Oops, I forgot to run this trailer yesterday, so here you go. Only a few more days to go before those theater seats get packed in by the drooling mobs of kaiju fanatics and their mental checklists, so expect to see the Internet world even more flooded than usual with Comic Book Guy-like rants and/or raves about what works and what some of these smarty-pantses think was done “wrong” by Del Toro and company in making their summer epic. Pass the oversize grain of salt, puh-leeze! Meh, some people are never happy (and that’s because if they ever got up in the air on a crane to direct a shot, they’d probably poop themselves and pass out from fear of heights.
I can probably tell you the long and boring story of my first pinball machine memories (1972,Gottlieb’s Batter Up, first version, but I also vaguely recall playing Central Park a few years earlier at Coney Island while standing on a rickety wooden crate), but then you’d be fast asleep and drooling in front of your computer instead of up-voting Phantom Compass’ (and friends!) innovative Rollers of the Realm on Steam Greenlight.
The team is working on what’s turning out to be a superb genre-blending mix of old and new ideas that features some excellent pinball action, decent writing and so far, what’s looking to be the makings of an instant hit that absolutely deserves to be on as many platforms as possible. I signed up to get access to a playable version as soon as I heard this was in development, that pre-beta access popped up in my inbox on Friday and after playing the first chapter a few times, I’m definitely recommending anyone even remotely interested in pinball, RPGs and puzzle games to take a nice long look at this one…
I hadn’t even thought about Ivan Tors until a weird dream a few weeks back and again today when I was in the shower and for some reason, images from “gog” popped into my head. More precisely, one of the two robots spinning around with its arms out, damaged yet still quite dangerous. Yeah, I think of oddball stuff in the shower – don’t you? No, not THAT kind of stuff… this is a family show! OK, not ALL the time, but you get the point (jab, jab!)…
Anyway, before you ask a second time (and haven’t yet looked to the left at that poster – it helps to read this site while fully awake most of the time), “gog” was the third film in Tors’ really outstanding Office of Scientific Investigation (OSI) trilogy of “hard” science fiction films:
1953’s The Magnetic Monster and 1954’s Riders to the Starsmade up the first two chapters and all three make up one of the most intelligent set of sci-fi flicks of the 1950’s. Tors himself was dedicated to making “realistic” genre films and all three succeed today despite many dated elements. That said, one does need to give films such as this a bit of a “pass” in terms of complaining about their cheesier or not so accurate aspects as they were predating and predicting many things science was still figuring out. I also give them a special hall pass gold star because audiences of the time got three films in two years that didn’t insult their intelligence and probably ended up as interesting for adults as it was for the kids who probably thought this was another raygun and robot quickie.
While I’ll most likely do a separate Random Film of the Week post on all three in the future, I’m going to go on ahead and recommend these (in order, of course!) if you’ve never seen them before. I think those of you with an eye for detail and an ear for good stories well told will get a kick out of this trilogy. Given that remaking them is probably never going to happen (although, it would be amazing to see these as period pieces rather than updated into today’s world), you may as well take these in as they’re meant to be seen and smile at the things that make you think a little more than you’d usually care to in a “B” movie…
"DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!" 