Hmmmm… I’d planned to ignore this flick until I found out Spike Jonze was behind the wheel, so on the list of stuff to see it goes. It’s hard to not watch anything the man works on and not be impressed and moved – this one looks pretty timely on a few fronts (although JP looks like a cross between the late Ernie Kovacs and Breaking Bad’s Walter White here). Well, we’ll see what’s what soon enough… if anything, it’ll be visually amazing like the director’s other works (well, not counting his appearance in that Jackass movie from a few years back)…
Was Invasion of the Bee Girls a modern feminist film disguised as a stupidly sexy 70’s exploitation flick? I’d say hell no, but for all its nudity and pervy middle-aged to old coots getting bedded and bumped off by a bevy of shapely babes with the power to kill any guy they mate with, there’s probably a message in there somewhere. I actually remember seeing this one as a kid one afternoon when it popped up on TV as a heavily edited (but still ridiculously racy) flick and it being a pretty hot topic at school the next day.
As I’ve “matured” and checked out the uncut version a few times since (hey, ONLY for research purposes!), it’s clear that all those hot and bothered guys (and a few gals) knew a while lot more about the birds and the bees that I did at that tender age…
Another favorite sci-fi flick from my younger days (OK, it still holds up today on a few fronts), Kurt Neumann’s 1957 film KRONOS is a really well-made and fun cheapie that benefits from some prescient scripting, pretty decent effects work (some nice for the era animation of the titular massive alien energy accumulator in a few quick shots), a snappy running time and a few unintentional chuckles from the usual overacting cast members emoting with relish about the over-sized and unstoppable alien threat of the week. Anyway, back in 2011 I was dinking around in MS Paint and had a sudden flash of inspiration to do a goofy tribute image and here you go. I guess it’s technically a piece of “fan art” although I have to chuckle at the “fan” part as it’s not exactly something I do on a regular basis. Yeah, I guess this gets added to the Random Film of the Week pile at some point. Feel free to check it out, as yep – it comes highly recommended.
One of those crazy 50’s “B” sci-fi/horror flicks that sticks in the mind thanks to the performance of its lead, The Indestructible Man is also one of those forgotten gems that modern audiences would most likely laugh out of a theater or change the channel after a few minutes of dialog during a slower moment. Of course, I grew up seeing this flick countless times on TV, so it was a formative part of my misspent youth. Combining sci-fi, horror and film noir elements and featuring a creepy performance from Lon Chaney Jr., this is one of those short, snappy little movies that makes for a nice jolt as well as few unintentional laughs.
Chaney plays Charles “Butcher” Benton, a convicted killer and thief who’s been given the gas chamber treatment, but has his dead body illegally sold to a scientist for research purposes. Of course, it being the 1950’s and a “B” movie and all, that scientist happens to be studying the effects of electricity and his own chemical concoctions on dead subjects and ends up quite thrilled when Benton is brought back to the land of the living. Naturally, when you beef up a dead man with voltage and vitamins, his first response will be to kill you and your assistant then take off with intent of wiping out just about anyone who sent him behind bars. Maybe that stupid scientist should have invented a time machine so he could pop up today and read this post, then zap back and get better prepared…
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…
So, the great horror/sci-fi/fantasy/ author Richard Matheson passed away last Sunday and I’ll have to admit that I hadn’t thought much about him lately until a few months back when on of Jack Arnold’s best films popped up on TCM at an ungodly hour and I sat glued to the TV once more with a fine bit of top shelf “B” movie bliss . I hadn’t seen The Incredible Shrinking Man in a few years, so I was glad to stop the clock on the work I was doing and spend a little time catching up with a few old friends.
Matheson and an uncredited Richard Alan Simmons wrote the film (from Matheson’s own novel The Shrinking Man) and unlike a lot of 50’s sci-fi featuring gigantic radioactive mutated versions of normal creatures, it’s lead character Robert Scott Carey (a great performance by Grant Williams) who gets scaled down in size after his radiation exposure. I recall the novel was even darker in tone and had some scenes that certainly wouldn’t fly past the censors of the era, but I’ll let the readers in the crowd find all that out on their own time.
Spoiler:Sunshine has a “happy” ending. End spoiler. I had to put that up front because Danny Boyle’s excellent 2007 sci-fi film is a layered downward emotional spiral with some solid performances throughout. The story pretty much sets up the fact that this is going to be terminally gloomy stuff (despite the positive sounding title): the crew of the Icarus II sets out from a suffering Earth to relight a dying Sun with a massive nuclear explosion seven years after the first mission fails. Yeah, that’s not your average blockbuster summer comedy hit storyline, that’s for damn sure…
As Icarus II gets closer to its target, it’s discovered that first Icarus didn’t actually disappear as much as become something of The Old Dark House in space (minus any comedic elements). When the new ship links up with the old in order to snag its bomb and it’s discover what happened to its crew, things get more than a little strange as a few shocking elements come into play…
When 2001: A Space Odyssey set the bar for visual effects back in 1968, movie studios around the globe kept trying to reach that level of polish and for the most part failed miserably. Outside of a few major and minor sci-fi hits and misses in theaters (Marooned, Journey to the Far Side of the Sun and Silent Running pop off the top of my head) and on TV (those bits of Gerry Andersen’s UFO and Space: 1999 that work), it wasn’t until the release of Star Wars that a major studio film had a visual aesthetic genre fans could glom onto almost universally for sheer “wow” factor. Granted, when Logan’s Run was in its production phase, I’m betting it sure looked “futuristic” to the very hard working teams building that huge model of the city and domes, the set and costume designers and yes, the visual effects crew, actors and director. Hell, it certainly impressed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, as a special Oscar was awarded the film at the 1977 Academy Awards. Of course, George Lucas and ILM made that award all theirs the next year in a film not predicted to do all that well by a few people (Lucas included)…
Still, that didn’t help matters much in my case, as even as a wee bairn of eight years of age, I knew Logan’s Run was going to be enjoyably junky thanks to the TV commercials and rainbow on those posters I saw in subway stations. Interestingly enough, it actually popped up on TV about a year later (an amazingly fast time for a major Hollywood film), and while I was fascinated by some elements, to my mind it still looked cheap and the story (which I didn’t know was even more edited for TV) was hard to follow. Naturally, even though I didn’t like the film much, I ended up watching every episode of the 1977-78 CBS TV series and just like what happened with Planet of the Apes on the network, it managed to be dumber than the film, but easier to follow once I figured out that nothing would happen to the leads because they needed to be around for next week’s show. But I digress… Continue reading →
So, the Xbox One. Yeah, THAT Xbox One. Did you know it has the computational POWER of ten Xbox 360’s? No? Well, Microsoft says so and while it’s probably true as the sky is blue (under certain circumstances) and the sun always rises even if you can’t see it (always, so far). Amusingly enough… I was planning to post that clip above BEFORE this article appeared (you WILL laugh at some point while reading it, trust me), but I got busy tinkering on a review and man, I feel as if they’re writing my lame comedy material for me and I don’t even OWN a Kinect.
At this point in damage control mode, you have to wonder when they’ll just start sending out white or black vans rolling around neighborhoods to grab random strangers off the street and MAKE them play a game just to show off how much POWER their system has. POWER, I tells ya… Granted, you still can’t use it offline unless you’re online first (subject to change based on day of the week and a update to the licensing agreement) and that new Kinect is always on even if you shut it “off”, but POWER! Wondrous working POWER… *Crack*,BOOOOOM!!!
I didn’t get around to seeing The Matrix until its first sequel hit theaters, but when I did, I was surprised that it was so close thematically and visually it was to Dark City, Alex Proyas’ complex and visually stunning sci-fi film. For me, despite the lack of a more polished story, a reliance on mostly practical effects and a smaller budget, the film has a richer and more unique look than The Matrix that borrows from all over but manages to work almost perfectly.
Silent, film noir and more modern films get multiple nods, there’s a decidedly comic book aesthetic to the action scenes with “panel” compositions to some shots and everything’s wrapped into a “pay attention!” plot that makes for a film requiring multiple viewings to appreciate. Of course, other than loving the look and those freaky bald Strangers doing their thing (The teeth clicking? Scary and hilarious simultaneously), I didn’t much care for the film the first time I saw the original theatrical cut…
"DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!" 