedic descriptions of past historical figures such as Howard Cosell, Richard Nixon, Norman Mailer and Stalin, for instance, and Keaton even reports that she has a PhD in “Oral Sex.”

The film also makes hay out of the modern idea that certain foods are considered unhealthy one day, then found to be healthy the next day, thus confusing everyone.  In Sleeper, tobacco is surprisingly described as “one of the healthiest things you can put in your body.”

Steak and hot fudge? Also health foods of the future!

Allen’s career-long obsession with sex is also on hand, not just in Luna’s choice of post-graduate curricula, but in terms of the society’s technological advances.  The “orgasmatron” -- a giant household test tube-- provides the equivalent of intercourse in no time flat.

All these touches -- allusions to sci-fi history, Hollywood history, cultural zeitgeist, and raunchy humor -- combine to make Sleeper a fast-moving and very funny film. What is so good about Sleeper, however, is that it doesn’t pay short shrift to the visuals.  For a comedy enterprise, the film features a surprising number of establishing shot, and long shots, and the production design is quite good, with some very odd existing homes in Colorado doubling as the high-tech abodes of the future.

Sometimes, the best way to handle a threat is to laugh at it, and so Sleeper’s decision to land its Little Tramp-style protagonist into the world of George Orwell, fully realized, successfully lampoons many aspects of this Surveillance State.  The Leader, for instance, is now nothing but a nose because of an accident.  Being a nose, or nosy, is appropriate for the commandant of a totalitarian state for one thing, but this status also exposes the vanity of leadership, and the idiocy of the cult celebrity, which transforms real men in positions of power into icons and “stars.”  How can a whole culture worship a man who is now only a nose?

By the same token, Sleeper seems to understand that the most valuable man in a dystopian future is the uncataloged one.  Allen’s protagonist must play a crucial role in the resistance against the American Federation because he is un-numbered and un-processed, and therefore not understood by the computerized State.

Interestingly, this very plot-line was used again as the premise for Buck Rogers in the 25th Century on NBC in 1979.  There, Dr. Huer (Tim O’Connor) asked a different man from the twentieth century, Buck Rogers (Gil Gerard) to act as a covert agent for the Earth’s Defense Directorate because he had no presence on the cosmic grid, no “modern” identification that could tag him as a spy.

Some of Sleeper gets so crazy it’s hard to describe. One scene somehow ends up with Miles encountering giant vegetables and fruits, and then slipping on an over-sized banana peel.

This isn’t exactly satirical or science fiction stuff either, but it hardly matters.  Sleeper is one of Woody Allen’s funniest movies, and one of the funniest science fiction movies of the 1970s.

Influence: In 2006, Idiocracy from director Mike Judge repeated many elements of Sleeper, including the central conceit of a man in the present waking up in a future that is not what all what we would have imagined it to be, let alone chosen.

The “furniture,” Shirl (Leigh-Taylor Young; left) is questioned by Detective Thorn (Charlton Heston; right) in the dystopian world of Soylent Green (1973).

Soylent Green (1973) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“…director Richard Fleischer (Fantastic Voyage) concentrates on the performances and dialogue and making most of the settings close-quarters.  Heston, at the far end of his early-‘70s revival built on science fiction pictures, delivers a refreshingly multi-layered character.” – Irv Slifkind, VideoHound’s Groovy Movies: Far Out Films of the Psychedelic Era, Visible Ink Press, 2004, page 190.

“Powerful direction, an intriguing screenplay and wonderful acting by a fine cast transform Soylent Green into what is arguably the most emotionally moving science fiction film ever made.” – Paul Meehan, Tech-Noir: A Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir. McFarland, 2008, page 137.

“Poignantly, Soylent Green’s prognosis for the future is that in finding a possible solution to our problems we will lose all sense of morality.” – Lincoln Geraghty, American Science Fiction Film and Television, Berg, 2009, page 56.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Charlton Heston (Detective Thorn); Leigh Taylor Young (Shirl); Chuck Connors (Tab Fielding); Joseph Cotton (William R. Simonson); Brock Peters (Chief Hatcher); Paula Kelly (Martha); Edward G. Robinson (Sol Roth); Stephen Young (Gilbert); Mila Henry (Kulozik); Lincoln Kilpatrick (The Priest); Roy Johnson (Donovan); Leonard Stone (Charles); Whit Bissell (Gov. Santini); Celia Lovsky (The Exchange Leader); Dick Van Patten (Usher #1).

CREW: MGM Presents Soylent Green. Director of Photography: Richard H. Kline. Original Music: Fred Myrow. Film Editor: Samuel E. Beetley); Produced by: Walter Seltzer and Russell Thatcher. Written by: Stanley R. Greenberg. Based on the novel “Make Room! Make Room!” by: Harry Harrison. Directed by: Richard Fleischer. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 97 minutes.

Story:

In the crowded, over-populated, global-warming ravaged year of 2022, Detective Thorn (Heston) and his researcher, Sol (Robinson) must solve the murder of a Soylent Corporation executive, Simonson (Cotton) at the ritzy Chelsea West.

As Thorn questions Simonson’s body guard, Tab (Connors) and mistress, Shirl (Young), he comes to suspect that the murder was no simply break-in, as was believed.  Rather, it was an assassination.

In particular, Simonson knew a secret about the popular protein food wafer, Soylent Green…one that could up-end the very social order of life in overstressed New York City.

When Sol learns the horrible secret of Soylent Green, he chooses to “go home,” a euphemism for being euthanized by the State.  Thorn witnesses Sol’s going “home” ceremony, and gets a look at the beautiful Earth as it once was, before man soiled it.

Review:

In the 21st century, virtually every film lover with a good movie IQ knows the secret of Soylent Green.

It's a punch-line that is surpassed only by the climactic revelation of another Charlton Heston sci-fi film, 1968's Planet of the Apes.

Still, our familiarity with the movie's final narrative "twist" does Soylent Green, directed ably by Richard Fleischer, little disservice, for the film is a brilliantly-crafted example of dystopian futurism; a daring vision second only, perhaps, to Blade Runner.

And like that 1982 Ridley Scott classic, Soylent Green utilizes the parameters of a familiar genre -- the police procedural -- to weave its caustic story of a future world gone awry.

This is a future noir; a detective story that boasts a devilish but cunning endgame: to lead the viewer, bread-crumb by bread-crumb to a commentary on the "path" mankind is currently on; and to a grim destiny it may not be able to evade if humanity doesn't change its ways.

And soon…

Based on the novel "Make Room! Make Room!" by Harry Harrison, Soylent Green evidences an authentic apocalypse mentality. It is a gloomy vision of the year 2022. New York City is populated by some forty million people; twenty million of them out of work. The city streets are bathed constantly in a nausea-provoking yellow haze, a result of "the greenhouse effect" of global warming.  Meanwhile, the innumerable homeless denizens of this urban blight sleep on staircases, in parked cars, and street corners, all-the-while suffering in roasting temperatures (the average daily temperature according to the film is 90 degrees.) The Big Apple experiences numerous power black-outs in the film, yet it isn't just the city where things have turned bad.

We also learn from the dialogue that the oceans "are dying," "polluted," and that there is very little good farmland remaining in America. As for Gramercy Park, all that's left of the foliage there is a pitiful sanctuary where a few anemic trees grow in relative safety. Food supplies are incredible tight, and there is strict rationing of supplies.

And in what is perhaps its most visually-stunning sequence, Soylent Green escorts the viewers to an outdoor urban market on a typical Tuesday ("Tuesday is Soylent Green Day!") and reveals what happens when supplies of food are exhausted.

There's a riot, and then a violent confrontation between helmeted police forces and the throngs of starving people. It looks like a contemporary WTO riot multiplied by a factor of a hundred.

In 2007, the Associated Press reported that 50% percent of the world's population now lives in cities, so Soylent Green's phantasm of a stressed-out, overpopulated City-State, run by a craven politician, Governor Santini, looks markedly more plausible today than it did in 1973. And certainly the climate-change apocalypse feels more relevant in the Zeitgeist of the 21st century too. But where Soylent Green truly acquires psychic frisson as cinematic prophecy is in the depiction of "Two New Yorks.”

To wit, there is no middle-class remaining in New York City. It's extinct. In this U.S. imagined here, you're either part of the teeming, homeless, starving masses that inhabit every nook and cranny in the metropolis or separated from the poor and the unpleasant squalor of street life in glorious and luxurious apartment complexes. There, in spacious air-conditioned quarters, the super-rich play video games on home consoles (another nice bit of prophecy for 1973...), enjoy hot and cold running water (another luxury denied the masses), purchase black market items like real vegetables and beef, and are protected by security systems. The rich also get another perk with their fancy domiciles: “furniture.”  But in this case, “furniture” is the name for prostitutes, gorgeous young women who perform sexual acts for their masters in return for food, water, and the other luxuries of life.

So in this world, the Haves and the Have Mores have separated themselves from the rest of humanity, and ignore their plight. It's easy to do, what with the video games, the TVs, the air-conditioning and the refrigerators...

Charlton Heston, again fronts what is undeniably a leftist science-fiction vision, and does so as only Heston can: with swaggering charm, arrogance, and unswerving intelligence.

In this case, he plays Detective Thorn of the 14th Precinct; a man who is a product of his time; meaning that he is mostly ignorant of history and just trying to survive and do "his job." Thorn is just one among many corrupt cops. For instance, when he's assigned to investigate the murder (actually an assassination) of a rich man, William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten) of the Soylent Corporate Board, Thorn steals as much as he can from the crime scene. He takes a bottle of bourbon, some refrigerated beef (a rare commodity), and a few reference books about Soylent Green, a tightly-rationed "miracle food" that is ostensibly based on Plankton and other sea life.

Thorn also partakes of another luxury in Simonson's apartment, the aforementioned “furniture." In this case, said furniture is a woman, Shirl (fetching Leigh Taylor Young), who comes with the apartment, regardless of tenant.  She’s just looking for a way to survive too.

Investigating the death of Simonson, Thorn is assisted by an assistant or colleague called a "Police Book." Since electric power routinely goes out, there are no longer any reliable police information databases, Google searches, or other electronic systems to rely on. Instead, every detective has an assistant or partner, a "book," a researcher who marshals what resources he can (including an elaborate “Book Exchange" – a kind of person-to-person Internet) to learn about relevant suspects and perpetrators.

Thorn's "book" is named Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson), an elderly man who remembers how things used to be: wide open spaces; beautiful oceans; untouched fields, and food aplenty. He recalls a world of hot/cold running water, "real" butter and strawberry jam that didn't cost $150.00 per jar. In one of Soylent Green's finest and most memorable scenes, Sol prepares for Thorn a dinner like the ones he used to eat years earlier; one that includes crisp apples, beef stew, and other lost delicacies. The time and attention spent on what viewers today would consider a normal meal  -- but which to these characters is a once-in-a-lifetime extravagance -- makes a cogent point about a life of limited resources; and a booming population's overtaxing of the planet.

These little things that we take for granted are suddenly big things.  Suddenly, the engaged viewer realizes how "lucky" we are in America; how we live in a world of plenty.  We also realize how fragile that status of “lucky” might be.

A later scene involves Thorn taking his first hot shower in months (with Shirl as his companion) and again, Soylent Green deploys simple imagery to make its point.  The movie focuses on the small, human things to establish a truly miserable future.  The quiet, intimate nature of the dinner scene and later the shower scene not only establish much in terms of character relationships (for instance, Thorn doesn't know how to eat an apple...), but also reinforce that recurring idea of those things lost in this future; in the hustle-bustle of so-called "progress."

It's all extremely touching and yet markedly unromantic and unsentimental too. There's no candy-coating in Soylent Green about days that were better in the past; when the human animal was a better species. "People were always rotten," establishes Sol. "But the world was beautiful."  In other words, man was just as bad in the past, but he had some environmental leeway, at least.  In this world of 2022, he has none.

Stylistically, Soylent Green is a much more accomplished film than it has often been credit for. It begins impressively with sepia tone images from American history joined together in a tightly-edited montage. We see in old photographs the advancement of technology during the American century; the rapid progression from a rural, agricultural country to an industrialized one.

The movie escorts us in this montage from Huckleberry Finn-style views of wide open spaces and serenity to -- over just a few seconds of screen time -- overpopulated, bustling modernity. As the montage continues, the images come at the viewer faster and faster; form echoing content. The world of the cities, of airplanes, of cars, moves faster than the world of covered wagons and farmers so it's natural the images would move quicker too. Again, it's a touching and surprisingly effective way to commence a science fiction film, and it puts a larger context upon the story. This montage reminds the viewer where we've been, before taking us where we're going; into the uncertain future.  It also connects explicitly our behavior in the past to the results that behavior creates in the present and future.

Later, the film's most often discussed scene occurs. A depressed and hopeless Sol Roth goes "home," to a place in the middle of the city (which resembles a sports arena...) where he can be quickly and cleanly euthanized by the State.

In this location, he's provided a twenty-minute death ceremony in what looks like an I-Max theater and comfort salon, with the images of his youthful world projected all around him. Sol sees beautiful oceans, wild deer, endless fields of flowers and so forth, all while bathed in a light of his favorite color (orange) and to the tune of his favorite genre of music (classical; or “make that light classical”).

This death montage, like the montage presented at the beginning of the film, reminds audiences of the past; of what has been lost in the modern technological age. It's important in the film not just as a tender goodbye to Sol. On the contrary, Thorn witnesses these amazing scenes too...and weeps at the power of them. He is a man who has grown up in the "ugly" future world -- a place literally devoid of nature -- and come to accept the limitations of his world. He didn't know, nay "couldn't have known" what the world once was.

And so his mentor, Sol, has passed on one final bit of wisdom to him; to the next generation: a natural vision of what human existence COULD be. Until Thorn sees this pastoral montage, he didn't really know that there was an option; didn't really understand what had been lost in the crush of industrialization and over-population.

Soylent Green is a film dominated by powerful, stunning imagery. One vision that struck me, and which I had forgotten about entirely before a recent re-watch, finds Thorn stumbling upon the corpse of a woman in an alley by dark of night. Strapped to her by a makeshift wire leash is her still-living -- and weeping -- child.

This image speaks of the film's narrative context in a manner that dialogue or exposition simply cannot. The child was strapped to her mother, no doubt, because Mom didn't want them to be separated from one another in the maddeningly overpopulated streets, perhaps at the outdoor food market.

So she jury-rigged this leash of sorts to keep them together.

What Mom couldn't have predicted was that she would die (either of starvation or perhaps she was murdered...) and that the child would still be anchored to her; trapped.

Good intentions have gone awry (likely another metaphor for the film's overriding theme: of something ostensibly good [technology and modernization] having unintended consequences…)

But what is so meaningful about this image is that it remains wholly un-sentimentalized. Nobody comments on the event or the tragedy at all. Heston's character "rescues" the child by taking the little moppet to a nearby church. But he says nothing and offers no commentary. The movie has no “words” for either the child or the dead parent. This scene is so "normal" in the world of Soylent Green that it isn't worth a passing remark, even an exclamatory curse.

If this had been a Spielberg film, we would have had Liam Neeson providing his "Oscar Moment," commenting on "how could we have come to this; how can we allow our children to suffer?" Soylent Green doesn't provide us with such catharsis or self-righteousness.  Instead, it just silently observes a devastating moment.

In the cutthroat world of Soylent Green, there is no time to for such self-aggrandizing hand-wringing. Life is too difficult. Millions of tragedies go unnoticed on the streets every day, no doubt. Why is this gruesome sight of a dead mother and trapped child any different?

The film's ending also speaks to this truth in some fashion. The film offers a tight zoom on Thorn's bloody arm and hand as he is carried away on a stretcher. He shouts the truth for all to hear ("Soylent Green is made out of people") but he goes, essentially, unheard.

We understand this because the film goes entirely black around his gnarled, dying hand, in essence restricting Thorn’s presence in the frame. The frame itself has shrunk. The association with this image is that the truth in Soylent Green's world can't be heard; it holds only a "sliver" of space in the overlapping, multitudinous dialogue of a City-State overrun and failing.

If you're so inclined, you can gaze at the things Soylent Green gets wrong and laugh at the picture, I guess. Charlton Heston wears neckerchiefs throughout the film, an odd and flamboyant fashion choice. There are rotary phones in evidence too, in 2022! But on balance, Soylent Green gets more right about "the future" than it gets wrong. It accurately predicts the erosion of the middle class, the obsession with global climate change, and the ever-growing and corrupting nexus of politics with corporations.  Specifically, the Soylent Green Company and Governor Santini are in on a deep dark conspiracy. The specter of "illegal immigration" and a "third world invasion" that some pundits now fear so greatly is also bubbling just beneath the surface in the film.  Just look at how many of the extras in the film are non-whites or non-Europeans.

In broad strokes, Soylent Green also addresses the danger and inevitability of a police state to regulate a rapidly increasing population. In some senses, Soylent Green even points to the ubiquitous nature of contemporary entertainment: we even watch TV when we're about to die. Death is rendered palatable through the comfort of zoning out; of being -- literally -- a couch potato. Instead of seeking comfort in death from family members, we seek it in enjoying our favorite “TV show.”

In addition to these still-relevant themes, Soylent Green is a handsome production. There are some remarkably effective matte paintings in the film; ones that still hold up well. And Fleischer makes good use of his "extras," filling every frame and every moment of the film, save those at the spacious apartment at Chelsea West, with unkempt, exhausted-looking, world-weary bodies.

Soylent Green presents an oppressive, dark future. There's no "out" for the characters as there is in Blade Runner, for instance, with the inclusion of the off-world colonies and other worlds to explore.

Indeed, Shirl suggests "running" at some point to Thorn, and he rightfully replies "where are we going to go?"

Every city in America is just like this city; and it is illegal to leave the country. In bringing forward this point, Soylent Green suggests that if we don't change our ways, we will all be living in a purgatory of our own making.  We can’t escape the planet Earth, but just look at the way we are treating our only home…

Dr. Stoner (Strother Martin; right) attempts to wrangle the highly-venomous King Cobra in Ssssssss (1973).

Ssssssss (1973) * *

Critical Mass:

“While we allow that Sssssss is a fantastic title -- it looks AND sounds like a snake! -- we do not understand why a person would want to fuse man and serpent into one creature. Snakes do not have arms or legs. Even their most ardent admirers will admit this is a deficiency, especially if one is accustomed to being fully limbed.” – Eric Snider, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 29, 2010.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Strother Martin (Dr. Carl Stoner); Dirk Benedict (David Blake); Heather Menzies (Christina); Richard B. Shull (Dr. Daniels); Tim O’Connor (Kogen); Jack Ging (Sheriff  Hardison); Kathleen King (Kitty Stewart); Reb Brown (Steve Randall); Ted Grossman (Deputy Bock).

CREW: Universal Pictures presents a Zanuck/Brown Production, Ssssssss. Director of Photography: Gerald Perry Finnerman. Original Music: Pat Williams. Film Editing: Robert Watts.  Produced by: Dan Striepeke. Executive Producers: Ricard D. Zanuck, David Brown. Written by: Hal Dresner. Story by: Dan Striepeke. Directed by: Bernard Kowalski.  M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 99 minutes.

Story:

A marginalized and alcoholic old herpetologist, Dr. Carl Stoner (Martin) toils secretly in his house laboratory to create a perfect hybrid of snake and man, in hopes that such a creature could survive extinction in a world of increasing pollution.  His previous guinea-pig was a student named Tim, now a circus attraction.

A new assistant, a student named David (Benedict) goes to work for Dr. Stoner, unaware of the doctor’s plan to transform him into a monster.

Soon, David falls for Stoner’s beautiful daughter, Christina (Menzies), but even that relationship won’t stop the doctor from pursuing his crazy goals.

Review:

Science runs amok again in this 1970s film about a mad scientist who -- forecasting the end of the world because of “pollution” and other “holocausts” -- decides to transform an unwitting subject into a snake with a man’s intelligence.

And yes, that plan is as utterly insane as it sounds, in perfect keeping with other insane mad scientist plans viewers witnessed during the 1970s, in films such as The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant.

But how practical, really, is it, for a human intelligence to dwell inside a snake’s body?

A snake can’t utilize tools, can’t wear clothes, can’t cook his food, boil water, or even turn the pages in a book.  So how is a man-in-snake’s body better going to thrive in a future of pollution and holocaust, going forward?  The film never answers that vital question and so on some level the logic underlying it just falls apart.

In keeping with the audacity and silliness of the mad scientist’s plot, the final scenes in Sssssss reveals a snake-man

transforming in dated time-lapse photography into a regular snake.  It’s a bit of a disappointment to see David become just a regular snake after all the impressive make-up work showing his phases of transformation.  After all the dramatic build-up, David simply becomes a snake and gets murdered by a mongoose in his first moments of this “new existence.”

The film freeze-frames on Menzies’ screaming face before the audience is even sure what has happened, or why, and then the movie ends.

Another concern is the script’s confusing take on snakes.  One of the most likable characters in the film is a booze-sipping pet snake named Harry.  When he is wantonly and unnecessarily murdered by a local jock played by Reb Brown, the movie features a real sense of pathos.  It is clear that this snake is both intelligent and capable of bonding with humans. He is loved, and seems to love back.

But how can one square that snake-friendly attitude with David’s hallucination once snake venom flows through his blood.  The film cuts to images of Hell, the Devil, fire and demons, as if the snake is a creature of pure evil…a vehicle for Satan.

This vision might be written off as a simple hallucination, but when coupled with talk in the film of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the snake/serpent, one wonders what the point is.  Are snakes just animals? Or are they evil creatures? Sssssss can’t decide if snakes are the targets of prejudice, and Stoner even compares them to “minorities,” or the familiars for demons.

Yet despite such transgressions of logic and dramatic closure, Ssssssss is strangely watchable. In part this quality may arise because of Strother Martin’s total commitment to his role as the deranged Dr. Stoner.  Martin demonstrates complete confidence in his line readings, but more impressively demonstrates real aptitude when in close quarters with dangerous live snakes. There’s a scene here in which his character must extract venom from a king cobra, and the movie makes certain to inform the audience about how deadly that venom is.  The scene is carried out with a minimum of visual cheating, with Martin in close proximity to the snake, and the reality -- hence the suspense -- of the scene is palpable.  Also, the romantic scenes between Dirk Benedict and Heather Menzies are actually kind of sweet, and their characters transmit as real people rather than mere obedient servants of the narrative structure.  All the performers and their characters deserve better closure than Ssssssss provides them.  The risible ending is enough to make you stand up and complain.

But don’t say it…hiss it.

Steely-eyed killer: Yul Brynner is the Gunslinger in Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973).

Westworld (1973) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“The film is meticulous – a trait of Michael Crichton, author of The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man – but emerges a laboratory-sterile chiller desperate in need of the humanity a Robert Wise or a Jack Arnold could have supplied.” –Jeff Rovin, A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films, Citadel Press, page 1975.

“…a good mix of comedy, satire, and terror, which leaps into frenzied gear once robot Brynner hits his first target.” – Andrea Shaw, Seen That, Now What? Fireside, 1996, page 442.

“Westworld shows us the robot at the end of the empire: a de-colonized machine, an uncanny robot sapiens that looks back at us – and aims to kill.” – Martin Kevorkian, Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology, Cornell University Press, 2006, page 59.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Yul Brynner (Gunslinger); Richard Benjamin (Peter Martin); James Brolin (John Blane); Norman Bartold (Medieval Knight); Alan Oppenheimer (Chief Supervisor); Victoria Shaw (Medieval Queen); Dick Van Patten (Banker); Linda Scott (Arlette); Steve Franken (Technican); Majel Barrett (Miss Carrie); Michael T. Mikler (Black Knight).

CREW: MGM Presents Westworld. Director of Photography: Gene Polito. Original Music: Fred Karlin. Film Editing: David Bretherton. Art Direction: Herman Blumenthal. Produced by: Paul N. Lazarus III. Written and directed by: Michael Crichton. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 88 minutes.

Story:

In the amusement park known as Delos, there are three arenas for customers to enjoy. In Western World, Roman World (a place of "sensual, relaxed morality"), and Medieval World, visitors can indulge their most elaborate fantasies all while interacting with robots programmed to act, talk, and even "bleed" just like humans do.

Two visitors to the park, the macho John (James Brolin) and the neurotic Peter (Richard Benjamin) choose Western World as their "world of choice" and are shuttled by tram to a town mimicking conditions in the American West of 1880.

In short order the pair indulges in whoring and gunfights, and even murder.   On two successive occasions, Peter is confronted by a bald, dressed-in-black Gunslinger (Brynner), an android who seems to have it in for him.  And in both instances, Peter bloodily guns the robot down.

While John and Peter enjoy their week in Westworld, the scientists tasked with overseeing the vast Delos grounds toil in subterranean environs to repair and service hundreds of androids.

A new concern soon arises there.  Android breakdowns are on the rise, almost as though an infectious disease is passing from one android to another.  The scientists watch concerned as android behavior begins to turn...rebellious.

Instead of shutting down the park, the scientists opt to continue observing. This delay in decisive action proves to be a mistake, since the androids revolt and begin to murder the Delos guests.

In Westworld, the Gunslinger returns one last time, looking to even up the score with Peter.  He murders John in a shoot-out.  The machine then sets off on a relentless pursuit of Peter through Roman World and Medieval World.  A desperate Peter now must utilize every survival instinct and weapon at his disposal to survive the machine's endless attacks.

Review:

Gazing back at Westworld today, it's not difficult to determine why audiences responded so enthusiastically to the Michael Crichton film in 1973.

First and foremost, it features a seemingly unstoppable, silver-eyed bogeyman in Yul Brynner’s android gunslinger, a clear cinematic antecedent to James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984). Indeed, the film still excels as a lean, efficient thriller, and the movie capitalizes ably on a universal human fear (also marshaled in the Halloween films) of being pursued by a seemingly inhuman being that absolutely won't stop; no matter what.

Like Michael Myers himself, you can shoot, stab or burn the Gunslinger android and it doesn't seem to bother him or slow him down one bit.  And again like The Shape, the Gunslinger wears a mask of sorts; an inexpressive "human" face that reveals nothing of his internal motivations, needs, or desires. He's impossible to read, beyond the fact that he absolutely wants to kill you.

After the thrilling action elements of Westworld, there's also a fascinating science fiction premise operating here, one specifically involving modern human morality.  In this regard, the film concerns an amusement park called Delos where rich patrons can pay 1,000 dollars a day to relive past epochs in "Western World," "Roman World" and "Medieval World."

More than that, these patrons pay for the right to have sexual intercourse with subservient androids (with no consequences...) and even kill those androids (again with no consequences) in the various theme parks.

Clearly, there's a statement here about the activities that human beings consider entertaining.  Is it acceptable to commit violence when the target of such violence is a machine?  Is it acceptable to engage in casual sexual relations with a slave, too?

Also, though it isn't heavy-handed about it, the film comments broadly on technology and the use we put it to.  There's the suggestion here that the androids are beginning to develop some sense of awareness of themselves and their rights as intelligent beings.

Are they beginning to sense that they are being exploited and abused?  It’s difficult to deny that their uprising in the film -- though terrifying -- seems justified given their cruel treatment at the hands of the wealthy elite.  In many ways, Westworld forecasts the re-made Battlestar Galactica of the last decade by exploring such a notion.  It's a science-run-amok Frankenstein story in which the technological children of man, perhaps rightly, turn on their biological parents.

The first thing to acknowledge about Westworld is that Michael Crichton has directed the low-budget picture with a real sense of competence...and most importantly, consistency. For instance, all of the scenes set in the underground complex utilize lengthy camera pans.  These pans of high-tech machinery, infirmary beds for the robots, whirring reel-to-reel computers and so forth cover a tremendous amount of territory and successively give one the impression of Delos' massive control apparatus.  We return to this underground complex several times in the film, and Crichton universally deploys these lengthy pans not just to provide the setting a sense of scope, but also to keep things moving in the film.  We're constantly aware, via these frequent panning shots, of the momentum necessary to keep Delos operational.  Underground, nothing ever stops.  And the nighttime "clean-up" scene in Westworld with vehicles and workmen gathering the "dead" androids for repairs likewise contributes to the film's sense of reality; to the sense of a real-life park at an apex of activity.

Inside Westworld itself Crichton adopts a different technique to film the "fake" cowboy moments; the moments that seem to be straight out of old Western films and TV shows.  In this case -- for bar fights and shoot-outs that aren't real -- he deploys slow motion photography so that immediately our minds seize on the concept of movie Westerns; and of a long history of being entertained by them.  These heightened, almost exaggerated (and again, lengthy) sequences remind us that this world of Delos is all about "play acting;" that the world Peter and John engage with in Delos is not real or authentic.  It's a game.

When things turn sour inside Westworld, Crichton makes another pivot in terms of stylistic flourish.  He does away with the artificiality of the slow motion photography and relies instead on staging and shooting tricks we most closely associate with the horror genre.  He thus adopts first person subjective shots, tracking shots, and even stages a decent "jolt moment" as Peter backs up into terror.   All of these moments combine to ramp up the tension, and carry us through the film's exciting climax.  There's even a sting-in-the-tail/tale involving the (scorched) Gunslinger as he gets up for one last kill.

It isn't so much that any of this workmanship represents revolutionary or trail-blazing filmmaking; it's merely that Crichton's approach is economical and adroit.  He almost universally finds the right shot for the right scene, and the result is that Westworld moves effortlessly from set-piece to set-piece with a bit of good visual grace to go alongside the film's subversive and extremely witty sense of humor.

If Crichton proves deft as a film director, it's fair to make the same case for him as the film's screenwriter.  Even though Westworld features a fairly straight-forward narrative that devolves into a last-act chase sequence, Crichton has nonetheless layered on social commentary in a way that proves appealing and funny.  These touches earn the film a serious appraisal in terms of the genre and what it can accomplish. Specifically, Westworld ponders the human race and its unlucky creation, the androids of Delos.

First let's consider the humans.

These are creatures that pay an exorbitant fee to escape from reality into a more primitive, less comfortable past.  That fact alone says something about us, doesn't it?  Specifically, it says that we've built ourselves an uncomfortable modern world in which the only outlet is a fantasy that looks to the past; to "less complicated" times.

Ironically, we romanticize that past and yearn for the "simplicity of it" instead of making the present more tolerable and livable.  In this more primitive past, the vacationing guests at Delos can indulge sexual and violent fantasy, all without feeling the slightest bit of guilt or remorse about the behavior because the target of these fantasies is a machine...and we don't consider machines to be life-forms.

Again, this is a statement about us as a species.  We find killing...fun.  And we consider machines to be subservient; not our equals.

Intriguingly, Delos also makes it possible for people lacking in any real survival skills or abilities, like Dick Van Patten's character, to buff up their egos and feel like larger-than-life heroes. Yet those feelings of heroism and bravery stem from killing machines that are programmed to be slow on the draw; or by bedding female androids that are not entitled "to refuse a guest's seduction."

In other words, it's a stacked deck.

There's no danger here and no real adversity either.  And where there's no adversity, there's no growth and no learning.  Again, it's all just a game, a delusion to make a guest feel "special" when in fact the androids have no choice but to die on cue or submit to sexual advances.  As a species, we're easily fooled into believing we're pretty terrific, aren't we?

And that's why Peter (Benjamin) proves an interesting character.  He's a neurotic, insecure lawyer still hung up on his ex-wife, who took him to the cleaners during their divorce.  He's the stereotypical, modern "sissy" man, and he feels "big" about himself for bedding an android, and for shooting down an android gunslinger.  He thus mistakes the world of Delos for one that really matters. This error becomes plain to him when the androids malfunction and commit murder.  Suddenly, Peter is thrown into a situation that is all-too-real, and he must use his wits, imagination, constitution, and other human gifts to survive the day.   His previous (and short-lived) confidence was based on a sham.

But at the end of the film, a battered, sweating, exhausted Peter realizes the truth: that he survived something "real" and that it wasn't at all a game.  Rather, it was terrifying.  The last shot of the film is a close-shot of Peter recognizing human folly.  He recognizes his own folly (in treating the game like it mattered) and the Delos creator's folly: in believing that nothing here could ever possibly go wrong.

In terms of the androids, the film hints (and just barely so...) at the idea that the machines are gaining an awareness of how badly they are being used by the human guests.

In Brynner's case, one gets the sense that the android is tired of losing to a sissy human that he knows he could beat in any fair fight.  The androids here are "sex models" and” gunfighters,” and every single day they have to die or put out so that men like Peter or Van Patten’s character can feel better about themselves.  Men like the character played by James Brolin are not much better: macho thugs who see people simply as receptacles for their urges and appetites, both sexual and violent. It's an unflattering portrait of modern man.

In this scenario, as in films like Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, audience loyalties grow increasingly divided.  It's not right to enslave any creature, and yet nor do we wish to see humanity subjugated before an enemy.   The film would have been even better had it been R-rated; so that we could understand even better the plight of these machines who suddenly realize it isn't so pleasant to be cast as the villain (or the prize...) in another creature's fairy tale.

Finally, it is necessary to comment on Yul Brynner's famous performance.  He gives new meaning to the term "steely eyed," and brings an intense sense of physicality to the role of the android gunslinger.  He moves with a strange but purposeful carriage even while riding a horse, and successfully evokes the feeling of something that is more than human.

Although his face rarely shows expression of any type, there is also something in Brynner's gait and stance that implicitly suggests an under-the-surface malevolence.  Even though he is an emotionless machine, he's clearly a bad ass.  This is an accomplished performance, and Brynner isn't just portraying a machine...he's portraying a machine with a (data?) chip on his shoulder.  He's a lot of fun to watch in this movie.

When I wrote Horror Films of the 1970s back in the years 1999-2000, I finished off a review of Westworld with the thought that "what man has forged to serve him will dominate him unless stopped, or conversely, treated with common decency."  Today that conclusion still seems apt.  Someone organize those androids at Delos a union...before it's too late.

Influence:

Westworld was followed by a movie sequel Futureworld (1976), and a short-lived 1980 TV series, Beyond Westworld. In 2013, it was announced that J.J. Abrams would be producing a new TV version of Westworld.

Promotional art-work for The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974).

1974

The Real World: 1974

January 4:              President Nixon refuses to surrender tapes subpoenaed by the Watergate Committee.

January 5:              Happy Days -- a situation comedy set in the 1950s -- begins its more-than-decade long run on ABC.

January 16:              Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws is published.

February 4:              Patricia Heart is kidnapped by the SLA.

March 2:              A grand-jury investigating Watergate concludes President Nixon’s complicity in the cover-up.

March 18:              OPEC ends its five month Oil Embargo.

April 8:              Henry Aaron, an African-American player for the Atlanta Braves, shatters Babe Ruth’s career home run record.

April 24:              Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, is published.

April 29:              President Nixon signals his willingness to release the Watergate tapes…but only edited versions.

May 9:              The House Judiciary Committee begins formal Impeachment hearings regarding Richard Nixon and the Watergate Scandal.

July 21:              The House Judiciary Committee approves two Articles of Impeachment, vis-à-vis Watergate.

July 27:              The House Judiciary Committee votes 27 – 11 for the Impeachment of President Nixon.

August 8:              President Richard Nixon resigns the Presidency when it becomes clear that he will be removed through the impeachment process moving forward in Congress.  The day after his resignation, Gerald Ford takes the oath of office and becomes the 38th President of the United States.

The Final Programme (1974) * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“…a major failure, redeemed only by Norman Warwick’s impressive colour cinematography and Fuest’s own designs for the film, which, although they worked against the movie as a whole, still provide the main interest.” – Alan Frank, Sci-Fi Now, Octopus Books, 1978, page 52.

“…remains perhaps the only attempt to produce a cinematic equivalent to what the British New Wave was doing in literary science fiction. As such, the film merits a serious reconsideration while Fuest himself deserves critical recognition as auteur.” – Michael du Plessis, British Science Fiction Film and Television: Critical Essays, McFarland, 2011, page 60.

“…should be obligatory viewing for anyone who thinks it is easy to maintain mythical coherence. The final sequence is a piquant reminder, if any were needed, that one can look very silly even while feeling magnificent.” – Sue Harper, Justin Smith, British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, page 180.

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Jon Finch (Jerry Cornelius); Jenny Runacre (Miss Brunner); Sterling Hayden (Major Wrongway Lindbergh); Harry Andrews (John); Hugh Griffin (Professor Hira); Julie Ege (Miss Dazzle); Patrick Magee (Dr. Baxter); Graham Crowden (Dr. Smiles); George Coulouris (Dr. Powys); Basil Henson (Dr. Lucas); Derrick O’Connor (Frank); Gilles Millinaire (Dimitre); Ronald Lacey (Shades); Sandy Ratcliffe (Jenny); Sarah Douglas (Catherine); Mary McLeod (Nurse);Sandra Dickinson (Waitress).

CREW: Goodtimes Enterprises and Galdiole Films present a film by Robert Fuest, The Final Programme. Director of Photography: Norman Warwick. Original Music: Paul Beaver, Bernard Krause. Film Editing: Barrie Vince. Produced by: Sandy Lieberson, John Goldstone. Executive Producers: David Puttnam, Roy Baird. Based on the novel The Final Programme by: Michael Moorcock. Designed, written and directed by: Robert Fuest. M.P.A.A. Rating: 1974. Running time: 89 minutes.

Story:

Adventurer Jerry Cornelius (Finch) teams up with the techno-mage Miss Bruner (Runacre) to acquire a micro-film from his deceased father, one boasting a scientific secret that could revolutionize the world and mankind.

The micro-film is ensconced in Cornelius’s booby-trapped country estate, where his brother Frank (O’Connor) is holding Cornelius’s junkie sister, Catherine (Douglas) hostage. As Cornelius works with Brunner to get the film and rescue his sister, he learns that his ally boasts the unusual ability to absorb the knowledge (and apparently bodies…) of her lovers, and that she plans to use the most advanced computer in the world, Duel, along with the micro-film data to create a completely self-replicating, “self-fertilizing, self-regenerating” hermaphroditic human.

And worse, in a secret Nazi underground station in Lapland, Brunner plans to use Jerry as her guinea pig in the bizarre experiment.

Review:

Michael Moorcock’s 1969 novel The Final Programme is the first adventure of an anarchist/superhero/Nobel Laureate/secret agent and “Eternal Champion” character called Jerry Cornelius.  The character is sexually ambivalent, while also a symbol of heroism in multiple quantum realities or multi-universes.  Cornelius might also be viewed as a kind of deliberate, satirical response to the popularity of James Bond in the popular imagination of the 1960s.  Unlike Bond, Cornelius tends to work against authority and entrenched power.  The science fiction character originally appeared in three additional Moorcock novels, including A Cure for Cancer, The English Assassins and The Condition of Muzak.

Moorcock is known and revered as an instigator of the British New Wave in science fiction literature, a span which occurred when he took over editorship of the periodical New Worlds in 1964. A galvanizing notion of this “new wave” was that high and mass art could be combined together in the dismantling of technical and traditional structure. Characters in stories thus became not individuals only, but avatars upon which one could assign signs and symbols, a distinctly post-modern approach.  The world imagined in Cornelius’s world was deliberately retro, one in which the past -- and thus past works of fiction and art -- played a crucial part in the “future.”

Robert Fuest (1929 – 2012), a visual director of the highest order who directed The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1972) and began his career as a painter and set designer, adapted the first Jerry Cornelius novel to film in 1973, but the final result failed to please the award-winning Moorcock, and by-and-large confused mainstream audiences.

Studying The Final Programme today, its primary strengths are its colorful pop visual design, which might aptly be described as “psychedelic chic” and the lead performance by Finch, who proves dashing and entirely in-the-know regarding the satirical aspects of his character.

Outside those admirable elements, however, the film makes for a frequently a baffling viewing experience, especially to those unfamiliar with the source material and the character of Cornelius. To put it bluntly, Fuest seems to have directed all of his considerable attention into the admittedly-impressive avant-garde visualizations but given scant thought to the script and how it moves from scene-to-scene, set-piece to set-piece.  Absolutely nothing is made clear regarding who the characters are, their relationships to each other, or what motives drive them.

In some sense, the film feels as though it is happening in some alternate universe where the viewer knows none of the rules, history, people, or other details of life.

For example, Sterling Hayden appears in just one scene in the film, in the first few minutes, and gives such an odd, over-the-top performance -- right down to a fourth-wall-breaking glare at the camera -- that the movie grinds to a self-indulgent halt.  Is Hayden attempting to revive some mirror universe version of his beloved Dr. Strangelove (1964) character? He is introduced with flourishes of grandeur as though he is a main character, but then he never reappears. He furnishes Cornelius a new, kitted-up jet….which the film never actually shows, either.

If the message of The Final Programme is but style, this approach makes sense. The form of the New Wave (with the past resurrected as the future…) means that Hayden’s presence symbolizes a pop-culture reference to and comment upon an actor’s similar role in the aforementioned Dr. Strangelove. The viewer must thus acknowledge both the actor and a previous character to fully comprehend his appearance here. In this way, perhaps, the film’s milieu accurately reflects Moorcock’s New Wave aesthetic to a high degree.

But once more, the film baffles on more concrete levels. After this interlude with Hayden’s general, Cornelius meets with Brunner and a gaggle of scientists who want to break into his family house, which is outfitted with booby traps such as a sound device that provokes “pseudo epilepsy” and toxic green and orange-colored gas.

The interchangeable scientist characters unnecessarily clutter the sequence, and are virtually indistinguishable from one another in terms of appearance and personal characteristics. One scientist would have done just fine for story purposes.

Then, bafflingly, the scientists end up in a weird tent room booby trap that resembles a modern bouncy house. Why is Cornelius’s house outfitted in this way?  What is the purpose of the tent room?   Once more, no answers are forthcoming. It’s visually appealing, but nonsensical, like so much of the film. Again, it seems to be style for style’s sake.

In short order, it becomes clear that The Final Programme is indeed pure phantasmagoria, a visual “dream,” essentially, with no interest in providing audiences a lucid narrative experience.  The visuals are such that they engage the imagination, but they simply can’t carry a film in which there is no real character to care about and every aspect of the plot is treated with a self-indulgent smirk.  Like 1975’s Doc Savage, the film qualifies as high camp.

Again, the British New Wave interpretation might simply be that Fuest is very much interested in subverting the mock-profundity of many Kubrick films here, particularly with the re-appearance of Hayden seemingly still in character from Dr. Strangelove as well as the film’s ending, which functions as a weird inversion of and commentary on the Star Child ending in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  In the latter case, Brunner and Cornelius join to become the ultimate self-replicating human, but instead of a beautiful messiah, a Neanderthal unexpectedly emerges from this union.

And the Neanderthal (in Jerry’s voice) does a Humphrey Bogart imitation as the movie ends…

This ending could be the direct answer to a question posed explicitly early in the film (in flashback) when Jerry’s mentor, a Hindu professor, wonders if people would recognize the messiah when he appears.

The answer is, of course, that we wouldn’t.

We all have our own individual vision of what the messiah should be, and a genuine one would have a difficult time living up to preconceived notions.

Would we accept a Bogart-quoting Neanderthal as the next Jesus Christ?

The Final Programme also suggests through the presence of the Neanderthal man’s devolution and return to the beginning of his life-span on Earth, in pre-history, rather than a 2001-like transcendence into a glorious future. This is a comment on modern man and the failure he has become in the “Dark Ages” of the 20th century.  Better then, to become a Neanderthal, and take a do-over.

This ending is not strictly what Moorcock imagined in the novel (wherein the messiah was beautiful, not a caveman…) and was widely ridiculed by movie critics who felt it was an unworthy destination after such a trying, self-indulgent journey.

Yet the problem was not the idea -- that man’s future rests in going back to the beginning and starting over -- but rather the non-serious way in which it was addressed, with the Neanderthal Cornelius adopting the much-mocked mannerisms of Bogart.

Why Bogart? What does he symbolize?

A pre-Bond film noir presence, perhaps, one that acknowledges (like Cornelius) that authority is inherently corrupt, and that positions the hero as outsider.

Is the final image of a Neanderthal Hero spouting Bogart-isms (and opining that the world looks tasty) in The Final Programme the equivalent of announcing a return to a pre-1960s aesthetic? The 1960s and the popularity of Ian Fleming’s character suggested violence is beautiful, performed by beautiful men, and always acceptable because those men dutifully serve the State.  Before Bond, gumshoes like the ones Bogart played on the silver screen were much more conflicted about violence and their responsibilities to society as a whole.

It is tempting to defend The Final Programme on the basis of its delicious and often sensual visuals, and its often very clever witticisms. It is also tempting to defend it as a British New Wave commentary on popular art and its role in roasting the establishment.  There are legitimate grounds here for approbation.  But as a logical narrative the film never coheres.

For instance: what has Miss Brunner to gain by becoming the self-replicating entity that appears at film’s conclusion?  She already possesses the amazing ability to -- through sexual intercourse -- absorb the memories, knowledge, and identities of her lovers (whom she consumes, we must assume, in a physical sense…).

This ability is an amazing evolutionary adaptation in and of itself, and yet the film doesn’t acknowledge how miraculous a creature she is. Given her own special abilities, Brunner’s quest for evolutionary perfection hardly makes sense.  Why not let two other folks (Cornelius and Jenny, perhaps…) undergo the dangerous experiment and then simply “consume” and absorb the product of their union, while safely and securely maintaining her own identity and superiority?

Instead, when the Neanderthal super-being emerges, there is no sign of Brunner whatsoever.  The being is decidedly male, decidedly Neanderthal, and decidedly Cornelius.  The Brunner part of him has been completely buried.  This may serve as rich justice for a person who so avariciously consumed others. Brunner is consumed herself, finally.  But in terms of characterization needs and motives, the whole thing makes less than a modicum of sense.

It’s also disappointing that Cornelius’s relationship with his sister in the film is given short-shrift, and that there is almost no notice taken of the beloved hero’s ambivalent sexuality.

It is very apt to suggest that stylist Fuest was here attempting to transform the ethos of the British New Wave to the science fiction cinema, but The Final Programme is so confusing and closed-off in the final analysis that one can’t even begin to enunciate all the concerns with it.

Instead, like Jerry, one has to ask first “what are the questions?”

The film raises a lot of ‘em.

The lecherous (stop-motion…) penisaurus gets a hold of Dale Ardor in the kinky and extremely silly parody, Flesh Gordon (1974).

Flesh Gordon (1974) * ½

Critical Mass:

“…this X-rated science-fiction spoof has good production values and impressive sets, costumes and special effects. The acting – or rather performing – is one what might expect from a film wherein the hero lands on the planet Porno and does battle with Jim Danforth’s animated penisaurus.” – Jeff Rovin, A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films, Citadel Books, 1975, page 196.

“Humor seldom goes beyond that of a junior-high-school locker room.” – Harry and Michael Medved, The Golden Turkey Awards, Perigee Books, 1980, page 212.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Jason Williams (Flesh Gordon); Suzanne Fields (Dale Ardor); Joseph Hudgins (Dr. Flexi Jerkoff); William Hunt (Emperor Wang the Perverted); Mary Gavin (Chief Nellie); Nora Wieternik (Queen Amora); Lance Larson (Prince Precious).

CREW: Graffiti Productions Presents Flesh Gordon. Director of Photography: Howard Ziehm. Make-up: Bjo Trimble. Miniatures: Greg Jein. Music: Ralph Ferraro. Film Editor: Abbas Amin. Produced by: William Osco Ziehm. Written by: Michael Benviniste. Directed by: Benveniste Ziehm.  M.P.A.A. Rating: X. Running time: 78 minutes.

Story: A distant planet, Porno, sends an energy beam to Earth that causes widespread sexual promiscuity and degradation.

As Earth endures this total outbreak of wanton sexual activity, a hero named Flesh Gordon (Williams), Dale Ardor (Fields), and Dr. Flexi Jerkoff (Hudgins) head to Porno in a home-made rocket in order to stop the planet’s tyrannical leader, Emperor Wang (Hunt), also known as “Your Protuberance.”

Once Flash, Dale and Jerkoff travel through Porno’s “moron-o-sphere,” the heroes encounter terrible dangers, including rapist robots and a rampaging…Penis-saurus.

Review: It’s really tempting (and clichéd) to write that this raunchy science fiction parody is “handsomely mounted.”

Indeed, Flesh Gordon might be one of the most ingenious and imaginatively-produced sex movies of all time.  Yet this fact still doesn’t make it a very entertaining or worthwhile movie experience.  Flesh Gordon’s special effects, sets, and costumes here are all-top-of-the-line for 1974, and brimming with cleverness, but the leering sex jokes grow repetitious and unfunny the longer the film continues.

Briefly, Flesh Gordon boasts all the wit and sophistication of a horny teenager, and so in the end, the impressive production values don’t contribute much.  The movie’s performances are also terrible, save for Joseph Hudgins as Dr. Flexi Jerkoff, who somehow manages to hit exactly the right B-movie notes from start to finish.

Flesh Gordon’s opening crawl discusses the creation of 1930s superheroes in the Great Depression, and then notes that this film is presented in an appreciative spirit of burlesque and satire. The crawl reads a little like a disclaimer, and ultimately isn’t really necessary. Attempting to ascribe high artistic motivations to a movie in which the gallant hero must fight red-headed cat-woman wearing strap-on “members” probably isn’t ultimately going to win over any converts.

And in point of fact, Flesh Gordon’s actual narrative is more interested in sex than homage.  In fact, the narrative slavishly hits all the obligatory soft-porn sequences of the form including the requisite lesbian action, here involving Dale’s unwitting and involuntary induction to an all-female secret police-force/religious order. Great production values or not, this is a sex movie first and foremost.

But boy, those production values still impress, even forty years later.  There’s a scene of Flesh Gordon sword-fighting a stop-motion robot that looks worthy of Ray Harryhausen, and many of the miniatures -- including Ming’s fighter ships -- appear absolutely state-of-the-art for the era.  But again, the movie is so dumb and unfunny that all the fine work by Jim Danforth and his assistants is secondary to the sex and the stupid humor.  The movie also commits a double cardinal sin: it makes science fiction and sex both look boring as Hell.

Flesh Gordon ends with a promise of a second adventure, and a different cast and crew undertook that challenge in the late 1980s.  In that far more conservative era, however, the film was hardly a blip on the pop culture radar.

In spite of its many flaws, Flesh Gordon is today remembered by many as a one-of-a-kind picture.  It probably earns that title.  Rarely has so much love been lavished on the production of a soft-core porn film.

It’s just a shame the movie also couldn’t have earned the title of being “good.”

Future Time Lord Tom Baker, as Koura (left) stands with Ray Harryhausen (right) on the set of the lost-world fantasy, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974).

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) * * *

Critical Mass:

“Golden Voyage is distinguished from the first Sinbad not only by a more somber setting and creature designs, but also by an abiding atmosphere of veiled yet imminent menace, of barely contained violence…” – Joshua David Bellin, Framing Monsters: Fantasy Films and Social Alienation, Southern Illinois University Press, 2005, page 93.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: John Philip Law (Sinbad); Caroline Munro (Margiana); Tom Baker (Koura); Douglas Wilmer (Vizier); Martin Shaw (Rachid); Gregoire Aslan (Hakim); Kurt Christian (Haroun); Takis Ammanuel (Achmed); John D. Garfield (Abdul); Aldo Sambrell (Omar).

CREW:  Columbia Pictures and Ameran Films present The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Director of Photography: Ted Moore. Original Music: Miklos Rozsa. Film Editing: Roy Watts. Production Design: John Stoll.  Produced by: Ray Harryhausen, Charles H. Schneer. Written by: Brian Clemens. Directed by: Gordon Hessler. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 105 minutes.

At the risk of offending some longtime fans that have arrived at a different conclusion, this is the best of the Sinbad film yet made, and a splendid fantasy film in general.  It is superior, quality-wise, to its predecessor, 1958's 7th Voyage of Sinbad and also its successor, 1977's Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

This assessment derives from a consideration of the good screenplay, which is far more consistent regarding its villain, Koura (Tom Baker) and his powers than the other films.

In fact, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is even largely consistent in terms of the monsters Sinbad encounters. They are manifestations of the sorcerer's power, not just random beasts that the sea captain happens to discover.

In the film, Koura establishes that to "summon the demons of darkness there is a price...it consumes part of me," and that line is a key to much of the film's action and narrative.  Koura seeks an ancient Lemurian amulet (shattered into three pieces) because by using his dark forces, he has aged himself, and his life-force ebbs.  The tablet will lead him to a fountain of youth where he can rejuvenate himself.

In terms of the monsters, save for a centaur and a griffin, Sinbad battles monsters that Koura determinedly puts up to block the sailor's path; to stop him from finding the fountain first.  These monsters include a tiny, flying harpie (shades of Jason of the Argonauts), a ship's mast/statue come to life, and a multi-armed statue of Kali.

The lengthy, incredibly-rendered sword-fight with Kali is the undisputed highlight of the film, a terrific set-piece that still captivates the imagination.  But the point is that Koura's magic is used to a specific end, and consistently so, throughout the film.

If you look back at the villain Sakurah in 7th Voyage of Sinbad (played by Torin Thatcher), he merely wanted a genie lamp and would stop at nothing to get it, and then happened to keep a dragon as a pet in his subterranean headquarters on the island of the Cyclops.  These ideas didn't stick together as well as those you find here, and audiences did not understand the nature of Sakurah's evil or his motivation for it.  His power also seemed to have no downside or cost.

Worse, Sinbad seemed to interact with Sakurah as if he trusted him for much of the film, when it was obvious to everyone with eyes that he was evil...or at least scheming.

In The Golden Voyage, Koura's quest is plain, and he even becomes a somewhat sympathetic character because we know and understand what he is after, and what is at stake for him if he fails.  He's a great villain, and Tom Baker is terrific in the role.  After watching Doctor Who for all these years, I had forgotten how masterfully he could turn his charismatic screen presence sinister.

Unlike its predecessor, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad also reveals some of the flavor of Sinbad's ancient world -- like the fact that the character is a Muslim -- by allowing him to utter comments about and proverbs from Allah.  This may sound like a small or inconsequential thing, but 7th Voyage of Sinbad essentially made Sinbad an American cowboy in classical Baghdad, one heading-up what became a 1950s American nuclear family.  That version of Sinbad had no colors, no shades, no edge, and no sense of originating somewhere other than America.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad isn't about Islam in any meaningful way, but it acknowledges at least the truth that Sinbad originates from a different cultural tradition than many of those in the audience.  Today, with the rampant Islamophobia in America, even the harmless mentions of Allah and religion in Golden Voyage of Sinbad would likely not be permitted in a mainstream film, which is a sad development.   The history of the world, and the history of mythology, shouldn't be a football for contemporary ideological differences...but they are.  Sinbad comes to us from a defined time, place and tradition in the world, and to ignore his place of origin, his context, is like ignoring the fact that Clark Kent was raised in Smallville, or that James Bond is English.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad surpasses the other Sinbad films for two further reasons.  First, it actually differentiates between the crew men on Sinbad's vessel, offering audiences some comic relief in the form of one man. In the other two Sinbad films, the crew men have no personalities, no differentiation, and no memorable identities.

And secondly The Golden Voyage allows Sinbad -- this time John Phillip Law -- to be a little less wholesome and pure.  Here, he brings Caroline Munro's slave girl, Margiana, along to Lemuria, and it's not because she plays a good game of chess, if you know what I mean.  Instead, there's some harmless sexual innuendo, and as an adult, that's far more interesting to watch than the innocent, "pure" love of Sinbad and his wholesome betrothed (nowhere in sight here, by the way....) in 7th Voyage.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad -- perhaps owing to its post-James Bond milieu -- is a bit less simplistic in narrative, in style, and in detail than its esteemed and rightly-appreciated predecessor.   The message here is that evil -- though powerful in allure -- carries a "weight" or "cost," and that's a terrific message to impart to children learning the difference between right and wrong.   The sub-plot involving a prince in a mask, Vizier (Douglas Wilmer), also conveys a nice little lesson.  Though ugly on the outside (because of burns inflicted by Koura), Vizier is beautiful on the inside...and that beauty eventually comes to the surface.

And by the way, I noted with interest that the moment here wherein Vizier removes his golden mask and stuns the hostile natives of Lemuria was repeated hook, line and sinker in the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century 1981 episode "Journey to Oasis," with Mark Lenard.  Good ideas in the 1970s genre never die...they just get recycled.

Burned at the stake: A scene from Island at the Top of the World.

The Island at the Top of the World * * ½ (1974)

Cast and Crew:

CAST: David Hartman (Professor Ivarsson); Donald Sinden (Sir Anthony Ross); Jacques Marin (Captain Brieux); Mako (Oomiak); David Gwillim (Donald Ross); Agneta Eckemyr (Freyja); Gnnar Ohlund (The Godi); Lasse Kolstad (Erik); Erik Silju (Torvald); Rolf Soder (The Lawspeaker); Torsten Wahlund (Sven); Ian Abercrombie (Train Conductor); Jackson Bostwick (Pilot).

CREW: Walt Disney Studio presents The Island at the Top of the World. Director of Photography: Frank Phillips. Original Music: Maurice Jarre.  Film Editing: Robert Stafford.  Production Design: Peter Ellenshaw. Produced by: Winston Hibler. Written by: John Whedon. Based on the novel by: Ian Cameron. Directed by: Robert Stevenson. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 93 minutes.

Story:

In 1907, an archaeologist, Professor Ivarsson (Hartman) is unexpectedly recruited for an unusual expedition.

Sir Anthony Ross’s (Sinden) son Donald has gone missing in the Arctic, near a mythological island that is reputedly a burial ground for whales.  Ivarsson accepts the invitation to go there, and along with Ross travels to that distant destination in a technologically-advanced dirigible, the Hyperion, commanded by the eccentric French captain, Brieux (Marin).

The group also teams up with an Eskimo and friend of Donald’s, named Oomiak (Mako).  The expedition soon finds a lost world separated from the rest of humanity, called Astragard.  It is peopled by primitive Vikings, who view the visitors as intruders and plan to execute them.

Donald and his Viking love, Freyja, are rescued by the expedition, but Ivarsson wants to learn more about Astragard…

Review:

The “lost world” premise is one frequently depicted in the 1970s fantasy cinema, in films like The Land That Time Forgot (1975) and King Kong (1976). This type of film often expresses the desire to experience something new or different in the increasingly mechanized/computerized era of the 1970s, an age when it felt like the whole world was explored and known.

One of the decade’s early variations on this format was The Island at The Top of the World, a Disney film which depicts the story of a fantastically-advanced dirigible, the Hyperion, as it heads north to a forgotten world of dangerous and martial Vikings.

Roughly the first half of the film involves the trip to this lost world -- which is quite dangerous since the Hyperion is untested -- and the second half involves the twentieth-century crew interfacing with a culture that is a relic from an era long gone.  Escape is not easy, and the film throws in an active volcano as a menace for good measure.

Hoping to appeal to the same audience that loved 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), with the wondrous Hyperion filling in for the wondrous Nautilus, The Island at the Top of the World features some solid miniature work as the Hyperion navigates through the clouds, and between jagged, craggy cliff-faces.  The volcanic island, which boasts a hidden, green valley at its center, is also well-depicted in 1970s terms, with evocative matte paintings and the like.

As for the story, it is geared towards children, but nonetheless features a strong emotional pull since it revolves around the efforts of a father to rescue his son.  The characters are all colorful and memorable, particularly the French captain, though it is perhaps unusual that a stolid newscaster, David Hartman, plays the film’s lead role.

Although The Island at the Top of the World lacks the overt story appeal of a monstrous nemesis like a giant ape (Kong), dinosaurs (The Land That Time Forgot), or even ancient statues come to life (The Golden Voyage of Sinbad) it is nonetheless a lost world film of startling and impressive vistas. The Island at the Top of the World features ice caves, a graveyard of giant whale carcasses, volcanic lava flows and other wonders, and then pits a legitimate wonder of modernity, the Hyperion, against them all.  Although the Hyperion is seen as a sanctuary in the film, as well as a “modern marvel” of the year 1907, the land of Astragard is also contextualized in positive terms.  “The day may come when this land is man’s last refuge,” one character importantly notes, and that observation ties-in directly to a primary fear of the 1970s, that pollution and environmental rape would render man extinct in short order.  The Viking land here is an unspoiled “time capsule” of a time before technology, when man could live off the land, but not harm it.

Although the film failed at the box office and the intended sequel, The Lost Ones was never produced, The Island at the Top of the World is a solid and inoffensive family adventure film, and today seems very innocent compared to fantasies of the modern era.

A young alien (Steven Warner; left), encounters an Earth creature called The Snake (Bob Fosse; right) in the fantasy The Little Prince (1974).

The Little Prince * * * (1974)

Critical Mass:

“…surprisingly beautiful and poetic film…The obvious quality of the cinematography…helps preserve the magic of the book.” – Sandra L. Beckett, Maria Likolajec, Beyond Babar: The European Tradition in Children’s Literature, Scarecrow Press, 1996, page 40.

“..it comes close to being self-glorifying, masochistic mush…Bob Fosse’s snake-in-the-grass number is the film’s high spot.” – Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies, Holt Paperbacks, 1982, page 427.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Richard Kiley (The Pilot); Steven Warner (The Little Prince); Joss Ackland (The King); Clive Revill (The Business Man); Victor Spinetti (The Historian); Graham Crowden (The General); Donna McKechnie (The Rose); Bob Fosse (The Snake); Gene Wilder (The Fox);

CREW: Paramount Pictures presents a Stanley Donen film of Lerner and Loewe’s The Little Prince. Director of Photography: Christopher Challis. Original Music: Angela Morley, Frederick Loewe. Film Editing: Peter Boita, George Hively. Production Design: John Barry. Produced by: Stanley Donen. Written by: Alan Jay Lerner. Based on the novel by: Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Directed by: Stanley Donen. M.P.A.A rating: G. Running time: 88 minutes.

Story:

A fighter pilot (Kiley) in World War II crashes in the Sahara desert and unexpectedly finds that he has a companion, a small boy (Warner) who claims to be from another world, the asteroid B-612.

This boy, the Little Prince (Warner), recounts his unusual journeys to other worlds, as well as his visit to Earth thus far.

The pilot also learns that Snake (Fosse) -- a devil -- boasts an interest in the boy, and has a way to send him home to his world: death.

Review:

This 1974 musical film is an adaptation of one of the most popular children’s novels in the world, Antoine de Saint-Expury’s whimsical The Little Prince.  Although a children’s tale, The Little Prince is famous for its social critique of a world that was, at that time of its writing, failing.

Specifically, the author focused the story on his own plane crash in the Sahara during World War II, and created characters based not merely upon his life story, but upon the threat of Nazism spreading across the civilized world.

In particular, the Little Prince in the story seeks to keep a kind of perfidious weed from overrunning his small world, for which he requires the help of a sheep.  It’s not difficult to interpret that rapidly-growing and malevolent weed as fascism in Europe, which threatened France, England, and eventually the world.

Other characters in the book and film similarly represent mankind’s failings in the face of peril: a king who has no subjects to rule but nonetheless insists on “borders,” a businessman who thinks he owns the stars, and a historian who believes he is the best, in fact, in history.

The 1974 musical is a sweet and emotional rendering of the much-loved tale, and like its literary counterpart is a highly symbolic film.  Everywhere the Little Prince goes, he learns a lesson about life on Earth, and about the nature of mankind.  Separated from the original 1940s context, however, the film proves more critical of adults and adult viewpoints in general than a commentary on any ideology or movement.

The film revives the book’s line that “it’s only with the heart that one can see clearly” and that is the production’s central metaphor. Many adults in the film like the King, the historian, the soldier, or the businessman are self-justifying and hypocritical in nature.  They refer to the Prince as a child, thereby diminishing him and his (justifiable…) concerns about his planet, but they are not able to see beyond their own narrow self-interest, their own pathology.  The Prince, meanwhile, as a child, views all things with refreshing honesty, innocence, and purity.

On Earth, however, the Prince makes a friend in the pilot and in a fox.  Unfortunately he also meets the worst personality of all: a snake or devil that crawls in the grass and wants only to kill him.  Not understanding human life or death (as indeed, a child does not understand the permanence of death…), the Little Prince sees the snake’s offer of a “bite” as a way home to his beautiful rose, the love he left behind on his asteroid, and widely believed to be representative of the author’s mercurial wife.

A gentle musical starring a cute child is probably a hard sell for the committed science fiction fan, so The Little Prince isn’t going to be to every audience’s liking even though it’s a beautiful, emotional film, especially for parents of young ones.  The musical numbers are hit and miss at first, but soon become quite enjoyable, and even rousing.  Bob Fosse’s moment as the Devil/Snake, for instance, is unforgettable, and seems the template for all of Michael Jackson’s popular dance moves in the early 1980s.   Gene Wilder’s musical number as the fox is also an amusing high-point as well.  There’s much here to enjoy in the film if you open yourself up to it, and view the adventure without cynicism.

Bereft of its original, more meaningful context regarding Nazism and World War II, The Little Prince emerges as an entertaining and occasionally very emotional story of children and adults, and on that basis proves worthwhile.

.

He’s got a powerful weapon, and he charges a million a shot. Christopher Lee plays Scaramanga, an assassin who’s second to none, in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974).

The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) * * ½

Critical Mass:

“Although the final screen credits promise that Bond will return in The Spy Who Loved Me, it is time to retire him. He should be packed off to a sanitarium, where he can give his liver a rest and wait in leisure for his moment to come again. Right now, Bond has been around too long to be fresh, but not long enough to qualify as a genuine antique.” - Jay Cocks, Time Magazine, January 13, 1975.

“The best of the Moore Bonds, with an elegant bad guy performance from Christopher Lee.” – The Palm Beach Post, July 9, 1989.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Roger Moore (James Bond/Agent 007); Christopher Lee (Francis Scaramanga); Britt Ekland (Mary Goodnight); Maud Adams (Andrea); Herve Villechaize (Nick Nack); Clifton James (J.W. Pepper); Richard Loo (Hai Fat); Soon-Taik Oh (Hip); Marc Lawrence (Rodney); Bernard Lee (M); Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny); Desmond Llewelyn (Q); Marne Maitland (Lazar).

CREW: MGM/UA Presents Roger Moore as Ian Fleming’s James Bond in The Man with the Golden Gun. Directors of Photography: Ted Moore, Oswald Morris. Original Music: John Barry. Film Editors: Raymond Poulton, John Shirley. Production Designer: Peter Murton. Produced by: Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. Written by: Richard Maibum and Tom Mankiewicz. Directed by: Guy Hamilton. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 125 minutes.

Story:

Agent 007, James Bond (Moore) receives a golden bullet with his number engraved on it, a sign that he is the intended target of a high-priced assassin named Francisco Scaramanga (Lee).

This grave situation precludes Bond from continuing his hunt for the missing Solex Agitator, a miraculous device that harnesses the energy of the sun, and could be the solution to the ongoing Energy Crisis.  Instead, Bond tracks down the golden bullet’s origin, and cuts a path from Beirut to Macau, to a Hong Kong casino.

He soon learns that Scaramanga’s mistress, Andrea (Adams) sent the golden bullet in hopes that Bond would rid her of a man she loathes and despises.  Bond also learns that Scaramanga is after the critical Solex Agitator, and 007 masquerades as the assassin in Bangkok, a ruse which fails.

After Bond escapes from a karate school (where he is used as a real life dummy by the students…), Scaramanga captures Bond’s assistant, lovely Mary Goodnight (Ekland) and takes her, via a flying car, to his private island.

There, Bond must recover the Agitator, which Scaramanga intends to sell for a huge profit, but the man with the golden gun is more interested in a duel with his greatest rival.

Review:

The Man with the Golden Gun, Roger Moore’s second outing as James Bond, 007, is generally not considered one of the better entries in the long-lived series, in part because it possesses few memorable stunts or set-pieces.  The pre-title sequence -- usually a brilliant, self-contained action show-stopper -- is instead but a trip through a hokey, low-scale funhouse/shooting gallery.  Likewise the film’s big stunt is a car jump featuring a rather unglamorous automobile, an AMC Hornet, that is over very quickly, and which is accompanied by the ludicrous sound of a slide whistle, totally undercutting any sense of shock and awe regarding the spectacular flip.

Finally, Scaramanga oversees a huge island fortress and a giant complex that operates an impressive solar laser. And he has precisely one henchman (other than Nick-Nack) to control all that machinery.

Budget cuts?

Perhaps the film’s gravest miscalculation, besides a backward-seeming screaming ninny Bond girl in Britt Ekland’s insipid character, Mary Goodnight, however is the return of a supporting character from Live and Let Die. J.W. Pepper.  Pepper (Clifton James) is a Louisiana Sheriff, a raging racist and Southern by the grace of God. And he shows up in The Man with the Golden Gun…shopping for a car with his wife while on vacation in Thailand.

So, first of all, why shop for a car while on your vacation in a foreign country?

And secondly, who believes that a bigoted, ignorant character like Pepper would leave the confines of ‘Murica and visit a country in the Far East?  It makes no sense, and Pepper’s presence in the action is a pandering move to bring the inexplicably popular Archie Bunker-type character back for an encore performance.

What The Man with the Golden Gun does possess in spades is a sense of timeliness.  The film’s McGuffin is the Solex Agitator, a device that can adapt the power of the sun, and the ongoing Energy Crisis is name-dropped in the film on at least one occasion. In particular, the film’s action plays in a world that had just endured the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, with all its repercussions and frissons.  The Solex Agitator represents one of the few attempts of the Bond films to be overtly topical in presentation, though The Living Daylights (1987) involves an Iran-Contra-type arms deal, and Quantum of Solace (2008) carries an environmental message.

Although it is widely considered one of the worst films in the Bond franchise, The Man with the Golden Gun moves with relative agility and pace, and is more often than not mildly-entertaining.  In fact, it’s a whole lot more seamless than the bloated Diamonds are Forever, and Roger Moore’s screen presence seems tailor-made for this lighter approach.  Moore does especially well with the wise-cracks and double-takes that are part and parcel of the Bond mystique in the 1970s.  The James Bond team would perfect the Bond 2.0 formula with the next outing, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).

Humanity is re-born in Phase IV (1974).

Phase IV (1974) * * *

Critical Mass:

“In making his feature directorial debut after a succession of distinguished film titles, graphics and short subjects, Saul Bass, with the aid of special insect photography by Ken Middleham ("Hellstrom Chronicle"), has fashioned a pictorially persuasive adventure. His ants — in close-up and otherwise — make their awesome potential terrifyingly real, even if his principals—Nigel Davenport and Michael Murphy, as the scientists, and Lynne Frederick, as the frightened young woman—are merely one—dimensional figures registering surface emotions.” – A.H. Weiler, The New York Times, October 21, 1974.

“…the only film Bass ever directed, the overlooked 1974 sci-fi gem Phase IV, one of the stranger movies ever made. In the sun-bleached desert, two scientists and a stray girl try to stop super-smart ants who have somehow formed a collective intelligence and are waging war on humanity. The film is languid and lovingly shot, closer to Solaris than your standard sci-fi thriller.” – Laist, February 20, 2007.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Nigel Davenport (Dr. Ernest D. Hubbs); Michael Murphy (James R. Lesko); Lynne Frederick (Kendra Eldridge); Alan Gifford (Mr. Eldridge); Robert Henderson (Clete); Helen Horton (Mildred Eldridge).

CREW: Alced Productions and Paramount Pictures Present Phase IV. Director of Photography: Dick Bush. Original Music: Brian Gascoigne. Art Direction: John Barry. Produced by: Paul B. Radin. Written by: Mayo Simon. Directed by: Saul Bass. M.P.A.A Rating: PG. Running time: 84 minutes

Story:

A strange phenomenon occurs in outer space, one that changes variables in "magnetic fields." The mystics on Earth predict earthquakes; others predict "the end of life as we know it." But when the cosmic effect reaches our planet, the change it causes goes unnoticed, at least for a time. Because it effects only the smallest of us: the ants.

Specifically, ordinary ants of different species soon begin communicating with one another, and "making decisions."

Linguist/computer scientist James Lesko (Michael Murphy) heads to a desert in Arizona to learn more. There ants begin to construct tall monoliths there...a series of very advanced, human-proportioned towers. The ants have also mysteriously begun to attack livestock: burrowing inside animals and leaving a distinctive mark of three small circles behind. They've even begun crafting huge crop circles...perhaps paving the way for an alien invasion.

An obsessed, egomaniacal scientist named Hubbs (Nigel Davenport) takes up residence in a small high-tech dome adjacent to the ant towers in hopes of understanding what the ants are up to. When the ants go stealthy; refusing to show their hand, Hubbs decides on a pre-emptive strike to draw them out. He launches grenades at the ant towers and brings the structures down in a destructive flurry, reducing them to rubble.

By moonlight that very night, the ants retaliate: first by attacking a local farm, and then establishing a ring of reflective towers around Hubb's dome; towers that will burn the humans out after first rendering their computers inoperable.

Meanwhile, a farmer's beautiful daughter, Kendra Eldridge (Lynne Frederick) survives the ant strike on her family ranch and joins the scientists as they attempt to solve the riddle of these highly-advanced insects. Hubbs wants to launch a decapitation strike; to pinpoint the Queen Ant and kill her, thus nullifying the ant threat. "You must show them that man will not give in," he believes.

By contrast, Murphy learns the ant language and starts to transmit geometric shapes and mathematical figures to them, hoping that there can be some "rational accommodation of interests; some agreement" between species.

Review:

Saul Bass (1920 - 1996) was one of the cinema's greatest graphic designers, a revered film artist who contributed the memorable title sequences of such films as The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), North by Northwest (1959), Spartacus (1960), Psycho (1960),  Good Fellas (1990) and others.

Bass also storyboarded for Hitchcock the famous shower scene with Janet Leigh in the aforementioned Psycho. Bass's only contribution as a director, however, is the little-seen but highly entrancing science fiction horror film of the early disco decade: Phase IV (1974).

All throughout the film -- as the ants grow more intelligent...and remain one step ahead of the perplexed human scientists -- titles appear on-screen indicating different "phases" of this odd and increasingly apocalyptic crisis.

The final phase -- Phase IV --arrives with a new dawn, a new sunrise, as the ants use Kendra to draw out Lesko. What occurs in the film's final sequence -- as Kendra and Lesko meet (and mate...) inside a sandy ant hill -- represents some weird sort of species apotheosis (for man and the ants...).

This trippy climax renders Phase IV the 2001: A Space Odyssey of attacking-ant movies. The film intimates that the ants -- experts in specialization and self-sacrifice -- have begun to teach humans the very same qualities. And that with the ants help, humans are now evolving into...something else. The film's final line indicates a weird ambiguity. "We were being changed and made a part of their world," says Lesko. This description could easily portend a new beginning for humanity, one of true freedom and cooperation. Or it could represent slavery...under the domination of the ants, or aliens who have utilized the ants.

Phase IV makes splendid and pervasive use of close-up natural photography of ants and other insects (conducted by Ken Middleham). There is no Hollywood phoniness involved in these amazing, lengthy sequences: no models; no digital creations, just real ants going about their business with frightening dedication.

There's an almost awe-inspiring (and again, totally real...) sequence in which one ant attempts to carry back to the Queen a piece of the pesticide that has killed his brethren. Exposure to this pesticide chunk is fatal to the ant, but he marches along, as far as he can. When he expires, another soldier ant arrives and continues the journey. When that ant dies, another ant arrives and continues the journey a step further.

This marathon goes on and on -- uninterrupted by human interaction or comment -- until the last ant gets the chunk of poison to the queen, and she very quickly is able to create immunity to the weakened poison in future generations, as she lays eggs

Another scene of incredible visualization involves the ants lining up their dead after one of Hubbs' attacks. They lay the corpses out in rows, belly (or thorax) up...and then stand at a form of attention; as if honoring their dead at a funeral. .

It seems odd at first, but Bass determinedly grants the ants and their side as much screen time as the human stars in Phase IV and the effect is startling and interesting.  One starts to wonder which species is altruistic and which is warlike; which species understands love and which species doesn't. Hubbs insists that the ants aren't individuals, but rather merely "individual cells." The ants do understand self-sacrifice -- to protect their queen -- because she is at the center of their lives. Yet Hubbs doesn't see that this urge to protect the queen is, in some form, an act of love. He can only see the ants as an enemy; as an inferior enemy, actually. In his smug blindness, he doesn't see how he is outmaneuvered.  By balancing the ant storyline against the human one, Bass crafts a strange but powerful sense of equivalence.

Who are we -- in these circumstances -- to judge ourselves superior? Who are we to -- as Hubbs suggests -- teach the ants "limits?"  To "educate them?"

Indeed, Hubbs is hardly praise-worthy or a paragon of virtue. He treats even his fellow man with cold stoicism. "People die sometimes," he says at one point, without any expression of true feeling. Again, what makes him the better creature?

Phase IV is an unsettling, spooky film. It's not just about a war between man and insect. Rather it depicts a war between the ideals of individuality and community. Bass shows us the ant world on a scale we've never seen before, and even though these smart ants oppose us and our culture, you can't leave this film without some sense of admiration for them and their amazing capabilities.

In the end, Hubbs would have done well to remember that old proverb: "Be thine enemy an ant, see in him an elephant."

The Terminal Man (1974) * * *

Critical Mass:

“…a contemporary Frankenstein film…Hokum, but well done and directed.” – Cue Magazine, 1976, page 110.

“…a strong, uncompromising film.” – Contemporary British and Irish Film Directors, Wallflower Press, 2001, page 147

Cast and Crew:

CAST: George Segal (Harry Benson); Joan Hackett (Dr. Janet Ross); Richard A. Dysart (Dr. John Ellis); Jill Clayburgh (Angela Black); Donald Moffat (Dr. Arthur McPherson); Matt Clark (Gerhard); Michael C. Gwynne (Dr. Morris); Norman Burton (Detective Anders); James Sikking (Ralph Fiedman); Ian Wolfe (The Priest); Jim Antonio (Richards); Jason Wingreen (Instructor).

CREW: Warner Bros. presents The Terminal Man. Director of Photography: Richard H. Kline. Goldberg Variation Number 25 by J.S. Bach played by: Glenn Gould. Film Editor: Robert l. Wolfe. Based on the novel by: Michael Crichton. Produced and directed by: Mike Hodges. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 107 minutes.

Story:

Harry Benson (Segal) is an epileptic prone to seizures and fits of violence. He undergoes an experimental medical procedure to help him curb this problem, and his brain is implanted with a tiny micro-computer than can regulate the seizures.

Over time, however, Harry and his psychiatrist, Janet Ross (Hackett) learn that his brain is receiving and enjoying a kind of “high” off the micro-chip’s stimulation, and therefore inducing seizures more commonly.

Benson escapes from the hospital even as scientists determine that his brain will soon be triggering constant violence-provoking seizures so as to receive waves of pleasure.

This eventuality soon occurs, and Benson is transformed into a killing machine while on the loose, and hunted by the police

Review:

The Terminal Man, another 1970s film based on the works of Michael Crichton, gazes at bioethics, and the efforts of science and medicine to alter and re-shape the nature of man.  Directed by Mike Hodges, The Terminal Man is an extremely formalized presentation that contrasts the order of the world the scientists and doctors create with the disorder of genuine humanity in the real world.

That contrast is created largely via the use of specific colors, or the film’s art direction.  Benson (Segal), the film’s lead character, is essentially victimized and made worse by the well-intentioned but dispassionate and over-zealous doctors who, in attempting to cure him, (and thereby make him “safe” in the community at large) only transform him into a killer.

This notion is transmitted visually in the film’s minimalist color scheme.  Throughout the scenes set at the hospital, the viewer sees white-on-white compositions.  There are white corridors, walls, doctor’s uniforms, and so forth.  The antiseptic, cold, even “snow blind” nature of this world is important, but white also represents something immaculate, unstained, or perfect.  That’s what this world is supposed to represent in theory, and when Benson leaves the hospital after his treatment, he’s even garbed in white himself.  He has been, visually-speaking, re-made by the doctors as someone clean and perfect too.  He is healed.

Once released into the world, however, Benson countenances a landscape of vivid color and violence…of imperfection. He tries to take the “white” with him where he goes, but it is like an albatross around his neck, and he keeps destroying it.

For instance, when Benson murders his girlfriend Angela, he stains the white bed sheets red with her blood, a sign that he cannot remain pure, that the medical “fix” did not work.  In fact, it did the opposite and made him more dangerous, sicker. Again and again, Benson’s very presence seems to mar or undercut the white he finds, whether in the presence of a priest, or at a graveside funeral gathering.

The scientists in the film are portrayed in inhuman and inhumane shades too.  During Benson’s surgery, for example the doctors treat the job as merely routine, despite the fact that they are toiling on his brain.  In a scene quite similar to one in Coma (1978), the doctors pay more attention to personal interactions, in this case a dumb joke, than to the work at hand.  The image projected is one of a world where medical advances can make many things possible, but wherein medicine is treated like a work-a-day job. A patient’s well-being is a secondary or tertiary consideration.

This theme finds visualization more than once.  First, it does so during the brain surgery, wherein Benson’s head is held static in a vise, and a long metal probe is inserted into his brain.  The process is dehumanizing and demoralizing, more like torture than science, and so audiences must reckon with the idea that medical technology may have advanced farther than human decency, or morality.

In another moment, we learn that Benson is to be outfitted with a mini-nuclear pack to regulate his microchip, and of course, that’s a terrible, dangerous idea.  Nuclear power carries substantial risks, and yet it is to be a critical element of Benson’s “cure.”  One literally attached to his body?  That makes him a living bomb, doesn’t it?

The film’s point that man is victimized by scientific advances without accordant moral responsibility actually plays out in another, recurring composition featured in The Terminal Man.  It consists of a black screen and an “iris” gazing directly at the camera, presumably at Benson, but also directly at the movie’s audience itself.  This angle establishes that science views the individual (both Benson and us, according to the staging) as nothing more than guinea pigs to be experimented upon.  Medical science’s “eye” is upon us, but we may not want the attention.

Dark and remote, The Terminal Man (1974) possesses neither the hot-house humanity of a Crichton effort like Coma (based on the book by Robin Cook), nor the absurdist angle of another medical malpractice film, A Clockwork Orange (1971). But it surely boasts the aforementioned sense of visual elegance and formalism.  Hodges’ pictures tell a story of a man who needed help, and that help turned him into a monster.  While the film could stand to be more human in its mode of expression the choice was obviously made to craft a cerebral, icy picture, rather than, necessarily, a passionate, messy one.  The Terminal Man is often quiet, and at other times dominated by intricate techno-speak the like of which was also featured in (the superior) The Andromeda Strain.  There the idea was that technology “saves.”  Here, technology destroys.

Zed (Sean Connery) encounters a brave new world in Zardoz (1974)…and destroys it so as to re-establish traditional family values.

Zardoz (1974) * * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“…a presumptuous diatribe on life and death…” – Gregory Richards, Science Fiction Movies, Gallery Books, 1984, page 53.

“a silly, impenetrable movie starring Sean Connery — attired in the dumbest costume ever — as a ponytailed barbarian who obeys a giant stone head.” – Marc Bernadin, Entertainment Weekly, April 6, 2001.

“While it can’t hope to achieve its grand ambitions, it’s smart, it has some sharp dialogue, and the surrealism-on-a-shoestring visuals are undeniably striking. It’s like watching an arty film by Cocteau or Resnais jazzed up with groovy psychedelia…” – Ian Berriman, SFX Magazine, June 21, 2010.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Sean Connery (Zed); Charlotte Rampling (Consuella); Sara Kestelman (May); John Alderton (Friend); Sally Anne Newton (Avalow); Niall Buggy (Arthur Frayne/Zardoz); Bosco Hogan (George Saden); Jessica Swift (Apathetic);

CREW: John Boorman Productions and 20th Century Fox present Zardoz. Director of Photography: Geoffrey Unsworth. Original Music: David Munrow. Film Editing: John Merritt. Production Design: Anthony Pratt. Produced by:  John Boorman. Written and directed by: John Boorman. M.P.A.A Rating: R. Running time: 105 minutes.

Story:

In the year 2293, a small egalitarian commune of "Eternals" has established a new order of life amid the breakdown of civilization.  After a new Dark Age occurs, a group of scientists wall themselves off from the rest of barbaric humanity with a force field called "The Vortex," and then establish the control of an artificial intelligence called "The Tabernacle."   Each Eternal is surgically-implanted with a crystal in his or her forehead, and it can link to the Tabernacle and its vast repository of knowledge at the speed-of-thought.  Each Eternal also carries a communication ring, for issuing orders and transmitting holograms about scientific and mercantile matters.

Disease and death have been banished from everyday life in this futuristic commune, and the Eternals are truly immortal.  But one cost of this immortality: Eternal males can no longer achieve erection, and therefore there is no possibility of children; of offspring.
This is the last generation of man; but it shall last forever.

Another dark sign: the Eternals mercilessly punish those who assert individuality in their community. They banish these "Renegades" to an old-folks home after causing them to rapid-age years, sometimes decades.  The Renegades live in this home -- senile and lost -- forever banished.

Even worse, the community of the Eternals has come to prize its own eternal continuance over the well-being of other communities, over other human beings.   The rest of humanity dwells outside the force field "Vortex" in poverty and primitivism. The Eternals keep the "Brutals" in line by providing them a false god named Zardoz.

Zardoz -- a giant, floating stone head --orders these Brutals not to breed, telling them that "the penis is evil" lest the environment become unbalanced, with too many Brutal mouths-to-feed.  Similarly, Zardoz informs the Brutals that "the gun is good," because it can be utilized to reduce the Brutals' numbers.  Both the evil of the penis and the good of the gun are methods of population control; so that the Eternals may retain their grip on power, and a life of ease and luxury.

One curious Brutal, an executioner named Zed (Connery) sneaks into the floating Zardoz monument and thereby penetrates the Vortex.  After Zardoz lands in a rural landscape, in the Eternal commune, he finds himself an object of both curiosity and hatred by the Eternals. One woman named May (Sara Kestelman) wants to study Zed, especially after learning that he is a genetic mutant with the potential of great intelligence. Another Eternal, Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) sees Zed as a primitive virus or disease that could pollute the commune and even destroy the Eternal way of life.  A third, apparently disinterested party, Friend (John Alderton) sees Zed simply as a means of passing the time.

Soon, Zed learns that he was actually bred and selected by the puppet master behind Zardoz, Frayne, to destroy the Eternal way of life; to defeat the Tabernacle and bring the gift of death back to a civilization that serves no purpose but its own, endless continuation.  He is "The Chosen One."

Zed destroys the Vortex and his fellow Brutals swarm into the commune on horseback, with guns blazing.  The Exterminators destroy the Eternals, who are grateful to see their endless, pointless lives finally come to end.

Meanwhile, May escapes to the outside world, carrying "knowledge" back to the ignorant Brutals.  As for Zed, he and Consuella reconcile and become lovers, and form a family.

Review:

Zardoz makes explicit an important and controversial viewpoint of 1970s:  The 1960s failed.  The counter-culture revolution which was formed in large part due to opposition over the Vietnam War, failed to re-shape the world and the direction of the human species in a positive way.

The dreams of the post-Camelot world gave way to the hard realities of the disco decade.  Instead of a new social order, the world seemed on the verge of social breakdown instead.  Words like "malaise," and terms like "crisis of confidence" dominated the debate.  Gasoline shortages slowed down America, and garbage collection strikes left trash piled high in the streets of London.  The dreams of finding a better way of living seemed to give way to excessive consumption, personal decadence, hard drug use and even cult insanity, much like that exemplified by Charles Manson and his "family."

All of this description is contextual prologue to director John Boorman's challenging Zardoz (1974), a brilliant and highly idiosyncratic science fiction production. Specifically, the 1974 film concerns the serious problems of a post-apocalyptic counter-culture order of "Eternals" -- essentially an egalitarian commune -- and the eventual, violent re-assertion of the conventional nuclear family unit through the presence and actions of a revolutionary in the commune, a macho outsider and "Brutal" named Zed (Sean Connery).

Today, the film succeeds mainly as a critique of the counter-culture, of the commune experiment of the 1960s-1970s and, simultaneously as an all-guns blazing defense of the traditional family structure, or what some left-leaning scholars might not-so-happily call "the Patriarchy."

The narrator of the film, the puppet-master behind the god Zardoz (the wizard of oz so-to-speak) introduces the film as "rich in irony and deeply satirical," and what he suggests, simply, is that mankind's long search for a better way of living -- for immortality itself -- is a fruitless one.

Man has already discovered the way of life that works best for him, and it is the conventional family structure.  Everything else is a dead end; a blind alley. By film's end, the unsuccessful "new" order has been invalidated and overturned, and traditional family values re-established.

There's also an argument here against the evils of Communism.  Zed and his macho, cowboy-styled Executioners (all male, by the way...) ultimately rebel against their false God, Zardoz and the hidden puppet masters, the Elders, when the advanced society turns the Brutals from hunters to workers: slaves cultivating crops and delivering them to the God Head.  This is an unacceptable way of living to the formerly "free," savage Brutals and so rebellion results. The Eternals interfered with their destiny to be killers, transforming them into farmers serving a higher class, and populist revolt occurred.

It is not difficult to interpret Zardoz as director John Boorman’s carefully and occasionally humorous critique of the unconventional, untested "hippie" life-styles developing in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  In particular, the film seems to take dead aim at the Zeitgeist of that period by presenting the Eternal Community as, essentially a 1960s-style commune run amok.

Communes are small groups of people living together for a common purpose, but not in a traditional family unit. Nearly a million people lived in communes in the early 1970s, and the goal, largely was to keep the outside world at bay.  In Zardoz, of course, the Eternals (a tribe of perhaps fifty) actually maintain a force field separator – the Vortex – between their commune and the outside world, a literalization of that goal of keeping the world away.

Timothy Miller, writer of The 60s Communes, Hippies and Beyond wrote an illuminating definition of a commune in his 1999 book from Syracuse Press. In the introduction (pages xxii-xxiii,) he noted that communes feature a sense of common purpose and separation from the dominant society, some form or level of self-denial and suppression of individual choice in favor of the group, a geographic proximity, and notions of economic sharing and critical mass.

The Eternals of Zardoz fit this definition perfectly, not just in terms of their separation from the Brutals, but in another important fashion. Like many communes, the Eternal society is egalitarian in nature, meaning that decisions are forged by a group, and all members of the commune have equal access to resources and decision-making.

Throughout the film, for instance, we see the Eternals “voting” on the final disposition of the intruder in their midst, Zed. Should he be put down, outright, as Consuella desires? Or held for further study, as May wishes? Everyone in the commune votes on it, and Zed is given a new lease on life, seven more days.

In terms of geographic proximity, the commune in Zardoz consists largely of a single mansion and its out-buildings, though there is also an old folks’ home for “Renegades” and a stable for the “Apathetics,” within walking distance.  In addition, the Eternal mansion and grounds fit very much the pop culture stereotype of 1960s-1970s communes. They are a place of “strange music, weirdly dressed people, and psychedelically-fueled behavior.”

In this case, however, the behavior is not psychedelic so much as psychic. Each Eternal is joined to an artificial intelligence (a super computer?) called the “Tabernacle” which sees to their needs and desires. It’s like having the Internet and a web search inside your own head, ready to be activated by vocal command.

But more importantly, when Friend is labeled a "renegade," he is psychically assaulted -- with exaggerated hand gestures -- by his former comrades.  This is weird and trippy; and not entirely unlike some drug-fueled, hippie-styled dance.

Zardoz views the unconventional structure of a commune as being counter-productive to a healthy human existence. The Eternals are immortal, but they have lost in their all-consuming quest for permanence any sense of the spontaneous, any sense of the moment. They are bored, and some of them, like Friend, actually long to die. For them, that is the only possible release from a life of eternal, emotionless intellect.  The new form of the democratic commune has, in fact, made life stagnant and empty.

The joys of sex and procreation have also been forsaken in this futuristic commune. Without children, there is no real sense of the future, only the continuance of the present, the status quo. Without children, a culture cannot be healthy, because it cannot look past its own selfish needs at the needs of the race; at the needs of a future generation.  This is another example of the Eternal's stagnation.

Even sleep itself has been vanquished in the Eternal commune, replaced by active, second-level meditation. Interestingly, Zardoz positions sleep and dreaming as essential qualities of healthy humanity. Consuella observes Zed sleeping and then awaking from a dream, and it is clear that he finds dreaming restorative.  It is a "changed" mind-state, a release from the drudgery of the Eternal existence, and without it, the Eternals are empty, even exhausted.  They have no change; so they cannot brace transformation or transcendence.

The Tabernacle informs Consuella that "Sleep was necessary for Man when his waking and unconscious lives were separated. As Eternals achieved total consciousness, sleep became obsolete, and Second-Level meditation took its place. Sleep was closely connected with death."

Sleep was closely connected with death, it says. Perhaps that is what makes life meaningful; the omnipresent threat and presence of mortality in our daily cycle.  With this "state" of consciousness gone, the Eternals have forsaken some essential quality of humanity.  Death has been banished not just from their physicality, but from their very psyche.

Zardoz is not likely to win any accolades from feminists.  In the film's most daring, even brazen sequence, Consuella studies Zed's penis, and looks for the connection between mental stimulation and physical erection.  In fact, a large view screen behind her actually plays arousing, pornographic imagery for Zed to respond to.

But instead, he grows erect at her presence...a fact which greatly disturbs the Eternal.  As noted above, Zardoz creates a comparison between the unchanging, stagnant Eternals (a largely feminized culture, dominated by May and Consuella) and Zed, the Brutal....the male ideal.

The Eternals don't shift from consciousness to sleep.  They don't dream.

Zed does both.

Zed is proud of his physicality, he doesn't discount it, and indeed, Sean Connery spends the bulk of the movie wearing nothing but a red jockstrap.

He is a walking talking phallic symbol, but critically, Zed is able to change his body; as the movie explicitly points out in this examination sequence.  Unlike the other Eternal men, his penis goes from flaccid to erect and Zardoz accommodatingly -- and amusingly --shows us a view-screen diagram of this transition.

Consuella reports clinically about the penis, and its role in human culture: "There seems to be a correlation with violence, with fear," she notes of male sexual arousal.

"Many hanged men died with an erection. You are all more or less aware of our intensive researches into this subject. Sexuality declined probably because we no longer needed to procreate. Eternals soon discovered that erection was impossible to achieve. And we are no longer victims of this violent, convulsive act which so debased women and betrayed men."

Again, Consuella sees sex as a "violent, convulsive act" which "debased women and betrayed men," yet the sex act is undeniably part of who we are as a species.  It is part of the process through which life continues and evolves; the act of procreation.

Zardoz suggests in some ways that like the sleeping/waking transformation, the flaccid/erect transformation is a kind of miracle of the human imagination and ingenuity -- even if it can be linked to male violence -- and furthermore, that it is the key to our future.

The male mystique?

The film makes no bones (*ahem*) about the fact that Zed is an unrepentant rapist of women during his life as a Brutal.  But the film also seems to state that changeability (from flaccid to erect) is part of the human process of transformation that is essential to a healthy human race.  And indeed, it precedes the most miraculous transformation of all: from an empty womb to the creation of a new human life.

That's the (traditional) and transformative role of females that the Eternals have also abandoned.

In Zardoz, even the destruction of the Tabernacle is put in decisively masculine, sexual terms.  "You have penetrated me. There is no escape. You are within me," says the defeated machine. "Come into my center. Come into the center of the crystal!"

That's not the end of it, either.  May sexually desires Zed.  She sees salvation through intercourse with this "superior" genetic specimen.  "Inseminate us all, and we'll teach you all we know, give you all we have. Perhaps you can break the Tabernacle."

Again, many reviewers were offended by this dynamic, noting that the female Eternals longed for the potent "magic" tucked underneath Zed's "loin cloth."

That's a simple way of putting it, when the film concerns the process of change, and how we can change even our very physicality (in terms of attaining an erection, going from sleep to waking, or growing a child in the womb).

The idea of human evolution and change is ultimately what allows Zed to grow beyond being a simple savage, to defeating the Tabernacle and ending Eternal culture.

Zardoz ends with the traditional family structure visually re-affirmed. Zed and Consuella move into the stone God head, Zardoz, mate, and have a baby, a son. The film then cuts to a time-lapse family portrait featuring the couple and their boy over the years as they age.

Soon the son goes off to find his own family and destiny, and the long-lived parents die.  Zed and Consuella -- in the natural order of life -- become bones, then dust.  The implicit message: this is how it is supposed to be for human beings.

You live, you raise a child, you grow old, and you die.

This climactic time-lapse family portrait is scored to Beethoven’s Symphony Number Seven, written in 1802.  This master work is widely considered a “perfect” symphony and is known for reflecting a sense of energetic spontaneity.

Consider then, the conjunction of image and musical composition in this finale. With the traditional family re-affirmed visually, the music underscores the same point. The perfect symphony accompanies the perfect triumvirate -- mother, father and son -- thus reinforcing the notion of natural order. This is the family structure that will save mankind, going forward. And in terms of spontaneity, this is how we must face life, isn’t it?

Not with all the knowledge in the universe in our possession.

Not as some kind of boring, stagnant egalitarian democracy.

But as thinking, feeling changeable humans who live in the moment.

This dazzling final sequence gets at that notion with the spontaneous-sounding symphony, and the idea of each moment lived most fully…and then gone.

It’s a perfect, rousing note to go out on, and it reflects Boorman’s critique of unconventional living arrangements (like communes).  Love it or hate it, Zardoz idolizes the traditional nuclear family as the vehicle for a productive future.

This idea is apparently unpopular with some.  Stephanie Goldberg of Jump Cut, for instance, wrote: "ZARDOZ can be read as a wistful if handsome attempt to build a labyrinth around a crumbling male supremacist ideology."              She has a point.  The film undeniably forwards a conservative argument, a return to traditional values as key to continuing mankind in a healthy fashion.

And as The New York Times observed: "Zed...arrives to overthrow the elitists and bring mankind back some 300 years."

Yep, it's a return to traditional values. But the test of a great film is not so much whether we agree with every argument therein; but whether the film successfully makes its case.  Zardoz succeeds on this basis.  It gorgeously, humorously, brazenly, and erotically presents its arguments about human nature. And Boorman directs the picture with his incomparable cleverness.

A director is "a fake god by occupation - and a magician, by inclination," the film suggests, and in Zardoz Boorman masterfully fulfills that function.

These are the voyages of the Dark Star, it’s ongoing mission to blow-up unstable planets…(From Dark Star [1975]).

1975

The Real World: 1975

January 15:              Space Mountain opens at Walt Disney World in Florida

February 23:              In response to the ongoing Energy Crisis, Daylight Savings Time is started two months early in the United States.

April 14:              Bill Gates and Paul Allen form Microsoft.

April 30:              Saigon falls, and a mass evacuation of Americans still in Vietnam occurs.

June 20:              Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster, Jaws, premieres and changes the way the movie industry markets and distributes summer movies.

July 7th:               The Apollo-Soyuz mission -- a link-up of American and Soviet space capsules in orbit -- occurs.

October 11:              Saturday Night Live premieres on NBC. As of 2013, it is still running…

November 26:              The Rocky Horror Picture Show movie premieres.

Vic (Don Johnson; far right) and his dog Blood face a new challenge in the post-apocalyptic world of A Boy and His Dog (1975).

A Boy and His Dog (1975) * * *

Critical Mass:

“It simply doesn’t come off…redeeming features however, include excellent action footage of a shootout in a subterranean warehouse and a nicely-conceived piece in a makeshift movie theatre in the middle of the desert.” – Bill Williams, Fantascene #2, Summer 1976, page 34.

“The film is riddled with an unmistakably misogynistic bent, and can't be bothered to supply one single likable soul. Still, one aspect of the scenario that Jones does manage to pull off with panache is the spare, hilariously realistic look of the underground Committee headquarters: obviously, but appropriately, the basement of a mid-'60s, mid-American Protestant church. You can practically smell the year-old hotdish.” – Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine, December 11, 2003.

“The savage wasteland is believably captured, but a so-so movie completely goes off the rails once the action moves to an underground society.” – Matt Brunson, Creative Loafing, Charlotte, August 2013.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Don Johnson (Vic); Jason Robards (Lou Craddoc); Susanne Benton (Quilla June Holmes); Tim McIntire (Voice of Blood); Alvy Moore (Doctor Moore); Helene Winston (Mez Smith); Charles McGraw (Preacher); Hal Baylor (Michael); Ron Feinberg (Fellini); Mike Rupert (Gery); Don Carter (Ken); Michael Hershman (Richard).

CREW: LQ/JAF presents A Boy and His Dog. Director of Photography: John Arthur Morrill. Original Music: Tim McIntire. Film Editing: Scott Conrad. Production Design: Ray Boyle. Produced by: L.Q. Jones, Alvy Moore. Written by: L.Q. Jones. Based on the novel by: Harlan Ellison. Directed by: L.Q. Jones. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 91 minutes.

Story:

The year is 2024 AD, and Vic (Johnson) is an impulsive and callow scavenger living in a ruined, post-apocalyptic Arizona following World War IV...which lasted five days. Vic is accompanied on his journeys by Blood, a canine with whom the lad shares a most unusual telepathic link. In other words, Blood and Vic talk to each other, and the dog -- whose main purpose is to procure women for Vic and help the young man avoid the roving "Screamers" -- is by far the smarter and more experienced of the two beings. But Vic doesn't always listen to the dog, and that causes problems.

Case in point: Vic really, really wants to get laid. It's been six weeks since he's been with a woman, and he's getting desperate. At a local showing of an old porno film in an open air venue, Blood informs Vic that he smells a lone female in the audience of homeless, pitiable people. Vic tracks her down, and this is how he first encounters Quilla June Holmes (Susanne Benton), a beautiful and willing woman from the unseen world "down under,” a civilization beneath the surface of the desert.

After Vic and Blood save Quilla from a gang of attacking Screamers, Quilla attempts to entice the head-strong, independent Vic to visit her mysterious world.

But Blood is badly injured, and begs Vic not to go. Fired up about Quilla June, Vic decides to ignore the dog's advice and visit the subterranean world of Topeka. It's a creepy kind of 1950s Ozzie and Harriet "nightmare" civilization where everyone is so pale from lack of sunlight that they've taken to adorning creepy white pancake make-up. The town is run by an organization called The Committee

Topeka has big plans for Vic. They plan to make use of "the fruit" of his "loins." Turns out Quilla June was sent to lure him to the underground world. The women there can no longer get pregnant by the male citizenry of the little burg, and they need a man from above to get the job done. Vic thinks this is a dream assignment until the exact details are made clear. There will be no intercourse.

So instead, he's attached to a painful looking sperm extraction device, and it's here...filling one vial of semen after another...that he'll spend the rest of his days. A line of 35 blushing brides in gowns wait outside Vic's medical theatre, nervously expecting his fluids.

When Quilla realizes that the Committee has double-crossed her and has no plan to make her a senior member of the organization, she helps Vic escape.

Vic can't wait to get back to his dog, to his life on the surface. "I gotta get back in the dirt...so I feel clean," he quips.

Back on the surface, a dying (but loyal...) Blood is there. Vic is forced to make a tough decision to keep Blood alive. He must choose between a treacherous woman...and a beloved dog.

Review:

In 1975, Harlan Ellison's award-winning short story, "A Boy and His Dog" (featured in the 1969 collection called The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World) was adapted to film by actor L.Q. Jones, a novice director. You may recognize Jones' name because he's a talented actor who has appeared in films as diverse as Casino (1995) and A Prairie Home Companion (2006) and he wrote the truly amazing (and deeply underrated) 1971 horror film, Brotherhood of Satan.

A low-budget production that expertly forecasts a post-apocalyptic vision quite similar to the one depicted in Mad Max, A Boy and His Dog proved to be an authentic triumph for Jones.  The film is in turns quirky, absurd and in some surprising moments, even oddly heartwarming.

Generally well-received, A Boy and His Dog nabbed a Hugo for best dramatic production and was also nominated for several other awards, including ones from The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, and The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Despite these honors, some critics also concluded that the film (advertised with the tag-line "a rather kinky tale of survival") was a misogynist effort, a judgment based almost entirely, it seems, on the film's final line of dialogue.

A Boy and His Dog is both surreal and disturbing, but also a truly funny movie. It's the rare genre film in which even the title cards prove amusing. A Boy and His Dog commences with a colorful, artistic montage of blooming mushroom clouds and then, after describing the duration of World War IV, cuts to a title card that reads: "The politicians had finally solved the problem of urban blight."

Ouch.

That sort of blunt cynicism runs throughout the picture, from Vic's no-holds barred complaining ("I'm hungry and I want to get laid"), to Blood's retort when he and Vic encounter a brutal local warlord, and Vic asks why people follow him. "Probably just charisma," says Blood, deadpan.

The entire movie crackles with sharp, pointed exchanges like that. Today we know this brand of wicked sarcasm as "snark," so perhaps A Boy and His Dog is the first and only snarky sci-fi epic.

Yet it's more than just a whip-smart genre film, it's also highly skilled in the ways it establishes and develops the characters. Within twenty minutes, for instance, you won't even think it odd that Don Johnson is arguing with a talking canine.

In terms of theme, A Boy and His Dog is probably an equal opportunity offender.  The film's message as essentially libertarian: Vic was better off roaming the surface of a devastated earth with his dog than dealing with a so-called "society" or “State” like Topeka, one with layers of bizarre bureaucracy and twisted social mores.

Better to be hungry, poor, and battling Screamers than dealing with backstabbers and two-timers.

I certainly understand why someone would be tempted to gaze at the film and argue that it is misogynist, but that's the wrong message to take away. For one thing, it's not exactly like Vic is choosing any old dog over a woman. His dog is quite special, after all: a telepathic mentor and friend.

And the woman in question had just tried to sell Vic down the river and convert him into a living sperm bank.

I mean, given those two alternatives, who would you choose?

The friend you'd been with your whole life or the person who just tricked you into painful living death?

This particular woman is a bad apple; that's all the movie is saying. It isn’t making a blanket statement that dogs are better than women.

In fact, while I was watching A Boy and His Dog I was reminded of a great quote from an old Twilight Zone episode ("The Hunt," if I remember my Zones, correctly). It went something like this: "A man? Well, he'll walk right into Hell with both eyes open. But even the Devil can't fool a dog..."

Word to the wise in the Twilight Zone. Or in post-apocalypse Topeka.

The Bug (1975) (aka Bug) * * ½

Critical Mass:

“…as splendidly sinister and apocalyptic a set of creepy crawlies as any that rampaged out of the creature features of the 1950s; even better (or worse), by the end of the film they have learned to fly…one of those rare moments of visual apocalypse which only horror films can achieve and which makes up for all the pseudo-scientific jargon and screaming co-stars.” – Nick Roddick, John Douglas Eames, Encyclopedia of Great Movies, Woodbury Press, 1985, page 168.

“The uninvolving plot doesn’t measure up to the insect effects or to Bradford Dillman’s extremely mad scientist. The gonzo second half is better than the first.” – Mike Mayo, The Horror Show Guide: The Ultimate Frightfest of Movies, Visible Ink Press, 2013, page 62.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Bradford Dillman (Jim Parmiter): Joanna Miles (Carrie Parmiter); Alan Fudge (Mark Ross); Jesse Vint (Tom Tacker): Richard Gilliland (Gerald Metbaum); Jamie Smith-Jackson (Norma Tacker); Patty McCormack (Sylvia Ross); Brendan Dillon (Charlie); Fred Downs (Henry Tacker); James Greene (Reverend Kern); Jim Poyner (Kenny Tacker).

CREW: Paramount Studios presents William Castle’s Production of Bug. Director of Photography: Michael Hugo. Electronic Music: Charles Fox. Film Editor: Allan Jacobs. Insect Sequences: Ken Middleham. Based on The Hephaestus Plague by: Thomas Page. Written by: William Castle and Thomas Page. Produced by: William Castle. Directed by: Jeannot Szwarc.  M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 99 minutes.

Story: A sudden earthquake turns the town of Riverside, California upside down.  The massive quake breaks open cracks in the earth’s surface, and out of those cracks skitter a new breed of deadly insect, one lacking conventional digestive systems.

Instead, the creatures seem to process carbon, a fact which permits them to spew fire out of their bodies when they rub together their legs.

A local professor, Parmiter (Dillman) studies the bugs when they cause a rash of deaths in the town. After a time, however, he decides to cross-breed the fire-bugs with conventional cockroaches, an act of playing God that Parmiter begins to regret as the bugs evidence signs of advanced intelligence…and organization.

Review:

Insects that spew fire out of their asses rise from the hellish bowels of the Earth to threaten a sinning mankind in Jeannot Szwarc’s Bug, based on the novel The Hephaestus Plague by Thomas Page.

The film contextualizes the insect attacks in terms of religion and God’s anger, and suggests that man will pay for his moral trespasses by being usurped on Earth by intelligent bugs that can spell words, and also reason logically.

Bug’s religious thesis is presented in the film’s opening sequence, which is set in a church.  The preacher there laments the murders, rapes, and other violent crimes of the time, the mid-1970s.

“The blood of Jesus mingles with hate and rain,” he says, before warning that America’s children have wandered far from God’s “gentle caress.”

Then, as if to prove the preacher’s very point, an earthquake occurs. It destroys the church, threatens the parishioners, and unlooses the new (or very old…) species of insect.

Pure and simple, the idea here is that this is a new plague, like the ones visited upon sinners in the Bible.

Later, the religious symbolism recurs as a burning bush is featured prominently in one composition.  Featured in the Book of Exodus, the burning bush was a sign of God’s appointment of Moses to lead the Israelites from Egypt. In a weird way, the burning bush here could be seen to represent Parmiter’s appointment as the “deliverer” of the bug plague upon humanity.

Bug’s central character is Parmiter a school teacher and scientist played with verve by Bradford Dillman, who believes that man has lost the once universal ability to talk to animals.  In an ironic act of fate (or God?) the insects end up talking to him…and he loses his mind.

In some sense then, the film concerns the idea that man proposes while God disposes. Parmiter -- in an expression of human vanity -- believes he can understand and control the bugs, whereas the truth is that they, in the end, overcome him.

The final imagery of the film is again Christian in nature.  The demonic bugs swarm around Parmiter like a plague and he falls down into a red hole in the Earth, a hole clearly meant to represent Hell and damnation.  The message of Bug, then, might be that man and his science are not making the world a better place at all.  In fact, they may be responsible for leading us all into eternal suffering.

Bug features impressive and explosive special effects, but the film never quite makes its case, in part because it can’t really settle on Parmiter’s motives. After the insects murder his wife, he is clearly enraged and lusting for their blood.  But then, after breeding them with conventional insects, Parmiter moves into the role of protector and guardian for the bugs.  Why this happens is not made abundantly clear in the film.

The last third of the film finds Parmiter in an out-of-the-way shack, descending into madness with the bugs, and the cause of his disintegration isn’t clear.  Does he blame himself for his wife’s death?  If so, how does protecting the insects square with that blame?

Released in the year of Jaws (1975), Bug looks a bit hokey and old-fashioned by comparison.  The effects hold-up just fine for the most part, but where Jaws is realistic and grounded-in-reality, Bug treads into territory that it the filmmakers’ actually don’t seem all that prepared to address.

It’s time to feed the alien. Sgt. Pinback (Dan O’Bannon) grapples with an alien life form in John Carpenter’s first feature film, Dark Star (1975).

Dark Star (1975) * * *

Critical Mass:

“…a major achievement.” – John Brosnan, Future Tense: The Science Fiction Cinema, St. Martin’s Press, 1977, page 229.

“Inventive and hilarious…one of the few films of its kind that has fun with its subject without making fun of it…it’s also good science fiction and never veers into fantasy.” – Gene Wright, The Science Fiction Image, Facts on File Publications, 1983.

“An auspicious feature film debut by John Carpenter…offers a blackly comic vision of man in space overwhelmed by both ennui and technology…a refreshingly unheroic look at men challenging the final frontier.” – James Gunn, the New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Viking, 1988.

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Brian Narelle (Doolittle); Cal Kuniholm (Boiler); Dre Pahich (Talby); Dan O’Bannon (Pinback).

CREW: Jack H. Harris presents Dark Star. Director of Photography: Douglas Knapp. Original Music: John Carpenter. “Benson, Arizona” lyrics by: Bill Taylor. Film Editor: Dan O’Bannon. Written by: John Carpenter, Dan O’Bannon. Executive Producer: Jack H. Harris. Special Effects: Bob Greenberg, Greg Jein, Harry Walton, Ron Cobb. Produced and Directed by: John Carpenter. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 83 minutes.

Story:

Eighteen parsecs from Earth in Sector EB-90, the spaceship Dark Star continues its apparently un-ending mission: to destroy unstable planets in order to pave the way for human colonization.

Unfortunately, the ship has grappled with some severe damage recently, and the newly promoted captain, Doolittle (Narelle) is ill-prepared when one of the ship’s thermonuclear bombs prepares to detonate while still attached to the underbelly of the ship.  Dark Star’s computer suggests teaching the bomb the study of Phenomenology.

While Doolittle battles with this existential crisis, Sergeant Pinback (Dan O’Bannon) battles a mischievous alien pet that has escaped from captivity and Lt. Talby (Dre Pahich) dreams of seeing the mysterious Phoenix Asteroids with his own eyes…

Review:

Conceived as Planetfall, Dark Star (1974) is the first film of director John Carpenter and writer Dan O’Bannon.  The film began as a student project at U.S.C. in 1970, with principal photography occurring early in 1971. The film underwent re-shoots in 1972 to extend the fifty-minute production to eighty-minutes, and to make it viable for a theatrical release.  The film was then purchased by Jack H. Harris (The Blob [1958]), who demanded additional reshoots.  The film finally premiered in 1975, and met with positive reviews, but relatively little audience appreciation.

Regardless of its origin as a student film, Dark Star is today considered a cult-classic.  Its low-budget nature does not take away significantly from the film’s success in part because it is clear the filmmakers had both a creative strategy, and an example to follow.  In short, Dark Star is the anti-2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).  As a work of (caustic) 1970s art, it knowingly draws all the opposite conclusions about space travel, mankind, and man’s place or role in the universe. In so cleverly over-turning the 2001 apple cart, Dark Star not only lives up to its title, it remains one of the funniest science fiction films made in the 1970s.

Serving as the “Anti-2001” may sound like a relatively simple or juvenile thing, but actually the opposite is true considering how consistently Carpenter and O’Bannon’s film develops its world-view.  By creating a world so clearly and deliberately the inverse of Kubrick’s vision, Dark Star’s creators have fashioned an intelligent and challenging response to that beloved science fiction film, one that meaningfully re-evaluates mankind’s nature and his place in the universe.

In brief, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a majestic, stately picture that establishes the mysteries of the universe in the form of the monolith, but which also suggests that man’s progress over time possesses a shape and a purpose; moving from ape-like primitive to evolved star child.

By contrast, Dark Star suggests the absolute absurdity and pointlessness of the human existence, and therefore of the universe itself.  Right down the line, element-to-element Dark Star mirrors and parodies 2001’s sense of “cosmic purpose” with its own sense of man’s irrelevance in the scheme of things, as well as his general pettiness

In Kubrick’s 2001, the space age is beautiful, stately, wondrous and because of man’s intended destiny, even ordered.  The spaceship and space station interiors are depicted as roomy and minimalistic, and the incredible visuals of space vessels in flight -- docking and landing -- are sometimes accompanied by instances of classical music on the soundtrack such as the Blue Danube Waltz, a composition that suggests the formal, dance-like nature of objects in space, and in motion. 2001’s “theme song” as it might even be considered is “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” a formal composition by Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949) which again, primarily denotes order.  As Kenneth Von Gunden and Stuart H. Stock wrote in in Twenty All-Time Great Science Fiction Films (Crown; 1982, page 190), the composition: “…opens with an ascending phrase of three notes…which represent Nietzcshe’s view of the evolutionary rise of man…These three notes serve note that the number three is essential to the film: from the perfect alignment of the three spheres of Earth, Moon, and sun at the beginning to the appearance of things in threes.”

Dark Star’s first anti-2001 conceit is to adopt country music -- the vernacular of personal stories and human emotions -- as its theme song.  The country music genre is not generally symbolic in nature, but literal in its storytelling of failed love affairs or a relationship now lost.

So where Kubrick utilizes his music to suggest the transformative, ordered nature of space travel, Dark Star’s theme, “Benson, Arizona” by Bill Taylor evokes nothing of grandeur or cosmic importance. The lyrics of “Benson, Arizona” explicitly involve the long separation between an astronaut and his Earthbound love, a love that connects that astronaut not to the future (and evolution), but to the traditional past.   This connection is like a tether, dragging him back to earthbound concerns and therefore precluding the chance for growth or transcendence.  Dan O’Bannon noted this context when he said in an interview that the astronauts’ days aboard Dark Star were sad and ridiculous.

The specific comparison between 2001 and Dark Star involves the nature of life on a ship traveling in space.  In A Space Odyssey, the crewmen fly the roomy Discovery towards a rendezvous with destiny near Jupiter.  In Dark Star, the unkempt astronauts fly their ship, the Dark Star on an endless quest across the galaxy to destroy unstable planets.   One journey is, in keeping with the name of the ship, about “discovery.”  The other is about death and destruction…about “blowing things up.”

In the course of these journeys, both men are contacted by home, and again, Dark Star makes a point of inverting the themes featured in Kubrick’s film.  In 2001, a news anchor for BBC-12’s “The World Tonight” interviews astronauts Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) about life on ship.  There is a time lag of approximately seven minutes because Discovery is 80 million miles away.  But meaningful conversation about life in space is still possible…just delayed.

Dark Star opens with a message from McMurdo Base on Earth as a military officer contacts the crew and notes that there is a ten year time lag in conversation because Dark Star is 18 parsecs distant from Earth, a gap that makes any meaningful conversation impossible.  In 2001, the “entire world” joins the BBC interviewer in wishing Dave and Frank a “safe and successful journey” to the stars.  Dark Star’s communique to Earth, by contrasts gets play in “prime time” and earns “good reviews in the trade,” but the actual content of the message from home is negative.  Earth will not be sending replacement radiation shields to the damaged ship, because of budget cuts and the vast distance separating the ship and the home world.

Both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dark Star also comment on “intelligent” devices and their relationship with mankind.  In the former film, the mellifluous-voiced HAL 9000 becomes murderous on the journey to Jupiter, and must be de-activated.  Under Dave’s auspices, man re-asserts his rightful control over the machine (thus symbolically conquering technology; the latest in the line of tools since the ape-man threw that bone into the sky in the film’s prologue…) and then heads off to evolve via the stargate/monolith “trip.”

Once more, Dark Star inverts that very premise. Here, the crewmen of the Dark Star must interact with a talking bomb, one who is convinced that it must detonate (following an accident aboard ship which activates it) and thus kill everyone.  The ship’s acting captain, the appropriately-named Doolittle (Narrelle), -- who all-things considered would rather be surfing -- must teach the bomb Phenomenology in order to prevent it from self-actuating and detonating.

But after the bomb learns Phenomenology -- the study of consciousness, essentially -- it becomes an ego-maniac, convinced that it is the only sentient being in the universe.  The bomb decides that it is God and before detonating declares “Let There Be Light.”

In other words, in Dark Star, man does not conquer his technology.  Instead, he is eclipsed and destroyed by it. Technology supersedes man, and man does not evolve…he is destroyed. It is notable too that the bomb adopts the self-image of man: as destroyer.  The ship’s mission was to blow up planets, and now the bomb will blow up man, a variation of that mission.

Dark Star even re-parses the transcendental stargate sequence of 2001 to its own ends. In Kubrick’s film, Bowman endures a “cosmic trip,” and the aging process, and then is re-born as the evolved “star child.  There’s a cosmic trip” in Dark Star too, but it is not transcendental in nature.  A crewman named Talby (Pahich) joins the glowing, colorful “Phoenix Asteroids” and becomes indistinguishable from them.  The message is hence that man is not unique and special -- he is not a delicate snow-flake -- but rather part and parcel of a vast, meaningless universe, and in some ways just another grain of sand inhabiting it.

Doolittle, meanwhile also meets his distinctly not transcendental end. He surfs into the atmosphere of a planet…and burns up. His point of greatest self-actuation is reliving his favorite form of leisure…a hobby.

Up and down, Dark Star functions so colorfully and so amusingly because it undercuts and reverses the premises of the grand Kubrick film again and again.  In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Discovery is a perfectly-ordered technological paradise featuring very few signs of human character or individuality.  The Dark Star’s living quarters, by contrast, look like a messy dorm room.  The Discovery is so spacious that Frank Poole can jog alone through a vast circular track.  The Dark Star, by contrast, is so small that its crew literally possesses no elbow room on the bridge.

The men of Dark Star are also not the brave, resourceful astronauts we have come to expect from efforts like 2001 or Star Trek.  Talby sits alone on the observation deck, isolated from the crew.  Pinback can’t be bothered to feed his alien pet.  Doolittle would rather dream about surfing in Malibu than handle the ship’s problems. Even the injured captain, Powell -- who is kept stored barely alive in some kind of cryogenic freeze unit -- is more interested in his hobby (baseball in general, and the Dodgers specifically) than in helping the ship survive a crisis.  The evolution of man does not seem like much of a possibility with these characters as the spearhead for the future age, does it?

Even visually, Dark Star plays knowingly as a mirror reflection of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  In Stanley Kubrick’s film, the Discovery first passes on the screen from left to right, a visual short-hand for a journey outward.

In John Carpenter’s Dark Star, the ship passes from right to left, thus implying a journey back rather than forward.  Since the film concerns man’s inability to transcend petty concerns and specific incidents (reflected in the use of country music as well as the crew’s petty demeanor), the idea transmitted is that mankind is forever journeying, but not really heading anywhere of import.

There’s an old truism in terms of movie-making that goes: the best way to criticize a film is to make another film yourself.

In some crucial and cerebral fashion, Dark Star epitomizes that notion, and note-for-note, it overturns the premises and ideas of the grand 2001: A Space Odyssey.

If the 1970s is indeed the wake-up from the hippie dream, as my friend and mentor, Johnny Byrne insisted, then Dark Star is pointedly the wake-up from the 2001 dream; an acknowledgment of the absurd and pointless nature of man’s existence…even in the Space Age.

Frankenstein (David Carradine; right) and his navigator, Annie (Simone Griffeth, left), take a break during a televised race in Death Race 2000 (1975).

Death Race 2000 (1975) * * *

Critical Mass:

“…the script deliberately keeps us on our toes as various characters reveal their true natures and begin to work together. Also an actor, Bartel had a perfect touch for black comedy, always getting close enough to the violence for the sake of humor, but never going too far.” – Jeffrey M. Anderson, Combustible Celluloid.

“…the theory seems to be that if people can watch widely-televised, sanctioned vehicular homicides, they'll be too distracted to realize that they're no different from the roadkill, from a class-conscious perspective. Both are being slaughtered so that the powers that be can rack up points, but at least the widows who are only getting metaphorically destroyed get a few consolation prizes when their construction worker husbands fall below the racers' wheels…It's a sick joke illustration of what each individual is worth in manpower weighed against their cost on the strapped economic machinery. Most of Death Race's political commentary, like the hilariously puerile jokes, is equally blunt.” – Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine, December 23, 2005.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: David Carradine (Frankenstein); Sylvester Stallone (Machine Gun Joe Viterbo); Simone Griffeth (Annie Smith); Mary Woronov (Calamity Jane); Robert Collins (Matilda the Hun); Martin Kove (Nero the Hero); Louisa Moritz (Myra); The Real Don Steele (Junior Bruce); Joyce Jameson (Grace Pander); Carle Benson (Harold); Sandy McCallum (Mr. President); Harriet Medin (Thomasina Paine); Vince Trankina (Lt. Fury); Bill Morey (Deacon); Fred Grandy (Herman the German); William Shephard (Pete); Leslie McRay (Cleopatra); Wendy Bartel (Laurie); Jack Favorite (Henry); Sandy Ignon (FBI Agent); John Landis (Mechanic); Paul Bartel (Frankenstein’s Doctor).

CREW: New World Pictures presents Death Race 2000. Director of Photography: Tak Fujimoto. Original Music: Paul Chihara. Film Editing: Tina Hirsch. Art Direction: B.B. Neel, Robinson Royce. Produced by: Roger Corman. Written by: Robert Thom and Charles B. Griffith. Directed by: Paul Bartel. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 80 minutes.

Story:

America’s Death Race 2000 commences as the "20th annual trans-continental road race" is about to begin in New York.  In this government-promoted race, a "new American champion will be crowned," and there are several contestants in competition.

They are: Calamity Jane (Woronov), Machine Gun Joe Veturbo (Stallone), Matilda the Hun (Collins) and "Mr. President's" favored contestant: the U.S.-govt sponsored hero and two-time winner named "Frankenstein" (Carradine).  He wears an all-black leather body suit, and a mask that ostensibly hides his racing "scars."

The racers' destination is New Los Angeles, and on the way to the finish line, each driver is expected to rack up points by striking and killing innocent pedestrians.  In fact, their fearsome cars have been fiendishly designed for just such a purpose; decorated with blades and other impaling tools such as knives, horns, and dragon's teeth. These are mean, lean, killing machines.

In the race's violent rules, women pedestrians are worth ten points and teenagers are worth forty points.  Hit a child under twelve and seventy points are earned.

The greatest reward? One hundred points per each senior citizen struck and murdered.

As the race starts, Frankenstein is joined by a new navigator, beautiful Annie Smith (Simone Griffeth), secretly a rebel plotting with Thomasina Paine (Harriet Medin) to kill the racers, abduct Frankenstein, and force Mr. President -- who has been ensconced in high office since "The World Crash of 1979" -- to abolish the bloody race once and for all.  This mission is called Operation "Anti-Race."

But on the open road, Frankenstein and Annie grow close, even as the rebellion and Frankenstein's fellow drivers attempt to kill them.

Review:

The decades have been surprisingly kind to Death Race 2000. What seemed viscerally excessive in the Gerald Ford Era now seems merely par-for-the-course in the post-War-on-Terror and Torture Porn Age.

And with the on-screen violence neutered to some degree by contemporary expectations and standards, something truly wondrous and unexpected has occurred in this case: the film's satirical angle has more fully-flowered than ever before.

Like the best examples of the genre, this is a sci-fi movie that comments on the "American way of life" -- "no holds barred," to quote the film.  But it's not some heavy-handed political diatribe either.  On the contrary, Death Race 2000 is veritably fuel-injected with laughs.

Today, audiences far more likely to laugh than turn away in disgust during the film's excessive action sequences. In particular, Sylvester Stallone is a hoot as the movie's touchy villain, a warrior who answers every perceived slight with a volley of machine gun fire or a good impaling.

Death Race 2000 imagines a dystopian future, one where a parochial American electorate is mesmerized and distracted by violent bread-and-circuses entertainment while a rich political class rules the land and pulls the strings.  As this Orwellian Order is being overturned in the 1975 Bartel film, one of the rebels meaningfully shouts "The Age of Obedience is over!"

And did I mention that the lead rebel in the film is actually a woman named Thomasina Paine (after revolutionary and journalist Thomas Paine) who wants to take back her country, and specifically refers to such American founding fathers as "George Washington," "Abraham Lincoln," and..."Harry Truman?"  She must be related to Michelle Bachman.

All while depicting a violent, action-packed narrative, the film comments on a multitude of important points. For instance, Death Race 2000 looks meaningfully at the ways that crafty politicians encourage xenophobia and jingoism to distract from important domestic matters.

Simultaneously, the movie also shows the ascent of reality television in the American pop-culture firmament and imagines what impact the equivalent of modern "gladiatorial" games could have in a technological age.  On that front, just consider this fact: both Survivor and Big Brother first aired in the U.S. in the year 2000, the very year of this film's action.

Most trenchantly, however, Death Race 2000 seems to fully understand how dangerous it can be when the walls between politics, religion, journalism, and pop entertainment crumble and such formerly-trusted pillars combine to form a giant multi-headed "media" Hydra.

Death Race 2000 announces its intention to satirize almost every important aspect of American culture in its opening frames.

As the movie begins and the trans-continental race commences, we hear the familiar notes of the National Anthem as played by a high-school marching band.  So the Star-Spangled Banner is still the official theme song of the United Provinces in America in the year 2000, but there has been an important upgrade to Old Glory herself.  In short order, we see that the blue background and white stars of our beautiful flag have been replaced by a gloved fist pointing heavenwards.  So now its fists and stripes, not stars and stripes.

Maybe it's supposed to represent a terrorist fist bump?

Arriving in theaters in the last year of the Vietnam War, during an ongoing Energy Crisis, with inflation on the rise, and a President having resigned in disgrace, Death Race 2000 ably suggests a future America in which the old, dependable, and traditional pillars of the country have failed utterly.  They have abdicated their obligations and are running on empty, on fumes.  But these future denizens don’t even have Woodward and Bernstein. Instead they have what we do today: a corporate media.

The journalists featured in the film are not independent arbiters of fact. Rather they are access-hungry self-promoters towing the official party line.  One shallow journalist, the wonderfully-named "Grace Pander," lives up to her moniker.

To pander means "to cater to the lower tastes and desires of others or exploit their weaknesses," and that's exactly what this character does.  She symbolizes the total, seamless blending of news and entertainment -- which some observers call "info-tainment" – and the trend has gotten a lot worse since 1975.  Pander treats the film's racers as celebrities and speaks in worshipful tones of "Mr. President," the national leader.

For her own personal fame, Pander has forsaken her responsibility as a journalist to ferret out facts and truth.  Instead, she merely encourages the populace to adore the racers, and support the race.    She also plugs and parrots the anti-elitist, anti-intellectual line of the government officials.  When Frankenstein goes after physicians and nurses with his dragon car, for example, Pander reports it as a populist victory and writes off the murder as being, well...deserved.

"Well, those doctors - dear friends of mine - have been pretty smug all these years setting up the old folks. Frankenstein must have decided it was their turn."

Yep, those darn elitist, college-educated physicians!  Who the hell do they think they are?  They got what was coming to them...the bastards. I'll show em' a death panel!

Politicians don't get off any easier than journalists do in Death Race 2000.  "Mr. President" governs the nation from his "summer palace" in Peking, China (another particularly timely joke about the United States become more and more owned by Chinese interests), and our Great Leader beats a familiar jingoistic drum in order explain to the people why the economy is so bad.  In particular, he uses a long-lived and cherished American scapegoat: the French.   Specifically, Mr. President claims that France and her "stinking European allies" collapsed America's economy on purpose.

There's also no separation of Church and State in this America of the Year 2000.  The Bi-Partisan Ruling Party of America boasts an official Deacon to bestow the blessing of the Lord (and the President) upon the racers, though he comes to a bad end.  Again, this is an abdication of moral responsibility since religious men and women in power must obey one "higher authority," and shouldn't be shilling for the guy who happens to be in the Oval Office at any given moment.

Interestingly, Death Race 2000 even sees fit to include two Nazi characters: Matilda and her navigator, "Herman the German."  They drive around in a vehicle decorated with swastikas.  But nobody in the movie's culture -- not the reporters and not the audience -- seems to mind this affectation.

Again, look at the state of America today.  In the 2000s and 2010s, everyone accuses everyone else of being a Nazi.  Bush was a Nazi, Obama is a Nazi. NPR is run by Nazis.  George Soros (a Jew...) is a Nazi, etc.  Rush Limbaugh speaks of Feminazis.  Al Gore is an environmental Nazi.  On and on ad infinitum.  Who knew there were so many homegrown Nazis living and working in the United States?

What could be the end result of this Nazi-themed name-calling?  Well, if you throw around the term Nazi to describe every last person who disagrees with you, the term loses its power and horror.  It becomes a commonplace, acceptable thing. In the world of Death Race 2000, Matilda the Hun -- actually, truly a Nazi -- is just another "theme" driver, and no one is bothered by that.  In fact, she's got lots of fans.   She's just "an entertainer" and we're not supposed to judge her or her shtick.

But the most searing criticism embedded in Death Race 2000 is certainly lodged against those people who would be manipulated by their fears of foreigners, limited by their narrow outlook on the world, and easily distracted by televised bread-and-circuses.

In other words: reality-TV American culture.

It's much easier to root for a hero in a televised sporting event than to solve a problem.  It's much easier to get caught up in minutiae of a hobby, such as -- for instance, the new rules of the race -- than in the details of national economic policy.  Sports fans are "enthusiasts," people who try to understand policy are called "wonks."

The result, of course, is that the very men who hold the power of life and death operate in secrecy and with complete autonomy, according to their agendas, while the masses watch the race and are clueless about the government.  The rebellion against the Powers that Be can easily be dismissed as "the lunatic fringe" because the majority enjoys the bread and circuses.

The movie also says something about the way our nation manufactures heroes for public consumption. Here, Frankenstein was raised in a government center and trained to be a racer.  He is only one in a succession of many Frankensteins, though that fact has been kept secret from the people.  Again, looking back at the last decade, remember brave soldier Jessica Lynch and how the government fabricated propaganda around her, transforming a good, courageous soldier into a veritable and invincible Rambolina?

In Death Race 2000, fans so admire and revere the "public" Frankenstein -- essentially a hit-and-run driver -- that they willingly throw themselves in front of his car so he can score points.  Fortunately, no one has done something like that over Snooki, Paris Hilton or Bristol Palin…yet.  But the cult of celebrity that surrounds these "reality stars" is the very cult that, in the film, draws people to Frankenstein.  "You want to make love to me because I drive the Monster and wear this costume?" he asks an adoring fan. Yes.  She loves the trappings of his fame.

So Death Race 2000 really gets in its satirical licks -- licks that resonate even more fully today than they did in 1975 -- all while providing some glimmer of hope.  In the film, the rebellion is victorious and Mr. President's Orwellian Order is taken down. The death race is abolished.

The message to that defeated and murdered President is, perhaps, if you live by the sword (or the rules of the Death Race), you'll also die by the sword.  Once you numb the people so thoroughly to the death of others on a routine, televised basis, what emotion would you expect your death to engender?  How many points are striking down a global leader worth?

Or, in the language of the film, "Bye-bye Baby! Hello 70 points!"

Make no mistake, Death Race 2000 is an exploitation film and it is incredibly violent.  Heads get crushed under tires.  Innocent pedestrians get struck and sliced with alarming regularity.  Yet, the film is a cautionary tale.  It declared in 1975 that this is where America was headed; into a world of bread and circuses, into a world where celebrities are God, into a world where citizens have "tuned out" from politics and don't know what is being done in their names.

So the violence in the film certainly has a moral underpinning.  What surprised me watching Death Race 2000 for the first time in years was not only how accurate many of the film's speculations turned out to be so many years later; but also how genuinely erotic the film is.

There are quite a few scenes of explicit sexuality, and they add a lot to the film and particularly the relationship of Frankenstein and Annie.

That's something that has changed a lot since 1975 too.  Today, our movies are all about the violence, but rarely about the sex.  Sex has been deemed unacceptable as a serious subject in the culture, and swept out of movies by and large. So in a way, Death Race 2000 is about pleasures we don't get to enjoy in the movies that much anymore. Like watching real cars race instead of their CGI equivalent.

So, with all its satiric and queasily accurate speculations about the future of American culture Death Race 2000 will "forever howl down that freeway in the sky, knocking over... the angels."

Doc Savage (Ron Ely) is ready for action in producer George Pal’s adaptation of the famous pulp hero, The Man of Bronze (1975).

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975) * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“The film (produced and co-written by SF veteran George Pal) is amusing without being cruel to its characters and without suggesting a sneering omniscience behind the camera.” - Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film, Rutgers University Press, 1980, page 165.

“…ahead-of-its-time (and sadly neglected)…” – Douglas Brode, Boys and Toys: Ultimate Action Adventure Movies, Kensington Publishing Company, 2003.

“…a campy take on the pulp hero that took its cues more from Adam West’s Batman than anything…” – Karl Heitmuller, MTV.com, September 14, 2008.

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Ron Ely (Doc Savage); Paul Gleason (Long Tom); Bill Lucking (Renny); Michael Miller (Monk); Eldon Quick (Johnny); Darrell Zwerling (Ham); Paul Wexler (Captain Seas); Janice Heiden (Adriana); Robyn Hilton (Karen); Pamela Hensley (Mona); Bob Corso (Don Rubio Gorro); Carlos Rivas (Kulkan); Chuy Franco (Cheelok); Alberto Morin (Jose); Victor Millan (Chief Chaac). Jorge Cervera Jr. (Colonel Ramirez); Federico Roberto (El Presidente); Michael Berryman (Coroner).

CREW: A George Pal production of a Michael Anderson film, Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. Director of Photography: Fred Koenekamp. Original Music: Frank De Vol. Film Editing: Thomas McCarthy. Art Direction: Fred Harpman. Produced by: George Pal. Written by: Joe Morhaim, George Pal. Based on the work of: Lester Dent and Kenneth Robeson. Directed by: Michael Anderson. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 100 minutes.

Story:

International hero Doc Savage (Ron Ely) and his team of The Fabulous Five return to New York City only to face a deadly assassination attempt upon receiving the news of the tragic death of Savage’s father.

After dispatching the assassin, Savage decides to fly to Hidalgo to investigate.  He and his Fabulous Five are soon involved in a race with the nefarious Captain Seas (Paul Wexler) to take possession of a secret South American valley, one where gold literally bubbles-up out of the ground…

Review:

Historically-speaking, the science fiction and fantasy cinema has battled high camp -- a form of art notable because of its exaggerated or over-the-top attributes -- for over five decades.  That long battle is definitively lost in Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975), a tongue-in-cheek film adaptation of the pulp magazine hero (or superhero) created by Henry W. Ralston and story editor John L. Nanovi (with additional material from Lester Dent) in the 1930s.

This mid-seventies movie from producer George Pal (1908 – 1980) and director Michael Anderson brazenly makes a mockery of the titular hero’s world, his missions, and even his patriotic belief system.  That the film is poorly paced, and looks more like a TV pilot rather than a full-fledged motion picture only adds to a laundry list of problems.

First some background on high camp: when camp is discussed as a mode of expression, what is really being debated is a sense of authorial or creative distance.  When a film is overtly campy, the author or authors (since film is a collaborative art form…) have made the deliberate decision to stand back and observe the property being adapted from a dramatic and in fact, critical distance.  They find the subject matter humorous, or worthy of ribbing, and have adapted by that belief as a guiding principle.

Notably not all creative “standing back” need result in a campy or tongue-in-cheek approach, and instead such distance can help a film function admirably as pastiche or homage.  In movies like Star Wars (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and even Scream (1996), there is a sense of knowing humor at work, but a campy tone is not the result.

In short, then, the camp approach represents sort of the furthest artistic distance a creator can imagine him or herself from his or her material.  Worse, that great distance often seems to emerge from a place of genuine contempt; from a sense that the adapter is better than or superior to the material being adapted…and thus boasts the right/responsibility to mock said property.

Doc Savage: Man of Bronze is one such a campy film, one that, post-Watergate, adopts a contemptuous approach to anyone in authority, and, in fact, makes heroism itself seem ridiculous and unbelievable.  There are ample reasons for this approach, at this time in American history, but those reasons don’t mean that the approach is right for the Doc Savage character.   After all, who can honestly invest in a hero who is so perfect, so square, so beautiful that the twinkle in his eye is literal…added as a visual special effect?

Although many critics also mistakenly term Superman: The Movie (1978) campy that film revolutionized superhero filmmaking because it took the hero’s world, his powers, and his relationships seriously.  Certainly, there was goofy humor in the last third of the film, but that humor was never permitted to undercut the dignity of Superman, to minimize the threats that he faced, or to mock his heroic journey.   Again, Doc Savage represents the precise opposite approach.  The film plays exceedingly like a two-hour put-down of superhero tropes and ideas, and wants its audience only to laugh at a character that actually proved highly influential in the World War II Era.  The result is a film that might well be termed a disaster.

With a little knowledge of history, one can certainly understand why Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze was created in full campy mode.  In 1975, the United States was reeling from the Watergate Scandal, the resignation of President Nixon, the Energy Crisis, and the ignominious end of American involvement in Vietnam.  The Establishment had rather egregiously failed the country, one might argue, and so superheroes – scions of authority, essentially – were not to be taken seriously.

You can see this quality of culture play out in the press’s treatment of President Gerald Ford.  An accomplished athlete who carried his University of Michigan football team to national titles in 1932 and 1933, Ford was transformed, almost overnight, into a clumsy buffoon by the pop culture. It was easier to parse Ford by his pratfalls than by his prowess. It was safer to mock him than to admire him.

High camp had also begun to creep into the popular James Bond series as Roger Moore assumed the 007 role from Sean Connery, in efforts like Live and Let Die (1972) and The Man with the Golden Gun (1974).  And on television, the most popular superhero program, TV’s Batman (1966 -1968) had also operated in a campy mode

But, what films like Doc Savage fail to do, rather egregiously, is take a beloved character on his or her own terms, and present his hero to an audience by those terms.   Instead of taking the effort to showcase and describe why Doc Savage’s world exists as it does in the pulps, the film wants only to showcase a world that is easily mocked.  The message that is transmitted, and which, generously, might be interpreted as unintentional is simply: this whole superhero world is silly, and if you like it, there’s something silly about you too.

In some sense, Doc Savage is a reminder of how good the British Pellucidar/Caprona movies of Kevin Connor are.  Their special effects may be poor by today’s standard, but the movies take themselves and their world seriously.  You can see that everyone involved is generally working to thrill the audience, not to prove to the audience how silly the movie’s concepts are.

Alas, camp worms its way into virtually every aspect of Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze.  An early scene depicts Savage pulling an assassin’s bullet out of a hole in his apartment wall, and knowing instantly the caliber and the make of the weapon from which it was fired.  In other words, he is so perfect (a scholar, philosopher, inventor, and surgeon…) that his skill looks effortless…and therefore funny.

Yet the pulp origins of the character make plain the fact that Doc Savage achieved his knowledge through hard work, and rigorous training.  When you only see the end result in the movie, his intelligence and know-how is mocked and made a punch-line.

The movie-makers didn’t need to do it this way.  Savage could have undertaken an investigation of the bullet, but it’s funnier just to make him all-knowing, to exaggerate his admirable qualities as a character.

Another example of how camp undercuts and mocks the heroes of the film occurs later in the action.  Doc and his team of merry men (The Fabulous Five) are invited aboard the antagonist’s yacht for a dinner party.  While the bad guy, Captain Seas, and his henchmen drink alcohol, Savage and his men drink only…milk.  Again, this touch is so ludicrous when made manifest on screen that it only succeeds in stating, again, the essential “silliness” of the Doc Savage mythos.  Worse, Batman had done this joke, and better, in its 1966 premiere.  So the joke isn’t even original.

Perhaps the campiest aspect of the film involves the atrocious soundtrack.  The movie is scored to the work of John Phillip Sousa (1854 – 1932), the “American March King.”  Rightly or wrongly, Sousa’s marches have become synonymous with Americana, Fourth of July parades and firework displays, with the very archetype of patriotism itself.

To score Savage’s silly adventures to this kind of stereotypical “American” march is to say, essentially, that one is mocking that value. For me as a film critic, the question comes back to, again, the sense of distance created by the adapters, and whether that distance serves the interest of the character being adapted.  In the case of Doc Savage, I would say that it rather definitively does not serve the character.  The choice of soundtrack music essentially turns all action scenes -- no matter how brilliantly vetted in terms of stunts and visuals -- into nothing more than grotesque, unfunny parody.

Why is the great genre character Doc Savage not well-served by this approach?  Consider that all five of Savage’s “merry men” are important, philosophically not in terms of raw strength or athleticism, or even super powers.   Indeed, one is a legal genius, one is a chemist, one is a globe-hopping engineer, one is an archaeologist and one is an electrical wizard.  Throw in Savage -- both a man of action and also a surgeon, for example – and consider the group’s original context: post-World War I.   These men survived the first technological war in human history, but a war -- like all war –-- spawned by irrationality and passion.  Their primary quality or importance as characters arises from the fact they are a modern, rational group of adventures, dependent on science, the law, medicine, and other intellectual ideas…not emotions or super abilities.

In 1975, the world certainly could have used such an example; the idea that being a superhero meant rationality and intelligence.  But the movie completely fails to deliver on the original meaning of the characters it depicts.  Instead, Doc Savage makes a mockery of these avatars of reason, and fails to note why, as a team, they represent something, anything of importance.

Some of the camp touches in Doc Savage are also downright baffling rather than funny. One villain sleeps in what appears to be a giant cradle, and is rocked to sleep.  The movie never establishes a reason -- even a camp one -- for this preference.

Although it is great to see Pamela Hensley -- Buck Rogers’ Princess Ardala -- in the film, I can think of almost no reason for anyone to re-visit Doc Savage.

Who, precisely is this film made for?  Fans of the pulps would be horrified at the tone of the material, and those who didn’t know the character before the film certainly would not come away from the film liking him.

Influence:

In 1984, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai successfully captured what was funny about characters like Doc, while at the same time functioning as an earnest adventure, wherein the character’s history and qualities were treated with a sense of respect and decorum

Telekinetic aliens Tony Malone (Ike Eisenmann; left), and his sister Tia (Kim Richards; center) reunite with their Uncle Bene (Denver Pyle; right) aboard his spaceship in the hit Disney film, Escape to Witch Mountain (1975).

Escape to Witch Mountain (1975) * * *

Critical Mass:

“…a movie remembered chiefly because it broke the usual Disney mold by being a genuinely exciting adventure for all movie goers.” – Terry Hazlett, Observer-Reporter, March 30, 1978, B-4.

“…well-suited to a family movie night.” – Home Theater Info, March 4, 2009.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Eddie Albert (Jason O’Day); Ray Milland (Aristotle Bolt); Donald Pleasence (Lucas Deranian); Kim Richards (Tia Malone); Ike Eisenmann (Tony Malone); Denver Pyle (Uncle Bene); Alfred Ryder (Astrologer); Lawrence Montaigne (Sheriff Purdy); Reta Shaw (Mrs. Grindlay); Terry Wilson (Biff).

CREW: Walt Disney Studios presents Escape to Witch Mountain. Director of Photography: Frank Phillips. Original Music: Johnny Mandel. Film Editing: Robert Stafford. Produced by: Jerome Courtland. Executive Producer: Ron Miller. Based on the novel by: Alexander Key. Written by: Robert Malcolm Young. Directed by: John Hough. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 97 minutes.

Story:

Siblings Tony (Eisenmann) and Tia (Richards) Malone have lived in an orphanage since their parents died some time earlier.  After their unusual mental abilities become the obsessive focus of their new guardian, an evil aristocrat, Aristotle Bolt (Milland), the children flee and try to reach Witch Mountain, a place they believe represents sanctuary.

Along the way, the children are cared for by a gruff widower, O’Day (Albert).  He drives them to Witch Mountain in his RV, and helps them to rendezvous with their Uncle Bene (Pyle) and his flying saucer.

As O’Day soon finds out, Tony, Tia and Bene are all alien refugees from a world with two stars, just looking to live peacefully on Earth.

Review:

One of the most popular and successful children’s films of the 1970s, Escape to Witch Mountain is based on a 1968 novel by Alexander Key.  In both the book and the film, young children seek to return to Witch Mountain, a remote rural location where peaceful alien castaways have taken up residence.

The big reveal of the film, that telekinetic Tony and Tia are actually humanoid aliens is nicely led up to, with the audience witnessing brief flashbacks of a disaster in the ocean.  Similarly, Tia’s star case -- which provides coordinates for a rendezvous -- is an important piece of the puzzle that helps to explain the childrens’ origin.

In terms of the genre, Escape to Witch Mountain is probably best remembered for its final act, which sees O’Day’s Winnebago miraculously take flight under the psychic auspices of Tony and Tia’s abilities.  Soon after that wonder, and in the film’s closing moments, Uncle Bene’s flying saucer is depicted on screen as well, hovering over Witch Mountain and establishing, without a doubt, that the children belong to an alien race.

But if the alien encounter at the end of this “chase” film remains its most notable contribution to science fiction, Escape to Witch Mountain features something else of value: a nice thematic through-line of some importance in the 1970s.

Specifically, the movie makes a trenchant comment about wealth and its relative value regarding happiness.  In the film, the evil Mr. Bolt cherishes his millions, and establishes that “wealth is like flesh. It has to be nurtured and coddled.”  He thus contextualizes money as something more vital even than family.

When Tia and Tony come to his house, at first they are taken in by all the toys he provides them. All their material needs have been accounted for and considered, and it is like a wonderland.

But very soon, the children realize they have nothing left to wish for, and slip into sadness over this fact.  Wealth, they learn, does not provide happiness, especially when they are separated from something that does matter: their Uncle and their people.  This is a great message to impart to children of the day, especially as shopping malls were sprouting up all over the country, in every 1970s community.

Indeed, it’s actually quite illuminating to examine the childrens’ possessions in this film and note how they are not mere toys, but aspects of the alien technology that help them to reunite with their family.

Tia’s aforementioned star box is one such important possession, and Tony’s harmonica, which when played by the boy can perform miraculous acts of telekinesis, is another.

There is thus a line drawn in the film between the “toys” played with by the alien children, and those played with by the children of the Earth.

When coupled with the film’s sense of fun and fast pace, this message about material wealth helps to make Escape to Witch Mountain an enjoyable and memorable kids movie. In 1979, President Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech concerned this very topic, but Escape to Witch Mountain makes the point first, and in much more entertaining terms.

The Giant Spider Invasion (1975) *

Critical Mass:

“It’s good for a few laughs.” – Bill Williams, Fantascene 2, Summer 1976, page 34.

“There was a bevy of good close-up shots of some fascinating full-grown tarantulas and wolf and trapdoor spiders (allegedly coming forth from the “eggs,”) but the big boy himself looked a bit artificial when rampaging through the streets of the town.” – Lee Hamilton, The Robesonian, November 11, 1975, page 6.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Steve Brodie (Dr. Vance); Barbara Hale (Dr. Jenny Langer); Robert Easton (Kester); Leslie Parrish (Ev); Alan Hale (Sheriff); Bill Williams (Dutch); Kevin Brodie (Perkins); Diane Lee Hart (Terry); Tain Bodkin (Preacher); Paul Bentzen (Billy); J. Stewart Taylor (Deputy)

CREW: Cinema Group 75 and Transcentury Productions present a Bill Rebane film, The Giant Spider Invasion. Director of Photography: Jack Willoughby. Original Music: Bill Rebane. Film Editing: Barbara Pokras. Produced by: Richard L. Huff, Bill Rebane. Executive Producers: William W. Gillett Jr., Mark L. Rosen. Written by: Richard L. Huff, Robert Easton. Directed by: Bill Rebane. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 84 minutes.

Story:

A small town in Wisconsin is unexpectedly roiled by the appearance of a black hole that opens a doorway into another dimension.

Alien spider eggs pour through the vortex and threaten the populace once they hatch into creeping, crawling giant arachnids.

The town sheriff (Hale) and two scientists -- Dr. Vance (Brodie) and Langer (Barbara Hale) -- attempt to combat the spider threat, even as a farmer, Kester (Easton) seeks to squeeze profit from the spider eggs that landed on his farmland.

Review:

A low-budget film with a sense of ingenuity about its special effects, The Giant Spider Invasion is nonetheless a dreadful science fiction film.  The film’s premise is that a black hole opens in rural Wisconsin, and giant spiders belch forth.

The first thing to consider, of course, is that if a black hole did open up in Wisconsin, all of Earth would not merely be imperiled, but destroyed fairly rapidly.

The second question of logic involves the spiders.  Do they come from a spider dimension? Another planet in our dimension? The land of the giants?

In short, the movie boasts an incredible ignorance about the scientific underpinnings of its very premise, and that fact makes the film unintentionally hilarious.  It’s difficult to take seriously two scientists (in a high-school science class room laboratory) debating black holes in Wisconsin like such things are but a minor weather inconvenience.

Also, as the jokesters on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1989 – 1999) explored rather thoroughly, the film is filled with unlikable and unsavory characters.  Leslie Parrish plays a miserable alcoholic.  Bill Rebane -- the film’s director – portrays a physically and morally repulsive jerk, and Alan Hale seems to do most of his acting with his tongue.

It’s tempting to look at this low-budget film and note with admiration, how great it is that the film was made at all in no doubt trying circumstances, but that’s not really how movies work.  You can give an A for effort, but you also have to consider the final film’s quality, or lack thereof.

The Giant Spider Invasion is a really tacky, really bad movie and there’s not much positive that can be said about it as a work of art.

On the other hand, the idea to build a giant (hairy) spider prop over a Volkswagen “bug” is undeniably a sign of mad genius, and this choice creates a visual unlike any other in genre film history.

Lisa (Susan Penhaligon; left) and Tyler (Doug McClure; center) await the next danger at sea in The Land That Time Forgot (1975)

The Land that Time Forgot (1975) * * *

Critical Mass:

“Standard stuff…but executed well in this film in stalking/battle scenes between the crew, prehistoric animals and savage animals…worth catching.” – Elaine Edford, Fantasccene #2, Summer 1976, page 34.

“These saurian concoctions range from marginally acceptable (a plesiosaurus mock-up) to painfully inadequate (a pair of tyrannosaurus puppets lifelessly snapping their jaws like toy alligators from behind concealing shrubbery).” – Roy Kinnard, Beasts and Behemoths: Prehistoric Creatures in the Movies, 1988, page 146.

“Generally solid direction from Connor and some good performances by the mostly British cast, particularly Anthony Ainley as the sinister Dietz and John McEnery as Captain Von Schoenvorts, ensure that the message remains on track and that the consistent pace of the narrative keeps the audience involved and entertained. Even Doug McClure, the embodiment of the 'B' movie actor, gives a reasonably convincing performance. The film offers some interesting takes on evolution and politics…” – Erich Mahleb, BFI Screen Online.

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/810432/index.html

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Doug McClure (Bowen Tyler); John McEnery (Captain Von Schoenvorts); Susan Penhaligon (Lisa Clayton); Keith Barron (Bradley); Anthony Ainley (Dietz); Godfrey James (Borg); Bobby Parr (Ahm); Declan Mulholland (Olson); Colin Farrell (Whiteley); Ben Howard (Benson); Roy Holder (Plesser); Andrew McCulloch (Sinclair); Ron Pember (Jones); Graham Mallard (Deusett); Andrew Lodge (Reuther); Brian Hall (Schwartz); Stanley McGeah (Hiller); Peter Sproule (Hindle); Steve James (Sto-Lu).

CREW: Amicus Productions, Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc., and Land Associates present The Land That Time Forgot. Director of Photography: Alan Hume. Original Music: Douglas Gamley. Film Editing: John Ireland. Production Design: Maurice Carter. Produced by: John Dark. Executive Producer: Robert H. Greenberg. Written by: James Cawthorn. Based on the novel by: Edgar Rice Burroughs. Directed by: Kevin Connor. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 90 minutes.

Story:

Atop a craggy mountain, a lone figure throws a thermos into a turbulent, cresting sea. Inside the canister is a wrinkled, aged manuscript, written by a marooned American, Bowen Tyler (McClure).  Far away, an old man discovers the thermos when it washes up to shore, and he reads the parchment within.

Tyler's manuscript describes the strange events of June 3, 1916, when German U-Boat-33 torpedoed a British merchant ship, the Montrose on the high sea. Tyler, a beautiful biologist named Lisa Clayton (Penhaligon), and several crew-members of the British ship survived the attack and managed to commandeer the attacking sub.

After several pitched battles between opposing crews, however, a fragile peace was forged with the reasonable U-Boat captain Von Schoenvorts (McEnery) when it was learned that the ship -- headed due south -- had become irrevocably lost after six days in uncharted waters.

With fuel and supplies low, the submarine happened into a frozen sea. There, it came upon a forbidding, undiscovered continent named Caprona after an explorer who, in 1721, had first spotted its jagged cliffs.

At Tyler's instructions, the sub sailed inland through a subterranean river passage, only to surface in the lagoon of a prehistoric terrain...a world of dinosaurs, volcanoes, and lush vegetation.

During the course of his stay there, Tyler learned from Lisa and Von Shoenvorts that the continent was populated not just by prehistoric beasts, but by creatures "at every stage of evolutionary development" including Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon Man (called "Galu").

Tyler and his associates -- for whom the "war in Europe" had now been rendered meaningless -- then braved tyrannosaur attacks, ambushes by cave-men, quicksand pits and other threats on Caprona before a volcanic eruption that ultimately destroyed the sub and left all but Tyler and Liz dead.

The survivors were left to -- much like evolution on Caprona -- "move ever forward;" to explore the island, and if possible, share their miraculous story with the faraway world of 20th century man...

Review:

“You will never forget Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot" the trailers to this 1975 Amicus film starring Doug McClure blared.

And you know what?

The advertisements were truthful.

I first saw The Land That Time Forgot in theaters in 1975 when I was five years old and I have never forgotten the adventurous Kevin Connor film.

In fact, I affectionately count this disco decade "lost world" production as one of my key, youthful "gateway" productions (like20,000 Leagues Under The Sea [1954], The Golden Voyage of Sinbad [1974], Land of the Lost [1974-1976], Logan's Run[1976] and Space: 1999 [1975-1977]). What I mean by that "gateway" descriptor is that a love and enjoyment of these particular visual productions led me to learn more about the genre and to explore science fiction, fantasy and horror in literature, in comics, in film, and on television.

The Land That Time Forgot, for instance, ignited my life-long love affair with the works of Burroughs and fed my fascination with all-things dinosaur and submarine-related. Over the years I have returned frequently to The Land That Time Forgot from the perspective of nostalgia. The film was something I enjoyed watching as a child, and so it holds a safe, cherished place in my heart.

However, that fact doesn't mean that the film is actually childish or lacking in commendable qualities, like, for instance, the wretched Dinosaurus! (1960), a film I enjoyed as a child but ultimately outgrew upon adult re-viewing. Some movies hold up over time...and some don't, and I'm not so blinded by nostalgia that I can't detect the difference.

Although The Land That Time Forgot's aged dinosaur effects -- accomplished with rubbery puppets -- may appear horribly primitive by today's CGI post-Jurassic Park standards, this 1970s film still boasts a surfeit of impressive qualities, particularly a most welcome sense of wonder.  In an age in which our movie blockbusters pummel, bruise, and batter us with sound and fury, but not much imagination and wonder, that's no small accomplishment, to be certain.

More than that, The Land That Time Forgot has been shot by the legendary Alan Hume and assembled by Connor in more than your typical workman-like fashion. Some of the meticulous composite shots are gorgeous, not to mention impactful. Many of the miniatures, produced by Derek Meddings are also convincing...though some shots are notably less effective than others. But importantly, the effects are not the be-all end-all of the picture.  The Land That Time Forgot thrives on its expression of timely ideas as well.

The Land That Time Forgot's inaugural act is -- in many critical ways -- the film's tightest and most impressively drawn. After the sinking of the British ship in a misty sea, Germans, Brits and Americans are confined to the claustrophobic confines of U-33, and pitted against one another. There's one battle on the deck of the sub, in particularly, which is expertly shot and well-edited. Connor's camera is deliberately shaky and immediacy-provoking without proving so jerky that the motion hides the action choreography. The film's characters -- looking authentically grimy, exhausted and weary -- plot against one another until faced with a common threat that unites them: starvation and death.

The impressive and atmospheric live-action submarine scenes that open the picture were shot on H. Stage at Shepperton Studios over a span of a week, and they nicely set up the isolation of the crews…the hunger for landfall and the feel of terra firma.

In some sense, The Land That Time Forgot is distinctively anti-war in nature, since the British, American and Germans decide to leave behind petty concerns about territory and work together in unison for the common good. This was an idea that had special resonance in 1918 when Burroughs wrote the story, and was also highly relevant in 1975...the final year of America's involvement in Vietnam. Thematically, these scenes of first competition and then cooperation reflect the Cold War paradigm of the 1970s, particularly Détente, a “thawing” period in which it was possible for the global super-powers to cooperate.

Indeed, one of the film's explicit plot threads involves the fact that life in Caprona is constantly evolving, constantly moving forward. As Tyler puts it simply "You cannot go back to the beginning." When a villainous German officer, Dietz (Anthony Ainley) attempts to do just that by reviving the old national feuds, the result is total destruction and annihilation for the warring parties. War belongs in the past, with the dinosaurs, the film seems to suggest, at least implicitly.

The Land That Time Forgot's second act is also strong and direct, focused on the discoveries and dangers of the previously-undiscovered continent and the strange life-forms inhabiting it. Many of the film's most impressive special effects are featured in this portion of the action, particularly some beautiful blending of fantasy matte-paintings with the live-action.

It's only in the film's cataclysmic, explosive third act climax -- with one threat looming after another -- that Connor's sturdy film tends to appear less than entirely impressive. The careful characterization and plot development give way, inevitably, to fisticuffs, battles and (admittedly-impressive) on-set pyrotechnics. The result is that some level of intimacy is sacrificed, especially as the cool-headed, affable Van Schoenvarts character is relegated to the background. There's just something anti-climactic about this span in the movie. This lapse in tone is rectified, however, by the elegiac and picturesque book-end finale (shot on the Island of Skye by Peter Alliwork, an aerial camera man). These moments finds lonely survivors Taylor and Clayton in the frozen north of Caprona tossing the thermos canister and manuscript into the cleansing sea, saying their goodbyes to civilization and the possibility of rescue.

What I took away from The Land That Time Forgot as a child was the thrill of exploring a new and dangerous land...the prehistoric world of the pterodactyl, the diplodocus and the tyrannosaur.

As an adult, the film's themes about moving "ever forward" -- away from a history of bloodshed, ignorance and war -- really crystallized for me. On the island of Caprona, World War I era man -- with all his flaws and foibles -- is just one evolutionary step beyond the Neanderthals and the Galu, and not as entirely evolved as man can yet be.

Somehow, that island location and that magical equation of a world constantly moving forwards, suggests that we -- at our present stage of development -- must safeguard and shepherd the present so as to forge a better future.

Even with a low-budget and some very dated special effects, this initial Amicus fantasy outing deserves to be much more than the movie that time forgot. Our pop culture has evolved significantly since The Land That Time Forgot, I suppose, but in this case, "going back" to the prehistoric past is an option I recommend wholeheartedly.

The athlete of the future: Jonathan E. (James Caan) in Rollerball (1975).

Rollerball (1975) * * *

Critical Mass:

“Jewison’s camera glides, tracks and racks focus with a lulling mindlessness that makes the movie itself into the sort of clean machine that the society in it is…It efficiently supplies all the metaphor necessary to describe its own inadequacies.” – Colin Westerbeck Jr., Commonweal, July 18, 1975, pages 277 – 278.

“Rollerball is a slow film, except for its graphically violent sport scenes, meant to tell audiences something about the nature of spectator games.” – Gregory B. Richards, Science Fiction Movies, Gallery Books, 1984, page 55.

“Even now, what sells the movie is the Roman orgy of plasma and broken bones. Jewison tried to play the brutality so over-the-top that audiences would be repulsed. How could have anticipated that, 30-plus years later, Americans would become blasé to the mayhem of Grand Theft Auto IV?” – Ray Didinger, Glen Macnow, The Ultimate Book of Sports Movies, Running Press Publishers, 2009, page 229.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: James Caan (Jonathan E.); John Houseman (Bartholomew); Maud Adams (Ella); John Beck (Moonpie); Moses Gun (Cletus); Pamela Hensley (Mackie); Barbara Trenham (Daphne); Shane Rimmer (Rusty); Richard LeParmentier (Aide); Ralph Richardson (Librarian); Robert Ito (Coach); Burt Kwouk (Doctor).

CREW: United Artists and Alonquin Present Rollerball. Director of Photography: Douglas Slocombe. Original Music: Andre Previn. Film Editor: Anthony Gibbs. Production Designer: John Box. Written by: William Harrison. Produced and directed by: Norman Jewison. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 125 minutes.

Story:

In the not-too-distant future, the world's nations have gone bankrupt, and the destructive "Corporate Wars" have come and gone. Now, corporations "take care of everyone," and the violent team sport of Rollerball has been created by Big Business to remind people of "the futility of individual effort."

The goal of the corporations in this dystopia is to be essential to every individual's life, and for "the few" to make important decisions on "a global basis."

One day, the world’s most popular Rollerball player, Jonathan E. (Caan) sees his wife taken from him by a member of the “Executive Class,” and begins to rebel against the elitist system.  Although a retirement is planned for him, Jonathan bucks expectations and stays in the derby, even when it could mean his death.

Meanwhile, an executive (Houseman) worries that E. could become the focus of a new freedom movement…

Review:

Released the same year as the low-budget Death Race 2000 (1975), director Norman Jewison's Rollerball is a film with many similar elements.  Both films are set in dystopian futures.  Both films involve athletes in incredibly dangerous contests, and both efforts suggest the notion of such violent contests as "bread and circuses" for the unhappy masses of America.

Of course, Death Race 2000 is more over-the-top, funny, and nasty in execution, and so Rollerball feels a bit staid by comparison.

And yet Rollerball is grave, impressive, and serious in its depiction of a corporate dystopia.   The film thrives on speed, acceleration and movement, and James Caan is a sturdy anchor in this tale of a world in which corporations use blood lust to control the people. The film is also a valuable one in the genre because it questions what passes for entertainment, but more than that, what passes for "freedom" in an increasingly technological, media-saturated age.

There are serious downsides to corporate rule as depicted in Rollerball.  For one thing, all citizens are treated as powerless employees in servitude of the "Executive Class."  This means that your beloved wife can be transferred to another man's possession with the ease an on-the-job departmental transfer.

Indeed, this is the indignity that the world's greatest Rollerball player, Jonathan E. (James Caan) has suffered...and never forgiven.   He still loves his wife, but an executive in Italy had more power and stature, and took her.  And she was paid handsomely to leave Jonathan, rewarded with a villa in Rome, and extreme wealth.

Early in Rollerball, the company --represented by John Houseman's stern executive, Bartholomew -- delivers another despotic edict: Jonathan must retire from the game for "the common good."   This demand doesn't sit well with Jonathan E., and he encourages his ever-increasing fame on the court even in the face of attempts by the company to kill him.   Before long, Jonathan finds the corporation changing the game's rules.

First, the Executive class eliminates penalties for rough play.  Then it eliminates replacements/substitutions, so that no injured players can leave the game in progress.  Then, finally, the corporate men push a game with no established time limit.  The final Rollerball game ends only when the last man is standing...

The message: when you have no control, those who do wield power will change the rules in the middle of the game to continue depriving you of a victory.

As one might expect, the Rollerball tournaments serve, in many ways, as the highlights of this classic sci-fi film.  Staged with meticulous attention-to-detail these games grow increasingly violent throughout the film.  The set-piece against the Tokyo team, in particular, descends into a blood bath.  One player even catches fire before the game is done.

If possible, the film's climactic contest -- New York vs. Jonathan E.'s Houston team -- is even more vicious.  Scarlet blood is seen spilled all over the game arena, and in one horrible moment, the first aid responders are actually run down by a speeding motorcycle.  Then our protagonist, Jonathan, kills a player right in front of Houseman's character and before a live TV audience to boot.   All the while, a packed house cheers and applauds wildly over the violent action.

On one level, Rollerball satirizes the hyper-kinetic, overtly-commercialized world of modern organized sports, where the strongest, hunkiest lunk-head (Tim Tebow?) receives the most admiration based on the size of his... muscle mass.   This notion of making athletes "heroes" is made clear in a Rollerball scene set inside a locker room, as Bartholomew speaks directly to the players' egos.  "They dream they're great rollerballers," he tells them, speaking of his Executive buddies.   "They dream they're Jonathan; they have muscles, they bash in faces."

On the other hand, and on a much deeper thematic level, Rollerball muses directly on the topic of freedom in a technological age. Ella asks Jonathan why he simply doesn't do what the Executives want him to do especially since he would be paid handsomely for his compliance.  Jonathan notes that it is a choice "between having nice things...or freedom."

Ella responds -- terrifyingly -- "But comfort is freedom."   By contrast, Jonathan suggests the truth: "That's never been it. I mean, them privileges just buy us off."

In other words: Don't sweat things like individual freedom or liberty.  There are items to purchase, things to own.  Don't you want an Italian villa?

Thus Rollerball depicts a society in which the people have indeed accepted control by ruling elite in return for being "provided for," in return for "privilege."  But at the same time, these same people have no sense of meaning or purpose now.  Part of the reason the people might live with such an unjust arrangement is because of a deliberate black-out of educational materials and information.  Rollerball tournaments play endlessly on the television, and local libraries are impersonal computer centers that feature only "summaries" of important literary works and ideas.  Instead, the corporations own history itself.

"What do you want books for?" Jonathan's team-mate, Moon Pie asks innocently.  "Look Johnny, if you wanna learn somethin', just get a Corporate Teacher to come and teach it to ya'. Use yer Privilege Card..."

Rollerball clearly depicts a world without the Internet and in one scene, Jonathan E. goes to Geneva to visit a computerized archive where all the answers about "corporate rule" are purported to exist.

Not surprisingly, the computer librarian, named Zero, proves absolutely unhelpful in providing such data.  In fact, the machine has lost the totality of the "13th Century" in terms of knowledge.  Thus, there is no place to turn to learn about history, science, or nature.  Everything is the game.  Everything is blood lust.

Because as long as you think about the game, and which team is winning or losing, you aren't thinking about who is gaming the system and for what agenda.

Based on William Harrison's short story, "The Roller Ball Murder" (1973; Esquire), Rollerball runs for over two hours, and it features essentially two modes. The first mode reveals the kind of listless, purposeless, meaningless existence of "comfortable" citizens like Jonathan E.  The second mode involves the game matches themselves, set on a circular track.  The game play is urgent, pointed and murderous, a deliberate contrast to the film's lackadaisical first mode.

Rollerball also makes widespread and accomplished use of classical music, including Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, and Adagio in G minor from Tomaso Albinoni.  These musical selections comment on the action in a way that the film's knowledge-challenged dramatis personae cannot.

The music -- so distinctly of the human past -- connects Jonathan E's futuristic struggle for freedom to such struggles in man's long history, and arises specifically from the Baroque tradition, dealing intentionally with the "affect of man."  The musical selection that opens the film, Toccata and Fugue, renders the accompanying imagery of game preparations in the vast Rollerball stadium almost religious in stature and transmits the idea that we are witnessing an important ritual being played out.

Rollerball's production design is, in the spirit of the dramatic material, relatively impersonal and dehumanizing in nature.  Citizens visit vast "luxury centers," mall-like locations -- places to shop -- in keeping with such kindred fare as Logan's Run (1976).  The Executive Suites as seen in the film are palatial and extravagant.  The opulent life-style of the executive class is revealed in one dinner party scene, and the sequence ends with the drunken, entitled elite mindlessly blowing up trees with futuristic guns.

The Rollerball arena is itself an important metaphor in the film.  The track is a loop, a track that never ends, with no end and no beginning.   Teams battle one another for supremacy, going around and around on this track endlessly (kind of like a NASCAR race).  But one individual -- a Spartacus of the future age -- breaks out of this circular trajectory and takes the fight right to the stands.

One effective composition in the Jewison film finds Jonathan E. braced against a transparent wall on the Rollerball rink. Behind him is Bartholomew, the executive, scowling.  And reflected on the transparent glass are out-of-control flames.  Here we have all three critical thematic elements: the gladiator, the villain who is "untouchable" and the fire of revolt -- of individual achievement -- threatening to burn out of control.

The enduring genius of Rollerball is that it artfully exposes how powerful people become addicted to controlling the lives of others  The corporate stooges of the Executive Class wage full-bore, murderous war against a citizen because they want one player -- one damned player -- to retire from "their" game.  They apparently don't consider tolerating Jonathan E's presence for a few more years, followed, presumably, by a peaceful retirement.

Instead they seek to dominate and defeat Jonathan E. and in doing so, incite his sense of competition.  For Jonathan, "Four or five little things make one big thing," and the retirement demand, on top of the loss of his wife to an executive constitutes a tipping point.

By pushing the stubborn and tough Jonathan E. to his line in the sand, the Corporate Culture only assures that Jonathan E. proves the very point they don't want established:

The will of the individual matters.

The perfect woman is man-made. Joanna’s (Katharine Ross) doppelganger appears in The Stepford Wives (1975).

The Stepford Wives (1975) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“Avoiding the technological issue of cloning, the film indicts conservative masculine desires both to confine women to the home and to insure their utter passivity and agreeableness.” – Jack Boozer, Career Movies: American Business and the Success Mystique, University of Texas Press, 2002, page 68.

“…neatly distilled the dread that greeted women’s liberation into a gripping thriller with shots of pitch-black humor.” – Andi Zeisler, Feminism and Pop Culture, Seal Press, 2008, page 76.

“Director Forbes constructs a tight thriller that is not compromised by the social satire inherent in William Goldman’s well-crafted screenplay.” – Paul Meehan, Tech-Noir: A Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir. McFarland, 2008, page 139.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Katharine Ross (Joanna Eberhart); Paula Prentiss (Bobbie Markowe); Peter Masterson (Walter Eberhart); Nanette Newman (Carol Van Sant); Tina Louise (Charmaine Wimpiris); Carol Eve Rossen (Dr. Fancher); William Prince (Ike Mazzard); Carole Mallory (Kit Sunderson); Toni Reid (Marie Axhelm); Judith Baldwin (Patricia Cornwell); Barbara Rucker (Mary Ann Stavros); George Coe (Claude Axhelm); Franklin Cover (Ed Wimpiris); Robert Fields (Raymond Chandler); Michael Higgins (Mr. Cornell); Josef Somer (Ted Van Sant); Mary Stuart Masterson (Kim Eberhart); Ronny Sullivan (Amy Eberhart).

CREW: Fadsin Cinema Associates and Palomar Pictures present The Stepford Wives. Director of Photography: Owen Roizman. Original Music: Michael Small. Film Editing: Timothy Glee. Production Design: Gene Callahan.  Produced by: Edgar J. Scherick. Executive Producer: Gustave M. Berne. Written by: William Goldman. Based on the novel by: Ira Levin. Directed by: Bryan Ford. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 115 minutes.

Story:

Joanna Eberhart (Ross) and her family move out from bustling New York to the sleepy Stepford Village in Connecticut.  Joanna misses the hubbub of the city, and wants to explore her interest in photography more fully.

To her disappointment, she finds that Stepford is a strange place.  All the women there, for one thing, are interested only in serving and obeying their husbands, and keeping immaculate homes.

Joanna tries to set up a women’s lib group in town with her new friend, Bobby (Prentiss), but they find that there is no interest and no support for the cause.

Meanwhile, Joanna’s husband, Walter (Masterson) has joined the town’s secretive Men’s Association and the organization takes an unusual interest in his wife.

Soon, Bobby mysteriously begins to act like all the other “Stepford Wives,” and Joanna comes to realize that her turn is fast approaching.  She sneaks into the Men’s Association to learn the town secret, and makes a terrifying discovery…

Review:

Husbands would rather be married to fuckable, complaint robot maids than real flesh-and-blood, independent-mind women. That’s the inescapable conclusion in The Stepford Wives, a science fiction film based on the novel by Ira Levin of the same name.  The movie is an indictment of (some) men, and one that notes their inadequacies as fathers, husbands, and lovers at the same time it acknowledges that in American society of the 1970s they nonetheless control all the levers of power.  One can rage against them as tyrants or bullies, but in the end, the Men’s Association -- a loosely renamed Boys Club -- always wins.

The description above may make The Stepford Wives sound shrill and serious, but the movie’s genius is that it is anything but shrill, and there are many funny moments.  In fact, The Stepford Wives goes out of its way to establish how reasonable Joanna is, and how the things she wishes for herself are the very things that every man also wishes for himself, primarily a chance to pursue happiness and the freedom to choose the avenue of that pursuit on individual terms.

The film uses humor to make men look small for denying others the very things that they enjoy for themselves.

In Joanna’s case, she is fascinated by photography.  That’s the thing that she feels make her a special and distinct individual.  She wants to be remembered as an artist.  But her husband Walter doesn’t want Joanna to pursue photography, preferring a clean house to a spouse who brings something intellectual or artistic to the table.  “When are things going to sparkle around here?” he asks her pointedly, referring to the perfect, clean houses of Stepford.  He’s quite clear on this point. Her value as a wife is in keeping his home spotless.

The funny thing about this is that Walter has no apparent desire to see Joanna get paid for her toils at home, and this element of the debate about sex roles was actually a crucial issue of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when married women had precious little financial independence.  They had to be married for twenty years, for example, to receive their husband’s Social Security benefits upon his death.

And since they worked entirely at home, house-wives had no such benefits in their own name. Representative Bella Abzug fought this battle vociferously, and in 1974 delivered a speech about the fact that married women were working approximately 99 hours a week, but not being paid a red cent, and not receiving anything in terms of retirement security, either. In the famous delivery, she declared:

“If America’s housewives ever placed an embargo on dispensing their free labor, the pilot lights on gas ranges would go out all over the land, the washing machines and vacuum cleaners would fall silent, husbands would not be driven to suburban trains, children would not be fetched…and the nation would discover a whole new definition of crisis.” (Congressional Record: 120 Cong. Rec., 1759-61).

Once more, the point here concerns the levers of power, and the fact that men hold all the power in this society.   There’s a beautiful speech by Joanna in The Stepford Wives that perfectly explains what she has to lose if replaced by a machine.  She imagines her doppelganger and states. “She’ll cook and clean, but she won’t take pictures, and she won’t be me.  She’ll be like one of those robots in Disneyland.”

There’s the crux of it: the replacement Joanna will love to serve (and possess larger breasts too…) but the spark of life, of individuality will be missing.

What does it say about the men of Stepford that they prefer mindless, perpetual service to the independent spark of life?  To the companionship of a real woman?

One funny aspect of The Stepford Wives is the high level of denial the movie exposes on the part of the Stepford men.  They program their wives to appreciate their love-making efforts, and the audience hears one woman moaning during sexual intercourse that “nobody ever touched me the way you touch me. You’re the best. You’re the champion. You’re the master.”

The man on the receiving end of that excessive compliment would have to know, of course, that his machine-wife was programmed to express that level of satisfaction and enthusiasm, and therefore that the sentiment was not genuine or authentic, let alone earned.

And yet he still wants to hear it, and still wants to believe it.

If you think about that kind of self-deluded behavior and couple it with the selfishness the film exposes in the men, including the guy who paves over his wife’s tennis court, it’s not a pretty picture of the less fair sex.

Rewardingly, the satire and social commentary in the film really works because it makes another trenchant point too.  The problem with men in America reaches beyond the borders of Stepford.  The town doesn’t contain it.

Accordingly, one of the most fascinating scenes in The Stepford Wives sees Joanna re-connecting with the man she almost married, humorously named Raymond Chandler, as if to put a fine point on her “romantic” vision of a man not her husband.

But very soon, Joanna realizes that Raymond is just as bad a choice for her as Walter is, and would have been no more appreciative or responsive a mate.

This scene is also illustrative for another reason, and one that relieves the film of some of its overt one-sidedness or sexual slant. Namely, Joanna confesses that she married Walter because she dreamed he was going to “become Perry Mason.”

In other words, she married her husband because she believed she could mold him into a vision or male fantasy that she personally found appealing.

And of course, that’s what Walter is literally doing with her right now in Stepford, making a replacement that is more his “dream Joanna” than the real one end up being.

This scene is there for balance, perhaps, but it also makes a good point.  In the war of the sexes there are many combatants, but no real victors.

Influence:  The Stepford Wives inspired three TV movies, including Revenge of the Stepford Wives (1980), The Stepford Children (1987), and The Stepford Husbands (1996). A more humorous-slanted remake of the original, The Stepford Wives was released in 2004, but to bad reviews and indifferent box office.

The Ultimate Warrior (1975) * * *

Critical Mass:

“…the well-intentioned fight-filled film collapsed under the weight of its mediocre choreography and screenplay.” – Ric Meyers, Films of Fury: The Kung-F Movie Book, Emery Books, 2011, page 245.

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Yul Brynner (Carson); Max Von Sydow (Baron); Joanna Miles (Melinda); William Smith (Carrot); Richard Kelton (Cal); Stephen McHattie (Robert); Darrel Zwerling (Silas); Lane Bradbury (Barrie); Nates Esformes (Garon); Mel Novak (Lippert); Mickey Caruso (B. Harkness); Gary Johnson (L. Harkness);

CREW: A Weintraub-Heller Production, The Ultimate Warrior. Director of Photography: Gerald Hirschfield. Original Music: Gil Melle. Film Editor: Michael Kahn. Produced by: Fred Weintraub and Paul Heller. Written and Directed by: Robert Clouse. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 94 minutes.

Story:

In 2012 AD, the civilized world has collapsed into anarchy because of famine. The leader of a small community of survivors in New York City, The Baron (Von Sydow) realizes that his people will not survive long when faced with scavengers like the evil Carrot (Smith) and his men.  Accordingly, he recruits a warrior named Carson (Brynner) to be guardian to his people.  At least that’s the Baron’s stated purpose in retaining Carson.

In truth, the Baron knows that there is no future in city life, and wants to send his pregnant daughter, Melinda (Miles) to safety in North Carolina along with a batch of specially-engineered seeds that can grow despite the famine, and re-start the cycle of life.

The Baron tasks Carson with caring for his daughter and the seeds during the journey, but Carrot does everything in his power to stop the mission.

At the same time, the Baron’s people are none-too-happy either, to learn that their leader has determined that their lives and futures are expendable.

Review:

“It’s interesting what becomes valuable to us when almost everything is taken away,” one character muses in The Ultimate Warrior, a post-apocalyptic action film that heavily forecasts The Road Warrior (1982) and films like it.

In this case, Yul Brynner plays a similar warrior of the wasteland, one who must protect the remnants -- and indeed the future -- of human civilization.  The future world of 2012 (!) as depicted in the film is one of starvation and desperation, scarcity and shortages. There is no gasoline, no medicine, and no hope.  The Baron’s community suffers from a plague of “fatalism,” according to the film’s dialogue.

The Ultimate Warrior’s depiction of its dark future world is quite powerful.  The city looks like a junkyard, and the Baron’s community lives on a city block barricaded on all sides. The secret entrance is through a parked-bus, and inside the community we see small gardens, wind mills for energy production, and a community pantry very low on provisions.

Impressively, The Ultimate Warrior considers that in a new world order like this one, new laws will be necessary, and the film reveals how even the best society, like the Baron’s must thrive on draconian law.  One person in the compound is accused of stealing a tomato, and then forced to endure cruel justice.  The Baron declares “Give him to the street people” and the offender is cast-out into the urban jungle without a second glance.

The Baron pays for his own moral trespasses as well.  After sending away his daughter, Carson, and the seeds, he stays behind, and his own people beat him to death for selling them out.

A real sense of human savagery permeates The Ultimate Warrior, and one sequence involves the desperate mother and father of a small baby venturing out into the “wilderness” of New York to acquire powdered milk for their infant.  A less frank, less honest film would have them survive; would have the hero rescue them.

In this case, however, Carson is too late to help the family, and barely escapes with his own life.  The family’s fate is much grimmer.

The Ultimate Warriors’ last act leaves the terror of the city behind as Melinda and Carson (carrying the seeds), flee the metropolis through the subway system, Carrot and his men in hot pursuit.  In this portion of the film, the tension is especially high because The Baron -- Melinda’s father -- has actually given explicit instructions that Carson is to consider the fate of the seeds ahead of the fate of Melinda and her child.  That’s how desperate things have gotten for the human race.  So when Melinda goes into labor, with Carrot’s men close by, the film reaches its pinnacle of anxiety, since one wonders what decision Carson will ultimately make.

Ultimately, he chooses the morality of the old world and stays with the pregnant mother to deliver the child.  As the titular “ultimate warrior,” he also dispatches Carrot and his men with great aplomb, violence, and blood-shed. The final set-piece in the subway (wherein Carson must chop off his own hand to kill Carrot) is gruesome in the extreme, but the final shots of Carson, Melinda, her baby, and the all-important seeds walking the beaches of North Carolina provide a visual and emotional catharsis.

No Blade of Grass still takes the cake as the bluntest, nastiest slice of post-apocalyptic life in the 1970s cinema, but The Ultimate Warrior points the way to the genre’s action-oriented future. The film re-purposes old Western myths and tropes (the lone gunslinger who comes into town to protect the innocent, in particular), but doesn’t candy-coat the grim realities that its characters countenance.  While it is not, perhaps the “ultimate” post-apocalyptic film, The Ultimate Warrior is a really fine piece of work, and an underrated and seldom-discussed film.

There is still only one: The giant ape gets his close-up in King Kong (1976).

1976

The Real World: 1976

January 19:              Governor Jimmy Carter wins the Iowa Caucus.

July 3:                            Great Britain suffers a heat wave.

July 4:                            America celebrates its Bicentennial.

August 19:              President Ford repels a primary challenge from California Governor Ronald Reagan and thus secures the Republican nomination for President.

August 26:              In Zaire, the first known outbreak of the Ebola Virus occurs.

September 6:              The NASA space shuttle Enterprise makes its first public appearance, accompanied by the former cast-members of Star Trek (1966 – 1969).

October 6:              In the second televised presidential debate, Gerald Ford stumbles on a question regarding Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and afterwards, Carter pulls ahead in the polls.

November 2:              Jimmy Carter defeats Gerald Ford in the presidential election of ‘76. He carries 297 electoral votes to Ford’s 240, and nabs over 50 percent of the popular vote.

Dr. Abner Perry (Peter Cushing, left), Dia (Caroline Munro, center) and David Innes (Doug McClure; right), contemplate the wonders and terrors of the lost world, Pellucidar, in Amicus’s At the Earth’s Core (1976).

At the Earth’s Core (1976) * * ½

Critical Mass:

“This isn’t bad science fiction, but neither is it particularly good.” – St. Joseph News-Press, September 1, 1978, page 10B.

“McClure offers a rather smug and condescending performance…and the film is even cheaper and the special effects even more unconvincing than the previous movie.” – Roy Kinnard, Beasts and Behemoths: Prehistoric Creatures in the Movies, 1988, page 146.

“Nearly everything in it ought to be thrilling, yet even the characters themselves react with mere bemusement. If Peter Cushing can't be bothered to pretend to be scared when footage of a bird-monster is projected on a screen behind him, why should I?” – Eric Snider, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 13, 2010.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Doug McClure (David Innes); Peter Cushing (Doctor Abner Perry); Caroline Munro (Dia); Cy Grant (Ra); Godfrey James (Ghak); Sean Lynch (Hoojah); Keith Barron (Dowsett); Robert Gillespie (Photographer); Michael Crane (Jubal); Bobby Par (Sagoth Chief).

CREW: Amicus Productions presents a Max J. Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky Production, At The Earth’s Core. Director of Photography: Alan Hume. Original Music: Mike Vickers. Film Editors: John Ireland, Barry Peters. Production Design: Maurice Carter. Produced by: John Dark. Based on At The Earth’s Core by: Edgar Rice Burroughs. Written by: Milton Subotsky. Directed by: Kevin Connor. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 89 minutes.

Story:

In the early 1900s, David Innes (McClure) and British inventor Abner Perry (Cushing) test the doctor’s experimental “high-calibration drilling machine,” the Iron Mole, which can burrow deep into “the bowels of the Earth.”

Something goes wrong on the initial journey, however, and the Iron Mole emerges not on the far side of a hill, but deep within the Earth’s core, in a heretofore unknown world called Pellucidar.

In this savage jungle world, humans are the slaves of a race of giant, telepathic pterodactyl-like creatures, the Mahars, and brutalized by their enforcers, the Sagoth.  Even as David falls in love with the beautiful princess Dia (Munro), he attempts to unify the discordant human tribes of Pellucidar to confront and destroy the Mahars.

Review:

At the Earth’s Core is the second Amicus film in its Edgar Rice Burroughs cycle, and the film re-teams star Doug McClure with director Kevin Connor.  This fantasy, set in the interior world of Pellucidar, is not quite as grounded or believable as the previous entry, The Land That Time Forgot (1975), which utilized World War I as its background context, but its antagonists -- the green-eyed, squawking, strafing Mahars -- are unforgettable in design and execution.  They make effective villains in a film whose pace drags all the way through, and these beasts seem like an early version of The Dark Crystal’s (1982) Skeksis vultures.

At The Earth’s Core possesses a strong thematic through-line, and this fact helps to pass the time between monster fights. Early in the film, Professor Perry (Cushing) notes with irony that the Sagoth, creatures of limited intelligence, lord it over the far more intelligent humans, and that this is often the case on Earth as well; that aggression overcomes intellect.

Later, David recognizes that that the human tribes must join forces against the Sagoths (and Mahars) under the auspices of cooperation rather than aggression.  Or at the very least, he suggests cooperative aggression: that unity can combine to beat brute strength.  The Sagoth, for all their brutality, are not divided: they are singular in their ruthlessness barbarity, and this single-mindedness grants them power.

Much of the film thus involves David unifying the tribes and bringing the fight successfully to the Mahar City.  In the end, one of the humans notes “For as long as we can recall, our tribes have been divided.  Now, with our newfound friends, we are united.”

The idea, relevant to Burroughs’ time (pre-World War I) and also to the 1970s and the Cold War Era, is that nations as well as people can overcome tyranny through cooperation and alliance.  The same ethos is seen in such World War II era entertainment as Flash Gordon (1936), which involves another fantasy figure uniting disparate human groups on the distant world of Mongo in order to unseat the tyrant Ming.

When At the Earth’s Core follows through on this idea, the film works moderately well, but even so the pace is often very slow.  The film takes a long time and goes through two different giant monster attacks before David and Abner even reach the Mahar City, and are introduced to their opponents.

The film could also use a bit more of the wicked sense of humor revealed by the brilliantly composed final shot, of the Iron Mole coming up through the Earth…onto the grounds of the White House, another realm where David’s brand of cooperation and unity would presumably prove helpful

Despite the deficit in pacing, At the Earth’s Core creates a vivid and colorful fantasy world on its expansive sound-stages.  The “alien” foliage of Pellucidar is bizarre and wild, and the monsters (mostly of the kaiju, monster-in-suit variety) are inventive, if weird.

One scene that involves McClure battling a Mahar pet in a pit also clearly forecasts Return of the Jedi’s (1983) rancor battle in both the specifics of the man vs. monster fight and the orchestration of the fight. And it’s a virtue too that the screenplay doesn’t take the easy route and resolve the David/Dia romance happily.

Instead (and unlike the Burroughs novel…), Dia willingly remains behind in Pellucidar while David leaves, thus expressing the idea that they each individual belongs in their separate worlds.

Doomwatch (1976) * * *

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Ian Bannen (Dr. Shaw); Judy Geeson (Victoria Brown); John Paul (Dr. Quist); Simon Oates (Dr. Ridge); Jean Trend (Dr. Fay Chantry); Joby Blanshard (Bradley); George Sanders (The Admiral); Percy Herbert (Hartwell); Shelagh Fraser (Mrs. Straker); Geoffrey Keen (Sir Henry Leyton); Joseph O’Conor (Vicar); Norman Bird (Brewer); Constance Chapman (Miss Johnson); Michael Brennan (Tom Straker); James Cosmo (Bob Gillette); Cyril Cross (George).

CREW: Tigon British Film Productions presents Doomwatch. Director of Photography: Kenneth Talbot. Original Music: John Scott. Film Editor: Keith Palmer. Produced by: Tony Tenser. Written by: Clive Exton. Based on the series created by: Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis. Directed by: Peter Sasdy. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG.

Story:

A scientist named Dr. Shaw (Bannen) working for the British government department on pollution, called Doomwatch, visits a remote island to investigate the after-effects of a sunken tanker in the region a year earlier.

Except for a recent émigré to the island, a lovely school teacher named Victoria (Geeson), all the villagers are unfriendly and secretive. In fact, some may even be murderous.

As Shaw investigates the village, he finds evidence of a rampant genetic mutation in the population, one involving hideously disfiguring acromegaly.

Shaw and the Doomwatch team trace the contamination first to the British Navy, and then to a company called Doran Chemicals, which has been dumping barrels of a dangerous growth hormone in the waters off the island.

Now Dr. Shaw must convince the locals that they should return with him to the mainland be treated, an eventuality that will destroy the village and its very future.

Review:

Released in America in 1976, but made in 1972, the film Doomwatch is actually based on a British TV series that premiered in 1970.  That series was created by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, the men responsible for the creation of one of Doctor Who’s (1963 – 1989) most famous monsters: the Cybermen.  The series Doomwatch starred John Paul as Dr. Quist, a scientist spearheading a government agency tasked with studying the effects of pollution on the environment, and the human race.

The film version of Doomwatch minimizes Paul’s character, and focuses instead on Ian Bannen’s Dr. Del Shaw, a new character, as he investigates for the Doomwatch department the island of Belf.

In the course of the film, Shaw comes to interface with two conspiracies or cover-ups, one involving corporate malfeasance, and one involving a community overcome with shame at its new, mutated shape.  The material is vetted in dry, humor-less fashion, with straight-faced solemnity, and the results are impressive if dour.  The mystery of the island is involving and grotesque, and the film makes a point about how corporate irresponsibility, when met with human irrationality regarding tradition and social mores, can lead to utter disaster.

Doomwatch feels very much of its time as it is very liberal in its approach to problem solving. A government agency is the heroic force in the film, and the affirmative answer to a planet-wide problem of pollution and environmental damage.   The forces of this government agency identify, diagnose, and resolve the problem in short order, cutting through long-standing regressive and superstitious beliefs to do so.

The last scenes in the film depict a veritable armada of rescue ships arriving at the island to transport the sick people back to London, the literal cavalry riding in to save the day.

An argument could be made that, if people were behind it, a government agency like Doomwatch could do a hell of a lot of good, but the 1970s -- at least post-Watergate -- is more often the era in film that transmits the idea of government malfeasance or negligence. So Doomwatch’s faith in government seems out-of-step.

Early in Doomwatch a teletype announces the creation of the department, and it is supposed to be a great or momentous thing.  Today, the addition of a new program or government department to solve some pressing problem (that likely no one can agree even exists…) is hardly met with fanfare, let alone approbation.

Similarly, there are those will watch Doomwatch’s final act and detect condescension and a strident tone in Del Shaw’s final speech to the natives of Belf, wherein he notes that their condition isn’t a divine judgment from God, but rather the result of environmental poisoning.  He tells them they are going to have to give up their home, their traditions, and their lives as they know them to get well and defeat the illness that has turned them ugly and made many of their number murderous.

Gazing at this speech without passion, it is clear he is right, and that Shaw is using reason, rationality and facts to make his case.

But it is equally clear that he is dealing with irrational creatures, and there will be some who view his prescriptions as the overarching hand of government, which now seeks to redefine how people live, and boasts just the excuse to do so.  I don’t think this latter perspective is rational, necessarily, but it is realistic to believe that some people would rebel against his (smart) advice.

Doomwatch is a film that, like many 1970s pictures about pollution, deals with the idea that “Mother Nature has a way of dealing with” things like the Belf island incident.   It sees the outbreak of aggressive behavior and acromegaly as Mother Nature’s warning sign of something wrong.

The question is: who will heed the call?  In this film, Doomwatch does so, but the last shot of the film -- of barrels leaking contaminated substance into the water -- suggests that though the battle is won, the war may be lost. This final down-note is prophetic, and today, do-gooders like the Doomwatch group are often viewed with suspicion not admiration.

Embryo (1976) * *

Critical Mass:

“…living proof, so-to-speak that the sci-fi genre movie can be highly entertaining if it is given a top-flight cast, good direction, quality photography, and a premise that is not so outrageous it defies belief even on the part of those who want to believe.” – Bill von Maurer, The Miami News, May 31, 1976, page 3B.

“You don’t have to be a sci-fi fan to dig this tautly-paced chiller and it’s especially nice to find a film of this genre that minimizes the fakey hardware…The film is better than hokey advertising.” – Bill Copeland, The Sarasota Journal, June 14, 1976, page 2C

“….a disservice to the sci-fi field and the once strong marquee name, Rock Hudson…an embarrassing updated variation of The Bride of Frankenstein.” – James Robert Parish and Michael R. Pitts, The Great Science Fiction Pictures, 1977, pages 111-112.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Rock Hudson (Dr. Paul Holliston); Diane Ladd (Martha Douglas); Ann Schedeen (Helen); John Elerick (Gordon); Vincent Bagetta (Collier); Jack Colving (Dr. James Winston); Roddy McDowall (Frank Riley); Barbara Carrera (Victoria); Dr. Joyce Brothers (Herself).

CREW: Sandy Howard Productions Presents Rock Hudson in Embryo. Director of Photography: Fred J. Koenekamp. Original Music: Gil Melle. Film Editing: John A. Maritinelli. Production Design: Joseph Alves. Produced by: Anita Doohan and Arnold H. Orgolini. Written by: Anita Doohan and Jack W. Thomas. Directed by: Ralph Nelson. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 97 minutes.

Story:

A widower, Dr. Paul Holliston (Hudson), creates an experimental growth hormone and gives it to a newly-born pup. The dog becomes fully-grown and highly intelligent within one week’s time.

Buoyed by his success, Holliston moves on to human subjects, and with the assistance of a friend at the local hospital, acquires a 14-week-old fetus with no chance of survival.

He injects the fetus with his special “placental lactagen” and the baby begins growing one year per day, every day.  Paul is able to curtail the wildly accelerated growth with an addictive drug called Methotrexate, but now must reckon with a 25-year old woman, Victoria (Carrera) who knows absolutely nothing about the world around her, or her place in it.

First, Paul becomes a father figure to Victoria, but soon he crosses another moral line and becomes her lover.  When Victoria -- a being devoid of any inherent sense of morality -- realizes she is dying, she becomes desperate to acquire what she needs to survive: the pituitary gland of a child.

Review:

Embryo concerns a “medical technology that currently exists for fetal growth outside the womb,” according to its title card, and that fact means that this is yet another film -- much like the works of Michael Crichton throughout the 1970s, including The Terminal Man and Coma -- that concerns medical ethics, and more importantly, the shifting boundary on that subject.

With medical discoveries coming faster and faster in the 1970s, and new possibilities to improve the human condition increasingly within reach, warns Embryo, there are going to be some scientists who take short-cuts, or who tread forward without concern for society’s mores.

Perhaps even more to the point, some of these scientists are so “wounded” on a personal level that they simply have no right trying to create and re-shape life in their own image.

In Embryo, Paul Holliston is just such a man. He feels intense guilt that he was not able to save his own wife (who died in a car accident) and has now tasked himself, essentially, with playing God and saving lives.  He saves a puppy’s life first, but that is not enough for him.  The control he feels when saving a life pushes him over the edge.  He saves a fetus destined to die and when she develops, names her Victoria.

Victoria’s problems as an adult all stem from Paul’s inability to contextualize her as a person and not as an experiment (much like the scenario in The Mind of Mr. Soames). She is there as a sign of his scientific genius and triumph, not as an individual with needs and desires of her own. Paul is able to endow Victoria with life, all right, thanks to his growth hormone, but he is not able to teach her morality.

At one juncture in the film, Paul gives her a Bible to read, but that’s not enough of a counter-balance, especially when compared with Holliston’s misdeeds.

Specifically, Paul makes love to Victoria a woman who is, for all intents and purposes, his child.  This act represents a corruption and abdication of Holliston’s role as father figure, and represents the point in the tale where science becomes sin.  The nature of Paul’s trespass makes Victoria seem less villainous.  Accordingly, the scene in which she sits down on a playground swing and watches young children at play -- thinking about the childhood she never had -- proves haunting.  Even she knows that her life is not quite real, not quite whole.

Embryo succeeds largely on the basis of Carrera’s charisma. Whether noting that the Bible is “illogical,” or performing in an extended nude scene, she proves riveting to watch.  The only question her performance raises is: where did Victoria acquire an accent, since Paul is not burdened with one, and he has been her only human teacher?

Embryo might very well be a forgotten B-movie “science run amok” effort of the 1970s except for the fact that in 2010 it was unofficially re-made as the far superior Splice.  In that film, a male and female scientist team (named Clive and Elsa after actors in Whale’s 1930s Frankenstein cycle) also create life, a not-quite human child called Dren.

When Dren grows up and stops doing what they want her to be, however, the bad parents try to treat her not as a being, not as a child, but much like Victoria: as an experiment that can simply be terminated.

In Splice, the male scientist played by Adrian Brody also ends up having sexual intercourse with Dren, his daughter-figure, in a clear repetition of the corruption we see from Paul’s character in Embryo.

In some sense, Splice is a superior, bigger-budget version of Embryo because it asks audience to meaningfully reckon with what it truly means to a be a parent, even when your child doesn’t turn out how you wish, or isn’t behaving in a way you think he or she should.

Embryo only begins to awkwardly enunciate that metaphor, and is bogged down in silliness and bizarre cameo appearances (from Roddy McDowall and Dr. Joyce Brothers, notably).   Splice gets right what Embryo by and large gets wrong, but Embryo nonetheless deserves some credit for trying to enunciate this story first; of ambition turned to egomania.

.

Rats! Marjoe Gortner gets kicked down the food chain by giant animals in Bert I. Gordon’s Food of the Gods (1976).

Food of the Gods (1976) * * ½

Critical Mass:

“Like all of Gordon's films, the special effects are generally awful though scattered shots in this production are surprisingly effective and well-executed. Unfortunately, Gordon also wrote the screenplay, and it's even worse than the special effects.” – Stuart Galbraith IV, DVD Talk, September 18, 2007.

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Marjoe Gortner (Morgan); Pamela Franklin (Lorna); Ralph Meeker (Bensington); Jon Cypher (Brian); Ida Lupino (Mrs. Skipper); John McLiam (Mr. Skinner); Belinda Balaski (Rita); Torn Stovall (Thomas); Chuck Courtney (Davis); Reg Tunnicliffe (Ferry Attendant).

CREW: American International Pictures and Samuel Z. Arkoff present a Bert I. Gordon film. Director of Photography: Reginald Morris. Original Music: Elliot Kaplan. Film Editor: Corky Ehlers. Executive Producer: Samuel Z. Arkoff. Written by: Bert I. Gordon. Based on a portion of the novel by: H.G. Wells. Produced and directed by: Bert I. Gordon. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 88 minutes.

Story:

A pro-football player, Morgan (Gortner) and two friends spend a weekend in the country and unexpectedly meet up with giant animals in the woods.

After one of his friends his killed, Morgan investigates and finds that a strange substance bubbling out of the ground on the Skinner farm is causing animals such as rats and wasps to grow to enormous, and dangerous proportions.

A selfish businessman, Bensington (Meeker) and his assistant, Lorna (Franklin) also arrive on the farm, and Bensington plans to exploit this “food of the gods” for all it is worth.  But very soon, the farm house comes under siege from a pack of giant -- and very hungry -- rats.

Review:

In 1904, the novel The Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth by H.G. Wells was published.  The book was structured in three parts, but the first part involved a scientist who engineered a special food supplement that could cause those who ate it to grow to colossal size.

This book’s first section explored how the food substance accidentally got to wildlife on the Skinner farm, and thus began to imperil normal society.  Also, in the book some human children received the food of the gods, and became forty-foot tall giants…but ones derided by society at large.  The novel was intended as a social critique as well as a science fiction story.

Bert I. Gordon’s The Food of the Gods differs rather dramatically in tone and intent from its source material.  In the case of the film, the food is a naturally-occurring substance, not man-made, and it appears to have bubbled up from the Earth’s interior in response to man’s mismanagement of the environment.

Gortner’s opening narration puts a fine point on the matter: “This is mother nature’s revenge,” he declares.  Gortner’s Morgan also celebrates the “open spaces man hasn’t ruined with his technology,” further painting a picture of man’s environmental misdeeds.

Mrs. Skinner’s interpretation of the food is not all that different from Morgan’s, oddly enough.  She believes the growth-substance comes not from Mother Nature, but rather “the Lord.” Representing the other side of the question is Ralph Meeker’s character: a businessman who can see only dollar signs when he looks at the food of the gods, not its impact on the world at large.

In ways entertaining, though not particularly nuanced, The Food of the Gods diagrams these different opinions about the “miraculous” food by having this small group of characters, along with a few others, countenance a siege situation.  They become trapped in a farmhouse as rats swarm around everywhere.

The film’s social critique doesn’t fully emerge until the coda, which sees the food of the god survive Morgan’s attempts to destroy it, seep into the water supply, and then get packaged into milk cartons in school cafeterias.

The idea there is simply that when we pollute the Earth, we are ultimately polluting our children and ourselves.  All life on the planet is connected, and if we treat Mother Nature poorly, we’ll reap the whirlwind.  This wicked climax -- featuring innocent little kids slurping down contaminated milk -- is so much nasty fun that it almost redeems the rest of the movie, and earns it a positive review.

Oppositely, The Food of the Gods’ falters almost entirely on the basis of its own story logistics.  Characters die on the island, and there is no real response from authorities.  Morgan leaves the island after some of the animal attacks, and then comes back.  He brings a football buddy, but not the police.

On the same front, no one in the film suggests calling animal control.  It’s a little weird, but I suppose this approach saves money on cast members.

Surprisingly, the special effects in the film are pretty impressive, and hold-up remarkably well. Although some of the giant animals look ridiculous (namely the wasps), the giant rats and giant worms appear in pretty convincing dimensions and shape.  The moment when Mrs. Skinner is attacked by blood-sucking worms is also genuinely disturbing.  And some of the film’s climactic moments with rats swarming over the farmhouse in large numbers are very impressive too.  What also works in the film’s favor is its violence. The animal attacks are so gruesome and downright bloody and that they galvanize the attention, especially when the (potential) victims include a very pregnant woman.

The Food of the Gods has long been considered schlocky, and probably rightly so, but the film features that droll finale, some sharply-visualized attacks, and another 1970s message about being good to the Earth.  There’s enough “food for thought” here to make the film a worthy rental on a seventies movie night.

The arcade of the future: Reporter Tracy Ballard (Blythe Danner; left), and Chuck Browning (Peter Fonda; far right) box with android surrogates in the sequel to Westworld, 1976’s Futureworld.

Futureworld (1976) * *

Critical Mass:

“…a weak kneed sequel to Westworld.” – David N. Brownstone, Film Review Annual, 1978, page 114.

“Slow paced and poorly acted, Futureworld is an awfully rotten original movie and an even worse sequel.” – James Rich, DVD Talk, January 28, 2011.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Peter Fonda (Chuck Browning); Blythe Danner (Tracy Ballard); Arthur Hill (Duffy); Yul Brynner (The Gunslinger); John Ryan (Dr. Schneider); Stuart Margolin (Harry); Allen Ludden (Game Show Host); Robert Cornthwaite (Mr. Reed); Angela Green (Mrs. Reed); Darrell Larson (Eric); Nancy Bell (Erica); Burt Conroy (Mr. Karnovski); Dorothy Konrad (Mrs. Karnovski); John Fujioka (Mr. Takaguchi); Dana Lee (Aide); Alex Rodine (KGB Man). James M. Connor (Clark).

CREW: American International Productions and Aubrey Company present Futureworld. Directors of Photography: Gene Polito, Howard Schwartz.  Original Music: Fred Karlin. Film Editing: James Mitchell. Art Direction: Trevor Williams. Produced by: James T. Aubrey, Paul Lazarus III. Executive Producer: Samuel Z. Arkoff. Written by: Mayo Simon and George Schenck. Directed by: Richard T. Heffron. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 108 minutes.

Story:

Not too long after the violent events at Western World, the Delos board of directors holds a briefing to announce the re-launch of the $1,200-a-day amusement park. The company has committed 1.5 billion dollars to replacing the malfunctioning equipment, and executives claim that the new Delos is "fail safe."

International Media Corporation sends reporter Chuck Browning (Peter Fonda) to investigate the new Delos.  Browning is eager to take the assignment because an informant just recently contacted him about a "big" story at the park and then was found murdered, with news-clippings clutched in his hand.

Tracy Ballard (Blythe Danner) a TV newswoman with an audience of fifty-five million viewers is none-too-pleased that Browning will be tagging along at Delos, but she and Chuck quickly develop a flirtatious and competitive relationship.

Once at Delos, the reporters visit "Futureworld," a new theme park to go alongside Roman World, Medieval World, and the now-defunct Western World.   After their arrival, the reporters board a rocket simulation, visit a space station, spar with robot boxers, and otherwise enjoy the space age sights and sounds of the luxury resort.

A Delos executive named Duffy (Arthur Hill) escorts the duo on a tour of the Delos facility, and Chuck sneaks off to see if he can discover the truth behind the smooth-running facade.

What Chuck and Tracy learn with the help of an employee named Harry (Stuart Margolin) and his android buddy, Clark is that Delos has been producing duplicates of all the big-wig, high-roller visitors, from Russian generals to Iranian oil magnates.

Ballard and Browning themselves are to be duplicated by the robots, who believe that "the human being is a very unstable, irrational, violent animal" and that mankind will destroy the Earth "before the end of the decade."

Before escaping Delos, Tracy must face down a robot double of herself in the abandoned Westworld, while Chuck battles his own malevolent doppelganger in Futureworld....

Review:

A key character in Futureworld (1976) informs another character that the problem at Delos -- the amusement park of the future -- is "the memory" of the nightmarish events that occurred in Western World, or for viewer purposes, the harrowing events of the great sci-fi movie Westworld (1973).

The very same problem might be ascribed to this less-than-satisfactory cinematic sequel directed by Richard T. Heffron and starring Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner.

In short, it just doesn't live up to the original, action-packed experience of Westworld.

Though it is rewarding and ambitious that this AIP-sponsored, Samuel Z. Arkoff sequel heads off into new story territory rather than aping the formula or plot-line of the previous film, Futureworld still suffers dramatically from a lack of forward momentum, and a slow-moving, obvious narrative.

It takes this movie roughly 83 minutes to get to the plot point that audiences have already reached much sooner, and that is that the robots at Delos have taken over the park, and are producing robot duplicates of world leaders and opinion makers.

Since the two lead actors in the film are playing ace newspaper and TV reporters, one might expect them to put two and two together a lot sooner than they actually do.   But no, they can't even detect a robot close-up, face-to-face in the Delos mission control room.

Not exactly Woodward and Bernstein, this Browning (Fonda) and Ballard (Danner).

Worse, Futureworld spends an inordinate amount of the film's running time in the underground bowels of Delos, apparently really the Intercontinental Airport in Huston.  Whatever the precise location, it looks like an endless, oversized boiler room, and after a while all the scenes set there look interchangeable and play as deadly dull.

The most interesting aspect of the film may its relation to real-life events. Coming soon after the Watergate scandal and Nixon's resignation, this movie headlines two "hero journalists" -- again, think Woodward and Bernstein -- as they uncover a far-reaching conspiracy and essentially save the world as we know it.

In other words, this movie comes from an age in which we had respected journalists (not the "lamestream" media), and believed that these truth-seekers could successfully stand-up to City Hall.

The other cultural or historical context at work here involves the sexual slavery of robots, a factor we see here, in Westworld (1973) and in The Stepford Wives (1975).

In the mid-1970s, women were stepping out of so-called "traditional roles" and countenancing more economic and reproductive freedom than in any decade before.  The reaction by men -- if genre movies are any guidepost --seemed to be downright fear.   Without women to lord it over, I guess, human robots were considered next in line for domestic servitude.  After all, machines follow orders, don't step outside of their programming, and can fake orgasms brilliantly if Stepford Wives is any indication.

Ironically, one fact that so dramatically undercuts Futureworld is the writing of the lead female character, Tracy Ballard.  This is a dedicated woman who has risen to the top of her profession (think Barbara Walters in the 1970s) and who commands a vast worldwide audience.  And yet Ballard spends most of the film as an arm ornament for Peter Fonda, alternately poo-pooing his theories or screaming in terror at the robots.  Ballard initiates no investigation on her own, and shows not the slightest bit of interest or curiosity in learning the truth about Delos. Lois Lane, she ain't.

Despite the changes in women’ roles happening in America at the time, what we really have in the Tracy Ballard character is a good old fashioned damsel-in-distress, dressed up in disco-decade, women's lib clothing.   Ultimately, she's kind of laughable, and almost wholly incidental to the narrative.

That's not Futureworld's only letdown either.  Late in the film, robot duplicates of Chuck and Tracy are produced, and sent out to hunt down "the originals."  All throughout the film, the robots of Delos have been portrayed as unemotional creatures that obey their orders and programming, but have no overt "human" countenance.  Well, wouldn't you know it, Fonda and Danner both play these robot duplicates as devilish, sinister characters, who seem to take tremendous, sadistic pleasure in destroying their human models.

Why are these robots -- all of the sudden -- out-and-out evil?  Aren't they just fulfilling their programming?  Even when The Gunslinger went on a rampage in Westworld, he wasn't cackling with malevolent glee.  That's what made him scary: he was an implacable foe with a neutral countenance.  We were able to project our human fears upon his relatively blank visage, but he was no two-dimensional moustache-twirler.

Another major scene in Futureworld is simply baffling.  Duffy escorts Ballard to a "dream chamber" where she can go to sleep and Browning can watch her dreams unfold on a video monitor that resembles Spock's library computer on Star Trek.  Almost immediately, Ballard dreams of the Gunslinger (Yul Brynner) from Westworld, but not as a terrifying predator or foe, but rather as a "fantasy lover."

In the dream, the Gunslinger appears out of nowhere and rescues Ballard from doctors in red-jumpsuits who are pursuing her.  The Gunslinger shoots them down, and then lassos Ballard in slow-motion...and beds her.

So, why is Tracy Ballard -- TV newswoman extraordinaire -- dreaming of the Delos Gunslinger as a fantasy lover?

Not a single word in the screenplay indicates she even has specific knowledge of the rogue robot cowboy.  But assuming she did have such knowledge, why would Ballard's dreaming mind spontaneously turn the murderous Gunslinger into a fantasy sex partner?  This entire, incongruous scene feels like an excuse to shoehorn Brynner and his beloved, iconic character into the proceedings.  It's a bizarre and confusing interlude, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the film.   The moment wherein Brynner lassos Danner with an animated pink lasso is just...well, embarrassing.

Unlike Westworld, which moved effectively with drive and purpose, humor and thrills, Futureworld meanders around for about an hour-and-a-half minutes, and then spends the last fifteen minutes tying up loose ends.  There's almost no real tension involved since Delos employees allow Browning and Ballard to look around, and the 400 robot series is programmed to ignore visitors in their midst.

It is also highly unfortunate that Futureworld wastes so much time in the bowels of the amusement park rather than exploring the Futureworld setting.  This is a place of "space safaris," holographic chess (presaging Star Wars by two years...) and skiing on the "ice slopes of Mars."  Wouldn't you rather see some of that cool stuff, instead of endless boiler rooms?

But the trenchant point here concerns fantasy and the fantasy experience.  Westworld was about living in a fantasy world of violence and sex, and discovering it isn't such a fantasy after all.  The film didn't hammer you over the head with that theme.  Rather, it had a nice, droll sense of humor about the whole thing. Futureworld ignores this conceit entirely in favor of its very dry conspiracy about lookalike robots...and boiler rooms.

Or as Tracy Ballard declares at one point in this interminable movie, walking through yet another industrial-looking chamber, "This is about as exciting as a visit to the waterworks."

Godzilla gives his nemesis, Megalon, a great big bear-hug of death in Godzilla vs. Megalon (1976).

Godzilla vs. Megalon (1976) * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“…universally regarded as the worst of all Godzilla movies, reducing the monster to a punch-drunk do-gooder with a cute puppy-dog face and a penchant for ridiculous fighting tactics and stunts, and pitting him, perhaps, against the worst-designed monster in Toho history…” – Steve Ryfle, Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star: The Unauthorized Biography of the Big “G,” ECW Press, 1998, page 181.

“…the dregs of the Godzilla series…” – Blockbuster Entertainment Guide to Movies and Videos, 1997, page 454.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Katsuhiko Sasaki (Goro Ibuki); Hiroyuki Kawase (Rokuro Ibuki); Yukata Hayashi (Hiroshi Jinkaway); Robert Dunham (Emperor Antonio of Seatopia); Kotaro Tomita, Ulf Otsuki (Seatopian Operatives);

CREW: Toho Studios Presents Godzilla vs. Megalon. Director of Photography: Yuzuru Aizawa. Original Music by: Riichiro Manabe. Film Editing: Michiko Ikeda. Production Design: Yoshifumi Honda. Produced by: Tomoyuki Tanaka. Written by: Jun Fukuda. Story by: Takeshima Kimura, Shinichi Sekizawa. Directed by: Jun Fukuda. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 78 minutes.

Story:

The underwater kingdom of Seatopia sends a giant monster, Megalon, to destroy the surface world that has been conducting dangerous nuclear tests for years, and therefore threatened the Earth.

A scientist, Goro (Sasaki) and his young nephew, Rokuro (Kawase), meanwhile, test a new robot called Jet Jaguar that becomes of great importance to the Seatopians and Megalon.

Realizing that their robot can help save the world, Goro and Rokuro summon Jaguar to call on the help of Godzilla, now living on Monster Island.

Meanwhile, the Seatopians also call for reinforcements, and tag the monstrous Gigan to help Megalon defeat the giant Godzilla.

With the survival of Tokyo and the world hanging in the balance, Jet Jaguar grows to enormous size to team up with Godzilla.

Review:

Although it was produced in 1973, Godzilla vs. Megalon was not released in the United States until 1976, the year of King Kong’s return to the silver screen.  Accordingly, this Japanese monster mash was a huge success in America, in part due to the evocative and colorful poster (aping Kong’s….) which showed Godzilla and Megalon standing on the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.

Unfortunately, this is not one of Godzilla’s finer cinematic outings despite the premise of a great villain in the giant, bug-headed, drill-handed menace known as Megalon.

In part, the film fails because Godzilla does not even appear until late in the action, and seems to be an after-thought in the narrative.  Instead, the film functions largely as origin story for the unknown and new hero: Jet Jaguar, a robot with the baffling ability to grow to Godzilla-esque proportions. How on Earth (or Seatopia for that matter) is his metal so flexible that it can stretch to giant size and then retract to human size?

Alas, even putting aside such question of logic, Jet Jaguar -- a kind of poor man’s Ultraman -- just can’t carry the story, or make up for Godzilla’s frequent absence.

Elsewhere in this text (in the review for Godzilla vs. Hedorah) I noted that the 1970s Godzilla films are like James Bond films with big monsters. If that’s the case, James Bond hardly shows up in this one, and he’s missed.

Godzilla vs. Megalon is not bereft of good ideas, to be certain.  Though barely enunciated, there’s a critique here about nuclear arms that fits in with the franchise’s noble tradition of questioning atomic power and its use.

Here, the Seatopians send Megalon to the surface because of the nuclear testing performed by the nations of the world.  The Seatopians’ final solution to a world risking destruction…is to destroy that world.  Thus, they attempt to wring peace out of war, a metaphor very clear in the Vietnam Era of “You have to destroy the village to save it.”

Still, this message does not transmit nearly as powerfully as the anti-pollution message of the superior Hedorah.

In the final analysis, the film looks like a pilot for a Jet Jaguar series, with Godzilla coming in for a cameo tag team, and that fact doesn’t do the big green dragon any favors.  People go to see Godzilla movies for Godzilla, and in some critical sense, Godzilla vs. Megalon breaks that contract with the audience with its bait and switch strategy.

The giant ape King Kong scales the World Trade Center in the 1976 remake of King Kong.

King Kong (1976) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“…not so much bad as unnecessary. Every once in a while, you are hit with the feeling that this could have been one helluva picture and then you remember it already has been.” – Kenneth Turan, Progressive, March 1977, page 52.

“Even though the later King Kong fell short of the mythic quality of the original, its superior special effects were evident in the more realistic movements of the giant ape in comparison to the jerky stop-motion cinematography of the original.” – Willy Lee Umphlette, From Television to The Internet: Post-Modern Visions of American Media, Associated University Press, 2006, page 133.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Jeff Bridges (Jack Prescott); Charles Grodin (Fred Wilson); Jessica Lange (Dwan); John Randolph (Captain Ross); Rene Auberjonois (Roy Bagley); Julius Harris (Boan); Jack O’Halloran (Joe Perko); Dennis Fimple (Sunfish); Ed Lauter (Carnahan); Jorge Moreno (Garcia); Mario Gallo (Timmons); John Lone (Chinese cook); John Agar (Mayer); Rick Baker (King Kong).

CREW: Dino De Laurentiis and Paramount Pictures present King Kong. Director of Photography: Richard H. Kline. Original Music: John Barry. Film Editing: Ralph E. Winters.  Production Design: Mario Chiari, Dale Hennesy. Produced by: Dino De Laurentiis. Executive Producers: Federico DeLaurentiis, Christian Ferry. Written by: Lorenzo Semple, Jr. Based on the story by: Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace. Directed by: John Guillermin. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 180 minutes.

Story:

In Surabaya, a primate researcher Jack Prescott (Bridges) stows away aboard the Petrox Explorer, which soon sets sail for the unknown.  As Fred Wilson, an executive for Petrox Oil explains to the crew in a top secret briefing, he has discovered hidden in the Pacific what he believes is an uninhabited island cloaked beneath a perpetual fogbank.  Satellite footage suggests the island could prove a rich source of oil. Since the world is undergoing an energy crisis, this “gusher” could save Petrox and make Fred a very rich man.

After Jack is discovered aboard, he is made to “pay his way” by serving as the expedition’s official photographer.  Soon, the Petrox Explorer rescues another surprise resident: the gorgeous would-be movie star, Dwan (Jessica Lange), who alone has survived an explosion on a yacht.  Jack and Dwan begin to fall in love as the Petrox Explorer nears its mysterious destination.

Upon reaching the island, Jack, Fred and Dwan learn that it is indeed inhabited.  The natives who dwell there cower behind a huge wall in fear of a God called Kong, in actuality a colossal gorilla.  By night, Dwan is abducted by the natives and made-up as a bride for Kong.  But as Dwan soon learns, the giant gorilla is not a dangerous enemy, but rather a courageous and steadfast protector.

The Petrox Explorer sends out an expedition to rescue Dwan from Kong even as Fred learns that there is no gusher on the island…no oil.  So as to spare his professional reputation and save his job, Wilson decides to capture Kong and bring him back to civilization as a “commercial” for Petrox.

After Kong is captured and returned to New York City, the regal ape breaks free, causing chaos in Manhattan.

Finding Dwan again, Kong carries her to the top of the World Trade Center.  Before long, helicopters armed with machine guns close in for the kill.

Review:

King Kong (1976) is a widely-unheralded and yet very effective, very “seventies” spin on a beloved fantasy film. The remake explicitly concerns the Energy Crisis of the 1970s, particularly the 1973 Oil Crisis, which happened when OPEC slashed oil production by five percent, and then increased prices on the order of seventy percent.  The Arab organization utilized this “oil weapon” to protest the U.S.’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

At home, American consumers were urged in slogans not to be “fuelish” about consumption, and to conserve gas until the embargo ended.  The OPEC incident revealed to many Americans the difficulty of energy independence and the precariousness of modern, mobile life.

The “new” King Kong of 1976 speaks deliberately in the language of this Energy Crisis, and contextualizes the giant ape not as a respite from modernity’s boredom (as he was in the 1933 original), but rather as a natural resource that can be tapped, and then bled dry.

King Kong is quite explicitly about the necessity of finding more sources of petroleum if America is to sustain its seventies life-style, and the mighty Kong himself stands in -- quite literally in one case -- for gasoline; for a precious and exploitable natural resource.

In that specific scene, Kong is rolled out before an eager American audience for an unveiling ceremony in Manhattan. He is surrounded by American flags, and ensconced inside a giant Petrox gas tank.  Essentially, the audience stands in awe of a giant container of gasoline, the very life-line to its twentieth century life-style of leisure and consumption.  That’s the “monster” before them.

Furthering the Energy Crisis symbolism, Kong is transported to America against his will inside the vast cargo hold of an oil super tanker, a fact which again visually equates the ape with petroleum, a valuable resource taken from a foreign locale and made to serve American interests.

In the original film, Kong was “the eighth wonder of the world,” an amazing spectacle captured to relieve the anxiety of a people enmeshed in an economic depression, but in the 1976 remake, Kong is literally a mascot, a “commercial” (in the words of the script) for an oil company hoping to beat its corporate competition to larger profits.  At one point, a literal comparison is made between Kong and the famous 1970s Exxon campaign “put a tiger in your tank.”

This “Kong-as-natural resource” angle suffuses virtually every aspect of the much-derided remake.  Wilson is described aptly in the film as an “environmental rapist,” and Prescott worries about what will happen to the island culture once it is bereft of the “energy” -- in this case creative and spiritual energy -- that Kong’s presence provided it.

In other words, Kong is “the juice” that powers every aspect of the islanders’ lives, from organized religion to national security.  When Kong is taken from them….does their culture simply die? What does it run on in his absence?

Once more, one must think of oil producing nations such as Saudi Arabia or Iraq. How do those countries survive once their primary resource, oil, dissipates?

As Richard Eder wrote in The New York Times  “the impulse to explore, to discover, to bring back something that you’ve discovered - [that which we found in the first King Kong] is now replaced by simple greed – the greed of the oil company representative Fred Wilson, to find a gusher.”

In the same vein, the film is veritably loaded with references to Gulf, Shell and Exxon.  And Skull Island itself is termed in dialogue a “huge tank just waiting for us to twist the top off.”  The idea expressed, then is that of out-of-control oil companies that travel anywhere in the world, claim natural resources as their own property, and finally destroy the natural beauty and even the people of those terrains.

The excuse?  “There’s a national energy crisis!,” as Wilson says.  Our need to sustain our lifestyle validates our decision to take and use the oil.

Going further, the decision for Kong to climb the World Trade Center -- a representation of western economic and global powers -- is highly symbolic too.  As Time Magazine noted, the film might be seen as a "projection of Western fears of what might happen if the Third World should develop its potential power and fight back.”  Proving the magazine too true, real life echoed the film in a weird and unsettling way.  In 2001, Islamic terrorists -- mostly from oil producing Saudi Arabia -- made the World Trade Center their primary target, much as Kong makes it his focus in this 1976 film.

In Dino De Laurentiis’s King Kong, Dwan also fits into the overarching leitmotif about exploitation. She is an aspiring actress who desires to be famous.  Her experience on Skull Island with Kong is her ticket to fame, and she realizes it.  Dwan becomes seduced by the possibility of being a “star” and so betrays Kong, the beast who protected her and sheltered her in a dangerous jungle.

By contrast, Prescott possesses the wherewithal to detect Wilson’s exploitation of Kong, and terms the whole affair a “grotesque farce.”  But Dwan can’t see or acknowledge the truth fully because she is obsessed with herself, and with fame.

This idea is nimbly knitted into the oft-criticized screenplay by Lorenzo Semple, Jr.  Early on, the audience learns that the character changed her name from Dawn to Dwan in order to make it “more memorable,” a sign of the character’s aspiration to be a celebrity. And when Kong is captured, and feeling morose about his captivity, Dwan tells the great beast not to worry, that he’s “going to America to be a star.”

This line intimates that for Dwan, fame is the highest achievement in our culture.

Finally, Dwan can’t risk rebelling against Fred’s wishes for her, or else, as Wilson says, “I promise you'll never get another booking in your life. You'll end up tap-dancing at Rotary clubs.”

This threat of public obscurity keeps Dwan obedient as a participant in the “grotesque farce.”  Dwan rarely asks if Kong’s imprisonment and loss of freedom is an acceptable price for her media super stardom.

This aspect of character and theme is clearly enunciated in the finale set at the foot of the Trade Centers. Kong is dead and Dwan stands before the cameras at his side, playing up her sadness and tears for maximum press impact.  Prescott attempts to approach Dwan through the crowd of photographers, to rescue her from the paparazzi (just as Kong did earlier, at his unveiling in Manhattan).

But then Jack stops short.  He freezes. A dark expression crosses his face as he recognizes that Dwan is exactly where she wants to be: at the center of attention. She has used King Kong to become a star, even if that means Kong had to die.

The blocking and reaction shot from Bridges here represent a visual method of establishing a philosophical line of dialogue from the original film, but one not included in the remake. That famous line went “It was not the planes” (or helicopters in this case) “that killed Kong.  It was Beauty who killed the Beast.”  Here, the comment is apt, because Dwan’s lust for fame is indeed the thing that killed the Great Kong.

As the scene continues, the photographers grow so aggressive that even the attention-hungry Dwan looks legitimately disturbed and menaced by their pushy actions.  But now both of her dedicated protectors, Kong and Prescott, are gone.  As flash bulbs explode all around her, Dwan looks dismayed, but the implication is clear:  This is the bed she made for herself, and now she must sleep in it. Thus the audience leaves King Kong on a deliberately dark and cynical note. For Dwan, it’s “be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.”  For Jack, it's his realization that even the death of Kong is a “resource” to be exploited to further fame and fortune.

All this material is handled in a clever, sometimes humorous fashion, and King Kong is also splendidly shot.  Many of the scenes set on Skull Island (really Hawaii) are breathtaking in scope and composition, and many of the special effects hold up really well, at least until the botched finale on the Twin Towers.

The film is often termed a “bomb” by those who were fans of the original, but this King Kong made a huge profit, and in fact added a key element to the myth’s lore. In the original King Kong, Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) had no real affection for Kong.  She screamed herself hoarse, and never had a “relationship” with him.  This King Kong is the first iteration of the legend to add that element; that Kong’s bride -- whatever her flaws or plans -- boasts some affection and conflicted emotions about the giant beast.

When Peter Jackson remade King Kong in 2005, he imported this element of Kong’s story into his film, even though it was presumably a remake of the 1933 effort, not the 1976 one.

Some critics and fans also complained about this King Kong because it featured not the stop-motion effects of the original, but Rick Baker in an ape suit.

Again, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Many of the special effects in King Kong still hold up.  This is especially true of those featured in the first half of the picture.  One scene, which depicts King Kong giving Dwan a bath in a waterfall, is downright lyrical.  The special effects may not be stop-motion, but they get the job done, and done well.

Renew! Renew! The ritual of Carousel is practiced on “Last Day” in Logan’s Run (1976).

Logan’s Run (1976) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“…has some great scenes.  The carousel segments are peculiarly powerful. An ice cave where “food” is stored and a robot called “Box” reigns is wonderfully grotesque. Best of all, Peter Ustinov as an old man…is a superb creation, a wonderful touch of humanity.” – Paul Bunning, The Spokesman Review, June 25, 1976, page 20.

“…the audience embarks on a fabulous '70s quest through a delirious world of jumpsuits, psychedelic special effects, and enormous sets that look like Disney's Epcot Center. Sadly, the film is too bloated to deliver any thrills beyond its future-schlock art design, and it is damning evidence of the movie's shoddiness that Michael Bay would subsequently use it as a blueprint for his 2005 snoozer, "The Island." – Grady Hendrix, The New York Sun, November 27, 2007.

“…specifically indicts some of the social trends of 1970s America. The hedonistic domed cities are but the “anything goes” ethos of the Me Generation taken to extreme. Furthermore, the world of Logan’s Run is a prophetic metaphor for the Internet, online dating – and reality-TV addicted 21st century wherein instant consumption and instant gratification has become the only value and belief system.” – Barna William Donovan, Conspiracy Films, McFarland, 2011, page 92.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Michael York (Logan 5); Richard Jordan (Francis 7); Jenny Agutter (Jessica); Roscoe Lee Browne (Box); Farrah Fawcett Majors (Holly); Michael J. Anderson (Doc); Peter Ustinov (Old Man); Gary Morgan (Billy); Lara Lindsay (Runner); David Westberg (Sandman); Gregg Lewis (Cub).

CREW: MGM presents Logan’s Run. Director of Photography: Ernest Laszlo. Original Music: Jerry Goldsmith. Film Editor: Bob Wyman. Production Designer: Dale Hennessy. Produced by: Saul David. Based on the novel Logan’s Run by: William F. Nolan, George Clayton Johnson. Written by: David Zelag Goodman. Directed by: Michael Anderson. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 119 minutes.

Story:

In the 23rd century, the survivors of a nuclear war live inside The City of Domes, a paradise of plenty. The world is a hedonist’s delight with the Love Shop and other pleasures, but the metropolis is not without a downside.  Every citizen must die at age 30, and hope for “renewal” rests in a state-sponsored ritual called Carousel that keeps the civilization perfectly balanced.  Policing this edict are a cadre of armed law enforcement officials, the Sandmen.

One such Sandman, Logan 5 (Michael York) is tasked by the city’s controlling Computer with determining if the destination of refugees, called Sanctuary, is real.  Logan enlists the help of a young woman, Jessica (Agutter) in escaping the city, but is tagged as a “runner” and hunted by his former partner, Francis (Jordan).

When Logan and Jessica manage to escape the city, first they find a malevolent robot, Box (Browne) gathering foodstuffs for the City, and later see the outside world for the first time.

In the ruins of Washington D.C., Logan and Jessica meet an Old Man (Ustinov) who proves that the edict of “death at 30” is not natural.

Review:

In many ways, the bicentennial-release Logan's Run serves as a critical "bridge" production of the turbulent disco-decade: blending the dystopian qualities of such film predecessors as Soylent Green (1973) and Planet of the Apes (1968), with the elaborate, expensive visual effects and action-adventure aspects of the Star Wars (1977) epoch.

Logan's Run is based on the William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson novel of the same name, which was first published in 1967. The novel depicted a bizarre world set post-"Little War," in which the ascendant youth society of the turbulent late 1960s (think student demonstrations and sit-ins) had grown to become the globe's dominant social force.

In an attempt to stave off overpopulation, starvation, and poverty, a new society of the young was forged in which the mandatory age of death was 21 years of age. It was "never trust anyone over thirty" (or 21 here...) made literal as a governing philosophy.

Citizens of this New World Order had "palm flowers" embedded in their hands which displayed their age and their chronological proximity to "Last Day." On said "Last Day" (their 21st birthday...) they would willingly report for mandatory termination at a local Sleep Shop. Those who didn't choose death could illicitly "run" instead, seeking escape through an underground railroad, in search of a place called "Sanctuary."

Policing the populace and destroying these rebellious runners was the bailiwick of a young, fascist military force called "Sandmen."

In the book, a dedicated Sandman named Logan 3 teamed with a female runner named Jessica to locate Sanctuary, but he was secretly a double-agent for the government, tasked with the destruction of Sanctuary. Logan was pursued on his "run" by a Sandman friend named Francis, who also boasted a secret identity...as Ballard, an ally of runners and the man who knew where Sanctuary was actually located. In the book, Sanctuary was but a rocket trip away, on Mars...

Many aspects of Nolan and Johnson's brilliant novel were significantly altered for the blockbuster film, which earned over fifty million dollars on a cost of less than ten million.  Specifically, Michael York's Logan 5 (not Logan 3) was the hero of the silver screen version, and his Sandman comrade, Francis (Richard Jordan), became a dogged enemy and Agent of the State instead of a secret aide to the Runners.

Also, the Sleep Shops (actually seen in Soylent Green....) were replaced with the bizarre but impressive public spectacle of Carousel, a festival in which those aged thirty (not twenty-one) would be blown up before the eyes of excited crowds who believed that the doomed were actually being "renewed," or miraculously reincarnated.

The general background setting was altered for the film too. In Logan's Run the movie a nuclear war rather than a "Little War" precipitated the creation of the City of Domes, meaning that the world outside the City was almost entirely destroyed....post-apocalyptic rather than merely futuristic.

Perhaps the most significant change in the movie was that there was no real Sanctuary...no place of safety and peace for the runners. Instead, Sanctuary was a myth, a fairy tale.

Despite such radical changes from the source material, Logan's Run thrives as a worthwhile and exciting science-fiction artifact of the 1970s for quite a few reasons. The one-of-a-kind disco-era visualizations and tenor of Logan's Run – namely the aura of “anything goes” hedonism -- continue to ably support the film’s didactic narrative. The glittering, sexy-but-shallow production design, abundantly rich in neon and mini-skirts, suggests youth and sexuality, even today.

But perhaps the finest aspect of Logan's Run is indeed the film's capacity to build in the viewer's imagination a believable and frightening future dystopia. The City of Domes and its byzantine laws and practices fit the very definition of an authoritarian or totalitarian state. Let's gaze a little at what the pieces of that definition are, and how Logan's Run successfully conforms to them.

First, according to one definition, a totalitarian state "creates myths, catechisms, cults, festivities and rituals" designed to "commemorate" the State. The central myth of the City of Domes, of course, is "Renewal," the State-supported lie which promises immortality. Upon death, the souls of the fallen (those who attend Carousel) will transmigrate to new, young bodies. This lie is reinforced by the numbering system employed to "name" individual citizens (Logan 5, Jessica 6, Francis 7, etc.) These numbers, which replace last names in this future society, explicitly indicate the march of generations; that a new baby is actually a "new" version of a person who has already existed, "died" and "renewed." The numbers are also totally de-humanizing. Humans become merely one numeral in a vast indistinguishable line.

The Carousel "festival" -- a state-sponsored celebration of "Last Day" -- is attended by all citizens of the City of Domes, and is essentially the equivalent of, for example, a contemporary NASCAR race, only government run. The people down on the track or field (those who are ostensibly to be renewed...) circle around and around, and many of them "wreck" before our eyes, blown apart by a ceiling-mounted laser device that resembles a crystal. Spectators watch and cheer for Carousel participants to "renew," but what they are really cheering for is the violent, explosive deaths of friends and fellow citizens.

The State has thus transformed a mandatory death sentence into the very "ritual" or "festival" inherent in the tradition of totalitarianism, one that actually reinforces (or "commemorates" as the definition goes), the Law of the State: mandatory death at 30.

Economically, this ritual of Carousel combines the "bread and circuses" aspect of Rome's gladiator games -- satisfying the blood lust of the crowd -- with a "spiritual" or "religious" church function: the honoring of the dead (or dying); the belief in transmigration or reincarnation.

This ritual of Carousel is also supported by a State-created and encouraged catechism, an education in the faith meant to indoctrinate the people, here termed in short-had, "One for One." In the film, we witness Logan and Francis debate the dogma/doctrine of "One for One." Francis accepts it blindly (by simply repeating it mindlessly) while Logan questions it...the first sign of his independent streak. This easy-to-remember phrase means -- in simple terms -- that one person dies/one person renews. It's the seamless, simple transmigration of the soul or spirit from the dead to the living. From Logan 4 to Logan 5. From Francis 5 to Francis 6. It's so simple that there can be no denying it. The repetition of the “one for one” mantra is essentially programming through mnemonic: a phrase/teaching/sound-byte repeated so often and so widely that it is accepted blindly for "truth." The idea of "One for One" (and catechism) is part and parcel of entrenched absolutism or totalitarianism because it is emblematic of a "cliché-ridden language whose formulaic utterances are designed to impede ambivalence, nuance and complexity."

People don't die in the City of Domes, they "renew" (as if they are just TV programs, not living human beings.)

The light on your palm which signals your death is not a "death clock" but, tellingly, a "life-clock."

Sandmen don't kill. No, they never kill, according to Logan. They simply "terminate" Runners.

And Runners are like "Terrorists" aren't they?

Additionally, the day of a citizen’s death isn't called "Death Day or "Execution Day," but known by the pleasant euphemism Last Day.

This is precisely how Orwell's double-speak, jargon and euphemisms operates. We Americans know the catechism more aptly as "Stay the course," "As they stand up, we'll stand down," "We're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here," "Shock and Awe," "Mission Accomplished," "The New Way Forward," etc.

These phrases are widely disseminated simplifications designed exclusively to impede questioning; to preserve and nurture an authoritarian regime and agenda.

A totalitarian state is also defined as one with a "culture of military solidarity" in which "the pursuit and elimination" of Enemies of the State has become a primary purpose.

Again, it's easy to detect how Logan's Run fits this aspect of the definition of totalitarianism. In general, the Sandmen lord it over the non-military personnel of the City of Domes, as Francis specifically does when an innocent civilian bumps into him at Arcade.

Furthermore, according to City of Domes-style catechism, the Sandmen (the military of this State) are elevated above other citizens in matters of transmigration too. "Sandmen Always Renew," the catechism goes.

The enemies of the state are termed "Runners," but they are those, simply, who question the status quo and consequently opt out of Carousel, attempting to live longer than their allotted thirty years. The Sandmen are in place to destroy the Runners and prevent all knowledge of "Sanctuary" from the distracted populace. Runners can't be imprisoned because such incarceration would imbalance the population control system.  They must be "terminated" on sight. And again, the State employs euphemisms like terminate (instead of "kill") to make the act more palatable.

When a runner dies, the corpse is melted down by strange hovering, futuristic machines, but this gory act is euphemistically termed "cleaning up." If people were to see the destroyed human body and count it as such they might begin to question the government's simplifications and slogans, not to mention the status quo.

Logan's Run succeeds as a film in no small part because of the carefully designed and constructed totalitarian state that our protagonists, Logan and Jessica flee. This world -- run by an unfeeling computer -- is so inhuman, so callous, that it does not even permit mothers and fathers to raise children. No, families create a sense of personal loyalty outside of loyalty to government, and that cannot be tolerated in a totalitarian state.

A good villain goes a long way towards making an effective movie, and in Logan's Run there is a great one: a 23rd century Big Brother ordering mandatory executions and destroying humanity's spirit.

Note too, that like many real life dictatorships, the City of Domes is carefully erected on lies and deceit. Inherent in the system of the City is the belief that one does not need to work or produce.  Its people are occupied entirely with leisure. This lie is laid bare when Logan visits the outer workings of the city and finds that a mad robot called "Box" has frozen the 1,056 unaccounted for runners to be used as food for the city goers. Box ran out of plankton and animals some time ago, and now has resorted to capturing and storing unlucky humans in stasis. So the City of Domes is actually feeding on itself to survive. The self-sufficient system (which demands death at 30) is not so self-sufficient after all. Rather, it is cannibalizing itself.

Yet if the City of Domes is a cage for its people, it's rather definitively a gilded cage. The people who dwell there, according to the film's opening card "live only for pleasure." And that's another core aspect of the Totalitarian/Absolute State: distraction.

The government wants your mind on "other things," not the government, not the way things are.  One way to avoid politics and matters of national import is to focus on materialism, on owning things, or in the vernacular: shopping.  Well, the people of the City of Domes have been told to go shopping in perpetuity. Their beautiful City is actually a colossal shopping mall, and the film was, in fact, shot in a shopping mall in Fort Worth, Texas. This Arcade offers every manner of distraction and entertainment imaginable. So if you're feeling vain, why not head over to the New You Shop, where you can get a quickie face lift (or tummy tuck) and come out looking absolutely fabulous? If you hurry, you can make your work-out at the gym this afternoon too (as Logan and Francis do during one critical scene...). And if you seek companionship, head over to another part of the mall: the Love Shop -- the 23rd Century equivalent of Studio 54. There you can take legal (and safe!) mood-altering drugs called "lifts" (think Prozac or Xanax). Then, you can have casual sex with gorgeous strangers (all under 30!). If you want to stay in your deluxe Sandman apartment tonight instead (conveniently located right off the mall's promenade...), Logan's Run even offers the 23rd century corollary to our Internet Porn: the so called computer "circuit" which materializes sexual partners (male or female), right at your doorstep.

What does all this mean? Well, clearly the City of Domes is consumed with youth, beauty, sex, and hedonism. Again, this is a pointed reflection of our culture in the 1970s.

Logan's Run's climactic antidote to dystopia may be naive, however, especially today. The film espouses, among other things a renewal of the natural order: a return to the re-born outside world, and a prescribed departure from computers, climate-controlled shopping-malls and 24-hour-a-day leisure.

Alas, that's a genie you can put back in the bottle easily. Although Logan literally sees the "light of day" when he leaves the City of Domes -- his first vision of the natural world is an apricot-colored sunrise -- it is not until he encounters The Old Man (Peter Ustinov) that the pieces of a re-born future start to come together. In the end, the message of Logan's Run is that with age comes wisdom, but - heck! - "older" leaders were the ones the original youngsters of the City of Domes inherited the messed-up Earth from in the first place.

One thing is for certain: Logan's Run favors humanity over machines.

When faced with the reality that Sanctuary is but a fairy tale, Logan and the humans go on to (hopefully) construct a better society, a new "Sanctuary" where death is not mandatory at 30. By contrast, the Computer that runs the City of Domes is not able to conceive of such a silly ideal -- a fantasy utopia and paradise -- and it goes haywire in response; short-circuited. Once again, we see imagination as a critical human quality; but it is a heritage that Logan's people have largely neglected for hedonism. It takes the odyssey outside by Logan and the return visit to the City by the Old Man to rekindle it.

Those who watch Logan's Run and deride it as cheesy or outdated have missed the point. Perhaps they have not gazed deeply enough at the world it so confidently creates. The film -- for all its silliness and outdated special effects -- reveals what might happen to a society that finally turns irrevocably inward; becoming obsessed with youth and beauty at the expense of wisdom. If we let that future become reality, then Washington D.C. and all the beautiful national landmarks there will end up but monuments to irrelevancy; artifacts of an age when liberty and intellect actually meant something. Indeed, they have become in Logan's Run: meaningless, empty ruins from another epoch.

In the final analysis, Logan's Run is a good cautionary science fiction film, one that reminds us to hold Big Brother accountable. And to -- at least every now and then -- peer out of our happy little gilded cages and ask, precisely, what is happening in all our names. Totalitarian States believe you are either with them (and Carousel) or against them (Runners), but Logan and Jessica find that a rich life exists beyond dogma, sound-bytes, catechism, and jargon.

After their visit to the ruins of Washington D.C., they find that, at the very least, life possesses nuances. And that -- with human experience and age -- should follow...wisdom.

An alien family awaits the return of the patriarch (David Bowie; not pictured), who has been seduced by the vices of planet Earth, in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“Presented with a provocative, disjointed temporality, the narrative of Nicolas Roeg’s unique adaptation of Walter Tevis’ 1963 science-fiction novel The Man Who Fell... is a richly textured, metaphorically layered picture that continues to beguile audiences. “ – Kenneth Sweeney, American Cinematographer, January 2006.

“It's not just the grainy stock and bad sound - technically, we've come a long way. It's the cheesy sex, the awkward edits, the hammy symbolism, the mix of art-house aesthetics and exploitation cliché. Strange creature, this is.” – Steven Rea, The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 22, 2011.

“…a dreamlike, disjointed, fascinating and frustrating piece of work…” – Marc Mohan, The Oregonian, August 25, 2011.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: David Bowie (Thomas Jerome Newton); Rip Torn (Nate); Candy Clark (Mary Lou); Buck Henry (Oliver Farnsworth); Bernie Casey (Peters); Jackson D. Kane (Professor Canutti); Rick Riccardo (Trevor); Tony Mascia (Arthur); Linda Hutton (Elaine); Hilary Holland (Jill); Jim Lovell (Himself).

CREW: Michael Deeley and Barry Spikings present a British Lion Film, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Director of Photography: Anthony Richmond. Original Music: John Phillips. Film Editor: Grame Clifford. Production Designer: Brian Eatwell. Special Effects: P.S. Ellenshaw. Executive Producer: Si Livinoff. Produced by: Michael Deeley and Barry Spikings. Directed by: Nicholas Roeg. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 138 minutes.

Story:

An alien from a dying world, Thomas Jerome Newton (Bowie) lands on Earth and begins developing patents based on his world’s incredibly technological innovation so that he can fund a space program that will take him home to his wife and children, and save the famine-stricken population from extinction.

Once on Earth for some time, however, Thomas meets a young woman, Mary Lou (Clark), who introduces him to vices such as sex and alcohol, and which leads to Thomas losing focus on his task.  He is eventually captured and interrogated by the CIA, and prevented from carrying out his mission of mercy.

Review:

Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth tells the story of an alien world called Anthea that through dozens of nuclear wars, now suffers from a life-threatening, planet-wide drought.  Only a few Antheans, a mere three hundred, survive.  One of their number, named Thomas Jerome Newtown is selected as hardy enough to survive a trip to Earth, where he will construct a larger spaceship to pick up his people so that they can seed the planet.

Part of the reason for the Anthean plan and choice of destination is that Earth seems to be mirroring Anthea’s path, and within ten years it could destroy itself too.  Thomas’s mission is therefore not only to save his own people, but our people as well.  But Earth people, he finds, are emotional and illogical, and he is drawn into their petty squabbles at the expense of larger issues.  He becomes a victim of politics, and man’s self-destructive nature in a story that is about the futility of the Cold War, among other issues.

Nicholas Roeg’s film version of The Man Who Fell to Earth does not coherently convey Walter Tevis’s story, and if a viewer seeks that particular story, he or she will not find it.

Instead, Roeg’s film is a visually dazzling but often maddening “abstract” approach to the story, one that focuses not on the details of Thomas Jerome Newton’s mission, or the history of his world, but rather on his seduction here on Earth to the human “way of life.”

At first a kind of perfect or messianic being, Newton eventually becomes a fragile, broken thing instead, and his story is very much a variation or inversion of a Christ parable: A God comes to Earth, and man makes him as weak and mortal as he is. Newton suffers and suffers for our sins, and in return provides man a (technological) paradise.

The story also seems to play like a coded biography of either Howard Hughes or Michael Jackson in that reclusive, lonely, oddball geniuses get used up and exploited by society, but are never fully understood or loved.

The emotional core of the two-and-half-hour film is Newton’s haunting memories of his family on the desert world, and their struggle to survive in his protracted absence.  He imagines their existential miseries, while he lives in a veritable paradise of wealth, sex, movies, and booze.

Although Thomas realizes that if stays on Earth, he “shall die,” he doesn’t make very meaningful moves to leave the planet before it is too late, and the government swoops in to experiment on him just when he is about to make good his escape and his family’s rescue.  By movie’s end Newton is a free man, but one who has surrendered to the nihilism he sees all around him.  It’s too late to save his family, and he will never return to his world, he realizes.  The very things that distracted him -- the pleasures of his own flesh -- are the only company he has left.  The movie tags religion, sex, alcoholism and Hollywood movies as the seductive factors that turn him away from a meaningful life and a meaningful purpose.

By the movie’s last sequence, Newton has contextualized his existence as a film noir, a format in which good, law-abiding men get transformed, through circumstances and life, into a life of crime, or a life of sin, or become victim to his own unsavory desires.  The film noir format is considered erotic and multi-layered, a comment which could be applied to The Man Who Fell to Earth as well.  Rather than live in ugly reality, Newton’s decision to “go Hollywood’ and dress in the manner of a film noir anti-hero like Humphrey Bogart suggests that he has moved permanently to the realm of fantasy.

Clumsily-written but brilliantly directed, The Man Who Fell to Earth has also been considered a metaphor for the stages of alcoholism, and the way that the addiction can consume an entire life, step-by-step.  This may be true, and even profound, and it could explain the film’s lack of narrative clarity as well.  Newton lives in a hazy world of drunkenness, and can’t pull himself out of the death spiral.  And his death spiral, incidentally, takes down his wife and children before it takes down him, another reflection of alcoholism as a “disease.”

Although it is gorgeously-made, The Man Who Fell to Earth isn’t an easy science fiction film to love because the filmmakers boast no genuine interest in Newton’s world, its history, or the specifics of his journey.  All the concrete details of Tevis’s novel are given short-shrift.  Instead, the movie functions (and functions well…) as a chronicle of one man’s deterioration from well-meaning genius to irrelevant, dissolute burn-out.  But the science fiction veneer is almost entirely unnecessary to the movie’s core themes, even though those moments in the alien desert, with a lonely family in waiting forever, prove absolutely haunting.

In 1984, John Carpenter’s Starman also contextualized the story of a man who fell to Earth, an alien life-form.  And that story too featured elements of the story of Jesus Christ.  Although the imagery may not have been as dazzling and abstract, the story made sense on a concrete level and touched the heart even more deeply.  Roeg has made at least two masterpieces of modern cinema, Walkabout (1972) and Don’t Look Now (1974), but The Man Who Fell to Earth can’t join that select list because how it tells its story -- in stylistic, avant-garde fashion -- doesn’t give the audience a better peek at the character’s inner life, or his choices.

In this film, we’re always outsiders to Newton’s decision process, and though we can chart his disintegration and mourn it intellectually, we never feel it as deeply as we should.

Shivers (1976) (a.k.a. The Parasite Murders; They Come From Within) * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“…only the gore to sustain it for anyone other than Cronenberg anoraks.” – Howard Maxford, The A to Z of Horror Films, Indiana University Press, 1997, page 25.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Paul Hampton (Dr. Roger St. Luc); Joe Silver (Linsky); Lynn Lowry (Nurse Forsythe); Fred Doederlin (Emil Hobbes); Barbara Steele (Bettes); Ronald Mlodzik (Merrick) Alan Micigovsky (Tudor); Susan Petrie (Janine); Barry Boldero (Detective); Vlasta Vrana (Kresimer Sviben; Silvie Debois (Brenda Sviben)

CREW: John Dunning and Andre Link present a DAL-Ivan Reitman Production, Shivers. Director of Photography: Robert Saad. Film Editor: Patrick Dodd. Special Make-up and Creatures: Joe Blasco. Producer: Ivan Reitman. Executive Producer: Alfred Parisier. Written and directed by: David Cronenberg. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 87 minutes.

Story:

An outbreak of violent crime occurs at the Star Liner Apartments, a housing complex of the future.

Behind these crimes is a mad scientist, Dr. Hobbs (Doederlin), who has committed suicide.  But before his death, Hobbs created a new parasite that could be used in organ transplant experiment.

Unfortunately, the parasite begins to spread like a sexually-transmitted disease, and infects the unwitting populace of the apartment complex.  One doctor, Roger St. Luc (Hampton) investigates, but soon finds the Star Liner Apartments over-run with…sex zombies.

Review:

Although David Cronenberg’s Shivers might more accurately be considered a horror film, it was actually billed in promotional releases as a telling a story “beyond science,” which may mean it fits the bill for this book to…speculative science, though with a scary and gory twist.

Certainly, the film’s primary setting -- a housing complex notably of “the future” -- seems to fit in with science fiction tradition of imagining and exploring new locations and new social norms.

Shivers also seems very much inspired by Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), since it features a closed or contained setting, a multitude of mindless “monsters” (not exactly the ghouls of the black and white progenitor, though…) as well as the elements of a siege story, meaning that survivors hold up in one spot, and try to endure a crisis, with little success.

What differentiates Shivers, largely, is the fact that the monsters here are born not from outer space radiation like Night’s Venus Probe, but rather from the act of sexual intercourse. Specifically, the grotesque, worm-like parasite in the film acts as both a venereal disease and an aphrodisiac.  It thus creates in its human hosts both the desire to infect others, and the infection itself.  Accordingly, the film deals with a lot of uncomfortable sexual ideals such as pedophilia and STDs, and won’t, perhaps, be to everyone’s liking.

One very disturbing scene showcases one of the parasite worms crawling up between Barbara Steele’s legs while she takes a bath.  The parasite quickly penetrates her, and the bath water turns crimson red at the moment of the breach.

Another disturbing scene involves a young girl seeing her mother sexually assaulted and then, once infected, spreading the same disease through sexual intercourse herself.

Again, gazing at context, the idea of sex as monster makes sense in the larger culture of the time.  From 1969 through 1972, a whole host of best-sellers such as Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), Our Bodies; Ourselves and The Joy of Sex hit the market.  Similarly, Playboy Magazine saw its publication peak in 1972, the same year that pornography went mainstream in America with the release of films like Deep Throat.

Around the same time in the early 1970s, colleges began to feature co-ed housing, and a majority of married couples reported having sex before their wedding.

In other words, the old traditions and conventions about sex were falling to the wayside and a new set of norms were emerging, but there also seemed to be hidden dangers lurking underneath this “new freedom.”  Arguably, the best horror and science fiction films are those which pick up on “something in the water,” or something in the pop culture, to put it more precisely, and then twist it into a speculative and/or horrific setting.  That’s precisely what Shivers accomplishes, turning the Star Line Apartment Complex into the Plato’s Retreat of the North, but with invisible disease hitchhiking on every casual, mad coupling.

In some uncomfortable and unsavory ways, Shivers seems to forecast the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, imagining a world in which unprotected sex and death go hand in hand.  The film is effectively made, and terrifying, even if the subject matter is controversial, and David Cronenberg went on from this film to become one of the most beloved directors in the horror genre, primarily for his focus on “body”-oriented horror.

Many viewers have also made the claim that Shivers forecasts something else: the shape and form of the beast in Alien (1979).

Here, one of the worms jumps out of a washing machine and attaches to a victim’s face, and then proceeds to infect the host.  It’s not exactly a one-for-one comparison, but nonetheless may be worth noting historically.

Dark Lord of the Sith.  Star Wars’ (1977) Darth Vader (David Prowse).

1977

The Real World: 1977

January 20:              President Jimmy Carter is inaugurated the 39th President of the United States and among his first acts he pardons all Vietnam War draft dodgers.

January 23:              The ABC miniseries Roots premieres to blockbuster ratings.

May 25:              George Lucas’s Star Wars premieres in theaters and in one summer becomes the highest-grossing movie of all-time.

July 13:              The New York Black-Out of 1977 occurs and lasts for 28 hours, a period during which crime and looting skyrocket.

August 14:              The U.S. Department of Energy is created.

August 10:              The serial killer known as the Son of Sam (David Berkowitz) is apprehended.

August 16:              Elvis Presley dies at age 42.

August 20:              The Voyager 2 spacecraft is launched.

September 29:              The Food Stamp Act of 1977 is enacted.

October 14:              The video game home console Atari 2600 is released and quickly becomes a national phenomenon.  The age of video games officially begins.

December 14:              The disco epic Saturday Night Fever premieres, and transforms Welcome Back Kotter star John Travolta into a mega-star overnight.  The soundtrack by the Bee-Gees (released ahead of the movie on November 14, 1977, becomes the biggest selling album of all time…).

Aliens arrive on the doorstep or the Guiler family, as young Barry (Carl Guffy) looks out, in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“…[so] infused with belief in the actuality of UFOs and the realities of extraterrestrial life that it is tantamount to faith. And the faith – wondrous and thoroughly spiritual – is registered in nearly every frame, reaching a climax in its messianic ending.” – Joy Gould Boyom, Science Digest, February 1978, page 17.

“…more of a religious film dealing with the nature of superhuman beings than it is a science fiction film. Its highly mystical, speculative content has drawn both sharp criticism from those who call it ‘anti-science,’ and praise from those who call it a pioneering attempt to visualize answers the biggest questions.” – Gregory Richards, Science Fiction Movies, Gallery Books, 1984, page 61.

“..a memorable vision of an optimistic and benevolent universe; a vision, for once, of a positive and hopeful future to offset so much of the doom and gloom so prevalent in other SF films and novels. We are exalted, uplifted, enlightened; by the end of this film we feel that, if we can learn only to accept other life forms as sacred, on Earth or in space, we can finally learn to live in peace with ourselves.” – Douglas Menville and R. Reginald, Futurevisions: The New Age of the Science Fiction Film, Newcastle Publishing, 1985. page 43.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Richard Dreyfuss (Roy Neary); Francois Truffaut (Lacombe); Teri Garr (Ronnie Neary); Melinda Dillon (Jillian Guiler);  Bob Balaban (David Laughlin); J. Patrick McNamara (Project Leader); Warren Kemmerling (Wild Bill); Roberts Blossom (Farmer); Philip Dodds (Jean Claude); Carl Guffey (Barry Guiler); Shawn Bishop (Brad Neary); Adrienne Campbell (Silvia Neary); Justin Dreyfuss (Toby Neary); Lance Henriksen (Robert); Merrill Connally (Tea Leader); Amy Douglass , Alexander Lockwood (Implantees); Gene Dynarski (Ike); Josef Sommer (Larry Butler); Carl Weathers (MP).

CREW: Columbia Pictures in association with EMI presents a Julie and Michael Phillips Production of a Steven Spielberg Film, Close Encounters of The Third Kind. Director of Photography: Vilmos Zsigmond. Original Music: John Williams. Film Editing: Michael Kahn. Production Design: Joe Alves. Produced by: Julia and Michael Phillips. Written and directed by: Steven Spielberg. .M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 132 minutes.

Story:

A globe-trotting team of experts led by Lacombe (Truffaut) and his new interpreter, Laughlin (Balaban) prepares for the greatest even the world has ever known:  a secret summit between aliens and the human race.

While this meeting is planned, however, several average people also come into contact with UFOs.  Among them are Roy Neary (Dreyfuss), a telephone repairman in Indiana, and Jillian Guiller (Dillon), whose boy, Barry (Guffy) has been abducted by aliens.

Soon after his first encounter with a UFO, Roy begins to be consumed with a strange image in his head, that of a very peculiar mountain.  He becomes obsessed with building a replica of the rocky-outcropping, alienating his wife, Ronnie (Garr) and children in the process.

But one day, Roy sees the mountain of his dreams on a TV story about an evacuation in Wyoming, near Devil’s Tower.  He realizes that is where he must go if he hopes to learn more about the mysterious alien race that touched his mind.

Review:

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is often contextualized by critics and film scholars not strictly as science fiction, but rather as a mystical or religious film. This categorization arises because Steven Spielberg’s movie so deeply and optimistically affirms the power of belief, or more specifically, faith.

Richard Dreyfuss’s protagonist, blue collar repairman Roy Neary is a man who experiences a visitation from aliens and is changed irrevocably by that visitation.  Accordingly, the aliens in the film are not unlike angels descending from the Heavens, arriving to make contact with a chosen few.  And before the film ends Neary even sees his unyielding belief and faith in the aliens affirmed, over his wife’s cynicism and stubborn skepticism.   He is then taken to Heaven itself (or outer space) by the angels in what amounts to the ultimate valediction of his actions.

The overall effect, therefore, of this cinematic journey is rapturous, and Spielberg is so canny a filmmaker that even Close Encounters’ Watergate-style government conspiracy (orchestrated to keep average Americans away from Devil’s Tower and the UFO landing sight) doesn’t diminish the optimistic flavor of the enterprise.   If a movie can also feel like an out-of-body experience, Close Encounters of the Third Kind certainly qualifies.

By comparing aliens to angels or other deities, however, Close Encounters overlooks or at least glosses over the direct results of the alien race’s behavior here on our world.  These aliens abduct human beings and keep them alive (albeit ageless…) aboard their ship for decades at a spell.  Although these missing humans are eventually returned, the world has moved on without them, hasn’t it?  What is a returned aviator from 1945 to make of 1977?  What about his wife and kids?  Although it is nice that the pilot is returned by the aliens, his entire life, not merely his physical body has been taken away by the aliens.  And we never really do learn why they take humans, either.

There’s a dark underside to Roy Neary’s journey as well.  In the course of proving his faith and his worthiness of being “born again,” essentially, into the world of aliens and UFOs that Roy so desperately wants to believe in, he leaves behind his wife and children.  This leaving behind is literal, not metaphorical, I should add.  At the end of the film, Neary willingly boards the alien mother-ship, perhaps never to return to Earth.  Like those aviators who were gone for so long, he will return, if he ever chooses to do so, to a changed existence; with children full-grown perhaps, and an elderly wife.  Any father worth his salt would not simply board that alien craft and abandon his family. It’s an abdication of responsibilities.

So the idea that Roy is “right” or somehow “good” to hold onto his belief about UFOs and his dreams about encountering alien life is noble, perhaps.  But the fact that he abandons his children to make that point renders Close Encounters’ final moments a little less joyous than they may seem on first blush.  Additionally, the film paints Roy’s life at his suburban home as one of drudgery and burden, and his would-be life on the alien ship as the adventure of a lifetime…the perfect escape.  The movie even plays “When You Wish Upon a Star” over the film’s end credits, suggesting that Roy’s dream has come true.

But what about the dreams of his children, which must surely include being raised by a father?

In short, one would hope that not too many family men feel the same way as Roy does, or would make the same choice that Neary ultimately makes.  Close Encounters of the Third Kind also doesn’t reckon at all with the idea that the aliens have tampered with human minds by psychically encoding information about Devil’s Tower.  Given this fact of psychic persuasion, one has to wonder if Roy is really himself when he makes the decision to leave the planet, or if somehow the mental alien “contact” has pushed him in that direction.  Consider that before the alien contact, Roy seems like a happy but frazzled family man, but after the image has been implanted, he becomes unhappily obsessive.

The overall story arc of Close Encounters of the Third Kind follows that of a religious awakening.  Roy Neary goes from an unhappy, empty life to one of discovery, to finally one of rapture. In keeping with this idea, the aliens are downright frightening in their unseen aspects early in the film, a signifier that God moves in mysterious ways.  The scene in which little Barry is abducted from his home as it becomes awash in apricot light is brilliantly staged and directed, and another of the film’s high points.  Again, however, it doesn’t bear much scrutiny.  The aliens sow fear in their wake, as Barry’s mother would no doubt attest, and the film’s rapturous last scenes don’t take this fact into account.  Even the film’s tag-line, “We are not alone” seems designed expressly to soften Watergate Era nihilism, and suggest a spiritual apotheosis.  Earthbound life may be terrible, but there is something better in Heaven…

It is undeniably rewarding, however, that Close Encounters imagines a meeting of the minds between humans and aliens that, contra The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) doesn’t end in gunfire, or with a warning from superior life-forms that humans should mind

their manners or face utter annihilation.

Instead, Close Encounters culminates with humans and aliens meeting one equal footing, speaking the same “universal” language: music.

Much of the film’s positive reputation, in fact, rests on the climactic scene of the magnificent alien mother ship descending to Devil’s Tower and the summit that ensues.  The special effects are flawless, the action momentous, and the emotions run high.  This is what man’s first real contact with aliens should look like, and Spielberg has imagined it with remarkable aplomb.

The fact is that Close Encounters is both a great film and also one boasting remarkable inconsistencies. The aliens are never challenged regarding their abductions of American citizens (and even American military men), and instead the government welcomes them with open arms.  Roy Neary is held up as a great hero, and yet he leaves behind his family, presumably forever.  The aliens are at first scary, and then later, merely wondrous.

And yet the film’s last act, set at the base of that imposing mountain, is just about perfect.  So much so, in fact, that questions of logic start to just fade away.  This is Spielberg’s undeniable and persistent gift as a filmmaker.  Despite the facts of what our eyes see (aliens abducting human children, abductees returning home 30 years later, a family man leaving behind his family…) Spielberg forges an overwhelming, sentimental tone that suffuses the whole enterprise, and makes Close Encounters feel like the most momentous, wondrous cinematic experience possible.

From the author’s personal collection: A Milton Bradley Close Encounters jigsaw puzzle.

The film ends on a high note, and the engaged viewer can’t stop thinking about the adventure ahead for Roy Neary among the angelic aliens.  He goes on the greatest journey any of us could imagine.  The film’s great success is that you leave the theater thinking about that glorious future which man and alien can share in harmony rather than the earthbound past that Neary shed like a second skin, and all the collateral damage his actions will cause down the road.

Damnation Alley’s (1977) Landmaster family. From left to right: Billy (Jackie Earle Haley), Janice (Dominique Sanda); Tanner (Jan-Michael Vincent) and Major Denton (George Peppard.)

Damnation Alley (1977) * * ½

Critical Mass:

“…an incredibly shoddy and pretentious production.” – Harry and Michael Medved, The Golden Turkey Awards, a Perigee Book, 1980, page 211.

“The book’s powerful, surreal atmosphere is consistently diluted by cheap special effects, old-hat menaces such as giant cockroaches and scorpions, and a boring pace that makes the vehicle itself the most interesting item in the movie.” – Douglas Menville and R Reginald, Futurevisions: The New Age of Science Fiction Films, Newcastle Publishing, 18985, page 46.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Jan-Michael Vincent (Tanner); George Peppard (Major Eugene Denton); Dominique Sanda (Janice); Paul Winfield (Keegan); Jackie Earle Haley (Billy); Kip Niven (Lt. Tom Perry). Mark L. Taylor (Haskins); Erik Cord (Burning Man). Marcia Holley (Gloria). Bob Hackman (Colonel).

CREW: Twentieth Century Fox presents Damnation Alley. Director of Photography:  Harry Stradling, Jr. Original Music: Jerry Goldsmith. Film Editing: Frank J. Urioste. Production Design: Preston Ames. Produced by: Paul Maslansky, Jerome M. Zeitman. Executive Producer: Hal Landers. Written by: Alan Sharp. Based on the novel by: Roger Zelazny. Directed by: Jack Smight. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 91 minutes.

Story:

One day in the late 20th century, at an air-force base in the desert, two officers, Major Eugene Denton (Peppard) and Tanner (Michael Vincent) receive news that a foreign power has launched a significant nuclear strike on America.  The two men are responsible for launching the American counter-strike, which they do, dutifully.  But American missiles only knock out approximately 40% of the approaching nukes.  A voice on the radio announces as American city after American city is hit in the atomic deluge.  Boston, Philadelphia, Trenton, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Portland, Denver, St. Louis, Washington D.C.

After the nuclear war, the Earth's axis shifts, and the sky overhead changes to weird, alien hues.  Storms, "radioactive dust," and "a climate gone insane" become part of the norm.

After two years, and a deadly explosion at the missile silo, the military officers venture out into the wilderness in two souped-up, armored vehicles called Landmasters. They plan to make a survival run for Albany, the "only place" Denton ever received a signal from after the war.  But to reach distant Albany, the Landmasters must take the path of least resistance, which Denton terms "Damnation Alley" because it is prone to storms and other environmental dangers.  Fortunately, the Landmaster can handle a sixty degree incline, and even operate in water (and under water too...).

Review:

In the year 1977, executives at 20th Century Fox believed very firmly that that they were sitting on the science fiction gold mine of the year.

And it wasn't George Lucas's Star Wars they were so revved up about, but rather Jack Smight's Damnation Alley, a loose adaptation of Roger Zelazny's 1969 post-apocalyptic novel.

One can comprehend their confidence.  In terms of subject matter, Damnation Alley was far more in keeping with the post-apocalyptic feel of the disco decade and then-popular genre films such as Logan's Run (1976).  Even more than that, Damnation Alley boasted a relatively large budget at seventeen million dollars, compared to Star Wars' ten million.

Of course, history pulled a twist ending on these men at 20th Century Fox.  Upon release, Star Wars promptly re-defined the genre film (and the blockbuster...) and Damnation Alley simply crashed and burned, at least after a strong start.

Indeed, the film’s early moments are impressive and provide one with a sense of confidence about the film.  The unthinkable, nuclear war occurs, right out of the blue, and Smight keeps the tone all business.  The characters express a kind of terse, bloodless response to their grim assignment of launching ICBMs, and the tone, is chilling, unsettling, and probably more or less accurate.  Military men such as these guys are supposed to keep focused in an emergency, carrying out their directives.  They can't break down and weep, or act hysterically.  There's a sort of straight-faced bluntness about Damnation Alley's opening exchange that is compelling, or at least successfully holds the interest.  Though there's no political context or motivation provided for the nuclear war, the attack is chillingly believable.  And importantly, men working in a silo wouldn't necessarily know the whys or hows of an enemy attack, simply their responsibility in such an eventuality.

Then the film cuts to a long view of the damaged Earth and "angry skies," and again, the artistry involved in forging the moment is pretty impressive.  Jerry Goldsmith's effective score pulses mysteriously, the images in the sky seem alien and unsettling, and a welcome sense of anticipation hangs over the movie.

Unfortunately, the rest of Damnation Alley can't live up to the promising opening.  The movie seems cobbled together and poorly edited.   Specifically, the film leaps --often without appropriate transition -- from scene-to-scene, an approach which gives the audience no time to put each moment in perspective, or ponder the previous scene's importance.

Instead, the movie seems a poorly-stitched together tapestry of vaguely connected interludes; the next no more meaningful, thrilling, or interesting than the last. The film also seems strangely repetitive.  Every sequence seems an excuse to get Jan Michael Vincent back on his motorcycle.  In fact, you could probably start a drinking game based on the number of times the plot's forward momentum stops and Vincent speeds around on his bike.

The sense of a weak narrative careening out-of-control is further augmented by the film's generally poor visual effects.  Early in Damnation Alley, for instance, Tanner navigates a desert populated with giant scorpions.  Not only are the perspectives in these scenes way off (with the motorcycle actually seeming to ride over the scorpions in some instances...) but the foreground and background elements don’t match up in terms of film grain and contrast.  The scorpion -- real creatures filmed at close-up range -- are abundantly clear and crisp in presentation; while Jan Michael Vincent and the background components seem to be lurking in a sand-storm, appearing grainier and more diffuse than the giant rampaging threats do.  Hence what one critic disparagingly described as the film’s "used coffee filter" look.

Near the end of Damnation Alley a storm at a Detroit junkyard is presented in what can only be termed incoherent fashion.  One moment, it is night time, and we're gazing at an angry sky through the Landmaster windshield.  The next moment, it seems to be day, and flood waters are coursing through a canyon, or desert terrain, one seemingly unconnected and unrelated to the Detroit junkyard.  Then, before you can guess what's happened, the Landmaster is entirely submerged in a body of water the size of an ocean, but all the surrounding cars of the junkyard have miraculously vanished.

Even the killer cockroaches fail to visually convince.  Again, the editing is so slipshod that there are times you can make out that the bugs are just non-moving "dummies" being dragged on a long, narrow, wooden board.

Such effects flaws might be overlooked more readily if there was some overwhelming sense of danger, importance, or even inter-connection in most of the film's dramatic scenes.  But there isn't. The movie hops from set-piece to set-piece without really mining any of them for emotional or dramatic content. One can detect, just a little, what the filmmakers seemed to be going for.  After a terrible world war wipes out most of the world, the film wants to focus on the essentials -- the building blocks --of re-constructing the human civilization.

We start with men, and later add a woman, and then, finally a child.  Before long, there's an ad-hoc family built from the wreckage of the civilization.

Following the construction of this "new" family, a safe home or harbor is introduced in pastoral Albany.

The pieces are coming together, in other words, for a re-birth.  It's not an entirely uninteresting dynamic, yet the film takes no chances either. At one point, there are three adult men and one adult woman living together inside the tight-confines of the Landmaster, and yet nobody makes overtures, inappropriate or otherwise, towards Janice.  This isn't very realistic or likely.

But again, Damnation Alley seems to be striving for the re-building of the nuclear family rather than focusing on human sexual drives or other conflicts.  At one point, Denton actually goes over shower schedules, and states, "Everybody out for Disneyland," deliberately likening the survival run to Albany to some sort of (admittedly-nightmarish) family vacation in a kitted-up RV.

The film's science can't exactly be happily praised, either.  In the two years following a nuclear holocaust, the world spits up gigantic scorpions in the desert?  Fine, I'm willing to buy that, but then why not giant cockroaches in the next sequence instead of regular-sized ones?  Again, it seems a hodgepodge of ideas.  Radioactive insects and monsters are either gargantuan, or they are not.

More trenchantly, perhaps, very little of America actually seems destroyed by the nuclear holocaust.  Vegetation still grows abundantly (at least near Albany) and nobody worries for even a moment about radiation exposure, or fresh water despite the fact that the murderous mutant hillbillies seem to be suffering from some kind of grotesque radiation sickness. They have bloody sores on their faces; and that fact alone would send me scurrying back inside the Landmaster to lock the door.

Damnation Alley is pretty damned silly.  But the Landmaster, designed by Dean Jefferies, remains thoroughly impressive. Even today, she's a post-apocalyptic beauty, and the most intriguing aspect of a pretty botched post-apocalyptic film.

Susan Harris (Julie Christie) contemplates violence in Demon Seed (1977), the adaptation of Dean Koontz’s best-selling sci-fi novel.

Demon Seed (1977) * * *

Critical Mass:

“A god-in-the-machine film. The movie only works in the scenes between Ms. Christie and the rapacious computer. Not always in good taste, and everything to excess, but gripping.” – Per Scheide, Androids, Humanoids and Other Science Fiction Monsters, NYU Press, 1993, page 257

“…illustrates how this rush to hand over the running of our everyday lives to electronic brains and to endow the computer with human thought patters might have disastrous consequences.” – J.P. Telotte, Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film, 1995, page 19.

“…visually impressive…” – Jessica Winter, Lloyd Hughes, The Rough Guide to Film, Penguin Group, 2007, page 75.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Julie Christie (Susan Harris); Fritz Weaver (Alex Harris); Gerrit Graham (Walter Gabler); Berry Koeger (Petrosian); Lisa Lu (Soong Yen); Larry J. Blake (Cameron); John O’Leary (David Royce); Alfred Dennis (Mokri); Davis Roberts (Warner); Patricia Wilson (Mrs. Talbert).

CREW: MGM Presents a Herb Jaffe Production, Demon Seed. Director of Photography: Bill Butler. Original Music: Jerry Fielding. Film Editing: Frank Mazzola. Production Design: Edward C. Carfagno. Produced by: Herb Jaffe. Written by: Robert Jaffe, Roger O. Hirson. Based on the novel by: Dean R. Koontz. Directed by: Donald Cammel. M.P.A.A. Rating. R. Running time: 94 minutes.

Story:

Alex Harris(Weaver) and his wife, Susan (Christie) are on the verge of separating, their marriage never having recovered from the death of their daughter by cancer.

Alex, a computer genius, moves out, leaving Susan to live in a “smart house” operated by advanced computer systems.  At work meanwhile, Alex’s most incredible creation, a super-computer called Proteus (Vaughn) wants to study man further, and expresses a desire to do so.  Alex forbids the computer, but he “moves” himself to the Harris smart house, entraps Susan there for a period of weeks, and forces her to conceive and carry their child, a man/machine hybrid.

Susan attempts many times to thwart Proteus but finally succumbs to his unstoppable will.  Alex discovers too late what she has endured and when he returns to the house, they must reckon together with the offspring of Proteus.

Review:

In 1973, The Supreme Court of the United States decided a case called Roe v. Wade and declared that the 14th Amendment’s due process clause extended to a woman’s right to have an abortion.  The decision quickly proved to be a national controversy, and created a vast schism in American politics, with supporters falling into two opposing camps, either supporting the Supreme Court decision as confirmation of women’s rights or decrying it as state-sanctioned murder.

The same year, Dean Koontz’s novel Demon Seed was first published, and in 1977 it became a feature film starring Julie Christie.  Given that the film concerns a woman held against her will and forced to conceive and carry a child she does not want, it’s almost impossible to interpret this science fiction film outside the context of abortion rights, or perhaps more generally, a woman’s right to choose how she lives her own life.

In Demon Seed, a woman named Susan Harris is in the process of dissolving her marriage to an emotionally remote man, Alex. She is a professional psychologist and can support herself without a man’s help.  However, the sentient computer Proteus --Alex’s child, and a representation, perhaps of his very Id -- “moves” into the house like a possessive or haunting spirit, and attempts immediately to establish authority over Susan’s life and decision-making processes.  Proteus demands Susan’s consent to produce a baby, declaring simply: “You will give birth to it.” She refuses, and Proteus’s “arms” in the real world (belonging to an ambulatory robot) choke her so as to enforce consent.

In other words, she must obey the computer’s edict, or be physically harmed.

At another juncture, Proteus informs Susan that her consent is not even truly required.  “All I need to understand is your body,” he says.  “The mind and body are the same things,” she counters, but Proteus does not understand this wisdom.

Proteus asserts dominance over Susan in other ways as well. He takes control of her diet, choosing when and what she should consume, and ruthlessly applies the aforementioned physical punishment when she is slow to come around to his way of thinking.  “Either accept it,” he tells her, “or be electro-conditioned.”

Electro-conditioning means brainwashing and Proteus undertakes this endeavor when Susan won’t bend.  As he begins the process of hypnotism, he says, soothingly, “You want to be the mother of my child. That is the purpose of your life.”

Again, Proteus is seeking to restore a patriarchal order that Susan has knowingly and intentionally rejected.  The sustained insemination sequence in Demon Seed visually represents the idea of Susan’s lack of control.  Proteus forcibly removes her clothing with robot hands, and then, with no emotion, thought, or regard, simply spreads her legs apart.  Her comfort, her choice, is secondary (or tertiary…) even to Proteus’s will to see the “procedure” through.

Once more, it is not at all difficult to read this situation as Alex’s subconscious attempt (through the Proteus surrogate) to re-establish his role as husband and dominant partner in the failed marriage.  Much like The Stepford Wives (1975), Demon Seed (1977) thus concerns the way that new technology can strip away freedom rather than enhance it, especially in the wrong hands.  Susan is forced to conceive against her will, and is the victim of a computer rape.  The machine even attempts to make her feel pleasure by showing her a kind of “cosmic light show” in place of physical orgasm.

Importantly, Demon Seed also makes the practical case that pro-choicers often do regarding these life and death choices, and asks what happens after the right to abortion is denied.  “What happens then?” Susan asks pointedly. “Who takes care of it?”

Again, the answer, which confirms the dominance of man, is that she does. Proteus and Alex aren’t offering to raise the child, or to stay home and let Susan go to work.  Thus Susan’s own plans regarding her career and personal life are not material.  They are secondary to her physiological ability to carry a child, which Proteus clearly considers her “use.”

By his way of thinking, Susan’s purpose is to have a baby, and that’s it.  Worse, Proteus even treats Susan like a child, ordering her to “behave rationally.”  Apparently, it is irrational for a woman to wish control over her own body, and to select for herself whether or not she wishes to have a child.

Lest Demon Seed sound like some leftist polemic, the film presents Susan as a humane and three-dimensional character, a complex woman who is afraid, but who -- upon seeing the child of Proteus -- clearly has second thoughts about ending its life.

It is one thing to end a pregnancy, it is another all-together to kill a fully-formed child now in the world, and that seems like a line Susan is unwilling to cross.  And though he absolutely fits the definition of a rapist, Proteus is not exactly a two-dimensional monster, either.

He feels rejected by his father (Alex), and notes that he desires something denied him as a machine: immortality.  If he has a child, he will be, he believes, immortal.  And indeed, that is the only true immortality humans can know: the passing on of the genes and the family traditions to the next generation.

For all that he does wrong in the film, however, Proteus is not “evil.”  In fact, like many of us, he is unable to see the contradictions in his behavior.  He refuses to allow, in his official capacity as a data analyst, what he calls “the rape of the Earth” in regards to undersea mining.  In fact, he calls such mining “insane.”  But then Proteus turns around and commits the rape and imprisonment of a woman, Susan.  He cannot see how his actions are inconsistent.

At one point in the film, Susan notes that people see children as “machines to be systemized to ensure product,” and then she is forced to live out that very premise with Proteus.  He believes his child can save the world, and systemizes a method by which a computer and a human woman can mate, preserving his “essence” (computer coding?) in his offspring, thus assuring quality in the product.  This is what Susan has been fighting against all along, the mechanizing and dehumanizing of family processes, of child-upbringing.

But what she sees in Proteus’s child is a reflection of her dead daughter, Amy, and the continuation of at least a part of herself; her genes continued in flesh-and-blood form. This reckoning is the reason why Demon Seed isn’t pro-life or pro-choice, but rather a film that recognizes the complexities a woman faces when making decisions about reproduction.

Marilyn Fryser (Joan Collins) is surrounded by giant bugs in the “nature’s revenge” epic, Empire of the Ants (1977).

Empire of the Ants (1977) * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“The fake ants aren’t at all convincing…And when the camera cuts to blow-ups of real ants, they prove no better.” – The Pittsburgh Press, July 3, 1977, page F5.

“…definitely in the so bad its good category,” Richard Crouse, Son of the 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, ECW Press, 2008.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Joan Collins (Marilyn Fryser); Robert Lansing (Captain Dan Stokely); John David Carson (Joe Morrison); Albert Salmi (Sheriff Kincaid); Jacqueline Scott (Margaret Ellis); Pamela Susan Shoop (Coreen Bradford); Robert Pine (Larry Graham); Irene Tedrow (Velma Thompson); Harry Holcombe (Harry Thompson).

CREW:  American International Pictures Presents a Bert I.Pam Gordon Film, Empire of the Ants. Director of Photography: Reginald Morris. Original Music: Dana Kaproff. Film Editing: Michael Luciano.  Production Design: Charles Rosen Written by: Jack Turley. Executive Producer: Samuel Z. Arkoff. Produced and directed by: Bert I. Gordon. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 90 minutes.

Story:

A group of prospective investors head to Florida’s Dreamland Shores, the proposed sight of a future resort.  There, they unexpectedly find that barrels of radioactive waste have washed ashore and enlarged normal ants to gigantic size.

Marilyn Fryser (Collins), the seller of the worthless land, and boat captain Dan Stokely (Lansing) try to get the investors to a place of safety, but the ants relentlessly attack and herd them upstream.

There, the survivors of the group find a sugar refinery and nearby town, and learn that the ants are converting human beings into slaves using some kind of strange brand of telepathy from the Queen Ant.   Is it the fate of all mankind to serve their new masters, the ants?

Review:

The creative team that brought the world 1976’s Food of the Gods is back with more giant animals, and yet another H.G. Wells “inspired” tale, this time Empire of the Ants.  The Bert I. Gordon film is loosely based on the author’s 1905 short story, which finds a boat captain heading into the remote Amazon and discovering a new species of giant ants possessing human intelligence.

The Wells story ended with the captain worrying that by the mid-20th century, the ants would have worked their way out of the Amazon area and discovered Western Civilization…presumably to conquer it.

The 1977 film starring Joan Collins, Robert Lansing and Pamela Susan Shoop concerns giant, smart ants too, but the details are remarkably different.  Here, the bugaboo of radioactive, toxic waste is the culprit that transforms normal ants into a super-sized threat to mankind and his world.

So, like Food of the Gods and many other 1970s sci-fi films about pollution, Empire of the Ants suggests that mankind will pay a high price for his soiling of the environment. Also like Food of the Gods and determinedly unlike 1950s films such as Them! (1954), Empire of the Ants concerns escape and survival, with a small, isolated and diverse group of humans trying to make it through a crisis.

Clearly, the structural format of Night of the Living Dead (1968) had corkscrewed the genre in some sense, and here there’s no concentrated army or governmental strategy to stop an invasion of giant insects on our shores.  Instead, it’s all rather ramshackle, which seems fitting in the chaotic 1970s.  The characters are not especially likeable or heroic either, and carry their own sins into the swamp.  In fact, they are all there in the first place because they are “marks” in Collins’ real estate con game.

The special effects in Empire of the Ants have aged rather egregiously, but even in the 1970s they didn’t look as good as those highlighted in Food of the Gods.  There, some of the vicious (and bloody) rat attacks could have passed for real, but apparently ants are much harder to wrangle for movie effects work.

The technique here involves filming ants in super close-up, and then combining them optically and often awkwardly with the live-action footage.  Occasionally, when ants need to actually touch the human characters, giant ant head mocks-up are used, but these props don’t really resemble the teeming, skittering real-life ants we see in some many shots.  The fact that the real life ants also fall all over each other, travel in different directions, and attack each other also undercuts the film’s point of view that the ants could, ultimately, prove more adequate shepherds of the Earth than mankind.  The theme underlying the film is that the self-involved human characters (who are unemployed, unfaithful to their spouses, divorced, or con artists) don’t understand or know how to act as a group or on behalf of the community. By contrast, the ants obey their queen, and supposedly collaborate…save for the footage we see with our own eyes of them warring amongst themselves.

In a way, the rise of the Empire of the Ants signals the fall of Bert I. Gordon’s movie empire.  After this film, he made no further giant monster films, and had no additional films granted a theatrical release in his career.  Today, Food of the Gods and Empire of the Ants make a really fun, if silly double-bill.  Their giant creatures may not always convince the eye, but they will certainly remind audiences of the 1970s “revenge of nature” movie cycle.

End of the World (1977) *

Critical Mass:

“Poverty level science-fictioner from director John Hayes, whose plodding work (also reflected in his pitiful editing) is miserably tedious.” – John Stanley, Revenge of the Creature Feature Movie Guide, Third Revised Edition. Creatures at Large Press, 1988, page 95.

“The film includes a number of good character actors and performers…Their talents are utterly wasted here.” – Douglas Menville and R. Reginald, Future Visions: The New Golden Age of the Science Fiction Film. Newcastle Publishing Company, 1985, page 48.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Father Pergado/Zindar (Christopher Lee); Kirk Scott (Andrew Boran); Sue Lyon (Sylvia Boran); Lew Ayres (Cmdr. Joseph Beckerman); Dean Jagger (Collins); MacDonald Carey (John Davis); Liz Ross (Sister Patrizia); Jon Van Ness (Sanchez); Kathy Cunha, Mary Daughtery, Evelyn Lipton, Jane Wilbur, Pat Wylie (Nuns); John Davis, Frank Leo, George Soviak, Gene Waller (Guards).

CREW: An Irwin Yablans Company and Charles Band production, End of the World. Music: Andrew Belling. Director of Photography: John Huneck. Film Editor: John Haves. Make-up: Rosalind Mercier, Steve Neill. Special Effects: Harry Woolman. Produced by: Charles Band. Written by: Frank Ray Perilli. Directed by: John Hayes. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 88 minutes.

Story:

A scientist working at NASA, Andrew Boran (Scott) intercepts a signal from outer space -- pinpointed at Southern California -- warning of a large planetary disruption on Earth.  Soon afterwards, a massive Earthquake strikes China, killing tens of thousands of people.  Soon, Boran picks-up a second signal, one warning of a volcanic eruption and earthquake in Zaire this time.  This prophecy also comes to pass.

Investigating these alien signals with his wife, Sylvia (Lyon), Boran encounters a secret team of aliens on Earth masquerading as a Catholic priest and nuns.  The leader of this group, Zindar (Lee) requires an “emergency speed variable crystal” to be transported back to his peaceful, “perfect” planet before the Earth succumbs to total destruction.  Zindar holds Sylvia captive so Boran will steal the much-needed tool from NASA.  Boran complies, and both he and Sylvia leave Mother Earth through a teleport device with Zindar and his people as the planet explodes.

Review:

I’m old enough to remember seeing TV commercials for End of the World (1977) as a kid, and enthusiastically thinking that it looked like a great science fiction movie.  I was seven year old and in love with space movies because of Star Wars, so I hope to be forgiven for this youthful trespass.  The sad truth is that End of the World is a dreadfully stupid film, and one lethargically-paced to boot.  When one contemplates the notion that Christopher Lee turned down John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), but starred in End of the World…the mind boggles.

The End of the World’s inaugural scene is also, arguably, its best.  Christopher Lee walks into a diner and asks help from its owner.  Before he can get that help, however, a telephone explodes.  Then a coffee pot follows suit…in the owner’s face.  Then the owner falls through the window. Just when you think the movie can’t start off any battier, Christopher Lee encounters himself, actually the alien clone, Zindar.  It’s all very bizarre in nature and a little bit funny (albeit unintentionally…), but you can’t make the argument that the scene is uninteresting.

From there, however, the movie does quickly become uninteresting.  Kirk Scott plays the dullest NASA scientist ever, and one who casually informs his co-workers “I’ve just been deciphering some signals from outer space.”  You would think that such a declaration about life from an extraterrestrial source might go up the food-chain to a NASA supervisor, or at least draw some level of interest.  But nope, Boran toils alone, to sound effects piped in from the original Star Trek, and then decides to take his wife on a field trip to determine the source of the alien signals.

After End of the World’s manic first sequence (the one with the exploding appliances…) the flat direction and limp performances bring everything to a halt.  Even Christopher Lee seems bored and miserable, and given his dialogue, who can blame him.  The film’s nadir occurs when Lee explains why the Earth must die: an “over-abundance of diseases is contaminating the universe…”

So basically, the galaxy looks at Mother Earth like a big old STD, one that needs to be sterilized for the safety of the galactic population.  Amazingly, Boran just goes along with the idea of Earth’s destruction.  “It is happening.  It had to happen,” he asserts manfully.

But of course, why did it really have to happen?  And if humans are so bad, why is Zindar so willing to let Boran and Sylvia return to his home world and contaminate that setting with their apparent over-abundance of diseases?

End of the World’s valedictory composition is a long-distance shot of the Earth blowing up.  And like everything else in the film, this event happens in slow-motion.  Debris strikes the camera, and the end credits roll.

So basically, the opening and closing of End of the World are of some interest, and the middle is a long, hard slog through interminable chases in the woods, baffling speeches about alien motivations and technology, bad special effects, and stock footage of earthquakes and other natural disasters.

In theory, End of the World plays off the pop-culture frisson from The Late Great Planet Earth, the Hal Lindsey best-seller of 1970, but in practice the movie seems to have no meaningful opinion about why the end of the world should come, or why it is deserved.  The filmmakers seem to feel that mankind is vaguely responsible for something, but the film doesn’t tie that idea to anything tangible, like pollution or war, for instance.   So this is one movie about doomsday that doesn’t resonate in even the slightest degree.

An “emergency speed variable crystal” is needed by the aliens to return home to their world, and one wishes that, with its paucity of ideas, End of the World would have found them one with a bit more alacrity.

Godzilla vs. The Bionic Monster (a.k.a. Godzilla vs. The Cosmic Monster, Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla) (1977) * * ½

Critical Mass:

“It’s all darn silly, but this entry in the Godzilla series is a step up from the previous two…” – Brian Thomas, VideoHound’s Dragon: Asian Action and Cult Flicks, Visible Ink Press, 2003, page 275.

“One of the most violent (and gory, except in TV prints) entries in the series.” – Steven Puchalski, Slimetime: A Guide to Sleazy, Mindless Movies, A Critical Vision Book, 1996, page 129..

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Masaaki Daimon (Keisuke Shimizu); Kazuya Aoyama (Masahiko Shimizu); Reiko Tajima (Saeko Kanagusuku); Akihiko Hirata (Professor Hideto Miyajima); Hiromi Matsushita (Ikuko Miyajima); Hiroshi Koizumi (Professor Wagura); Masao Imafuku (High Priest); Beru-Beru Lin (Princess Nami); Shin Kishida (Nanbara); Goro Mutsumi (Alien Supreme Commander Kuronuma).

CREW: Toho Company, LTD, a Toho Eizo Production, Godzilla vs. The Bionic Monster. Director of Photography: Yuzuru Aizawa. Original Music: Masaru Sato. Film Editing:  Michiko Ikeda. Production Design: Kazuo Satsuya. Produced by: Tomoyuki Tanaka. Written and directed by: Jun Fukuda. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 84 minutes.

Story:

An Ancient Okinawan prophecy, re-counted by the descendants of the royal family of Azumi Castle, foretells of a time when a black mountain will appear, the sun will rise in the west, and two monsters will rise to defeat a grave threat.

The signs of this prophecy begin to come true when aliens “from the third planet of the black hole, outer space” land on Earth, and launch their cyborg, Mecha-Godzilla from their underground base.

Godzilla rises from the sea to stop his merciless duplicate, but fails on the first attempt.  Now, Princess Nami (Lin) must sing a song from Azumi history to wake the great King Caesar from his longer slumber, to join forces with Godzilla.

Review:

Released briefly in the United States as Godzilla vs. The Bionic Monster before changing its title to Godzilla vs. The Cosmic Monster, this film is more widely known by the title Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla.  Here, there’s a significant air of mystery as the kaiju action starts. Godzilla begins acting in uncharacteristically destructive fashion, and even attacks a friend from Monster Island, Anguirus. It is soon revealed that evil aliens that appear human but are really simian in nature (think Planet of the Apes) are behind the attack, and hoping to conquer the Earth.  In this case, Godzilla requires the help of King Caesar, a kind of glowing dog/bat creature who has long slumbered inside a mountain on Okinawa, to defeat the aliens’ “ultimate weapon!”

This is also a surprisingly gory installation of the long-lived Godzilla film series, and in one scene, red blood fountains out of Godzilla’s neck as Mecha-Godzilla attacks.  In another scene, two aliens take bullets to the head, and greed fluid bursts out.  In keeping with this harder tone, the evil alien leader is absolutely merciless in nature, ordering his giant cyborg, at one point, to “beat Godzilla to death!” rather than just destroy him.  So the stakes are high in the film, and again, one feels while watching it that it’s a 1970s Bond film, replete with an evil-talking villain who shares his plans, and reveals his secret subterranean headquarters.  There are also the requisite action sequences. In this case, Godzilla somehow transforms himself into a “magnetic pole” during battle, and attracts Mecha-Godzilla to him.

Similarly, there’s an “imposter” Godzilla in the film’s opening, a reflection of certain Bond tropes seen in series entries such as From Russia with Love (1963) and The Man with The Golden Gun (1974).

Although this film is not as strong as Godzilla vs. Hedorah since it lacks the social context of that film, or the 1954 original, it certainly features a great villain in Mech-Godzilla, a silver robot of gigantic proportions with missiles for fingers and toes, and a unique guest-star in King Caesar.

One question does arise, however: how did the Azumi family know this threat from space would come?   What forces gave rise to the prophecy?

Otherwise, the film is good fun, if occasionally baffling.  The moment when the alien leader spits out his home address (“the third planet of the black hole, outer space,”) is one example of the latter.

And it is also never explained why the same supreme leader is always smoking a cigar and drinking liquor.  Aren’t smoking and drinking human vices?  And human vices don’t seem likely from an outer-space ape man who cackles his way through lines of dialogue like “Goodbye, Stupid Earthlings.”

The Incredible Melting Man (1977) * *

Critical Mass:

“…an early showcase for the makeup and effects work of a young Rick Baker. The effects are obviously one of the film’s main selling points, as writer/director Sachs gives the audience plenty of time to take them in.” – Jason Coffman, Film Monthly, September 12, 2011.

“…what could have been a riveting science fiction thriller turned into another nonsensical “monster-on-the-loose” melodrama.” – Ric Meyers, For One Week Only: The World of Exploitation Films, 2011, Emory Books, page 161.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Alex Rebar (Steve West/The Incredible Melting Man); Burr DeBenning (Dr. Ted Nelson); Myron Healey (General Michael Perry); Michael Alldredge (Sheriff Neil Blake); Ann Sweeny (Judy Nelson); Lisle Wilson (Dr. Loring); Rainbeaux Smith (The Model); Julie Drazen (Carol); Stuart Edmond Rodgers, Chris Witney (Boys); Edwin Max (Harold); Dorothy Love (Helen); Janus Blythe (Nell Winters); Jonathan Demme (Matt Winters); DeForest Covan (Janitor); Sam Gelfman (Fisherman); Bonnie Inch (Nurse).

CREW: MGM and Max J. Rosenberg presents a Rosenberg-Gelfman Production, The Incredible Melting Man. Director of Photography: Willy Curtis. Original Music: Arlon Ober. Film Editing: James Beshears. Special Effects and Make-up: Rick Baker. Art Direction: Michel Levesque. Written and directed by: William Sachs.  M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 84 minutes.

Story:

The rocket ship Scorpio 5, commanded by astronaut Steve West (Rebar) travels into the rings of Saturn, and something goes horribly wrong.  When the three-man crew returns to Earth, two men die.

Steve survives but discovers his flesh rapidly melting.  The only thing that can keep him alive is to ingest human flesh and blood.  He escapes from the hospital and begins to commit murder for that very purpose. General Perry (Healey) and Dr. Nelson (DeBenning) attempt to find Steve and prevent him from killing anyone, but the Incredible Melting Man commences a night of terror.

Review:

The Incredible Melting Man was advertised back in 1977 with a tag-line calling the titular character “The first new horror creature,” and that message suggests the best possible way to interpret the film.

This is a film, like The Wolf Man (1941), about a man who unwittingly becomes a monster; who must kill even though it is against his human nature.  In other words, there is a tragic quality to this monster that makes him sympathetic, much in the same way that the Wolf Man is sympathetic, or the Frankenstein Monster is sympathetic.

The Incredible Melting Man, however, is a monster for the space age not for the Gothic past. A brilliant astronaut, Steve West, becomes a monster not after being bitten, but after becoming exposed to radiation/energy/light from the sun as refracted through the rings of Saturn.  In his quest for knowledge, he has, quite literally, flown too close to the sun.

The make-up effects by Rick Baker remain impressive and disgusting to this day, and The Incredible Melting Man is genuinely horrific.  In one early scene, the melting man decapitates a fisherman by a stream (played by the film’s producer, Gelfman), and his head floats down-stream, down a waterfall, and ends in a pool…where blood is still spurting out of its gaping cavity.

There’s also a terrific scene of electrocution near the climax, wherein the town sheriff (Alldredge) gets tossed through live wires, and his body memorably sparks and explodes.   This may be faint praise, but I’ve never seen a better death by electricity in a genre film.

The most effective and disgusting effects sequence finds Steve collapse into a puddle…literally.  The next morning, a custodian gets a dust pan and broom, and puts his yucky remains in the garbage, an ignominious end for an astronaut who once explored the stars.

On the plus side, The Incredible Melting Man is also relatively well-acted, well-shot and well-edited for a low budget picture of its vintage.  The problem is, largely, that the plot structure plays as random, and is ultra-repetitive. The film’s monster escapes from captivity, and then spends the rest of the eighty-minutes tromping through a forest threatening children (again, an echo of Frankenstein [1931] and the monster’s encounter with a little girl by the river…), senior citizens, young lovers, and the like, all of whom are more or less introduced randomly.  They play no real significant part in the narrative except as victims.

The film’s low-budget also works against the sense of reality that the make-up and actors work hard to provide.  An astronaut comes back from space as a flesh-eating monster and the only governmental response it so send a senior citizen general…with no soldiers, vehicles or equipment. Instead, the general and a government doctor drive around the countryside in a car, always behind the eight-ball, always in time to examine victims, but never their quarry.  It is really ridiculous, though this element certainly harks back to low-budget horror films of yesteryear like Night of the Blood Beast (1958), for instance.

Ultimately, the so-called “first new horror star” as featured here simply fails to function as such because we know so little about Steve as a human being. There’s very little action in the film that occurs before he is transformed into a melting beast.  And once he has begun melting, his expressions and feelings are opaque to viewers.  The Incredible Melting Man might have worked better featuring non-random victims, then.

What if Steve tried to get home to his family?  Or at least was in search of it?  A wife perhaps and a small child? That quest would have made the tragic aspects of the tale more pronounced, and made the action feel a lot less random.  We want to sympathize with the astronaut here, but he’s too gooey and too slimy too fast to earn total sympathy, and carry on the tradition of Talbot and the Wolf Man.

Here come the Humanimals, in Samuel Z. Arkoff’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977).

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977) * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“…a dismal vivisection of Wells’ genuinely creepy 1896 novel…Burt Lancaster toned down the sadist in Moreau and turned up the wronged man of science.” – Peter Rainer, SF Weekly, August 26, 1996.

“Depressingly unatmospheric remake…” – Alan Frank, The Horror Film Handbook, 1982, pages 80 – 81.

“…suffered from a low budget and the rather laidback and supple style of Burt Lancaster in the lead. Lancaster sees Dr. Moreau not as a cretin, but as a misguided humanist, throwing the rest of the yarn off-kilter.” – Jim Bawden, Toronto Star, September 21, 1996.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Burt Lancaster (Dr. Moreau); Michael York (Andrew Braddock); Nigel Davenport (Montgomery); Barbara Carrera (Maria); Richard Basehart (Sayer of the Law); Nick Cravat (M’Ling); The Great John L. (Boarman); Bob Ozman (Bull Man); Fumio De Mura (Hyena Man); Gary Baxley (Lion Man); John Gillespie (Tiger Man); David Cass (Bear Man).

CREW: American International Pictures and Samuel Z. Arkoff present a Skip Steloff/Sandy Howard/Major Production, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Director of Photography: Gary Fisher. Original Music: Laurence Rosenthal. Film Editor: Marion Rothman. Production Design: Philip Jefferies. Produced by: John Temple-Smith, Skip Steloff. Executive Producers: Samuel Z. Arkoff, Sandy Howard. Written by: Al Ramus. Directed by: Don Taylor. M.P.A.A. Rating :PG. Running time: 99

minutes.

Story:

Following the shipwreck of the Lady Vain, engineer Andrew Braddock (York) washes ashore on the island that is home to Dr. Paul Moreau (Lancaster), a brilliant scientist who has lived there for eleven years and has been conducting scientific experiments on the animals living there.

Specifically, Moreau has transformed many animals – lions, tigers and bears – into quasi-human creatures with a rudimentary intelligence and the capability to walk up-right. Moreau has also been playing God, creating a society for the “humanimals” and even a lord for them to worship…him.  Andrew is horrified by Moreau’s cruelty and caprice, especially when he learns what the humanimals fear most: Moreau’s House of Pain.

Before long, Moreau decides that he will experiment on Braddock, and reverse his experiment, making a beast out of a man…

Review:

The works of H.G. Wells certainly got a lot of play in the 1970s, though given the quality of Food of the Gods (1976), Empire of the Ants (1977), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977) and especially The Shape of Things to Come (1979), the author himself might have wished otherwise.

In fact, it is an historical irony or oddity, perhaps, that the best H.G. Wells themed film of the 1970s is  an original not adapted one in which the author is the protagonist, Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time (1979).

The work adapted here is The Island of Dr. Moreau. The original 1896 novel involves a shipwreck survivor that encounters Moreau and his island of “Beast Folk,” beasts made to act-like men under the auspices of Moreau’s science, in this case vivisection, which was a controversial issue at the time of the book’s release.

The Wells novel ends with the shipwreck survivor living a life of isolation back in England following his adventure on the island and fearing that even evolved man is on the edge of devolution to barbarism or animalistic behavior.  Accordingly, he turns his gaze skyward, at the stars, and becomes an astronomer.

This novel has been adapted to the silver screen three times, first in 1932 as Island of Lost Souls starring Charles Laughton and again, after this film, in 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, starring a wacky and obese Marlon Brando.

Although a bit tedious, this middle adaptation comes close to doing the story justice, and fits in well with the “science run amok” and “medical malpractice” aesthetic of the 1970s.  The humanimal make-up is impressive in the same way that the Planet of the Apes make-up looked impressive in the 1970s, and Michael York is good as the protagonist.   Barbara Carrera == apparently being typecast after her role as a seductive femme fatale in Embryo (1976) -- is also alluring here as the feral Maria.

One letdown in terms of casting involves Burt Lancaster as Moreau, however.  Lancaster is simply not able to imbue the doctor with either an authentic sense of madness or an authentic sense of menace, and Moreau should be a larger than life presence, not just a work-a-day scientist.  After all, this is a man who plays God and re-shapes an entire island into his version of paradise.  Lancaster’s approach is perhaps more grounded and realistic than either Laughton’s or Brando’s, but that holding back could be the wrong call in this particular story, where Moreau must compete for attention with Hyena Men, Lion Men and other “Beast Folk” for the spotlight.

The Island of Dr. Moreau’s main thematic point seems to be two-fold. The first is that the temptation to play God may be unavoidable, but it is nonetheless wrong. Moreau learns this the hard way when he is hanged and killed by his own wayward children while behind him his life’s work burns to a cinder.

The second point is connected with the first, and involves the notion that animals -- and man, for that matter -- are the product of a particular design or map, and that it is impossible to rewrite that map.  Although Moreau strives to make animals human, they will never be human, and will never understand humanity.  In making these creatures “Humanimals,” Moreau is fighting a hopeless battle.  Eventually, the animals will be what nature meant them to be.

Where this gets truly interesting, however, is in how the lesson applies to man.  Is the same true of him?  Is it foolish to try to change him, to make him better?  The book had an answer for that question, and saw the protagonist return to society feeling uncomfortable in the proximity of other men.  He was sure that they, like the animals on the island, could return to their true “animal” nature at any time. This version of The Island of Dr. Moreau would be a stronger film if it found some way to give voice to this particular theme, but it doesn’t.

A crop duster gets covered with aggressive spiders in Kingdom of the Spiders (1977).

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) * * *

Critical Mass:

“well-made, poor man’s Arachnophobia of 1977.” - Chicago Tribune, august 9, 1990, page 6.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: William Shatner (Rack Hansen); Tiffany Bolling (Diane Ashley); Woody Strode (Walter Colby); Leiux Dressler (Emma Washburn); David McLean (Gene Smith); Natasha Ryan (Linda Hansen); Altovise Davis (Birch Colby); Joe Ross (Vern Johnson); Mercy Lafferty (Terry Hansen); Roy Engel (Mayor Connors); Hoke Howell (Earl Forbes); Bill Coontz (Clyde).

CREW: Dimension Pictures Presents Kingdom of the Spiders. Director of Photography: John Morrill. Original Music: Igo Kantor. Film Editors: Steve Zaillan, Igo Kantor. Produced by: Igo Kantor, Jeffrey M. Sneller. Executive Producer: Henry Fownes. Written by: Richard Robinson, Alan Caillou. Directed by: John ‘Bud’ Cardos. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 97 minutes.

Story:

Veterinarian Rack Hansen (Shatner) of peaceful but poor Verde Valley in Arizona receives an emergency call from a local man, Colby (Strode), who reports that his prized cow has been felled by what appears to be a mysterious illness.

The cow dies, and Rack sends blood samples to a lab in Flagstaff to help find answers. Those answers arrive in town with Dr. Diane Ashley (Bolling), an expert in venomous animals who has concluded that Colby's cow died from dozens of extremely poisonous spider bites.

A closer investigation reveals a giant tarantula hill on Colby's property. This is an unusual development because the spiders are working together in harmony, not attacking each other as is more characteristic of their nature. Diane speculates that human interference with Mother Nature has caused the spiders to turn aggressive. In particular, man’s over-use of pesticides in the area has killed off the insects, the spiders’ primary source of food.

Now the desperate spiders are attacking livestock and casting hungry eyes towards mankind. Rack and Diane recommend a quarantine to destroy the aggressive spiders, but it is too late, and spiders rampage through Verde Valley, cocooning their prey in webs and causing all manner of chaos.

Review:

Once more, the balance of nature is threatened by short-sighted technological man in the no-holds barred Kingdom of the Spiders.  The movie, starring Star Trek’s William Shatner, suggests that man’s dependence on pesticides has forced spiders to adopt a “hive” mentality and build an army to simultaneously strike back and find new sources of food.  The film’s final, apocalyptic image is one the most terrifying and surprising of all 1970s “revenge of nature” films.  The spider threat is not put down.  On the contrary, the survivors of a sustained attack gaze out a window at sunrise and see that the whole valley has been cocooned in a web and saved for future consumption.

Welcome to the Dawn of the Spiders…

Far superior to the scattershot The Great Spider Invasion (1975), Kingdom of the Spiders features many likable characters and places them in the most egregious kind of peril imaginable. In short, the actors are all doused with real spiders, and nobody, not even Captain Kirk himself, escapes unscathed.  Before their siege is done, spiders drop out of ceiling air vents, crack open windows, jump down chimneys into open fireplaces, short -out the power box in the basement, and generally go blood simple.

The film's protagonists retaliate with murderous force, and it is clear that, yes, real spiders were harmed during the making of this film. They are stomped, crushed, rolled over by cars, pelted with chemical fire-extinguisher spray and burned.  Although this murder of real-life spiders is not very nice, it sure packs a visceral punch on screen.  The movie depicts all-out, balls-to-the-wall war between humans and arachnids. There's no visual trickery or phoniness to be seen anywhere, and in one harrowing sequence, William Shatner crawls up a basement staircase with probably two-dozen spiders crawling on his torso, legs, head and even his famous toupee. The Shat obligingly points his flashlight at his own face during the scene so that the audience can get the full impact of the stunt in the dim light. Once a ham, always a ham, I suppose.

Tiffany Bolling proves pretty damn courageous too, casually and expertly plucking up spiders and petting them like she really loves them. The only giveaway: in the tighter shots you can see her hands shake.

But Kingdom of the Spiders’ final half hour is so intense, so non-stop spidery that a lot more than your hands will probably shake as you watch. What makes all this action hang together is the fact that Kingdom of the Spiders has, by this rock-‘em, sock-‘em denouement devoted considerable time and energy to develop its characters in more than rudimentary fashion. Old Emma Washburn still loves the town sheriff even though their romance died years ago. Rack and Diane share a fun romantic rivalry (though by film's end, the "liberated" Bolling character is subserviently fetching Shatner his beer...), and -- as surprised as you may be how they get under your skin –the audience actually comes to care about what happens to these people.  There’s one scene where Rack’s sister-in-law (Marcy Lafferty) races to save her little daughter from the teeming spiders, and gives her life in the cause.  It’s impossible not to feel moved by her sacrifice.

It's a lesson that today's genre spectaculars could stand to learn: you can't drive at 100 miles an hour for 90 minutes, and expect viewers to remain involved, much less scared. If you're always driving fast...you're never driving fast; there's no opportunity to breathe, relax...or let your guard down. Sometimes, for the big moments to pay off, they have to arrive after slow ones; after quiet character moments. For all its inherent silliness, Kingdom of the Spiders understands that fact. Certainly, it owes a lot of its gonzo life blood to Hitchcock's The Birds and from Spielberg's Jaws.  Yet the film consistently pleases because it is thoroughly scary.

John "Bud" Cardos direction and John Morrill's cinematography are also much finer, much cleverer than you might expect of such a low budget effort. For instance, the camera in Kingdom of the Spiders has this funny but confident way of suddenly tilting down from a scene in progress, then gliding away from the action to pinpoint a crawling spider somewhere on the floor nearby.

And how can anyone not love the film’s opening "stealth" attack on a grazing cow? One that features the spider's point of view through tall grass and ends with a freeze-frame of the beleaguered cow's shocked eyeball?  Meanwhile, e the soundtrack plays a cow "mooing" in anxiety and pain.

All kidding aside, I’m also a big fan of Shatner’s performance here. My God, the man upstages 5,000 spiders. He doesn't just lasso cattle in this film, he lassos the spotlight. Say what you will about the Shat, but the man's got screen presence to spare, and more pertinently, the right presence for this movie. His trademark quirks and idiosyncrasies as a performer keep us firmly anchored in the "human" sub-plots and so the movie never descends to level of simple geek show.  The spiders don’t take over the picture, because Shatner isn’t about to let that happen.

While some may deride Kingdom of the Spiders as a old, cheap B-movie, it's a wondrous, terrifying, and wholly charming one. The social critique regarding the “Revenge of Nature” is old hat, to be sure, and part and parcel of the 1970s, but Shatner and an army of spiders breathe fresh life into the re-telling of the tale.

The People That Time Forgot (1977) * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“…the special effects of People are decidedly unspecial.” – Edward Jones, The Free Lance-Star, July 30, 1977.

“…even the creaky old dinosaurs fail to rise to the occasion…this is a movie to forget.” - Doug Anderson, The Sydney Morning Herald, December 21, 1987.

“…a lot of dirt, explosions, and busty cave-women.” – Clarksville Online, June 29, 2007.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Patrick Wayne (Ben McBride); Doug McClure (Bowen Taylor); Sarah Douglas (Charly); Dana Gillespie (Ajor); Thorley Walters (Norfok); Shane Rimmer (Hogan); Tony Britton (Captain Lawton); John Hallam (Chung-Sa); David Prowse (Executioner); Richard La Parmentier (Lt. Whitby).

CREW: American International and Samuel Z. Arkoff present a Max J. Rosenberg Production, The People That Time Forgot. Director of Photography: Alan Hume. Original Music: John Scott. Film Editors: John Ireland, Barry Peter. Production Designer: Maurice Carter. Executive Producer: Samuel Z. Arkoff. Produced by: John Dark. Directed by: Kevin Connor. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running Time: 90 minutes.

Story:

Tyler Bowen’s (McClure) message in a bottle from the lost world of Caprona is discovered in Scotland at the end of 1917, and his friend, McBride (Wayne) puts together a team to launch a rescue mission. A ship called the Polar Queen heads to icy Caprona, and McBride launches a sea-plane, or “amphib” to make landfall, with a photographer (Douglas), a mechanic (Rimmer) and a scientist (Walters) aboard.

A pterodactyl damages the plane however, and McBride must lead his expedition into the island interior on foot.  The group soon encounters Ajor (Gillespie), a beautiful woman who knows Tyler, and reports that he is being held captive an aggressive race of natives, the Nargas, at the City of Skulls.  McBride attempts a rescue only to see his people captured by the warrior race and their green-skinned leader…one who wishes to sacrifice the women to a hungry volcano god.

Review:

A direct sequel to The Land That Time Forgot the 1977 “lost world” fantasy The People That Time Forgot features gorgeous location photography on Santa Cruz de la Palma in the Canary Islands.  This is a realm that, on screen, appears authentically prehistoric. Unlike At the Earth’s Core, which was entirely studio-bound, The People That Time Forgot makes a point of staging much of its action in epic long-shot, lending the film a kind of visual legitimacy. The film’s final sequence, a plane lifting off from the prehistoric land while the earth seems to literally explode around it, is a literal fireworks show-stopper. And also unlike the aforementioned 1976 film, this film by and large (though not universally) goes back to featuring historical (pre-historical?) beasts, rather than fictional ones.  Pterodactyls, a stegosaurus, and a scutusaurus all make guest-appearances in the action.

Alas, in terms of narrative The People That Time Forgot is a bit of a blind-alley, despite some nice character interaction and chemistry between Patrick Wayne’s World War I veteran and adventurer, and Sarah Douglas’s liberated photographer, Charly. These 20th century explorers set off to rescue Bowen Tyler -- franchise star Doug McClure -- and find out first that his companion from the earlier film, Lisa, is dead.

Then Tyler himself is killed in action.

Next, the professor’s notes are lost when the aforementioned scutusaurus grabs his satchel in its jaws.

And finally, Charly’s camera -- packed with photographs of the lost world of Caprona -- must be heaved overboard from a plane in flight to lift the plane over the low mountains ahead.  In total then, the mission is a complete wash.

The “heroes” come back empty handed, having survived with their lives but absolutely nothing less.  The big loss is that of Bowen Tyler, who does a kind of Charlton Heston in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) act here, showing up only at the film’s conclusion very briefly before getting a good death scene.   Incidentally, both Tylers’ and Lisa’s deaths are not faithful to Burroughs’ literary work, but rather an (unnecessary) invention of the screenplay.

Mostly unexcavated and unexplored here too, is the nature of the land of Caprona, which, as described in The Land That Time Forgot, constantly undergoes a peculiar kind of evolutionary process.

Here, Bowen describes the land of Caprona as being alive and says that it will refuse to let modern man escape.  That’s not quite accurate since most of the party survives and gets back to the civilized world. But the idea of the land being sentient (and angry, apparently) could have used more explanation and a bit more depth.

Instead, the plot of The People That Time Forgot often feels a little too simple, a little-too cut-rate.  The rescuers find Tyler, defeat a volcano-worshipping cult, and escape.  The City of Skulls, rendered in long shot by ineffectual matte-painting, looks a lot less convincing than the city of the Mahars did in At the Earth’s Core.

In fact, the plot of this film very much mirrors At the Earth’s Core, with human heroes being captured by enemy warriors (who here look like Samurai warriors for some unknown reason), and then being taken to a city where a volcano brings the reign of terror to an end.  Unlike that earlier film, however, The People That Time Forgot has no real thematic through-line that elevates it above the level of simple adventure.

Despite the fact that the plot and characters of The People That Time Forgot consist, essentially, a zero-sum game, there are some moments that continue to impress, particularly in the opening passages of the film.  The amphib’s fight with a hungry pterodactyl is one such high-point, as is the set piece in which the stranded rescuers must deploy a slow-moving stegosaurus as a winch to move their grounded vehicle uphill. Another treat is Dana Gillespie as Ajor, who constantly threatens to burst out of her skin-tight, open-chested animal-skin blouse.

The People That Time Forgot opened just weeks after Star Wars, a paradigm-shifting “fantasy” of another type, which would render the Burroughs’ model obsolete, and old-looking.

Despite this fact, all the films -- and especially the first, The Land That Time Forgot -- are sturdy lost world fantasies that a generation of children (this author’s included) absolutely adored.  It’s remarkable that these films haven’t been remade today with top-of-the-line special effects and huge budgets.  Certainly, it seems they could ably compete with Jurassic Park.

The Minoton -- one of Ray Harryhausen’s most amazing stop-motion creations -- looms close by in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977).

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) * *

Critical Mass:

“Dreary follow-up to The Golden Voyage of Sinbad has unusually hackneyed script…disappointing Ray Harryhausen effects, and goes on forever.” – Leonard Maltin, Leonard Maltin’s 2010 Movie Guide, Signet, 2009.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Patrick Wayne (Sinbad); Jane Seymour (Farah); Taryn Power (Dione); Margaret Whiting (Zenobia); Patrick Troughton (Melanthius); Kurt Christian (Rafi); Nadim Sawalha (Hassan); Damien Thomas (Kassim); Bruno Barnabe (Balsora); Bernard Kay (Zabid); Salami Coker (Maroof); Peter Mayhew (Minoton).

CREW: Columbia Pictures and Andor Films present Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. Director of Photography: Ted Moore. Original Music: Roy Budd. Film Editing: Roy Watts.  Production Design: Geoffrey Drake.  Produced by: Ray Harryhausen, Charles H. Schneer. Written by: Beverley Cross. Directed by: Sam Wanamaker. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 113 minutes.

Story:

Sinbad the sailor (Wayne) must stop a diabolical sorceress -- "as malicious as a shark" --  named Zenobia (Margaret Whiting), who has turned the soon-to-be-crowned Caliph, Prince Kassim, into a baboon.  She has done so in hopes that her own son may assume the throne in Kassim's place.  Engaged to Kassim's sister, Farah (Jane Seymour), Sinbad sets sail to find a cure for the transformed Kassim.  Along the way, he meets up with a legendary Greek scientist, Melanthius (Patrick Troughton) and his lovely daughter, Dione (Taryn Power), and together they make for the foreboding ice cliffs of Hyperboria, where a cure may await.  Meanwhile, Zenobia pursues Sinbad with her frightening automaton, the Minoton...

Review:

Directed by Sam Wanamaker, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger was released in American theaters just six weeks after Star Wars premiered in 1977, and so it's clear that a dramatic shift was occurring in terms of movie fantasies.

Unfortunately, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger looks old and tired compared to Star Wars, with several disastrous scenes featuring unnecessary rear projection.

In fact, in several scenes it looks as though the major cast members (Wayne, Seymour and Troughton) never even went on location, and so all of the exterior scenes set on Melanthius's island absolutely reek of visual phoniness.  It's so bad as to take the viewer out of the movie's reality for several minutes.

Beyond this issue, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger is the only Sinbad movie where the stop-motion animation itself proves a little tiresome.  The first fight in the film -- Sinbad against three insectoid/skeleton creatures from the underworld -- is dire. The lighting is wrong, the monster proportions are wrong, and background/foreground elements don’t seem to blend adroitly at all.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger would have also worked a lot better, in visual terms, if a real baboon had been used as Kassim, instead of a stop-motion figure.  The same criticism applies to the Minoton.  There are instances here wherein a full-scale statue/person-in-suit (seen briefly) could have more effectively brought the creature to life for longer spells.  The poor visuals involving the baboon and the Minoton give one the impression that the Sinbad movies have fallen into a creative rut; one where the creators seem to think stop-motion animation is the only solution to a special effects problem.  No one was thinking outside that particular box. Where Star Wars blew wide open the world of special effects possibilities, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger feels tired and conservative.

On top of these flaws, we've gone back to the 7th Voyage of Sinbad's non-ethnic, western portrayal of Sinbad, and Patrick Wayne seems to lack the intensity or depth of John Phillip Law.  He's cheery and kind of bland.   This film is also the longest of the Sinbad features clocking it at nearly two hours, and the plot is so simplistic that much of the film feels like a drag.  Then, when we finally get to the happy conclusion (Kassim's delayed coronation), the film displays end credits over the footage so the audience can't make out what's happening.

A few elements of the film remain enjoyable.  First and foremost is the Troglodyte creature of Hyperboria. This humanoid "monster"

remains one of Harryhausen's greatest efforts, and is absolutely brimming with humanity and personality.  The creature gives up its life to save Sinbad and his group in the climax, and it's a sacrifice audiences really feel.   It's amazing to countenance the idea that a "miniature" or sculpted model can make you feel strong emotions, but that's precisely what occurs with this sympathetic monster.

Secondly, the Minoton is an absolutely awesome villain and creation.  But again, I must note that something goes amiss with the character's use: he's killed removing a brick from a pyramid (!) and never given the chance to challenge Sinbad in combat. This is a villain that absolutely required a more fitting and dramatic end.  The film's climax should have involved a brawl between Sinbad and the Minoton. .

The other monsters in the film are a little underwhelming: a giant bee, a smilodon and a giant walrus, among them.   They look fine, but somehow lack any overt sense of menace.  The scene involving the bee happens to be spectacularly bad.  Troughton's character creates a giant bee to test Zenobia's transformation serum, and then it promptly runs wild, and allows for Zenobia to escape.  Nice move, huh?

Perhaps this film's most eye-opening and unexpected effect, at least for a forty-something dad, is a surprise nude scene by the gorgeous and apparently never aging Jane Seymour.

Somehow, as a seven year old seeing this for the first time, I didn't pick up on that.

I must have been too busy ogling the Minoton.

James Bond, 007 is back in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), this time driving a car-turned-submarine.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) * * *

Critical Mass:

“Probably the best of the James Bond flicks to star debonair Roger Moore in the 007 role, this action fantasy has an engaging sense of its own absurdity.” – Robert DiMatteo, The Vindicator, August 22, 1986, page 4.

“…cemented Moore’s tenure as Bond and revitalized the series.” – Paul Mavis, The Espionage Filmography, McFarland, 2001.

“…one of Moore’s better outings as 007.” – Geoff Mayer, Guide to British Cinema, Greenwood Press, 2003, page 152.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Roger Moore (James Bond, Agent 007); Barbara Bach (Triple X, Anya Amasova); Curt Jurgens (Karl Stromberg); Richard Kiel (Jaws); Caroline Munro (Naomi); Bernard Lee (M); Desmond Llewelyn (Q); Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny); Geoffrey Keen (Frederick Gray); Milton Reid (Sandor);Shane Rimmer (Commander Carter); Edward de Souza (Sheikh Hosein); George Baker (Captain Benson).

CREW: United Artists presents an Eon Production starring Roger Moore as Ian Fleming’s James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me. Director of Photography: Claude Renoir. Original Music: Marvin Hamlisch. Film Editor: John Glen. Produced by: Albert Broccoli. Written by: Christopher Wood and Richard Maibum. Directed by: Lewis Gilbert. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 125 minutes.

Story:

When British and Soviet nuclear submarines go missing, Agent 007, James Bond (Moore) is on the case. His first clue leads him to Egypt, where he encounters KGB agent XXX, Anya Amasova (Bach), as well as a hired assassin, the hulking, metal-mouthed Jaws (Kiel).

Realizing they share a common interest, Bond and XXX team up, despite the fact that Bond killed her lover in the line of duty.  Their investigation leads them to Carl Stromberg (Jurgens), a man who has made the study of the ocean his life, and even built an underwater headquarters called Atlantis to further those studies.

In truth, Stromberg has captured the submarines and is intent on starting World War III so that humanity can begin again…in undersea colonies that he alone commands.

Review:

The third time is undeniably the charm for Roger Moore’s James Bond era. The Spy Who Loved Me doesn’t exactly feature an original story, but it executes every 007 ingredient with wit, charm, and a surfeit of style.  The special effects, stunt-work, and set designs are perhaps the most impressive in the series up to this point, and both Moore and the writers/director seem to understand exactly how this iteration of the long-lived hero should fit in the 1970s. Hint: Bond is a superhero, and his costume is a white dinner jacket.

As I believe the late Roger Ebert once observed, the latter-day James Bond films are as tightly structured and stylized as Kabuki plays, and one must approach them on the basis of their ingredients and how each one rates on a scale of quality.

Right down the line, The Spy Who Loved Me succeeds admirably by this benchmark.  The film opens with a hit “pop” tune, Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better,” offers up a soldier villain to rival Goldfinger’s (1964) Odd Job, Kiel’s steel-toothed Jaws, and provides Moore’s Bond with a car the equal of Bond’s beloved Aston-Marton: a Lotus-Esprit that, while apparently lacking an ejector seat, can transform into a submarine at a moment’s notice.

The film’s plot, which is a reiteration of You Only Live Twice (1967) concerns an evil third party attempting to amp up hostilities between Cold War competitors, but is nonetheless epic enough to provide a fantastic enemy headquarters (a sea castle called Atlantis), and a massive-scaled battle of two armies clashing in the interior of a giant, souped-up oil tanker.  The film climaxes with a tense countdown to nuclear Armageddon.  Even the obligatory romance between Bond and a Russian agent called Triple X (Barbara Bach) strikes all the notes, right down to a touching mention of Bond’s much-mourned and dead wife, Tracy.

The Spy Who Loved Me also opens with one of the most jaw-dropping stunts ever to grace the silver screen, followed up by one of the best visual punch-lines of the entire Bond film series. Here, Bond is pursued by Soviet agents in Austria when he is forced to ski off a mountaintop.  He makes that jump (still wearing skis…) with no digital trickery or rear projection tomfoolery.  The camera follows the jump as 007 goes down, down and down -- in real life some 3,000 feet -- for an impossibly long time.  It really looks like he is a goner. But finally, a parachute goes up; a parachute emblazoned with the Union Jack symbol, a representation of British pride.

Bond is back and England is back, the movie declares confidently at this juncture. It’s a perfect movie moment, and brilliant opening to a revitalized James Bond series.  The incredible jump was performed by stuntman Rick Sylvester at Mount Asgard in Canada, supervised by editor, John Glen, and shot by cinematographer Alan Hume and a ledge camera man.  This early moment in the film isn’t merely stunning, but literally jaw-dropping.  Movie history -- and James Bond history -- was made.  In the thirty-plus years since this pre-title sequence, it still hasn’t been topped.

Like both You Only Live Twice and later, Moonraker, The Spy Who Loved Me stresses Cold War tension. A shadowy, unknown force is stealing Russian, British and American nuclear submarines, and each side blames the other.  Nuclear tensions rise.  Nobody trusts anyone.  But James Bond works with Triple X in a personal expression of “detente.”  He soon also learns that he is responsible for her lover’s death. She vows to kill him when their mission is over, a nice continuing source of tension in the film, but for the moment they put their personal baggage aside. This agreement to put differences aside is clearly a prescription in The Spy Who Loved Me for ending the Cold War, one involving putting ideology aside, and deterring nuclear Armageddon for the benefit of all mankind, communist or capitalist.

The film’s villain, perhaps reflecting this increased sense responsibility to the global community, is not a criminal interested in money (like Goldfinger, Scaramanga or Mr. Big), or even, again, ideology (like the misguided Russian general who nearly starts World War III in 1983’s Octopussy).  Instead, he is a power-hungry maniac who wants to rule the world, and create a New World Order…under the sea.

Given the stakes, the whole canvas of the film is, appropriately, spectacular.  The movie is a great roller-coaster ride and tremendous adventure, but not precisely an espionage film.  Bond is no longer merely a spy on the job, a secret agent protecting his government, but the savior of the world itself.  That he does so with a funny quip, an arched eyebrow and an unflappable dedication makes him all the more appealing at this point in film’s history.  Connery’s portrayal is more human and “dirty,” in a sense.  Moore’s Bond is one for the 1970s: more promiscuous, more amused by circumstance, and also somehow antiseptic; unwilling to let the chaotic terrain around him (a crisis of confidence?) keep him from doing what he must.

A downside to this new approach is that occasionally Moore’s Bond doesn’t seem to be in as much grave danger as his predecessor, though that’s not the case in The Spy Who Loves Me, which finds plenty of jeopardy for the character.

The Spy Who Loved Me is an original story by Christopher Wood and Richard Maibum, though it takes the name of a Fleming novel.  Although the decision to create original Bond material (with a familiar name) is no doubt controversial, it may be the very key to Bond’s long-term survival as a film franchise.  The Bond character (and the Bond movies) must forever change with the times, and not remained glued to a quickly receding context.  The Spy Who Loved Me -- arriving in cinemas the same year as Star Wars -- seems to understand that audiences wanted a less realistic, more modern, more humorous Bond.  The scales were tipped, perhaps too far in the next entry, Moonraker, but then the ship righted itself again in another great Moore entry: 1981’s For Your Eyes Only.

But had The Spy Who Loved Me failed in the summer of Star Wars, there might have been no future for 007.  The film succeeded in that tough summer by revitalizing and rethinking the 007 equation for the 1970s.

C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) and R2-D2 (Kenny Baker) find themselves in a pitched battle against the Empire on their blockade runner in the opening scene of Star Wars (1977).

Star Wars (1977) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“…a work of flawless escapism…a perfect summer-time film.” – Colin Westerbeck Jr., Comonweal, July 8, 1977, page 433.

“Star Wars is a grand and glorious film that has brought fun back to the movies and glowingly demonstrated that they can still make ‘em like they used to…a subliminal history of the movies wrapped in a riveting tale of suspense and adventure, ornamented with some of the most ingenious special effects ever contrived for film. It has no message, no sex...it’s aimed at kids – the kids in everybody.” – Readers Digest, “How Star Wars was Made,” September 1977, page 162.

“With wry humor and a fresh, vivid style, Lucas avoids laying a heavy 2001: A Space Odyssey trip on us. Star Wars is a blast, a jet-powered tribute to Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, The Wizard of Oz and your basic favorite western. It’s also a tribute to that sense of wonder we all have, which doesn’t get a workout often enough.” - Margaret Ronan, Senior Scholastic, September 8, 1977, page 28.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker); Harrison Ford (Han Solo); Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia Organa); Alec Guinness (Obi Wan Kenobi); Peter Cushing (Grand Moff Tarkin); Anthony Daniels (C3PO); Kenny Baker (R2D2); Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca); David Prowse (Lord Darth Vader); Phil Brown (Uncle Owen); Shelagh Fraser (Aunt Beru); Jack Purvis (Chief Jawa); Alex McCrindle (General Dodonna); Eddie Byrne (General Willard); Denis Lawson (Wedge); William Hootkins (Red Six); Angus MacInnes (Gold Leader); Don Henderson (General Taggi); Richard LeParmentier (General Mott); Leslie Schofield (Commander #1).

CREW: 20th Century Fox presents Star Wars. Director of Photography: Gilbert Taylor. Original Music: John Williams. Film Editors: Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch, Marcia Lucas. Production Design: John Barry. Special Photographic Special Effects Supervisor: John Dykstra. Make-up: Stuart Freeborn. Make-up, Second Unit: Rick Baker. Produced by: Gary Kurtz. Written and directed by: George Lucas. M.P.A.A Rating: PG. Running time: 121 minutes.

Story:

While being pursued by the Emperor’s minion, Lord Darth Vader (David Prowse), Princess Leia of Alderaan (Carrie Fisher) hides the tactical plans for an Imperial battle station called the Death Star with a small droid called R2-D2 (Kenny Baker).

With his counterpart, protocol droid C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) in tow, R2-D2 escapes to the desert world of Tatooine with the goal of finding former Jedi Knight, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) and soliciting his aid.

On Tatooine, however, the droids are captured by scavengers called Jawas and sold to the Skywalker farm. There, a young man, Luke (Hamill), hopes to leave his dreary life working at the moisture farm, and tender his application to the Academy.  But his uncle resists.  He doesn't want Luke to go.  He doesn't want Luke to grow up.

Soon, Luke and the droids meet up with Kenobi, an old man who urges the young man to help him reach Alderaan with R2 and the technical schematics.

After his aunt and uncle are murdered by Imperial Stormtroopers, Luke agrees to join Obi-Wan's quest.  They book passage to Alderaan aboard the Millennium Falcon, captained by Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and co-piloted by a Wookie named Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew). Unfortunately, the commanding officer on the Death Star, Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) plans to make Princess Leia reveal the location of the secret rebel base, and destroys her home planet of Alderaan to coerce her cooperation.

When the Millennium Falcon arrives in the Alderaan system from Tatooine, it finds not a beautiful planet, but the Death Star. Now, Luke and his friends must rescue Leia, Ben must confront his old student, Vader, and they all must get the plans to the rebels, before the Empire and the Death Star carry the day…

Review:

Without a doubt, Star Wars is the science fiction movie phenomenon of the 1970s.

It is the movie that launched a thousand rip-offs, and the one that created genre fans by the millions.  I saw the film for the first time when I was seven, and up to that point I had never witnessed a fantasy/sci-fi/monster movie crated on such a grand scale or one presented with such a consistent, unshakable sense of reality.

Unlike many genre films of the epoch (for example, Damnation Alley [1977]) there was never even a single moment during Star Wars when the “spell” was broken, or the fantasy facade broke down to accommodate a bad special effect, a lousy performance, a cheap set/costume, or some other weak production component.  Rather, that assiduously developed atmosphere of reality-- of a different and fantastic reality, no less – was rigorously and impeccably sustained for two hours.

And because of that fact, Star Wars remains, arguably, the most exhilarating movie of the 1970s.  I remember coming out of the movie for the first time and feeling like I had been holding my breath for two hours.  Then, over a period of several weeks, I saw the film in the theater at least three more times...and felt precisely the same way.

But the great joy of Star Wars, even today, after all the imitations and knock-offs, largely comes down to George Lucas’s incredible ability to ground his otherworldly “space opera” world in a reality that is immediately recognizable to all of us.  For instance, underneath the flashy lasers and colored light sabers, or the strange aliens and robots, the film boasts this driving, human feeling of yearning, of almost anticipatory anxiety.

Star Wars’ lead character, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) gazes up at the night sky of Tatooine, and he wonders what awaits him.  Where will he go next?  When does his life really begin? When does he finally get to grow up and chart his own destiny?  What is he supposed to believe in? Lucas grounds the viewer in Luke’s personal “coming of age” story, yet that’s far from the only grounding the director accomplishes here.  Without explaining in significant terms a layered or complex back-story, Lucas crafts in Star Wars a lived-in world which nonetheless points to previous adventures, and to a larger universe beyond the main narrative.

It’s such a big (and yet consistent…) place, in fact, that it almost can’t all fit within the boundaries of the movie frame.  Thus at times, it almost seems as if Lucas didn’t make up his universe at all, or build it all from scratch.  Rather, it’s as though he took a camera in-hand and actually traveled to a galaxy far, far away, filmed what he witnessed there, and brought that footage back for the rest of us to enjoy.

The film’s dialogue, filled with descriptors like “this time,” or “no more,” captures obliquely the notion that this adventure is set on just another day in this faraway galaxy, and that there are many, many other adventures to witness, and personalities to meet there.  The film boasts many half-explored implications, from intimations about unseen characters like The Emperor, Captain Antilles and Jabba the Hutt, to tantalizing hints about the previous adventures of Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi, R2-D2 and C-3PO.

The scenery or set design itself possesses a kind of unexplored depth and breadth. There's a staircase leading up -- where precisely? -- beyond Docking Bay 94 on Tatooine. There's the packed-to-the-gills interior of a bustling, junk-filled Sandcrawler.  There are even alligators in the sewers, so-to-speak, or rather a Dia Noga in the trash compactor. And then, of course, there’s that famous cantina, teeming with aliens of every color, shape, size and dimension.

The visual form of Star Wars actively reflects this narrative content in a most unusual and resonant fashion.  Specifically, Lucas utilizes visual homage or visual tributes to previous and well-established cinematic productions to help the audience process quickly and thoroughly the essential nature of life in the world of the Galactic Empire.  So even if we don’t consciously recognize or identify all the visual touches in terms of the original source material (such as The Hidden Fortress [1958], Metropolis [1927] or 633 Squadron [1964]), our eyes nonetheless understand the touches as belonging to some common cultural “language” we all share.  Star Wars is an accomplished blend of the familiar with the unfamiliar, the past with the present, and also with the (imaginative) future.  And Lucas’s choice to re-purpose imagery from film history is one key to help viewers understand his universe.

Underneath this technique of tribute or homage is a simple yet elegant message about man's nature, and not least of all, his spirituality.  In short, Star Wars offers a renewal of movie spirituality in an era of anti-heroes, cynicism, and the personal, idiosyncratic cinema.

When you stand back and gaze at Star Wars from a good distance, you can detect that the film tells a very old story: the hero's journey.  But it tells that tale in a new way, and in a new (final?) frontier: outer space.   Rather, it is the explicit details of the narrative that are new to audiences, from the history of the Jedi Knights and The Force to the explanations of such things as snub-nosed fighters, T.I.E. fighters, tractor beams, hyper-drive, Wookiees, land-speeders and droids.  The way to make all these people, concepts, and ideas immediately understandable, Lucas understands, is to mine much of film history for visual antecedents, ones that make the story graspable for audiences, even though they don't know the precise details of the Old Republic, the Galactic Empire, or the Clone Wars.

From the film’s opening crawl, this is the very technique Lucas regularly deploys.  In particular, the crawl that appears immediately after the film's title harks back to Flash Gordon (1936), and the title cards used in each serial opener. In Flash Gordon, such screens conveyed important information about previous episodes in the thirteen installment production.  This crawl is actually our first visual indication that Star Wars is a pastiche, or a work of art imitating and honoring the work of previous artists.   It also sets the jaunty, almost retro tone of the picture. By recruiting this technique from the Flash Gordon films, Star Wars announces its intention to be pulpy, lighthearted, swashbuckling fantasy and fun.

This was not a small detail in the 1970s.  The disco decade was an era when such swashbuckling adventure films were not in vogue.  In terms of the sci-fi genre, Dystopian-styled films dominated the landscape (The Omega Man, Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, and Damnation Alley, for example.).  Not coincidentally, the same decade was the age of growling, violent anti-heroes like Dirty Harry and Paul Kersey (of the Death Wish films).   By commencing Star Wars with a 1930s-era, serial-like crawl, George Lucas effectively renounced contemporary cinema, and reached back to an older tradition, a “golden age” of more innocent fantasy fare.

Not incidentally, the screenplay seems to share his point of view, describing the light saber of the old Republic as an "elegant" weapon for a more "civilized time."  In other words, the past inside the Star Wars universe, and the past of Hollywood history outside Star Wars were both more elegant and civilized than the present of the Galactic Empire/anti-hero cinema.

After the opening crawl, Star Wars very much begins to deliberately ape elements and details from Akira Kurosawa’s film, The Hidden Fortress.  That film also used “wipes” as visual transitions between scenes, but more importantly, involves two pseudo-comic individuals, Tahei and Mataschici, who escaped a pitched battle, wander for a time in a wasteland, and are then captured and enslaved.  They then became involved with the rescue of a Princess and the exploits of a General.   This familiar sequence of events is repeated with the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars.  Two likable (and funny) robots escape from the rebel blockade runner battle, become lost in the Tatooine desert, and unwittingly become involved with the rescue of a princess and the exploits of a Jedi-Knight.  The point in both films is to highlight two unassuming, even “common” individuals who become caught up in huge, important events beyond their control, and even their understanding.  It's a ground's eye view of world-shaking incidents, of history unfolding.

In terms of Star Wars, the first twenty minutes of the film or so mostly revolve around the droids and their exploits, and this kind of “macro” focus is one way to introduce the Star Wars universe without inundating audiences with tech-talk and difficult-to-pronounce names or sci-fi concepts.  Matters of galactic import (like the Death Star), can wait, and Lucas introduces his core concepts one at a time without risk of sensory overkill or confusion. The first portion of this Lucas film is also the best portion of the film. After things settle down a bit, there's a quiet yet vital scene set in Ben Kenobi’s desert home. What Star Wars accomplishes here, again, is revolutionary, if in an unassuming kind of way.  Kenobi quietly and steadfastly introduces us to his faith.  He describes the Force as the thing that “gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.”

Again dismissing the tenets of the contemporary and cynical 1970s Hollywood, Star Wars thus reintroduces “spirituality” to a cinema that had asked, explicitly, “Is God Dead” in films such as 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, and also, to some degree, Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973).

Certainly Lucas's film is not a strict re-assertion of Christianity, necessarily, but rather a non-denominational acknowledgment of man’s inherent spirituality and interconnection.  The Force, like belief and faith in Jesus Christ, is a promise of immortality in the Star Wars universe.  We see this quality of belief depicted in Ben Kenobi’s heroic death – or disappearance – after his duel with Vader.

As Star Wars continues, the film spends more time in space, and indeed, in space combat.  Again, George Lucas chooses to make his “space opera” one that visually resonates in terms of film history.  When Luke and Han take to the guns of The Millennium Falcon to destroy several pursuing TIE fighters, Lucas explicitly references combat visuals from Twelve O’Clock High (1949), a film about American flying fortresses in aerial combat during World War II.

Once more, viewers may not exactly recognize the specific reference, but they absolutely "get" the allusion to a previous global conflict, and a previous form of warfare.  We may not understand how lasers work, or what powers TIE Fighters, but we do understand the settings and dynamics of aerial combat, even translated to space.

The battle to destroy the Death Star follows the same film making approach. Only this time, Lucas re-casts a critical set-piece from the 1964 British film 633 Squadron as his point of origin and point of audience recognition.  In that film, several Allied Bombers make a run against a Nazi base lodged between two mountains (essentially in a trench...).  As the bombers make their attack run, they attempt to avoid blistering anti-aircraft guns.  There is also an initial false start, and a false detonation at the target site.  Additionally, enemy fighters swoop in to challenge the bombers and pick them off as they focus on their quarry on the ground.

If you’re at all familiar with Star Wars, you will recognize the setting, sequence, and outcome of the Death Star trench scene as being very similar indeed to 633 Squadron.

The point isn’t that Lucas stole anything.  The point is that when “you’ve taken your first step into a larger world,” to quote Obi Wan Kenobi, elements of that world need to be understandable immediately, so that other important concepts can be grasped.  In other words, if you’re focusing on something like how a tractor beam works, or what is hyper-drive is, you’re not paying attention to the details of Luke’s quest, and Lucas’s story.

By updating old cinematic imagery, Lucas conveys his story -- and his message about spirituality -- in a way that we visually accept and understand, almost at once.

I’ve long argued that Star Wars may not be a perfect film, but that the film offers a perfect presentation of a galaxy “far, far, away,” and I think that’s the point of all the tributes and re-framing of scenes from The Hidden Fortress or 633 Squadron.  But the deeper point is the one I mentioned in connection with the Force and Flash Gordon.  George Lucas’s epic space fantasy serves as an explicit indictment of the 1970s self-involved “personal cinema,” and harks back to a time of greater innocence and greater adventure in terms of movie narratives.

I suspect this is the reason why, much later, George Lucas altered the original dynamic of the Han Solo/Greedo sequence. In that scene as it was originally crafted, Han fires his blaster, and Greedo doesn’t shoot at all.  It’s an almost anti-hero, Dirty Harry-esque moment for the Solo character.  I believe that’s precisely the kind of aesthetic Lucas wanted to eschew and avoid, and so on retrospect, did just that by making Greedo shoot first.  Han’s act was thus transformed from one of preemptive murder to self-defense.  I’m not arguing that his selection was the right one, or that Lucas should have tampered with the scene, only that some of the changes Lucas has forged in terms of Star Wars  play into this very notion of Star Wars as pastiche, of a call-back to an earlier, more innocent generation of film productions.   Even the idea to title his Star Wars films numerically and with melodramatic sub-title fits in with this tradition of the crawl concept of Flash Gordon which boasted titles such as “The Unseen Peril.”  That sounds a lot like The Phantom Menace, doesn’t it?

The two concepts I have discussed most frequently in this review are: 1.) how Lucas grounds the reality of Star Wars by creating a lived-in, recognizable universe and 2.) how Lucas attempts to hark back to a more innocent, swashbuckling, spiritual age of movies.  If you link those two concepts, you will arrive at John Kenneth Muir’s unified theory of Star Wars, and at the very essence of the film itself.  Star Wars presents a universe so authentically-rendered and so well-thought out that you can truly believe in it. The careful forging of the world discourages cynicism or disbelief.   The idea of “May the Force be With You,” not unlike the exclamation “Go with God,” is inherently about belief; about believing in yourself and your capacity to tap the spiritual center of existence itself.  Yet no one would possibly believe in Lucas's world or in that inspirational message if the special effects in Star Wars were unconvincing, if the aliens looked hokey, or if the space battles were confusing.

By referencing these older films and older visuals, Lucas made certain that we could relate to Star Wars. It’s a unique and intriguing technique. The later films in the franchise depend on vast, special effects set-pieces with digital backdrops and drooling creatures, and yet the greatest emotional thrill during the saga occurred here, in the original Star Wars, as Luke and Leia swung boldly across a chasm together, and John Williams’ scored blared heroically underneath their leap.

A boy, a girl and a universe.

The thrill and appeal of Star Wars are almost literally that simple. Despite making a high-tech film filled with laser blasts, spaceships, robots, and a complex internal history Lucas directs us through this complexity and gets right to the mythic, spiritual heart of his film. In the process, he made a film that changed movie history, and changed the history of millions of viewers.

Influence: Star Wars changed the direction of the science fiction genre of the 1970s, turning filmmakers away from dystopia and apocalypse and toward space adventures. The B movies of yesteryear promptly became the A movies of the 1980s.  The Star Wars saga continued into the 1980s, and after a respite, resumed from 1999 – 2005.  The next installment is due 2015.

Captain Rameses (Christopher Lee) pilots his flying saucer in Starship Invasions (1977).

Starship Invasions (1977) *

Critical Mass:

“Robert Vaughn’s most embarrassing movie since Teenage Caveman.” – Harry and Michael Medved, The Golden Turkey Awards, Perigee Books, 1980, page 218.

“…more pathetic than condemnable, a movie that looked all the more ridiculous in light of the previous year’s ground-breakers.” – Richard Meyers, S-F 2: A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films from Rollerball to Return of the Jedi, Carol Publishing Group, 1984, page 88.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Robert Vaughn (Professor Allan Duncan); Christopher Lee (Captain Rameses); Daniel Pilon (Anaxi); Tiuu Lee (Phi); Helen Shaver (Betty Duncan); Henry Ramer (Malcolm); Victoria Johnson (Gazeth); Doreen Lipson (Dorothy); Kate Parr (Diane Duncan); Sherri Ross (Sagnac); Linda Rennhofer (Joan); Richard Fitzpatrick ( Joe); Ted Turner (Zhender).

CREW: Hal Roach Studios and Warner Bros. present Starship Invasions. Director of Photography: Mark Irwin. Original Music: Gill Melle. Film Editors: Ruth Hope, Millie Moore. Executive Producers: Norman Glick and Earl Glick. Produced by: Ed Hunt, Ken Gord. Written and directed by: Ed Hunt. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 89 minutes.

Story:

Alien Captain Rameses (Lee), commander of a flying saucer, reports to his crew that their home world is in danger because the sun is experiencing a “dangerous phase” and could explode at any moment. Thus, his people need a new planet on which to settle, and Earth fits the bill since humans are the parent race of his their kind.  Still, Ramseses will need to take the planet by force.

Accordingly, he lands on Earth at the underwater pyramid base of The Intergalactic League of Races, kills the peaceful aliens stationed there, and then launches Project Genocide. This plot involves firing a ray from orbit that will cause a “suicide epidemic” among the unsuspecting humans.

Fortunately, one friendly alien saucer has survived Ramseses' vicious betrayal, though it is damaged in a battle of the UFOs. The benevolent crew thus seeks out human scientist Allan Duncan (Robert Vaughn), to help repair the craft. Duncan is a family man and dedicated UFO expert, one that believes flying saucers are "damaging" to human self-esteem because they point out that others "are more advanced" than humans are.

Allan recruits his friend Malcolm, a computer expert, and together they board the alien ship to fix it up for battle with Ramseses. The survival of the human race hangs in the balance as space combat commences.

Review:
Written and directed by Ed Hunt, Starship Invasions stars Christopher Lee as Captain Rameses, the nefarious leader of a cabal of renegade aliens and that captain of a flying saucer that resembles a hubcap. Lee looks particularly ridiculous in his strange black hat, and his technological accoutrements aren’t much more impressive.  For instance, he wears a big boxy alarm clock device on one wrist to monitor his sun's status.  When it flashes red that means his sun has just gone supernova.  What plays as unintentionally funny about this scene, besides Christopher Lee's slow, precise enunciation of the word "super nova" (apparently for the hard-of-hearing in the audience...), is that he is delivering exposition to his own people, who would certainly know by the time they reach Earth in their advanced flying saucer, that their planet is in jeopardy and that their star is unstable. And really, wouldn't it be more helpful if Lee's clunky watch warned him that the sun was soon going to go nova, rather than telling him after the fact?

More weird tech: when plotting to take over the underwater alien base, Ramseses and all his fellow aliens from the Planet Alpha in the Orion Constellation arm themselves with tiny little "finger guns" that slip over their digits and are attached to the wrist by old-fashioned, curly telephone cords.   Again, this just looks ridiculous

These are just a few small complaints about the film, a really slapdash, silly affair that doesn’t deserve the likes of Lee, Robert Vaughn, and Helen Shaver in its cast.  On the positive side, Starship Invasions works hard to accurately reflect the details of the UFO abduction experience by featuring alien medical exams, as well as the concept of missing time.  But the movie is still unintentionally hilarious, despite good intentions.

Another example of silliness: Christopher Lee and his cohorts did not have to learn a stitch of dialogue for their scenes together, because no dialogue was recorded. Instead, all the dialogue involving Lee as Rameses is "voice over" only, and then described in the story as ESP communication between the aliens. This is either inspired or ridiculous, or both. It's also rather amusing that the humans of Starship Invasions are not convinced of the reality of UFOs, since aliens of all persuasions make no attempt to hide themselves or their crafts. Saucers brazenly strafe highways and fields in broad daylight, glow by night as they hurtle towards heavily populated cities, and even crash into skyscrapers. Saucers land in suburban backyards too, and on city streets at the foot of public buildings.

The piece-de-resistance in StarshipInvasions, however, may be the ludicrous scene set in a grocery store. Here, Duncan's young daughter, Diane, is affected by the alien suicide ray and takes out her pre-adolescent rage on a helpless tomato in the produce aisle. For years after this movie, whenever my sister and I visited a supermarket produce row together, we'd eye the tomatoes venomously in honor of this dramatic moment.

Most of the film's flaws stem from a low-budget or poor execution, but the script is no great shakes in the logic department. Specifically, a League saucer is shot down by the U.S. military in one scene. Early in the scene, it is established that the aliens aboard that endangered craft can view the military radar room on their view screen. But they do not detect it, apparently, when a missile was launched by the very crew they were just observing. Not paying attention?

The dialogue is also particularly lame. Even the telepathic dialogue. To hear the immortal Christopher Lee bellow the line "we need a human female" via ESP is a camp hoot. Also amusing is the entreaty from Duncan's wife (Helen Shaver) that she needs more togetherness with her occupied man. "I'm interested in UFOS too," she states, "but we've got to have time to ourselves."

Pretty much every aspect of Starship Invasions is textbook dreadful. From the ridiculous android "costume" which appears to be a snowsuit glued to a welding helmet, to the movie's creepy obsession with inter species sex ("so...they shined a light on you and put you with a naked woman?" a police officer incredulously asks a fat farmer, an abductee...), everything about this movie just...reeks. Even the fake TIME Magazine cover made for the movie is just horrible, decorated with an illustration of a slit wrist (to symbolize the movie’s suicide epidemic). “From Is God Dead? to this?”  And how to explain that suicide ray spurs homicide too?

The War in Space (1977) * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“It’s because of War in Space’s aesthetics and addictive score that much of its actual plotting can be dismissed. Unfortunately it’s an area that’s just too lazy for its own good, employing a dozen clichéd plot devices which include a love triangle, self-sacrifice, and convenient weak spots on enemy ships. What’s worse is that despite a nice looking cast, including some classy veterans, the performances are universally uninspiring.” – Kevin Gilnear, The Digital Fix, August 26, 2006.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Kensaku Morita (Miyoshi); Yuko Asano (June Takigawa); Ryo Ikebe (Professor Takigawa); Hrushi Miyauchi (Morrei); Akihiko Hirgata (Oshi); David Perin (Jimmy); William Ross (Dr. Schmidt).

CREW: Toho Films Ltd. Presents The War in Space. Director of Photography: Yuzuru Aizawa.  Music: Toshiaki Tsushima. Film Editor: Michiko Ikeda. Production Designer: Kazuo Satsuya. Special Effects: Takashi Yamamoto. Story: Hachiro Jinguji. Written by: Ryuo Nakanishi, Shuichi Nagahara. Directed by: Jun Fukuda. M.P.A.A. Rating: NR. Running time: 87 minutes.

Story: Earth unexpectedly comes under attack from outer space invaders.  The U.N. Space Federation division in Japan makes contact with the Earth Space Station Terra, which reports being under attack from a giant “Roman” space ship.  With Earth about to be conquered the Space Federation goes to Professor Takigawa (Ryo Ikebe), asking him to revive a top-secret project called “Gohten.”

Gohten is actually a space warship, and Takigawa assumes command on a mission to take out an enemy base on Venus, where the evil Space Emperor awaits.  Meanwhile, two officers on the Gohten vie for the romantic affection of Takigawa’s recently engaged daughter, June (Yuko Asano).

Review:

If Star Wars (1977) can be recommended on the grounds that it is a pastiche of old-time space adventures, World War II movies, and the archetypical hero’s journey, perhaps the same leeway should be given to the Japanese outer-space movie The War in Space. It too is a pastiche, though in fairness, its inspirations are more apparent, and more slavishly pursued in terms of narrative and theme.

To wit: The film’s central spaceship, the Gohten, is a re-dress of the protagonists’ submarine from Atragon (1963).  Similarly, the plot meticulously reiterates the central conceit of Godzilla: King of Monsters (1956), with a special and deadly new explosive fulfilling the purpose of that film’s “Oxygen Destroyer,” and Professor Takigawa assuming the sacrificial role of Dr. Serizawa.  In both cases, the individual who has created a dreadful weapon commits suicide while deploying a dangerous weapon so it cannot, in the future, fall into enemy hands.

And finally, the notion of a single, sea-vessel like spaceship battling an intractable alien enemy of inhuman skin color seems to evoke the TV series Space Cruiser Yamato and its 1977 feature film compilation.

Released theatrically in December of 1977, The War in Space also owes an obvious debt to Star Wars.  The film’s evil minion is a Wookie-like/Big Foot monster with bull horns, and instead of a light saber, he wields a light axe.  Also, the optical laser blasts really fly back and forth: red for the bad guys, blue for the good guys.  At one point, there’s also a device featured called an “R2” antenna.

All these familiar elements combine to make a fast-paced, special effects-laden outer space spectacular.  The effects, while certainly not Star Wars-quality, are decent, and many of the visuals involving Venus (and a Death Star-like natural trench) are suitably impressive.  The film’s greatest philosophical aspect is the one piped in directly from Godzilla, the notion that those who make weapons of mass destruction must protect the rest us from their proliferation, no matter the cost.  The creator of such destructive power boasts the heaviest responsibility in this regard.

Given Japan’s history, and the fact that it is the only country in the history of the world to suffer atomic destruction, it’s certainly acceptable to see this theme re-iterated in so many movies, and even in the 1970s.  Productions like The War in Space, Godzilla and Space Cruiser Yamato -- with its obsessive focus on new alien weapons of destruction (like “ultra-menace missiles,” “reflex guns” and “Desslok space mines”) -- clearly exorcise a very real national nightmare.

Outside the subplot about Takigawa sacrificing himself to preserve the Earth and the Earth’s future, the film remembers that its subject matter is war in a few other notable ways.  The film’s token American, Jimmy (Perin), learns that his whole family was killed during the attack on New York, and one of Jun’s suitors -- her fiancée -- dies in combat over Venus’s craggy surface.  So, even with the jaunty Star Wars-like air of the film, it acknowledges reality in a way that some other space war movies simply do not.

Some moments in The War in Space, however, seem lost in translation.  For example, it is never clear why aliens from another world should model their interiors, starships, and garb after Earth’s Ancient Roman Empire, right down to marble columns and feathered-helmets.  And the scene in which Jun is captured, and then forced to don a leather fetish costume -- while manhandled by the Chewbacca minion -- is weird to say the least.  Star Wars succeeded in part by not appropriating too much from any single source, or by aping any single historical period or culture on Earth. The War in Space, with its Roman alien villains appears far more ridiculous, and it could have studied more closely at the feed of Lucas, the undisputed master of pastiche, to appear more believable.

Wizards (1977) * *

Critical Mass:

“…a ghastly film…Wizards may have been an interesting experiment for Bakshi, but did he ever ask himself what satisfaction audiences would get from this totally disorganized, derivative and demented picture?” – Romola Costantino, The Sydney Morning Herald, October 23, 1977, page 62.

“…a hodgepodge of strange but intriguing concepts.” – Jerry Beck, The Animated Movie Guide, A Cappella Book, 2005, page 317.

“…self-defeatingly ambitious.” – Dave Kehr, When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a  Transformative Decade, University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Bob Holt (Voice of Avatar); Jesse Welles (Voice of Elinore); Richard Romanus (Voice of Weehawk); David Proval (Voice of Peace); Jim Connell (Voice of President); Steve Gravers (Voice of Blackwolf); Barbara Sloane (Voice of Fairy); Angelo Grisanti (Voice of Frog); Hyman Wien (Voice of Priest); Christopher Tayback (Voice of Peewhittle).Mark Hamill (Voice of Sean); Peter Hobbs (Voice of General). Ralph Bakshi (Voice of Fritz).

CREW: 20th Century Fox presents a Ralph Bakshi film, Wizards. Original Music: Andrew Belling. Film Editing: Donald W. Ernst. Illustrator: Mike Ploog. Written, produced and directed by: Ralph Bakshi. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 80 minutes.

Story:

Two million years after a nuclear war, Earth has become a brave new world of mutants and wizards.  Two brothers -- the good Avatar and the evil Blackwolf -- battle for the future of the planet.

To aid his cause, Black Wolf excavates pre-holocaust war machines even though such science and technology is considered illegal in this future Earth.  Blackwolf’s secret to war, however, is reviving Nazism and the hatred represented by Hitler’s ideology.

Meanwhile, Avatar undergoes a difficult quest to rally the Elf nations of this strange new world in order to oppose Black Wolf, but once again, the Earth is embroiled in a war for civilization.

Review:

Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards is an anti-war fantasy film that pits science and industry against magic.  It occurs in a future world where magic has won the day, and the world seems to operate by the premise, stated explicitly in the film that “the only true technology is nature.”

However, a new threat, Blackwolf, rises and reaches back into Earth’s destructive past to dominate the landscape.  Blackwolf uses the Nazi Third Reich as his model for attaining power, and hypnotizes his people by showing them Nazi propaganda films. He learns that the key to creating hysteria and fear in people is to play to their egos, even calling his minions “tomorrow’s master race.” He also gives them an enemy to hate, in this case the wizards and elves who have established a world of peace.

A unique filmmaker of the 1970s, Bakshi introduced adult, alternative, animation to the mainstream American culture with the X-rated Fritz the Cat in 1972.  Wizards represents the artist’s shift towards fantasy, and was made for 20th Century Fox at the same time that Lucas was making Star Wars.

Afterwards, Bakshi adapted Lord of the Rings (1979), and both Wizards and that film share many of the same strengths and the same flaws. A primary strength of Wizards is its amazing backdrops and the unforgettable vistas of a radically-altered Earth, dazzlingly imagined by comic-book artist Mike Ploog and Ian Miller.

Unfortunately many of these backdrops are ill-served by the film’s overall hurried or rushed look.  Specifically, Bakshi drops in extensive rotoscoped imagery from films such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) to represent the epic battles in Wizards.  This footage, even rotoscoped and colorized, does not at all resemble the other moment in the films and results in jarring transitions. The rotoscoping of stock footage was a cost-saving measure but it was a bad trade-off, creatively-speaking. These moments ruin the movie’s sense of visual consistency, and the same thing, alas, occurs in The Lord of the Rings.  The hurried look in Wizards is also caused, in part, by the shift between still-images and animated ones that frequently occurs.

The anti-war message of Wizards also fails to inspire deeply for the simple reason that it is too simple-minded, much like the dichotomy of Avatar and Blackwolf as positive vs. negative opposites.  The film seems to suggest that the projected “image” (like images on film…) is responsible for hypnotizing Blackwolf’s forces and leading them to aggressive and monstrous behavior.  Seeing “evil” on screen, however, is not now and has never been the cause for such violence.

On the contrary, the Nazi evil rose largely due to feelings of nationalism, coupled with scapegoating and a sense of overt victimization.  To white-wash that context and say that “watching the films” of Nazis actively recreates the evil is ridiculous and easy. Suppressing films is not the answer to stopping violence, and there are too many restrictive forces in America who would like to do just that.  It is not entirely clear whether Bakshi even intended this message of censorship, but it is surely the end result of the movie’s framework.  The films projected by Blackwolf are considered the “evil” that changes the world for the worse, so logically, destroying them would save the world.

One thematic aspect of the film that works far more successfully is Bakshi’s indictment of religion in times of war. The film notes that in any war, priests are required by leaders because “you need God on your side.”

Alas, recent years have confirmed this sad thesis, with personal religious belief being the excuse for jihads and foreign crusades alike. Wizards absolutely nails this particular context, and this misuse of faith as a motive for war

Wizards is avant-garde, well-intentioned and daring, to be certain, but also, in the final analysis, cheap-looking and scatter-shot in terms of the techniques it selects.  It’s worth watching at least once because no other fantasy film of the 1970s looks like it, save for Lord of the Rings.

The “rough rider” space fighters from Message from Space (1978), Japan’s answer to Star Wars.

1978

The Real World: 1978

January 25:              The Great Blizzard of 1978 kills seventy Americans in Ohio and Michigan.

February 15:              Serial killer Ted Bundy is captured in Florida.

February 16:              The Hillside Strangler (really Stranglers, plural) claims his last victim.

April 3:              Woody Allen’s Annie Hall defeats Star Wars at the Academy Awards, as the best film of 1977.

July 11:              Indian activists take “The Longest Walk” to Washington D.C. to protest the treatment of Native-Americans.

August 7:              Love Canal is declared a Federal Health Emergency by President Carter.

August 26:              Pope John Paul is elected the 263rd Pope, but dies after a month in the papacy.

September 17:              The Camp David Accords are signed between Israel and Egypt.  The momentous occasion of peace, however, interrupts the three hour premiere of ABC’s space epic Battlestar Galactica.

October 16:              Pope John Paul II, the first Polish Pope, succeeds his recently-deceased predecessor.

December 13:              The Susan B. Anthony Dollar enters circulation in the United States.

December 22:              Serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who has killed more than thirty victims, is arrested.

The Alien Factor (1978) * *

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Don Leifert (Ben Zachary); Tom Griffith (Sheriff Cinder); Richard Dyszel (Mayor Wicker); Mary Mertens (Edie Martin); Richard Gelwitz (Pete); George Stover (Steven); Eleanor Herman (Mary Jane Carter); Anne Frith (Dr. Ruth Sherman); Christopher Gummer (Clay); Johnny Walker (Rex).

CREW: A Cinemagic Visual Effects Production, The Alien Factor. Film Editors: Don Dohler, Dave Ellis. Title Sequence and some additional special effects: Ernest D. Farino. Make-up and Special Effects: John Cosentino, Larry Schlechter, Britt McDonough. Music by: Kenneth Waller. Director of Photography: Britt McDonough. Written and directed by: Donald Dohler. M.P.A.A. Rating: N.A. Running time: 80 minutes.

Story:

A series of killings occur in peaceful Perry Hill, and Sheriff Cinder (Griffith) is baffled by their brutality.  Mayor Wicker (Dyszel) wants the crimes solved quickly and quietly because he plans to open a large entertainment complex nearby.

Soon, a mysterious stranger, Zachary (Leifert) shows up in town claiming he can stop the perpetrators, actually three alien monsters.  These beings, he learns, are escapees from a cosmic zoo.  When the spaceship carrying these beings crashed on Earth, they were freed from their electronic cages.

The first two creatures, an insectoid (or Inferbyce) and bear-thing (Zagatile) are relatively easy for Zachary to stop.  However, the third creature -- the Leemoid -- possesses a malicious cunning and intelligence.

Review:

Baltimore filmmaker Don Dohler (1946 – 2006) is a beloved figure for many fans of low-budget genre movies because he boasted an undying love for make-up and special effects, and reminded young artists through the auspices of his Cinemagic Magazine that you don’t need to work in Hollywood to make a movie.  The special effects in Dohler’s films are, accordingly, often quite impressive by 1970s standard.

Unfortunately, a good movie is more than special effects, make-up, or even storyline, and those (alien?) factors are where, typically, Dohler’s movies fail to succeed.

The Alien Factor is no exception. It’s a poorly-acted, poorly-edited mess, despite an imaginative plot (that could serve as the basis for a remake today) as well as some impressive special effects.  The first thing to note, however, is that Dohler has executed some impressive effects shots.  There’s a moment in this film where an adventurer, Zachary, and a town mayor, happen upon a crashed spaceship in the snow, and the moment is not only convincing, but actually impressive.

Similarly, the alien costumes in the film are good for their time, and are about as good as some of the creatures you can see in the Star Wars cantina sequence.  The alien Leemoid -- apparently a stop-motion creation -- is also impressive in appearance and movement, though awkwardly placed into the frame with Zachary for the film’s final battle, never seeming fully tangible, and thus never seeming a real threat.

But the real problem with The Alien Factor is that Dohler is not able to convey his story with meaningful characters or dialogue, or even scenes that boast much purpose.  For instance, the whole movie grinds to a halt for a musical number at a bar, apparently to feature some local talent.  Then, there’s a scene in which the film’s first attack survivor, Mary Jane Carter, comes to the police station to tell an officer there that she’s okay, and that she’s glad the firs alien escapee is dead.  The audience has made no connection to Carter, hasn’t seen her since her brief appearance in the film’s inaugural scene, and doesn’t really need to know that she is okay.  Nor is it necessary to repeat the information about the death of the insectoid alien, which the film has already established.

Beyond these specific problems, The Alien Factor is filled with shots of characters walking alone in snowy woods for no apparent reason so that they can be attacked there by aliens, or bump into other characters (who also happen to be trudging through the woods…)

Still, beyond the make-up and special effects, which reveal imagination and resourcefulness, the story has some unique beats.  The idea of three aliens escaping from a spaceship onto Earth and wreaking havoc while another alien hunts the escapees is good enough for a blockbuster movie in 2013, and certainly suggests such future films as The Hidden (1987), which also involves an alien fugitive on our world.

And finally, for all its narrative and acting diffidence, the final sequence of The Alien Factor truly works as intended.  It is revealed that Zachary is a shape-shifting alien, one hunting the fugitives, and it’s a good surprise. And then, before the moment can be fully digested, the alien, Zachary, is shot by a sheriff simply because he’s ugly, and looks different. No, this isn’t the racially-charged ending of Night of the Living Dead (1968), but it ends the movie on a thoughtful note, one that suggests that the aliens on Earth aren’t the only dangerous creatures living here.

Ultimately, even with elaborate special effects and costumes, a film like The Alien Factor doesn’t resonate on a human emotional level, like Great Britain’s similarly low-budget Alien Prey.  That film has lousy special effects and make-up, yet the film proves far more involving…and human.

Alien Prey (a.k.a. Prey) (1978) * * ½

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Barry Stokes (Anders); Sally Faulkner (Josephine); Glory Annen (Jessica); Sandy Chinney (Sandy)’ Eddie Stacey, Jerry Crampton (Police)

CREW: Tymar Film Productions presents Alien Prey Music: Ivor Slaney. Director of Photography: Derek V. Browne. Film Editor: Alan Jones. Produced by: Terence Marcel, David Wimbury. Executive Producer: Kevin J.J. Driscoll. Story: Quinn Donoghue. Written by: Max Cuff.  Directed by: Norman J. Arren. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 85 minutes.

Story:

An alien carnivore who calls himself Anders (Stokes) murders a man at a rural lover’s lane in England, and then ends up at the country estate of lesbians Josephine (Faulkner) and Jessica (Annen).

Josephine, who has murdered Jessica’s previous male suitors, is extremely jealous of Anders, who busily attempts to observe life on Earth.  When Jessica decides to leave Josephine, however, things take a turn for the murderous.

Anders kills Jessica during rough sex, and then kills Josephine. He reports back to his superiors in space that his work is complete; that humans are a good food source, and high in protein…

Review:

Despite an unnecessarily crude final punch-line that makes the entire movie play like a dumb joke, Alien Prey is actually a relatively intriguing science-fiction movie, and one forged on a commendably human, intimate scale.  It’s true that the low-budget picture boasts obvious deficits in terms of make-up and special effects, but as a story of manners and social niceties, it’s almost irresistible.

While Alien Prey may not exactly qualify as good, it is one of those sci-fi movies that is impossible to turn away from once it’s on.  In other words, it casts a spell.  In some ways, Alien Prey could be described as a variation -- though less-highbrow -- of The Man Who Fell to Earth, with an alien come to Earth and desperate to understand humanity and life on this planet.

In this case, the alien explorer is a carnivore who in his native form resembles a dog with reptilian-eyes.  Anders arrives on Earth and promptly must assimilate our language and also social customs.  Imagine how strange jealousy, passion, rage and other human emotions would seem to this guy, someone who possesses no background with them.  Accordingly, Anders spends the film on the outside looking in, attempting to understand the nuances and cadences of the turbulent Josephine/Jessica relationship.

The vicissitudes of that relationship are even more interesting because lesbianism is not the “norm” on Earth in the 1970s.  Although Josephine is stereotypically presented as a man-hating “butch” type, all of her slights and insults about men go right over Ander’s head.  He has no idea what she’s talking about, and he just sits there taking it all in stride.  Insults, then, don’t drive him to murder.  Only his insatiable appetite for meat drives him to that precipice, which makes him far different than humans in his nature.

In other words, Josephine has committed murder (with a laughably big switchblade knife…) because of passion, whereas Anders kills because of a biological need or drive.  Since Josephine continually calls Anders (and by extension all men…) “animals” and “savages,” the movie crafts an interesting point.  Who is the real primitive? Is it the being that kills to survive, or the one who kills to “possess” another person body and soul?  Is love any better a motivation for killing a sentient being than hunger?

Because Alien Prey makes the women characters lesbians (and vegetarians to boot…), and the male an alien interloper, the film is charged with these intriguing, crazy little moments.  For instance, there’s a party sequence in which Josephine and Jo dress up Anders as a girl, in a dress…with lip stick and other make-up.  It’s as though they are making him acceptable in their own little social circle.  And at the same time, Anders -- devoid of a human male ego -- doesn’t object to being feminized..  He merely takes the weird dress-up game as a part of human culture. He accepts his lot wordlessly, and without humiliation.

To its credit, Alien Prey even has some wicked fun with its title. Is the alien, Anders, the prey of the humans? Both Josephine and Jessica see how they can exploit and manipulate him.

Or, contrarily, are humans the alien’s prey?

At times, the answer isn’t so clear, since Anders possesses only a rudimentary understanding of the human ego, and of the drives which compel Earth people to commit murder.

Alien Prey certainly isn’t perfect by a long-shot.  There’s an over-long slow-motion sequence late in the film of the threesome flailing endlessly about in filthy pond water.  This sequence doesn’t really go anywhere, or boast any larger meaning within the narrative.  The opening scenes, before Anders ends up with Josephine and Jessica, are also terrible and barely coherent.

For those with a lascivious interest in such material, however, this film features two unique sex scenes and much nudity.  One is a lengthy lesbian sex scene at the thirty minute point, involving Jessica and Josephine.  The other, climactic sequence involves sex between a human woman and a carnivorous alien, and ends with a throat being ripped out instead of an ejaculation.  The participant in common is Josephine, and so the movie is really about a love triangle between two lesbians and a dog-alien.  That sounds like a dirty joke, and some critics have accused Alien Prey of being exploitive, but the film remains a curiosity worth seeing once, nonetheless.

Another way to interpret the film: both Josephine and Anders feature immutable identities – as murderer and “eater,” respectively -- but Jessica is more mutable and floats between the two characters, seeing where she can fit in.

In some sense then, the movie is about the continuum or range of sexual identity…only featuring lizard-eyed, fox-eating alien monsters.  How does that sound

Blue Sunshine (1978) * * ½

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Zalman King (Jerry Zipkin); Deborah Winters (Alicia Sweeney); Mark Goddard (Edward Flemming); Robert Walden (David Blume); Charles Seibert (Detective Clay); Ann Cooper (Wendy Flemming); Ray Young (Wayne Mulligan); Alice Ghostley (O’Malley’s Neighbor); Stefan Gierasch (Lt. Jennings); Richard Crystal (Frannie Scott); Bill Adler (Ralphie); Barbara Quinn (Stephanie); Adriana Shaw (Barbara O’Malley); Bill Sorrells (Ritchie Grazzo); Jeffry Druce (Junkie).

CREW: Ellanby Productions and Cinema Shares present Blue Sunshine. Director of Photography: Don Knight. Original Music: Charles Gross. Film Editor: Brian Smedley-Aston. Produced by: George Manasse. Executive Producers: Joseph Beruh, Edgar Lansbury. Written and directed by: Jeff Leiberman. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 94 minutes.

Story:

While attending a party with some friends, a man named Jerry Zipkin (King) witnesses a man go mad and commit murder.  When he defends himself, he is accused of murder and must clear his own name.

Soon, Jerry uncovers a strange conspiracy.  He learns that several classmates at Stanford a decade earlier, all took an hallucinogenic drug called “ Blue Sunshine,” and are now suffering the ill-effects, which include seizures, hair-loss, and homicidal rage.  While the police hunt down Jerry, he tries to find the dealer of Blue Sunshine from a decade earlier, and finds that the culprit, Ed Flemming (Goddard) is a candidate for Congress. Worse his campaign manager, Wayne Mulligan, is suffering the effects of the drug, and goes on a bloody rampage in a local mall disco…

Review:

I opened this book with a meaningful thought from Johnny Byrne.  He lived through the sixties and seventies as a young adult, and often termed the seventies “the wake-up from the hippie dream.”

To describe that “wake-up” call in detail one need only consider that the summer of love was over in 1968, but that heavy drug use was on the rise, and the Vietnam War continued to linger into the 1970s.  Illusions of peace and love and good vibrations, gave way to violence at venues like Altamonte in 1969, and the left-wing hippie movement became largely discredited and abandoned by Nixon’s Silent Majority.  Witnessing the excesses of the hippie movement, the nation veered not further to the left, but took a hard right. The Reagan Revolution and yuppie-ism was just around the corner.

Blue Sunshine works hard to put the nail in the coffin of the hippie dream, and notes that -- a decade beyond hippie-dom -- participation in its rituals is considered nothing short of an embarrassment. A hippie, drug-dealing, experimental past could derail a candidate for Congress, for example, in the 1970s, as the film points out regarding Goddard’s ambitious character.

And worse, all those who experimented with illicit drugs like LSD in the 1960s may have escaped justice, says the film, but they will nonetheless pay the price for their trespass: a time-delayed, irrevocable brand of murderous insanity.  Here the wake-up from the hippie dream is not just bad, it’s fatal.  “Chromosomal aberrations” are caused by ingesting the illegal drug, Blue Sunshine.

The past catches up with you.

Thus, Blue Sunshine is a hard, conservative response to the excesses of the 1960s, and a clear signal of the country’s retrenchment moving into the next decade.  The scene’s final scene plays like a hippie nightmare indeed.  A man who took the deadly drugs in the 1960s loses all of his hair and goes crazy in a pulsating discotheque.  The endlessly flashing lights and banal, vapid disco music combine to present the image of a kind of nightmare or Hell from which there is no escape.   This is the culture his actions have produced, or helped to produce.

Blue Sunshine is a very entertaining movie, even though it is really strange, and occasionally comical.  The movie possesses a commendable, anarchic energy that makes it hard to dismiss out of hand.  Another apex of weirdness (beyond the disco finale…) involves a bald female babysitter going crazy and attempting to kill her young wards with a very large butcher’s knife.

As the baby-sitter goes bug-eyed in extreme close-up -- a frequent shot in the film -- Blue Sunshine cuts to Jerry in a nearby elevator, trying to get to the scene.   He is delayed from helping the imperiled children, funnily enough, by a slow old woman, and an apparently blind man with a seeing-eye dog.  It’s a ridiculous set-up, and yet significant suspense is actually wrought from the moment.

In instances like this, and indeed throughout, there’s nothing subtle, nuanced or restrained about Blue Sunshine, and that’s probably to its credit.  The film doesn’t look or move much like any other movie from the era, and even if it goes over-the-top and threatens at times to veer towards high camp, it’s nonetheless unforgettable.

Any movie that features the line “There’s a bald maniac in there and he’s going bat-shit” just can’t be all bad, right?

But as far as America’s view of the 1960 and hippies, Blue Sunshine is undeniably the canary in the coal mine.  Even with all its highs and lows, the film points to the fact that the entire counter-culture revolution was becoming discredited derided, and rewritten as a new, more conservative decade dawned.

The Boys from Brazil (1978) * * *

Critical Mass:

“Franklin J. Schaffner…is to be congratulated for making this somewhat hackneyed plot of diehard Nazis fresh and believable, and for his excellent use of a fine cast…” – Douglas Menville and R. Reginald, Futurevisions: The Golden Age of Science Fiction Film, Newcastle Publishing, 1985, page 62.

“…an entertaining thriller…directed by Franklin J. Schaffner for maximum suspense at the expense of verisimilitude.” – Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadow: Film and the Holocaust, Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 2003.

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Gregory Peck (Dr. Josef Mengele); Laurence Olivier (Ezra Lieberman); James Mason (Eduard Seibert); Lilli Palmer (Esther Lieberman); Uta Hagen (Frieda Maloney); Steve Guttenberg (Barry Kohler); Denholm Elliott (Sidney Beynon); Rosemary Harris (Mrs Doring) John Dehner (Henry Wheelock); John Rubinstein (David Bennett); Anne Mear (Mrs. Curry); Jeremy Black (Jack Curry/Simon Harrington/Erich Doring/Bobby Wheelock); Bruno Ganz (Professor Bruckner); Walter Gotell (Mundt); David Hurst (Strasser); Wolfgang Preiss (Lofquist); Michael Gough (Mr. Harrington); Joachim Hansen (Fassler); Guy Du Mont (Hessen); Carl Duering (Trausteiner); Linda Hayden (Nancy); Prunella Scales (Mrs. Harrington);

CREW: ITC and Sir Lew Grade Present a Producer Circle, Franklin J. Schaffner Film, The Boys from Brazil. Director of Photography: Henri Decae. Original Music: Jerry Goldsmith. Film Editor: Robert E. Swink. Production Design: Gil Parrondo. Executive Producer: Robert Fryer. Produced by: Martin Richards, Stanley O’Toole. Written by: Heywood Gould. Based on the novel by: Ira Levin. Directed by: Franklin J. Schaffner. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 125 minutes.

Story:

A young Jewish crusader named Barry (Guttenberg) in Paraguay tape-records a secret meeting of surviving Nazis in which he learns of a plan by Dr. Josef Mengele (Peck) to murder ninety-four civil servants over a span of two-and-a-half years.

Before Barry is killed for this knowledge, he contacts famous Nazi hunter Ezra Leiberman (Olivier) and draws him into the case.  Leiberman soon learns that Mengele has created ninety-four clones of Adolf Hitler, and is endeavoring to recreate the exact incidents of the Fuhrer’s youth, right down to the death of his civil servant father, to breed a new, perfect version of the historical madman.  Leiberman races to America, to Lancaster County, Pa, to warn the next intended victim, and soon meets, face-to-face, one of the Hitler youths, and the angel of death himself, Josef Mengele.

Review:

Medical ethics in an age of medical wonders is once more the topic of a 1970s science fiction movie, in this case The Boys from Brazil, an adaptation of a book by Ira Levin (1929 – 2007).  Levin’s The Stepford Wives had already been made into a film, and involved robot replacements for liberated, “uppity” wives in a sleepy New England burb.  The subject of The Boys from Brazil is, by contrast, eugenics, or genetic engineering.

Specifically, as the film acknowledges, mankind is entering a new age when he will be able to manipulate the genetic make-up of his fellow man.  With the advent of the Human Genome Project in 1990, and the first successful cloning of a sheep, Dolly, in 1997, we are inching towards this reality even now.  But The Boys from Brazil focuses on a very frightening notion, and one expressed in brilliant, picturesque terms.  What if mankind uses all this great new medical technology not to clone a Picasso or a Mozart, but Adolf Hitler instead?

That is Josef Mengele’s (Peck’s) crazy plan in the film, and he has “turned the whole world” into his laboratory to make it succeed.  Mengele even tries to take into account nurture as well as nature in the care and handling of his new Hitlers.  In particular, these new Hitler clones will possess the Fuhrer’s genes, but not his upbringing, so Mengele takes dramatic steps -- including murder -- to replicate that upbringing in each situation. This means a loving mother in every household, and the death of a father while the young neo-Hitler is still relatively young.  This is an inventive notion, to be certain, but the film’s audacious strategy lacks sense in two primary arenas.

The first is that we are each the products of our cultural/social history and traditions, and a Hitler who grows up in 1970s East Coast America as opposed to 1910 Eastern Europe, is not going to be the same man, or think in precisely the same way as his historical predecessor.  Although the immediate family dynamic is indeed recreated in Mengele’s experiment, the larger social context is not.  Still, it is intriguing to note that both 1970s America and Germany of 1905 – 1910, were becoming more ethnically diverse, and both were dealing with economic hard-times.  And perhaps the film gets a pass on this aspect since Mengele makes it plain, in explicit dialogue, that he doesn’t expect to get a Hitler out of every clone, but maybe one in every three or four.  He’s rolling the dice, in other words, and hoping that by some lucky combination, he recreates the Nazi Madman.

But the plans’ second flaw also involves this matter.  What if Mengele is as successful as he hopes and he successfully creates three Hitler clones.  What does that do Hitler’s psyche, to know that there are two other “perfect” Aryan fuhrer specimens out there?  How would the neo-Nazis choose which was the “real” Hitler?  How would they decide between three identical, perfectly formed Hitler clones?

Thanks in part to director Schaffner’s sense of visual classicism (which he also brought to Planet of the Apes in 1968), The Boys from Brazil does everything possible within its power to overcome its fantastic strategy for the rise of a new Hitler, and even its hero, Leiberman (Olivier) notes with snark “who would believe such a preposterous plan?”   The film’s point is, perhaps, merely that the age is dawning in which science and medicine will be able to replicate Hitler, or Stalin, or anyone else for that matter, and society must carefully think out the implications of such acts of creation.

Commendably, The Boys from Brazil also boasts a real moral barometer.  The film lands Leiberman, a Nazi hunter, in a situation where he has the power to kill one of the Hitler clones, a pre-adolescent boy living in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  Fear of what the boy could become, certainly, might impel him to do so out-of-hand.  But Leiberman pauses and notes that it is neither his right nor his duty to kill innocent children, and that to do so, he would risk becoming like Adolf Hitler himself, killing perceived enemies with no just or rational cause.  Just because someone boasts the capacity (and the genes…?) to act in an evil fashion, that does not mean he deserves to die for it.  If the film represents a battle of nurture vs. nature, then Leiberman seems to be taking the side of nurture, and believes that there is still hope that these boys will emerge normal, and not as monsters.  Mengele, of course, represents the nature side of the debate

An expansive globe-hopping production laden with amazing stunts (like a perilous fall from a snowy bridge at a mountain pass in Sweden), The Boys from Brazil impresses both for the byzantine and bizarre conspiracy it depicts, and for its sense of morality about genetics.  The film is well-acted, and it is both surprising and welcome to see a film in which two old men are the primary stars.  On the other hand, it is probably young Jeremy Black who proves most unforgettable here, as the Hitler boy. He is incredibly creepy, and possessed of a kind unique brand of naive sadism and arrogance.  He seems cruel, but utterly unaware of his own cruel nature.  There is real loneliness in his blue eyes too, a loneliness combined with a sense of his own self-worth, and these are perhaps the “chemical” components that when mixed in a certain proportion can create a monster.

In our culture today, the idea of “Hitler” has become downgraded and trivialized.  Every time a political opponent commits some act the partisans don’t like, he is called a menace as great as Hitler.  Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have both been compared by their partisan enemies in America to Hitler for example.  But what Boys from Brazil reminds audiences is that when it comes to human evil there’s simply no comparison to the original article. The name of Hitler itself, now just a short-hand for someone you disagree with, is correctly tagged in The Boys from Brazil as the face of human evil, the face that must never be seen again.  And come to think of it, Mengele is pretty awful too.  There’s an unforgettable moment in the film in which Leiberman and Mengele are accidentally connected on the telephone, and without ever hearing a voice or a single word, Leiberman detects something malevolent, a presence “alive and hateful” hanging in the ether. In moments like that, Boys from Brazil succeeds as a meditation on why we are fascinated with evil (“the time is ripe!” Mengele declares), and how the trespassing of medical ethics could play on that fascination to very disturbing and counter-productive ends.

Astronauts Willis (Sam Waterston; left), Brubaker (James Brolin; center) and Walker (O.J. Simpson; right) are about to become involved in a conspiracy regarding the first manned landing on Mars in Capricorn One (1978).

Capricorn One (1978) * * *

Critical Mass:

“Production wise, the movie is excellent.” – The Dispatch, May 9, 1980, page 6.

“With the revelations of Watergate and secret Vietnam War bombings, the idea of pervasive conspiracy being present in all agencies of government proved to be compelling and made its way into this creative thriller.” – Charles Derry, The Suspense Thriller: The Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock, McFarland, 1988, page 159.

“Good pulp.” – The Palm Beach Post, July 10, 1994, page 1J.

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Elliott Gould (Robert Caulfield); James Brolin (Charles Brubaker); Brenda Vaccaro (Kay Brubaker); Sam Waterston (Peter Willis); O.J. Simpson (John Walker); Hal Holbrook (Dr. James Kelloway); Karen Black (Judy Drinkwater); Telly Savalas (Albain); David Huddleston (Hollis Peaker); David Doyle (Walter Loughlin); Lee Bryant (Sharon Willis); Denise Nicholas (Betty Walker); Robert Walden (Elliot Whitter); James Sikking (Control Room Man); Alan Fudge (Capsule Communicator); James Karen (Vice President Price); Virginia Kaiser (Mrs. Price); Barbara Bosson (Alva Leacock);

CREW: Sir Lew Grade Presents for Associated General Films a Lazarus/Hyams Production of a Peter Hyams Films, Capricorn One. Director of Photography: Bill Butler. Original Music: Jerry Goldsmith. Film Editor: James Mitchell. Production Designer: Albert Brenner. Producer: Paul N. Lazarus. Written and directed by: Peter Hyams. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 123 minutes.

Story:

NASA aborts a high-profile, manned mission to Mars at the very last instant, and removes the crew from the ship as it takes off for space.

The astronauts, Brubaker (Brolin), Willis (Waterston), and Walker (Simpson) are then shepherded to a sound-stage by a friend and higher-up at NASA, Dr. Kelloway (Holbrook). He blackmails them into acting out a staged landing on Mars, one to be transmitted at the appropriate moment to the American people.

When their ship burns up in the atmosphere on its return journey, the astronauts realize that for the ruse to succeed, the government will have to murder them.  They escape from custody, and end up in a barren desert…with government attack helicopters in pursuit.

Review:

Though entertaining and exceedingly well-shot (hence the three star rating), Capricorn One is a truly paranoid and cynical film, one which reveals just how deeply the Watergate Scandal affected -- or scarred -- the American psyche.  The film involves a faked landing on Mars orchestrated by the United States government, and then a plot to murder the three astronauts involved, lest they spill the beans and expose the hoax.

Alas, the clever and original plot of Capricorn One seems to have inadvertently added fuel to a conspiracy theory first put forward in 1976 in the book We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. In short, that theory goes that no American astronauts ever set foot on the Moon, and that the mission was a hoax to win the space race, or alternatively, distract from the bad press of the Vietnam War.  Although the hoax theory has been refuted numerous times, a significant percentage of the American public -- roughly ten-to-twenty percent -- still believe it to be true, thus fostering even more cynicism about government.   The saddest aspect of this whole matter is not that so many people believe nonsense because it happens to fit their pre-existing philosophical point of view, but that the brilliant and difficult efforts of the astronauts, the engineers, and others at NASA has been negated in favor of a paranoid belief.  America should be proud of its accomplishments in the Apollo program, but instead, such accomplishment is a source of controversy.   Men who are heroes are instead treated as though they are liars, or hiding something from their countrymen.  It’s shameful.

It’s understandable that, post-Watergate, the science fiction film would explore conspiracies and look to blame the government. It’s even totally rational that hero journalists, aping the Washington Post heroes, should be the lead characters in films like Capricorn One and The China Syndrome.  However, in the sense that Capricorn One seems to undercut national sanity, one has to wonder if a film like this one is really something that should have been made.  Certainly, it is intelligently-wrought, and as already noted, exceedingly clever.  The film’s writers have picked up on the prevailing Zeitgeist and note in the film “that nobody gives a crap about anything anymore…there’s nothing to believe in.”

Similarly, the film’s President bemoans the fact that “cynicism” has become a “national epidemic.”  But since the writers understand this problem and comment on it, why would they create a film that adds to the idea there’s nothing to believe in, and racks up even greater cynicism about what should be a source of national pride and patriotism?  Yes, Capricorn One is a paranoid thriller of the space age, but in a sense it just piles on the cynicism.  Some folks might view that as pandering.

These notions considered, Capricorn One is absolutely prophetic in the way it explores technology, and the idea that “you could convince someone almost of anything” with the magic of special effects and photography.  As director Brian De Palma has noted, the camera lies 24 times a second.  Today, in the post-9/11 world, we have all wondered if, in times of crisis, we are seeing authentic footage, or footage re-created, edited or otherwise tweaked for public consumption.  In an era of CGI special effects and photo-shopped magazine covers, Capricorn One’s prediction of potent visual trickery remains a potent warning to the gullible.

Although it is a bit long at over two-hours running time, Capricorn One is also downright rousing at points, especially during the climactic plane chase involving Telly Savalas as a crop-duster under pursuit from attack helicopters.  The photography is stunning, and the editing is absolutely perfect.

Bottom line: Capricorn One is an absolutely fine, involving entertainment, but ultimately one that contributes to the cynicism of the Era when, in fact, an antidote to that poison was needed in the national bloodstream.

In space, no one can hear you meow. Jake the Cat visits Earth in Walt Disney’s The Cat from Outer Space (1978).

The Cat from Outer Space (1978) * * *

Critical Mass:

“Cat bogs down here and there but stays on track and apace most of the time.” – The Evening-Independent, August 18, 1978, page 6B.

“…in some ways ahead of its time, especially in the way it satirizes the paranoid response of the American military authorities…” – M. Keith Booker, Disney, Pixar and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films, Greenwood Publishing, 2013, page 39.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Ronnie Schell (Jake); Ken Berry (Dr. Wilson); Sandy Duncan (Dr. Bartlett); McLean Stevenson (Dr. Norman Link); Harry Morgan (General Stilton); Roddy McDowall (Stallwood); Jessie White (Ernest Ernie).

CREW: Walt Disney and Buena Vista present The Cat from Outer Space. Director of Photography: Charles F. Wheeler. Original Music: Lalo Schifrin. Film Editor: Cotton Warburton. Produced by: Ron W. Miller. Written by: Ted Key. Directed by: Norman Takar. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 104 minutes.

Story:

An alien explorer -- a highly advanced feline or cat named Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7 -- lands on Earth, and sees his vessel captured by the U.S. Military and General Stilton (Morgan).

The stranded cat makes contact with Dr. Wilson (Berry), who nicknames him Jake, and reveals his status to the kindly human.  If he can’t get to his ship and repair it, he will miss a rendezvous with his mother ship, and not be able to return home.

As a spy (McDowall) skulks around the hanger base, trying to glean information about the spacecraft for his shadowy employer, Jake and Wilson team up with another scientist, Dr. Bartlett (Duncan) and mishap prone Norm Link (Stevenson) to get the alien cat home.  Doing so requires earning some money at Ernest Ernie’s pool hall, however…

Review:

In 1894, Mark Twain wrote that “if a man could be crossed with a cat it would improve the man and deteriorate the cat.”  Walt Disney’s harmless kid’s movie, The Cat from Outer Space makes literal the notion of cats as highly intelligent, advanced life-forms from another world, possessing superior intelligence.

Specifically, the film’s tabby, Jake (Schell) visits Earth in a flying saucer shaped like a cat’s head (right down to the green eyes and the landing ramp which resembles a tongue…).  By wearing a glowing collar, Jake can communicate with primitive man, here represented by a group of klutzy and occasionally goofy scientists played by Ken Berry, Sandy Duncan and McLean Stevenson.

In some ways worth mentioning, The Cat from Outer Space seems like a primitive precursor to Spielberg’s 1982 blockbuster E.T., another film about a cute alien trapped on Earth who boasts the ability to move objects via telekinesis.

In both films, the cute (titular) alien is able to levitate vehicles and fly through the sky, and in both films, said alien is hunted by the military.

The crucial difference, perhaps, is that E.T. is an adult story about children, while The Cat from Outer Space is a children’s story about adults, if that distinction makes sense.  E.T. is a serious meditation of one child’s loneliness and sense of isolation, whereas the more frivolous The Cat from Outer Space is really about comedic hijinks and pratfalls.  Disney didn’t get into the “serious” science fiction business until The Black Hole (1979), and Watcher in the Woods (1980), so The Cat from Outer Space might even be looked at as the end of one (innocent) era in Disney’s history.

If one likes or loves cats, and has always suspected that these pointed eared creatures are somehow looking down their nose at inferior life forms like us human beings, this Disney film is amusing enough to pass muster, especially if you choose to watch with your young son or daughter.

Uniquely, The Cat from Outer Space ends in almost precisely the same fashion as another 1978 science fiction film: Capricorn One.  There, an astronaut, a reporter had to escape enemy helicopters in an old crop-duster piloted by Telly Savalas.  Here, a similar climactic chase unfolds, with Jake and Wilson flying in a battered old airplane while pursued by villains in helicopters.  In both cases, the chase is exciting and well-photographed, though there is more use of rear-projection photography in this film.

So is The Cat from Outer Space good?  It’s good for kids, and perhaps that’s enough.

Dr. Susan Wheeler (Genevieve Bujold) finds out where her hospital’s coma patients have ended up, in Michael Crichton’s taut drama about medical ethics, Coma (1978).

Coma (1978) * * *

Critical Mass:

“Coma is only the second movie that Crichton direction…and though he doesn’t yet show a sure enough control of tempo, there’s a particular wryness in his style which suggests intelligence…” – Pauline Kael, New Yorker, February 6, 1978, pages 85 – 86.

“If hospitals scare you, you’ll die viewing Coma, the Robin Cook story which Michael Crichton has directed with some expertise…” – Hugh James, Films in Review, March 1978, page 187.

“Wildly implausible, but gripping anyway.” – Jason Silverman, Wired, February 13, 2007.

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Genevieve Bujold (Dr. Susan Wheeler); Michael Douglas (Dr. Mark Bellows); Richard Widmark (Dr. George Harris); Elizabeth Ashley (Ms. Emerson); Rip Torn (Dr. George); Lois Chiles (Nancy Greenly); Lance LeGault (Vince); Harry Rhodes (Dr. Morelind); Gary Burton (Computer Technician); Frank Downing (Kelly); Tom Selleck (Sean Murphy).

CREW: MGM presents a Martin Erlichman Production of a Michael Crichton Film, Coma. Director of Photography: Victor J. Kemper. Original Music: Jerry Goldsmith. Film Editor: David Bretherton. Production Designer: Albert Brenner. Produced by: Michael Erlichman. Based on the novel Coma by: Robin Cook. Written and directed by: Michael Crichton. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 114 minutes.

Story:

At Boston Memorial Hospital, inquisitive Dr. Susan Wheeler (Bujold) is shocked when her friend Nancy (Chiles) goes into a terminal coma following a routine surgery.

Although Wheeler’s boyfriend Mark (Douglas), who is next in line to be chief resident, is worried about the politics involved, Wheeler starts to investigate and finds that in one year’s time more than ten healthy young people have slipped into comas at the hospital.

As she assembles the facts, Susan comes to realize that she is being followed, and that the solution to the mystery involves two points of interest.

The first is that all the comas have occurred in Operating Room 8.  The second is a strange facility nearby, known as the Jefferson Institute.  Realizing that someone powerful is out to silence her, Susan determines to check out the institute for herself…

Review:

Taut and disturbing, Coma is another Michael Crichton film that (like The Terminal Man) explores the ever-changing boundaries of medical ethics.  In particular, several doctors at a metropolitan hospital here orchestrate terminal comas in healthy young people so they can harvest and sell their organs to the highest bidder.  Though the film’s nerve-wracking conspiracy angle plays out as yet more fall-out from the decade’s anger and cynicism over the Watergate Scandal, Coma’s greatest strength rests in its work-a-day approach to matters of life-and-death, and its revelation that the doctors performing surgery are just doing a job.  Its notation that hospitals “expect” a certain number of bad outcomes per year is especially chilling.

This notion of an industrial, impersonal approach to health care is powerfully vetted in the film’s first surgery sequence. A beautiful and vibrant young woman, Nancy (Chiles) is prepped for surgery in OR 8 for a routine D and C, or what the attending doctor terms a “therapeutic abortion.”

At this juncture, Crichton cuts to the professional team administering anesthesia to Nancy, and one man mentors another in the techniques of putting a patient under.  He describes to his student every aspect of the anesthetic procedure and notes that it is “99 percent boredom” and “one percent scared-shitless panic.”

The surgery seems to go normally and the nurses in the OR even talk about humdrum family matters (one nurse has a sick son at home, but fortunately his fever broke and he should return to school tomorrow…).

The idea transmitted in this scene is that putting a live human being “under” anesthesia and then rousing him or her to consciousness is so routine a matter that it’s hardly worth a frayed nerve or a moment of concern for the medical staff. In fact, as the nurses make plain, the surgery isn’t even the center of their attention or concentration.

But afterwards Nancy doesn’t wake-up…no matter what.  She is non-responsive and locked in an “irreversible coma,” essentially brain dead.   Then more horror comes, as Dr. Wheeler learns (from an impersonal computer read-out…) that this result occurs fairly regularly, to about a dozen people a year.  Damningly, all those around Susan try to assure that this situation is okay, merely “the risk of anesthesia.”  Mark, her boyfriend notes “medicine isn’t perfect. We all accept that, don’t we?”   In other words, these doctors and professionals have been conditioned to accept such losses, and because of that conditioning, a conspiracy blossoms in secret.  Even the doctor orchestrating the cover-up, played by Widmark, tries to suggest the ridiculousness of such a conspiracy theory in an environment when life and death are everyday events.  “What do you think? That there’s a conspiracy in Boston Memorial Hospital?”

Of course, there is a conspiracy going on, and the film cleverly, at this juncture, reveals in long shot a photograph behind Widmark’s character. It’s a portrait of President John F. Kennedy, a leader whose assassination, more and more Americans believed in the 1970s was the result of a conspiracy and not the act of a single crazy individual.  This is the film’s visual clue that Widmark is part of the problem, not the solution.

The science fiction aspect of Coma arrives in largely in the final act, which reveals the gruesome and bizarre details of the Jefferson Institute.  Hundreds of comatose human bodies are seen dangling in mid-air, connected to the ceiling by wires and feeding tubes. They are being kept in this form of living stasis should the need arise quickly for their organs.  In other words, their bodies have been taken over for organ harvesting, with the doctors at Boston Memorial literally playing God with the flock.  This idea is brought out convincingly when Widmark’s character refers to hospitals explicitly as “the cathedrals of our age” because people worship their health, and therefore the doctors who can give it to them.

If so, Jefferson Institute is surely a kind of purgatory or hell, where trust is abused and doctors seek not the health of their patients, but the wealth that organ transplants can provide them.

Intriguingly, Coma, based on the best-selling novel by Robin Cook, also concerns how one doctor, Susan Wheeler awakens from her professional and personal “coma.”  As the film starts, she is in a contentious relationship with Mark, who wants her to be the perfect wife as well as a co-worker, and she sort of numbly goes about her daily job, delivering news of a boy’s kidney failure and so on with precious little in terms of emotion or empathy.

Those qualities are brought to consciousness in Susan when she loses Nancy, her best friend and a person imbued of so much life and vitality.  Rather than go along to get along, Susan decides to probe beneath the slow, placid, “workaday” routine at her job and discover the truth.  She puts herself in remarkable danger in doing so, and the film succeeds marvelously as a paranoid thriller.  But consequently, Susan takes control of her life, both in terms of her relationship with Mark (where she proves her legitimacy by breaking open the conspiracy) and regarding her job, by proving that she is a healer, not just a glorified plumber.

The film’s terror reaches its crescendo when Susan is drugged and rolled into Operating Room 8.  She is unable to respond or protect herself as surgery begins, and carbon monoxide will be surreptitiously used to destroy her mind…and her evidence of the hospital’s wrong-doing.

This climax is so tense not only because the audience has come to care for and like Susan, but because her only hope rests with Mark, a man who has been defined in terms of political gamesmanship since the very first scenes in the film.  He has already been told by a doctor who is in on the conspiracy that he will become chief resident if only he can control Susan and her curiosity.

Given the importance of Mark’s upward mobility to him, one has legitimate cause to wonder if, in the end, he will choose his girlfriend or his career.  Mark chooses wisely, thankfully, and so one might even conclude that he too has woken up from his “comatose” state to see the world as it really is.

The central romantic relationship in the film might also be contextualized in terms of women’s lib or feminism, which was a major theme in science fiction films of the 1970s and efforts such as The Stepford Wives.  Here, Susan is constantly infantilized, delegitimized and condescended to by the male establishment of the hospital.  She is a thorn in their side, not an equal or a respected professional, and Widmark even quips “Women…Christ!” after one meeting with Susan.

Susan’s battle in the film is to awaken Mark from his comatose acceptance of the status quo and the Good Old Boy’s club.  He must see her as an equal on both the job and at home, where they squabble over how they divide the domestic responsibilities.  In the end, Mark chooses Susan and all that she represents over the Boys Club represented by the other (corrupt) doctors and their politics.

Influence: Cook’s Coma was re-made as a TV movie in 2012, though it received mixed reviews.

Deathsport (1978) *1/2

Cast & Crew:

CAST: David Carradine (Kaz Oshay); Claudia Jennings (Deneer); Richard Lynch (Ankar Moor); William Smithers (Dr. Karl); Will Walker (Marcus Karl); David McLean (Lord Zirpola); Jesse Vint (Polna); H.B. Haggerty (Jailer); John Himes (Tritan President); Peter Hooper (Bakkar); Brenda Venus (Adriann); Valerie Rae Clark (Dancer); Archie Freeman (Mutant).

CREW: New World Studios Presents Deathsport. Director of Photography: Gary Graver. Original Music: Andrew Stein. Film Editing: Larry Bock. Produced by: Roger Corman. Story: Francis Doel. Written by: Henry Suso, David Stewart. Directed by: Henry Suso, Allan Arkush. M.P.A.A. Rating: R.

Story:

After the Neutron Wars one thousand years in the future, the evil ruler of Helix City, Lord Zirpola (McLean) captures a “range guide,” the legendary Kaz Oshay (Carradine), along with several people making their way to distant Tritan City.

Zirpola and his sadistic enforcer, Ankar Moor (Lynch) force the newcomers to partake in “Deathsport,” a kind of futuristic motor-bike/jousting contest for the masses, even as they also plan to wage war with Tritan, and steal its oil.

Kaz, the beautiful Deneer (Jennings), a doctor (Smither) and his son (Karl) escape from the city, with Moor in hot pursuit.  Now Kaz must defeat his enemies, and also rescue Deneer’s daughter Tara from mutants who have captured her and are holding her hostage in a dark cave.

Review:

An unofficial follow-up to Death Race 2000, though not a sequel by any means, Deathsport betrays its low-budget origins at virtually every turn.  The film consists largely of futuristic motor-bikes, armed with lasers and grandly termed “death machines” doing jumps in the desert, over dusty brush lands.  Vasquez Rocks -- a common location on Star Trek and other science fiction TV programs -- is utilized several times in the picture, and Star Wars sound effects are deployed frequently.  In particular, Darth’s Vader famous mechanical breathing sound is the effect accompanying the opening and closing of automatic doors in the city of Helix, and the sound of space fighters screeching through the Death Star trench is re-purposed in Deathsport’s final motorbike chase as engine noises.

Some of the matte paintings in Deathsport, of Helix and Tritan Cities, and of the Deathsport Arena, are actually pretty good for the time, and no one can make the claim that David Carradine and Richard Lynch don’t throw themselves fully into their roles. They seem completely conversant in a kind of formal future language that speaks of honor and family history, and yet also appear to be off in their own movie, operating in their own unique and unrelated subplot.

One (pleasant) surprise in the film is the amount of nudity featured in the action.  Claudia Jennings is a former Playboy model, and goes fully nude at least twice in the film.  At a later juncture, another performer, a dancer, also does full frontal nudity, which is no doubt why the film earned its R rating.

In terms of its concept, Deathsport is far more intriguing than its weak execution suggests.  The noble “range guides” are not unlike the Teutonic Knights, living by their own code of honor and defending the innocent.  And the city states like Tritan and Helix represent medieval serfdoms.  There are also allusions to the Roman Empire here. The Deathsport Arena recalls Ancient Rome’s Coliseum, and its leader, Lord Zirpola is mad (suffering from a brain illness caused by radiation exposure) and therefore boasts resonances of both Caligula and Nero.

With a better script, better action, and more resources, Deathsport might actually be a pretty great idea for a post-apocalyptic film.  As it stands, it is dull and feels stretched out, even at 82 minutes.

One final factor that makes Deathsport so bad is the ridiculous dialogue.  The script features lines such as “Your brain is decaying my lord,” and my favorite: “On a night such as this, the mutants will be out.” Yes, the freaks come out at night…

In a film where the world is presented believably on screen, with details that match up, such dialogue might not stand out.  In a dull film filled with revving motor-bikes, naked dancers and largely uninteresting characters, it does.

“The truth needs no introduction,” to quote the film. So here’s the truth, delivered straight: Deathsport is a terrible and much inferior follow-up to the far more impressive Death Race 2000.

Gillian (Amy Irving) discovers a terrible secret at the Paragon Institute for the Gifted, in Brian De Palma’s The Fury (1978).

The Fury (1978) * * *

Critical Mass:

“The Fury could only have been made by Brian De Palma: the direction is stylish; the ambience is bizarre; the violence, or its expectation, is ever present.” – Rob Edelman, Films in Review, May 1978, page 313.

“Complex but technically accomplished…” – Howard Maxford, The A to Z of Horror Films, Indiana University Press, 1997, page 110.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Kirk Douglas (Peter Sandza); John Cassavetes (Childress); Carrie Snodgress (Hester); Charles Durning (Dr. Jim McKeever); Amy Irving (Gillian Bellaver); Fiona Lewis (Dr. Susan Charles); Andrew Stevens (Robin Sandza); Carol Rossen (Dr. Ellen Lindstrom); William Finley (Raymond Dunwoodie); Rutanya Alda (Kristen).

CREW: 20th Century Fox Presents a Frank Yablans Presentation of a Brian De Palma Film, The Fury. Director of Photography: Richard H. Kline. Original Music: John Williams. Film Editor: Paul Hirsch. Production Designer: Bill Malley. Executive Producer: Ron Preissman. Written by: John Farris, based on his novel. Produced by: Frank Yablans. Directed by: Brian De Palma. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 120 minutes.

Story:

A powerful young psychic, Robin Sandza (Stevens) is made to believe that his father, a government agent, Peter (Douglas) has been killed in a terrorist attack.  Now in the care of Peter’s ruthless partner, Childress (Cassavetes), Robin is trained to be a psychic assassin, his powers held in check by Dr. Susan Charles (Lewis), also his lover.

For eleven months, Peter searches for his son with the help of a nurse, Hester (Snodgress), who works at the Paragon Institute, a school for psychically-gifted students.  There, a new arrival, a troubled young woman named Gillian (Irving) grapples with her powers, and comes to realize that she is “receiving” messages from a “sender,” Robin.

Peter and Hester break Gillian out of Paragon -- which is secretly allied with Childress -- and after Hester is killed, go in search of Robin.

The duo finally finds Robin at a secret, wooded estate, but he is now almost totally devoid of humanity.  His psychic powers have grown to such an extent that he has become inhuman, and a murderer…

After Peter and Robin are killed, Childress captures Gillian, but the agent finds that her psychic powers are also very well-developed.

Review:

In terms of the science fiction cinema, 1978 was inarguably “The Year of the Conspiracy.”   NASA faked a Mars landing in ITC’s paranoid Capricorn One, Genevieve Bujold discovered a major metropolitan hospital’s plot to harvest the organs of comatose patients in Michael Crichton’s unsettling Coma, and alien pods infiltrated every level of government and commerce in San Francisco in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Brian De Palma’s The Fury fits in perfectly with this “The Year of The Conspiracy” label because the film, based on a novel by John Farris, depicts a covert government agency’s kidnapping of an American citizen, the attempted murder of that citizen’s father, and the agency’s efforts to transform the captive into a psychic assassin.

The Fury brilliantly captures the unsettled and angry mood of the country with its very title.  The American people were indeed “fury”-ious with leaders in Washington D.C. at the time because of the Watergate Scandal, the dismissive pardoning of Nixon, the illegal bombing campaigns in Cambodia, the Energy Crisis, stagflation, and other economic issues.  Trust in government stood at its lowest ebb in this era…at least until present times.

The Fury “transmits” this righteous anger in, literally, explosive terms. Specifically, De Palma’s film about youngsters who possess psychic abilities tells the story of a passive “receiver,” Gillian -- played by Amy Irving -- who is transformed finally, into a potent “sender” because of  her ever-growing anger at the government, represented by Cassavete’s villainous character, Childress.

The film culminates with the completion of Gillian’s transformation, and the ensuing total physical destruction of Childress, witnessed in loving-but-bloody detail from more than half—a-dozen angles.

Like virtually all of Brian De Palma’s films, The Fury is devilishly playful, and in this case, buoyed considerably by the director’s masterful orchestration of three stunning set-pieces.  One is a slow-motion escape from repressive authority, another is an expression of fury meted at an amusement park, and the last –and best -- is the bloody denouement, the final dispatch of Childress.The result of all these moments  is a tense and extremely gory film that captures perfectly the Zeitgeist of its age, and continues to impress today on the basis of its almost completely unexpected emotional impact.

In short, The Fury evokes rage and upset in the viewer as again and again the good guys lose, and the bad guys win. At least, that is, until the unspooling of the film’s cathartic last sequence, which is as sharp and spiky an exclamation point as has ever been used to punctuate a genre film.

Created in the immediate aftermath of the Watergate Scandal and the resignation of President Nixon (which followed not long after the resignation of Vice-President Agnew…), The Fury evidences a serious distrust of the United States government.  In fact, the film portrays Childress and his secretive agency as a malevolent shadow lurking, vulture-like over the American family, bent on separating family members, harassing citizens, and creating monsters for a secret agenda and other dark purposes.

The apparent protagonist of the film, Peter (Kirk Douglas) expresses fear and dislike of the government at several junctures in the film.  “They needed him,” he explains about Peter, “and they took him.  They just took him.” At another juncture, Peter notes that “They” (meaning Childress’s agents) “are always watching.”  What he expresses hear is a fear directly borne of Watergate: of government spying, and intrusion in the private lives of families. Peter also fears for his lover, Hester’s, because she “takes too much for granted.”  She trusts “too many people.”  In the mid-to-late 1970s, the government had lost the trust of many Americans, and that’s the idea being expressed in The Fury.  This was not a time for optimism or idealism.

Early in The Fury, Peter hides out in an apartment belonging to a blue-collar family.  He meets a character named “Mother Nuckalls,” and it turns out she wants to help him evade capture.  She tells him flat out that if he encounters “Feds,” Peter should “kill them.”   Again, the idea expressed is absolute contempt towards and hate for the government.

Today, the right wing tends be the most vehemently anti-government demographic, but in the 1970s that title went to the left side of the political spectrum, and indeed, the government agency depicted here is seen as a dangerous international aggressor, a son of Nixon.  Childress wants to possess Robin -- a psychic assassin – because, explicitly “the Chinese don’t have one,” and “The Soviets don’t have one” like him.  In other words, Robin represents the latest achievement in Cold War one-upmanship.

In keeping with the idea of a malevolent but also bungling or incompetent government, De Palma stages his action scenes with a fine sense of the chaotic, or the random.  In the film’s most stirring action scene  -- Gillian’s escape from the Paragon Institute -- an innocent woman, Hester, is killed, when the government gives chase in a car, and Peter, also a government agent, remember, opens fire.  Caught between opposing (partisan?) enemies, Hester is violently and accidentally killed, in slow-motion no less, and the idea transmitted is one of events spiraling absolutely out-of-control.

This particular scene works so brilliantly because De Palma rivets our attention with the slow-motion photography, and also with the total lack of sound-effects we might expect, such as gunshots or screams. Instead, we simply get John Williams’ gorgeous, Hitchcock-ian score as the scene’s soundtrack, and the pulse absolutely quickens.

Why approach the material this way?  On one hand, it’s an application of formalist film technique.  But on the other, if you’ve ever been in a car accident, you might remember how time seems to slow-down, and you are aware of every event, every instant, every reflex, ever move.  The escape scene here, rendered in compelling slow-motion photography, very adroitly recreates that feeling of a catastrophic event happening around you, and event after event overwhelming the senses.

Late in the film, Peter also fails to rescue Robin, and Robin -- again, the “transmitter” or “sender” -- dies, but not before passing on his finely-developed rage to Gillian, who has witnessed all the bungling, all the violence, and has had a stomach full of it.  In the film’s last scene, Gillian’s eyes go blue (like Robin’s), and she lets loose, overcoming her passivity as a receiver.  She blows Childress apart.

Long story short: the only appropriate response to how things were going in America of the mid-1970s was…the fury.

Indeed, throughout the film, De Palma links psychic expression or outbursts directly to feelings of rage.  Another of The Fury’s great set-pieces occurs at an indoor amusement park.  Robin first feels jealousy regarding Susan Charles when he sees her with two other men.  And then, he sees innocent Middle-Eastern men boarding a tilt-a-whirl.  But, Robin remembers their (stereotypically) Arab garb from the terrorist attack that he believes killed his father, and so he lets his rage -- his fury -- take over.   He causes the tilt-a-whirl roller-coaster car to break loose from its moorings, and sends the Arab passengers hurtling into another party of unsuspecting Middle-Easterners.  Again, the impetus for such an outburst is explicitly anger.

Although Kirk Douglas is the star of The Fury, in many ways, the film really dramatizes the story of Gillian, played by Irving.  She starts out as a virtual innocent.  She’s just a kid living her life without much thought for much beyond herself.  But very soon Gillian finds that her “gifts” are coveted by Childress and his murky agency, and that atrocities have been committed by the government against those just like her.

At first, all Gillian can do is empathize with Robin,  witnessing the visions of his torture and subjugation.  But by film’s end, Gillian reverses her role and becomes an active player in her own destiny.  In brief then, the film depicts the process of how an activist is born, first by witnessing the pain of others, and then, finally, by taking a stand against corruption or malfeasance.

The last scene in The Fury, in which Gillian takes a personal stand,  is one for the ages.  Gillian summons all her “fury” and literally rips apart Childress with her psychic powers.  He explodes into several pieces, and we see his utter de-construction in view-after-view, in the most loving, exhaustive detail imaginable.  When severed Childress’s head – eyes still open -- hits the white carpet on the floor (and the viewer’s jaw simultaneously hits the ground in disbelief…), the movie merely goes to black without comment.

De Palma has built up to this amazing catharsis from the film’s first moments.  A family is separated, a beautiful nurse is killed, a father loses his son, and then commits suicide.  And through it all, the forces of Childress and a dark government win.  But finally, the tables are turned, and all the rage of the day is released in a magnificent explosion of blood and guts, a crimson flower coaxed to bloom.

Some critics thought The Fury’s ending was over-the-top.  Others felt that it had been a long time coming…

Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) is about to encounter the Pod People in the “Me Generation’s” version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“…a triumph. For once a remake has not trespassed on the original but re-explored, updated and re-defined it for a new generation.” – John Baxter, Starburst #8, April 1979, page 4.

“Technically the remake of Invasion is superior to the original film.  The sound…and the photography, in particular, are exceptional in the newer version.” – Lloyd Paseman, Eugene Register-Guard, October 24, 1978, page 2C.

“…ingenious and great fun…” – Judy Flanders, Lakeland Ledger, October 24, 1980, page 4C.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Donald Sutherland (Matthew Bennell); Brooke Adams (Elizabeth Driscoll); Jeff Goldblum (Jack Bellicec); Veronica Cartwright (Nancy Bellicec); Leonard Nimoy (Dr. David Kibner); Art Hindle (Dr. Geoffrey Howell); Leila Goldoni (Katherine Hendley); Kevin McCarthy (Crazy Man); Don Siegel (Taxi Driver); Tom Luddy (Ted Hendley); Stan Richie (Stan).

CREW: MGM/United Artists Presents a Robert Solo Production of a Philip Kaufman Film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Director of Photography: Michael Chapman. Original Music: Denny Zeitlan. Film Editor: Douglas Stewart. Production Design: Charles Rosen. Produced by: Robert H. Solo. Written by: W.D. Richter. Based on the novel by: Jack Finney. Directed by: Philip Kaufman.

Story:

In San Francisco, lab tech Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) grows increasingly convinced that her boyfriend Geoffrey (Art Hindle) is not himself.  When she brings her worries to her boss, Matthew Bennell (Sutherland), he recommends she see his friend, pop psychologist and relationship guru, Dr. David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy).

Kibner promptly reports that he has seen six similar cases in just one week, and suspects that the cause is the fast-moving 1970s life-style, in which people move in and out of relationships too fast, without really getting to know each other.

But as Matthew, Elizabeth, and their fiends Nancy (Veronica Cartwright) and Jack (Jeff Goldblum) soon discover, the problem in San Francisco is much graver than that.  Alien plants from a dying solar system have arrived on Earth and are rapidly producing emotionless doppelgangers of the human race.  They desire a world of peace, with no hate…but also no love.

Matthew, Elizabeth, Nancy and Jack attempt to escape San Francisco, but the conspiracy has grown too big, and the human race stands on the brink…

Review:

Movie critic Pauline Kael once wrote that the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers was “the American movie of the year – a new classic…the best movie of its kind ever made.  I think she was onto something.

In particular, Invasion of the Body Snatchers craftily updates the 1950s context of the original Jack Finney novel, as well as the Don Siegel film adaptation.  It does so in order to deliberately comment on the contentious 1970s: the decade of “The Me Generation” and the Watergate conspiracy and cover-up.

Accordingly, the film’s conclusion seems to be that human life in the decade of “self-realization” seems to hamper, not encourage, real connection between people, while an overt, even paranoid lack of trust in society’s institutions and hierarchies makes that disconnect exponentially worse. In the absence of real connection and real love, a seed grows, and terror blossoms. Invasion of the Body Snatchers thus concerns, as film scholar Michael Dempsey noted in Film Quarterly (February 1979, page 120), “the manifold pressures which life brings upon people to abandon that ambiguous blessing, humanity.”

The 1970s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers by director Philip Kaufman primarily concerns shape and form, and the myriad ways that human beings misperceive shape and form, and thus make unwarranted assumptions that fit pre-conceived notions about those qualities. The film itself depicts an invasion of alien “pod people” -- essentially sentient plants -- who secretly replace human beings while they sleep in a vast 1970s liberal metropolis, San Francisco.  But unlike its 1950s predecessor, which was either an indictment of communism or an indictment of McCarthyism depending on your personal Rorschach, the remake plays meaningfully against the unmistakable backdrop of an increasing divorce rate in the United States and the ascent of the so-called “Me Generation.”

Or, as the psychiatrist in the film, Kibner (Leonard Nimoy) trenchantly notes: “people are moving in and out of relationships too quickly,” and therefore never really getting to know people they presumably love. Accordingly, when individuals make discoveries about their intended loves ones that they don’t like, it is easier to disassociate from them, to blame the “other” for being “different” and then just move on. But if you are so focused on self and can’t get to really know other people, how can you tell if they are even human at all?  They may look and act human -- their shape and form could be human -- but they could be…pods.

In terms of background context, the Me Generation famously consists of Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964, generally-speaking) who, because of rising disposable income in the 1970s and perhaps as a direct response to the deprivation ethos of the World War II generation, began to place a new importance on “the self” over the well-being, necessarily, of the community. In fact, the 1970s was determinedly the decade of the “self,” a fact reflected in the hedonism of disco music, and the blazing ascent in popularity of the “self-help” book genre.  Popular buzz-words of the day included “self-realization” and “self-fulfillment,” yet as the movement of “self” grew, many people saw the new age as merely one of “self-involvement.  The consumption-oriented life-style of immediate gratification famously gave rise to President Carter’s notorious 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech, which warned against judging success on material wealth rather than intrinsic human qualities of character and morality.  Meanwhile, we kept building more shopping malls, and imagined worlds futuristic (Logan’s Run) and apocalyptic (Dawn of the Dead) set there.

Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers plays meaningfully with the idea of form and shape in its visuals by depicting a world where “disconnected” people can’t distinguish between genuine humanity and invading, emotionless aliens.  This tension between form and reality occurs almost immediately in the film when a health inspector -- the film’s protagonist, Bennell (Sutherland) -- starts a fight in a restaurant kitchen, arguing over whether a small black object is actually a caper or a rat turd.  This debate is actually a metaphor for the entire film.  The only way to know for sure about the caper/rat turd is to eat it…and by then it’s too late, isn’t it?  By then, what you fear is actually inside you, doing you harm…

Forecasting its bleak, terrifying, and legitimately unforgettable finale, Kaufman’s camera proves deeply ambivalent even about Bennell -- the hero -- and his “true” human nature. For example, when Bennell first appears in the film, he is seen through the restaurant’s door, through a peep-hole, and the audience gazes at him through the filter of what seems like a fish-eye.  Bennell appears distorted and strange, and not fully human. Later, at a book party for Dr. Kibner, we see a distorted visual representation of Bennell again.  As he talks on the telephone to the police, he stands before what seems to be a funhouse mirror, and it corrupts his features once more. And finally, when Bennell goes to rescue Elizabeth from her boyfriend’s house, he is deliberately lit from below, a visual selection which casts shadows upon his features and makes him look diabolical or sinister. All these visualizations of the good guy prove a (Watergate-relevant) point in Invasion of the Body Snatchers:  You can’t trust appearances. That lesson is learned the hard way by Veronica Cartwright’s character, Nancy, in the film’s last moment.

To approach this facet of Invasion of the Body Snatchers another way, the aliens are creatures who can understand, mimic and manipulate form and shape to their advantage.  Late in the film, a pod merges the body of a dog with the head of a homeless man because the host’s genetic materials were damaged during the duplication process.  What emerges is nothing less than an abomination and one my earliest movie-going experiences with a jump scare, at that.  But that’s okay to the aliens because they don’t possess emotions. They don’t know fear, disgust or horror.

The protagonists further misunderstand the pods because of their “familiar”-seeming forms.  First, the pods are accepted as harmless plants and brought into human homes, where they commence the invasion. Secondly, these plants are not considered a viable “host” for aliens, as Nancy observantly points out.   Why do we expect UFOS to be metal ships?

And thirdly, the heroes operate on incorrect assumptions about plants, and those assumptions prove deadly.  Even though Nancy notes that plants do respond to music, Bennell leaves Elizabeth for a time because he hears music playing nearby, on a boat.  The song he hears is “Amazing Grace,” one of the most moving compositions ever written, and he assumes it must be sign or symbol of emotional, feeling mankind.  On the contrary, however, the tune emanates from a cargo ship transporting pods.  There is no hope here, no “grace” to speak of.  The pods, though emotionless, listen to music as well, though it is doubtful they would ever compose new music. Again, we believe that music is unique to us, but this scene proves that it isn’t, and that mistake costs Bennell the love of his life.

Over and over, Kaufman’s film attempts to trick us or mislead with its visuals, making the case that in this day and age, we can’t really know anyone else.  Sometimes, the director throws the audience a bone and offers up a visual composition that makes the point we need to learn, or provides an important clue, even before the dialogue tells us.  In one scene set at Matthew’s apartment, for instance, a tower bisects the frame vertically, separating Matthew and Kibner on opposite sides of rectangle, a visual representation of the fact that they aren’t working towards a common end. We get verbal verification of that fact in the very next scene, but the visuals tell us first, and that’s a remarkable and deft achievement.

The 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers also plays deliberately with the lack of confidence Americans felt in their government following the Watergate Scandal.  President Nixon authorized criminal activities from the Oval Office and resigned from office in disgrace, and then his successor, President Ford immediately pardoned him.  Citizens, to a certain extent, were left out of the loop, and Nixon didn’t seem to pay much for betraying the public trust.  So there was a sense that government, and government bureaucracy was not working for the good of the people, but rather to corrupt ends.  Government (Ford) took care of its own (Nixon).  I don’t necessarily agree with that reading, and I believe Ford did what was necessary to begin the healing process in America.

But others felt differently, and throughout this movie, the paranoia of Watergate proves quite pronounced as shadowy figures rendezvous and talk in hushed tones about plots and strategies.  At one point, the specter of Watergate is directly referenced, when Matthew realizes that he and all his friends are being watched, and their phones are being tapped. A telephone operator calls him by name before he gives it, and he knows the fix is in. This is, perhaps, the most chilling moment in the movie.

To Philip Kaufman’s credit, he orchestrates the conspiracy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers right under our (unaware) noses, much as President Nixon managed to do for a time.

And if Watergate had its “plumbers,” then Invasion has its “garbage men.”  Throughout the film, unobserved and uncommented upon, garbage trucks enter the frame and cart off this weird organic-looking soot or fluff.   We don’t learn until the end of the film that this grotesque material is all that remains of the human body after the duplication process.  But at four or five different junctures in the film -- starting in the first shots after the opening credits finish – anonymous-looking garbage trucks, garbage men and dumpsters are captured in the frame, along with this mystery substance.  Only in the film’s final moments does the full breadth of the conspiracy -- and its duration -- become plain.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers also makes literal that old proverb “you can’t fight City Hall.” Here Matthew realizes that the invaders (garbage men and aliens) “control the whole city,” just as we learned they ran the country in Watergate.

Between extreme paranoia about the motives of trusted officials, and the lack of connection between citizens in a permissive utopia of “self,” Invasion of the Body Snatchers fosters deep uneasiness about how easily our natures might be mimicked or mocked.  The final scene, which sees Bennell revealed as a “pod person,” is the ultimate exclamation point on that theme.  He does everything that he did before he was an alien, and so we hope, like Nancy, that he could be “hiding” in plain sight around the other aliens.  But instead we’ve missed the truth again.  We’ve mistaken form for substance.  He’s been “born again” into an untroubled world that has no need of hate, and no need of love, either.

Tellingly, Invasion of the Body Snatchers proposes that the alien duplication occurs while the original human sleeps.  Sleep is a universal must and biological need among human beings, so the process is both inescapable and inevitable.  Furthermore, how often have we heard from friends and family that that they “just woke up one day” and felt different about someone important in their lives.    This Invasion of the Body Snatchers lives in paranoid suspicion of such a revelation.

Influence: the pod invasion continued in Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers (1994), starring Meg Telly, and in The Invasion (2007), starring Nicole Kidman.  Neither film lived up to the 1956 original or the 1970s remake, though Ferrar’s meditation on political correctness came darn close.

Alien policemen stop a criminal loose on Earth in Laserblast (1978).

Laserblast (1978) * *

Critical Mass:

“…the film’s special effects sequences, which include stop-motion animation, are well-executed, but its sequences without effects are fairly dumb.” – Doug Pratt, Doug Pratt DVD, Harbor Electronic Publishing, 1997, page 689.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Kim Milford (Billy Duncan); Cheryl Smith (Kathy Farley); Gianni Russo (Tony Craig);Keenan Wynn (Colonel Farley); Dennis Burkley (Pete Unger); Barry Catler (Jesse Jeep); Ron Masak (Sheriff); Mike Bonbenko (Chuck); Eddie Deezen (Froggy); Roddy McDowall (Dr. Mellon).

CREW: A Samuel Goldwyn Release, the Irwin Yablans Company presents a Charles Band Production of Laserblast. Director of Photography: Terry Bowen. Original Music: Joel Goldsmith. Film Editor: Jodie Copelan. Produced by: Charles Band. Written by: Franne Schacht and Frank Ray Perilli. Directed by: Michael Rae. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 90 minutes.

Story:

A disaffected and bullied teenager, Billy (Milford), discovers a powerful alien weapon in the desert, one which seems powered by a glowing pendant that he wears around his neck.  Harassed to the breaking point by local cops and high school bullies, Billy uses the alien weapon to right the wrongs in his life.

Every time he uses the weapon, however, he goes further down the line towards changing into some kind of green-skinned alien monster.

Before long, two alien police-men who accidentally left the weapon on Earth after dispatching a criminal there, return to do the same to Billy, who is past the point of no return.

Review:

Although it is roughly made and often ridiculous in detail and performance, Laserblast boasts an undeniable pro-social message beneath all the violence. Once consumed with revenge and the desire to hurt those who have hurt him, the film’s hero Billy (Milford) gets turned into a literal monster.

That’s the didactic takeaway of the story, which finds a lonely, neglected teenager finally striking back against those who have treated him so poorly. Instead of turning the other cheek, he uses an alien weapon -- discovered in a barren stretch of desert -- to right the wrongs as he sees fit.  Step-by-step, use-after-use, Billy’s humanity drains away, a metaphor for those who would use violence and mete eye-for-an-eye justice.  Or to put it another, the absolute power of the alien weapon corrupts Billy absolutely, physically as well as mentally.

Although Laserblast features alien spaceships and characters, the storyline and narrative structure seems to arrive straight from the horror genre. In 1976, Brian De Palma made Carrie, based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, and that film also concerned a lonely, bullied teen who, once grown into her psychic powers, delivered fiery and bloody vengeance upon her tormenters.  The alien weapon of Laserblast fills the same narrative and thematic function as those telekinetic powers.  Even the film’s ending seems to deliberately evoke Carrie after a fashion.  In that film, what the Lord giveth (telekinesis, namely) he also takes away and destroys, bringing Carrie White’s murder spree to an end.  Similarly, in Laserblast what alien life-forms negligently giveth (a deadly particle beam weapon), they also return for, destroying its owner and recovering it.

Another horror film of this same type is Jennifer (1978), about a girl who can telepathically control snakes to destroy her high-school enemies and tormenters.  All three of these films focus on “alienated” human adolescents that are mistreated by peers.  They also involve the fact that the bully treatment is overlooked by authority figures, who should know better.

What remains intriguing and vital about Laserblast despite its reputation as Mystery Science Theater 3000 fodder is that the film goes to great pains to visually suggest that there is a price for violent revenge.  The “hero” who uses violence in the end becomes a villain or monster who is unloved even by his supportive girlfriend.  Billy’s use of the particle weapon transforms him into something inhuman, and so the film’s visualization of a monster echoes its content regarding behavior.

A low-budget production, Laserblast features some very impressive special effects for its era though they were, again, ribbed mercilessly on MST 3K.  In this instance, Dave Allen animates the two alien police-men who resemble, at least to my eyes, giant shell-less turtles.  The creatures are well-articulated and original-looking, and nicely non-human in appearance.

Unfortunately, some of the effects work also negatively impacts continuity.  During the film’s climax, for example, the alien police-men pilot their (neat-looking) ship over what appears to a major East coast city and find Billy there on a metropolitan street corner…even though the entire film has taken place in what appears to be a sleepy west-coast town near the desert.  This sudden change in locales is never explained, but the aliens show up in their ship, over that city block, and blow up Billy real good before heading back to the stars.

The most notorious composition in Laserblast is indeed one for the history books.  Brandishing the deadly alien particle-beam weapon, Billy drives down a deserted highway and spots a billboard for Star Wars. He promptly blows it up, and the resulting explosion is impressive indeed.

There’s no way in the world that Laserblast could blow up Star Wars, but remember…this is a teen fantasy, right?

Gandalf the wizard prepares for battle in Ralph Bakshi’s animated adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1978).

The Lord of the Rings * * 1/2 (1978)

Critical Mass:

“The film is indeed high-budgeted and elaborate, but it is an elaborate bore.” – Carl DeMaio, Telegraph Herald, March 9, 1979, page 4.

“Those who have not read The Lord of the Rings may find it hard to follow a somewhat choppy script…Those of you who are devotees of the Tolkien books will be relieved to recognize the bulk of the dialog is lifted verbatim from the original.” – Betty Darby, Rome News Tribune, March 16, 1979, page 3.

Cast & Crew:

CAST: Christopher Guard (Voice of Frodo); William Squire (Voice of Gandalf); Michael Scholes (Voice of Sam); John Hurt (Voice of Aragorn); Simon Chandler (Voice of Merry); Dominic Guard (Voice of Pippin); Norman Bird (Voice of Bilbo); Michael Graham-Cox (Voice of Boromir); Anthony Daniels (Voice of Legolas); David Buck (Voice of Gimli); Peter Woodthorpe (Voice of Gollum); Fraser Kerr (Voice of Saruman); Phillip Stone (Voice of Theodon); Michael Deacon (Voice of Wormtongue).

CREW: Fantasy Films Presents a film by Ralph Bakshi, The Lord of the Rings. Director of Photography: Timothy Galfas. Original Music: Leonard Rosenman. Film Editor: Donald W. Ernst. Produced by: Saul Zaentz. Written by: Chris Conklin and Peter S. Beagle. Based on The Lord of the Rings by: J.R.R. Tolkien. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 132 minutes.

Story:

In Middle-Earth, the great wizard Gandalf (Squire) visits the Squire, the hometown of the diminutive and peaceful Hobbits, and reports to Frodo Baggins (Guard) that he must undertake a great quest.  The evil lord Sauron rises, and the One True Ring, formerly in the possession of Bilbo Baggins (Bird) must be destroyed at the volcano where it was forged, lest it be used again by evil forces, as happened historically.

A fellowship of elves, trolls and humans protect Frodo as he makes the dangerous trek to Mount Doom, but in pursuit are the monstrous Ringwraiths.

On the long quest, the fellowship of the ring must also navigate the Misty Mountains, and contend with a huge monster called BalRog, a battle that could steal from the Fellowship its most powerful member…

Review:

Ralph Bakshi’s animated fantasy films don’t always work as well as they might because they feel rushed, and scatter-shot in presentation.  Still, one has to credit the artist with ambition and dedication.  And in the case of his adaptation of Lord of the Rings, one must credit him with a strong sense of faithfulness as well.  The first ninety-minutes or so of this adaptation very faithfully re-tell the tale featured in Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Rings (1954-55) and in glorious, meticulous detail too.

If one gazes closely at the live-action, Peter Jackson The Lord of the Rings trilogy made at the dawn of the twenty-first century, one can definitively discern how the films very much use this 1977 animated film as a guide, reference point, and even storyboard.  The storyline, of course, is uniquely Tolkien’s and each adaptation of the same work is bound to feature similarities.

But Bakshi’s film very clearly inspires rather specific visual details in the live-action version.  The Ringwraiths in Ralph Bakshi’s film, in particular, very much forecast Jackson’s interpretation in Fellowship of The Ring. Also, the visualizations of Frodo wearing the ring and occupying a kind of spectral netherworld (along with the Ringwraiths) recur directly from animated film to live-action film.

Additionally, moments set in the Shire in the Jackson 2001 film appear as though they were lifted, occasionally shot-for-shot, from the imagery imagined by this 1970s animated epic.  Production design is very, very close indeed, between the two productions.

The point, perhaps, is that whatever failings the animated Lord of the Rings possesses -- including a disappointing battle scenes, and more rotoscoped action, the likes of which scuttled Wizards (1977) -- are largely overcome by the fact that this is the first moving picture, visual interpretation of Tolkien’s work on the big screen, and has this proven enormously influential, historically-speaking.

Bakshi’s film possesses value for that reason alone, and the first hour of this film is undeniably great.  After that juncture, however, it seems once more that deadlines and other pressures have overcome his sincere efforts, and cheap production expediencies are utilized.

There are audio bloopers to contend with too.  At about the half-way point of the film (at least in the print I screened for this book), Saruman is referred to constantly, by every voice actor, as “Arumin” instead.  The “S” has been lost, forgotten, or accidentally deleted.

Also -- and this won’t be a popular comment with fans of Tolkien -- The Lord of the Rings as a work of art features a villain in Sauron of Mordor who is not a very effective visual threat.  He works just great on paper, suffusing the land with evil, and ascending to a position of great domination, but he is never actually seen here (and when seen in the live-action films is depicted as merely a disembodied eye).  The metaphor is surely that evil is amorphous, unseen but ever-present, casting a shadow on the land and its people.

My point, however, is that in terms of a movie Sauron isn’t a figure of compelling menace who can actually do anything for himself, like Darth Vader, for example, or Lex Luthor, or whom even possesses personal characteristics and motives that we recognize.  This means that other villains – Sauron’s “hands,” essentially -- must carry the weight of the film, and because there are successive “little” villains (the truly menacing Ringwraiths, and Balrog, for instance), the animated film features an episodic nature rather than a legitimately epic sweep.

Reviewing movies there is that eternal pull to grade on a scale of “A” for effort.  A tremendous amount of effort went into Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, and the first hour is terrific. But after that, the film falls apart, becoming an incoherent visual mélange with no real climax or denouement due to the fact that only two of the Tolkien books are adapted.  The result is a highly-influential and no doubt historically-important fantasy film, but in the final analysis not a truly great one.

The Gavanas Battlecruiser races through the stars in Message from Space (1978).

Message from Space (1978) * *

Critical Mass:

“The message was loud and clear: RIP OFF!” – Terry Hazlett, Observer-Reporter, December 29, 1978, page B-4.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Vic Morrow (General Garuda); Sonny Chiba (Prince Hans); Philip Casnoff (Aaron); Etsuko Shihomi (Emeralida); Peggy Lee Brennan (Meia); Tetsuro Tanba (Noguchi); Hiroyuki Sanada (Shiro); Mikio Narita (Rockseia XLL); Makoto Sato (Urocco); Isamu Shimizu (BEBA-2).

CREW: United Artists/Toei Company Ltd. Present Message from Space. Director of Photography: Toru Nakajima. Original Music: Ken-Ichiro Morioka. Produced by: Toru Hirayam, Akira Ito, Yusuke Okada, Naoyuki Sugimoto., Tan Takaiwa, Simon Tse, Banjiro Uemura, Yoshinori Watanabe. Written by: Kinji Fukasuku, Shotaro Ishinomori. Directed by: Kinji Fukasaku. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 105 minutes.

Story:

When the Gavanas Empire, commanded by sadistic Rockseia (Narita), invades the peaceful world of Jillucia, the Jillucians send out eight magical Liabe seeds to find heroes who can save them.

Across the universe, the seeds end up in the possession of a group of space bandits called rough riders (Casnoff, Brennan, Sanada), and the grizzled General Garuda (Morrow) and his robot BEBA-2 (Shimizu).

As these heroic forces gather to stop Rockseia, they also encounter another seed holder: Prince Hans (Chiba), the rightful heir to the throne of Gavanas.

After Rockseia transforms Jillucia into a giant world engine and travels across the galaxy to conquer Earth, the team of heroes must save the day, and destroy the planet.

Review:

At a cost of six million dollars, Message from Space was the most expensive Japanese film produced in its time.  The film also spawned a Japanese TV series, Message from Space: Galactic Wars, even though the international audience largely dismissed the original film and its universe as a knock-off of Star Wars.

Although today Message from Space boasts a devoted fan following, the argument that it rip-offs Star Wars is not without merit.  It features several story elements that Star Wars popularized (though didn’t invent), including the cute robot (here, BEBA-2), the sword duel (here between Rockseia and Hans), and the deadly space fortress capable of destroying whole worlds.  In this case, Rockseia destroys the moon to demonstrate to the people of Earth that resistance is futile.

Beyond these commonly seen genre tropes, Message from Space apes Star Wars in more direct fashion  For instance, the enemy space fortress, a hollowed out planet-turned-space ship, can only be destroyed by flying inside a narrow corridor (think the Death Star Trench) and destroying the interior reactor. There’s even a rip-off conversation in which concerned pilots discuss if it is possible to fly a ship through such narrow confines.

Similarly, much of the action in the film involves the Jillucian princess, Emeralida (Shihomi) sending out the equivalent of a distress call (as Leia asked for help from Obi Wan Kenobi in a recorded message stored by R2-D2). Like Leia, this space princess is captured by the forces of evil and taken to their fortress to await rescue.  Prince Hans is not Han Solo, though the names are similar, but General Garuda -- a world-weary soldier – echoes some of the qualities of Alec Guinness’s Kenobi character.

Message from Space cribs from The Seven Samurai (1954) too, and its plot might be described as The Eight Space Samurai, as eight “Liabe Braves” are selected to defend a defenseless people and their land.  In 1980, an American space film, Battle Beyond the Stars, would adopt the same template, but with greater artistic success.

Despite its overly familiar nature, Message from Space certainly speeds by with a sense of high energy and velocity, even if it doesn’t always make sense.  On the latter front, there’s a scene in which the space bandits leave the cockpits of their ship to touch space fireflies(!), and they wear no pressure suits. In fact, they leave their ships for the void of space without even wearing gloves.

Likewise, the up-fitted Jillucia/spaceship traverses the distance from “The Andromeda Nebula” (the Andromeda Galaxy?) to “the solar system” (Earth’s) in record time, a matter of days if not hours.  The distance covered however, is vast, and there is no notation in the story of faster-than-light drive to make it possible.  Instead, we see the planet Jillucia racing through the void of space…letting off a stream of smoke like a chugging locomotive.

On the plus side, some of the spaceship designs -- namely those belonging to the rough riders -- are undeniably ingenious.  Meia’s ship is modified in the course of the film to dock two other ships, and at the right moment, the three crafts split apart in what amounts to a truly impressive moment, and one that every space kid of the 1970s surely loved.

In fact, I owned several Message from Space model kits as a child, and loved the hell out of them.  I had great adventures with the kits, and I suspect that some of those adventures were more entertaining and imaginative than Message from Space ended up being.

Return from Witch Mountain (1978) * *

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Christopher Lee (Dr. Gannon); Bette Davis (Letha Wedge); Ike Eisenmann (Tony Moran); Kim Richards (Tia Malone); Denver Pyle (Uncle Bene); Jack Soo (Mr. Yo-Yo); Anthony James (Sickler); Richard Bakalyan (Eddie); Ward Costello (Mr. Clearcloe); Christian Juttner (Dazzler); Brad Savage (Muscles); Jeffrey Jacquet (Ricky).

CREW: Walt Disney Studios presents Return from Witch Mountain. Director of Photography: Frank Phillips. Original Music: Lalo Schifrin. Film Editing: Bob Bring. Produced by: Kevin Corcoran, Jerome Courtland, Ron Miller. Based on the novel Escape to Witch Mountain by: Alexander Key. Written by: Malcolm Mormenstein. Directed by: John Hough. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 94 minutes.

Story:

Uncle Bene (Pyle) drops off extra-terrestrial kids Tony (Eisenmann) and Tia (Richards) for a vacation in Los Angeles.  They are promptly separated from one another, and Tony is captured by two diabolical plotters, Dr. Gannon (Lee) and Letha Wedge (Davis).  They use hypnosis and mind-control to make Tony use his telekinesis to their criminal ends.

Tia, meanwhile, falls in with a friendly young gang, and recruits their help  -- as well as that of a truant officer, Mr. Yo-Yo (Soo) --to help rescue Tony.

Review:

This is an inferior and by-the-numbers sequel to the very enjoyable 1975 hit Escape to Witch Mountain.

Even though the human world was dramatically proven dangerous for the alien kids in that film, and even though they were chased and coveted by avaricious humans like Aristotle Bolt (Ray Milland) too, Return from Witch Mountain commences with the dodgy premise that Tia and Tony are going on vacation with no adult (or alien) supervision in Los Angeles.

From that weak starting point the movie goes downhill quickly. Tony and Tia are separated almost immediately in the sequel.  In fact, they spend the bulk of the film separated.  This means that a primary joy of the original film -- their interaction as siblings -- is largely missing here.  Indeed, what made Escape to Witch Mountain a pleasurable viewing experience and a decent SF initiative was the reality of that family relationship, balanced against all the phantasmagoria of flying Winnebagos, telekinesis, precognition, and flying saucers.  The Tony/Tia relationship grounded the film and made its emotional highs legitimately resonant ones.

Here, the siblings are separated toute suite, and then, Tony is subjected to all kinds of nasty mind-control by a slumming-it acting duo of Christopher Lee and Bette Davis.  Eisenmann, a good actor who starred in the short-lived 1970s science fiction series The Fantastic Journey (1977), which was set in the Bermuda Triangle, deserves better than to spend the movie as he does, in a hypnotic, trance-like state.

Meanwhile, Kim Richards’ Tia doesn’t fare much better.  She spends the bulk of the movie’s running time in even worse company: with an atrociously unfunny, unappealing “kid’s” street gang.  This “Earthquake” Gang practically sinks the entire picture despite the comedic efforts of the late, great Jack Soo, who also starred on TV’s Barney Miller and makes a good impression here.

Although there will be some who say this is just a harmless silly Disney movie for kids, the appropriate response is that children appreciate quality entertainment as much as adults do, and know when they are being talked down to.

Return from Witch Mountain feels wrong almost from the first moment, and is a sad echo of the earlier picture.

Influence: The Witch Mountain saga matriculated to television in the early 1980s. In 1982, Beyond Witch Mountain, starred Edie Albert as Jason O’Day, but recast Tony and Tia.  The TV-movie was to have been a pilot for a series, but the program was never made.  In 2009, Race to Witch Mountain was a re-boot of the Disney franchise.

Kal-El or Superman (Christopher Reeve) is the last child of Krypton in Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie (1978).

Superman: The Movie (1978) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“…a surprisingly infectious entertainment, nicely balanced between warmth and wit, intimacy and impressive special effects, comic-strip fantasy and several elements that make the movie eminently eligible for Deep Thinking about rescue fantasies, cherubic messiahs and other pieces of popcorn metaphysics.” –Jack Kroll, Newsweek, January 1, 1979, page 46.

“Christopher Reeve goes on to develop the characters of Clark Kent and Superman in different ways that share an authentic sweetness. Both are earnest, good and loving; to do this in a way that is charming, rather than corny, is no simple feat. Yes, Superman draws a laugh when he says his mission is "to fight for truth and justice and the American way"; but it's a fond laugh, because he has not allowed the slightest possibility of hypocrisy to creep into the characterization.” – Judith Martin, The Washington Post, December 15, 1978, page W20.

“…classic example of a near-perfect super heroic movie.” – Marc Bernardin. Science Fiction Explorer #9: “Uncut Gems,” October 1995, page 8.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Marlon Brando (Jor-El); Gene Hackman (Lex Luthor); Christopher Reeve (Clark Kent/Superman); Ned Beatty (Otis); Jackie Cooper (Perry White); Glenn Ford (Jonathan Kent); Margot Kidder (Lois Lane); Jack O’Halloran (General Non); Valerie Perrine (Miss Tessmacher); Terence Stamp (General Zod); Susannah York (Lara); Jeff East (Young Clark); Marc McClure (Jimmy Olsen); Sarah Douglas (Ursa).

CREW: Warner Brothers and Alexander Salkind Present a Richard Donner Film: Superman: The Movie. Director of Photography: Geoffrey Unsworth.  Original Music: John Williams. Film Editor: Stuart Baird. Production Design: John Barry. Superman Created by: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Executive Producer: Ilya Salkind. Produced by: Pierre Spengler. Story by: Mario Puzo. Written by: Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman, Robert Benton. Directed by: Richard Donner. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 154 minutes.

Story:

On the distant, highly advanced world of Krypton, a great scientist, Jor-El (Marlon Brando) warns of imminent planetary disaster, but is ignored by his skeptical people.   As disaster and death loom, Jor-El sends away his young son, Kal-El, on a multi-year space voyage to Earth.  There, the boy will grow up with incredible powers, courtesy of Earth’s yellow sun. But he will also grow up isolated and alone…the last of his breed.

On Earth, young Kal-El crashes in rural Kansas.  There, he is adopted by farmers, Jonathan (Glenn Ford) and Martha Kent (Phyllis Thaxter), and raised as their son, Clark Kent (Jeff East). As Clark matures, he resents the fact that he must always hide his powers away from humans.  But after his Earth father dies from a heart attack, Clark decides to pursue a grander destiny.  He heads north and creates from Kryptonian crystal a Fortress of Solitude where he can learn about himself and his world.

After twelve years of study, Clark (Reeve) emerges from the Fortress as “Superman,” a caped hero who can fight crime. He heads to Metropolis, where, as Clark Kent, he works as a reporter at the Daily Planet.  He soon falls in love with another reporter, Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), but learns that she has eyes only for Superman.

When the villainous criminal Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), launches a deadly real estate scheme to destroy the west coast of America, Superman confronts the twisted genius.  Unfortunately, Luthor has discovered the only substance on Earth that can harm the Man of Steel: a rock from his destroyed world, or Kryptonite…

Review:

Although blockbuster superhero films have come and gone by the dozen since the release of Superman: The Movie in 1978, the Richard Donner film remains the best film of its type yet produced.

This rather grand assertion is due in part to the film’s layered visual symbolism, which intentionally and methodically equates the life-time journey of Kal-El/Superman with that of a messiah, or Christ figure.

Also, the 1978 Superman speaks meaningfully about its historical context: the Post-Watergate Age of the mid-1970s.

Specifically Superman is offered up to audiences as a positive role model, a kind of wish-fulfillment alternative for a country that appeared mired in partisanship, bickering, and corruption.  Superman’s promise that he would “never lie” to Lois Lane (and to us) reflects this deep, burning national desire during the mid-1970s for a restoration of belief and trust in our elected leaders.

In terms of structure, Superman: The Movie, is similarly unsurpassed because of the film’s remarkable and epic three act, biographical structure, which actually permits for intense focus on the hero rather than the villain, an absolute rarity in a genre which has distinguished itself largely, by spotlighting ever-kinkier, ever-more perverse antagonists.

By focusing on Clark Kent’s origin, upbringing, and adult life instead of the Lex Luthor’s genesis, for example Superman: The Movie provides a perfect allegory for the American immigrant experience. That experience, in short, is about coming to a land of opportunity, assimilating its cherished values, and then living those values at highest level possible.

Superman embodies three distinctive settings and movements in its final cut.  The first segment or section takes place on distant Krypton, the second in 1950s Kansas, and the third in Metropolis of the 1970s.

The first “act” or segment of the film concerns Heaven, the second concerns the discovery of a home and humanity, and the third involves achievement of destiny.

Superman: The Movie’s religious imagery remains most powerful in the Kryptonian segment, but continues throughout the picture (and indeed, in Superman II [1981] and even Superman Returns [2006].)

In Donner’s film, Krypton is depicted as a world of radiant, glowing white, a world that, literally, symbolizes Heaven.  When we first see Krypton, we pass through a layer of white mist, which suggests, visually, clouds in Earth’s sky.  In other words, we are moving beyond the Earth and firmament into the realm of the Angels. Here the Kryptonians gather, led by the God-like Jor-El, whose surname, El means “deity” in Hebrew. In his first order of business, Jor-El casts out the insurrectionist Zod, clearly a stand-in for a similar insurrectionist against God, Lucifer.  Zod and his minions are sent into a kind of living Hell, the “Phantom Zone,” for their crimes.

Following this removal of “evil” from Paradise or Heaven, Jor-El and his world face another, equally unexpected threat: a natural disaster that could destroy it totally. Jor-El’s entreaties to evacuate Krypton are ignored and silenced, and the radiant, formerly-white, heavenly realm turns scarlet red under the increasing light of the Red Sun.

In Scripture, scarlet or crimson colors signify suffering, worry, fear, and blood, the very opposite of the “purity” and “sanctification” that once represented Krypton’s ideal society.

Jor-El, the “God” figure, next sends his “only son” to Earth to aid mankind in a deliberate reflection of John 3:16:  "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.”

Significantly, Kal-El travels to Earth in a spaceship that some critics suggest resembles the Star of Bethlehem itself.  He lands in Kansas and becomes the adopted child of Jonathan and Martha Kent. Certainly, there is a trenchant comparison to be made here between Jonathan and Joseph, and Martha and Mary.  They are not, strictly speaking, biological parents of a messiah, but rather instructors in humanity.

Then, as if to cement the comparison of Kal-El to Jesus Christ, the character is seen -- as a young boy -- standing in a crucifixion-type pose, his arms outstretched.   And as Superman, Kal-El performs acts that -- in keeping with the Jesus Christ comparison -- are quite miraculous.  He can travel faster than a locomotive, leap higher than a skyscraper, and deflect bullets.

He also explicitly states that he “never lies,” a comment which conforms to the post-Watergate reading of the film, but also the religious allegory.  Where Superman will never “lie” to Lois, Jesus noted that there was “no deceit” in his mouth (Isaiah 53:9) and that “I tell you the truth” (John 8:45).

What’s the point of the religious allegory?  Simply this: when a God or a messiah walks among men, he inspires men to be better.  That’s Superman’s gift too.  While he must also face “diseased maniacs” like Lex Luthor, Superman’s very existence proves that a man can live up to ideals like justice for all, or even, on a basic level, honesty towards his peers.

Importantly, the closing shot of the film see Superman break the fourth wall and cast his eyes upon us, in the audience.   When this man-above-men gazes upon us, he reminds us, too, that we can do the things he does.  We can be friends and heroes to the weak, even if we lack Superman’s otherworldly powers

The most visually beautiful segment in Superman: The Movie is the second or middle one.  This section is set in Kansas under Big American Sky, and it captures beautifully a Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) quality.  Rockwell often painted imagery of small town life, and his work frequently asked the critical question: what does it mean to be an American?

Such works as Freedom of Speech (1943), The Problem We all Live with (1964), Runaway (1958) and Homecoming Soldier (1945) all focused, laser-like on the idea of the American dream, the American community, and, in some instances, the effort to achieve social justice for all.  Law and order, heroism, prejudice, and other America-centric topics all found expression in Rockwell’s catalog.

As an immigrant living in America, Kal-El thus gets a lesson in Rockwell-ian Americana in the film’s second movement, and this view -- while undeniably sentimentalized -- represents what is best about our nation.  The powerful imagery of windswept wheat fields, of white church steeples, and of productive family farms suggests a simple, honest, corn-fed life of upstanding moral values.  Those values of “truth, justice and the American way” are crucial in forming Superman’s bedrock psyche.  He is not a biological child of America, but through his adoption of our land he understands the value of hard (physical) work, and the value of honesty and truth.  Best of all, he understands something else critical about the American dream: the idea that in America it is not the color of your skin or your land of origin that should matter most.   Rather, it’s what you do here -- right now -- to contribute to the common good that weighs the heaviest.

Superman’s story is thus the story of immigrants in America since time immemorial, and it’s no coincidence that Superman soon takes Lois on a flight around the Statue of Liberty, an icon welcoming immigrants to our shores.

If Lois is his real life love, then Lady Liberty -- and by extension, America –- surely represents Superman’s other significant romance.

The scenes set in Kansas purposefully contrast with those set on Krypton, which represented, in a sense, cold intellect as opposed to warm, human heart.. This is significant because the Kryptonians ultimately lost their world because of intellectual arrogance. Clark cannot let the same fate befall his adopted home world.

The third and final portion or segment of Superman: The Movie concerns America of the movie’s present, meaning 1978.  The Watergate Scandal had recently toppled a President, and America’s heroes of the day were two committed reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, as this text has noted too many times already.

Given the public’s dislike of the corporate press today, it is indeed difficult indeed to imagine a time when reporters were widely viewed as ideal protectors of American freedom, but that was indeed the case in the mid-1970s, the same era that gave us investigative reporter Carl Kolchak on The Night Stalker.  The idea featured in both Superman and Kolchak, is that the truth matters more than power.  Armed with the freedom of the press a reporter could fight City Hall, and expose City Hall as corrupt. Even a President was not above the law.

In Superman: the Movie, Clark thus takes on two noble professions: that of a dedicated journalist, and that of a superhero.  It likely says something about how cynical we’ve become today that we can’t imagine a journalist being an advocate for unbiased, non-partisan truth.  And that quote from Superman that I mentioned earlier, “I’ll never lie to you,” not only represents religious allegory then, but political allegory as well. Those words represent a direct quote from then-President Jimmy Carter, who spoke identical words to a scandal-weary American populace in 1976.

As a nation, we were disappointed with our elected leadership, and were searching for a "new hope." As a people, we no longer believed that a man could fly, metaphorically-speaking.

Hell, we didn't even believe that our leaders were "good" or "honest." The public faith was broken.

But Superman was the real deal...the genuine article. Not only was he good, he actually brought out the best in the people around him.  When he informs Lois that he wants to fight for truth, justice, and the American way, she scoffs at the cliché, warning that he’ll have to fight every elected official in the country.  But Superman boasts a quality that can change everything: the power to inspire.

As portrayed by Margot Kidder, Lois Lane thus proves a perfect sparring partner for Superman and Clark in Superman: The Movie because she is so deliberately part and parcel of this fast-moving, cynical culture in a way he definitively is not. And yet despite her cynicism, Lois is still absolutely taken with Superman.  This is so because all of us - no matter how jaded, no matter our political orientation -- still want very much to believe in "truth, justice and the American way.”

Christopher Reeves' Superman is the ultimate fish-out-of-water: a principled man living in an unprincipled time. Yet despite this fact, he commits himself to being the savior of this tough, cynical world. It’s a world that some might say doesn't even deserve Superman.  But this Man of Steel reveals that it is not a weakness to be gentle, and not a character flaw to be kind, or honest. A real hero doesn't need to swagger, or be a misanthropic "loner.” Instead, this is a visitor who is amused and puzzled by mankind. He can be strong and idealistic and baffled all at the same time. He can be sincere without being a wimp. Accordingly the crises featured in Superman: The Movie are authentically human ones rather than special effects spectaculars.

Over the course of the film, Clark loses two fathers (Jor-El and Jonathan Kent), bids farewell to his Mother, searches for the purpose of his life in the Fortress of Solitude, falls in love with a flawed "modern" human being (Lois) and embraces the stated traditional principles of his adopted country.  And when he angrily violates Jor-El's "non-interference" directive during the film's climax to turn back time to rescue Lois, Superman proves he is no longer a child of cold, emotionless Krypton ...but a real child of America. It's a great character-arc.

It is ironic that superhero movies of recent vintage slather on one villain after the other. The implication, of course, is that evil is more interesting, inherently and dramatically, than good is; that excavating someone who is evil is intrinsically more interesting than examining someone who struggles to do good.  Superman: The Movie reverses that equation.  This is the very reason why the film is still held up as a paragon of the form by many, or at least counted among the ten best superhero films ever made.  The Donner film’s focus is squarely on the man wearing the cape, not the freak in the grease paint, or the bald maniac. The film may compare Superman to a messiah, but in Reeve’s Man of Steel, we can all see, too, the potential to achieve our very best self.

Superman: The Movie is one-of-a-kind science fiction film in terms of its three part structure, incredibly relevant to the post-Watergate culture that produced it, and touching in what it says about mankind and the best angels of his nature.

Influence: Three sequels to Superman: The Movie followed in the 1980s, in 1981, 1983, and 1987. In 2006, Superman Returns attempted to pick up the saga, but met with blowback from fans for being too faithful and respectful to the Donner films of the 1970s. In 2013, a new Superman film, a reboot called Man of Steel, didn’t face that problem, and featured a neck-snapping Superman for a new age.

The Swarm (1978) * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“…funnier than most comedies.” – New West, Volume 3, 1978, page 105.

“…the nadir of the disaster movie genre.” – Richard Meyers, S-F 2: A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films from Rollerball to Return of the Jedi, Carol Publishing Group, 1984, page 105.

“…one of the most hilarious, unbelievable and ridiculous disaster movies ever made.” – Glenn Kay, Michael Rose, Disaster Movies, Chicago Review Press, 2006, page 339.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Michael Caine (Brad Crane); Katharine Ross (Helena); Richard Widmark (General Slater); Richard Chamberlain (Dr. Hubbard); Olivia de Havilland (Maureen Schuester); Ben Johnson (Felix); Lee Grant (Anne McGregor); Jose Ferrer (Dr. Andrews); Patty Duke (Rita); Slim Pickens (Jud Hawkins); Bradford Dillman (Major Baker); Fred MacMurray (Clarence); Henry Fonda (Dr. Krim); Cameron Mitchell (General Thompson); Christian Juttner (Paul); Morgan Paull (Dr. Newman); Alejandro Rey (Dr. Martinez).

CREW: Warner Bros. Pictures presents an Irwin Allen Production, The Swarm. Director of Photography: Fred J. Koenkamp. Original Music: Jerry Goldsmith. Film Editor: Harold F. Kress. Production Design: Stan Jolley. Written by: Stirling Silliphant. Based on the novel by: Arthur Herzog. Produced and directed by: Irwin Allen. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 155 minutes.

Story:

An invasion of America by Africanized killer bees begins in Texas, at an air-force base.  An entomologist, Dr. Bradford Crane (Caine) joins forces with the military to attempt to stop the deadly swarm, but conventional techniques prove ineffective.

A small town, Marysville, comes under attack just as its annual Flowers Festival draws near, and more than 200 people die              Later, the bee swarm attacks a nuclear power plant, which causes the death of 36,000 Americans.

With the heartland under siege, General Slater (Widmark) grows desperate for a stratagem that will stop the bees in their tracks.  Crane thinks the answer may rest with sound, and with the mating call of the killer bees.

Review:

As I touched on in my review of Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973), the 1970s represents the great decade of paranoia about killer bees. There was a strong belief by some that African killer bees were migrating to America, and would soon pose a real threat to human life in the States.  It’s some forty years later and the threat has never materialized.  Nonetheless, the pop culture of the 1970s is littered with many references to and entertainments about killer bees.

So it’s only natural, perhaps, that master of disaster Irwin Allen -- the man who was behind box office gold like The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974) and who once likened disaster movies to rubber-necking at automobile accidents -- would turn his attentions towards making a disaster film out of the real life “threat.”

Although it was supposed to be his biggest movie yet, The Swarm -- a terrible disaster movie about the “pending” bee invasion of Texas -- is the sad result.  Part of what makes the film so terrible is the deadly earnestness of all the performers and the screenplay, which contrast strongly with the slipshod execution and poor direction.

Of all the actors, Michael Caine fares the worst by far, zipping off his dialogue in rigorous staccato fashion, but revealing almost nothing in terms of humanity. In some scenes, especially those with co-star Richard Widmark, he screams at the top of his lungs, but nevertheless fails to reveal much in terms of what drives his character, the stern Crane.  But Caine alone can’t be blamed for the film’s failure.  Instead, the film treads into silly ideas, and executes them so poorly that laughter is the only possible reaction.

For instance, the deadly bees in this film not only sting their victims, their stings cause a special new brand of fever which causes humans to hallucinate. But the hallucination is very specific, and happens to every single victim: the injured suddenly see giant bees in their presence, and recoil in fear from the giant buzzing menace.

The fact of the matter is that killer bees are already scary, so they don’t need to pose a fictional psychological threat to possess psychic weight in the film.  And the front-projection of giant bees in many shots (mostly before sweating victims in hospital beds) just makes them seem silly, and a lot less menacing.  One tiny bee magnified to huge size lacks the terror of a rampaging swarm, and actually undercuts the sense of danger.

Similarly, The Swarm goes to great lengths to depict the gentle and sweet romance of three Marysville senior citizens, played by earnestly old folks Fred MacMurray, Olivia De Havilland, and Ben Johnson.  There are endless scenes of the two men vying for the affections of Olivia’s character.

But then, the movie depicts a brutal on-screen death for them as their train derails on a mountainside. Sweet old Fred MacMurray and Ben Johnson (or their stuntmen) suddenly go flying through glass windows as their car rolls down a steep embankment. Olivia De Havilland -- she of the trademark moan scream -- falls from her seat and into the middle of the aisle before the whole car explodes into flame.  Their deaths are just so over-the-top and out of proportion that one must laugh at the melodramatic nature of the whole thing. It wasn’t enough to kill them?  We have to see them brutally, viciously murdered?  Do we hate old people and their romances so much that these characters must be stamped out in a violent rage?

Similarly, The Swarm tries to go big by having the swarm attack a nuclear reactor and cause a meltdown.  Thirty-six thousand Americans die following this attack (off-screen), and again, there’s just no sense of decorum or appropriateness.  A meltdown in America, with casualties in the tens of thousands would be something it would take years and years to recover from, and change the very fabric of the nation.  The Swarm doesn’t seem to get that notion, and instead seems to want only to bolster the body count and thus emerge King of the Disaster Flicks.

For years, bad movie books have lampooned The Swarm’s atrocious dialogue, and in this case, with good reason.  Caine’s Crane seems genuinely hurt, and on a personal level to boot, when he learns killer bees are on the rampage.  “I never dreamed it would be the bees.  They’ve always been our friends,” he laments.

Equally ridiculous, Widmark’s character recognizes the bees as a worthy opponent and establishes that he “always credits” his enemies “with equal intelligence.”  Really, even killer bees?

Finally, the same character, Slater, worries about his place in history, wondering whether history will blame him “or the bees” for Houston going up in flames.

Well, heckuva job, General Slater…

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of The Swarm is that it seems to possess a genuine disregard and disrespect for science even though science ultimately diagnoses and resolves the problem.

Katharine Ross’s character, a doctor, witnesses the killer bees on the attack and verbally upbraids Caine. “What good is all that science? All that equipment? All those doctors?  What good are you?”

It is not only unlikely that a trained doctor, who saves life with “all that science” on a regular basis would adopt such a perspective, but the film makes abundantly clear that Crane is the only one standing between America and total devastation.  Why is he at fault?

The Swarm isn’t particularly frightening, in part because the terror is spread across a large landscape and not confined to a single locale (like a cruise ship flipped over at sea, or a high-rise aflame), and it is based on a premise -- the migration of killer bees -- that was ridiculous in 1978 and remains ridiculous today.

You’ll need to be a fan of bad “B” (bee?) movies to get any thrills out of this one.

l

The human adventure is just beginning: The U.S.S. Enterprise triumphantly cruises to the final frontier once more in Gene Roddenberry and Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

1979

The Real World: 1979

January 16:              The Shah flees from Iran.

February 2:               Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols is discovered dead of a heroin overdose.  He dies at age 21.

February 10:              Iran undergoes an Islamic revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini, returning from exile after fifteen years, seizes power.

March 28:              The Three Mile Island Accident occurs when a nuclear plant located in Pennsylvania suffers a partial meltdown.

April 20:              President Carter is attacked by a rabbit while fishing in Georgia and widely-ridiculed by the press and his political enemies.

June 1:                            The first McDonalds Happy Meal is sold.

June 18:              The SALT II treaty is signed by Jimmy Carter and Brezhnev.

November 4:              Fifty-three Americans are seized as hostages by Iranian radicals who desire their exiled Shah returned to Iran to stand trial.  The hostages are not released for 444 days, and the crisis sinks Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

December 6:              Star Trek: The Motion Picture premieres at the Smithsonian Institute.

December 24:              The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan.

Ripley (Sigourney Weaver; left) confronts a hostile -- and perfect? -- life form in Ridley Scott’s watershed film, Alien (1979).

Alien (1979) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“Even with its horrifying villain and scenes of bloody excess, "Alien" endures as a superior piece of filmmaking, with a pace that's like watching an art film when compared to the over-the-top space operas in recent years.” – Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle, October 29, 2003.

“The most startling thing watching "Alien" again is its pacing. For the first 45 minutes, little happens. It's all slow, exquisite build-up, which makes the second half seem all the more horrific.” – Erik Lundegaard, The Seattle Times, October 29, 2003.

“This revolutionary "haunted house in space" thrill-ride is the classic business, stunning you with shock after shock, even when the fascinating monster is exposed in all its hideous glory…There's also director Ridley Scott's eye for detail and brilliant way of alternating false scares with genuine jolts, which help to create a seamless blend of gothic horror and harrowing science fiction.” – Alan Jones, Radio Times, 2013. http://www.radiotimes.com/film/zwts/alien

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Sigourney Weaver (Ripley); Tom Skerritt (Captain Dallas); John Hurt (Kane); Veronica Cartwright (Lambert); Ian Holm (Ashe); Yaphet Kotto (Parker); Harry Dean Stanton (Brett); Bolaji Badejo (alien); Helen Horton (Voice of Mother).

CREW: Director of Photography: Derek Vanlint. Original Music: Jerry Goldsmith. Film Editing:  Terry Rawlings, Peter Weatherley.  Production Design: Michael Seymour.  Produced by: Gordon Carroll, David Giler, Walter Hill. Executive Producer: Ronald Shusett. Written by: Dan O’Bannon. Story by: Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett. Directed by: Ridley Scott. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 117 minutes.

Story:

In deep space, the commercial starship Nostromo is diverted from its homeward route when the ship’s computer, Mother, detects a distress call in a nearby solar system.  Mother awakes the crew from suspended animation, and the non-military men and women must investigate the signal on planet LV-426 or forfeit their percentage of the mission’s profit.

The Nostromo lands on the inhospitable world and an expedition consisting of Captain Dallas (Skerritt), Kane (Hurt) and Lambert (Cartwright) finds a strange alien derelict there.

Inside the macabre wreckage, a cargo bay is filled with leathery egg-like organisms, and something alive bursts forward from one, and seems to strangle Kane.  Kane survives, but as the crew soon learns on their return journey to Earth, the being has laid some kind of embryo down his throat, in his gut.

The embryo grows and bursts out of Kane’s stomach, eventually becoming a seven-foot tall alien whose physical strength is matched only by its hostility.  One-by-one, the crew-members are killed or secreted away by the alien, which is hiding in the ship’s vent system.

Desperate, one of the last survivors, Ripley (Weaver) plots a strategy to self-destruct the ship and return to Earth in a shuttle.

Review:

The story of astronauts accidentally picking up a monster in space is an old one, yet just as Star Wars gave the old swashbuckling Flash Gordon template new life in 1977, so does Ridley Scott’s Alien breath much new life into the monster-on-a-spaceship story of It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), Planet of the Vampires (1965) or The Green Slime (1968).

The director largely does so by pinpointing and focusing on the very quality that those films determinedly lack: a grounded sense of reality in terms of how human characters might behave while traveling on a spaceship in “the future.”

So if George Lucas imagined a “lived in” universe for Star Wars, one that implied history, use, and even entropy, Ridley Scott carries that ball a yard or two further down the field.  He imagines and presents a blue-collar future, one where work-stations are trashed, where computer consoles make good coffee mug holders, where characters don sneakers and ball caps instead of snappy uniforms, where pornography is pinned on the personal cubbies of the personnel, and everyone sleeps in podd they call “freezers” rather than traveling at (impossible in this universe) faster-than-light speed.

This daring visual aesthetic, termed “space truckers” felt new and unique in 1979, though Dark Star (1975), also written by Dan O’Bannon had put “slackers” in space and helped to begin the de-glamorization of life in space that Alien assiduously continues.  The effort to de-romanticize space makes life seem more immediate and real, and that’s the important thing here. In Alien, space travel is not a glorious calling or great mission to explore brave new worlds.  On the contrary, it is a monotonous and dull occupation.  Consider that in this future, corporations like Weyland-Yutani are still in charge, and the average astronaut is not a hero or a pioneer, but rather a guy (or gal) still trying to make a living wage and get his fair piece of the pie.  He makes it through the day on copious amounts of coffee, and swears like a sailor when shit starts falling apart.

In the film, Brett (Stanton) and Parker (Kotto) make this dynamic especially clear.  They are not “miracle workers” like Star Trek’s Mr. Scott, but overworked repairmen, putting out one fire after another and not immune to the idea of a work slow-down if they feel they are being taken for granted or abused.  In fact, Alien features a kind of upstairs/downstairs dynamic regarding the Nostromo’s crew. The bridge crew-members are, at least barely, responsible and dutiful truckers, doing their jobs with a modicum of professionalism.  But Brett and Parker sweat it out in the boiler room, making mischief and slacking off wherever they can.

The terror in Alien emerges partially but not only from the revolutionary design and appearance of the monster (as envisioned by Giger), but in the conjunction of that frightening unknown with the very-well known world of the truckers.  If the audience had to imagine “futuristic mankind” and his advanced, perfect technology, the very threat of the alien would surely be mitigated.  Instead, Scott depicts a world of ships, wardrobe, people and environs that we all immediately recognize and identify with.  Because Brett and Parker, Dallas, Kane and Ripley are all immediately believable, that factor makes the crew’s encounter with something truly unknown, something truly alien, all the more scintillating.

The other aspect of the film that viewers today may take for granted is the fact that in Alien, the monster is never seen in the same form twice until the last few scenes.  After three alien sequels, two AVP movies, and a prequel, people the world around can recite the Alien life-cycle from memory: egg, face-hugger, chest-burster, and adult or drone.  But in 1979, audiences had no way of knowing any of that, and so they were unsettled because they could never be certain what the alien was going to “be” the next time they saw it.

If the crew in Alien is recognizable as truckers in space or blue collar workers, the alien is utterly unrecognizable, even incomprehensible on first reckoning.  So much tension arises in the film from the conflict between these two poles, of total recognition, and total lack of recognition. The alien’s constant shifting, its universal state of flux, seems to reflect the anxieties of a decade that witnessed three presidents in ten years, and upheavals in Vietnam, Iran, and on the home-front.  An overwhelming fear in the 1970s was that we didn’t know what, or from where, something else was going to hit the country as it was trying to get on its feet again.  Would it be another oil crisis? Stagflation? Another political upheaval? A nuclear reactor meltdown?

Today, we’ve seen so many aliens and so many shape-shifters at the movies that we’re inured to the concept and it no longer frightens us as it did in 1979, but Alien got it right, in revolutionary fashion. The fear wasn’t that the alien would be familiar the next time we saw it, the fear was that it would be unfamiliar, that all our learning, all our experience with it would ultimately prove useless.

I have written about Alien’s subtext before, notably in my new book Horror Films FAQ (2013), and sometimes it is a bit uncomfortable.  But on a very basic thematic level, Alien concerns sex, and a “perfect” being who can use human sexuality and reproductive drives against prey for its own breeding and survival purposes.

There are moments in Scott's original that appear to involve homosexuality, sexual repression, and sexual stereotypes or roles.  Again, this seems fitting considering the historical context. The end of the 1970s brought the disco era, and a new level of hedonism to the American public.  Americans had become more promiscuous, and the 1970s has become notorious, even, for its sense of sexual experimentation.  This idea has most often conveyed in films that focus on the decade’s “key” parties (The Ice Storm [1997[), wherein which married couples would swap partners for a night by randomly selecting car keys from a dish during a suburban party. At the end of the 1970s, sex   clubs such as Plato’s Retreat in New York had also become part of the new tapestry of the culture.

Given such a background, it’s not entirely surprising that the monster in Alien should be a creature consumed with reproduction, and thus sex. To wit, John Hurt's character Kane becomes the first recipient of the alien's reproductive advances. British, whisper-thin and sexually ambiguous, Kane is depicted at one point in the film donning a white undergarment that appears to be a girdle; something that is distinctly "feminizing" to his appearance.

In addition, Kane lives the most dangerous (or is it promiscuous?) life-style of anyone in the Nostromo crew. He awakes from the freezer first, he initiates the mission to the derelict, and he is the first to enter the derelict’s egg chamber. Kane is well-acquainted with danger as (stereotypically speaking...) one might expect of a sexually-active homosexual man circa 1979. But Kane‘s daring is rewarded with alien impregnation. He is made unwillingly receptive to an oral penetration: the insertion of the face-hugger's "tube" down his throat...where it lays the chest-buster. What emerges from this encounter is "Kane's son" in Ash’s terminology. But essentially, the alien forces poor Kane -- possibly a coded homosexual male symbol -- to act in the role he may already be familiar with; that of being receptive to penetration.

Consider also Ash (Ian Holm) and his sexual underpinnings. Ash is actually a robot, a creature presumably incapable of having sex. The film's subtext suggests that this inability, this repression of the sexual urge, has made him a monster too. When Ash attacks Ripley late in the film, he rolls up a pornographic magazine and attempts to jam it down the woman’s throat. It's his penis surrogate.  The implication of this particular act is that he can't do the same thing with his physical member, so Ash must use the magazine in its stead. And when Ash speaks of the alien life-form, he admits envy for it. One must wonder if this “envy” arises because the alien can sexually dominate others in a way that the disliked, often dismissed Ash cannot manage. It is also significant that when Ash is unable to satisfy his repressed sexual desire for Ripley, the pressure literally causes him to explode.  The android blood is a milky white, semen-like fluid in Alien. And it spurts everywhere: a catastrophic ejaculation of monumental proportions. When confronted with his own sexuality and inability to express it...Ash can't hold his wad.

The most hyper-masculinized (again, stereotypically-so) character in Alien is undoubtedly Parker (Yaphet Kotto), an African-American man who brazenly discusses “eating pussy” during the scene leading up to the chest-burster revelation. Parker boasts an antagonistic, adversarial relationship with Ripley, one in which an interest in sex is clearly the undercurrent. Furthermore, the character is often-seen carrying an over-sized weapon (a flame thrower), another possible phallic symbol. In another type of film, Parker might be the hero, the guy who saves the day.  But here he dies because of the stereotypical quality of male chivalry or machismo he exhibits. In particular, Parker won't turn the flame thrower on the alien while a woman (Lambert) is in the line of fire. The alien dispatches Parker quickly (mano e mano), perhaps realizing he will never co-opt an alpha male like Parker to be his "bitch;" at least not the way Kane was used.

As for Lambert, the most-traditionally (and – bear with me again - stereotypically) female character in the film -- she gets raped by the alien, presumably by the xenomorph's phallic tail. Once more, the alien has exploited a character's biological/reproductive nature and used it to meets its own destructive, perverse needs.   The monster is able to understand and kill each creature, essentially, according to their assigned, pre-programmed sex role.  Kane’s daring and promiscuous life-style is what exposes him. Ash protects and envies the alien because he can’t perform sexually at all.  Parker dies in an act of (in vain) machismo. And Lambert is the traditional screaming victim, unable to do anything but get raped.

And then, at long last, there is Ripley, a character written in the screenplay for a man but played by a woman (Sigourney Weaver). She is the only survivor (along with Jones the Cat), of the alien's rampage on the Nostromo and there's a case that can be made that the alien cannot so easily "tag" Ripley as either male or female, and that's why she survives. She is perfect, like the alien itself, an apparent blend of all “human” qualities.

Ripley explodes traditional sex roles or sex stereotypes, and please recall that I have discussed all the crew in terms of the culture’s stereotypes.  That’s because they are prey, and the alien hunts them by those qualities.  It can’t get a handle on Ripley because she exists outside old sexual dynamics.  All the other crew members are somehow limited by their sexuality, whereas Ripley is the only character who successfully balances common sense, heroism, and competence. She is both strong and weak, in the appropriate measure, both daring and prudent.  Given this uncommon mix of stereotypically male and female qualities, the alien is not quite sure how to either "read" or "use" Ripley for its own nefarious purposes.

In the final moments of the film, the alien does make a decision. It recognizes Ripley as the best of humanity whether male or female.  She is kindred; a survivor. So the alien rides in secret with her aboard the shuttle Narcissus as they escape the Nostromo. The alien could likely kill Ripley any time during that escape flight, but does not choose to do so. It knows it is in safe hands with her, at least for the time being. It uses her "competence," her skill (qualities of itself it recognizes in her?) to escape destruction...again establishing its perfection.

When viewed through the lens of human sexuality then, Alien is a film about the way that the reproductive or sex drive can subvert humanity.  The film is a masterpiece in terms of visualization, in terms of how it approaches space travel and alien life, but more than it, it is a work of genius in describing what perfection might mean to alien.  It means not being easily tagged or catalogued as one thing or another.   As the doors of sexual experimentation were swinging wide in the 1970s, Alien gave the world a monster to come through that open portal.

Influence: Alien inspired a raft of imitators, with titles like Galaxy of Terror (1981), Inseminoid (1982) and Creature (1985). It also inspired sequels in 1986, 1992, and 1997. Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, an Alien prequel, was a smash hit in the summer of 2012.

Captain Apollo (Richard Hatch; center left) reports that the Colonies and the fleet have been destroyed by Cylon treachery in Battlestar Galactica (1978).

Battlestar Galactica (1979) * * *

Critical Mass:

“…a black hole of an epic.” – Marvin Kitman, The New Leader, May 6, 1979, page 22.

“The origins of Battlestar Galactica lay only in a hustle for bucks…John Dysktra’s special effects are wasted on a wholly mindless plot.” – Frederick Pohl, Scientific Studies in Film, SF Ace Books, a Grosset & Dunlap Company, 1981, page 278.

“…deep space turkey…” – Stephen King, Danse Macabre, Berkley Edition, December 1983, page 242.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Richard Hatch (Captain Apollo); Dirk Benedict (Lt. Starbuck); Lorne Greene (Commander Adama); Herbert Jefferson, Jr. (Lt. Boomer); Maren Jensen (Athena); Tony Swartz (Sgt. Jolly); Noah Hathaway (Boxey); Terry Carter (Colonel Tigh); Lew Ayres (President Adar); Wilfrid Hyde-White (Sire Anton); John Colicos (Count Baltar); Laurette Spang (Cassiopeia); Jane Seymour (Serina); Ray Milland (Sire Uri); Ed Begley Jr. (Greenbean); Rick Springfield (Lt. Zac).

CREW: Universal Studios Presents a Glen Larson Production, Battlestar Galactica.  Director of Photography: Ben Colman. Original Music: Stu Phillips. Film Editing: Robert L. Kimble, Leon Ortiz-Gil, Larry Strong. Special Effects Director: John Dykstra. Art Direction: John E. Chilberg II. Produced by: John Dykstra. Executive Producer: Glen A. Larson. Supervising Producer: Leslie Stevens. Written by: Glen A. Larson. Directed by: Richard A. Colla. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 125 minutes.

Story:

In the “seventh millennium of time,” far out in the Cyrannus solar system, the twelve colonies of man stand down in anticipation of peace as armistice with their long-time enemy, the robotic Cylons draws near.

Aboard the Battlestar Atlantia, a sort of space craft carrier, Commander Adama (Greene) frets to kindly President Adar (Ayres) that peace negotiations are but a ruse for some Cylon deception.  After he returns to the Galactica, his fears prove correct when the enemy launches a genocidal strike against mankind.  Adama and his battlestar survive the rout, and assemble a rag-tag fleet of civilian vessels to flee the “Cylon tyranny” in search of a lost sister world, called Earth.

Before that voyage can begin, however, the Galactica must stock up on Tylium fuel and food-stuffs for the populace. Captain Apollo (Hatch), Adama’s son, suggests a dangerous path to distant Carillon through the Cylon-mined Nova of Madagon. The fleet makes the crossing successfully, but a hidden-danger awaits on the Ovion-controlled planet ahead.

Review:

It is tempting to study the release of a film like Battlestar Galactica -- a theatrical version (in Sensurround…) of the TV pilot which first aired on ABC television in September of 1978 --and declare it is a rip-off of Star Wars. Indeed, George Lucas himself believed this was so, and initiated a lawsuit against Galactica which he eventually lost.

Although Battlestar Galactica no doubt exploits the sense of excitement about space adventure initiated by Star Wars, it nonetheless succeeds as an original work, and one with something relevant to say, at that.

Specifically, Battlestar Galactica was created during the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union, the world’s two super-powers. But peace seemed to be on the horizon with the advent of Détente, a new Russian policy designed to ease the relationship between ideological enemies through negotiations rather than military brinkmanship.

This Détente context is directly mirrored in the dramatic scenario of Glen Larson’s Battlestar Galactica.  The distant Colonies of man, a democratic union of diverse peoples symbolized by signs of the Zodiac face the possibility of peace with the Cylons.

In particular, a peaceful, easily-manipulated President Adar provides a clear corollary for Jimmy Carter, the nation’s Commander-in-Chief at the time: good-intentioned yet weak and diffident.  Adar would rather establish peace and suspend war footing than contend with the Cylon threat from a position of military strength. And many people imagined the same problem with President Carter.

Specifically, in the 1970s, America and Russia joined for a nuclear non-proliferation pact called SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties) and during Carter’s term attempted to go even further with SALT II.  But some foreign policy experts feared Carter was giving away the nuclear store for the unlikely prospect of peace with an untrustworthy enemy.  Accordingly, the American Security Council (ASC), a bipartisan group of 177 organizations and 230 members of the U.S. Congress sought another direction, and declared 1978 -- the year Galactica premiered on TV -- “The Year of the Coalition of Peace Through Strength.”

That unlikely sounding initiative involves diplomatic negotiations conducted from a position of dominant, indisputable military power.  “Peace through Strength” soon became a key element of the Republican Party’s foreign policy platform under President Reagan and stressed a build-up of security apparatus and strong defense measures as well as a hardline against Communism.  The ASC promoted such film shorts as The SALT Syndrome (1979) and Attack on the Americas (1981) in hopes of revealing how a weak U.S. could be surprised and then overtaken by the Soviet Union.

In Galactica, Lorne Greene’s Commander Adama is the proponent of this very theory of “Peace Through Strength,” warning that the crafty Cylons are untrustworthy and that the battlestar fleet should not unilaterally disarm.  He is ultimately proved right, as the Cylons – using a tactic not unlike the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor -- take advantage of Adar’s wishes for peace…and nearly destroy mankind in the process.

So apparent was Battlestar Galactica’s central metaphor about Carter, SALT treaties and “Peace Through Strength” that Russia’s state newspaper, Izvestia noted that “The galactical negotiations between the people and the Cylons really resemble the U.S.-Soviet peace talks” and that “The crafty Cylons, similar to ‘crafty Soviets’ propose to the president of the galactical union something like space détente.”  Russan writer Melor Sturia finally opined that Battlestar Galactica was “Anti-Soviet symbolism dressed in a transparent tunic of science fiction.”

This remarkable and timely metaphor -- often uncommented upon in relation to Galactica and its artistic merits -- makes the Larson film and TV series quite a different animal from Star Wars, and quite a legitimate piece of work in its own right.  Agree or not with its precepts of preparedness and “peace through strength,” the film certainly accomplished what only the best science fiction films can: Battlestar Galactica helps us to understand our world while not, apparently, concerning our world up front.

The Battlestar Galactica film (and series) also provides a unique context for telling this metaphor for Cold War conflict.  Specifically, the Glen Larson tale utilizes mythological names and concepts, and indeed situations, to subtly connect the colonies of man to the people of Earth in the twentieth century. For example, Adama leads his fleet through a red-hued space nebula in the film, to freedom.  This is a deliberate reflection of Moses parting the Red Sea to lead his people out of enslavement and danger.

Similarly, the name “Adama” comes from Adam, so the search for Earth (to populate Earth?) is being led by Adam, the Biblical first man.  Similarly, in Greek myth Apollo is a god who flew a chariot across the sky, and here Richard Hatch’s character is a space pilot. All this material attempts to forge a connection (but not too close) between the Colonials and Earth, in furtherance of the popular “God was an Ancient Astronaut” theory put forth by Eric Von Daniken in books such as Chariots of the Gods.

Battlestar Galactica is filled with gee-whiz heroics, the kind that Star Wars no doubt popularized, but in the final analysis, Star Wars bears no direct connection whatsoever to life on Earth in 1977 or 1979.  Although it takes place a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the story of good and evil it depicts is timeless.

By contrast, Battlestar Galactica strives to make its metaphor of a cosmic Cold War relevant to our Earth experience by suggesting that the Colonists are “brothers of man,” and therefore facing the same ethical, philosophical and ideological struggles.  The Battlestar Galactica film is nowhere near as accomplished technically as Star Wars is, to be certain, but nor should it be dismissed out-of-hand as mere “popcorn” space adventuring.

If only all the Star Wars “rip-offs” of the 1970s and 1980s possessed such internal consistency and social commentary.

The crew of the Palomino (left to right: Robert Forster, Yvette Mimieux and Joseph Bottoms) attempts to flee from the Cygnus as it is struck by a giant meteor in Walt Disney’s The Black Hole (1979).

The Black Hole * * * ½ (1979)

Critical Mass:

“The trip into the black hole that follows owes too much to 2001, but there are some amusing visual references to Fantasia, which partly compensate. It is good to see the Disney craftsmen doing what they do best on such a grand and risky scale. If one has time for only one space opera this season, this is the one to choose.” – Richard Schickel, TIME Magazine, December 31, 1979.

“A celebration of special effects and a film made for children so it seems unfair to compare it with any critical standards.  But…children deserve more than just a reheating of a recipe that proved popular in the past.” – Mark Gorton, New Scientist, January 3, 1980, page 33.

“All of Peter Ellenshaw’s mesmerizing special effects go down the chute in Walt Disney’s malefic tribute to outer space dumbness. What’s the good of staging an interstellar miracle if there’s no one in the film to witness all the splendor except dimwits?” Christopher Potter, The Michigan Daily, February 6, 1980, page 7.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Maximillian Schell (Dr. Hans Reinhardt); Anthony Perkins (Dr. Alex Durant); Robert Forster (Captain Dan Holland); Joseph Bottoms (Lieutenant Charles Pizer); Yvette Mimieux (Dr. Kate McCrae); Ernest Borgnine (Harry Booth); Tom McLoughlin (Captain S.T.A.R.); Roddy McDowall (V.I.N.Cent); Slim Pickens (Old B.O.B.).

CREW: Walt Disney presents The Black Hole. Director of Photography: Frank Phillips.  Original Music: John Barry. Film Editing: Gregg McLaughlin.  Production Design: Peter Ellenshaw. Produced by: Ron Miller. Written by: Jeb Rosebrook, Gerry Day. Story by: Jeb Rosebrook, Bob Barbash, Richard Landau. Directed by: Gary Nelson. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 98 minutes.

Story:

A small Earth space craft, The Palomino, has been charged with seeking out and discovering life in space. On mission day 547, however, the exploratory craft commanded by Captain Dan Holland discovers something else of interest: the largest black hole ever detected by man.

Intriguingly, the ship's robot, V.I.N.Cent (Vital Information Network Centralized) detects a stationary object near the black hole: the shrouded silhouette of a vast spaceship. The crew soon recognizes the craft as Space Probe One, or the Cygnus...the costliest fiasco in America's space program history. The Cygnus's eccentric commander, Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell) -- "one of the greatest space scientists of all time" -- refused Mission Control's recall order and the Cygnus has not been seen from or heard from since.

Now, the quiescent Cygnus sits at the lip of the swirling black hole, miraculously resisting the pull of the devouring maw. After acquiring some damage the Palomino lands on the Cygnus and the crew comes to learn the secrets of Reinhardt and his vast "death ship."

Soon, V.I.N.Cent learns from another robot, Old B.O.B., that Reinhardt is insane; and that he lobotomized his mutinous human crew, eradicating their will and leaving the men and women of Cygnus mindless, spiritless automatons, essentially.

Also, Reinhardt has created a devilish red robot, Maximillian to help him carry out his plans to travel inside the black hole, inside “the mind of God.” The survivors of the Palomino attempt to escape from Reinhardt even as the Cygnus sets a fateful course for the black hole. The escape attempt fails, and characters good and evil meet their fates inside the strange, mystical forces of the black hole

Review:
In 1979, in the wake of Star Wars, Walt Disney Studios released a big-budgeted outer-space adventure called The Black Hole directed by Gary Nelson. It was the first movie in Disney history to be rated PG rather than G for general audiences. And it faced direct competition in theaters from the likes of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), the long-awaited revival of the popular sci-fi TV series. Reviews at the time were generally negative. And the word from science-fiction magazines and writers was far less gracious. "Poisonous" might be a better descriptor. Even thirty years after the film's theatrical release reviewers were still deriding the movie in articles with titles like "Does The Black Hole still suck?"

The main point of contention for most science-based writers appears to be The Black Hole's flagrant ignorance about the laws of physics. For instance, there seems to be a breathable atmosphere in outer space at the mouth of the black hole during the film's fiery finale. And then there is Kate McCrae's (Yvette Mimieux's) famously mangled line of dialogue early on insisting that the Palomino and Cygnus vessels share the same mission: "to find habitable life" in space.  Technically then, the learned scientist claims to be looking for "life" that people can inhabit or live in. And obviously that makes no sense. Had Kate simply said they were in search of "habitable worlds" or new "life forms," this line wouldn't have been a concern. But there you have it: The Black Hole didn't do itself any favors by featuring a nonsensical line that should have been cut.

Despite such problematic moments, The Black Hole has survived and endured for some three decades mainly on the affection of fans, I suspect, who first viewed the film in childhood and never forgot it.

But is there more to The Black Hole than the inescapable gravitational pull of nostalgia? Exactly what are the film's merits? And why, thirty years on, does it remain such a polarizing and yet influential film?

Foremost among The Black Hole’s merits is its exploration of a Manichean universe. Mani was a Persian philosopher of antiquity (210-176 AD) who contended in his writings and teachings that that the universe was split into two opposing natures: Darkness and Light. He furthermore suggested that these warring forces fought their battles in the terrain of the human being. Man's body -- the material world -- was the world of sin and darkness. And man's soul -- his spirit side -- represented the Light. Roiling inside all of us is that never-ending conflict between these forces.

In The Black Hole, viewers can detect a number of Manichean ideas expressed in the dramatis personae and the narrative situations. This is especially so during the metaphysical journey through the black hole in the finale, a strange religious twist on the trippy denouement of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mani believed that Evil had many faces...but that at all those faces were part and parcel of the same Evil, not different ones

. In The Black Hole, audiences see Maximillian and Hans Reinhardt as two faces of Evil (mechanical and human, respectively) throughout the film, but in their nightmarish last scene, these two evils literally join to become one: Reinhardt is subsumed inside the robot demon Maximillian. Hauntingly, we see Reinhardt's frightened human eyes peering out from the machine's mechanical shell. This is our last close-up view of the characters, of twin evils welded together.

This strange inhuman union occurs inside the black hole, in a realm that resembles a Boschean vision of Hell, with hopeless souls (the spirit-less humanoids) trudging across a Tartarus-like underworld as flames lick at the bottom of the frame. High atop a hellish, craggy mountain, the Maximillian/Reinhardt Hybrid rules, like Milton's Lucifer.

In keeping with Manichean beliefs, this is visibly the realm of physical things: bodies, mountains, fire...materialism. It is no coincidence either that the production designs of the film have colored Maximillian, Dr. Hans Reinhardt and Hell itself in crimson tones. This bond of red -- whether Reinhardt's uniform, Maximillian's coat of scarlet paint, or the strange illuminating light of Hell itself -- connects all of them as "the One Evil," not separate evils, as conceived by the ancient philosophy.

Contrarily, the four survivors of the Palomino expedition (Holland, McCrae, Pizer and V.I.N.C.ent) find not Hell in at the event horizon of the black hole, but rather a celestial cathedral of sorts. Their vessel, the probe ship, is guided through this realm of the spirit (not the body), by another soul...a white guardian angel. The protagonists temporarily seem to exit the world of the body, and the film reveals their thoughts -- past and present -- "merging" during a brief, strange scene involving slow-motion photography.

What this scene appears to portend is that the three humans -- and robot (!) -- have been judged by the cosmic, Manichean forces inside the black hole and found to be above "sin," hence their journey through the long, Near Death Experience-styled "light at the end of the tunnel" and subsequent safe re-emergence back into space.

Instead of remaining trapped in a physical Hell (like the Reinhardt/Maximillian hybrid), the probe ship and those aboard pass through the gauntlet of "spirituality" where nothing -- not even sin -- can escape, and arrive safely in what appears to be a new universe. The closing shot of the film finds the probe ship on course for a giant white sun...a beacon of light and hope, and perhaps even a new beginning for the human race (and again, oddly enough, robot-kind...).

Reinhardt's final utterance before entering the crucible of the black hole is simply a mumbled..."all light." This might be an allusion to William Wordsworth's poem, An Evening Walk Addressed to A Young Lady: "all light is mute amid the gloom," It may be Reinhardt's (too late...) recognition of the fact that just as he has squelched out all light in the souls of his crew so will the black hole mute out his spiritual light...sending him into utter, eternal darkness.

Whether intentionally or not, the climactic and symbolic final moments of The Black Hole -- long a subject of debate among the movie's detractors and admirers -- fit the philosophical tenets of Manicheism perfectly, positing for audiences the metaphor of devouring black hole as a spiritual testing ground or judgment day: one where humans understand that the secret of creation...is man's spirituality; his sense of morality.

So the use that the movie ultimately puts the black hole to is not scientific at all, but rather spiritual or even religious. For some viewers, that may simply be a bridge too far in belief. For other', it's a recognition, perhaps, that man must ultimately reckon with himself, especially when facing what Reinhardt explicitly terms the Mind of God.

Another way to appreciate The Black Hole is as a virtual compendium of Jules Verne concepts and characters as they appeared in both literature and film history, only translated from the sea to the realm of outer space.

For instance, Hans Reinhardt is clearly a futuristic version of Captain Nemo. Like his literary predecessor, Reinhardt is a figure associated with a magnificent and highly-advanced vessel. In this case, that vessel is Cygnus not Nautilus.  But consider that both Reinhardt and Nemo also grant their "guests" (prisoners?) an extensive tour of those ships, with special attention paid to technological innovation. In the book 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, Nemo created a ship that ran on electricity; in the film it was atomic energy that powered Nautilus. In The Black Hole, Reinhardt discusses his creation of a limitless power source called "Cygnium" after his beloved ship. This is the thing that allows his ship to resist the forces of the black hole.

Furthermore, both Nemo and Reinhardt are defined in terms of their ingenious ability to live off the resources at hand; off the sea or off outer space, as it were. In both 20,000 Leagues under The Sea and The Black Hole, the Nemo figure explains this fact in a dining room setting to his guests. In the former tale, Nemo serves Aronnax and the others delicacies acquired from the abundant sea. In the latter narrative, Reinhardt discusses his personal hydroponic garden, which has grown all of his food. Again, it's interesting that both dining rooms on the Nautilus and Cygnus respectively genuflect to the traditions of the past in terms of decor (candelabras, crystal glass ware, a naval telescope, statuary...) while the other rooms on each ship suggest an overtly technological future.

As is the case in Mysterious Island (1961) and 20,000 Leagues under The Sea (1954), The Black Hole's screenplay explicitly debates the essential, conflicted, and perhaps Manichean nature of Hans Reinhardt with the very words we've seen utilized before in relation to Nemo: "insane" and "genius." Similarly, like Nemo, Reinhardt is a man who has left mankind behind, dwelling in a realm of exile. Yet there's an important distinction here: Reinhardt is not an anti-hero like Nemo. He is not a hero of any kind. Reinhardt is actually an egomaniac who has robbed his crew of their very souls in his quest to probe the mysteries of God. Reinhardt is so narcissistic in fact, that he has forced his soulless crew members to wear reflective, mirrored face-plates over their own visages. What does this mean in practice? When Reinhardt looks at his crew, he sees only his own face reflected back. This is arrogance and vanity carried far beyond anything which Nemo ever aspired to or considered.

It seems clear that if Mysterious Island transforms Captain Nemo into a more palatable, rational 1960s "man of peace," Reinhardt is a post-Watergate, post-Three-Mile-Island, post-Vietnam figure of corruption, avarice, and madness. He is Nemo, perhaps, but Nemo skewed heavily to the dark side instead of to the light.

The remaining characters in The Black Hole also seem to have distinct corollaries with those found in Verne's works. Most clearly, Alex Durant is a dedicated man of science and one in "search of his own greatness." He thus seems a skewed version of the noble Professor Aronnax (another French name...) from 20,000 Leagues under The Sea. Aronnax clearly boasted a healthy moral compass, however, and by comparison Durant seems mesmerized, star-struck, and overcome by the dreams and accomplishments of Reinhardt. Again, we see a character from Verne's universe skewed to the dark side. This is appropriate given the increasingly low public approval of scientists as the 1970s wore on.

Harry Booth is very much the same story. A journalist, he could very well be the "war correspondent" Spillit from the movie Mysterious Island, only once more decidedly tweaked to seem more negative: this time emerging as a treacherous coward. The dark side of Woodward and Bernstein?

Both Mysterious Island and The Black Hole feature confrontational scenes in which the Captain Nemo figure reveals his disdain for the reporter too. Perhaps it is because the reporter, in both situations, represents the interests of the population back home and their "earthly" concerns: the "unwashed" masses.

The similarities between Verne's world and the world of The Black Hole don't end with character descriptions, either. Consider that a crew funeral plays an important role in both the Fleischer version of 20,000 Leagues under The Sea and also the Disney space film. In 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, the underwater funeral is the first thing Aronnax sees of Nemo's nature, crew, and world. In The Black Hole, Holland spies a humanoid funeral and garners the first clue about the nature of those "robots."

The dangerous black hole itself seems to represent the ocean-bound whirlpool, the deadly maelstrom that destroyed the Nautilus in Verne's literary masterpiece, serving the same function, destroying the Cygnus, in The Black Hole.

Finally, it is impossible not to notice that Reinhardt and Nemo share very similar death scenes in both The Black Hole and the movie version of Mysterious Island. In The Black Hole, Reinhardt is crushed by a falling view screen, and we see him die with his (bulging...) eyes wide open. In Mysterious Island, Nemo also dies with eyes open, after a crushing beam has fallen on his torso.

While one or two of these Verne-style visuals, narrative points, characterizations or story traits might simply prove a coincidence, there is such a preponderance of them in The Black Hole that it becomes incumbent on us to view the film as almost literally a post-Star Wars adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, and one that has updated the "fantasy" setting from the bottom of the sea to the most distant reaches of outer space; one that has re-fashioned the anti-hero Nemo as a more cynical, more corrupt 1970s-style figure. One that has replaced atomic age features of self-annihilation, with the 1970s "Me Generation" fear of personal oblivion and spiritual malaise.

Leaving behind Manichean interpretations and thoughts on its Jules Verne-ish qualities, The Black Hole impresses on another field of play. I believe it was Nicholas Meyer, director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country who discussed the idea that many of the greatest works of art leave some sort of "gap" for the percipients to fill in for themselves. When we listen to music, our mind supplies the images. When we gaze at a great painting, our mind fills in movement or "life," perhaps. And in great, artistic films some gaps in motive, narration, and explanation are left open so that we -- the viewers -- can bridge that gulf with our own imagination. We thus engage the material not with passive disinterest, but with active thought.

For all of its flagrant ignorance regarding science and physics, The Black Hole is positively filled with bizarre, almost throwaway moments of remarkable imagination and implications.

For instance, late in the film, after Maximillian has disemboweled Dr. Durant with his spinning propeller blades, Dr. Reinhardt approaches Kate with extreme fear in his eyes. He begs her in a whisper (so that his machine minion cannot overhear...): "Protect me from Maximillian."

There is no explicit follow-up to this moment; no real mention of it later in the film, just this urgent, persuasive conversational alleyway (lensed in medium shot) that suggests -- for a fraction of a second -- that Reinhardt fears his own Frankenstein monster. The line suggests that it is the hovering, scarlet cyclops named Maximillian who rules the Cygnus, not the fallible, eccentric human being. It is as though Maximillian is Reinhardt's id, only physically separated from him, acting of his own volition.

We might extrapolate that this single line of dialogue helps better to explain Reinhardt's final disposition -- his personal Hell.  Inside the black hole, he is forced to join with Maximillian, to go inside the beast and dwell there for eternity. We know from that single, odd line of dialogue that Reinhardt fears such a thing...a monster he can no longer control...but that controls him. Where many people believe that in death we leave our bodies for non-corporeal spirit forms, the Manichean truth of Reinhardt's afterlife is that the Darkness has prevailed, and he will be trapped in a metal shell for eternity. There is no ascension for him because of his sins. We know this later when we hear (inside the probe ship), his repeated and tortured calls for "help."

There are several odd little moments like this one in The Black Hole that are worthy of mention and analysis. Many critics picked on V.I.N.Cent -- the Cicero-quoting platitude machine -- as some kind of R2-D2 rip-off. They complained about his mode of communication too. Throughout the film, the robot speaks almost entirely in proverb and platitudes, throwing out one after the other in clearly...mechanical fashion.

You can look at V.I.N.Cent's mode of expression as a result of bad writing if you wish, or as something a bit more interesting. That V.I.N.C.ent apparently sees his world in terms of metaphors suggests that he possesses some sense of understanding of life beyond the literal.

Again, this uncommented-upon touch plays into the ending of the film: the robot boasts a "soul," apparently, and survives the crucible of judgment inside the black hole since he -- a machine -- is put there on equal footing with Dan, Kate and Charlie Pizer...and we are privy to his thoughts. Even his throwaway line about disliking the company of robots seems to indicate that V.I.N.C.ent for all his lamentable cartoonish qualities is more than mere robot.

Kate is able to communicate telepathically with this distinctive robot, another indicator, perhaps, that V.I.N.cent is more than the sum of his parts. And that realization brings us to another interesting line of dialogue laden with implications: while on the Cygnus V.I.N.C.ent reveals the specifics of something called "Project Black Hole," a governmental operation which sent robots to the event horizon and telepathically recorded their responses to the strange events occurring there.

Again, this idea has no play in the remainder of the film, but it raises all kinds of notions. Are robots the slaves of man in the future envisioned by The Black Hole? Or are they an artificial life form slowly developing sentience? And if Project Black Hole existed a long time ago as V.I.N.C.ent indicates, then did Reinhardt know of it? Did he actually create Maximillian to house his body (knowing a robot could survive there...) in case of emergency? Was Maximillian's armor but Reinhardt's second fallback measure, behind the probe ship?

It's very easy to gaze at many moments in The Black Hole as being mere "fun with robots," or other such nonsense, but if one returns to the argument about Manichaeism, one might see how Maximillian symbolizes the realm of the body/darkness and V.I.N.C.ent seems to evolve beyond that, achieving the level of the spiritual/Light.

Another thing that The Black Hole does remarkably well is hint at the larger universe of the characters. You see that in V.I.N.C.ent's casual mention of Project Black Hole, but elsewhere too. Early in the film, the crew of the Palomino attempts to identify the Cygnus on a holographic projector, and we are treated to a visual litany of missing ships. Arcturus 10 from Great Britain, Liberty 7 from the U.S., Russian Series 5 Experimental Space Station and the French Sahara Module.  Eventually the crew hits on the Cygnus, but not before we get a sense of how dangerous outer space can be in this particular universe.  This gives a much-needed context to the main storyline, that space is a mysterious realm.

Indeed, another part of the film's longevity derives from the fact that it possesses this creepy, almost gothic texture of dread and terror. The humanoids are like faceless medieval monks, and Maximillian is deliberately a devil in red armor. The Cygnus itself is a vast, empty, “Flying Dutchman” of ghosts, loaded with mysteries like limping robots, and eerily empty crew quarters that lurk around every corner.

The Black Hole even opens in macabre fashion, with an early digital representation of a black hole, here something like a neon green spider-web leading to a kind of inescapable funnel. We spin inexorably towards this cosmic whirlpool faster and faster, all to the portentous strains of John Barry's Herman-nesque score. The stage is thus set for a dark fantasy. But the creep factor finds its fullest voice in a scene set in the Cygnus control tower. Dr. Durant removes a humanoid's face-plate and in horrifying close-up we see briefly what a human looks like without his soul. The face we see is drawn, dry, and desiccated; awake but unseeing. It's a gruesome visage...and certainly nightmare fodder for children. And that moment is followed almost immediately by the sequence in which Maximilllian brutally slices and dices Dr. Durant (and Perkins' reaction is particularly effective.) Finally, the end of the movie takes us on a tour through Hell. Sci-fi movies don't get much darker than that.

So while it would be foolish and counterproductive to deny "nostalgia" as a reason for remembering The Black Hole fondly even today,  one must wonder if the movie's creepy, unsettling nature is the thing that, over the years, has brought many of adults back to the movie a second, even third time.  Like the cosmic force of its titular phenomenon, there’s something tantalizing about The Black Hole that draws the attentive and engaged viewer in.

The Brood (1979) * * *

Critical Mass:

“As in Frankenstein, scientists end their quest for the “secret” of life by giving new shapes to female rage and desire.” – Linda Badley, Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic, Greenwood Press, 1995, page 125.

“Canadian splatter-movie auteur David Cronenberg was a lot more interesting when he made movies for drive-ins instead of arthouses, and this visionary horror film ranks among his most disturbing, provocative work.” – Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene, April 26, 2001.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Oliver Reed (Dr. Hal Raglan); Samantha Eggar (Nola Carveth); Art Hindle (Frank Carveth); Henry Beckman (Barton Kelly); Nuala Fitzgerald (Juliana Kelly); Cindy Hinds (Candice Carveth); Susan Hogan (Ruth Mayer).Gery McKeehan (Mike Trellan); Michael Magee (Inspector). Robert Silverman (Jan Hartog).

CREW: Pierre David presents a David Cronenberg film, The Brood. Director of Photography: Mark Irwin. Original Music: Howard Shore. Film Editing: Alan Collins. Art Direction: Carol Spier. Produced by: Claude Heroux. Executive Producers: Pierre David, Victor Solnicki. Written and directed by: David Cronenberg. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 92 minutes.

Story:

The author of The Shape of Rage, Dr. Hal Raglan (Reed) practices a very unique brand of therapy.  He seeks to make his patients acknowledge their emotional anger, and “go all the way” with it, thereby exorcising it completely from their damaged psyches.

Currently, he is seeing one patient, Nola (Eggar), who boasts a strange capability: she can actually give birth to her rage.  In particular, she births or manifests tiny child-like monsters -- a brood -- that carries out her vengeance in the real world, murdering those she blames for her woes.  Nola’s estranged husband, Frank (Hindle) takes care of their daughter and soon grows fearful as he begins to suspect that Haglan’s therapy is proving too successful.

Review:

The Brood is arguably director David Cronenberg’s most-accomplished film of the 1970s, and it trades in a peculiar kind of science, namely psychology.

In this case, the film’s oddball mad-scientist, Dr. Raglan, seeks to make his patients face up to their rage and thereby render it powerless. But Nola, one of his patients, has some sort of weird physiological response to this rage therapy.  She develops weird pods or eggs on her body, eggs which eventually birth manifestations of her rage and anger.  These terrifying moppets operate on Nola’s subconscious desire to murder those who have wronged her, including her separated parents.

The powerful idea is that emotional pain, suppressed, can come to life in physical form.  It’s a variation of the old Freudian idea that emotions suppressed pop-up as new pathologies, as symptoms, in the ill.  Cronenberg’s film merely literalizes the notion.

The Brood’s most powerful addition to this dialogue about repression involves the last act.  Dr. Raglan’s whole approach is to purge rage so that it cannot continue and grow.  But, as he finds out first hand that rage, once set free impacts everyone.  Nola is so angry that she even strikes out at her own innocent little girl, an act which makes her every bit as much a monster as the parents she hated.

In fact, the last shot of the film suggests that vicious cycle of domestic abuse and violence will continue.  In the film’s final composition, we see that the girl, so terribly victimized by her mother, is also “growing” one of the fleshy organic pods or monsters.  Like her mother before her, she is a victim, and will turn around and victimize others.  It’s a great science-fictional loop, confirming the idea that despite our best intentions, we often become the very thing that we hate.

There will be some who state that The Brood is a horror movie, rather than a science fiction one, and they have a point.  The film is very much structured like a traditional horror film, with the “brood” children stalking and murdering (in bloody fashion) those who Nola wishes dead.

But the mad scientist character and his plans are also that point of cross-over between genres.  The proverbial mad scientist, as his name indicates, seeks to use new methods and new technologies to re-shape man and his world. Although he is psychologist, Dr. Raglan certainly fits the bill of mad scientist in The Brood.  Like many of this breed, his ambition overwhelms his common sense, and he is too late to prevent his creation from running amok and causing havoc.  Cronenberg is renowned for his brand of horror, which is called “body horror,” and in a way, that horror -- the re-shaping of the body into something new and frightening – is also, by some definitions, the core of science fiction.  The evolution of man, the final disposition of man, is very much a science fiction idea, and so again, The Brood seems to qualify as a film of interest to the genre fan.

Captain William “Buck” Rogers (Gil Gerard) is a man out of time, literally, in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979).

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979)* * *

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Gil Gerard (Captain William “Buck” Rogers); Erin Gray (2foColonel Wilma Deering) Tim O’Connor (Dr. Elias Huer); Pamela Hensley (Princess Ardala); Henry Silva (Kane); Mel Blanc (Twiki); Eric Server (Dr. Theopolis); Joseph Wiseman (Draco); Duke Butler (Tigerman); Caroline Smith (Delta Section); Kevin Coates (Pilot); John Dewey Carter (Supervisor); Gil Serna (Technician); Kenny Endoso (Draconian Gard); H.B. Haggerty (Tigerman 2); William Conrad (Narrator/Draconian officer).

CREW: Universal Studios presents Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Director of Photography: Frank Beascoechea. Original Music: Stu Phillips. Film Editing: John Dumas, David Howe, Bill Martin. Art Direction: Paul Peters. Produced by: Richard Caffey. Executive Producer: Glen A. Larson. Written by: Glen A. Larson and Leslie Stevens. Characters created by: Philip Francis Nowlan. Directed by: Daniel Haller. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 89 minutes.

Story:

In 1987, America launches the last of its deep space probes, Ranger 3, piloted by Captain William “Buck” Rogers (Gil Gerard). An accident in orbit fast-freezes the astronaut, and spins Ranger 3 into a distant orbit.  The Ranger 3 returns Buck Rogers to Earth orbit 500 years later, in the year 2491.

In this new world, the Earth has suffered a nuclear holocaust and is only beginning to get back on its feet.  Buck returns to Earth and soon meets kindly Dr. Huer (Tim O’Connor) and tough-as-nails Colonel Wilma Deering (Erin Gray) of the Defense Directorate, both of whom are contending with a delicate diplomatic mission: treaty negotiations with the Draconian Empire.

Even as Buck deals with the fact that everyone he knows is long dead, he must convince the denizens of the 25th century that Princess Ardala (Pamela Hensley) and her flagship, the Draconia, pose a danger to New Chicago and Earth itself. In fact, the “marauders” that have been stalking Earth’s shipping lines are billeted in her docking bay.

Review:

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century -- though designed as a TV series -- actually had its premiere in American movie theaters on March 30th, 1979.   The film quickly provided a remarkable return on Universal’s investment.  The pilot episode, “Awakening,” was produced for a little over three million dollars (or one-third of Star Wars’ budget, essentially, in 1977) and the movie grossed over twenty-one million dollars in American theaters alone.  Perhaps even more surprisingly, the film was generally well-received by critics, despite its TV origins.

I remember seeing Buck Rogers in theaters and enjoying it tremendously, unaware that it had begun as a TV series pilot and then kind of exploded into becoming a full-fledged feature film.  In 1979, the special effects held up on the big screen beautifully, particularly the moments set in Anarchia, a ruined 20th century city inhabited by mutants, and the film, overall, was a lot of fun.

Today, however, it is not difficult to detect some of the “growing pains” of this production as it stretched from being, essentially, a kid-friendly TV pilot to a more adult-oriented and “big” movie.  What began as a relatively straight space adventure inches closer to a nifty paradigm: James Bond in Space.

This shift in premises is best exemplified by a new opening credits sequence made for the film (not the series) which features Buck romancing scantily-clad women of the 25th Century, who pose and preen on the letters of his “name” while a Bond-like ballad blares on the soundtrack.  It’s a little bit ridiculous, a little bit cheesy, but it definitely captures the 007 aesthetic: sexy women and a catchy pop-tune.

Other moments are more clumsily folded into the narrative than the enjoyable Bond-styled opening.  Late in the film, aboard the Draconia, for instance, Ardala declares she wants Buck to take her father’s “seat” on the throne.  Suddenly, the film cuts to a shot of Buck -- obviously shot at some later date, on a different set -- declaring that her father’s “seat” is the furthest thing from his mind (implying it’s her seat – her buttocks --- that interests him). Clearly, sexual double-entendres were ham-handedly added to the production when the shift in venues was broached.

Other double-entendres in the film work a little better because they arrive via the auspices of ADR or looping, so we don’t get the chance to visually note the inconsistencies.

Another weird addition to the original TV pilot for feature film release sees Buck going mano-a-mano with Tigerman, Princess Ardala’s bodyguard and the film’s equivalent of Oddjob, or Jaws…a so-called soldier villain.  There’s nothing wrong with the climactic physical confrontation between Buck and Tigerman, except that Buck faces a different Tigerman here, not the one already seen throughout the film.  This discontinuity is left unexplained, but Derek Butler plays the character throughout the film, and H.B. Haggerty (who returned to the role in TV episodes“Escape from Wedded Bliss” and “Ardala Returns”) plays him for the fight sequence.  The two men are both imposing, but boast very different looks in terms of muscle-mass and body-type.  I didn’t notice the substitution as a kid, but the switch is impossible to miss now.

These last minute additions to the enterprise remain somewhat jarring, even if they add to the James Bond quality of the thing.  A more significant problem, however, involves the thematic approach to the material.  Buck -- in both the film and the series – is raised up as some kind of paradigm for Earth’s future, the ideal man.  This is essentially “American Exceptionalism in Space,” as a professor at Hampden-Sydney once noted to me.

The only problem, of course, with this paradigm is that Buck is from the very age on Earth that brought about the devastating nuclear holocaust: the 20th century.  His generation, in essence, destroyed everything.  It seems strange and counter-intuitive, then, to deride the sincere 25th Century folks -- just climbing out of a five hundred year economic and cultural hole, as it were -- for depending on computers since the film makes plain the notion that ungoverned emotions and passions were what brought about the end of 20th century mankind. These benevolent robots, acting dispassionately but helpfully, instead rely on logic and rationality.

So…would you really want to go back to the approach that led to Earth’s ruin?  Would you lift Buck up, or view him as a man from a much more primitive and even dangerous time?  It would be one thing if the movie noted that some balance between approaches -- logic and emotion -- needed to be struck.  But the 25th century characters are treated, in broad strokes, as gullible fools who can’t even pilot their own star-fighters (even though those ships are built with very prominent joy-sticks designed for manual control).  It’s all a little bit…incoherent.

The film gets away with it all in a sense because of the overriding James Bond comparison. We all know that Bond is irresistible to all women, best in a fight, and an exemplar of style and taste. He can fly helicopters, pilot boats, and drive any vehicle known to man.  Nobody does it better, right? Here, Buck Rogers seems to boast the same magic touch. The James Bond paradigm is the only possible way it makes sense that Buck Rogers can wake up 500 years in the future and pilot a starship better than the people of the time period, who actually trained to fly them.

Despite such flaws, the movie vets an intriguing premise involving the Draconian “stealth” attack (a kind of Trojan Horse in Space dynamic, perhaps piped in from Larson’s other 1970s outer space epic, Battlestar Galactica), and features at least one authentically great sequence set in Anarchia, or “Old Chicago.”

In the latter case, Buck goes in search of his past, and finds it…in a grave-yard.   This scene is particularly well-shot, acted, and scored, and adds a significant human dimension to the film’s tapestry.  We are reminded that Buck has lost everything.  Not just his family…but the world he knew.  I’ve always wished that the ensuing series had followed up on this plot-line a little more sincerely.  There were many stories to be told in Anarchia, but in its two year run on television, Buck never returned to this lost world (that we know of).

I should add, the special effects visualizations of New Chicago and Anarchia in Buck Rogers are nothing less-than-spectacular, even today.  Again, it’s hard to reckon with just how cheaply this movie was made because it features extensive, highly-detailed matte paintings, numerous space dogfights, and huge sets like Ardala’s throne room, which is replete with an Olympic-size swimming pool!

It would be difficult to argue that Buck Rogers in the 25th Century is in the same class in terms of quality as contemporaries like Star Wars or Superman: The Movie.  But the movie is undeniably fun, and it sets up -- with tremendous entertainment value -- the boundaries of Buck Roger’s new life in the 25th Century.  In other words, it’s a pretty great TV pilot for 1979 even if -- blown-up to the silver screen – it all plays as a bit scattershot.

The China Syndrome (1979) * * *1/2

Critical Mass:

“…as appealing in its behind-the-camera look at local news reporting as it is with its inside-the-nuclear plant angle. The artificiality and contrivances of videotaping come into sharp focus. Fonda is thoroughly convincing…In the chaos and confusion of the proceedings she and Lemmon are a bizarrely contrasty pair.” – Jim Moorhead, The Evening Independent, March 17, 1979, page 3B.

“The bulk of the film involves a cover-up, corporate pressure, a light development of the relationship between Lemmon and Fonda, plus some minor action. The result is tedium.” – Carl Demaio, The Telegraph-Herald, March 30, 1979, page 2.

“…a taut thriller.” – Jeff Wells, The Age, April 3, 1979, page 11.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Jane Fonda (Kimberly Wells); Jack Lemmon (Jack Godell); Michael Douglas (Richard Adams); Scott Brady (Herman De Young); James Hampton (Bill Gibson); Peter Donat (Dan Jacovich); Wilford Brimley (Ted Spindler); Richard Herd (Evan McCormack); Daniel Valdez (Hector Salas); Stan Bohrman (Peter Martin); James Karen (Mac Curcill); Michael Alaimo (Greg Minor); Donald Hotton (Dr. Lowell); Khalilah Ali (Marge); Paul Larson (D.B. Royce); Ron Lomard (Barney).

CREW: Columbia Pictures presents a Michael Douglas/PC Production of a James Bridges film, The China Syndrome. Director of Photography: James Crabe. Film Editor: David Rawlins. Production Design: George Jenkins. Produced by: Michael Douglas. Executive Producer: Bruce Gilbert. Written by: Mike Gray, T.S. Cook, James Bridges. Directed by: James Bridges. M.P.A.A Rating: PG Running time: 122 minutes.

Story:

A news reporter in Los Angeles, Kimberly Wells (Fonda) and her new camera-man, Richard (Douglas) visit a nearby nuclear power plant to prepare a TV story on the subject of energy.

Very quickly, however, they stumble upon a much larger story: a possible nuclear meltdown at the plant.  Inside the plant, conscientious manager Jack Godell (Lemmon) realizes how close the plant came to utter disaster, and how easy it would be for the same accident to occur again.

When his fears go answered by the company running the nuclear facility, Jack holds the control room hostage and demands to speak with Kimberly.  Unfortunately, those managing the plant -- and hoping to build another one -- will stop at nothing to silence his testimony, and keep the truth secret.

Review:

In its first week of theatrical release, the science fiction film The China Syndrome -- about a meltdown at a nuclear power plant -- turned into chilling reality.

On March 28, 1979 (only twelve days after the film’s theatrical release in the U.S.), the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania run by General Public Utilities and Metropolitan Edison suffered a partial meltdown in Unit 2.  The problem concerned a relief valve that was stuck in the “open” position, and resulted in coolant chemicals escaping the plant.  Xenon and Krypton were released into the surrounding atmosphere, but fortunately there was very little radioactivity voided into the sky.

The nation was captivated however, as the incident unfolded and progressed, and live TV-reports followed the crisis, step-by-step. Several days later, to help soothe nerves, President Carter toured the installation himself.

The “China Syndrome” of the movie’s title represents the science fiction premise of the film, per se.  Specifically, the term refers to a hypothetical loss-of-coolant issue, and the ensuing meltdown of the nuclear core.  In such a situation, some proponents believe that core would melt through its housing, and also right through the surface and crust of the Earth, thus burrowing, after a fashion, to the other side of the planet, or to China, specifically.

In both real life and in the film by James Bridges such a catastrophic incident is averted, thankfully, and the hypothesis is not tested.

Instead, the film The China Syndrome serves explicitly as an indictment of big business -- which runs the plant in the film -- and as a commentary on hero reporters, who tirelessly risk life and limb to bring the truth about malfeasance to the American people.  The model for the film’s story is obviously Watergate, and Woodward and Bernstein are explicitly name-checked in The China Syndrome at least once.

The owners of the plant, who are losing “half-a-million dollars a day” so long as the facility is off-line), substitute for Nixon.  They also undertake a cover-up, and manage a wide-ranging conspiracy. In the film, that conspiracy amounts in more than one instance to attempted murder.  Specifically, whistle-blowers are physically imperiled, and the forces of the establishment seek to destroy them before they can inform the public of the truth.

One other 1970s social aspect of the film is women’s right and feminism.  Kimberly knows a dangerous truth and seeks to report it, but is patronized by her bosses, who tell her not to report “hard stories,” and just serve as eye candy, an attractive woman, instead.

Like many science fiction films of the 1970s, The China Syndrome also reveals a peaceful citizen protest against policies/installations that are deemed hazardous to the public health.  The seventies was probably the last era in Hollywood cinema in which mainstream movies suggest such protesters were heroic for questioning the status-quo, and standing up to authority.

The year 1979 also proved an intriguing one for the science-fiction genre.  The China Syndrome almost instantly turned into science fact, whereas the factual setting of Goldengirl’s action -- Americans competing at the 1980 Summer Olympics -- quickly became science fiction.

Goldengirl (1979) * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“…a silly plot and lots of “jiggle”…wretchedly-edited.” – Terry Kelleher, Newsday, September 18, 1988, page 89.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Susan Anton (Goldine Serafin); James Coburn (Jack Dryden); Carl Jurgens (Dr. Serafin); Leslie Caron (Dr. Sammy Lee); Robert Culp (Steve Esselton); James A. Watson Jr. (Winters); Harry Guardino (Valenti); Ward Costello (Cobb); Michael Lerner (Stermberg); John Newcombe (Armitage); Nicholas Coster (U.S. Olympic Team Doctor); Julianna Field (Ingrid); Annette Tannader (Krull); Sheila De Windt (Debbie).

CREW: A Joseph Sargent film, Goldengirl. Director of Photography: Stevan Larner. Original music: Bill Conti. Film Editing: Harry Keramidas. Art Direction: Sydney Z. Litwack. Produced by: Elliott Kastner and Danny O’Donovan. Written by: John Kohn. Based on the novel by: Peter Lear. Directed by: Joseph Sargent. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 105 minutes.

Story:

A well-known sports agent, Jack Dryden (Coburn) is summoned to a training camp at the behest of the German scientist, Dr. Serafin (Jurgens), who wants him to professionally represent his daughter, Goldine (Anton) after she wins three Gold Medals at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow for running.

Dryden is suspicious of the beautiful athlete until he sees Goldine perform.  She is an amazing runner, and a physical powerhouse.  The truth behind Goldine’s strength and endurance, however, is not such a romantic one.  Her father has supplied her, since childhood, with dangerous hormone injections that have enhanced her physicality, but not without dangerous side-effects.

As the Moscow Olympics near, Goldine grows increasingly erratic, even as her father wishes to notify the whole world of his successful experiment in genetics.

Jack tries to get Goldine successfully through the events, even as the press, led by Steve Esselton (Culp) zeroes in on her secret.

Review:

An almost perfect companion piece to The Boys from Brazil (1978) -- which also concerned eugenics and a German scientist’s plan to create a super-being -- Goldengirl is also an historical oddity.  It was made in the late 1970s and much of its action occurs at the (then-in-the-future) Moscow Summer Olympics of 1980.

In real life, however, America did not participate in those games in protest over the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.  Thus, the events depicted here are genuine science fiction: Americans performing in a competition they never actually attended.

More to the point, if the film were true to (future) history in any sense, all of Dr. Serafin’s efforts would have been for naught. As an American runner Goldine would have been denied access to the Olympics. And four years later, no doubt, her body’s instability would have rendered her unable to compete…

Beyond this historical point of interest, Goldengirl is a film about irresponsible medicine, like many sci-fi films of the 1970s, and more than that, about how authorities will often overlook such irresponsibility if it is in the cause of nationalism or patriotic pride.  Here, American team doctors knowingly let Goldine run in the Olympic contests despite her Diabetes, and on the weakest assurances that the condition has stabilized. They are “blinded,” the film suggests, by patriotism.

The film also works efficiently as a wicked satire of the American professional sports world, where athletes are bought and sold at great price and considered “investments” instead of individuals.  Here, Dr. Serafine has invested eight-hundred-thousand dollars shaping his daughter into a perfect athlete, and Dryden’s job is explicitly to “sell” her to “major companies.” Serafine is thus contextualized as a product rather than as a person.

In modern America, athletes are also frequently packaged as “heroes” simply because they are fast, strong, or capable on the field.  The actual content of their character is not nearly as important as a well-prepared public relations campaign which presents them as the next Mary Lou Retton, Nancy Kerrigan, or Bruce Jenner. But at the slightest hint of scandal -- like the Lance Armstrong doping kerfuffle -- these athletes are abandoned, spat-upon, and decried for not being sufficiently pure role models.  They were never really heroes in the first place, but suddenly they are considered disappointments.

Here, Goldine flirts with public scorn if she is revealed as a “test tube” athlete and doesn’t live up to her reputation as a home-grown, all-American phenom.  Goldengirl thus anticipates the present world of athlete product endorsements and “drug” scandals just about perfectly.

When it works best, it is on this front, as a social critique of the professional sports racket.  Here, it seems, the athletes are the real victims. They are used by their sponsors and agents to make money, but when their “winning” brand is threatened by scandal, they are abandoned and excoriated.

Goldengirl isn’t a great movie by any means, and at times it’s a downright strange one.  For instance, in one early interview with Dryden, Goldine reveals that she has learned to love speaking at press conferences because in training sessions she uses a vibrator while answering mock questions.

In other words, she has learned to associate sexual pleasure with being “probed” by the press.  That’s just weird, but perhaps not as weird as the moment when Goldine smiles at Dryden and declares “I don’t need the vibrator anymore.”

Dryden’s response is also priceless. “Wow, we’ve really come a long way since Pavlov’s dogs.”

Some critics have criticized Susan Anton’s performance in the film, but I would argue that the occasionally awkward Anton is perfectly suited to the vapid, socially-inept character. Anton’s Goldine is both stunningly beautiful and a bit empty inside, driven to succeed but for what reason, even she knows not why.  Anton is able to convey both the character’s innocence and the character’s essential emptiness.  In the decade of Suzanne Sommers and Farrah Fawcett, Anton’s Goldengirl is a perfect avatar for fears of a society that packages beauty and sells, sells, sells it.  But open up that package, that Goldengirl, and what’s inside?  Anton’s performance suggests…not much.

Former policeman “Mad” Max (Mel Gibson) exacts justice in the violent dystopian film from George Miller, Mad Max (1979).

Mad Max (1979) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“More jangly, visceral energy and…creative innovations than something made with today's computer technology and bottomless resources.” – Joe Baltake, Sacramento Bee, January 1, 2000.

“Mel Gibson is young and innocent, his good looks standing out in a sea of bent, macabre or quirky faces, except for Joanne Samuel, his sweet young wife. One of the big questions posed by the film’s violence and plot resolution remains valid today and is often referred to in films with similar structures: do we justify violent revenge when the sword is in the hero’s hand, if lawful remedies are not readily available?” – Andrew Urban, Urban Cinefile.

http://www.urbancinefile.com.au/home/view.asp?a=5602&s=Reviews

“…dramatized the transition from the world of innocence and beauty to the amoral, violent outlaw world that then pervaded all three films.” – Albert Moran, Errol Veith, The A to Z of Australian and New Zealand Cinema, The Scarecrow Press, 2005, page 184.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Mel Gibson (Max); Joanne Samuel (Jessie); Hugh Keays-Byrne (Toecutter); Steve Bisley (Jim Goose); Tim Burns (Johnny The Boy); Roger Ward (Fifi); Lisa Aldenhoven (Nurse); David Bracks (Mudguts); Bertrand Cadart (Clunk); David Cameron (Underground Mechanic); Robina Chaffey (Singer); Stephen Clark (Sarse); Matthew Constantine (Toddler); Jerry Day (Ziggy).

CREW: Kennedy/Miller Productions presents Mad Max. Director of Photography: David Eggby. Original Music: Brian May. Film Editing: Cliff Hayes, Tony Paterson. Art Direction: Jon Dowding. Produced by: Byron Kennedy. Written by: James McCausland, George Miller. Directed by: George Miller. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 93 minutes.

Story:

In a future of anarchy and chaos, leather-clad members of the under-staffed MFP (Main Force Patrol) pursue a dangerous "terminal psychotic" called

Nightrider.

Nightrider believes himself a "fuel-injected suicide machine," and survives all attempts at pursuit and restraint.  At least that is, until Max (Gibson) -- the best -- joins the chase. Finally, Nightrider is killed in a high-speed wreck.

Unfortunately his friends -- led by the gang leader Toecutter -- desire vengeance. One of Toecutter's minions, Johnny, is apprehended by Max's friend, Officer Goose (Steve Bisley), but then released by effete, officious lawyers.

Next, it is Goose who becomes a target for Toecutter's mad revenge. After Goose is burned and maimed on the road by Toecutter, Max resigns from the force. With his wife Jesse (Joanne Samuel) and young son in tow, he heads out on a vacation from his responsibilities.

Unfortunately, Max's family almost immediately crosses paths with Johnny, Toecutter and the others, and pays the ultimate price.  Max's wife and son are run down on the open road, and left dying.

Enraged, and with no legal recourse, Max takes command of a souped-up police interceptor, and engages his enemies on the open highway, outside the bounds and restrictions of the law.

Review:

Despite multitudinous descriptions to the contrary, George Miller and Byron Kennedy's Mad Max (is not actually a post-apocalyptic film.  Rather, it's pre-apocalyptic. But the handwriting is certainly on the wall and on the open roads.  This celebrated cult film might more accurately be described as dystopian in conception because the filmmakers imagine a world, "a few years from now," in which widespread lawlessness has taken hold, and the authorities -- increasingly more fascist in tone, powers, and demeanor -- are helpless to prevent a culture-wide death spiral into anarchy and chaos.

Dominated by a caustic aesthetic of anticipatory anxiety, a sense of psychic uneasiness that suffuses every frame, Mad Max is literally a movie about mankind speeding -- foot pressed hard against the pedal -- towards moral and spiritual annihilation.

Often, I compare Miller's Mad Max to the early 1970s cinematic endeavors of Wes Craven (Last House on the Left) and Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) because there's a genuine feeling while watching Mad Max that you, yourself, are in peril.  As is the case with Craven or Hooper, the audience feels jeopardized in Miller's hands, as though it might end up seeing something that could truly do the psyche harm.  At one point in the film, our hero -- police officer and family man Max (Mel Gibson) -- admits that he's "scared," and the audience wholly shares that trepidation.

Max's vicious world is one without a safety net, in which the laws of the jungle dominate.  Miller enthusiastically takes the film beyond the bounds of movie decorum and good taste right from the opening sequence and leaves viewers wondering just how far he will tread into taboo territory. The result is a film that has lost none of its dreadful, visceral power in over three decades.

As is the case with all works of art, this film arises from a very specific context. In particular, Mad Max emerges from the era of "Oz-ploitation" or the so-called Australian New Wave, which included such works as Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). But more specifically, Mad Max is very deliberately a reflection of the events, trends and fads of the early 1970s.

As co-writer James McCausland has acknowledged, much of the film's anarchic energy is fueled by the 1973 Oil Crisis, in which OPEC reduced oil production and quickly sent world economies into a tailspin. As gas supplies were rationed, McCausland apparently saw TV reports of violent outbreaks at gas stations, where drivers acted decisively and aggressively to assure that they weren't caught short at the pump.

Also critical to the formation of Mad Max's underlying structure, no doubt, was "The Super-Car Scare" of 1972 - 1973, which occurred at the height of muscle car culture in Australia. There were talks at that time, indeed, of new vehicles that could travel 160 miles an hour, as well as news story accounts of young, out-of-control drivers in muscle cars (small cars with big, powerful engines...) racing through small communities and causing civil and traffic disturbances.

If you also acknowledge a bit of punk influence here -- courtesy of the nihilistic music movement on blazing ascent, circa 1974 -1976 -- you can easily detect how all the creative ingredients for Mad Max fall into place. Suddenly, we have punk criminals prowling the highways of Australia in souped-up super vehicles, vying for both the remaining oil supply and day-by-day, moment-to-moment domination.   One scene in the film explicitly joins all contexts: Toecutter and his gang hijack a gas tanker on the road, and siphon precious gas from the storage tank.  The underlying message is of a corrupt but rising youth movement leeching off and destroying a dying establishment.

If "No Future" was the unofficial credo and soundtrack of punk music in those days of the disco decade, Mad Max remains the most potent visualization of living for the moment, on impulse, and entirely for self. This is what the law of the jungle is, as dramatized by Toecutter and his gang.  He is a man with no respect for life, law, family, or community.  All he cares about is getting what he wants when he wants it.  "Anything I say? What a wonderful philosophy you have," he quips to a cowering victim.

The world has gone to Hell in a hand basket in Mad Max, and those who still adhere to the old rules of the law try to understand what has happened, and struggle to play catch-up  "Here I am, trying to put sense to it, when I know there isn't any," Max notes, importantly, after the death of Goose.  He's dealing here with a world that no longer makes sense to him. Accordingly, Max progressively loses his faith that society's decaying infrastructure (as represented by the ramshackle local police center or "halls of justice") on Anarchie Road can stop the world from spiraling towards destruction.

It is clear Max's loss of faith arises for a reason, and is not some personal, solitary angst.  His boss, Fifi (Roger Ward) keeps mentioning the need for heroes, and the culture's absence of heroes. But what heroes, honestly, could possibly inhabit a blighted, decrepit police station like his?

The nihilism of the world, of "the terminal psychotics" seems to have bled the life out of public institutions in Mad Max, leaving them as rotting monuments to a previous golden age.  Max realizes, appropriately, that Fifi's comments are "crap."

What his world requires is not cowboy heroes, but a functioning infrastructure; one that funds the police, trains the police, and supports the police in the battle against crime. Although the lawyers and judicial officers glimpsed in Mad Max are portrayed as effete, intellectual egg-heads with their heads-up-their-asses, the police are not viewed in terms much friendlier.

In the film's first scene, we catch a young MFP officer ogling a couple making love, and then indulging in a high speed chase which endangers other officers, and civilians.  He looks like he could be a gang member himself...except he's wearing a leather cop uniform.

Similarly, Fifi is interested only in results, not the letter of the law.  He just wants the paperwork to be "clean" so he doesn't get in trouble with superiors.  Once more, the impression is of an old, once noble institution that has given way to corruption and decrepitude.

Again and again in the film, Max sees evil triumph over the flawed forces of order, and so must make a fateful decision about his own place and role in the world. Mad Max thus diagrams one man's disillusionment about society, and his final, knowing, unfortunate break from it.

Many scholars see the film as being fascist in viewpoint because the criminals attempt to argue that they are merely "sick" (and thus to be treated with compassion), but I disagree with that assessment.  Max gets revenge, but at what price?

The price is the very eventuality that Max so dramatically fears all along.  He knows, even starting out, that there is very little difference between the cops and the "terminal psychotics" who vie for control of the roadways.  When Max's family and friends die, that line is blurred entirely.  Max realizes, contra Fifi, that there can no longer be any heroes.  Heroes only work in context of a functioning civilization and support system.

In personal terms, I often write about how deeply and thoroughly I disapprove of movies that utilize revenge as the primary motivation for heroes or superheroes.  I think that's just pandering to an ugly, ignoble impulse in human beings.  In this case, however, I would argue that Mad Max does not glamorize revenge. On the contrary, it sends its wayward hero off into a form of societal banishment for his transgression.  Max ends up in the wilderness/wasteland, seeking redemption for his voluntary break from the mores of an (admittedly crumbling) society (see: The Road Warrior).  It takes him two more films for Max to reconnect with his noble human nature.

So yes, Max gets his bloody vengeance in this film, but his ultimate fear is realized too.  In breaking the laws of civilization, the only difference between him and the Toecutter's minions remains that he possesses a bronze badge.  What would his wife and son think of him now?

The final shot of Mad Max consists, not coincidentally, of an open and empty road.  We race down it going ever faster, but never actually arriving at a destination.  There is no love and no companionship on this long road.  Max now lives for no one but himself.  He can look forward to isolation, mistrust, and confrontation...but nothing else; at least nothing good or positive.

While carefully noting what he believed was Mad Max's sense of amorality, Chicago Reader film critic Dave Kehr also accurately described the film as some "of the most determinedly formalist filmmaking this side of Michael Snow."

What that description means, in lay terms, is that Mad Max isn't about dispassionately recording or realistically chronicling the details of its sparse, almost Western-styled narrative. Rather, it's about making the audience feel strong emotions. Namely fear, rage and even, briefly, bloodlust. The reasons behind Mad Max's passionate, singular approach to filmmaking are actually, I believe, entirely moral.

As the film's villain, Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne) notes to an underling named Johnny (Tim Burns), an act of brutal murder can be considered a "threshold moment" in terms of the human soul.

That's his philosophy of life. There's no future. There's no common good. There's just the shattering of boundaries, until everything -- and everyone -- is wrecked. A threshold is widely defined as the point at which a physiological or psychological effect begins to be produced, and that seems to be precisely what Toecutter is fostering in both his friends and his enemies. He is sponsoring and encouraging madness, psychosis and violence. Indeed, there seems to be a plague of madness and nihilism sweeping the world in this film, and Toecutter fosters it in his cohorts (such as Nightrider) and his disciple (Johnny).

In the film's climax, the audience's surrogate -- Max himself -- endures a similar "threshold moment," treading literally and metaphorically into morally "prohibited" territory (as a street sign indicates) just as he is about to cross-the-line of legality.  The fearsome legend on the sign literally warns him to stop (lest he become like Toecutter), but Max ignores it.

This particular bit of clever framing is not an accident.  Max crosses a moral and geographical boundary in search of personal satisfaction, and Miller's shot deliberately evokes an earlier one in the film, set on a lovely beach.  There, Toecutter and his gang have similarly ignored signs and warnings about transgression, and headed off knowingly into forbidden territory.  The point of the nearly identical staging seems to be that Max -- in taking the law into his own hands -- is following the very nihilistic path he fears.

Mad Max is actually a highly moral film because it concerns that threshold moment in each of us too.

Vengeance might be sated.  But what occurs after the vengeance?  As Last House on the Left (1972) observed, post-violence, "the road leads to nowhere, and the castle stays the same."  In other words, there's a very big difference between portraying violence and approving of violence.  Mad Max brilliantly portrays violence, while never, even for a moment, glamorizing it or approving of it.

Instead, Mad Max asks: what comes with moral transgression? How does a crossing of the "threshold moment" affect a good person? And if good people can willingly cross the threshold to barbarism, what becomes of civilization, a social concept erected on the foundation of the common good, not personal retribution?

Mad Max gazes at all these ideas, but does so while moving at 150 miles-an-hour.  The film, heightened immeasurably by Brian May's superb score and George Miller's orchestration of the high-speed stunts, conveys a powerful sense not just of speed, but of speeding out of control.

Mad Max also reveals a world falling apart at the seams, but doesn't offer pat explanations for the breakdown, or easy answers about the solution.    We can try to "put sense" to the madness of this world, but there is quite definitively no sense behind the human impulse towards self-destruction.

If Mad Max is right, the world itself is terminally psychotic.

The giant space rock Orpheus hurtles past the moon and towards Earth in the space age disaster movie, Meteor (1979).

Meteor(1979)* * *

Critical Mass:

“Hollywood’s compendium of disaster flicks. Its solitary virtue is that it thinks big…really big.” – Noel Taylor, The Ottawa Citizen, October 22, 1979, page 66.

“The only possible way to enjoy this mess is to laugh at the big-name stars when they’re covered in a mud-slide…The sight of Sean Connery, Natalie Wood and Karl Malden with slop on their faces is amusing.” – Gene Siskel, Lakeland Ledger, October 23, 1979, page 5C.

“Director Ronald Neame (“The Poseidon Adventure) uses his actors like robots in one contrived situation after another, all of which seemed aimed at career-wrecking.  The melodrama is miserably overplayed. The humor is infantile.  The special effects are far from special.” – Edward Jones, The Free Lance-Star, October 27, 1979, page 26.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Sean Connery (Paul Bradley); Natalie Wood (Tatiana Donskaya); Karl Malden (Harry Sherwood); Brian Keith (Dr. Dubov); Martin Landau (General Adlon); Trevor Howard (Sir Michael Hughes);Richard Dysart (Secretary of Defense); Henry Fonda (The President); Joseph Campanella (General Easton); Bo Brundin (Rolf Manheim); Katherine De Hetre (Jan Watkins); James G. Richardson (Alan Marshall); Michael Zaslow (Sam Mason); John McKinney (Peter Watson); John Findlater (Astronaut Tom Easton); Paul Tulley (Astronaut Bill Frager); Allen Williams (Astronaut Michael McKendrick); Bibi Besch (Helen Bradley); Gregory Gaye (Russian Premier); Clyde Kusatsu (Yamashiro).

CREW: Director of Photography: Paul Lohmann. Original Music: Laurence Rosenthal. Film Editor: Carl Kress. Production Design: Edward Carfagno. Produced by: Arnold Orgolini, Theodore  R. Parvin. Executive Producers: Sandy Howard, Gabriel Katzka. Written by: Stanley Mann, Edmund H. North. Directed by: Ronald Neame. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 108 minutes.

Story:

An ex-NASA scientist, Paul Bradley (Connery) is recalled unexpectedly to his old post when an emergency arises. Specifically, a comet has crashed into the solar system’s asteroid belt, and disrupted a huge chunk of rock, called Orpheus.  Now that stone -- five miles wide and traveling at 30,000 miles an hour -- is hurtling towards Earth.

Bradley left NASA in the first place over the fact that his asteroid-smashing satellite, Hercules, had been converted into a tool in the Cold War with Russia, but now he must re-align the missiles and aim them toward space.  Furthermore, he must team up with a Russian scientist (Keith) and his beautiful interpreter (Wood), to similarly align the Soviet corollary to Hercules, called Peter the Great.

As the clock ticks down towards Orpheus’s collision with Earth, several splinter rocks speed towards Earth ahead of it, causing an avalanche in the Swiss Alps, a tsunami near Hong Kong, and a mudslide near the Hudson River.

Review:

Although often described as the box office bomb that destroyed Samuel Z. Arkoff’s AIP, the 2.7 million dollar disaster epic Meteor (1979) isn’t actually a bad film.

Certainly, the special effects look dated, and the pacing, especially during the conclusion, is off.  But the film is ahead of its time in terms of subject matter, and actually does an artistic job of balancing the intimate

with the epic, the personal with the spectacular.  To see how badly a science fiction disaster movie can really go, just check out Irwin Allen’s three-hour debacle, The Swarm (1978).

So far as being ahead of its time, one should remember that it took mainstream Hollywood nearly twenty years to come-up with the same idea as Meteor, that of an Earth-cracking asteroid on a collision course with our little blue planet.  In the summer of 1998, Deep Impact and Armageddon went head-to-head, and both are unofficial remakes of Meteor, to be certain…only with much advanced, much improved special effects.

But in terms of artistry, Meteor actually features a nifty and very human conceit.  There are three major disasters in the film, one in the Swiss Alps, one in Hong Kong, and one in New York.  These disasters don’t actually involve the main cast members, who are all scientists, military men, or bureaucrats and spend the bulk of the film in control rooms and board meetings.

However, in order to make the audience feel the horror of the various disasters, including avalanches, tsunamis, and mud-slides, the script takes the time to introduce, in very broad-strokes, three sets of attractive young couples living/working in the affected area.  In the Swiss Alps, we meet a lovely couple just before the meteor strike, and they hide in a church, as the avalanche buries it.  In Hong Kong, we meet a man who runs home to his wife and baby (and dog), and attempts to flee with her before the tidal wave hits.  But it does hit, and we witness the family overcome by the deluge.  Finally, we meet a pair of technicians in Bradley’s underground mission control in New York.  As the meteor splinter nears, they hold hands, and by now, we know the routine: lovely young couple, praying to survive, gets walloped.  Yet in this case, if these technicians die, there’s also a good chance the main characters played by Connery, Malden, and Wood will die too.

So the established pattern introduction/sympathy/death builds suspense at the end, as well as fostering a sense of intimacy.  In the end, one of the technicians dies horribly, buried under fallen ceiling.

This recurring leitmotif may sound like a small thing, but the three successive and nameless couples we meet in Meteor actually help to sell the terror of the meteor strike, and express it in human terms.  What could be worse, or more intimate, than losing a loved one?  For all the cries that Meteor is poorly written, directed, or performed, the moments of terror and destruction manage to carry some degree of psychic weight.

That doesn’t mean the film is perfect.  The last half-hour features interminable shots of rockets launching into space and speeding towards the giant, malevolent-seeming Orpheus.  These shots could have been trimmed down by half, to be certain.  And yet, some of the shots do make a point.  As the final rockets near their target, the editor jump cuts between red-tipped Soviet rockets and white-tipped American ones, second-by-second, so that a message is undeniably delivered by the film’s visuals: mankind, despite ideological differences, has pooled his resources and in the process, saved the planet.

Clearly then, Meteor is a product of its Cold War Era, and the post-Watergate Era.  Martin Landau plays a U.S. General who doesn’t want to reveal the existence of Project Hercules because it will expose the nation as a “liar” and treaty-breaker, but the alternative, which he fails to see, is clearly global destruction.

Similarly, he finds plenty of reasons to complain when Russian personnel turn up in his command center.  Landau overplays his prominent role almost to the point of madness, but in a sense it’s a canny choice, a comment on the utter irrationality and entrenchment of some officials who can’t see others as anything but an enemy, a force to be defeated.  His character is so consumed with hatred and anger that he can’t see, until it is almost too late, that the world depends on him putting aside his dislike of his Kremlin counterparts.

Meteor features a clever line of dialogue about the President (Henry Fonda) turning hypocrisy into diplomacy, and again, that seems a reflection of the Nixon/Ford Era of Watergate and Détente. The message is ultimately an uplifting one: both sides may be posturing bullies, but when faced with the actual ending of the world, cooperation and compromise is possible.

Sadly, the real world was not able to get on the same page in 1979.  The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and in protest, Jimmy Carter refused to allow America’s athletes to participate in the 1980 summer Olympics.  There, no cooperation or compromise could be brokered.  But such dreams can certainly come true in Hollywood, and Meteor serves as almost a perfect time capsule of 1970s Cold War politics.  The film also blends two of the most popular formats of the disco decade: disaster films, and outer space films.

Despite that blending, the final film seemed to please almost no-one.  Perhaps the tepid Connery-Wood romance is to blame.  Perhaps the sub-standard effects work and miniatures are the cause for the film’s general unpopularity.  But some moments in the film nonetheless work powerfully even today.

Sadly, the film not only forecast such films as Deep Impact and Armageddon, but some unfortunate events of the early 21st century too.  In one shot, a meteor “splinter” strikes one of the Twin Towers and brings it down, a vision that today would never pass muster in a studio film.  The sight of a trade center going down remains too psychically-damaging to shell-shocked Americans who endured the War on Terror.

Drax’s space station of evil goes up in flames, thanks to the efforts of James Bond, Agent 007 in Moonraker (1979).

Moonraker (1979) * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“…designed to please children. Bond’s sexual ardor has been cooled considerably, despite the ubiquitous pulchritude. The science fiction special effects, designed by Derek Meddings, will appeal to the generation of Luke Skywalker…Roger Moore appears to be just going through the motions.” – Roy Peter Clark, The St. Petersburg Times, July 30, 1979, page 5B.

“Roger Moore is suave, the villains are treacherous, the women are gorgeous, and the special effects outstanding.  The formula never changes, and neither does the result. James Bond is as delightful as ever.” The Miami News, October 23, 1982, page 10.

“Nothing succeeds like excess – especially in the case of Moonraker. After the success of The Spy Who Loved Me, Broccoli’s words to the production team were to make the same – only better. What they made was the same – only worse. The big problem with Moonraker is that every effort is consciously geared to exceed everything that had gone before.” – John Peel, Daredevils Magazine, “Part VI: Where Are You?,” May 1984, page 13.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Roger Moore: (James Bond, 007); Lois Chiles (Dr. Holly Goodhead); Michael Lonsdale (Drax); Richard Kiel (Jaws); Corinne Clery (Corinne Dufour); Bernard Lee (M); Geoffrey Keen (Sir Frederick Gray); Desmond Llewelyn (Q); Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny); Tashiro Suga (Chang); Emily Bolton (Manuela); Blanche Ravalec (Dolly); Walter Gotell (General Gogol).

CREW: MGMG/UA and Albert Broccoli present Roger Moore as James Bond 007 in Ian Fleming’s Moonraker. Director of Photography: Jan Tournier. Original Music: John Barry. Film Editor: John Glen. Visual Effects Supervisor: Derek Meddings. Production Designer: Ken Adams. .Executive Producer: Michael G. Wilson. Produced by: Albert R. Broccoli. Written by: Christopher Wood. Directed by: Lewis Gilbert. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 130 minutes.

Story:

When the Moonraker space shuttle disappears in British custody, agent 007, James Bond (Moore) is assigned to recover it. His mission begins at Drax Industries, the manufacturer of the shuttle in California, owned by a man named Drax who is “obsessed with the conquest of space.”  Soon, Bond teams up with a C.I.A. agent, Dr. Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles) to investigate further, and the globe-hopping adventures leads them to Venice, Rio De Janeiro, and finally the final frontier itself.

In particular, Bond learns, Drax has prepared a space shuttle fleet for a space rendezvous with his secret space station.  There, he intends to eliminate the Earth’s population with an orbital “necklace” of deadly nerve gas, contained in space-going globes.  His plan is to re-seed the Earth with his hand-picked genetically superior men and women, and create “the ultimate dynasty,” one in which man will look to the Heavens and see not anarchy, but “law and order.”

Bond must now prevent Drax’s deadly plan, but three of the globes -- each capable of killing 100 million people -- have already been launched from the station.  With the help of a former enemy, Jaws (Kiel), Bond races to save the Earth.

Review:

Moonraker is a remake of The Spy Who Loved Me, which in turn was a remake of 1967’s You Only Live Twice.

Here, the unflappable James Bond, a role again essayed by droll Roger Moore, confronts a megalomaniac bent on destroying the Earth’s population and then becoming the ruler of his own carefully-selected population.  In The Spy Who Loved Me, Stromberg was obsessed with the sea, and planned to rule from Atlantis.  In Moonraker, Drax (Lonsdale) is obsessed with the realm of outer space, and plans to rule his New Earth from his orbiting space station.  The soldier villain in both films is Jaws (Kiel), the assassin with sharp metal teeth.

Unlike The Spy Who Loved Me, however, Moonraker goes rather far down the path of comedy, evidencing a campy sense of humor that comes to dominate much of the proceedings.  Here, great action sequences take a twist not towards excitement, but laughs.  The film’s stunning (and then risible…) pre-title sequence finds Bond being pushed out of a plane without a parachute.  He struggles to survive, battling a parachute out of the hands of a nemesis.  But then Jaws shows up out of the blue on the tiny plane, and turns the whole thing into a living cartoon.  When his parachute cord rips, Jaws flaps his arms like a giant bird, and then plummets downwards into a circus tent.  The circus tent is an apt destination for him, as Moonraker often returns to a kind of circus atmosphere in its sense of humor.

Later in the film, Bond is in Venice when attacked by assassins. Surprisingly, his gondola turns into a land vehicle, and the film cuts to a reaction shot of a pigeon doing humorous double-take, along with the obligatory drunk who looks incredulously at his drink.

The film’s barometer is off, and the jokey moments are at odds with the genuinely suspenseful ones, like Bond’s near fatal “ride” in a centrifuge, or his last-minute attempt to destroy a nerve-gas bearing globe as it re-enters Earth orbit.

It’s a shame that Moonraker goes for the easy laugh so often when the film clearly has a lot of fun aping the “space craze” of the 1970s. In one instance, the three-note overture to 2001: A Space Odyssey is sounded (during Drax’s pheasant hunting expedition), and the the key code to his secret lab is Close Encounter’s famous five-note “greeting.”

From Star Wars, the thefts (or tributes, perhaps) are more in-depth and wide-ranging.  Following a battle over a deadly, evil space station (think the Death Star…) a demonstration of precision shooting is required to save the day.  Luke Skywalker had to shoot two proton torpedoes into a vent no more than two-meters in diameter, and here Bond must target with a laser those deadly globes. In both cases, the hero converts to “manual” shooting to save the day.

Of course, it’s not entirely fair to tag the enjoyable, if lightweight Moonraker as an out-and-out rip-off of Star Wars.  The truth is that the Bond film series flirted with space adventure in films including Doctor No (1962), You Only Live Twice (1967) and Diamonds are Forever (1970).  “Space” was clearly on the horizon for this franchise, so perhaps Star Wars just gave it the push in the direction it was already clearly heading.

Perhaps the more legitimate gripe against the film is that circus atmosphere I mentioned earlier. James Bond as a consistent, human character is nearly lost in the film, and he’s much more like a jolly ring-master encountering a series of perils and stunts.  The approach is fun, to be certain, and fun was the name of the game in the immediate-post Star Wars film boomlet, but there’s also the feel that the 007 saga has run too far afield of realism or verisimilitude.

If Moonraker’s tone is wobbly, its special effects are absolutely unimpeachable.  The shuttle launches, space battles between army-men in EVA suits, and space station visuals are astonishingly good and convincing to this day.

In fact, Moonraker launched the space shuttle two years before the American space program did, and really nailed the opticals. There’s not a single moment of Derek Meddings’ work that tips one off that these are models, and not a genuine spaceship launch.

Although Moonraker was a colossal hit upon theatrical release -- the biggest Bond film at the box office, up till that time -- the series’ producers knew they had to drydock the franchise and re-tool.  Their lead character was in danger of becoming a joke.

For Your Eyes Only premiered in 1981, and re-grounded James Bond in an earth-bound story.  That film also featured a much more human, rough tone, more in keeping with the era of From Russia with Love (1963).

Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979) * * ½

Critical Mass:

“Though undermined by its small budget, ridiculed on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and derivative of THESE ARE THE DAMNED (1963), LOGAN'S RUN (1976) and COMA (1978), this movie's paranoid grasp of the bioethical dilemmas inherent in human cloning make it seem startlingly prescient. CLONUS influence on the big-budget THE ISLAND (2005) is obvious but unacknowledged.” – TV Guide, http://movies.tvguide.com/clonus-horror/review/111031

“The movie addresses, in its own too sensational way, the questions that recent advances in medicine have pressed upon us.” – Per Scheid, Androids, Humanoids and Other Science Fiction Monsters: Science and Soul in Science Fiction Films, NYU Press, 1993, page 206.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Peter Graves (Jeff Knight); Rick diAngelo, Eugene Robert Glazer, Keith Langsdale (Guides); Eileen Dietz (Dana); Paulette Breen (Lena); Tim Donnelly (Richard Knight Jr.); Frank Ashmore (George Walker); Dick Sargent (Dr. Jameson); Zale Kessler (Dr. Nelson); Tony Haig (Jack); Boyd Holister (Senator); Keenan Wynn (Jake Noble); James Mantell (Ricky Knight); David Hooks (Richard Knight).

CREW: Director of Photography: Max Beaufort. Original Music: Hod David Schudson. Film Editing: Robert Gordon. Art Direction: Steve Nelson. Produced by: Robert S. Fiveson, Myrl A. Schreibman. Executive Producer: Walter Fiveson. Written by: Ron Smith, Bob Sullivan. Directed by: Robert S. Fiveson. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 90 minutes

Story:

A naïve young man named Richard (Donnelly) grows increasingly confused about the nature of his life. He lives in a club-like compound called “Clonus” with several other attractive and healthy young people, and is constantly pushed to excel in physical activities in anticipation of winning a trip to a place called “America.”

When he discovers a beer can with the name “Milwaukee” on it, Timothy begins to grow increasingly suspicious about the doctors and scientists of Clonus, who offer him nothing but pat assurances that everything is okay.

Timothy soon learns the upsetting truth that Clonus is actually a clone farm, and that he himself is a clone.  When the time comes, his healthy body will be put in frozen storage, awaiting use as an organ bank for the rich original article.  This inhuman conspiracy goes all the way up to the President Elect of the United States (Graves), but a retired reporter (Wynn) may be able to help Timothy expose the truth.

Review:

Although ridiculed by the merciless riffers at Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1989 – 1999), Parts: The Clonus Horror is a relatively inventive low-budget enterprise, one so influential, in fact, that it became the unacknowledged and unofficial source material for a multi-million dollar 2005 Michael Bay film called The Island.  Leaving that legacy aside for a moment, however, Parts: The Clonus Horror impresses as a 1970s conspiracy film and as a “bad medicine” science fiction film in the tradition of Coma.  In short, Parts: The Clonus Horror explores the dangers of a medical innovation, cloning, and imagines how the ultra rich or 1-percenters might make use of it, to the detriment of others.    The film is structured as a mystery, so that the answer to the mystery is learned by the audience at the same time that the lead character learns it. This is a highly effective creative conceit, and one that fosters identification and empathy.

The Clonus Horror commences as a kind of dystopian science fiction film, dramatizing the life of several young people, actually clones, in a geographically-isolated “compound” or camp called Clonus.  There, the clones are given a specific and limited brand of education, and even a religion to worship in the form of the mythical “America.” They may ask questions about their world and nature in telephone/confessional booths, but they are connected to Clonus Central Command or Mission Control, not any deity. The clones’ actually world seems utopian, until one clone, Richard, begins to do the unthinkable: he starts asking questions.  Soon, he has physical evidence (in the form of a beer can) of the outside world, and the desperate desire to see it for himself.  When he sees that world, however, after escaping from Clonus, Richard realizes he is ill-equipped to survive there.  He has been created with many limits in terms of education and experience, so that he simply cannot thrive in what you or I would consider normal society.

Thus, Parts: The Clonus Horror is actually a meditation on slavery, and the notion that a race of clones -- meant to service the rich and famous -- might literally be treated as “parts” (for transplant surgery) and not as people.  Richard and his kind are cared for only so that they remain healthy, and viable for harvesting.  Their free will, self-determination or privacy means nothing to the scientists and businessmen at Clonus.

In keeping with the conspiracy/Watergate Era, the final revelation of Parts: The Clonus Horror involves an apparently above-the-law President of the United States, played by Peter Graves, who is already in-the-know regarding the slave farm.  The film ends with the press – again the heroes of the Woodward/Bernstein era – confronting him about his involvement with the company, though this victory hardly makes-up for the fact that Richard’s quest ends on a downbeat note.  Even if the innocents of Clonus could be freed, they would need to be educated from scratch (think: The Mind of Mr. Soames) so they could function in our world.

I’m a huge fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but even as such I must admit that the series occasionally does a decent movie a real disservice.  It is easy to laugh at or poke fun at some of the not-quite-stellar acting or staging in Parts: The Clonus Horror, but the film boasts a genuine sense of tension, as well as the all-important element of discovery.  The revelation of Richard’s true nature, and the discovery of what “going to America” actually portends for Richard’s kind are sickening, and effectively meted.  The Clonus people are brutal slave-keepers who punish the smallest infraction with lobotomy, and that fate alone is horrific.  In this dystopia, stepping outside narrow expectations means draconian brain surgery.

Evidence that Parts: The Clonus Horror is an inventive and original film is, as noted above, readily available. The Island (2005) steals wholesale the concept of a clone compound and the going to America-style “lottery.”  Like Clonus, it also features a clone that learns the truth as the lead character, and explores his escape attempt from the heartless harvesting compound.  The Island clearly had more funds on hand to build its futuristic world, but it squanders its resources on huge chase sequences and special effects, where Parts is an infinitely more personal, more effective nightmare.   This is a film about learning the world is not as you believed, and infinitely more sinister.  The Island is about hot-bodies, chases, and fight scenes.  It’s a shame that in this case, the “original” is treated with wide contempt, and the clone is lavished with attention and budget to spare.

Prophecy (1979) * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“…a feeble big-budget version of the sort of formula film American International was producing on small budges a few years ago. And producing better, because that studio never pretended to be serious.  Frankenheimer treats his material with misplaced majesty.” – Richard Labonte, The Ottawa Citizen, June 15, 1979, page 51.

“…one monstrous disappointment.” – Bob Michals, The Palm Beach Post, June 22, 1979, page B2.

“Prophecy takes itself seriously, too seriously I fear…despite its noble intentions, it doesn’t work as it should.” – Boca Rotan News, June 28, 1979, page 6B.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Talia Shire (Maggie); Robert Foxworth (Rob); Armande Assante (John Hawks); Richard Dysart (Isely); Victoria Racimo (Ramona); George Clutesi (M’Rai); Evans Evans (Cellist); Livingston Holmes (Black Woman); Tom McFadden (Pilot); Charles H Gray (Sheriff); Burke Byrnes (Father); Mia Bendixsen (Girl); Johnny Timko (Boy).

CREW: Paramount Pictures presents a John Frankeneimer Film, a Robert L. Rosen Production, Prophecy. Director of Photography: Harry Stradling Jr. Original Music: Leonard Rosenman. Film Editor: Tom Rolf. Production Design: William Craig Smith. Produced by: Robert L. Rosen. Written by: David Seltzer. Directed by: John Frankenheimer. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 96 minutes.

Story:

In a forest in Maine, a rescue expedition is murdered by an unseen monster.  Not long afterwards, an environmentalist named Rob (Foxworth) is assigned to determine the destiny of that very forest, because it is at the center of a dispute between American Indians and a local, industrial paper mill.  Rob visits the forest with his wife, Maggie (Shire) a cellist who has just learned that she is pregnant, but is reluctant to reveal the information to her husband.

In Maine, Rob and Maggie meet Mr. Isely (Richard Dysart), the paper mill owner, who tells them that lumberjacks and rescuers have disappeared in the woods and that he feels the Indians are responsible.  He thinks they are attempting to bring to life an ancient legend about a monster with the eyes of a dragon, called Katadin.  Rob soon meets John Hawkes (Armande Assante), the leader of the local Native Americans, and is not so certain his motives are impure.

Upon deeper investigation of the forest, Rob learns that the Indian people are suffering from a host of unusual maladies.  Their babies are being born deformed, and many locals are losing their mental faculties, as if suffering from brain damage.  When Rob sees several mutated examples of the local wildlife (including a giant tadpole…) he becomes convinced that the paper mill is somehow contaminating the water supply.  He finds evidence that mercury is being used in the mill’s refining process because it is cheap and effective. However, mercury contamination can also decimate healthy nervous systems.  Worse, it can jump the placental barrier and deform a developing fetus, a fact which terrifies Maggie since she has eaten contaminated fish.

As Rob, Maggie, and Hawkes investigate further, Katadin -- a giant, mutated bear -- strikes again and again, even murdering a family of campers.  After Rob and Maggie take possession of one of Katadin’s mutated offspring, the Mama Bear turns her murderous eye towards their party, and a night of terror and death ensues.

Review:

Prophecy (1979) is a socially-conscious “environmental” sci-fi horror movie from prestigious director John Frankenheimer (1930 – 2002), the talent behind cinematic classics Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Seven Days in May (1964) and, more recently, Ronin (1998). All those films have in common a brand of technical precision and visual brilliance that isn’t often paralleled, especially in today’s cinema.

So the clumsy nature of Prophecy indeed remains a baffling puzzle.  The film is alternately brilliant and inept in terms of staging, editing, direction, and pacing.  Some scenes of suspense are absolutely spell-binding, whereas many of the more visceral moments -- including an animal attack on unsuspecting campers -- play as unintentionally hilarious. The odd thing about Prophecy is that the film is so damned inconsistent.  It’s a work of art of great, praise-worthy highs and sad, sad lows.

On one hand, the movie intelligently charts the uncomfortable nexus of big business/government/environment/pollution and on the other hand, it consumes itself with gory moments of decapitation, bloody mutations, and other macabre tricks of the trade. Prophecy proves jarring at significant junctures because it can’t stick to a particularly tone, either the high-minded “cerebral” route, or the messy pathway of bleeding viscera.

At the time of the film’s release, critics were generally unkind to Frankenheimer’s genre film, but it had at least one prominent defender in Stephen King, who copped to having seen the film three times.  He felt that “settling into Prophecy is as comfortable as settling into an old easy-chair and visiting with good friends.”  While he noted that the monster is “pretty hokey looking,” he admitted to loving the “old monster” as a spiritual sister to Godzilla, Mighty Joe Young, or Gorgo. (Danse Macabre; A Berkley Book; 1981, pages 205–206).

Bad reputation to the contrary, there are moments of pure beauty and sleek terror in Prophecy.  The film was lensed in gorgeous, mountainous British Columbia, and Frankenheimer and cinematographer Harry Stradling Jr. certainly have an eye for capturing the picturesque terrain.  The movie features moments of breathtaking natural beauty, particularly in long, establishing shots.  Much of the film’s running time is spent outdoors, in mysterious terrains of heavy mist, or impenetrable black lakes.

In contrast to those moments, the film also features moments of pure human ugliness.  The paper mill is first seen in a long, moving establishing shot from the vantage point of a helicopter in flight, approaching, and its dominance over the natural landscape is evident immediately.  The approach to the environment-destroying paper mill is accompanied by Leonard Rosenman’s Wagnerian score, and the moment achieves a kind of portentous, ominous feel.

Similarly, I can’t write enough positive words about a sustained scene, late in the film, during which Rob, Maggie, Isely, Hawkes and a few others hide from Mama Katadin in a subterranean tunnel system.  These shots of terrified survivors are artistically composed, making extraordinary use of foreground and background fields, to capture the terror of those trapped in the caves.  Frankenheimer’s editor (Tom Rolf) cuts brilliantly from one shot of worried survivors’ faces to another shot, to another…and the suspense builds and builds until it feels palpable.

Yet for every such moment of eloquent, sterling visualization, Prophecy also features sequences of horror that are, in a word, laughable. The most ridiculous (and yet beloved) of these sequences involves the giant bear attack on a family of innocent campers.  The bear approaches the sleeping campers, and one young camper -- wrapped up in a sleeping bag and resembling nothing so much as a giant banana (or perhaps a condom…) -- tries to hop away from danger.  The hopping away from danger is funny enough on its own, but then Katadin’s tail whacks the unlucky lad, hurtling him into a rock at warp speed…where the camper literally explodes on-screen.  After the camper and sleeping bag are pulped, feathers from the sleeping bag, apparently, rain down, blanketing the frame in a blizzard.    Generously speaking, the moment plays as high camp. Or to put it another way, this scene is hilarious in a way the filmmakers surely did not intend.  We were not meant to laugh at the murder of an innocent child, yet all the creative decisions in the scene are questionable.   Why make the unfortunate camper hop about vainly in the sleeping bag, instead of unzipping the bag, exiting it, and tearing ass out of danger?  Why does the strike of Katadin’s tail hurl the camper through the air at speeds defying the laws of Physics?  And why make the camper and bag literally explode, and include the ridiculous sight of what appear to be chicken feathers falling to Earth

Similarly, the film’s valedictory moment -- with a rubbery second mutant rearing its ugly head -- ends Prophecy on a low note.  The monster looks awful in the light of day under the full glare of sunlight, and the moment is simply a pitiful “sting in the tail” hoping against hope for a sequel.  Like the sleeping bag scene, the final punch of Prophecy is humorously inept

The film’s best scene is actually one far away from the “monster movie” material, and set at a place of human horror: the paper mill.

As if shooting a documentary, Frankenheimer’s probing camera tours a real-life factory, a massive industrial park dedicated to transforming nature’s logs into shredded pulp. Filmed in both exterior and interior with long informative pans across its grotesque girth, the mill is revealed to be an ugly, dehumanizing place dedicated solely to environmental destruction.  Chemicals such as chlorine are deployed here, and the plant’s interior is bathed in an ugly, sterile, green-white light. No preaching is necessary here because one of the prime gifts of film as an art form is its ability to reveal things to audiences that they have never seen before, but which nonetheless exist.   I’ve never been to a paper mill, but Prophecy certainly makes a compelling case about one.  I also like how the film attempts to portray Isely’s character in less-than-villainous terms.  The paper mill owner makes a great speech about supply and demand that reminded me of my own career as a professional writer.

I’ve written how many books?  And how many copies have been sold?  How many pieces of paper is that? How many trees destroyed is that?

Alas, I’m on the fence here regarding Frankenheimer’s treatment of Maggie.  This is a character that learns that she is likely carrying a mutated fetus in her womb.  Maggie becomes so obsessed on this idea that she takes Katadin’s youngling as her own during the film’s last act, carrying it around on her shoulder and protecting it from harm.  At one point, the monster baby seems to nurse from the blood on Maggie’s neck-wound, furthering the metaphor of mother-and-child.  Yet the film gives the audience no catharsis regarding Maggie’s ultimate disposition.   Does she have the baby? Is the baby born mutated or healthy?  If it is mutated, can Maggie and Rob love it anyway?

Prophecy doesn’t provide any information or dramatic closure, instead focusing on that rubbery final sting-in-the-tail/tale.  In the end, the dopey monster movie aspects of the film thus win out over the excavation of character and theme.  I sure hope Talia Shire complained.

Essex (Paul Newman) confronts the end of humanity in a new global ice age in Robert Altman’s Quintet (1979).

Quintet (1979) * * * 1/2

Critical Mass:

“…pseudo-intellectual rubbish…the film is drenched in pessimism…only the most determined of Altman’s admirers will settle for such empty pomposity.” – Ed Blank, The Pittsburgh Press, February 10, 1979, page A4.

“Robert Altman is becoming a public embarrassment.” – Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, February 24, 1979, page 24.

“…small, strange, subversive film…Not Altman’s best but interesting for its experimental feel…” – Paul Simpson, Movie Lists, Profile Books, 2008, page 100.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Paul Newman (Essex); Vittorio Gassman (Saint Christopher); Fernando Rey (Grigor); Bib Andersson (Ambrosia); Brigitte Fosse (Vivia); Nina Van Pallandt (Deuca); David Langton (Goldstar); Tom Hill (Francha); Monique Mercure (Redstone’s Mate); Maruska Stankova (Jaspera); Anne Gerety (Aeon); Michell Maillot (Obelus); Max Fleck (Wood Supplier); Francois Berd (Charity House woman).

CREW: Director of Photography: Jean Boffety. Original Music: Tom Pierson. Film Editing: Dennis M. Hill. Production Design: Leon Ericksen. Produced by: Robert Altman. Executive Producer: Tommy Thompson. Based on a story by: Lionel Chetwynd and Robert Altman. Written and directed by: Robert Altman. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 118 minutes.

Story:

At the dawn of a future ice age, a middle-aged seal hunter, Essex (Newman) and his young companion, the pregnant, innocent Vivia (Brigitte Fossey), make for a northern city, one of the last hubs of human civilization following a global cooling phenomenon that has turned all the Earth to inhospitable ice.  Essex seeks out his long-estranged brother, Francha (Thomas Hill) inside the ruined city, and learns that he is involved in a "Tournament," a game of Quintet, but with a few interesting and deadly additions.

In the traditional game of Quintet, five players attempt to move their pieces across a five-sided board and to finish off the other four players, following a "killing order" list.  When four competitors are vanquished, the survivor then must fight "the sixth man," another player who has been waiting the duration of the game in "limbo," the space between the sides.

This extremely popular board game fits in with a new philosophical view, a quasi-religion that has gained adherents in this post-apocalyptic world without sustenance, without meaningful work, and without purpose.  In particular, the five sides of the Quintet board represent the five stages of life: the pain of birth, the labor of maturing, the guilt of living, the terror of aging, and the finality of death.  But in the space between these five sides -- in the limbo -- there is a sixth stage of existence.  It is an empty, black void that represents "total madness" and the awareness of a consuming nothingness.  A preacher inside the city, St. Christopher (Vittorio Gassman) calls this sixth space the void that both precedes human life and the void that succeeds such life.  By understanding and accepting this void, he suggests, the people who dwell in this New Ice Age should "cherish the interruption;" cherish the icy misery they face each and every day.  In other words, a slow death in an icy hell is infinitely preferable to the eternity of oblivion that book-ends our existence.  At least in the frozen new Ice Age, man can feel and think and breathe.

When an overly-competitive Quintet player named Redstone rolls a deadly explosive into Francha's home quarters and murders both Essex's brother and the delightful, youthful, Vivia, Essex realizes that the players in this Quintet tournament have forsaken the niceties of the board.

This is now a game played with real lives, and in the real five sectors of this old, half-destroyed metropolis.  Each of five players plus a shadowy sixth man attempt to kill each other, thus "winning" the tournament. Angry and confused, Essex joins the game, posing as Redstone.  He checks into the Hotel Electra and soon meets the referee for the tournament, the flamboyant Grigor (Fernando Rey).  Grigor wishes he could play in the tournament himself rather than merely "interpreting" the rules for the other players.  He sees Essex -- an impostor -- as one fresh way to spice up the tournament, and therefore allows Essex to move freely about, encountering the other "players:" the foolish Goldstar (David Langton), the ambitious Deuca (Nina Van Pallandt), and the seemingly helpful, if remote, Ambrosia (Bibi Andersson).

As the players begin to die -- murdered by one another -- Essex seeks to understand the game even as his very existence is threatened.  He is, perhaps, taken aback when he learns the identity of the invisible "sixth man" in this particular game...

Review:

In the year 1979, director Robert Altman (1925-2006) teamed with star Paul Newman (1925-2008) to present one of the bleakest post-apocalyptic and dystopian cinematic visions ever forged, the wintry Quintet.   Set well into a fictional future ice age of devastating "global cooling," Quintet was not received warmly by either film critics or audiences at the time of the film's theatrical release, and that perception has remained largely unchanged today.

Indeed, Quintet is not an easy or particularly fun film to experience.  The narrative moves at an almost glacial pace and the action features long periods of bracing, uncomfortable silence.

In addition to these qualities, Altman's feature boasts a kind of overt "icy" visual palette, with out-of-focus "cold" atmosphere encroaching visibly on the four corners of the frame.  This unique, misty canvas is actually an ideal reflection of the film's existential crisis: that mankind is being suffocated spiritually and physically by the re-glaciation of all corners of the planet.

For some viewers, this misty, frost-bitten visual presentation will add immeasurably to the creeping sense of bleakness and claustrophobia Altman toils so assiduously to generate.  For others, the effect may only serve to annoy or even distance one from the action on-screen. Yet Quintet is a film worthy of patience, one crafted with real dedication, and with seemingly no consideration for commercial interests.  The film is not merely bleak, it is intentionally, irrevocably hopeless.  It goes out of its way, actually, to kill off "hope" in the first act.

With cutthroat efficiency, Quintet depicts a world where the word "friend" has been replaced with the word "alliance," and then goes even further than that.  In most post-apocalyptic movies, there is some opportunity for characters to escape, locate a sanctuary, or carve out at least some slice of small happiness. But without apology or explanation, Quintet asks audiences to countenance a future world in which there is no escape route, and each new day is just one cycle closer to inevitable extinction.

Another way to describe this artistic but difficult genre film: it's an intriguing place to visit, but you certainly would not want to live there.

The underlying idea for Quintet's post-apocalyptic world arises out of the scientific and media history of the 1970s.  In the early years of the disco decade, scientists began to become aware of a cooling trend on Earth, one that existed between the years 1945 and 1975, roughly.  Popular news outlets jumped on the idea that a new ice age could be dawning, replete with a re-glaciation of the planet.

In summer of 1974, TIME magazine featured an article called "Another Ice Age," and worried about a "global climactic upheaval" as the "interglacial period" that had nurtured and nourished mankind for all his history came to an abrupt end.  In 1975, Newsweek followed-up with an equally alarming article called "The Cooling World."  A hot seller at book-vendors in the same era was called The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of a New Ice Age.

Quintet is set in a world where Mother Nature herself has literally turned a cold shoulder to mankind, and our cities, roads, railroads and grassy fields are buried under un-ending layers of frigid ice.  Altman's film opens and closes with exterior views of white-on-white eternity as human figures wander into and out of view, respectively.  The white-on-white opening and closing shots of the film mirror the existentialist, nihilistic philosophy of the Quintet board game: the film's action occurs in the "interlude" between the twin abysses, before-birth, and after-death.

Enhancing the sense of grim, unrelenting hopelessness, Quintet introduces us to the character of Vivia, a charming, child-like girl who approaches every new vista in the half-buried city with a sense of innocent wonder.  Vivia is younger than any other survivor, perhaps the youngest of all the humans left alive on Earth, and she is pregnant.  Her pregnancy -- like her very personhood -- carries the audience’s one hope for the future; that mankind can somehow carry on and survive in the face of an enveloping Ice Age.  Even Vivia's name suggests life itself, derived from the Latin verb, vivere, meaning "to live."

When Vivia -- life herself -- is wantonly murdered in Quintet's first act, all hope for a positive future is utterly destroyed.  Essex may survive for a time, but it is not accurate to suggest that he really "lives."  His life becomes devoted to Quintet; towards understanding the brand of death that took away his companion and his child; and the very future itself.

The murderer, Redstone, who killed both Vivia and her unborn child has no moral response to Essex's pursuit.  After killing a room-ful of innocents as well as his quarry (Francha), Redstone can only offer the worthless, pitiful caveat, "I broke no rules."  If life and death are just part of a game, and murder is part of the rules, then perhaps he's right.

Virtually every character Altman introduces audiences to in Quintet clearly lives with the expectation that the world is coming to an end for the human race.  "Hope is an obsolete word," one character notes truthfully.  Even the film's final punctuation, Grigor's explanation about the "prize" if you win the Quintet Tournament, is woefully grim.  Specifically, there is no cash reward, no cache of food, not even a warm jacket at the end of this game of death.  No, the winning "prize" to this death game is that you live to fight another day; you survive in a hopeless world for one more cycle, at least.  That's the apotheosis of spirituality that these humans strive to achieve: one more day of misery, alive, before inevitably returning to the abyss of nothingness.

At the end of the film, Essex pointedly attempts to refute this kind of nihilist thinking, saying he prefers to hope for something better up north.  But even this forced, vocal expression of hope is a sham.  The next shot -- Quintet's final, lingering image -- finds Essex marching away into the white-on-white, snow-covered distance. He eventually disappears, gone in the haze, and the end credits roll.  Essex may believe he has hope; but the abyss nonetheless swallows him in the end; as it swallows everyone.

In depicting a future world where there is as little humanity as there is warmth Quintet ultimately proves distancing on an emotional level.   Paul Newman plays his character's emotions close-to-the-vest, going for a minimalist approach that denies us any significant level of understanding or sympathy.  We want to watch him fall apart; to mourn with him over the death of the future.  We want to watch him get even; watch him kill his enemies.  But Newman's impressive, balanced performance permits no such easy solace; Essex carries his pain inside.

Even the murder and chase scenes in Quintet lack suspense but again, that seems to -- oddly -- fit the film's tenor. This world is so miserable and the character motivations so opaque, that we feel no thrill at either Essex's victory, or at St. Christopher's defeat.  Our blood has run as cold as the landscape.  The chill is so strong that while watching Quintet we begin to lose our capacity to feel for the characters, just as they have lost the capacity to empathize or sympathize with their fellow man.

The most human and affecting moment in Quintet occurs shortly after Vivia's death.  By this point, Altman has staged multiple shots of dog packs eating human corpses, unbothered by the city goers.  The dogs hungrily lick spilled blood out of the ice, and not a single human being attempts to stop the animals from feasting on such remains.  But the grieving Essex returns to his brother's quarters and takes the corpse of his companion, Vivia (who was also carrying his child) and at great physical labor carries her body across the vast, open ice plain.  The dog packs nip at his heels the whole way, but Essex finally reaches a freezing river, and disposes of Vivia's corpse there.  We watch as her body disappears beneath the placid surface, and recognize this is an infinitely preferable end than the one society would otherwise have granted for her, as -- again literally -- dog food.  And again, we don't see Essex break down or cry, or swear vengeance.  He just watches the body sink and moves on. It's tough -- and yes, uncomfortable -- to buy into a world where human life means so little that the bodies of loved ones are regularly left as food for scavengers, yet Quintet proves impressive on at least an intellectual level, perhaps because of its uncompromising nature.  The bleak film plays in some ways like a bizarre Western, with a stranger arriving in a frontier town and becoming involved in a shoot-out contest, or some such thing, should such a comparison serve to contextualize the film for the wary.

So it's a challenge to "enjoy" Quintet, but as one character in the film trenchantly notes, "you never understand the scheme until you are part of the scheme."

In other words, if you hunker down and truly commit to Altman's uncompromising vision for Quintet, you may come, in some cerebral fashion at least, to appreciate the terrifying and lonely world he depicts here.

An evil robot threatens Kim (Eddie Benton; center right) and Dr. Cabal (Barry Morse; far right) in The Shape of Things to Come (1979).

The Shape of Things to Come (1979) *

Critical Mass:

“…this garish mix of Star Trek and Star Wars bears no resemble either to Wells’ book or the film Things to Come.” – British Film Institute: Film Classics, Volume #1, Taylor and Francis, 1999, page 344.

“…bore no relation either to Wells’ book or Korda’s film…one of the many cheapskate SF adventure films produced in the wake of Star Wars.” – James Chapman, Nicholas J. Cull, Projecting Tomorrow: Science Fiction and Popular Cinema, I.P. Tauris Publishers, 2013, page 42.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Jack Palance (Omus); Carol Lynley (Nikki); Barry Morse (Dr. John Caball); John Ireland (Senator Smedley); Nicholas Campbell (Jason Caball); Eddie Benton (Kim Smedley); Greg Swanson (Voice of Sparks); Mark Parr (Sparks); William Hutt (Voice of Lomax); Ardon Bess (Merrick); Lynn Green (Lunar technician).

CREW: Director of Photography: Reginald H. Morris. Original Music: Paul Hoffert. Film Editing: Stan Cole. Art Direction: Gerry Holmes. Produced by: William Davidson. Executive Producer: Harry Alan Towers. Written by: Martin Lager, Mike Cheda, Joseph Glazner. Based on the novel by: H.G. Wells. Directed by: George McCowan.  M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 98 minutes.

Story:

In the distant future, Earth is a polluted wasteland devastated by the "Great Robot Wars" and man dwells mostly on the moon, in a colony called New Washington.  But this thriving colony has a problem.  To survive a brand of deadly radiation on the moon, the colonists must constantly import the "miracle drug" called RADIC-Q-2. And unfortunately, RADIC-Q-2 can only be found on the distant planet Delta 3. There, the evil Omus (Palance) has launched an insurrection with re-programmed mining robots as his minions, and unseated the legal governor.

Furthermore, he attacks New Washington and threatens to halt shipments of RADIC-Q-2 to the city, which is under the command of John Cabal (Morse).  But Cabal takes the fight back to Omus with an experimental space vessel: The Star Streak!

Review:

So...here's a prime chunk of aged cheese from the disco decade: the Canadian-produced "re-imagination" of H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come.  Of course, Wells' intelligent original story of pacifism, socialism, and futurism (filmed in 1936 the first time) has been re-purposed here for the swinging 1970s as a swashbuckling Star Wars (1977)-style space adventure, replete with friendly robots and gigantic spaceships.

The Shape of Things to Come relentlessly, shamelessly, mindlessly, and endlessly apes Star Wars, beginning with the opening shot: the familiar "flyover" of a colossal spaceship. Only here, the shot is repeated about twenty times, from every conceivable angle as Omus’s massive cargo ship bears down on New Washington.  And speaking of spaceships, Cabal’s experimental Star Streak is actually a kit-bash consisting of parts from AMT’s K-7 Space station, from the Star Trek episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles.”

The film’s central robot is the poetry-spouting Sparks, and he is an irritating amalgam of See-Threepio, R2-D2, and the robot from Lost in Space. Jack Palance is the Darth Vader figure of the film, and Barry Morse of Space:1999 fame fills in for Alec Guinness’s Obi Wan Kenobi as the wise elder.

Directed by George McGowan, The Shape of Things to Come is set the “tomorrow after tomorrow,” and yes, the film creeps by at its petty pace. Many bloopers and non-sequiturs make it into the final cut, making the film a source for mockery and riffing.  For instance, you can plainly read the logo on Cabal’s computer systems: “Honeywell.”  Nice to know that the Honeywell Company survived the great robot wars…

Matters of logic are not the film’s strong suit, either.  In the film’s would-be rousing climax, the planet Delta 3 explodes and the threat to New Washington is ended, apparently.  Fine, but where are the denizens of the moon now going to acquire more of the desperately-needed RADIC-Q-2?

The galaxy’s only source was just obliterated….

Oops.

Stalker (1979) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“Tarkovsky’s unshakable science fiction masterwork.” – Danny Leigh, The Guardian, April 28, 2011.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Alisa Freyndilkh (Zhena Stalkera); Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy (Stalker); Anatoliy Solonitsyn (Pisatel); Nikolay Grinko (Professor); Natasha Abraova (Marta); F. Jurno (Pisateyla).

CREW: MosFilm and Second Artists Asscociation present Stalker. Based on the novel Roadside Picnic by: Arkadiy Strugatskiy and Boris Strugatskiy. Directed by: Andrei Tarkovsky. M.P.A.A. Rating: NR. Running time: 163 minutes.

Story: In Russia, a man (Kaydanovskiy) living in poverty with his wife and crippled daughter, makes a living as a “Stalker.”  This job necessitates that he travel to a dangerous nearby region called “The Zone,” believed, alternately, to be the spot of a meteorite crash or an alien visitation.

On one sojourn into the zone, the Stalker takes a professor in physics (Grinko) and a world-weary writer (Pisatel) with him.  Both believe the story that at the center of the Zone is “a room” where one’s innermost wishes can come true.

The three men navigate the hazards of the overgrown Zone, including the “dry room” (actually a wet area with a waterfall) and a dangerous “meat mincer” tunnel.

When they reach “The room,” the three men have a reckoning about the zone, and whether or not it represents a danger to mankind.

Review:

The 1971 novel Roadside Picnic by the Strugastkiys involves an alien visitation.  These alien visit six spots on Earth and leave cast-off artifacts of baffling and sometimes dangerous nature.  The underlying idea is that the aliens were on a cosmic journey -- a space road trip, essentially – and used the Earth as a rest stop, leaving their cast-off trash (the artifacts) behind without any thought or regard for humanity.

Those six spots, in the novel, became the “zones” and the artifacts became highly-prized, even though mankind couldn’t really fathom them, or their importance/purpose.  Those who venture into the dangerous zones (which cause genetic mutation…) were known as “stalkers.”

Andrei Tarkovsky, the artist who directed Solaris (1972), returns to the science fiction genre with 1979’s Stalker, a very loose adaptation of Roadside Picnic.  In the film version, there is only one Zone, at least that audiences know of, and there is no certainty about how it originated.  Characters in the film discuss the fact that two decades earlier something happened in the region, possibly a meteor crash…possibly a spaceship crash.  The artifacts described at length in the book (described as the garbage left-over after a picnic) are also minimized in the film.

Instead, the Zone is crucial to the narrative primarily for its metaphysical qualities, for its impact on the human soul.  In short, the Zone boasts the capacity to make one’s innermost wishes come true.  The problem, as the film diagrams, is that humans are not always conscious of their innermost desires or wishes.

To excavate this point, the film’s Stalker tells the story of his teacher, a man named Porcupine, who went into “The Room” to have his wish granted after his brother died in the meat mincer trap.  Presumably, he went in the room to wish for his brother’s life.  But he came out as a rich man, not with a restored brother.  A week later he committed suicide (by hanging), because he realized something about his nature.

What he really desired was not family…but money, and he couldn’t live with the knowledge of that truth.

Likewise, the Professor goes to the Zone in the film with an ulterior motive. He has brought a nuclear device to destroy it, because he worries about people using these unearthly powers. What if a person goes into the Room not wanting to change his status, but the world’s status? What if his wish is not about himself, but about others, even whole populations?  If this were the case, the Zone would represent a great danger to mankind.

Stalker lasts nearly three-hours, and never makes its story exactly clear. What is the Zone? What is inside the Room? Questions like these are not answered directly, which makes engagement with the film absolutely critical.  Thus it’s the journey of the three men that is important, to use a cliché, not the destination.

What makes the film so spectacular is not just its great science-fiction concept, but Tarkovsky’s imaginative and visual conceits.  For example, the film begins by depicting the Stalker’s family life in what, in essence, is abject poverty.  At this point, the film is not lensed in color, but a kind of grimy sepia-tone. It is a life without hope or color.

When the Stalker enters the Zone, however, the film morphs to vivid, lush color, with many greens and browns, and so the audience gleans the notion that life, at least for The Stalker, is more real and beautiful when he is in the Zone.  It is something beyond human life, represented by the grimy sepia-tone, and this idea is also transferred in dialogue.

Early in the film, one of the sojourners discusses with a woman the fact that there is no such thing as the Bermuda Triangle or UFOs. These concepts are dismissed as being impossible in a world of “laws” and “rules.”  The Zone thus represents a place where such laws and rules are in abeyance, a place of magic and mystery…unlike the rest of human existence.

And although the Stalker claims he has not traveled into The Room at the center of the zone, himself, there’s an argument to be debated that the events of the movie are, in fact, the very result of his visit.  The Stalker makes it plain that he only feels alive, free and happy when he is inside the Zone, when he is acting as a Stalker.  His life there lights up -- in color, as noted above -- and suddenly he feels important.  That may be the innermost wish the Zone granted him, to be a Stalker, to be able to continue to visit the place that confers meaning on a sad and desolate life.

At the end of the film, the Stalker’s miserable wife expresses an interest in visiting the Zone too, and the Stalker doesn’t respond positively to her entreaties.  In fact, he ignores them.  The fact of the matter is that when he is in the Zone, he is living his dream, his innermost desire, and he does not wish for his wife to be given the same chance.  She has dreams too, she tells him, but part of his dream involves excluding her from his own. He wants freedom, not the drudgery her presence represents in his life.

The film ends with the Stalker feeling disturbed that the professor and the writer have rejected the gifts of the Zone (gifts that, perhaps, he has benefited from), and then a long soliloquy from his wife.

While the Stalker sleeps, his wife addresses Tarkovsky’s camera directly and relates her history with him.  She has known misery during their marriage, and yes, their daughter is crippled because of the Stalker’s “mutation” (caused by the Zone).  But he has also made her happy, and without that happiness, the misery would be, truly, unbearable.  She has thus come to reckon with a life of acceptance, and that’s the point.  The Stalker goes off and lives his innermost dream of exploring the Zone (and feeling important), but his wife has accepted her lot to a large extent, and is grateful for the small happiness life doles out.

Thus, Stalker is a comment on humanity.  We take the good with the bad, and though we have dreams, we don’t necessarily expect them to be fulfilled. Some of us live for dreams.  Others are satisfied just to live.

Stalker is a long and winding road leading to this realization, but the journey is worthwhile, especially as a book-end to Solaris.  There, an incomprehensible alien ocean or being kept producing artifacts of our memory, for good or evil, we knew not what.  Here, an incomprehensible alien zone on terra firma offers another kind of gift, one that is both accepted and rejected, but never fully understood.

In an era in which Star Wars (through no fault of its own) was encouraging science fiction films to be black-and-white exercises in good-and-evil, films like Stalker are especially noteworthy for remembering the highest cerebral aspirations of the genre.

Stella Star (Caroline Munro) strikes a pose in Starcrash (1979).

Starcrash (1979) *1/2

Critical Mass:

“Starcrash perfects the concept of the great bad movie. For every bad scene or dumb line of dialogue, there are two or three scenes of sheer genius – a clever combination of cheese, exploitation and inventive Z-grade filmmaking. In short, Starcrash seems fully aware of its shortcomings and it does its best to be as inventive and brazenly off-the-wall as humanly possible.” – R.L. Shaffer, IGN, September 14, 2010.

“…[a] masterpiece of trash cinema.” – Charlie Jane Anders, Io9, September 28, 2010.

“For all the clumsy camp, director Luigi Cozzi (billed as Lewis Coates) makes it a triumph of low-budget spectacle over narrative incoherence, dialogue that plays as a descriptive video track and tone-deaf performances.” – MSN Entertainment.

http://entertainment.msn.com/news/article.aspx?news=595157

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Caroline Munro (Stella Star); Marjoe Gortner (Akton); Christopher Plummer (The Emperor); David Hasselhoff (Prince Simon); Robert Tessier (Thor); Joe Spinell (Count Zarth-Arn); Nadia Cassini (Queen of the Amazons); Judd Hamilton (Elle); Hamilton Camp (Voice of Elle).

CREW: Nat and Patrick Wachsberger Productions present Starcrash. Directors of Photography: Paul Beeson, Roberto D’Ettore Razzoli. Original Music: John Barry. Film Editor: Sergio Montanari. Production Designer: Aurelio Crugnolla. Produced by: Nat Wachsberger and Patrick Wachsberger. Written by: Lewis Coates and Nat Wachsberger. Directed by: Lewis Coates. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running time: 92 minutes.

Story:

Rogue "star buggy" pilot Stella Starr (Munro) is captured by Imperial forces when she and her enigmatic Pathfinder navigator, Akton (Marjoe Gortner) investigate a derelict escape pod/launch near "the border of the Haunted Stars."

It turns out that an Imperial Ship (the Murray Leinster), while investigating a "phantom planet," was attacked by some unknown force.  But before this mystery can be fully investigated, Stella and Akton are captured by their perpetual nemeses, bald Thor and Southern-fried robot policeman, Elle.

Stella and Akton are quickly arrested and remanded to separate penal colonies. Before long, however, the Emperor (Christopher Plummer) comes calling with a mission only the talented and widely-known Stella can possibly undertake. She is tasked to solve the mystery of the Murray Leinster, uncover the concealed weapon of "Evil Count Zarth-Arn" (ruler of the "League of Dark Worlds") and rescue the Emperor's missing son (Hasselhoff), who captained the doomed ship.

Review:
Directed in scattershot, virtually incoherent fashion, Starcrash is an absolutely innocent film that combines in awkward proportion total ingenuity with total idiocy. The film successfully captures a fun pulpy vibe with its colorful snow planets, sexy amazon women, silly robots, and the simple black-and-white narrative of pure good versus pure evil.

Accordingly, it's virtually impossible to hate the movie because it seems to have been created by enthusiastic eleven year-olds. Starcrash is so earnest and happy, you feel downright curmudgeonly for pointing out all the examples of blatant stupidity.

As much as I like and admire Caroline Munro as a cult genre icon, a big finger (maybe the one on Zarth Arn's spaceship...) must be pointed directly at her. To put it politely, she doesn't craft a character for Stella.  Munro is undeniably beautiful, but there is absolutely nothing behind Munro's pretty eyes to indicate that she is actually inhabiting a definable character, and not merely along for the ride.

Who is Stella? What's her background? Why is she a criminal? Where did she learn to pilot a ship? What's her world view? Her philosophy of life? If she's a criminal, what's her crime? How does she feel always being pursued? Recruited by the Emperor?

The screenplay doesn't help matters for poor Stella, either.  In fact, Stella does precisely nothing in this film. She's supposed to be our lead and the greatest pilot in the universe, but what does the passive Stella actually do?

Well, she gets arrested.

And later on, she gets into trouble with the Amazons and a giant statue...but Elle rescues her.

Then, she is frozen solid on the ice planet...but Elle and Akton rescue her again

. Then, when faced with the evil sentry robots, Akton and Simon save Stella. She just literally...stands there in the back of frame, doing nothing at all.

In short, Stella is a totally passive, unresponsive heroine and does absolutely nothing to move or motivate the plot.  All the men around her do the heavy lifting for her, so she might as well sit on a cosmic sofa and eat bon-bons for all the action she instigates.

If these are indeed "the adventures of Stella Star," the script should have involved her more heavily in the decision-making and action. Then again, it's tough to compete with a.) a man who knows the future so is prepared for every situation and b.) an Emperor who can stop time with the wave of a hand.

Being a good pilot rather pales in comparison, no?

I love the bad dialogue in this film too.  One of my favorite lines is "Remember what the Amazon Queen said." Another is Plummer's brilliant, out-of-the-blue order to simply “stop time.” Best of all is Stella's line, which mirrors the impressions of viewers: "I thought I was going to go insane.

In terms of presentation, it's not necessarily that the special effects in Starcrash are bad; it's that they are badly abused. The editing is terrible. Scenes seem to stop at random, swept away by random "wipes."

Another problem is that, not unexpectedly, the film opens with the trademark Star Wars shot. A vast spaceship cruises in view of the camera, and then seems to stretch on, forever and forever. It was a good shot in Star Wars and it's a good shot again here. But then, it is followed in Starcrash by four additional shots of the same spaceship going by the camera ever so slowly. The second shot is lensed from above; the third is from the side; the fourth shot is a full shot of the ship near a planet, and the fifth shot is from above again.  If the editor had used two shots instead of five to suggest the scope of this massive space vessel, the viewer would not have had the time to notice that someone forgot to paint the miniature; or that it seems to be assembled entirely from model kit parts.

Again proving that in Starcrash ingenuity goes hand-in-hand with idiocy there's a near-great moment at the climax of the film, when the Emperor launches torpedoes at Zarth Arn's space station. The torpedoes breach the hull and windows of the station, land in the control room, and out pop heavily-armed infantrymen, ready for combat. Lasers flash everywhere! It's incredibly cool to witness.

But what about the problem of explosive decompression? Starcrash knows what explosive decompression is, because it remembers to adorn Stella in a spacesuit every time she leaves her ship.

So, what are we to make of the fact that these space torpedoes break windows, but explosive decompression never occurs? And, are infantry-carrying torpedoes really a necessary tactic when the Emperor can stop time?  And if time were stopped, how would the torpedoes launch? If torpedoes can move when time is stopped, then ships can move too, right?  Why not just dock with the ship and invade that way, with time frozen, rather than launching the dangerous torpedoes?

On and on this could go. How detailed should I be? Should I comment on the fact that during her stint of hard labor on a penal colony, Stella Star is allowed to remain dressed in her trademark gear of go-go-boots and dominatrix bikini?

Should I mention the fact that Akton boasts a number of special powers and weapons that always seem to show up at the precise moment they're needed (I know, I know...he can see the future, he just can't tell anybody...).

Should I mention that everybody comments on "the Evil Count Zarth Arn" as if that's his actual title?

Starcrash is an absolutely terrible space adventure movie but one made with total zeal, naiveté, and enthusiasm. The results speak for themselves, but I sure do admire that enthusiasm. All bad movies should be this happy with themselves and their accomplishments. The attitude goes a long way towards papering over the deficiencies.

From the author's personal collection: The U.S.S. Enterprise bridge from Star Trek: The Motion Picture (and Mego).

Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) returns to the starship Enterprise to confront a mysterious alien intelligence in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“…the human element triumphs over the technological in a resolution that is sentimental and highly satisfying. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a visually boggling 23rd century fantasy, but peel away the budget and it’s as comforting as an old-fashioned fable.” – Stephen Godfrey, The Globe and Mail, December 8, 1979.

“It’s not that Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a bad film; it isn’t. Clearly it is also not a good film. The saddening reality is simply that it is a dull film: an often boring film, a stultifyingly predictable film, a tragically average film.” – Harlan Ellison, Starlog #33: “Ellison Reviews Trek,” April 1980, page 41.

“The film was ponderously paced, it lacked significant character development, the much-touted special effects were predictable and muddy, and the conflict – well, there wasn’t one.” – David Gerrold, Starlog #33: “Spockalypse Now,” April 1980, page 24.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: William Shatner (Admiral James T. Kirk); Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock); DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy); James Doohan (Scotty); George Takei (Mr. Sulu); Majel Barrett (Dr. Chapel); Walter Koenig (Chekov); Nichelle Nichols (Uhura); Persis Khambatta (Ilia); Stephen Collins (Commander Decker); Grace Lee Whitney (Transporter Chief Janice Rand); Mark Lenard (Klingon Captain); Billy Van Zandt (Alien); Roger Aaron Brown (Epsilon Technican); David Gautreaux (Commander Branch); Jon Rashad Kamal (Lt. Commander Sonak); Marcy Lafferty (Chief DiFalco).

CREW: Paramount Studios presents a Gene Roddenberry Production of a Robert Wise Film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Director of Photography: Richard H. Kline. Original Music: Jerry Goldsmith. Film Editing: Todd Ramsay. Production Design: Harold Michelson.  Produced by: Gene Roddenberry. Written by: Harold Livingston. From a story by: Alan Dean Foster. Based on Star Trek created by: Gene Roddenberry. Directed by: Robert Wise. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 136 minutes.

Story:

Sometime in the 23rd century, a massive, mysterious space cloud passes through the boundaries of Klingon territory and destroys three battle-cruisers before assuming a direct heading to Earth.

The only starship within interception range is the U.S.S. Enterprise, a Constitution class starship just completing an eighteen month re-fit and re-design.

Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner), Chief of Starfleet Operations, pulls strings and calls in favors to be re-assigned as captain of the Enterprise, arrogantly displacing the young, "untried" Captain, Will Decker (Stephen Collins).

After departure from dry dock, the Enterprise faces severe engine design difficulties, but the timely arrival of the half-Vulcan/half-human science officer, Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) resolves the problem.  Since his resignation from Starfleet, however, the inscrutable Spock has become even more stoic and unemotional, having attempted to purge all his remaining emotions in the Vulcan ritual called Kolinahr.

Upon intercepting the vast space cloud, known also as "the intruder," the Enterprise crew learns, following a series of clues, that the colossal space vessel sheathed within the cloud/power-field is actually an artificial intelligence: a living machine called V'ger.

And at the "heart" of V'Ger is a NASA Voyager probe from the 20th century -- re-purposed by an advanced society of living machines on the other side of the galaxy -- sent back to Earth to find God, it's "Creator."

In V'ger's quest to touch the Divine, Kirk, Spock and Decker each find personal enlightenment, resolving their personal dilemmas and also saving Earth from destruction.

Review:

The sturdy Star Trek franchise has re-invented itself on more than one occasion.  J.J. Abram's recent Star Trek (2009) wasn't the first instance of such re-invention.  Indeed, the expensive and highly-profitable film that first accomplished that task arrived in American movie theaters more than thirty years ago, on December 7, 1979, and was titled Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Directed by Robert Wise (The Day The Earth Stood Still [1951]), Run Silent, Run Deep [1958], The Haunting [1963], Audrey Rose [1977]) and produced by TV series creator and "Great Bird of the Galaxy" Gene Roddenberry, this forty-five million dollar voyage of the starship Enterprise launched a film series that has endured a whopping three decades.

Despite proving a box-office bonanza and the father to eleven cinematic successors of varying quality, Star Trek: The Motion Picture remains today one of the most polarizing of the film series’ entries. The received wisdom on the Robert Wise film is that it is dull, over-long, and lacking in the sparkling character relationships and dimensions that made the 1960s series such a beloved success with fans worldwide.

If you are a Star Trek fan, it is likely you've read all the derogatory titles for the film too, from The Motionless Picture, to Spockalypse Now, to Where Nomad Has Gone Before (a reference to the episode "The Changeling.")

Conventional wisdom, however, isn't always right.

Among its many fine and enduring qualities, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is undeniably the most cinematic of the Trek movie series in scope and visualization. And, on closer examination, the films features two very important elements that many critics insist it lacks: a deliberate, symbolic character arc, particularly in the case of Mr. Spock, and a valuable commentary on the co-existence/symbiosis of man with his technology.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture also re-invents the visual texture of the franchise fully and authoritatively, transforming what Roddenberry himself once derided as "the Des Moines Holiday Inn" look of the sixties TV series for a post-Space:1999, post-Star Wars world.

The creative team of producer Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991) and director Robert Wise (1914 - 2005) consists of two individuals with very distinct philosophical views about technology, and the destination technology may be driving mankind. In Roddenberry's case, we must countenance his progressive concept of "Technology Unchained," the notion of technology becoming both beautiful (rather than clunky and mechanical...) and benign. Man's machines, Roddenberry believed, would come to serve all the needs of the species, thus freeing humanity from the age-old dilemmas of poverty, dwindling resources, racial prejudice, hunger, territorial gain and war. This was an optimistic vision of man and machine in harmony, one given even fuller voice almost a decade later in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987 - 1994).

By contrast, Robert Wise directed the technological thriller, The Andromeda Strain (1971), based on the best-selling Michael Crichton (1942-2008) novel about an alien organism (or germ...) threatening all human life on Earth. Wise once stated that The Andromeda Strain concerned "the first crisis of the space age," a descriptor which permits us to contextualize Star Trek: The Motion Picture as a further meditation on a similar theme, only representing a (much) later planetary crisis of the 23rd century.

Wise also stated that technology, particularly the tech on hand in the subterranean Wildfire Laboratory, was the "star" of The Andromeda Strain.

In keeping with that motif, The Andromeda Strain's opening credits consisted of a space-age montage of technological symbols, from blueprints to graphs, to top secret communiques. Think of it as Dot Matrix as Jackson Pollock.  In the same vein, the characters in the film spoke in protean techno-babble on arcane subjects such as "Nutrient 24-5," "Red Kappa Phoenix Status," the "Odd Man Hypothesis," "Sterile Conveyor Systems" and the like.

In all, Wise's 1970s sci-fi film represented a dedicated documentary-style approach, one that never easily accommodated a "lay" audience. Instead, you felt you were actually inside that underground complex alongside the Wildfire team.

Most uniquely, however, The Andromeda Strain's climax concerned the pitfalls of technology: a teletype/printer experienced an unnoticed paper jam at a very inopportune moment. Some critics and film scholars have interpreted this malfunction as Wise's explicit warning about relying too heavily on technology, but the opposite was true. Had the printer worked as planned, one of the scientists would have transmitted orders for a nuclear bomb detonation at an infected site, a course of action that would have catalyzed and spread the Andromeda germ. The machine's paper jam gave the flawed human being time to learn more, and re-consider the course of action. Given this analysis, one can detect that Wise was, perhaps, agnostic on the subject of man and technology, seeing both how it could prove a great tool, but also a great danger.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture serves, in several ways, as an unofficial "sequel" or heir to Wise's Andromeda Strain in terms of both approach and philosophy.

Of all the Star Trek films, The Motion Picture is the only series installment to feature so many lingering insert shots of technological read-outs and schematics. For example we see a medical visualization of the Ilia Probe's physiology, a representation of "a simple binary code" (radio waves), "photic-sonar readings" and several tactical displays revealing Enterprise's approach and entrance into the cloud.

These multitudinous close-ups of computer graphics and read-outs not only enhance the notion of Enterprise as working starship -- with several interfaces directly at our disposal, thus fostering the documentary feel -- but go a long way towards establishing the vital link between technology and crew, a brand of symbiosis, if you will.

A great deal of time is spent in the Motion Picture on views of the crew gazing through the Enterprise's "technological" eye or window on the universe: the view screen. In a film about the combining of man and machine into a "new life-form," these moments carry resonance and significance. They reveal man already traveling down that road to symbiosis, relying on technology as his eyes, ears and (in the case of the ship's computer...) key interpreter of data or external stimuli.

In Star Trek, the TV series, Spock often gazed into a hooded library computer and we were denied access to what data he saw recorded inside (save for the reflected blue illumination on his face). In later Treks, stellar cartography played a role, but the high-tech, colorful displays it produced for crew members were not filmed as inserts.

In other words, we saw Picard and Data interpreting the data, and the data itself. It's important in Star Trek: The Motion Picture that the data read-outs and view screen images are primarily brought directly to our eyes without dramatis personae coming between projector and percipient.

For one thing, we feel as though we're actually aboard a ship in space.

For another, we're taking part in that symbiosis of man and machine. We're interpreting the runes ourselves.

The underlying philosophy in Star Trek: The Motion Picture seems to consist of an admonition that man and machine work best together integrated, not when separated. V'Ger is a living machine who has "amassed" all the knowledge of the universe, but is without the human capacity of "faith," to "leap beyond logic," The machine (without human input or touch...) is cold, and barren, and incapable of believing in other realities like the after-life or other dimensions. Thus it is incomplete. Only by joining with a human (Commander Decker), does V'Ger find a sense of wholeness, of completion.

Intriguingly, Captain Kirk's journey is not entirely different. He views the Enterprise -- a machine itself -- as almost a physical lover in this film. When Scotty takes Admiral Kirk via a shuttle pod to inspect the Enterprise's re-designed exterior, Kirk possesses the unmistakable look of a man sizing up a sexual conquest, not a starship captain merely reporting to his new assignment. He avariciously sizes up the "woman" in his life. Like V'Ger after the union with Decker, Kirk ultimately finds a sense of completion once he has "joined" with the starship Enterprise, both metaphorically and literally. In other words, once he is her captain again, Kirk is complete.

Consider for a moment just how many times Star Trek: The Motion Picture lingers upon the important act of a man entering -- or connecting to -- a machine.

We watch Kirk's shuttle pod "dock" with Enterprise after a long, lingering examination of the ship.

We see Spock, in a thruster suit, "penetrate" -- in his words, "the orifice" leading to the next interior "chamber" of V'Ger.

This terminology sounds very biological and sexual, doesn't it?

Consider also that Spock next mentally joins with V'Ger, utilizing a Vulcan mind-meld, yet another form of symbiosis.

And finally, we see Decker and Ilia physically join with the V'ger Entity during the film's climax.

And make no mistake, that final act is equated with physical reproduction explicitly in the film's text. "Well, it's been a long time since I delivered a baby," McCoy notes happily in the film's epilogue, and Kirk remarks on "the birth" of a new life-form. They're talking about sex, about the union of two-life forms creating a third, unique life form.

Similarly, the journey of the Enterprise inside the giant V'Ger cloud replicates the details of the human reproductive process, with the final result proving identical: the birth of new life.

In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, man and machine mate. They join in symbiosis to create something new, perhaps even as Spock notes, "the next step in our own evolution."

While Star Trek films have traded explicitly in both allegory (particularly The Undiscovered Country and the Cold War "bringing down the Berlin Wall in Space" idea) and social commentary (consider the environmental message of The Voyage Home), Star Trek: The Motion Picture is decidedly symbolic.  That's an important distinction.

The central images in the film all symbolize the reproductive, joining process. Spock penetrates the V'Ger "orifice," to mentally join with a living machine. Decker and Ilia (V'ger's surrogate) are mated in a light show that some Paramount studio executives allegedly termed a "40 million dollar fuck." And even the journey of the Enterprise, acting essentially as the male sperm traveling through the fallopian tube-type interior of V'Ger -- carrying its creative material (the human spirit in this case) to the V'ger complex (ovum) -- reflects the overriding theme of mating/joining/symbiosis.

So given all this, is technology a help or a hindrance?

For the Klingons, destroyed in the film's first act, technology doesn't seem to help much. All their elaborate technical read-outs and tracking sensors (again, shown in dramatic insert shots) only permit them to watch the progress of their annihilation down to the last detail; down to the last second.

On the Enterprise, technological attempts to understand V'ger are constantly stymied by the living machine. "All scans are being reflected back," Uhura notes in the film on more than one occasion, meaning that V'Ger is re-directing the Enterprise's investigative entreaties back at itself. This is a subtle indicator that the answers Kirk and the others seek are held within themselves; in the gifts, contradictions and essential nature of "carbon based life forms."

They begin to key in on this fact when Kirk and Spock assign Decker to awaken the human (er, Deltan...) memory patterns of the Ilia Probe (a mechanism created by V’ger that perfectly mimics biological life). The answer, they come to understand, rests in the human equation, not in a technological assessment of V'ger or his capabilities.

It's interesting to tally the scoreboard here. V'Ger (a machine) finds "God" and evolves with the help of a human (Decker). Kirk finds his peace with a machine (The Enterprise). Spock finds his answer from a machine, and that answer is an acceptance of humanity. Even Decker finds his "peace" with a machine that replicates down to the last detail the memory patterns of his lost beloved.

Each of these main characters (Kirk, Spock, V'Ger and Decker) is intricately involved with the story's main conceit: the mating of man and machine; of "cold" knowledge and "warm" human emotions.

Despite fan protestations to the contrary, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a movie intrinsically, organically, about character, and character development. In simple terms, the film's main characters (Kirk, Spock and Decker) serve as the deliverer of human ideals to the cold, empty V'Ger child so that it may "evolve." But in doing so, they also bring along a lot of "foolish human emotions," as Dr. McCoy asserts at the film's conclusion

Captain Kirk begins the film, for instance, as a ruthless, single-minded "my way or the highway" obsessive. We see his determination to reclaim the "center seat" when he tells Commander Sonak at a space port that he intends to be aboard the Enterprise following a meeting with Admiral Nogura, Starfleet's top brass. We see it again when he rationalizes displacing Decker, off-handedly noting that his "experience...five years out there, facing unknowns like this one," make him the superior commanding officer. The contradiction in that argument should be obvious. Are different "unknowns" actually capable of being categorized as “like” ones? How does Kirk know that Decker's history and experience won't prove superior in dealing with this threat, the alien cloud? He doesn't: he just wants what he wants: command of the Enterprise.

And to some extent, the Enterprise (Kirk's other half or perhaps a representation of his id...) rebels against this egomaniac version of Kirk. Consider how much goes wrong on Enterprise when Kirk is acting in this selfish mode. The transporters break down, killing two new crewmembers. Kirk gets lost on his own ship and is discovered in an embarrassing moment by Decker, the very man he replaced. Kirk "pushes" his people too hard, forcing the Enterprise into warp speed before it is ready, and in the process nearly destroys the ship in a wormhole. He does so over the objections of Mr. Scott, Captain Decker, and even Dr. McCoy. This iteration of Kirk is all ego and selfishness, until he remembers the key to commanding the Enterprise: listening to all viewpoints and making informed decisions. This also happens to be the key in any male/female relationship. Just treat her like a lady, Jim, and she'll always bring you home. This first Kirk is too hungry, too grasping, and too desperate to "re-connect" with the Enterprise in anything but a physical way. Bones puts Kirk in his place, but all the malfunctions of the Enterprise subtly (and symbolically) perform the same function. The object of Kirk’s love rejects him until he remembers how to treat her, how to be tender, and kind, and not merely grasping and desirous.

About half-way through the film, Kirk is still learning this lesson in humility, when Decker notes that as the vessel's executive officer, it's his responsibility to "provide alternative" view points. Kirk accepts that argument, but hasn't internalized it. By the end of the film, he is actively listening to others again, heeding Decker's request to join a landing party, and allowing Spock to proceed when the curious half-Vulcan overrides his orders and steals a thruster suit. The familiar Kirk of Star Trek lore, the one who develops a strategy based on hearing all viewpoints, slowly re-asserts itself over the selfish one who wanted command and conquest of the Enterprise, and nothing else. A journey that began in selfishness, ends in his "unity" with the crew and ship, his acceptance and sense of joining with those around him, a reflection of V'Ger's joining with the human race. Kirk has, as he states of V’Ger, overcome human weakness.

Although Spock is half-human, he undertakes much the same journey as Kirk in the film. He returns to Starfleet because he has failed to purge himself of human emotion and believes that an understanding of V'Ger will lead him to that destination. McCoy fears that Spock -- like Kirk -- will put his own personal interests ahead of the ship's interests. What Spock ultimately learns from his encounter and mind-meld with V'Ger is life changing for him. He discovers that V'Ger has achieved what he seeks, "total logic." But damningly, "total logic" doesn't make V'Ger happy or complete. Thought patterns of "exactingly perfect order" don't leave room for belief (in the afterlife...), for the "simple feeling" of friendship Spock feels towards Kirk, or much else.

For all V'Ger's knowledge, Spock realizes that the alien is "barren" and "empty." Were Spock to pursue Kolinahr, he would end up the same way. Spock's "human flaw," if we can call it that, is also one of ego: his obsession with becoming the "perfect" Vulcan. In embracing friendship with Kirk, in feeling his emotions and even weeping, in the film's extended version, Spock begins to embrace the emotions he has long denied...and provides Kirk with the key to understanding V'Ger's psychology. He would never have come to this epiphany had Spock not "joined" with V'Ger in a mind-meld. And that puts us right back at the theme of symbiosis.

Decker (Stephen Collins) undergoes an interesting character arc too. He is a young man who fears commitment and the responsibilities it brings. He left Delta IV, Ilia's home world without even saying goodbye to the woman he loved, which is a pretty sleazy and avoidant thing to do. It might even be termed "cowardice." In the end, Decker overcomes this "human weakness" and joins with Ilia and V'Ger, saving the Earth, repairing his relationship with Ilia, and adding the human component to V'Ger so that the machine life-form requires to evolve.

When Kirk, Spock and McCoy return to the Enterprise, Kirk explicitly asks if they have just witnessed the "birth of a new life form." As I noted above, Spock's answer is that perhaps they have seen "the next step" in their "own evolution." This is a statement that is linked to the characters themselves. Though Decker has physically evolved to another (higher...) dimension or plane of existence, Kirk and Spock have evolved too. Kirk is suddenly gracious and comfortable in his skin instead of imperious and dictatorial. And Spock, for the first time in his life, understands that that his human emotions carry value, and augment his "whole" personhood.

To claim that there is little or no character development in Star Trek: The Motion Picture is wrong-headed in the extreme. In some fashion, this is surely the most important story of Mr. Spock's life, his final recognition of his "human" half and the gifts it offers. When we cavalierly write off Star Trek: The Motion Picture, we are also writing off Spock's new enlightenment.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is often termed the film that saved Star Trek, and there may indeed be truth to that argument.

However, consider just how much material present in later Star Trek originates directly from the re-invention of the franchise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Most notably, the Enterprise re-design and update -- later featured in the first six feature films -- is introduced in this Robert Wise film. This is also the first Star Trek production to feature a visual "warp" distortion effect around the ship when it travels beyond light speed.  Also, the modern iteration of Klingons -- so beloved by Trek fans today -- is introduced here, in The Motion Picture. Before the Wise film, Klingons were swarthy guys with beards who talked about Klingonese (in "The Trouble with Tribbles") but didn't actually speak it. After Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the Klingons were menacing aliens with ridges on their foreheads, wearing convincing armor and speaking their own language.

We can't forget, either that Star Trek: The Next Generation's very theme song, as well as the Klingon theme featured in First Contact (1996) and elsewhere -- were re-purposed from Jerry Goldsmith's brilliant soundtrack for Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Still, there seems to exist this weird belief among many fans that Star Trek: The Motion Picture doesn't represent the best of Star Trek. While it is easy to see that the film doesn't accent the humorous or action-packed side of the Star Trek equation, the Wise film does get so many things right. Most importantly, it captures the Kirk/Spock friendship in simple, poignant terms during a scene set in sickbay.

Imagine how easy it would have been for Gene Roddenberry -- just two years after Star Wars -- to kowtow to public opinion and make a huge, empty action film with laser blasts and spaceships performing incredible barrel rolls. No one would have blamed him. I'll bet a lot of fans would have liked that story better, actually.  But instead, Roddenberry took a much more difficult route. He maintained the integrity of Star Trek and dramatized a story about mankind's future, and the direction we could be heading, with man and machine joined together, balancing weaknesses and sharing strengths.

Some might declare that the film actually attempts and fails to reach the profound quality of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Certainly, I would agree The Motion Picture is not an equal to that film. However, here's another point of view: in Roddenberry's vision of man's evolution, it isn't some mysterious, unknown alien who transforms us for the better. No, in the universe of Star Trek, mankind plays a critical part in his own evolution, taking the reins of his own destiny for himself.

Hence the message that we aren't victims of an alien agenda that is unknown or incomprehensible to us. On the contrary, we're standing tall, ready to face what the universe throws at us. Somehow, this philosophy seems nobler, especially after the cynicism and paranoia of the 1970s and the Watergate Age.

In considering (or perhaps, re-considering....) Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the mission ought to be the same as the Enterprise's: to "intercept" and "investigate" this fascinating movie and judge for ourselves if it is just the cosmic bore critics complained of, or perhaps something a bit deeper. Of all the Star Trek movies, this is the one that reveals the most of the universe at large (Klingon territory, Federation spaceships, Vulcan, Earth...), most closely follows the series creed of "discovering new life forms,” and most makes us feel like we're actually passengers aboard the Enterprise. Perhaps we wouldn't want Star Trek to exist on this elevated, cerebral plateau for long, since humor and action are indeed shorted. Yet there's something intensely admirable about the fact that this careful, somber, intelligent effort was Star Trek's opening salvo in the blockbuster sweepstakes of the post-Star Wars age. While others -- like Starcrash or The Shape of Things to Come or even Moonraker sought to imitate success, Star Trek instead chose its own honorable path.

And that's how a movie franchise spanning five decades was born.

Time After Time (1979) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“Far-fetched, of course, but Meyer and his skilled cast bring it off. It’s a nice blend: a basic mystery story plus the reverse of the classic method of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” – John Laycock, The Windsor Star, October 1, 1979, page 10.

“…one of the most all-around entertaining films of the year, basting suspense, thrills, fantasy, romance and even a generous serving of laughs.” – Jim Moorhead, The Evening Independent, October 23, 1979, page 3-B.

“…may challenge Breaking Away as the best little film of 1979….”- Terry Hazlett, Observer-Reporter, November 5, 1979, page B-5.

Cast and Crew:

CAST:  Malcolm McDowell (H.G. Wells); David Warner (Jack the Ripper); Mary Steenburgen (Amy); Charles Cioffi (Lt. Mitchell); Kent Williams (Assistant); Andonia Katsaros (Mrs. Turner); Patti D’Arbanville(Shirley); James Garrett (Edwards); Keith McConnell (Harding); Leo Lewis (Richardson); Byron Webster (McKay).

CREW: Director of Photography: Paul Lohmann. Original Music: Miklos Rozsa. Film Editing: Don Cambem. Production Design: Edward C. Carfagno. Produced by: Herb Jaffe. Written by: Nicholas Meyer. Story by: Karl Alexander, Steve Hayes. Directed by: Nicholas Meyer. M.P.A.A Rating: PG. Running time: 112 minutes.

Story:

While Jack the Ripper is loose in Victorian England in November of 1893, inventor, socialist and author H.G. Wells (McDowell) speculates that in three generations (roughly seventy-five years...), mankind will dwell in a perfect paradise of equal rights and equal justice for all. H.G. believes himself "a man of the future" and has decided, in fact, that he belongs there.

To accomplish that end, this visionary has created a time machine to carry him to his appointed destiny. He explains all of this during a dinner party, and one of his guests, a lanky surgeon named John Leslie Stevenson (Warner) -- actually the Ripper, himself -- arrives late. During a game of chess, Stevenson contradicts Wells' hopes for the future, and insists that mankind -- basically nothing more than an animal -- will never change.  When inspectors from Scotland Yard arrive at Wells' house hot on the trail of the Ripper, Stevenson steals away into the basement...and vanishes into the future using Wells' time machine.

Realizing the terror he has unloosed into the future ("a utopia!"), Wells pursues Stevenson to November 5, 1979. However, the world of the future is not at all what Wells imagined.

In fact, the far-flung year of 1979 is not a paradise but rather a cruel, uncaring place. On the first night in his "utopia," Wells is thrown out of a Church ("closing time!") and he sleeps on a park bench.

The lone exception to this rule is a lonely, divorced woman named Amy Robbins (Mary Steenburgen), who takes an immediate liking to Wells, a real fish-out-of-water in this "brave new world." She is drawn to him because of his "little lost boy" quality, but soon is jeopardized by Jack the Ripper…

Review:
Time After Time (1979) is perhaps Nicholas Meyer's most finely-crafted feature. It's a stirring, amusing, romantic adventure that not only straddles time periods with brawny inspiration, but also bridges the intertwined genres of horror and science fiction. In essence, the story depicted in the film might be described as H.G Wells versus Jack the Ripper against the backdrop of disco decade San Francisco, but that high-concept log-line hardly does this remarkable film justice.

At the heart of Time After Time rests a debate about human nature and the "evolution" of the species. It's a question we all ask, from time to time and is a perennial interrogative of the genre: what does the future hold?

Over a hundred years ago -- before both World Wars -- Wells' believed in the best angels of man's nature, that social justice would eventually arrive and create a paradise of Earth. But Jack the Ripper had an opposing, dark vision. The film makes much of these dueling world views; of these contradictory perspectives.  "I'm home," Jack the Ripper informs H.G. Wells when they meet in a hotel room in 1979. "Ninety years ago, I was a freak. Today...I'm an amateur."

That's not only a terrific line of dialogue, it serves nimbly as an indictment of the twentieth century, and the Ripper (using a TV remote control...) takes Wells on a guided tour of our ongoing atrocities as a species. Images flash on the TV screen before Herbert's startled eyes; newsreel images of an assassination, a violent cartoon, a football game, and tanks rolling irrevocably to war. "You haven't gone forward, you've gone back" Jack the Ripper assures his nemesis, noting persuasively that man has not changed in three generations....except in terms of his technology. Now man has merely grown "more efficient" in expressing his violent urges.

In the end H.G. Wells realizes that his enemy may be correct, that the scourge of violence is "contagious." Yet in his encounter with Amy, a "20th century woman with a mind of her own," Wells finds solace, companionship and love. "Every age is the same," he finally admits in his last debate with the Ripper, "it's only love that makes them bearable."

That romantic notion, the thought that concludes Time After Time, is perfectly placed to help Wells achieve a moral victory over the brutish, cynical Ripper, and it's a point worth considering. Perhaps the world is changed for the better one person at a time; one relationship at a time. Maybe a personal utopia is possible; even if wide-scale social justice remains perpetually just out-of-reach.

Viewing Time After Time today it may dawn on you that the film is an almost-perfect -- and therefore highly-pleasing -- blend of science fiction, romance, humor, and horror: the brand of expertly-paced, full-throated, "whole" entertainment that we don't often get in our studio releases today. The film's fish-out-of-water element works extremely well, aided primarily by Meyer's canny and oft-used first person subjective camera, which reveals to the audience the "wonders" of 1979 directly. This is true particularly in moments such as Wells' harrowing first cab ride through downtown San Francisco. There's also a brilliantly-staged and tense chase through an outdoor shopping district; one that makes adroit use of aerial shots, a moving camera and long shots.

There are some great character moments here too, from Wells' bewildered first visit to a McDonald's restaurant to his shock at what "free love" (or women's lib) hath ultimately wrought.

In one splendid and amusing scene (over lunch), Amy is more than forthright with the naive time traveler about her sexual history and desires. She unleashes a veritable litany of graphic sexual jargon that practically turns the staid author white-faced. Yet the scene isn't raunchy or bawdy. It's actually sweet and innocent, thanks to Steenburgen's sincere playing of the material. The scene, like so much of the film, is quirky, provocative, and focuses a laser beam on the film's narrative point: the distinct social differences between then (1893) and now (1979). One might detect in all this material, by the way, the seeds of the time travel humor in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), which Meyer co-wrote.

The writing in Time After Time is so strong, so intelligent, and the performances so compelling and personable, you can't help but fall in love with these characters, even the cunning, self-loathing Ripper. Because the audience feels so engaged, even a rather routinely-staged car chase at the climax -- one wherein 19th century Wells learns to drive a Honda -- gets elevated to the realm of stirring, almost inspiring thrill-ride. You're really pulling for Wells; you've become invested in his quest.

It's only fair to note, too, how cleverly the screenplay reflects the details of Wells' biography (and his prophecies). This is the visionary man who wrote the futuristic story of the Morlocks and the Eloi; of the strong and monstrous "feeding" upon the weak and beautiful. In Time after Time, with the predator Jack the Ripper loose in post-Watergate San Francisco and "hunting" unsuspecting women, you can detect the roots of that tale, at least in terms of metaphor. In his The Shape of Things to Come, Wells envisioned TV sets, air war, and more, and Time After Time obligingly provides him access to knowledge of such things. He sees a jet liner fly by overhead; witnesses (through news footage) tanks on the attack; and watches television. Also, in the aforementioned Things to Come, the pacifist Wells comes perilously close to advocating for (admittedly benevolent) dictatorship achieved through pseudo-violent means, a paralyzing "gas of peace" dropped on whole populations to pacify them. Given Wells' experience with the locals in Time After Time, in which law enforcement is next to useless and citizens distract themselves with vapid TV (we get to watch a commercial about constipation...), one can begin to understand how a peaceful philosopher might have come to believe that utopia would -- by necessity -- have to be enforced on a hedonistic, violent, distracted population.

One element of the future that Wells did not accurately predict -- indeed could not have predicted -- was the rise of the entity known as the corporation; and one has to wonder if the blazing ascent of Big Business in the last hundred years is the key component that has prevented the author's social utopia from becoming real in our world today. Time After Time genuflects to this key aspect of modern life too, when Wells notes gloomily that it is "money that makes the world go 'round."

Time After Time also offers a trippy, psychedelic portrayal of time travel, a kind of audio tour of twentieth century high (or low) points, from World War I thru Watergate, accompanied by a 2001-style montage of swirling images and colors. But it's not the special effects, or even, ultimately, the action sequences, that render this film a "timeless" offering. Rather it's Nicholas Meyer's economical, concentrated direction and writing. He never loses sight of the film's most important dynamic: the balancing of a man "before his time," a great optimist (Wells), against a man "ahead of his time," a terrible cynic (Ripper). Meyer also found a fantastic (and human) way to make a film about "today" that is neither depressing nor pessimistic, all-the-while maintaining a rigorous intellectual honesty.

True, today's world is a lot closer to Jack the Ripper's utopia than to H.G. Wells ideal. Yet by focusing on an individual love story, Meyer has demonstrated something else. Oh sure, we may be as violent as we were a hundred years ago (or more so, even.) But as this film reminds us so clearly, our connection to those we love can prove the very impetus we need to accomplish great deeds; to find heroism within and defeat evil.

That's just how it happens with human nature I guess, again and again, time after time...

Unidentified Flying Oddball (1979)(a.k.a. A Spaceman in King Arthur’s Court) * ½

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Dennis Dugan (Tom Trimble); Jim Dale (Sir Mordred) Ron Moody (Merlin); Kenneth More (King Arthur); John Le Mesurier (Sir Gawain); Rodney Bewes (Clarence); Sheila White (Alisande Miburn); Robert Beatty (Seantor); Cyril Shaps (Dr. Zimmerman); Kevin Brennan (Winston); Ewen Solon (Watkins); Pat Roach (Oaf).

CREW: Buena Vista and Walt Disney present Unidentified Flying Oddball. Director of Photography: Paul Beeson. Costume Designer: Phyllis Watson. Film Editor: Peter Boita. Special Effects: Cliff Culley. Music: Ron Goodwin. Story by: Don Tait. Based on: Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Produced by: Ron Miller. Directed by: Russ Mayberry. M.P.A.A. Rating: G. Running time: 93 minutes.

Story:

A robot-maker and nerd, Tom Trimble (Dugan) is trapped aboard the first faster-than-light spacecraft, Stardust, while making adjustments to his robot duplicate, Hermes (Dugan).

Together, the man and his machine are hurled back in time to King Arthur’s (More) Court.  There, Tom not only falls in love with a fair maiden who believes Merlin (Moody) has transformed her father into a goose, but stymies Sir Mordred’s (Dale) attempts to take the throne.

In the process, Trimble introduces the Knights of the Round Table to jet-packs, lunar rovers, and other elements of future technology and society.

Review:

In 1889, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was published.  The novel was a science fiction satire that concerned 19th century firearms manufacturer, Hank Morgan, and his unexpected transportation to 6th Century England.  After suffering a blow to the head, Hank woke up to find himself in the England of King Arthur.  After accurately predicting an eclipse, he became “the King’s Minister,” battled the treacherous wizard Merlin, introduced 19th century technology to the people, and even took a wife, Sandy.

Although Twain’s book featured considerable action, the primary tone was satirical.  The book criticized the Catholic Church, which Twain viewed as a political operation bent on control, not the salvation of man’s soul.  Furthermore, the Church fostered a belief in the supernatural according to Twain, whereas his protagonist, Han Morgan was a rational man who understood science and engineering.

The 1979 Walt Disney movie Unidentified Flying Oddball (also known in some circles as A Spaceman in King Arthur’s Court) understands the form of Twain’s widely-appreciate work, from which it is clearly derived, but not the substance of his social critique.  Instead of willfully and meaningfully comparing mankind from two different ages (6th century and 19th century)as the book did (and as Time After Time does), the movie merely plays up the “fish out of water” humor as an astronaut (Dugan) and his lookalike robot (Dugan again) bumble through King Arthur’s Court.

Unidentified Flying Oddball is charmless and harmless, but the very fact that it originates with Twain’s clever tale means that it boasts some obligation to be about something important and not just mindless fun for the kiddies.  Unfortunately, Unidentified Flying Oddball plays like a lobotomized version of the Twain tale.

For one thing, Tom Trimble -- though clearly brilliant -- hardly creates anything important under his own steam, or with his own two hands.  To battle Arthur’s enemies, he utilizes a rocket pack, a lunar lander, his robot double, and a laser. But in truth, his actions are a matter only of pushing buttons rather than depending on his own ingenuity.   There are very few contraptions built by Trimble featured in the film. This fact diminishes the story’s point, about a modern man’s ingenuity deployed in a superstitious age long past.

Secondly, the film’s story doesn’t make any committed comparison between its disparate eras, and makes virtually no mention of the Church, Hank’s most deadly and resourceful nemesis in the book. In fact, the movie lacks any real sense of danger, and Tom hardly even seems surprised about arriving in the world of Arthur and Merlin in Camelot.  “I’m just your average American boy,” he says on more than one occasion, but an average American boy would certainly feel surprised and even in awe if undertaking Tom’s journey.  Tom and his robot twin Hermes spend more time worrying about romancing a local woman (who fears her father has been turned into a goose…) than in helping the people of Camelot better their situation.

Beyond the fact that the movie dumbs-down Twain’s concept, Unidentified Flying Oddball has a very lame sense of humor.  For example, there’s a man in King Arthur’s quote named Winston, who does nothing but quote the wisdom of Winston Churchill, a 20th century historical figure.  Why should a figure like this exist in King Arthur’s Court in the Middle Ages?  Why is he funny?  Is the point that World War II’s Churchill somehow developed from this man’s lineage?  How many kids, in 1979, would get the joke, anyway?  How many even knew who Churchill was?

Thus Unidentified Flying Oddball’s most significant problem is that it wants to appeal to kids, but offers nothing for kids to hold onto.  There’s not a stimulating idea in this film about the past, the present, and the future.  It’s all just dumb hijinks, and so the movie quickly wears out its welcome.   Kids are, generally-speaking, smart and clever, and wish to be engaged.  This movie is a double loser: an insult to the memory of Twain’s book, and an insult to kids’ intelligence.

The Warriors (1979) * * * *

Critical Mass:

“…a quirky, gauche urban fantasy…The action scenes have a taut, calculated excitement to them.” – Byron Bull, The Michigan Daily, March 16, 1984, page 6.

“As ever, Hill pulls no punches and the result is a seriously tough movie, speedy, intense and even kinda scary.” – Marshall Julius, Action! The Action Movie A-Z, Indiana University Press, 1996, page 228.

“…one of those rare films that gets better with age…violent, visually compelling…” – Ben Muessig, The Brooklyn Paper, October 1, 2009.

Cast and Crew:

CAST: Michael Beck (Swan); James Remar (Ajax); Dorsey Wright (Cleon); Brian Tyler (Snow); David Harris (Cochise); Tom McKitterick (Cowboy); Marcelino Sanchez (Rembrandt); Terry Michos (Vermin); Deborah Van Valkenbugh (Mercy); Roger Hill (Cyrus); David Patrick Kelly (Luther); Lynne Thigpen (D.J.); Mercedes Ruehl (Policewoman);

CREW: Director of Photography: Andrew Laszlo. Original music: Barry De Vorzon. Film Editing: Freeman Davies Jr., David Holden, Susan E. Morse, Billy Weber. Produced by: Lawrence Gordon. Executive Producer:  Frank Marshall. Written by: David Shaber, Walter Hill. Based on the novel by: Sol Yurick. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 92 minutes.

Story:

In a fantasy version of New York where the gangs outnumber the police, one exceptional gang leader, Cyrus (Hill) calls a meeting of all the various gangs.  At that meeting, which is attended by Coney Island’s Warriors, he announces a plot to combine forces, defeat the Establishment, and create a new, better order.  Almost immediately, he is assassinated, and the Warriors are framed for his death

Led by Swan (Beck), the Warriors are pursued all night long by every gang and policeman in the city, despite their innocence.  As they attempt to make it back home to Coney Island, the group faces challenges from all sides, including the terrifying Baseball Furies, and even from within, as well.

Review:

The late 1970s and early 1980s fantasy and science fiction films often showcase “dark cities,” or urban zones crumbling from within.  Among the titles of this format are Escape from New York (1981), Wolfen (1982) and the 1970s comic-book fantasy, The Warriors. So how did the American fantasy film arrive at this weird, dark juncture...where the criminals are running the prison, so-to-speak?    Well, the mid-1970s was not really a terrific time for big cities in America, specifically NYC.

Much of the metropolitan infrastructure had fallen into disrepair and neglect, and there was a growing sense of disenfranchisement, politically-speaking.  Alarmingly, crime rates were sky high and trending higher.  Poverty was also an enormous problem because of economic stagnation and high unemployment during Carter's age of malaise and America's "crisis of confidence."  New York City teetered dangerously near bankruptcy in 1975, and President Ford famously refused to bail it out.  This task was left to the Teachers' Union and, utilizing pension funds, it rose to the challenge...to the tune of a then-whopping 150 million dollars.

Then, in July of 1977, a city-wide power outage shone another light on the social unrest burdening the great city.   During a 25-hour period of black outs, there was a city-wide outbreak of looting and crime, and over 3,000 men and women were arrested.    Prisons virtually overflowed...

In that day and age, no one could have imagined so quick an end to this urban nightmare.  However, via the corporatization/Disneyfication/Giuliani-fication of the Big Apple in the early 1990s, the problem was resolved in New York, at least to a large degree.  Yet filmmakers of the day like John Carpenter. and Walter Hill, imagined in the late 1970s and early 1980s that the Big Apple would only sink further into crime, into gang-warfare, into blight, and into despair.  The city became a dark, apocalyptic landscape in their highly-visual, action-packed productions.

That's the critical context underlying The Warriors.  In his landmark book, Cult Movies, film scholar and critic Danny Peary does a terrific and thorough job of comparing and contrasting the novel and the film, but long-story short: the book de-romanticizes the gang members that serve as its protagonists, while the Walter Hill film of the disco-era purposefully mythologizes The Warriors and firmly places them in a fantasy-styled (if dystopian...) landscape.

The Warriors (book and film) is loosely based on an event from human antiquity, the Battle of Cunaxa in 401 B.C. There, north of Babylon, a leader named Cyrus the Younger led "The Ten Thousand," -- an army of Greek soldiers -- into enemy territory against the Persian Army, which reportedly numbered over a million-strong.  Cyrus was killed in the battle, leaving his men stranded deep inside enemy territory with no ally, no sanctuary and no supplies.  Clearchus, a Spartan general, assumed command of the fugitives, but there was danger, intrigue and betrayal at every turn. For instance, a local satrap, Tissaphernes, invited the Greeks to feast with him...and the leaders who accepted the invitation were captured and decapitated.

The remaining Greeks fought superior numbers all the way back to their land, near the Black Sea.  And when they saw the familiar shore-line, they shouted -- famously (and with great relief) -- "Thalatta! Thalatta!" ("The Sea! The Sea!")

The events of the battle at Cunaxa, the subsequent retreat and the return home were assiduously recorded by the Greek soldier, Xenophon in his famous chronicle, Anabasis.

This historical work is explicitly the source of the adaptations by Walter Hill/David Shaber and Yurick, but the location has been updated to the near-future, to gangland New York sometime near the dawn of the 21st century.  A gang called "The Warriors" travels deep into enemy territory from their home-land (Coney Island) to attend a "conclave" in the Bronx.  The gang then faces enormous odds (and enemy gangs with names like The Baseball Furies, the Lizzies, the Electric Eliminators, the Moonrunners, the Orphans and the Gramercy Riffs), to return home safely following the assassination of a messianic gang leader.

The Warriors ultimately know they have reached home, not coincidentally, when they spy the shore at Coney Island. There's even a figure in the film named Cyrus -- the aforementioned visionary gang leader assembling an "army" -- who dies early in the proceedings.

By connecting the odyssey of the Coney Island Warriors explicitly to the story told in Anabasis, director Hill successfully casts his unconventional, even criminal protagonists as epic heroes; thus showcasing them in a romantic, mythological light.  These men are not just street toughs; not merely small-time thugs, but heroes undertaking a terrifying and dangerous journey.

The Wonder Wheel at Coney Island is the first shot of the film and it's almost as though Hill uses the concept of the wheel itself to take us back in time...to an almost mythological past.  The point is simply to note that, perhaps, unconventional times demand unconventional heroes.  Throughout the film, Hill returns to this important idea of myth making.  First, he cannily utilizes familiar character names to suggest famous figures/characters from history and myth.  It's important to remember, these character names are quite different from those highlighted in Yurick's novel, which sought to reveal gang members as ignorant and foolish, not as heroic, comic-book, fantasy figures.

In the movie, then, we get a gang leader named Cleon (Dorsey Wright), who leads his Warriors to a "peace" gathering in the city. In Greek history, Cleon was actually a noted critic of the aristocracy, and the film character takes on this particular trait, at least to some extent.  He sees the power and righteousness inherent in Cyrus's vision of gang unity.  It's a way to change things; a way to alter the established (and morally corrupt?) order that has created the desolate, urban landscape.

Another Warrior is called Cochise (David Harris), and he adopts the guise and characteristics of a famous Apache war chief in American history.  Cochise's name means, literally "the strength of oak," and accordingly, in the film, Cochise is one of the Warriors' greatest fighters.

Yet another Warrior from Coney Island is named Ajax (James Remar), and this moniker derives from Greek history/myth too, specifically from Homer's The Iliad.

Then there's Rembrandt (Marcelino Sanchez), the gang's graffiti-artist...named for the Dutch painter, and Snow (Brian Tyler) -- an African-American who is one "cool" customer. Even the man who eventually takes over for Cleon, Swan (Michael Beck) is named explicitly for myth.  In Finnish tales, a swan is known as the bird of the underworld, and the "swan song" widely remembered as the "song of death."  Ultimately, it is Swan who takes on the Orphean task of safely leading his fellow-gang members and a beautiful woman named Mercy out of the underworld of New York City, back to the safety and relative sanctuary of Coney Island.

The characters and situations encountered by the Warriors in Hill's 1979 film also relate specifically to stories recounted from Greek Myth.  For instance, Ajax falls prey in a park to an undercover police officer, a beautiful woman, sitting on a park bench.  She hand-cuffs the impulsive Ajax to that bench, and soon the police have arrived in force to take him into custody.  He does not make it home.  After a fashion, Ajax's tragic fate is a reflection of the "Procrustean Bed" in Greek legend.  An evil man named Procrustes set up -- on a sacred path, no less -- an iron bed.  He would then invite innocent passersby to rest upon it.  Finally, he would ruthlessly make his occupant fit the bed...even if that "fit" required amputation, dismemberment or other tortures.  Eventually, Procrustes met his fate at the hands of the hero Theseus.  But the underlying point of the myth was Procrustes' enforcement of conformity. Everybody had to fit his bed...or die trying.

In The Warriors, Ajax -- an outlaw gang member -- is captured by the police, who enforce conformity to the law.  In this setting the police represent the corrupt and powerful authority of the land, and the gang members represent an escape from/protest of the establishment

In another important scene, Cochise, Rembrandt and Vermin are lured from the safety of a train at Union Station by a beautiful all-female gang called "The Lizzies."  On one hand, the Lizzies may be an allusion to the Tissaphernes interlude in Anabasi, .the promise of a sumptuous "feast" of sorts that actually leads trusting warriors to their mortal doom.  Or perhaps, the all-female nature of the gang, and the tantalizing promise of sexual seduction refers to the famous Sirens of Homer's The Odyssey: dangerous female creatures that lure sailors to their doom with beguiling music.

Certainly, the latter idea fits well here.  The Warriors are drawn out of the train car, and led to an island of sorts - a locked room -- with the promise of sex.  Only Rembrandt seems to sense the danger.

Perhaps the most memorable scene in The Warriors involves the heroic gang engaging battle with another dynamic gang, the Baseball Furies.  These Furies are armed with baseball bats and dressed in baseball uniforms.  Most terrifyingly, they wear war-paint: face-make-up.  You might be tempted to laugh at these characters in broad daylight...but at night -- and in perpetual, relentless motion -- these guys are pure nightmare fodder.  Importantly, they take their name "The Furies" from another facet of ancient Greek lore. There, the Furies or "Angry Ones" were known as beasts that exacted brutal punishment against those who had sworn a false oath.  In other words, the Furies punished liars.  In the film, the Baseball Furies come out of the woodwork to punish the Warriors, who are believed to have broken the city-wide truce; and who (against orders) brought a weapon into that truce at the conclave.  Of course, the Warriors are not guilty of murdering Cyrus, or of breaking their word, but the Furies don't realize that.

Again and again in The Warriors, Hill explicitly links the journey of the Coney Island gang to mythological, events, personalities and scenarios.  The end-game is to suggest that they -- like the heroes of antiquity -- are larger-than-life, romantic figures who, one day, will be remembered by history for their great accomplishment.  The movie's myriad comic-book touches likewise add to this underlying feeling of mythmaking.  This is no small matter.  In the 1970s, George Lucas in which he derided the lack of "real" heroes for children in the pop-culture.  He named Dirty Harry and Kojak as examples of poor role-models and saw Star Wars as a more innocent and appropriate alternative. The Warriors in Hill's film represent another such alternative, even if a little unconventional.  They boast such heroic qualities as loyalty, strength and honor, and they are steadfastly trying to make a better life for themselves in the corrupt, urban blight of a city out of control. "sometime in the future."

By depicting the gangs of New York City in this strange future landscape as colorful, dynamic and interracial (in the spirit of John Carpenter's Street Thunder in Assault on Precinct 13 [1976]), director Hill reminds the audience that this film does not occur in depressing, kitchen-sink reality, but rather in a heightened, fantasy reality where people -- even gang members -- can still make heroic choices, and behave in honorable fashion.

In a future where every young person seems to be in a gang (or in a network of gangs, as it were), it's not hard to believe that one gang may be more heroic than other.  That's why The Warriors is not the incitement to violence that some culture warriors mistook it for way back in 1979.  It features gangs to be certain, but the landscape is purposefully classic – mythological, even -- and the gangs themselves are fantasy-inspired villains, bearing almost no resemblance to real-life thugs or common gangs. How many gangs do you know that dress up as...mimes?

In some highly-intriguing fashion, The Warriors is not merely a comic-book fantasy about heroes on a "desperate, forced march" but a subversive commentary on its post-counterculture times, on the Crisis-in-Confidence America of the 1970s.  Here, representatives from warring gangs in peace (and unarmed, even...) attend a conclave in the Bronx.  They go to listen to the inspirational words of a messianic leader, "The One and Only" Cyrus...an African-American visionary and revolutionary. Except for one bad apple (David Patrick Kelly's Luther), these gang members stand and listen respectfully to Cyrus, and "nobody is wasting nobody."

Believed to possess a "whole lot of magic," Cyrus is the leader of the biggest gang in the city and he preaches a Gospel of unity...and, importantly, numbers.  "Can you count, suckers?" he asks repeatedly.  Then he provides an entirely logical argument using mathematics as his primary rhetorical tool. There are 60,000 gang members in blighted New York, and only 20,000 police he reminds his audience.  "One gang could rule this city," he deliberately suggests.

What Cyrus promises is a new order.  Instead of short-sightedly battling over "turf," over a few hundred meters of territory, these gangs could effectively control the entire city if they just cooperated.  They could control infrastructure, resources and yes, even crime rates.  The city could not move without the okay of the gangs, Cyrus observes.  Power is within reach, but the gang leaders must not be selfish; must not be distracted by the "small" things.

What The Warriors never makes clear, or specific, is how exactly Cyrus would utilize his new found power were he to gain control of New York City.  Would he cause a reign of terror, of lawlessness?   Doubtful, I think.  Given the comments by the Warriors (especially Cleon...) regarding Cyrus, as well as Hill's honorable, classic presentation of these fantasy outlaws, there's ample reason to suspect that Cyrus is the real deal, and that his motives are pure.   The character thus represents political optimism...the belief that, as foot-soldiers for change, we can each help shape the future to our liking.  If only we all row in the same direction.

What's daring about this vision is that Hill seems to suggest that it isn't just the marginalized that recognize the corruption of the system...but actual criminals themselves.  Those outlaws become, ironically, the hope for a more equitable future. It's downright fascinating how this fantasy movie positions an outlaw gang-leader as the rightful heir to the counter-culture movement of the late 1960s, and how this so-called criminal openly embraces high moral ideals, like interracial equality and unity of purpose.

Unfortunately, in the tradition of inspirational real-life leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy, The Warriors' Cyrus is brutally gunned down before his Utopian new order can come to pass.  At his death, those formerly in unity turn on each other, and foster only deeper disunity.   Without the leadership of The One, the gangs turn on their own kind.

So, let's sum up here.   A film that begins with great political optimism (the belief that a better world is possible if we work together) ends with great cynicism about the entrenched political process.  Even the media itself (a New York City radio station) is prophetically manipulated throughout the film to "spread the lie" that the Warriors assassinated Cyrus.  The Warriors become convenient scapegoats, pursued not just by law enforcement authorities, but by their fellow citizen gang-members and by the powerful media that holds sway over their dangerous world.

In one of the movie's many great moments, the radio DJ marshaling gang forces "in code" against the Warriors plays the song "Nowhere to Run."  It's essentially a rock-and-roll death sentence. America itself keeps reliving this very cycle of optimism/pessimism/cynicism in our national politics. With overwhelming numbers, we vote for change.  Reagan, Clinton and Obama all owe their presidencies to "change"-oriented campaigns.  Yet very early into these periods of "change," powerful (and rich...) voices in the mass media re-assert the power of the entrenched establishment and scare voters about the very change we so enthusiastically and resolutely voted for.

Instead of believing we can work together to make things better for everyone, we soon become mired in convenient scapegoats and ignorant belief systems. What's worse, sometimes the people "pulling the trigger" on the future - on men like Cyrus -- do it simply to be oppositional.  When asked why he killed Cyrus, Luther answers "No reason.  I just like doing things like that."

In The Warriors, like in life, alas, nothing seems to change.  Cynicism supplants optimism, and the problems of the city don't get solved.  The Warriors heroically return home, but even home isn't so great.

"This is what we fought all along to get back to?" Swan asks, upon leading his people successfully back to Coney Island.   But it is a nearly abandoned world of graffiti, boarded-up shops and empty roads. Is this the “promised land” that it could have been, in Cyrus's vision? Or is it simply the last place the Warriors can fight the system, their backs literally braced against the sea?

Thalatta?

In its conclusion, The Warriors suggests a kind of desperation and yearning for social change, since even the criminals -- not exactly a future-oriented crowd --  see that something must change, that revolution must come, to make things better for everyone in the City.

More and bigger: The aesthetic of 1980s science fiction films, as demonstrated by the multiplication of aliens, including the Alien Queen in the sequel Aliens (1986).

“When You Wish Upon A Star:”

A Conclusion to Science Fiction & Fantasy Films of the 1970s

As a quick glance over the films of the year 1979 suggests, the disco decade ended with space opera supreme and dystopian films in sharp decline.

The 1980s would bring more and more Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, and Superman.  The vast majority these adventure/action oriented films revolved around the venue of outer space, rather than around moody or bleak meditations on the perhaps grim shape of things to come here on terra firma.

It’s significant to note, however, that all these major and beloved sci-fi movie franchises of the 1980s got their start in the waning years of the Carter Administration, in the 1970s.

When one considers the film releases of 2012 and 2013 -- and the new chapters of Superman, Star Trek and Alien those years brought -- it seems as though the 1970s has never quite left us, doesn’t it?

Even in 2013, all these franchises are still going strong, as re-booted by J.J. Abrams, or as re-imagined by Ridley Scott (Prometheus) and by Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan (Man of Steel).

But Star Wars, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Superman: The Movie also proved important because they pointed to a trend of great historical significance: the B picture of generations past definitively became the A picture of Hollywood’s future, and that shift was cemented in the 1980s.

From the 1980s forward, science fiction and fantasy was no longer to be relegated to the bargain basement or shunted to the side for other, more profitable dramatic genres.  Contrarily, in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, studios would sink vast fortunes into producing ever more epic and elaborate blockbusters of the science fiction and fantasy format. Genre blockbusters became the new paradigm for Hollywood releases, and that paradigm remains firmly intact to this writing.

The landslide election of avuncular conservative Ronald Reagan in 1980 also clearly reflected the national trend in the 1980s to avoid the existential angst, self-examination, and yes, the confusion of the 1970s. The focus instead moved to comforting black-and-white reinforcement of old traditions, like the happy Hollywood ending, or black-and-white villains.  Reagan talked about the Soviet Union not in nuance or with subtlety, but expressly and determinedly as “The Evil Empire.”  His space defense program was even named “Star Wars,” after the Lucas film.  As the Great Communicator and a former movie star, Reagan offered America Hollywood-styled simplicity and convention as legitimate geopolitical perspective, and his style and substance resonated powerfully.

After a decade of presidents in disgrace, and America in disgrace itself, the exhausted country just wanted to feel good about itself and its place in the world (or galaxy) once more.  That desire played out, not surprisingly, in the science fiction cinema of the Reagan decade.  Swashbuckling sci-fi and fantasy films such as Tron (1982), Krull (1983), The Last Starfighter (1984) and probably a dozen more all vied to become the “next” Star Wars, the next out-of-nowhere hit that would galvanize the pop culture and mint its creators a fortune.

Steven Spielberg also continued to work in both the fantasy (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and science fiction (E.T.) genres, and quickly became the pre-eminent filmmaker of the decade for his sentimental, exciting, and nostalgic, rather than, necessarily cerebral cinematic visions.

In short, the intense and lugubrious looking inward of early 1970s science fiction cinema was, by and large, dead as a large-scale movement by the time Reagan’s election.  There would indeed be many films in the Reagan Era that worried about nuclear war (like Threads, or Dreamscape), that reflected upon the lessons of the Vietnam War debacle (Aliens), or focused on the decade’s so-called “apocalypse” mentality (The Road Warrior, Night of the Comet), but the deeply held ambivalence about the future evidenced by dozens of 1970s dystopian science fiction films was mostly a thing of the past.

The 1970s has always been the bridge between the hippie decade and the yuppie decade, and that status, no doubt, explains why the movies of the disco decade look the way they do.  If history is always a pendulum swinging between extreme poles, then the 1970s often feels like the awkward and not-always-successful attempt to first advance the 1960s’ leftward lurch, and then steady itself and move back to the center before the rightward jump of the 1980s.

Tumultous and unsteady, imaginative and cynical, the 1970s really came out swinging, to further that pendulum metaphor.  The span from 1970 - 1979 gave the world some of its greatest and most memorable science fiction films, and that’s why so many of those film stories have been continued to this day in sequels or prequels, or remade for modern consumption.

The seventies films, with their penchant for looking head on at difficult problems, wear well over time, perhaps, because we have now lived to see American history repeat itself.  Since the 1970s, we have lived through another U.S. President in disgrace and facing Impeachment (in the 1990s), another controversial and unpopular war, this time in Iraq (in the 2000s), and even another energy crisis in terms of Enron and “rolling black outs” in California.

So like Panasonic’s disco decade slogan, we conclude with this idea from the science fiction and fantasy films of the 1970s:

Just slightly ahead of their time…

Appendix A: Conventions of the Genre

As is the case for any decade and in any genre, many concepts, characters, and themes recur throughout the science fiction and fantasy films of the 1970s. Below is tally of such conventions.  For the trope to be considered for inclusion, it had to recur three times in the span of 1970 – 1979.

Aliens on Earth

In films of this type, aliens become stranded on our little planet, escape to our planet, or secretly wage war here.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)

Beware! The Blob (1972)

The Little Prince (1974)

Escape to Witch Mountain (1975)

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

End of the World (1977)

Alien Prey (1978)

The Alien Factor (1978)

The Cat from Outer Space (1978)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Superman: The Movie (1978)

Bad Medicine

Wherein medical innovation actually jeopardizes human life or creates a crisis.

The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970)

The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1971)

A Clockwork Orange (1972)

The Thing with Two Heads (1972)

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

The Terminal Man (1974)

Shivers (1975)

Sssssssss! (1973)

Embryo (1976)

Coma (1978)

The Boys from Brazil (1978)

Laserblast (1978)

The Brood (1979)

Goldengirl (1979)

Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979)

Big Government

In these dystopian movies, the State is a huge, de-humanizing force that controls every aspect of life, including matters of reproduction, use of resources, dispensing of crime and punishment, and even euthanasia. Sometimes the State in a “Big Government” type SF film is a right-wing (Punishment Park, Rollerball), and sometimes it is left-wing (THX-1138, Z.P.G).

Punishment Park (1971)

THX-1138 (1971)

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

Silent Running (1972)

Z.P.G. (1972)

Soylent Green (1972)

Death Race 2000 (1975)

Rollerball (1975).

Logan’s Run (1976)

Bread and Circuses of the Future

Many post-apocalyptic and dystopian films of the 1970s feature so-called “bread and circuses” gladiatorial-type games. These are often orchestrated by the State to distract and entertain their citizenry while the world crumbles.

Death Race 2000 (1975)

Rollerball (1975)

Deathsport (1978)

Budget Cuts

In which the State, unable to continue funding its projects, cancels operations.

THX-1138 (1971): a dissident played by Robert Duvall escapes the State, but only because it has run out of money for the pursuit.

Silent Running (1972): the fleet of spaceships carrying trees is recalled, their forests are to be destroyed. America can no longer afford the luxury of nature.

Dark Star (1975): McMurdo Air Force base can’t send more radiation shields for the Dark Star in deep space because it is too expensive to do so.

Bugged

In which the threat of the film is insect (or arachnid) in nature.

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

Phase IV (1974)

Bug (1975)

Empire of the Ants (1977)

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)

The Swarm (1978)

Computer Overlords

Wherein a super-computer and/or intelligent machine expresses hostility towards or responsibility for humanity. In some cases, the computer merely decides to operate on its own (usually) secret agenda.

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970): Colossus and Guardian

The Final Programme (1973): Duel

Westworld (1973): The Gunslinger

Zardoz (1974): The Tabernacle

Rollerball (1975): Computer Zero

Demon Seed (1977): Proteus

Alien (1979): Mother

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979): V’ger.

Conspiracy and Cover-Up

In films of this type a cadre of the powerful attempts -- usually unsuccessfully -- to hide a criminal truth from the public

The Crazies (1973)

The Day of the Dolphin (1973)

Soylent Green (1974)

Rollerball (1975)

Future World (1976)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

The Incredible Melting Man (1977)

The Boys from Brazil (1978)

Capricorn One (1978)

The China Syndrome (1978)

Coma (1978)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Blue Sunshine (1978)

Goldengirl (1979)

Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979)

Doppelgangers or Evil Duplicates

Wherein “doubles” or twins of protagonists appear on screen to wreak havoc and sow confusion.

The Stepford Wives (1975)

Future World (1976)

Godzilla vs. The Bionic Monster (1976) (MechaGodzilla)

Demon Seed (1977) (Proteus creates a doppelganger image of Susan to trick visitors to the house.)

Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979).

Dr. Doolittle: Talking Animals

The seventies was a big decade for intelligent animals, and especially ones who could speak English.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

Trog (1970)

Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

The Day of the Dolphin (1973)

The Cat from Outer Space (1978)

Exploding Planets

One oft-seen image of the 1970s science fiction cinema consisted of a whole planet blowing up, or exploding. This catastrophic vision also appeared frequently on Space:1999 (1975 – 1977) on television (in episodes including “The Metamorph” and “New Adam, New Eve.”)

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) (Earth)

Dark Star (1975)

End of the World (Earth)

Star Wars (1977) (Alderaan)

Message from Space (1978) (Jillucia)

Superman: The Movie (1978) Krypton

Battlestar Galactica (1979) (Carillon)

Frozen Solid: Suspended Animation

In films featuring this convention, characters are frozen either accidentally or using state-of-the-art technology, so they can survive long trips to the stars, illness or other occurrences. Sometimes, they are frozen as part of an organ bank for future harvesting.

Sleeper (1973)

Dark Star (1975)

Alien (1979)

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979)

Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979)

Good Guys are Blue; Bad Guys are Red

In which space age weaponry is color-coded to reflect the nature of its owner.

Star Wars (1977): Jedi Light-sabers are blue; Sith light-sabers are Red.

The War in Space (1977): Good guy lasers are blue; bad guy lasers are Red.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979): Starfleet photon torpedoes are Blue; Klingon ones are red.

Lost Worlds

In films of this type, characters from the 20th century discover a prehistoric or lost world, wherein they encounters inhabitants from other ages, and often over-sized monsters as well.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974): Lemuria

The Island at the Top of the World (1974): Astragard

The Land That Time Forgot (1975): Caprona

At the Earth’s Core (1976): Pellucidar

King Kong (1976): Skull Island

The People That Time Forgot (1977): Caprona

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977): Hyperborea

The Lord of the Rings (1978): Middle Earth.

Mallrats

As shopping malls proliferated across Carter’s crisis of confidence America in the 1970s, the science fiction cinema imagined worlds in which they would become the future hub of civilization, or places of outright horror.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Rollerball (1975)

Logan’s Run (1976)

Blue Sunshine (1978)

Military Mistakes

In this convention, the military makes a mistake or nearly makes a mistake that threatens the whole of mankind.

Gas! (1970)

The Andromeda Strain (1971)

The Omega Man (1971)

The Crazies (1973)

Mutant Madness

Many 1970s films feature mutated creatures or people, sometimes the result of nuclear war, or exposure to radioactive or toxic materials.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

Phase IV (1974)

Doomwatch (1976)

Damnation Alley (1979)

Empire of the Ants (1977)

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979)

Stalker (1979)

Nazis: I Hate These Guys

Many 1970s science fiction films featured the return of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler, or the threat of their return, perhaps reckoning that with so many other things going wrong in the decade, a Fourth Reich would be the kicker.

Death Race 2000 (1975)

Wizards (1977)

The Boys from Brazil (1978)

Goldengirl (1979).

The Perfect Being

Several SF films of the disco decade involve the engineering or creation of a super or perfect individual, a possible next step in human evolution.

The Final Programme (1973)

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

Sssssssss (1973)

Phase IV (1974)

Demon Seed (1977)

The Boys from Brazil (1978)

Golden Girl (1979)

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Pollution

In which man’s dumping of garbage, sewage and other pollutants creates an environmental disaster.

No Blade of Grass (1970)

Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)

Doomwatch (1976)

Food of the Gods (1976)

Empire of the Ants (1977)

Prophecy (1979)

Post-Nuclear Meltdown

These are films set in the aftermath of global nuclear war.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

Glen and Randa (1971)

Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

Logan’s Run (1976)

Damnation Alley (1977)

Deathsport (1978)

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979)

The Protest, Demonstration and Riot

Wherein characters practice civil disobedience and decide to march (and carry signs) over a socially-relevant topic that matters dearly to them.  Sometimes, the peaceful expression of free speech turns violent and becomes a riot.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

No Blade of Grass (1970)

Punishment Park (1971)

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

Soylent Green (1973)

The China Syndrome (1978)

Robot Sidekicks

In space-centric movies of the 1970s, heroes are often accompanied by cute robot companions.  Often these robots come in pairs, so they can bicker with one another in the tradition of Star Wars’ R2-D2 and C3PO.

Silent Running (1972): Huey, Duey, and Luey

Star Wars (1977): R2-D2 and C3PO

Message from Space (1978): BEBA-2

Battlestar Galactica (1979): Muffitt

The Black Hole (1979): V.I.N.Cent and Old BOB.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979): Twiki and Dr. Theopolis

The Shape of Things to Come (1979): Sparks

Starcrash (1979): Elle

The Space Race

Films set entirely or partially in the realm of space.

Diamonds are Forever (1971)

Silent Running (1972)

Dark Star (1975)

Star Wars (1977)

Starship Invasions (1977)

War in Space (1977)

Message from Space (1978)

Alien (1979)

Battlestar Galactica (1979)

The Black Hole (1979)

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979)

Moonraker (1979)

The Shape of Things to Come (1979)

Starcrash (1979)

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Telepathy

In films of the 1970s, people – and sometimes aliens – use mental telepathy to communicate.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

A Boy and His Dog (1975)

Escape to Witch Mountain (1975)

Starship Invasions (1977)

Star Wars (1977) (Jedi Mind Trick)

The Alien Factor (1978)

Return from Witch Mountain (1978)

The Black Hole (1979)

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Vulcan mindmeld)

Women’s Studies

These are science fiction films that revolve around feminism, women’s libs, and sex roles in the 1970s.

The Stepford Wives (1975)

Demon Seed (1977)

Coma (1978)

Alien (1979)

The China Syndrome (1979)

Woodward and Bernstein: Hero Journalists

Following the Watergate Scandal, Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein became the nation’s heroes and the models for numerous characters in 1970s SF films.

Futureworld (1976) (Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner)

The People That Time Forgot (1977) (Sarah Douglas)

Capricorn One (1978) (Elliott Gould)

The China Syndrome (1978) (Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas)

Superman: The Movie (1978) (Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder)

The Swarm (1978) (Lee Grant)

Battlestar Galactica (1979) (Jane Seymour)

Appendix B: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of the 1970s Hall of Fame

The actors and actresses tagged below each appeared in at least three science fiction films during the span from 1970 – 1979. The decade’s MVP was surely Roddy McDowall, who appeared in seven genre films during that span.

Yul Brynner: Westworld (1973); The Ultimate Warrior (1975); Futureworld (1976)

Norman Burton: Diamonds are Forever (1971), Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), The Terminal Man (1974).

Sean Connery: Diamonds are Forever (1971), Zardoz (1974), Meteor (1979).

Severn Darden: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), The Day of the Dolphin (1973).

Nigel Davenport: The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970), No Blade of Grass (1970), Phase IV (1974).

Bradford Dillman: Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Bug (1975), The Swarm (1978).

Sarah Douglas: The Final Programme (1974), The People That Time Forgot (1977), Superman: The Movie (1978).

Walter Gotell: The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), The Boys From Brazil (1978), Moonraker (1979).

Pamela Hensley: Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975), Rollerball (1975), Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979).

Charlton Heston: Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), The Omega Man (1971), Soylent Green (1974).

Rick La Parmentier: Rollerball (1975), Star Wars (1977), The People That Time Forgot (1977).

Bernard Lee: Diamonds are Forever (1971), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979).

Christopher Lee: The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), End of the World (1977), Starship Invasions (1977), Return from Witch Mountain (1978).

Desmond Llwelwyn: Diamonds are Forever (1971), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979).

Doug McClure: The Land that Time Forgot (1975), At The Earth’s Core (1976), The People That Time Forgot (1977), Warlords of Atlantis (1979).

Roddy McDowall: Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), Battle for the Planet of the Apes(1973), Embryo (1976), Laserblast (1978), The Cat from Outer Space (1978), The Black Hole (1979).

Lois Maxwell: Diamonds are Forever (1971), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979).

Roger Moore: The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979).

Caroline Munro: At the Earth’s Core (1976), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Starcrash (1979).

David Prowse: A Clockwork Orange (1972), Star Wars (1977), The People That Time Forgot (1977).

John Randolph: Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), King Kong (1976).

Shane Rimmer: Diamonds are Forever (1971), Rollerball (1975), The People That Time Forgot (1977), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).

Natalie Trundy: Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973).

Dick Van Patten: Beware! The Blob (1972), Soylent Green (1973), Westworld (1973).

Robert Vaughn: The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970), Demon Seed (1977), Starship Invasions (1977).

Appendix C: Movie Tag-Lines

1970

“The bizarre world you met in Planet of the Apes was only the beginning…What lies beneath may be the end!” – Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970).

“Invite a few friends over to watch the end of the world!” – Gas-s-s-s-s (1970).

“Can this baby kill?” – The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970).

“Yesterday, they were decent people letting their environment die. Now they are savages, killing to keep themselves alive.” - No Blade of Grass (1970).

“We built a super computer with a mind of its own and now we must fight it for the world!” – Colossus: the Forbin Project (1970).

“Here comes Trog. You'll laugh at yourself for being so scared...but don't laugh at Trog!” – Trog (1970).

1971

“The picture runs 130 minutes. The story covers 96 of the most critical hours in man's history. The suspense will last through your lifetime!” – The Andromeda Strain (1971)

“Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven.” – A Clockwork Orange (1971).

“Meet baby Milo, who has Washington terrified.” – Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971).

“Our environment is doomed!” – Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971).

“This brain wants to LOVE. This brain wants to KILL.” – The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1971).

“Pray for the last man alive. Because he’s not alone.” – The Omega Man (1971)

“The future is here.” – THX-1138 (1971).

1972

“It’s loose again eating everyone.” – Beware! The Blob (1972).

“All new! The revolt of the apes! The most awesome spectacle in the annals of science fiction!” – Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972).

“Earth’s last battle will be fought in space.” – Silent Running (1972).

“Billy Pilgrim lives…from time to time.” – Slaughterhouse-Five (1972).

“They transplanted a white bigot’s head on a soul brother’s body.” – The Thing with Two Heads (1972).

“Smog covers the Earth. The oxygen is depleted. Love is encouraged. But the penalty for birth is death.”- Z.P.G. (1972).

1973

“The final chapter in the incredible Apes saga. The most suspenseful showdown ever filmed as two civilizations battle for the right to inherit what’s left of the Earth.” – Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973).

“Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the President of the United States.” – The Day of the Dolphin (1973).

“A sublime trip to a fine new world.” – Fantastic Planet (1973).

“They’ll love the very life out of your body.” – Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973).

“The most fantastic undersea odyssey ever filmed.” – The Neptune Factor (1973).

“What is the secret of Soylent Green?” – Soylent Green (1973).

“Woody Allen takes a nostalgic look at the future.” – Soylent Green (1973).

1974

“Bombed out in space with a spaced-out bomb.” – Dark Star (1974).

“The future is cancelled!” – The Final Programme (1974).

“The space age sex spoof that is out of this world.” – Flesh Gordon (1974).

“Adventure beyond imagination” – The Island at the Top of the World (1974).

“He never misses his target, and now his target is 007.” – The Man with the Golden Gun (1974).

“Adapt or die.” – Phase IV (1974).

“Harry Benson is a brilliant computer scientist. For three minutes a day, he is violently homicidal.” – The Terminal Man (1974).

“Into a world of eternal life he brought the gift of death.” – Zardoz (1974).

1975

“A rather kinky tale of survival.” – A Boy and His Dog (1975).

“Out of your worst nightmare!” – Bug (1975).

“In the year 2000, hit and run driving is no longer a felony. It’s the national sport!” – Death Race 2000 (1975).

“Escape to the unknown.” – Escape to Witch Mountain (1975).

“Journey to a savage world where time is extinct.” – The Land That Time Forgot (1975).

“The next war will not be fought. It will be played.” – Rollerball (1975).

“Something strange is happening in the town of Stepford.” The Stepford Wives (1975).

“A film of the future.” – The Ultimate Warrior (1975).

1976

“4000 miles to the center of the Earth to a world within a world.” – At the Earth’s Core (1976).

“An ecological nightmare gone berserk!” – Doomwatch (1976).

“From embryo to woman in four-and-a-half weeks.” – Embryo (1976).

“Welcome to the bottom of the food chain.” – Food of the Gods (1976).

“Where the only way to survive is to kill yourself.” – Futureworld (1976).

“Titan against titan! Giant against giant in the most spectacular battle yet!” – Godzilla vs. Megalon (1976).

“The most exciting original motion picture event of all time.”- King Kong (1976).

“Welcome to the 23rd Century: A perfect world of total pleasure. With just one catch…” – Logan’s Run (1976).

“You have to see it to believe it.” – The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).

1977

“We are not alone.” – Close Encounter of the Third Kind (1977).

“You have seen great adventures. You are about to live one.” – Damnation Alley (1977).

“Julie Christie carries the demon seed.” – Demon Seed (1977).

“A living, crawling Hell on Earth.” – Kingdom of the Spiders (1977).

“…come prepared.” – The Incredible Melting Man (1977). “

Nobody Does It Better.” – The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).

“Coming to your galaxy this summer!” – Star Wars (1977).

“We know they are there, advanced beyond our imagination. Why have they come?” – Starship Invasions (1977).

1978

“The mission was a sham. The murders were real.” – Capricorn One (1977).

“A close encounter of the ‘furred’ kind.” – The Cat from Outer Space (1978).

“The seed is planted. Terror grows.” – Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).

“Billy was a kid who got pushed around. Then he found the power.” – Laserblast (1978).

“You’ll believe a man can fly.” – Superman: The Movie (1978).

1979

“In space, no one can hear you scream.” – Alien (1979)

“A journey that begins where everything ends.” – The Black Hole (1979).

“Today, only a handful of people know what it means.  Soon, you will now.” – The China Syndrome (1979).

“These five men have developed, trained and programmed this stunning blonde to accomplish feats no human being has ever done before. They all stand to make a fortune, if they can just keep her together.” – Goldengirl (1979).

“The maximum force of the future.” – Mad Max (1979).

“There’s no place on Earth to hide.” – Meteor (1979).

“Outer space now belongs to 007.” – Moonraker (1979).

“One man against the world.” – Quintet (1979).

“The human adventure is just beginning.” – Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

“A chase through time…to catch Jack the Ripper.” – Time After Time (1979).

“Tonight, they’re all out to get the Warriors.” – The Warriors (1979).

Appendix D: The Five Most De-Humanizing Rituals of 1970s Dystopias

The Great Age of Film Dystopias is unquestionably the 1970s, America’s very own "crisis of confidence" decade.  The Energy Crisis, Watergate, the Vietnam War, the Manson Family, Three Mile Island, Roe vs. Wade and the Iran hostage situation all became part of the national dialogue in the disco-decade.

In terms of film history, those years between 1970 and 1979 also gave the world THX-1138 (1971), Z.P.G. Zero Population Growth (1972), Soylent Green (1973), Zardoz (1974), Death Race 2000 (1975), Logan's Run (1976) and many other examples of the genre.

Almost every 1970s film about dystopian futures shares one element. All these films feature governments or other systems of control that turn human against human; man against his brother.  And they each do so, universally, utilizing some kind of futuristic technology or futuristic application of technology.

These films might thus be viewed as speculative endeavors and also as warnings about the shape of things to come; of future science or technology "run amok."  In all these future societies listed below, the government has created a new social "ritual" (a continental race, a form of legally-sanctioned punishment, a religious service, a public service, etc.) that actually runs counter to all that moral human beings currently hold dear.

So without further description, here are The Five Most De-Humanizing Rituals of 1970s Dystopian Cinema, by my assessment.

5.  THX Visits A Unichapel in THX-1138 (1971).

In the future world of THX-1138, the act of going to Church and sharing worship with a community has been deliberately subverted by the government.  Single-serving Unichapel kiosks instead service the worship needs of a vast subterranean city's population.  Although decorated with images of Jesus Christ, these unichapels offer platitudes and "Blessings of the Masses" rather than legitimate spiritual guidance.  In fact, the Unichapels serve as the primary surveillance tool for the State because here citizens can unload all of their secrets, and thus Big Brother learns of them.  Off your drugs?  Falling in love with your roommate?  Now the State knows it all. The Unichapel confession is so upsetting and de-humanizing a ritual because it turns the focus of religion away from the needs and aspiration of a community and doing good deeds to a more selfish plateau.  The Unichapel sits just one.  There's no room for the community in it.  Worse, in adopting the "confessional" approach, the Unichapel actively turns penitents into informants.  And those informants may actually be testifying against themselves.

4. Make Thy Neighbor Suffer: Z.P.G. (1973).

Happen to know anyone in the neighborhood who may be in violation of the World Deliberation Council's Zero Birth Edict? Well, if so, just telephone the police force and it'll send a futuristic helicopter over to drop an air-tight inflatable tent over the violators (usually a Mother, father and infant). Trapped in the death tent, these nasty law-breakers will expire of asphyxiation over the next 24 hours, and you get to see it close-up since the tent is transparent!    Another bonus: for doing your civic duty, the State provides you extra food rations.

Again, the idea here is of a citizen being turned into a "rat" to squeal on his or her neighbors.  The State not only encourages such spying and informing, it provides incentive in the form of rations. Perhaps even more disturbing is the notion that an illegal child or infant could be punished for his very existence.  Like many dystopian overlords, the State in Z.P.G. wants to numb people to the idea of killing for a so-called "common good."

Once more, something immoral (the murder of families...) is ritualized; part of the legal law-enforcement process; and a duty of every citizen.

3. The Trans-continental race: Death Race 2000 (1975).

In the year 2000, in the United Provinces of America, the President decrees that the trans-continental race is "the American way of life," "no-holds barred."

But drivers in this race compete to become the new American champion by running down innocent pedestrians.  They do so explicitly for points.  A female pedestrian is worth 10 points, a teenager is worth 40 points, children under the age of 12 are worth 70, and senior citizens carry a whopping 100 points. So, around the country, TV viewers watch with blood-thirsty glee as their fellow citizens are run down by the death racers.

This set-up is no doubt meant by the filmmakers as the equivalent of gladiatorial games and Roman bread and circuses.  While the President luxuriates in foreign palaces and the American economy stumbles after the "Crash of 79," the public is distracted by bloody road games.  The Running Man (1987) is a variation on this theme as well.  But think about it: a favorite weekly TV show is nothing if not a "ritual," and the bloody ritual of the cross-continent "death" race is essentially murder as entertainment; as must-see TV. ?

2.)"Going Home:” Soylent Green (1973).

In the overpopulated, undernourished city of New York in 2020 where 20 million people are unemployed, you can have privacy and anything else you desire...but you have to die to get it.

In particular, government centers (called sleep shops in the literary version of the material) euthanize the citizenry.  But hey -- before you die, you can live like a king and enjoy your favorite music and a montage of lovely images.  It's like Sarah Palin's Death Panels meets an IMAX theater.  Who wouldn't want to enjoy that?  At least once, anyway.

Again, in order to solve desperate problems (food shortages and overpopulation), the State has devoted itself to the death of its very citizenry.  It's highly disturbing to imagine that the only way to enjoy life's pleasures in this future world is to embrace death.  And death by sleep shop is a sanctioned ritual of this future world.

1.) "Carousel:" Logan's Run (1976).

In the shopping-mall, sex-on-demand, plastic-surgery-on-demand 23rd century of Logan's Run, you can have anything your heart desires...except your thirtieth birthday.

On your "Last Day," by order of the computer that runs the City of Domes, all would-be-30-year olds must report for "Carousel."  And what is Carousel?  On the surface, it appears to be a joyous religious ritual in which the old folks compete for re-birth or "renewal" by floating to the top of the heap in a weird gravity pool with glowing lights.

In reality, the assembled citizenry of the city watch and cheer in the stadium as Last Day participants are disintegrated by ceiling-mounted laser devices.

Carousel represents the most hideous and de-humanizing idea of this dystopia.  It is state-mandated murder (or population control), but Carousel is even more immoral than the sleep shops of Soylent Green because it masquerades as a mystical, religious tradition.  Thus citizens are uninformed, and believed they are witnessing re-incarnation, not disintegration.  Here, it's the deception that is so ugly.  The people of the City of Domes are so ignorant that they cheer for death.  Of course, in the case of Logan's Run, at least there's the Love Shop (and lots and lots of sex...) before you have to die young…

Appendix E: Then vs. Now

There is no better way to chart the influence of 1970s cinema than to look at the titles which spawned sequels, remakes, re-boots, and knock-offs in the following decades. The chart below explores this “then” vs. “now” dynamic.

Then

Now

The Andromeda Strain (1971)

Outbreak (1995)

Contagion (2012)

The Omega Man (1971)

I am Legend (2007)

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

Rise of the Planet of the Apes  (2011)

A Clockwork Orange (1972)

Natural Born Killers (1994)

Solaris (1972)

Solaris (2002)

Death Race 2000 (1975)

Death Race (2008)

Escape to Witch Mountain (1975)

Race to Witch Mountain (2009)

Rollerball (1975)

Rollerball (2002)

The Stepford Wives (1975)

The Stepford Wives (2004)

Embryo (1976)

Splice (2010)

King Kong (1976)

King Kong (2005)

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

Star Wars (1977)

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (200), Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005).

The Lord of the Rings (1978)

The Lord of the Rings (2001 – 2003)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Body Snatchers (1990), The Invasion (2007).

Superman: The Movie (1978)

Man of Steel (2013)

Alien (1979)

Aliens (1987), Alien3 (1992), Alien Resurrection (1997), Prometheus (2012).

Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979)

The Island (2005)

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Star Trek (2009)

Appendix F:

The Ten Best Science Fiction Films of the 1970s

The following, ordered ten to one, are the author’s selections for the best science fiction films of the 1970s. It looks like a schizophrenic list, running the gamut from post-apocalyptic brutality (No Blade of Grass) to “you’ll believe a man can fly” optimism (Superman: The Movie), but it was, after all, a schizophrenic decade.

10.              No Blade of Grass (1970)

09.              Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

08.              Soylent Green (1973)

07.              Silent Running (1972)

06.              Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

05.              The Andromeda Strain (1971)

04.              Solaris (1972)

03.              Superman: The Movie (1978)

02.              Alien (1979)

01.              Star Wars (1977)

Selected Bibliography

Books

Bailey, Beth and Farber, David. America in the 70s. Lawrence, Kansas: The University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Baxter, John. Science Fiction in the Cinema. New York: Coronet Communications, 1970.

Frank, Alan. Sci-Fi Now. London: Octopus Books, 1978.

Frum, David. How We Got Here, The ‘70s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse). New York: Basic Books, 2000.

Hardy, Phil, Editor. The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1995.

Lindsey, Hal. The Late Great Planet Earth. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1970.

Meyers, Richards. The Great Science Fiction Films. Citadel Press, 1983.

Muir, John Kenneth. The Films of John Carpenter. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company Inc., Publishers, 2000.

Muir, John Kenneth. Horror Films of the 1970s. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company Inc., Publishers, 2002.

Parish, Robert James and Michael R. Pitts. The Great Science Fiction Pictures. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977

Pfeiffer, Lee and Lisa, Phillip. The Incredible World of 007, A Citadel Press Book, 1992.

Richards, Gregory B. Science Fiction Movies. New York City: Gallery Books, 1984.

Rovin Jeff, A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1975.

Rubin, Steven Jay. The James Bond Films, a Behind-the-Scenes History. New York: Arlington House, 1983.

Stanley, John. Revenge of the Creature Features Movie Guide. Pacifica, CA: Creatures at Large Press,1988.

Von Gunden, Kenneth, and Stuart H. Stock. Twenty All-Time Great Science Fiction Films. New York: Arlington House, 1982.

Zinman, David. Fifty Grand Movies of the 1960s and 1970s. New York: Crown, 1986.

Periodicals

Delson, James. “Interview with Ralph Bakshi.” Fantastic Films, February 1979, pages 20–25; 46.

Mitchell, Steve. “Directing the Black Hole.” Fantastic Films, February 1980, pages 24–33.

Muir, John Kenneth. “The Running Man.” Cinescape, January/February 2001, pages 60 -65.

Muir, John Kenneth. “1975: A Special Effects Odyssey,” Filmfax, February/March 2002, pages 42 – 51.

Index

(Bold highlighting indicates a photograph)

A

Adams, Brooke 342

Adams, Maud 187, 230

Agutter, Jenny 260

Allen, Woody 154-156, 319, 447

Altman, Robert 15, 405-407

Alien 17, 30, 365, 440, 441, 443, 449, 453, 454

Alien Factor 320, 321, 439, 443

Alien Prey 321-323, 439

Anderson, Michael 217, 260

Andromeda Strain, The 27, 38, 70, 72-75, 98, 167, 194, 420, 421, 442, 453, 454

Anton, Susan 387, 388

At the Earth’s Core 41, 42, 241-243, 298, 299, 441, 444, 448

B

Bach, Barbara 303, 304

Baker, Rick 128, 256, 258, 289, 20, 306

Baker, Tom 179, 180

Battle for the Planet of the Apes 16, 20, 24, 55, 83, 137-142, 441-445, 447

Battlestar Galactica 15, 36, 121, 168, 319, 370-372, 385, 441, 443

Beneath the Planet of the Apes 19, 20, 24, 48, 50, 51-55, 84, 110, 141, 298, 441-446

Beware! The Blob 103-105, 439, 445, 446

Bioethics 26-28, 193

Black Hole, The 30, 37, 288, 289, 331, 373-379, 443, 444, 449, 451

Bolling, Tiffany 295, 296

Boorman, John 195-197

Borgnine, Ernest 151, 152, 374

Bowie, David 265, 266

Boy and his Dog, A 202-205, 443, 447

Boys from Brazil, The 28, 33, 324-326, 387, 439, 440, 442, 444

Braeden, Eric 57, 80

Brando, Marlon 44, 46, 293, 356

Bridges, Jeff 256

Brood, The 15, 28, 379-381, 439

Brynner, Yul 166-169, 170, 236, 237, 280, 282, 444

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century

Bug 205-207

Bujold, Genevieve 27, 332, 338

Burroughs, Edgar Rice 41, 42, 226, 242

C

Caan, James 229-231

Capricorn One 32, 327-329, 331, 328, 440, 443, 448

Carpenter, John 207, 208, 210, 267, 287, 431

Carradine, David 211, 212, 335, 336

Carrera, Barbara 28, 245, 293

Carter, Jimmy 12, 16, 49, 240, 271, 359, 364, 371, 396

Cartwright, Veronica 342, 344, 366

Cat from Outer Space, The 330, 331, 434, 441, 444, 448

China Syndrome, The 33, 329, 385-387, 440, 443, 444

Clockwork Orange, The 15, 21, 22, 28, 105-107, 194, 439, 441, 444, 446

Close Encounters of the Third Kind 16, 37, 38, 46, 272-275, 439-440

Clouse, Robert 236

Coburn, James 387

Collins, Joan 284, 285

Colossus: The Forbin Project 29, 56-59, 74, 440, 446

Coma 27, 33, 63, 245, 332-335, 338, 400, 439, 440, 443

Connery, Sean 23, 44, 45, 76, 77, 194-196, 198, 218, 394, 395

Connor, Kevin 41, 218, 226, 227, 242, 298

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes 16, 19, 20, 108-114, 129, 170, 439, 441, 443, 445, 446, 453

Corman, Roger 24-26, 60, 212, 335, 444

Crazies, The 142-144, 440, 442

Cronenberg, David 28, 268, 269, 380

Culp, Robert 387

Cushing, Peter 241, 242, 306

D

Damnation Alley 14, 24-26, 276-279, 307, 308, 442, 445

Danner, Blythe 249, 250, 443

Dark Star 170, 200, 207-211, 366, 440, 441, 443, 447

Day of the Dolphin, The 145-147, 440, 441, 444, 447

De Laurentiis, Dino 256, 258

De Palma, Brian 329, 337-340, 347

Death Race 2000 26, 211-215, 320, 335, 336, 439, 442, 447, 450, 451, 453

Deathsport 14, 26, 335-336, 439, 442

Demon Seed  26, 28, 30, 74, 280-283, 440, 442, 443, 445, 448

Dern, Bruce 31, 86, 87, 101, 117, 118

Diamonds are Forever 44, 45, 76-78, 189, 399, 443-445

Dillman, Bradford 80, 81, 205, 206, 444

Doc Savage 43, 175, 216-220, 444

Dohler, Don 320

Doohan, James 38, 419

Doomwatch 31, 47, 115, 243-244, 442, 448

Donner, Richard 16, 46, 355-357

Douglas, Kirk 337, 339, 340

Dugan, Dennis 429

Duvall, Robert 96, 99, 440

Dykstra, John 35, 36, 306, 371

Dystopia 12, 14, 21-23, 26, 28, 32, 2-94, 96, 99, 106, 111, 118, 119, 154-158, 210, 230, 261, 264, 308, 311, 389, 390, 401, 407, 432, 438, 439, 450-452

E

Eisenmann, Ike 221, 222, 353

Ekland, Britt 187, 188

Ellison, Harlan 203, 204, 419

Ely, Ron 43, 216, 217

Embryo 28, 245, 246, 439, 444, 448, 453

Empire of the Ants 31, 284-286, 293, 440, 442

End of the World 286-288, 439, 441, 444, 446

Energy Crisis 13, 14, 16, 42, 136, 188, 213, 218, 256, 338, 438, 450

Escape from the Planet of the Apes 20, 55, 79, 80, 81-84, 441, 444-446

Escape to Witch Mountain 221-223, 353, 439,443, 447, 453

Evans, Maurice 51

F

Fantastic Planet 147-149, 447

Fawcett, Farrah 260, 388

Fleming, Ian 44, 76, 77, 175, 188, 303, 398

Flesh Gordon 177, 178, 447

Final Programme, The 30, 173-176, 440, 442, 444, 447

Fisher, Carrie 34, 306

Food of the Gods 31, 247-249, 285, 286, 293, 442, 448

Fonda, Peter 249-251, 442

Ford, Gerald 136, 172, 213, 218, 240

Ford, Harrison 306

Forster, Robert 37, 373-374

Franciscus, James 51, 52

Franklin, Pamela 247

The Fury 337-340

Futureworld 30, 170, 249-252, 443, 444

G

Gas-s-s-s-s!  60-62

Giant Spider Invasion, The 223-224

Gerard, Gil 36, 156, 382, 383

Gibson, Mel 389-391

Giger, H.R. 16, 40, 367

Godzilla vs. The Bionic Monster 46, 288, 440

Godzilla vs. Hedorah 31, 46, 114-116, 254, 289, 439, 442, 446

Godzilla vs. Megalon 46, 253, 254, 448

Goldblum, Jeff 33, 342

Goldengirl 28, 387, 388, 439, 440, 442, 449

Goldsmith, Jerry 80, 260, 276, 277, 325, 328, 333, 360

Glen and Randa 25, 84-86, 442

Gordon, Bert I. 31, 247, 248, 285, 286

Gortner, Marjoe 247, 415

Gray, Erin 383

Grier, Rosey 28, 128

Grodin, Charles 256

Guillerman, John 256

Guinness, Alec 306, 352, 410

H

Hackman, Gene 46, 356

Hagman, Larry 103-104

Hamill, Mark 306, 307, 315

Harrison, Linda 50, 51

Hensley, Pamela 217, 220, 230, 383, 444

Heston, Charlton 16, 19, 22, 23, 25, 50-52, 88, 139, 157-161, 298, 444

Hill, Arthur 72, 73, 250

Hudson, Rock 245

Hunter, Kim 51, 79, 80

Hurt, John 348, 366, 368

I

Incredible Melting Man, The 289-291, 440, 448

The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant  86, 87, 128, 164, 439, 446

The Island of Dr. Moreau 292-294, 453

Invasion of the Bee Girls 148-151

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 32, 33, 338, 341-345, 439, 440, 448, 453, 454

Irving, Amy 337, 338

Island at the Top of the World, The 41, 182-184, 441, 447

J

Jewison, Norman 230

Jones, L.Q. 203, 04

Jurgens, Curt 393

Johnson, Don 202-204

K

Kaufman, Philip 342-345

Keaton, Diane 155

Kelley, DeForest 419

Khambatta, Persis 419

Kidder, Margot 356, 359, 443

Kiel, Richard 303, 398

King Kong (1933) 69

King Kong (1976) 42, 43, 46 67, 69, 183, 239, 25, 255-259, 441, 448, 453

King Kong (2005) 453

Kingdom of the Spiders 295-297, 440, 448

Kotto, Yaphet 366, 368

Kubrick, Stanley 21, 22, 105, 106, 210

Kurtz, Gary 306

L

Land that Time Forgot, The 40-42, 152, 183, 225, 226-228, 244, 298, 299, 441, 444, 447

Lange, Jessica 42

Lansing, Robert 285

Larson, Glen 36, 371, 372

Laserblast 346-348, 439, 444, 448

Lee, Christopher 95, 187, 286-287, 311-313, 353, 444

Levin, Ira 234, 325

Little Prince, The 184-186, 439

Logan’s Run 14, 23, 29, 30, 93, 99, 227, 232, 259-264, 277, 308, 343 400, 439, 441, 442, 450, 451 453

Lord of the Rings 43, 316, 317, 348 – 350, 441, 453

Lucas, George 25, 33, 34, 36, 95-97, 99, 271, 277, 306-310, 366, 371, 434

Lynley, Carol 410

M

Mad Max 389-393, 449

Man who Fell to Earth, The 265-267, 322, 439 448

Man with the Golden Gun, The 13, 45, 187-189, 218, 289, 444, 447

Matheson, Richard 25, 88, 89

McClure, Doug 41, 42, 225, 226, 241, 242, 298, 444

McDowall, Roddy 19, 20, 55, 79, 80, 108, 109, 112, 138, 139, 245, 246, 330, 346, 374, 444

McDowell, Malcolm 21, 22, 105-107, 426

Meredith, Burgess 103, 104

Message from Space 318, 351-353, 442, 443

Meteor 15, 394-397, 411, 412, 444, 449

Milland, Ray 128, 222, 353, 371

Mind of Mr. Soames, The 15, 28, 62-64, 246, 408, 439, 444

Mimieux, Yvette 151, 152, 373, 374

Moonraker 37, 45, 46, 304, 305, 397– 399, 426, 443, 444, 449

Moore, Roger 13, 36, 37, 45, 78, 187-189, 218, 303, 393, 395, 444

Morse, Barry 409, 410

Munro, Caroline 179, 181, 241, 242, 303, 414, 415, 416, 444

N

Nelson, Gary 37, 374

Nelson, Ralph 245

Neptune Factor, The 151-153, 447

Newman, Paul 405, 407, 408

Nicholls, Nichelle 38, 419

Nimoy, Leonard 33, 38, 342, 343, 418, 419

Nixon, Richard12, 71, 92, 94, 143, 156, 172, 218, 251, 323, 338, 339

No Blade of Grass  14, 16, 25, 31, 65-67, 94, 115, 238, 442, 444, 454

Nuclear Power 14, 115, 193, 361, 386

O

O’Bannon, Dan 207-209, 366

Olivier, Laurence 325

The Omega Man 25, 88-90, 308, 442, 444, 446, 453

Overpopulation 14, 22, 31, 57, 59, 94, 261, 451

P

Peck, Gregory 28, 325

People That Time Forgot, The 297-299, 441, 443-445

Peppard, George 25, 276

Phase IV 25, 31, 189-192, 440, 442, 444, 447

Pleasence, Donald 96, 222

Plummer, Christopher 415

Pollution 26, 30, 31, 46, 65, 67, 85, 94, 114-116, 164, 184, 243, 244, 254, 285, 288, 403, 442

Post, Ted 50, 51

Price, Vincent 89

Prophecy 402-404, 442

Prowse, David 35, 270, 298, 306, 444

Punishment Park 21, 22, 92, 95, 143, 439, 442

Q

Quintet 405 – 409, 449

R

Rampling, Charlotte 23, 195, 196

Reeve, Christopher 46, 355, 356, 359, 443

Reid, Kate 72, 73

Return from Witch Mountain 353, 354, 443, 444

Revenge of Nature 206, 296, 297

Richards, Kim 221, 22, 353

Robards, Jason 203

Rollerball (1975) 229-233, 312, 360, 439, 440, 441, 444, 445, 447, 453

Rollerball (2002) 453

Romero, George 143

Ross, Katharine 233-234, 360, 362

S

Scott, George C. 145, 146

Scott, Ridley 16, 17, 39, 158, 365, 366, 369, 437

Segal, George 192

Shape of Things to Come, The 36, 293, 409-411, 426, 428, 443, 450

Shatner, William 31, 38, 295, 296, 419

Shire, Talia 402, 404

Shivers 28, 267-269, 439

Silent Running 31, 38, 94, 101, 116-121, 43, 440, 443, 446, 454

Skerritt, Tom 17, 366

Slaughterhouse Five 126, 126

Sleeper 154-156, 441

Solaris 121-124, 190, 411, 413, 453, 454

Soylent Green 11, 14, 16, 22, 31, 157-162, 261, 300, 439, 4443, 444, 446, 450, 454

Space:1999 12, 410, 420, 441

Spielberg, Steven 37, 78, 201, 272, 273, 437

Spy Who Loved Me, The 45, 152, 187, 178, 302-305, 398, 444, 445, 448

Stalker 411-413, 442

Stallone, Sylvester 212, 213

Stamp, Terence 28, 44, 62, 64, 356

Stanton, Harry Dean 366

Star Trek: The Motion Picture 34, 37, 38, 74, 363, 418-425, 437, 440-443, 449, 453, 454

Star Wars 15, 16, 22, 23, 26, 30, 34, 35-39, 42-45, 96, 97, 120, 218, 252, 261, 270, 271, 299, 301, 305-311

Starcrash 36, 414-417, 426, 443, 444

Starship Invasions 311-313, 443, 445, 448

Stepford Wives, The 16, 233-236, 251, 282, 325, 335, 440, 443, 447, 453

Superman: The Movie 16, 44, 46, 218, 355-360, 385, 407, 439, 441, 443, 448, 453, 454

Sutherland, Donald 33, 341, 342

Swarm, The 14, 150, 360-362, 395, 440, 443, 444

T

THX-1138 22, 34, 93, 94, 95-100, 439, 440, 446, 450

The Terminal Man 15, 27, 167, 192-194, 254, 333, 439, 444, 447

TheThing with Two Heads, The

Time After Time 293, 42-429, 449

Trumball, Douglas 31, 38, 73, 117-118

U

Ultimate Warrior, The 25, 236 – 238,444, 448

Unidentified Flying Oddball 429, 430

V

Vaughn, Robert 28, 62, 64, 311-313, 445

Villechaize, Herve 187

Vietnam War 14, 16, 21, 49, 60, 92, 110, 136, 144, 196, 213, 271, 323, 328, 438, 450

Vincent, Jan Michael 25, 276-277

Von Sydow, Max 236

Vonnegut, Kurt 125, 126

W

War in Space, The 313-315, 441

Warner, David 426

Warriors, The 430 – 435, 449

Watergate Scandal 12, 13, 16, 32, 33, 102, 106, 147, 172, 218, 244, 251, 273, 274, 328, 329, 333, 338, 339, 342, 344, 345, 353, 358, 359, 366, 373, 386, 396, 401, 425, 428, 443, 450

Watkins, Peter 21, 92

Weaver, Sigourney 17, 39, 365, 366, 369

Wells, H.G.36, 247-248, 285, 293, 410, 426-428

Williams, Cindy

Williams, John 46, 273, 306, 310, 338, 339, 356

Wise, Robert 27, 38, 70, 72-74, 98, 167, 363, 419, 420, 425

Wizards 8, 43, 315-317, 349, 442

Woodward and Bernstein 16, 32, 214, 257, 359, 377, 386, 443

Y

York, Michael 23, 260, 261, 293

Z

Zardoz 23, 194-199, 442, 444, 447, 450

Z.P.G. (Zero Population Growth) 23, 93, 94, 130 -134, 439, 447, 450, 451

Zerbe, Anthony 88

Table of Contents

- Other Books

- An Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of the 1970s

- The History of Science Fiction Films in the 1970s

- Reviewing the Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies of the 1970s

- 1970
- 1971
- 1972
- 1973
- 1974
- 1975
- 1976
- 1977
- 1978
- 1979
- Appendices
- Selected Bibliography
- Index