Mystery Monday! Hong Kong cartoon animals

When I thought of this feature, it was obvious I was going to have a lot of potential material to work with. I decided it wouldn't be enough just to have a weird little toy without an identifiable manufacturer (see the nuclear samurai guy). It would have to be something that eluded even my best efforts for a long time. For the comeback post, I decided the one to cover was an odd little set that I have had lying around as long as I can remember. I simply think of these as the Funny Animals. Here's a closeup of the one that I suppose started this misadventure.

This is reasonably clearly a tiger, though the only trace of stripes is a red blotch on the back. I have noticed him now and then, and been moderately impressed by the quality of the sculpt. It's clearly cartoonish but with a good level of detail. I especially like the jowls and the chest patch, which are both sculpted. You the reader should just about be able to see a marking on his haunch. It reads, "Made in Hong Kong" (which for this kind of thing is slightly less unhelpful than "Made on Earth"), and adds, "NO.923". Here's another closeup.

"Who framed thy fearful asymmetry?"

Eventually, I realized that I had a few more creatures lying around that must have been from the same set. What finally started that train of thought long enough to create this post was running across another of these, a wonky broken camel I had loose in a random box. This was the one that clearly had the most painted detail preserved, and something like an expression to boot. When I did think to look for others, I was briefly unsure if I could even find the tiger. As it turned out, the next one that turned out was one I hadn't thought of, a smudgy horse or zebra. Here's a few pics of that pair.

With these two, I had a pattern. They both had the Hong Kong mark and a number. On further examination, I discovered the camel was numbered 907 and the zebra bore 908. It was less fortunately clear that they were cheap even for the toys I usually deal with. One of the camel's legs was obviously broken, and on closer examination I found a fracture in the remaining hind leg. Strangely, it proved easier to get the camel upright than the zebra, which is why the latter ended up on the rock landscape piece. At least one leg is clearly warped. on top of that, there's even less left of the stripes than the photos might indicate, though at least there's unequivocal traces of them. And I can't for the life of me figure out the deal with the mouth. The camel is at least an exaggerated version of a real camel, whereas the zebra looks more like a sea horse than a horse.

After finding these two, I went to a shoebox that's been my main repository of little junky tows for at least the last decade. With some digging, I recovered the tiger and one more I vaguely remembered, a donkey. He's the most (or closest to) realistic of the bunch, and well-preserved enough to have the mouth still painted on. As it turns out, his number is 917. Here's a couple pics of him.

It was only after gathering this group that I tried to investigate online, literally with terms like "cartoon animal toy". Almost disappointingly, I did get enough results to place these. The important thing I found out is that they were part of a Noah's Ark set. When and by whom proved elusive, however. Most accounts said they were made in the 1970s, before my time but in the age range for my older sibling, while a few said the 1960s, less likely unless (as is quite plausible) someone was churning them out for at least 10 years after. Tantalizingly, some held that they were from Arco toys, previously met in connection with the patchisaurs and the Rogun Robots. Alas, my own investigations showed that while Arco had indeed released at least one Noah's Ark toy line, the known specimens were of a very different style. Here at least is a picture of a relatively complete set.

Things started to get heartbreaking when I finally got a good look at the colors on the well-preserved specimens, especially the tiger's stripes. Then I had the really big break: I found an online listing of a good set, complete with the damn boat, represented with pics far better than I have found before or since. The price was good,  and I took enough interest to see if the seller could find a manufacturer or copyright date. 

The answer was no.

I didn’t buy it. Not because I was disappointed, but because knowing a little more was enough. And that’s the end of this story, at least for now. As always, more to follow!

Space 1979: The one where alien eggs are shipped to New York in a coffee boat

Title: Alien Contamination aka Contamination

What Year?: 1980

Classification: Knockoff/ Evil Twin

Rating: What The Hell???? (3/5)

I have previously commented that the one thing I haven’t done as much as I expected to so far is Alien knockoffs, though I have already done a bit of catchup. In contrast, the one thing I have done more of than I expected is Italian movies, including a few (particularly Flash Gordon) where I didn’t comment on that angle. For the last few reviews, I have tried to go into more detail about what the Italian filmmaking scene was really like, and that brings us to another movie I originally planned to do much earlier. This is the Italian answer to Alien, and by reputation it’s the one thing nobody would have expected from the Italians: boring.

Out story begins with a ship adrift in the harbor of New York. A team boards the ship and discovers the gruesome bodies of the crew amid a hold full of strange objects that look more like oversized cucumbers than anything else. When one of the things bursts in a spray of fluids, the humans exposed explode for no obvious reason. A frantic search led by a battleaxe heroine reveals that the eggs (or whatever) are being shipped by an equally mysterious cartel through a supposed coffee company. In the process, the heroine reconnects with a disgraced astronaut who knows the secret of the origin of the eggs. After various intrigues, hijinks and returns from the dead, they find the headquarters of the cartel, led by none other than the astronaut’s former crewmate.

Alien Contamination was written and directed in 1980 by Luigi Cozzi, in between Starcrash and the first of the Lou Ferrigno Hercules movies. The production crew and cast overlapped with both Dawn of the Dead and Zombie/ Zombie 2, notably with Goblin performing the soundtrack and Ian McCulloch cast as the astronaut. Other cast included Canadian actress Louise Marleau as the heroine, German star Siegfried Rauch as the cartel leader, and Italian Marino Mase as a New York police officer. Cozzi not only acknowledged basing the film on Alien but admitted using the early title “Alien Arrives On Earth”, almost the same title used by the (apparently???) unrelated ripoff Alien 2. A good part of the budget went into a full-sized animatronic alien featured in the final scenes, which Cozzi reportedly intended to be stop-motion.

On reflection, I think a big part of why Italian films have figured so prominently in this feature without more comment is that by the early 1980s, Italian productions had reached the point of becoming “mainstream”. Spaghetti westerns like The Good, The Bad And The Ugly had become established “classics”, Italian and Italian-American horror films like Suspiria and Dawn of the Dead were revolutionizing the genre, and Italian filmmakers like Dino Delaurentiis had established themselves in the Hollywood studio “system”. The films of Cozzi are in many ways an encapsulation of why native-born Italian science fiction and fantasy failed to find a corresponding niche in this ecosystem. At their best, especially with Starcrash and the first Hercules, they had the offkilter, genre-bending freedom of the 1930s pulps. At worst, they were stilted and bizarre yet also oddly tame, and this film is the quintessential example, in ways that will take quite a bit longer to dissect.

The foremost problem is that the movie suffers from a quite strange lack of action. Apart from a few very meaty gore sequences and some sparsely spaced human-on-human fight scenes, most of the movie is people talking. This feeds directly to an even bigger problem: The dialogue is incredibly and altogether inexplicably bad, all the more so when compared to other Cozzi movies. It’s quite clear that he could write and direct dialogue that “works”, at least within the genre conventions and assumed settings of myth and science fantasy. Here, in a literally down-to-Earth setting, the impression I personally get is akin to Robert E. Howard trying to write a car commercial. It all feels either impatient or entirely befuddled, exaggerating the flaws that were undoubtedly in Cozzi’s writing to begin with. Of course, this wouldn’t be complete without obvious dubbing, notably a black foreman at the cartel plantation who sounds more like a Russian taxi driver. The most unaccountable failure is Marleau’s dialogue, which if it is not entirely dubbed was somehow written, delivered and recorded in a way that makes her sound like a supporting character in a telenovela.

Even with these flaws, however, there is enough that is creative or at least interesting that I can’t actively dislike it the way I do some of the films featured here. The main characters are well-developed and likable despite the issues with the dialogue. The soap-opera level inanities collectively achieve a believable sense of tension and domestic awkwardness, particularly in a scene where the astronaut and the cop debate whether to knock on the heroine’s hotel room door while she faces an egg left in her bathroom There is also a convincing level of chemistry between the astronaut and the heroine that doesn’t quite become romantic. This peaks early on with a meeting in the astronaut’s apartment, where the heroine delivers an infamous one-liner about what he could or couldn’t do with a crane.

The most interesting aspect of the film is the cartel (very much my own designation), whose presence gives the movie the feel of a gangster flick with the aliens thrown in. On more careful consideration, they prove less like a criminal organization than a cult set on mass suicide, something the story leaves frustratingly underdeveloped. There is at least an unnervingly cold-blooded fanaticism throughout their ranks, from a trio of minions who rupture one of the eggs when cornered to a leader who seems to speak directly for the alien presence. By comparison, the eventual appearance of the alien feels quite routine, which as we shall see momentarily is really saying something. To me, it feels in many ways preferable to have left the directing alien threat unseen or wholly ambiguous. It could be a singular alien, a Borg-style hive mind a shared delusion of the leader and his followers, or any and all of the above, and still just as terrifying if done with the flare the film’s creator was certainly capable of.

For the “one scene”, I had a few good choices, but it was always going to be the finale with the alien. After a suitably dramatic buildup from the cartel/ cult leader, the heroine is led into the presence of an enormous creature surrounded by hundreds of the eggs. A few establishing shots establish its huge size, but it is the closeups that make the scene. It has the look and feel of a Lovecraftian demon/ monster/ god brought straight from page to screen (certainly more effectively than many Lovecraft adaptations). The detail shots reveal gooey textures, subtly textured surfaces, multiple orifices and a single, truly hypnotic eye. It remains inert (per the lore about all the rig was capable of) while using its psychic powers to draw its victims within range of a proboscis that serves as its mouth. The cop is lunched feet-first in the most complex and effective effects shots of the movie. Then the lady shambles forward wide-eyed, just as the astronaut catches up. As the predictable rescue unfolds, there is one more dramatic shot as the cult leader emerges from the flames, just long enough to reveal his gruesome fate.

What I find most interesting about this movie is that it offers more of the groundwork of the franchise it ripped off than any entry in the series up to that time, an odd pattern previously seen way back with Message From Space and Inseminoid. The lead alien responsible for laying the eggs assumes the role of the Alien Queen, which famously didn’t appear until Aliens in 1986. The appearance of dedicated troops to investigate the alien outbreak anticipates the space marines, again unseen until Aliens. The placement of the aliens in a modern setting anticipates the setup of the Aliens Vs. Predator side branch of the Alien series. Most impressively, the idea of a pro-alien cult would be central to the original Dark Horse Aliens comic, whose first issues were published in 1989. It’s this kind of “coincidence” that keeps the field of knockoffs and runnerups interesting, and I find it enough to nudge this one up the rating scale. Let it be a lesson, the one thing the Italians didn’t do is boring, even when they were trying.

For links, the image credit goes to both Temple of Schlock and Offscreen. The latter site gives a reasonably insightful review of the movie. As usual, you can see the feature Introduction for an overview of the classifications and rating scale.

Bigger than Godzilla! The Giant Iron Giant

I needed another relatively quick post today, so I'm back with a mini feature that might not get any further. I previously introduce the Lanard Alien Queen, a Walmart-exclusive toy almost as big as my Dormei generic Godzilla. This time, I have another Walmart buy that's the real deal, based on the most awesome giant robot ever, The Iron Giant! Here's a pic of the big guy with my "new" Genericzilla.

This find was one of a pair of bots that hit Walmart early this year, the other being Robby the robot. Both were marked as from a company called Goldlok Holdings and sold as 14". Certainly the Iron Giant is somewhat taller than either of my Dormei Godzillas. Both bots came with lights, voice and sound effects and a walking action feature. Here's some unboxing pics, including both bots on the store shelves.

While I can't say much first-hand about Robby, the Iron Giant clearly shows that the manufacturer was focused on the electronic features over articulation. The chest and pelvis are a solid piece, and even the head is immobile. The legs have no motion apart from the walking mechanism, which works well enough. The arms are entirely strange. The hands, elbows and upper arms are all reasonably articulated, but the motion of the shoulders is limited to back and forth and drastically reduced by the shoulder pad things (which admittedly didn't make a lot of sense in the movie either). Trying to put him in a fighting stance mostly just makes it look like he's trying to negotiate, though this certainly fits the character well enough.

"Have you considered, humans might not like being used as incubators?"

Fortunately, the sound and light features are the best part. The eyes can glow red or green, and as shown above, the chest plates open to reveal the laser whatsit. He makes various sounds and says "I am Superman!"; for some reason, they left out, "I not gun." Here's another pic. If it seems like there's a little glare, it's because I left a TV on while I was working on this.

All in all, this is definitely not great, but it's not bad either. It's also just about the first Iron Giant collectible to be on regular store shelves since the guy that came with the VHS tape (which I of course still have). Here's a few more pics to round this out.

"Let me guess, you signed a contract with Roger Corman, too..."

"SUPERMAN! And say, I can actually raise my arms."

That's all for now, more to come!

Space 1979: The one that got released as the unauthorized sequel to the sequel of Night of the Living Dead

Title: Zombie aka Zombi 2

What Year?: 1979/ US release 1980

Category: Ripoff/ Weird Sequel

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (2/5)

 

I said in my review to Night of the Creeps that I have so far avoided zombie movies. Having said that, I’m now back with another one. The thing about me and zombie movies is that I have been doing this for enough time that there isn’t a lot out there I’m still looking for. Most of the ones I really want have been in my collection for years. The rest are the ones that I either can’t get or already watched and let go, which tends to make things awkward when friends have tried to gift me a zombie movie. This review is of one of the movies in my “dropped” file, and also just happens to be one of the most notorious and brazen Italian ripoffs of all time.

Our story begins with a sailboat coasting into New York harbor. The police board the boat and meet an impressively bloated and hideous zombie. While the authorities apparently do nothing, an intrepid reporter traces the boat to an uncharted island where her father disappeared. There, they find a superstitious population living in fear of a horde of undead rising from their graves. The closest thing to a responding authority is a sketchy medical man whose wife is among the first victims. While the doctor vaguely recounts his search for a rational explanation, the reporter and a small party of companions try to outrun a growing number of revenants, including their own reanimated friends and family. As night falls, the surviving protagonists hole up with the doctor in a church turned field hospital. They manage to wipe out most of the besieging horde but destroy the building in the process. As the survivors go back to sea, they hear a broadcast from the mainland, revealing that the city is already infested with the undead.

Zombie was one of the first of a wave of “spaghetti zombie” offerings from Italy, which in turn drew on an earlier tradition of graphic giallo genre films. It was famously made and released in Italy as Zombi 2, with “Zombie 1” being an alternate title for George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, a move which Italian law allowed without permission from the makers of the original film. Accounts differ at what point in the production the decision to present it as a “sequel” occurred; director Lucio Fulci is on record as denying any knowledge of it, while screenwriter Dardano Sarcchetti maintained that a draft of the script existed before Dawn of the Dead was released. It had a successful North American run under its sequel-free title. Fulci followed it up with several loosely related films, including the “official” sequel Zombi 3 in 1988. More typical offerings from Fulci focused on supernatural themes over corporeal zombie action, notably 1981’s The Beyond. Predictably, a number of  other movies were represented as numbered sequels to Fulci’s original film in Italy and the US. It will suffice to note that Fulci was involved in none except Zombi 3.

My mixed feelings about this movie go back a long way. Fulci had a unique style that has never clicked with me, though Zombie actually avoids the most aggravating and flatly incomprehensible features of many of his works (especially The Beyond, which I just might get to). It does share with his other films an emphasis on incongruous visuals and disjointed narratives, egregiously an encounter between a submerged zombie and a shark, which certainly “work” but mostly on a hit-or-miss basis. The deeper problem is that it never works its way to a resolution or “point”. In those terms, Fulci effectively tries to be more post-modern than Romero. If Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead refused to give audiences conventional happy endings, Zombie does little more than start and then stop.

Then there are certainly plenty of particular problems, which I find noticeable with the setting. As noted, there is no sign of police, military forces or government. There is also no effort by the reporter or her companions (including a man who owns his own boat) to figure out which nation might have claim to the island before landing on it, which in real life would be an easy way to start a war. The glimpses of native life that follow are paper thin, in contrast to the rich if stereotyped visions of early Caribbean zombie movies like White Zombie and I Walked With A Zombie. Even the “real” belief in zombification gets little mention beyond the use of the word, which ironically was almost entirely avoided by Romero. Things get more curious as the undead begin rising from their graves (also specifically absent from the Romero movies), often and randomly enough to give the ominous impression that there are about as many people buried on the island as there are actually living on it. This particular detail could have been developed into a darker tale that might give deeper meaning to the goings-on, but like many things, nothing is said of it.

For the zombies themselves, the most interesting aspect by far is that the movie discards what scientific logic there was to the Romero-style zombie apocalypse. The dead seem to rise no matter how far past their expiration date they might be, and then usually whenever one the living is close by. Their appearance is egregiously rotten, another contrast to Romero, without giving the feel of greater realism, particularly considering how quickly decomposition is clearly shown to occur in the island’s climate. More problematically, they prove slow-moving even by old-school zombie standards, to the point that several victims have to stand and wait to be devoured. A curious further twist is that there are times when zombies seem simply to ignore the living, particularly a pack already occupied with the doctor’s wife. As seen with The Green Slime, this is in itself a very unsettling nuance of behavior, but again, it mostly seems to keep the creatures from attacking when it doesn’t suit the needs of the script.

For the one scene, I could pick several “favorites”, particularly the zombie-shark encounter, which is good enough (in fact rather too good) for another honorable mention. But the one that has always drawn my attention is the iconic closing scene, where the undead march along the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s an impressive and eerie sequence that extends through the credits, all the more so given that it is far too low-tech not to have been filmed on location. What always stood out to me is that throughout the scene, cars can be seen driving back and forth below, obviously because the film crew did not have the budget or authority to close the bridge. The equally obvious joke is that even the apocalypse wouldn’t slow down NYC traffic. Yet, it’s quite disconcerting to further consider how many motorists must have passed the very real, fully made-up extras without thinking it worth the trouble to slow down!

In closing, I will say that this is a movie I am glad exists, even if I don’t particularly like it. It was this movie as much as any other that established the zombie-apocalypse genre, and for that alone it’s worth more than the sum of its parts. It’s the kind of movie that’s better to have held and seen than to possess, and even with that said, I suppose the odds are I will buy it sooner or later if somebody doesn’t buy it for me first. So go ahead and look it up, whether you’ve seen it or not, because there’s never going to be one quite like it.

For links, I just have the Introduction, and while I'm at it the Futureworld review introducing the Weird Sequel category. More to come!

Timmee Tuesday! Mini Galaxy Laser Team space guy revisited

I wanted to get a short post in today, and I definitely have wanted to do more Timmee. As luck would have it, in the last week, I made a major new discovery about an old friend. I have regularly featured Timmee's Galaxy Laser Team line, including the large-sized figures. Not long ago, I also introduced a rather mysterious figure that was clearly a smaller version of the "Commander" figure. Now, I finally have information on where he came from, and it turns out to be a whole new twist on the origins of GLT. Before I get into that, here's some pics of the mini space guy with other GLT figures, including a "vintage" figure that came in the same group as the Marx and Lido aliens.

I had previously commented that the GLT astronauts were  very different from the other  figures in the set. They were oddly realistic compared to the other characters, even a little "retro" (though certainly less so than the Marx 4 inch space guys), and also slightly different in size. These inconsistencies quickly made me wonder if the astronauts came from an earlier set. As soon as I got the mini astronaut, he puzzled me further. It would have been easy to assume he was a "bootleg" copy of the Timmee figure, which certainly existed. This, however, was of a very high quality with details that closely matched the more familiar figure. I quickly concluded this had to have been copied from the same mold, most likely by Timmee. Here's a few more pics to show what I mean.

My big lead was courtesy of Steve Nyland, a Y*utuber I have consulted for a number of posts. He reported in a response to a casual comment that the small versions of the GLT astronauts had been included in a set of rocket toys released by Processed Plastic, the company that bought out and then revived Timmee. After following that rabbit hole, I quickly concluded that the "mini" astronauts must have come first. Here's a pic of one of the rockets with the astronauts, and another of a specimen on card.

Just how old these guys are is still unclear. The style of the card art and the rocket itself definitely points to the era of the actual Apollo program, which went from the mid-60s through the early '70s.  A tantalizing further detail is that some versions have USAF rather than USA. This suggests that some were made even before the formation of NASA in 1958. On the other hand, some of these early versions didn't have the figures, notably a mindboggling ICBM set. Because who needs Marx casualty figures when kids can  enact World War 3?

This is another discovery that's a bit of an anticlimax. I was especially disappointed to find out that Timmee never tried or planned to do a "realistic" astronaut set on the lines of Marx. Then there is one more loose end. For me, the main piece of evidence that the astronauts predated GLT was the commander's open hand. It always looked like it was intended for an accessory, perhaps a flag, that certainly wasn't in the GLT set. But now I know the pose was there all along, and there is not only still no sign of an accessory, but clear evidence that the sculpt was never meant to be compatible with the "army man" scale sets that could have supplied one. So did they plan on issuing a flag? Was there a version of the set that did have something to go with it? We may never know, and we probably care far more than Timmee ever did.

That's all for now, more to come!

Space 1979: The one with swords, lasers and a rotoscoped King Kong

Title: Adventures of Hercules aka Hercules 2

What Year?: 1985

Classification: Weird Sequel/ Mashup/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: What the Hell??? (3/5)

 

If there is one thing where I tend to break with the crowd in my tastes, it is in sequels. These are normally the most successful yet reviled of movies, for good reason. Studios pay to make sequels with the expectation that they will earn a lot of money without the need for new ideas, controversy, or effort in general, and relatively few filmmakers are bold enough to break with the plan, especially when there are already two or more franchise entries under the belt. The unfortunate flipside is that sequels which genuinely build on the existing material are the ones that are more likely to fail, with audiences, critics and fans alike. I seem to be the one who can look at a sequel for what it did (or tried to do) differently, which is a major reason I introduced the Weird Sequel category to this feature. This time, the specimen under consideration is the weird sequel to one of the weirdest movies on the early to mid-1980s landscape.

This time, our story starts with a cosmic montage of the creation of the universe, followed by a longer opening credits montage of the highlights of the previous movie. By the time that’s done, we then learn that several of the Greek gods have rebelled against Zeus and stolen his thunderbolts. The king of the gods sends the hero Hercules back to Earth to retrieve his thunderbolts, which have been transformed into a range of monsters and malign demigods, including Anteus, a being of energy that receives sacrifices from fearful mortals. Two plucky women, Urania and Glaucia, join Hercules to avoid being sacrificed, while the rebellious gods resurrect Hercules’ old enemy King Minos, despite his previous avowed goal to overthrow the gods of Olympus with science. By the time Hercules has gathered most of the lightning bolts, Minos has wiped out a good part of the pantheon with the acquired powers of Chaos. The two rivals are transformed to meet on the cosmic plane, and the two women discover the secret of their true selves.

The Adventures of Hercules was a sequel to the 1983 Italian-American production Hercules. Bothe movies were written and directed by the indefatigable Luigi Cozzi (the offender most responsible for Star Crash), and starred Lou Ferrigno as Hercules and William Berger as the villain King Minos. Where the original had a cast of high-profile but subordinate actresses (including Battle Beyond The Stars’ Sybil Danning), the sequel placed exploitation starlet Sonia Viviani and semi-respectable Milly Carlucci as the comparatively self-reliant heroines. It was released in Italy and then the US in 1985. By all accounts, it was poorly received compared to the first movie, though no tale tells how much it earned or cost.

This installment is the most difficult decision I have made about which movies to cover. I very seriously considered reviewing both this and the original. In the end, I finally stuck with the precedent of one entry per “franchise”, and as with Westworld/ Futureworld, the sequel was of greater interest. While the first movie was absolutely bonkers, it really never needed defending; nobody then or since suggested it was anything but the original and bizarre experiment it really was. (If anything, I should have given it a mention when I reviewed Krull.) By comparison, the sequel is in a number of ways more conventional, but also better anticipated the course of its genre, to the point that it would be easy to be lulled into accepting it as part of trends that were really still years away. Like several of the most curious films to come up in this feature, it feels like it “should” have been made either a decade earlier or a decade later, which is always enough for me to give it further attention.

What obviously stands out with this movie is the two heroines, who give many of the adventures the feel of an episode of Xena (first aired in 1995!). Of at least equal consequence is the diversity of the villains, which frequently draw in influences from science fiction and even more incongruously from Medieval fairylore. We have a stop-motion gorgon, an animated version of Anteus that looks like living lightning, an ogre-like armored giant that collects souls, and a tribe of almost zombie-like slime people. It’s of further note (in contrast to the original) that few if any of the battles are too easy for Hercules, which in turn makes it all the more impressive that his female companions are frequently able to fend for themselves. The effects continue the first movie’s mashup of science fiction and fantasy, complete with laser beams. This culminates in the finale, when the animated versions of Hercules and Minos transform into a series of improbable forms including King Kong (!!!). The opening sequence portraying the primal interplay of creation and chaos is equally hallucinogenic, augmented with what I am absolutely sure is CGI.

The story hinges on its characters, as it should, but unfortunately, this is where it struggles. Hercules as portrayed by Ferrigno is just as unquestioningly virtuous and possibly even dumber than he was in the first movie. Minos as played by Berger again runs rings around him, yet suffers more in the transition. It is especially jarring to hear him give his usual speeches about the virtues of science and reason while calling on the powers of primal chaos, a union about as predictably ill-fated as his alliance with the rebellious gods. The Olympians themselves are the most well-realized characters, none especially well-developed but all conveying the same petty malice to be seen in the original myths, and this time Zeus actually has what looks to be a real beard. Then there are the heroines, already noted as the most innovative element of the movie. It is here that the movie clearly falls short of its potential, reducing the pair to little more than pawns in the final act, though it manages to wring out a few poignant twists.

For the “one scene”, I had to go with the stop motion sequence, and that’s saying something with the finale in play. Where the first movie had several explicitly mechanical monsters realized with stop motion, the sequel offers only the gorgon, first seen as a very elegant noblewoman in a hall of statues. As the lady grows more menacing, Hercules orders the heroines to run for an exit, without offering much confidence that he will follow. As the villainess’s laughter draws nearer, he actually retreats, for just about the only time in either movie. When the gorgon’s form is revealed, it could easily be regarded as an anticlimax. The stop motion armature is on a “claymation” level, and the animation does not improve matters. However, the design is freakishly original, combining the familiar form of the gorgon with a scorpion for no apparent reason. When Hercules strikes, we finally see the damn thing in its entirety, just in time to witness its death throes every bit as hideous as the creature itself.

Even more than Krull, the Ferrigno Hercules movies were an oddity that could only heave come about in the early to mid-1980s. This time, at least, things got far enough for more than one entry, and one that set out in a new direction to boot. While it would be far too optimistic to suppose that either movie had much influence on later and more successful films, they at least pointed to path ahead.  Let’s further celebrate the Italian cinematic-industrial complex (already overdue for some further representation), the only group of people who could take throwing a bear into orbit and make it really weird.

No links this time because Blogger and Windows literally won't let me. More to come!

Rogues Roundup! Attack of the 35mm aliens

For this weekend's post, I'm back in the rogues' gallery format, with some new acquisitions I hadn't been sure I would get. In the course of collecting space guys, I had long been aware that Marx and certain other companies had made alien figures to go with their astronauts. For the most part, I was not greatly interested in these, but I did keep an eye out for a good deal. A few weeks ago, I finally got a couple vintage aliens. Here's a lineup with our old friend, the Timmee turtle-crab alien, a Lanard Alien egg and face hugger, and another guy I hadn't gotten to.

Space 1979: The one that was an ad for a video game that never existed

Title: The Last Starfighter

What Year?: 1984

Classification: Runnerup/ Irreproducible oddity

Rating: Pretty good! (5/5)

 

I have mentioned in previous reviews that a lot of my exposure to movies was through movies aired on TV. Another major vector was my older brother’s comic book collection. He had (and as far as I know still has) a very sizable comic book collection, mainly a collection of well over 100 issues of Iron Man, every one a time capsule of self-dating advertisements. There were plenty of movies, toys and games I first heard of because of old comic books, I’m sure including quite a few I’ve never heard of since. This review is one time the two intersected, a movie I saw advertised in the old comics and actually had a chance to see on TV instead of hunting it down decades later. It was the most 80s of 80s movies, one I would much later learn to be the tip of the iceberg of a multimedia franchise that never was. This is the story of The Last Starfighter.

Our tale begins with a young man named Alex living in a trailer park, where the only amusement available is a video game on the porch of what seems to be a restaurant, with graphics at least as good as a Playstation 1. The rest of the trailerites are hard up enough to gather in excitement when he breaks the high score. While he is brooding later that night, a mysterious stranger arrives who identifies himself as the creator of the game and offers him an unspecified opportunity. The protagonist goes for a ride to a destination that turns out to be a real starfighter base, with ships whose controls were simulated in the game. He becomes reluctant when he discovers that the base is in the path of an invading armada, but after the villains follow him back to Earth, he returns to the fight. When he arrives, he discovers that the base has been ravaged by a sneak attack, leaving only a single experimental fighter and a crusty alien navigator for a desperate raid against the approaching fleet.

The Last Starfighter was one of the last of a wave of space opera/ science fantasy films in the wake of Star Wars. It had a large budget and a high-profile cast that included Richard Preston of The Music Man as the recruiter Centauri and Daniel O’Herlihy as the hero’s copilot Grig. Lance Guest had an effective double role as Alex and a robot assigned to replace him, and Catherine Mary Stewart appeared as his girlfriend. The effects included space ship sequences created with (then) advanced CGI. It was famously intended to be released simultaneously with a tie-in arcade game from Atari, responsible for the semi-3D Star Wars arcade game and the less fortunate E.T. and Krull tie-in games, but the legendary game maker backed out before the game was developed. The movie made at least $21 million against a $14M budget. At least one planned Atari 2600 game saw release under an alternate title, while others have been unearthed or created by fans. A tie-in game was finally released for NES at the very late date of 1990, reportedly a modified version of an originally unrelated PC game.

As with a number of movies featured here, I first saw this movie on TV in the early 1990s. It was good fun at the time, but didn’t make a big impression at the time. What fascinates me in hindsight is that this is a movie that should have aged like anchovy pizza without refrigeration. To begin with, the intended cross-platform marketing was as crass as the most notorious Eighties cartoon/ toy commercial; if successful, it would have made the movie more “meta” than the Deadpool franchise. The ambitious CGI are painfully archaic, while still being far too good to pass as a genuine 1980s video game. As a bonus, its release date was exceptionally disastrous, right after the infamous video game crash of 1983 and a year before Kenner gave up on the original Star Wars figure line. While nobody seems to have connected Atari’s withdrawal from the project to the company’s direct misfortunes with the ET game, I certainly will.

Yet, the movie works, and for once I’m not the voice in the wilderness when I say it; this is another of the few movies I got requests for before deciding to include it. (And thank the Logos, it’s not Space Mutiny!) The acting and dialogue (especially from Preston and O’Herlihy) is among the best of any vintage genre film.  The practical effects are likewise top-notch, supplying very convincing aliens as well as the bonkers spacecar rig driven by Preston. The stone-age CGI actually succeeds in blurring the line between the gameplay of the opening scenes and the posited “real” world of the space war, while the story gives a measure of logic to the obvious video game setup. The design of the Gunstar (from Alien production designer and Dark Star alumnus Ron Cobb) even makes a fair amount of sense, with an almost Art Deco sense of smoothness and speed. Over it all is a sense of sincerity that ought to be almost painful, especially given the commercialism surrounding the production. Once again, it really works, with plenty of help from the soundtrack.

As always, what really matters for me is the world-building. The rival factions of the Star League, the opposing Ko Dan and the petulant renegade Xur are mostly white noise, but still convey depth and hints of moral ambiguity, particularly from a pair of alien commanders who clearly despise Xur as much as the good guys do. Centauri and Grig are the true soul of the resistance, idealistic yet clearly cunning. Then there is a whole arc of the android replacement left on Earth, which is what I remembered most strongly from my original viewing. I could easily have chosen a number of the duplicate’s scenes as my “one scene”, but the story is strong enough that no one moment stands out in isolation.

What I am going with this time is an action scene, which I haven’t done that often. Despite the video game homage, the movie puts most of its action in one climactic battle. After attacking the villain’s command ship, the Gunstar is swarmed by opposing fighters. The fighters prove uncoordinated but clearly effective, destroying a number of their own with friendly fire in the process of damaging the Gunstar. Grig announces that their super weapon, the Death Blossom, is available but still theoretical. Alex promptly responds, “Theoretically, we should already be dead!” The weapon works as advertised, leaving only the returning command ship against the crippled starfighter. It all ends with another moment I remembered all the way from back when, as the alien commanders exchange two immortal lines of dialogue before the final impact.

In closing, I offer an explanation for my classification. I developed the term “runnerup” for supposed “ripoffs” of Star Wars and other major movies that were really developed in parallel with better known films, like The Black Hole and Flash Gordon. This movie is clearly not in that category. What it is is an “imitation” that recognized the best qualities of the original product and actually made the effort to reproduce them. With better timing and better luck, it truly could have been another Star Wars, franchise and all. What we have instead is a very good movie that never got weighed down by its own success. As always, being a runnerup isn’t bad.

For links, the image credit goes to LaunchBox Games Database, which includes a decent overview of what is known of the Atari 2600 game. Den of Geek provides a deeper account of the various video game projects. As usual, see the Introduction for an overview of the feature, classifications and ratings.