The one that was released as the first sequel to Alien

 

Title: Alien 2 aka Alien Terror

What Year?: 1980

Classification: Ripoff

Rating: Dear God WHY??? (1/5)

 

If there’s one thing that has not been a surprise about this feature, it’s that I’ve done a lot of Alien knockoffs. In the course of choosing these movies, I have tried to go for variety. In no particular order, we’ve had an Italian Alien knockoff (Alien Contamination), a Roger Corman Alien knockoff (Forbidden World), a direct-to-video (and good!) Alien knockoff (Deep Space), an insane Alien knockoff (The Falling), and for that matter an Alien “knockoff” that wasn’t really a knockoff (Inseminoid). What we haven’t really had is an absolutely terrible Alien knockoff. For this review, I’m following up on a lead that just might change that. It just happens to be the only movie to be released as a direct sequel to Alien, and boy, is it… Eh, I had a joke, but I already did this joke with Star Trek 3.

Our story begins on clearly present-day Earth, which is the first sign this isn’t so much a “sequel” to Alien as a movie that has nothing to do with a space mission. We do learn of the impending return of a space mission. We also meet our heroine, Thelma, who talks on TV about her enthusiasm for caving (in an interview that for some reason airs in the same time slot as coverage of the space mission. Things take a turn for the worse when the returning spaceship is found empty, and a woman on the breach discovers her daughter’s face is missing, two events that will not be connected with each other or the rest of the movie except by a strange blue rock. This doesn’t stop Thelma from going on another expedition with her husband Roy and friends, one of whom picks up another of the rocks. As they descend into the cave, the rock transforms into an alien creature that multiplies by bursting out of its victims, and of course the party splits up…

Alien 2 was written and directed by Italian filmmaker Ciro Ippolito under the name Sam Cromwell. He exploited a loophole that allowed films to be released as “sequels” in Italy without the consent of the makers of the original film (which previously figured in Zombie/ Zombi 2), as well as a window in which Fox had failed to put “Alien” under trademark. The film was shot at locations in Italy and the US, with the actual Castellana Caves system of southern Italy being used as a principal location. The cast was led by British actress Belinda Mayne, who also had a supporting role in Krull, and exploitation star Mark Bodin. The filmmakers actually won a lawsuit by Fox, but replaced the “sequel” title in English-language distribution. In  an ironic twist, Ippolito would later accuse The Descent of plagiarizing his work.

For my own experiences, I realized I must have heard of this one years ago, but at the time I didn’t sort it out from other knockoffs I had either seen or known about. I finally identified it while doing the research on Alien Contamination, which I had semi-seriously suspected of being the one to rip off the title. (As outlined in that review, the producer Cozzi might have considered something similar.) When I did identify the movie, I seriously debated whether to bother giving it attention. Still, the tale was too intriguing to ignore entirely, so I took a look a few weeks before getting to the current review.

My immediate and almost disappointed reaction was that the production as a whole consistently reaches a high standard of mediocrity. The acting and dialogue are competent, the music (credited to “Oliver Onions”, the name of a Gothic horror writer) is good, and the lighting, camerawork and effects are genuinely impressive. On the other hand, it quickly manifested many of the problems that specifically annoy me. It’s under 90 minutes, but has at least 10 minutes of filler. Clearly English-speaking cast members still sound dubbed. Large chunks of the exposition never match up with what we see later in the film. Most seriously, the creatures simply don’t look like anything, and are largely inert when they do appear.

Any redeeming qualities of the movie come from the use of the cave. The shots of the rock formations establish and enhance the slow, moody style of shooting, which further spares us choppy jump cuts. The characters get a bit of further character development, including hints of a psychic premonition or sensitivity from Thelma. When the first victim collapses, there is very real tension as the rest of the group try to get her to safety. Then, when the key emergence occurs, there is a pan of the immobile body as stately as the passing of the starship Nostromo. The problem is that everything after that is much too hurried to benefit from the painstakingly established atmosphere. Everything from the first appearance of the creatures (clearly many more than can be accounted for from the infected in the party) to the escape of the last few survivors takes place well within 30 minutes. Even the gore gets a short shrift, consisting of a few more characters getting lunched by the creatures, plus one more emergence scene as worthy of Scanners (released the next year!) as of Alien.

For the “one scene”, the only one I can find much to work with is the quite predictable “twist” ending. After fleeing the cave, Thelma and Roy return to the city, only to find things eerily quiet. For no apparent reason, they make their first stop at a bowling alley (which, dear Logos, was introduced earlier). The empty lanes and the sound of the pinsetters is genuinely unsettling. Roy moves out of sight, and suddenly cries out. Thelma calls out desperately as she searches for him, only to retreat. As she runs back and forth, we see Thelma framed in what seems to be a pulsing sphincter within a mass of bloody flesh. What is it? The camera angles are almost all from above, implying something much bigger than anything we’ve seen. Where did it come from? Are we seeing the viewpoint of just one, or a pack of them trying to hem her in? What the Hell is going on??? Nobody involved here cared before, and they certainly aren’t giving us answers now. As the camera finally pans away from Thelma’s tiny, lonely form to the ominous caption, it feels like a threat not of the monsters but another movie.

 

This film was one of the very few times I genuinely wished a movie had been worse than it is, not just because it would have made for an easier review, but because it might actually have made it more enjoyable to watch. I further debated whether giving it the lowest rating (not to mention reviewing it at all) was simply giving it more attention than it deserved. What settled things in my mind is that this one could have been much better, even flat-out good. All they had to do was improve the script, work out a few kinks in the world-building and use some of the filler time for character development. But then that would have meant trying to make a decent movie instead of racing to cash in on a far better one, and if that had happened, I probably would never have bothered to watch it. Touche, “Mr. Cromwell”. At least I can say that I have never been happier to be done with a review.

For links, I recommend a review video from Corrupt Nostalgia, which makes this film sound about as tedious as it is. I also respectfully refer to a kind of good review at Offscreen, which is probably how I sound to most people who saw The Falling. As usual, the concept of the feature, the classifications and rating system are explained in depth in the feature Introduction.

Space 1979: The one that was supposed to be the worst movie ever made

 

Title: Plan 9 From Outer Space

What Year?: 1956 (filming)/ 1959 (release)

Classification: Prototype/ Mashup/ Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: Downright Decent! (4/5)

 

I have already written a fair amount about the genesis of this feature. With this installment, I’m going back to something I had in mind before I thought of it. For that reason, it’s outside the time frame and categories I laid out in the Introduction, but as I will show, its relevance would grow far beyond its own time, Without further ado, I introduce Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Our story begins with an introduction from Criwsell, who pronounces that we are all concerned with the future because that is where we will all spend the rest of out lives. It is further hinted that the film will show events covered up by various authorities. The next few scenes alternate between he death and burial of a grief-stricken old man and the arrival of flying saucers in the skies over major cities. The latter arc is standard for what was laid down in The Day The Earth Stood Still and Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, except instead of Harryhausen’s stop-motion we have kit models with a tendency to wobble. We soon meet an army pilot convinced that aliens have arrived on Earth, and the aliens themselves, who appear reluctant to act against Earth but hint at a greater threat to the universe itself.  To advance their still uncertain goals, they are authorized to implement a new plan: Raise the dead! Can you prove it didn’t happen???

Plan 9 From Outer Space was made in late 1956 by the infamous Ed Wood under the original title “Grave Robbers From Outer Space”, with $60,000 provided mainly by a church. He famously arranged the film around test footage of Bela Lugosi, taken shortly before the legendary actor’s death. Its release was delayed until 1959. By available accounts, contemporary showings were mainly as “double bills” with other low-budget films. The movie had a long pre-VHS afterlife through late-night television showings. Its notoriety culminated in its listing as “worst movie ever made” in the 1980 book The Golden Turkey Awards by Michael and Harry Medved. The Medveds’ book appears to have been the immediate source of a rumor that the ships in the movie were paper plates, a story the authors attributed to one of Wood’s crew. In fact, the ships have been conclusively identified as a kit model originally made by Lindberg. (Do I need to mention I own one?...) The movie and other Wood films received further attention after the release of the 1994 Tim Burton film Ed Wood.

Like quite a few movies featured here, my experiences with this movie began long before I saw it. I first learned about it in The Golden Turkey Awards in the early 1990s, I heard a bit more during the release of Ed Wood, and I continued to see it mentioned in various places. During that time,  I saw it go through a kind of mirror-image arc to that of Logan’s Run: Where its infamy was once set in stone, skeptics and revisionists have turned discussions in other directions. It’s worth further note that this paradigm shift has occurred not because of any groundswell of new appreciation, but simply because more people are recognizing how many other astonishingly bad films made at the time had fallen into obscurity (though the works of Wood remain very much in the running).

With all that background in place, I will confess that I didn’t get to watching Plan 9 until just a month or two before I posted my MessageFrom Space review. Fittingly, I watched it with free streaming while I was assembling and testing a lava lamp. My immediate reaction was that I had seen movies that were much worse, though I had to think a bit for which ones. What took me entirely by surprise was how tight and focused the movie is in telling its story. I’ve seen any number of movies well under 90 minutes that still got padded out with filler, especially from the 1970s. (The Day Time Ended was an egregious example that kind of got away with it.) By comparison, almost every scene in Plan 9 advances the narrative in some way. It’s certainly debatable whether this was because of Wood’s skill or simply because he didn’t have the money to dither around, but either way, it’s a comparative triumph for “old school” storytelling.

What makes the film most interesting is the blend of science fiction and horror, which would probably have tipped my hand if I had gotten to the latter genre before this review. The flying saucers freely intermix with the graveyard shenanigans of the undead, led very effectively by Tor Johnson and Vampira, and somehow, it works, despite some of the film’s most notorious gaffes. This leads directly to a bizarre sequence where the alien commander Eros loses control of the enormous revenant played by Johnson in the presence of his immediate superior. It is tempting to take the subsequent order to proceed with their plan as a malicious joke by their leader. What gets uncanny is that the briefly outlined plan anticipates the Romero-style “zombie apocalypse”. Of course, Ed Wood could never have gotten the budget for that, so we instead get a showdown in the saucer as a finale.

That brings us to the “one scene”, one more thing I knew of long before I saw the movie. Eros allows a party of military and police officers to enter the ship, though he tells his second-in-command that they will have to be killed. He then freely stares down the armed humans long enough to reveal the reason for his mission: Humans are believed to be close to developing “solaronite”, a weapon so uselessly overpowered it could destroy the universe.  In fact, his description of its capabilities not only puts the aliens in the right but would completely justify exterminating humanity without any warning whatsoever. (The details make a very small amount of sense based on what we now know about solar emissions, but that’s clearly beside the point.) In the movie’s most surreal moment, the “hero” actually tries to argue that humans have a right to possess the weapon, and it’s not at all clear if the viewer is expected to take his side. That’s enough for Eros to snap entirely, end in the process show both his anger and total contempt toward Earth.

All of this brings us back to the real questions readers (if any) might ask: Am I really defending this movie? And if so, why am I doing it in a feature dedicated to movies from decades later? It should be clear that my praise is a little bit facetious. By any objective standard, the movie is just as bad as people have said it is, regardless of whether it’s that much worse than other films made then or since. A determined apologist could easily counter that the most obvious problems are caused by the budget (if anything high by Wood’s standards), but that can be countered by the comparable or lower budgets of other clearly better movies, including the $114K price of Night of the Living Dead only a decade after its release. A better defense is that Wood really meant for this to be funny, which I personally am convinced of up to a point. The one thing I will stand by is the clarity and purity of the story, which at least ensured that the film doesn’t actively annoy me.

For the second question, the simple fact is that this movie was more relevant from the 1970s onward than it ever could have been at the time it was made. It was only then that a cultural niche emerged for the viewing, listing and reviewing “bad” movies for their own sake. In further hindsight, it rose and to an extent fell on the expanding availability of home media, something I have both factored in and tried to cover in the course of this feature. In my own experiences, even relatively recent, big-budget movies like Krull were expensive if not difficult to obtain well into the current millennium. In that environment, a chance to watch a non-budget oldie like Plan 9 was a novelty indeed. But in the era of online stores and streaming, the only reasons you can’t order or view a film in minutes are if it’s entirely lost (the fate of several films I intend to cover sooner or later) or because one or more jackasses tied up the rights in court. As already noted, the curve only moved because Plan 9 was no longer viewed in isolation.

Yet, there is one more thing that should give us pause. If Plan 9 is truly considered as a social satire, and not just intentional or unintentional comedy, it becomes almost terrifyingly prescient. Technology too deadly to be used without mutual self-destruction. A self-styled superior mind who has a point but can’t make it without insulting his audience. Authority figures who accept what they see but won’t admit it to those they are responsible to protect. A war to stop the use of a weapon that might or might not exist. These are the true absurdities of Ed Wood, and we need to stop laughing.

For links, I recommend the Cinemassacre review for a semi-serious revisionist take on the movie. Another interesting take can be found at The Dissolve .  The image is taken from online listings under the expectation of "fair use"; the tale of my own collection will wait for another day.

Space 1979: The one that's REALLY weird

 

Title: The Day Time Ended

What Year?: 1980

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity/ Anachronistic Outlier

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

 

From the time I came with this feature, I have had a definite plan to end it sooner or later. As I’ve looked ahead, I have tried very hard to narrow down what movies I would definitely cover if I had to make a choice. For this review, I’m back with another movie that’s been on that “list” from the beginning, or nearly so. I didn’t get to it before in large part because I wasn’t sure what I could say about it. As I finally get to it, I find I still don’t know, but I’m at least ready to try. With that indeterminate endorsement, I introduce The Day Time Ended.

Our story begins with a shot of the darkness of outer space, or the murky gray-green of a malfunctioning Game Boy depending on the quality of the copy. After the credits roll, we get a meandering narration on the nature of time from an unseen speaker who casually mentions that he “used” to live on planet Earth. We then transition to several generations of a family driving out to a vacation home in what looks like southern California. They quickly realize that strange things are happening. Mysterious flying objects appear in the sky, a green glow flares up in different rooms of the house, a little girl sees a tiny humanoid creature in her room, and a menacing mini-UFO flies in right through the window. Meanwhile, radio broadcasts announce earthquakes and fleeing refugees elsewhere. As the night continues, the house is besieged by giant monsters and even stranger visions, and the family soon realizes there may not be a way home.

The Day Time Ended was a relatively early effort by Charles Band, who previously appeared here with Laserblast and remarkably hasn’t appeared till now. (Don’t worry, I still have several of his works in the lineup.) The movie included extensive stop-motion effects by David Allen. The cast included Christopher Mitchum (son of Robert Mitchum) and television actor Jim Davis as the grandfather of the family. There is no serious dispute that the movie received a theatrical release, but no tale tells how wide or successful it was. The movie’s soundtrack was released on vinyl, an unusual move for a low budget film, with enough apparent success that copies can still be purchased for about $20 (more than can be said for Krull!). The movie was released on VHS in 1997 by Band’s latter-day Full Moon enterprise, and found further popularity after being featured on the revived MST3K series in 2018.

My personal experience with this movie began a couple years back, when I bought it online as a two-pack. I have watched it exactly twice, including a viewing for this review. (I still haven’t watched the other movie in the set.) My foremost conclusion is that I simply can’t get through this movie without losing track or tuning out. This has a lot to do with my own issues, but I don’t buy that this means I have somehow missed something; I could follow Zardoz, after all. That leads directly to my further impression, that this film is simply incomprehensible. What is all the more striking is that it is really quite simple in its premises; on top of that, the whole run time is just under an hour and 20 minutes. What story there is could be summarized in a few sentences, even more concisely than my spoiler-free account above. The strangeness all comes from the execution.

On any further analysis, what stands out is how completely random the movie is. In that respect above all, the movie feels like it belongs to the 1970s rather than 1980. There are any number of movies that people joke feel like a bad acid trip, but this one is absolutely the real deal, and I say that as someone who can get the “stoned” experience just by going off my meds. What seals it is not the strangeness of what is shown, but how much of it has little or nothing to do with anything else. It would be easy to assume that the movie was created by shooting the effects sequences first and building a story around them, which would be entirely on brand for this crew. However, the stop-motion sequences in particular are in fact very well-integrated with shots of the human cast and their environments. If the film feels like a grab bag of bizarre imagery, it’s because those involved from Band on downward decided to do it that way.

What becomes all too clear is that even on these terms, the film struggles. To begin with, the best effects sequences, particularly the fairy-like humanoid, come relatively early in the film, leading to a major slowdown in the final act that only picks back up with a visionary cityscape at the very end. The episodic and disjointed use of the effects sequences, and even their uniformly good quality, leaves the whole feeling less than the sum of the parts. It must be added that the only especially novel sequence is a stop-motion monster brawl a little past midpoint, and then mainly for surprisingly graphic violence (complete with a surreal “arrow through the head” sight gag). A further problem is that only this and a few other sequences give strong sense of the human characters being in danger. The very limited character development greatly contributes to these and other problems, with only the girl and her grandfather making enough of an impression for a viewer to care what happens to them.

For the “one scene”, the sequence that stood out to me is at around the hour mark. After the swirling lights envelope the house, the grandparents find themselves looking out at a daylight scene instead of night. The grandfather steps outside into a landscape that looks like an elephant’s graveyard for spacecraft. Most of the scenery is clearly a matte painting, with the already “retro” feel of a Robert McCall illustration, but the composite is convincing enough to track the old man’s progress as he examines the vehicles. The pseudorealistically detailed machines are all mockingly dilapidated, with many already clearly wrecked, stripped or simply falling apart. He investigates a noise from one of the craft (I’m absolutely sure a DC3 fuselage), but finds only a flapping rag. As the wind rises, he looks back and finds the lights have enveloped the house again. He scrambles back to the porch, seemingly just in time… and just before he hears his granddaughter call out behind him.

In the proverbial light of day, what this film really represents is a style very specific to the 1970s of weirdness for its own sake. The problem in hindsight is that this brand of strangeness was far too often a sheep in wolf’s clothing, hiding not only a lack of further conceptual development but also a lack of emotional involvement and depth. This movie in particularly had the best chance of getting something more interesting out of the format, with ideas and themes that evoke anything from the cosmic terror of Lovecraft to the far-future “sense of wonder” of Van Vogt. In my judgment, it does succeed enough to rise above otherwise more competent films like Zardoz, which is the chief reason I don’t give it an even lower rating. But it came out at a time when films like Star Wars and Alien were already proving that science fiction could do and be more than this. In fairness, Band and his crew did learn their lesson, which is why most of their work has so far fallen outside the scope of this feature. Let this one count as a useful experiment, even if it is a failed one.

For links, the image credit goes to Discogs.  I also recommend a review at Something Awful. The ratings and classification system can be seen in the feature Introduction. 

The one with a Beatle and a football player as cavemen

 

Title: Caveman

What Year?: 1981

Classification: Parody/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Downright Decent! (4/5)

 

For the end of the parody arc, I’ve finally worked my way to one of the very first films I thought of covering for this feature. It’s also one of the movies I personally like the most, and if there’s one thing that should be clear by now, it’s that this makes an honest review very, very hard. Since I first thought of this feature, there have been times I was ready to make it one of my first reviews and others when I was ready to drop it entirely. Without further hand-wringing, I introduce Caveman.

Our story begins in a time introduced as “One Zillion BC”, where tribes of hunter-gatherers share the Earth with various dinosaurian monsters. In short order, we meet Atuk, a caveman who shows empathy and concern when an attack by one of the beasts leaves several of the tribe dead and injured, and Tonda, who casually plows through anyone in his way. We also learn that Atuk is pitifully obsessed with Tonda’s mate, Lana, and not above trying to flatly abduct her for a chance to woo her. When his scheme goes disastrously awry, Tonda drives him from the tribe. Accompanied by his injured friend Lar, Atuk begins to gather his own band of outcasts and misfits, including a woman named Tala who fancies him and her blind father (figure?) Gog. But they cannot seem to avoid Tonda and his old tribe, and Atuk is not ready to give up on Lana. When a happenstance accident puts Lana in his hands, Tonda prepares a swift retaliation with help from Tala, forcing the outcasts to gather for war.

Caveman was directed and co-written by Carl Gottlieb, whose previous work included a writer’s credit for Jaws. The production parodied a modest wave of “caveman” movies in the 1960s and 1970s, influenced by the 1966 remake of One Million BC and prehistoric scenes in 2001. Many of these were foreign films, such as When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and When Women Had Tails, potentially contributing to perceptions of Caveman as a parody without a “serious” source during its US release. Ringo Starr was cast as Atuk, with his future spouse Barbara Bach as Lana, Shelley Long as Tala, and NFL star John Matuszak as Tonda. The supporting cast included Dennis Quaid (previously sighted in Innerspace and Jaws 3) as Lar, Avery Schreiber of Galaxina as Tonda’s ally Ock, and Evan C. Kim as the only character to speak a certain amount of English. Stop-motion models and effects were provided mainly by Jim Danforth (previously seen slumming in Planet of Dinosaurs), who left the production before completion. The finished film was released by United Artists, with a $6.5 million budget and an estimated $15M box office. Contemporary promotional materials included a printed lexicon of the caveman language used for the vast majority of the film’s dialogue. Ironically, the European caveman wave would continue with films such as Quest For Fire, also released in 1981.

My experiences with this movie start fairly late, when I ordered it online around 2007. I loved it as a tribute to older dinosaur movies, especially the Harryhausen version of One Million BC. It further impressed me in its own right, obviously for the stop-motion effects, also for the cast, good character development, great music and a sense of general high-spirited silliness that consistently transcends any individual gag. I recognized from the beginning that there were certain things that went “too far” from the standpoint of more modern tastes, but it didn’t detract from what was good. I watched it reasonably regularly in the following years, including a day when I was too sick to go out for an interview for what became my first real job. It had been a little while since I watched it when I thought of reviewing it for this feature. I watched it again quite early, and then… Aw, dammit.

From here, I’ll start by backing up to what’s good. As already outlined, its use of effects, sight gags and physical comedy are top notch, to the point that the movie as a whole starts to feel just uniformly okay. The performances from Starr and Matuszak greatly improve an already promising movie; it’s all the more impressive that they hold their own in the midst of a cast of quite accomplished actors. Then the one thing that’s easy to overlook is that there are serious and even poignant moments. The overall result is a fundamentally convincing picture of “stone age” life. The struggle for survival crowds out any sense of good against “bad”. Tonda in particular is crude and mean, but rarely deliberately cruel. Again, the movie is further boosted by the music from Lalo Schifrin, whose credits included the Mission: Impossible theme and Dirty Harry. The high point of the score and perhaps the movie is a sequence of inspired insanity when Atuk’s band sings the theme, accompanied with improvised instruments.

For what’s bad, the unavoidable problem is Atuk’s schemes toward Lana, which add a whole extra layer of cringe to a movie that already has plenty of crude humor. I can charitably interpret what is shown as in line with semi-benign practices of the native American tribes, which ideally ended with either consensual marriage or the return of the woman for a ransom. Even then, his methods are extreme, to put it very kindly, leading to one early and extremely uncomfortable sequence. What makes things even more awkward is that none of his new band challenges his behavior, but on the contrary enable his continued aggressions up to the very end. The implied contest of Lana and Tala just gives one more layer of discomfort. Lana is a transparent opportunist, but her actions even more than Tonda’s are dictated by her circumstances. By comparison, Tala is introverted at best and passive-aggressive at worst. One can find a redemption arc in Atuk’s eventual choices, but like much of the movie, it’s a pointedly weak as a moral.

For the “one scene”, I could never say no to a stop-motion dinosaur scene. Around the middle of the movie, Atuk’s tribe is stalked by a tyrannosaur we have already met several times. It’s one of the finest stop-motion creations, animated by Randall W. Cook with Danforth’s model. It looks pitifully old, complete with unfocused rheumy eyes and a meager handful of teeth, but still clearly dangerous. Absurdly, it tries to sneak up on Atuk at the rear, and even more absurdly, it nearly succeeds. When the dino smacks its chops, the band belatedly realizes the danger and runs for it, leaving Tala behind. Atuk turns and runs to the rescue, armed only with a bush full of very potent fruit. The beast munches the plant whole, and promptly becomes happily tipsy, a little too close to the cliff.

Of all the movies to turn up here, this movie is perhaps the one that did the most to put itself on the wrong side of history (at least apart from Space Mutiny). To me, what it has always felt like is a good 1970s (or even '60s) movie crossed with a bad 1980s movie. Even as I wrote this review, I have been conflicted about how to rate it. Before getting back to it, I was ready to consider giving it the highest rating; immediately after, I despaired whether I could justify giving it a 3/5. I rate it as I have for what it does right, and especially for what it has meant to me. With that, I for one can finally move on.

For links, I recommend  a Cinemassacre video that covers a number of European caveman movies, all in the course of discussing a clip featured in Troll 2. As usual, see the Introduction for the ratings and classification system.

Movie Mania! The Krull soundtrack

 

I'm back with a bit with something a bit different for this feature, which I really had in mind all along. While movie tie-in toys/ collectibles are awesome, it isn't the end of the scope of my collection. Whether it's movie soundtracks, novelizations, "making of" books and documentaries or tie-in fiction, my answer is "yes to all", and I was thinking of covering the artifacts I have accumulated on this blog even before I started reviewing movies here. Today's specimens are among the most hard-fought of my acquisitions, the soundtrack of one the greatest or at least weirdest fantasy films of the 1980s, Krull.

As covered in my movie review, Krull was a big-budget fantasy epic produced in parallel with films like Conan the Barbarian and Clash of the Titans. The production included a score from James Horner, fresh off of doing the soundtrack for Wrath of Khan. The soundtrack would go through its own strange saga. From the evidence at hand, there was a contemporary release mainly on vinyl. However, the main CD release was in 1992, almost a decade after the movie came out, while a giant-sized 2-disk version is dated as late as 2015 per Discogs (my main resource on these things for some time). Because movie studios are inherently evil and also apparently opposed to actually making actual money, none of these albums have been made available for digital purchase. In fact, the only digital track of any kind to come to my attention is a cover of the main theme and opening on an album called Cinemagic 30.

All of this makes a soundtrack CD about as difficult to obtain as the glaive from Krull (except the CD actually does something). Prices usually start in the $40-50 dollar range. As an extra frustration, there's a version out there (possibly a direct copy of the LP) that has only 8 tracks, two of which are less than 3 minutes long. I have also seen listings I found suspicious for the 2-disk version at especially low prices. I initially thought these had to be bootlegs of some kind, though I also considered the possibility that someone had found a big load of backstock that couldn't be moved fast enough. After double-checking the year as I write this, it's now clear that this version isn't even that old, so the latter could well be true.

For my personal adventure, I finally went looking for the Krull soundtrack very early this year. I first tried a listing on Amazon that I covered most of the price of with bonus points. Of course, it turned out to be the short/ abomination version. I followed up that purchase with a 1990s CD that had reprinted the soundtrack version of the main theme (yes, they left it out), and ended up with about 50 minutes of music that I pieced together on my mobile devices for listening on my travels. Here's pics of the CD insert and track list.

After a little time listening to this, I decided I wanted more, but not necessarily a lot more. I thus set my sights on the "single disk" version. The prices were still consistently steep. I finally went with an offer from the UK, which of course meant extra in shipping, but it still cost less than any other offer. It came with 16 tracks, a total of about 80 minutes. Here's shots of what I got. I love the line "light years beyond..."

...Or beyond a truckload of hallucinogenic drugs, which is really more impressive.

I got the CD right before the end of March of this year, which turned out to be a few weeks from when I was ordered to start working from home. I had to come up with my own setup quickly, and that included getting music I could play as long as possible. I also figured out quickly that using newfangled voice commands weren't going to work when I had to talk to people, while dealing with ads on a certain video site was only slightly less obnoxious. I set up first a CD clock radio, and then a new (very cheap) CD boombox. What I ended up listening to almost exclusively was the Krull soundtrack. It might not seem quite as great listened to over and over again, and even 80 minutes isn't a lot in the course of a whole work day, but it's been holding up, and hearing "The Ride of the Firemares" start up is always a good morale boost. At any rate, that's all for now; more to come!

Space 1979: The one with an android portrayed by a porn star

 

Title: Galaxina

What Year?: 1980

Classification: Parody/ Mashup/ Anachronistic Outlier

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

 

With this review, I am continuing a minor arc of sci fi comedies/ parodies, including a few I had in mind very early. Back when I first wrote theI ntroduction for this feature, parodies posed some of my most difficult choices both in definitions and material. In most cases, these were of limited interest, especially if they came from “mainstream” creators; that was my assessment of Spaceballs in particular. The ones I definitely wanted to cover were a few that were early and innovative enough to have influenced other in-genre movies, especially Dark Star. Others that got on my radar were usually ones that had comedic and/ or satirical elements but kept the sci fi “straight”, like Night ofthe Creeps. That still left a few that I genuinely wasn’t sure what to do with. For this review, I’m finally covering the most egregious of these entries, a very odd little movie called Galaxina.

Our story starts with a ship flying through space that’s longer than usual and distinctly pink. It’s introduced as the police cruiser Infinity, and in short order we meet the motley crew, including captain Cornelius Butt, the lonely Sgt.Thor and the eponymous Galaxina, the ship’s android pilot. As the mishaps and misadventures continue, we meet a mysterious alien from beyond the galaxy that bests the ship in combat, another alien locked in the ship’s brig that eats rocks hurled at it by the captain, and a creature of uncertain intelligence that hatches from an egg the captain tries to eat. Meanwhile, a romance blossoms between Thor and Galaxina, hindered by her inability to speak plus ill-timed power surges. When the crew is sent on a 27-year trip in suspended animation to catch a fugitive with a powerful artifact, Galaxina tries to modify herself into a more suitable partner. Then the upgraded android must venture out into a hostile frontier planet to recover the artifact, with the crew’s old adversary and several more wild cards as competition.

Galaxina was written and directed by William Sachs, an independent sci fi/ horror film maker whose previous work included the 1977 film The Incredible Melting Man (which I’m definitely getting to at some point, though it probably won’t be here). Playboy model Dorothy Stratten was cast and prominently billed as Galaxina, in her only starring film role before her murder shortly after the film’s mid-1980 release. Other cast included veteran comic actor Avery Schreiber as the captain and Stephen Macht as Thor. Sachs complained that the film was significantly changed by budget limitations and a reduced shooting schedule that prevented the shooting of certain scenes. The film was distributed by Crown International Pictures, and received an R rating from the MPAA. By all accounts, contemporary reception was mixed at best. The film has remained available for streaming in recent years, though at the time of this writing only itunes offers it for direct purchase.

As alluded above, I had seen this movie and thought of it very early, but delayed getting to it mainly because of strangeness concerning availability. With a fresh viewing for a frame of reference, I can easily say that this is one of the oddest films I have covered, far more so than I can easily convey by describing it in cold blood. Indeed, the single most striking thing about it is how pervasively and almost unsettlingly tame it is. The vast majority of it would fall well within “PG-13” for a modern movie, or even “Seventies PG” outside of some brief profanity. By my reckoning, the fact that it doesn’t push the envelope for adult content is the chief reason it remains watchable and even charming.

This brings us to the upside, the science fiction here is thoughtful, well-realized and generally good. The romance between Galaxina and Thor remains an intriguing and forward-thinking take on human-AI relations, with several of the film’s better gags and a few genuinely moving moments thrown in. The crew are also well-realized, on par with the space truckers of Alien (not to mention Dark Star) without being beholden to it, while the ship for all its willfully suggestive design makes a fair amount of sense. The on-planet locales offer a reasonably clever reductio ad absurdum of the “space Western” subgenre, with such additions as a consumer-product cult and the wicked double meaning of a “human restaurant”. One more extra twist is the use of advertisements as part of the world building, a device brought to its apex in Robocop. They might not be on the level of that film, or especially good in themselves, but they give an extra level of irreverent realism to the proceedings.

The downside is that the film is simply and unaccountably unfunny. To begin with, it suffers acutely from a quite common tendency of vintage sci fi comedies to be more amusing between the jokes, but that’s a survivable flaw. The humor of the film holds up fairly well as long as it sticks to sight gags, which give its better moments the feel of a sci fi version of Airplane. Then there are some genuinely laugh-out-loud lines from Schreiber in particular, such as the fateful comment, “If people worried about where eggs came from, they would never have eaten them.” But for every gag that works, there are several more “jokes” that start out awkward and get painfully drawn out from there. What gets rather uncanny is that some of these gags might well have been relevant and even influential in their own time but merely draw a déjà vu sense of familiarity in hindsight. The most jarring example ia a musical flourish that occurs every time the artifact is mentioned, openly commented on by the cast. Even more unsettling is a dialogue bit about whiplash and lawsuits that would be self-dating in a 1990s movie.

For the “one scene”, a single sequence stands out simply for living up to the film’s potential. As the first act ends, the crew go to a house of adult entertainment, blatantly styled on an Old West saloon. The workers and patrons include plenty of sight gags and some genuinely good practical-effects creatures. The captain openly comments on them with some decent zingers. As they settle in, they become more friendly, without going much further than that. The scene is framed by a shot that reveals Galaxina watching sternly from the ship, with an eye on Thor in particular. But then back up, and the film quite pointedly shows a woman who has one more endowment than usual. It’s exactly the same gag shown graphically in Total Recall, and nobody’s going to convince me it’s a coincidence that this is the second time I’ve referenced the works of Paul Verhoeven!

This is a movie I would love to have hailed as a neglected gem.  The reality is that it is still worth watching, and certainly not as disappointing as plenty of far more successful films of the era. But the fact that it has not been elevated to newfound fame must be attributed not to being overlooked, but on the contrary to remaining just accessible enough for the discerning to seek it out. The one factor truly in its favor is that, like all comedy, it was intended for its own time, and like all movies before the VHS age, nobody involved would have expected it to remain under scrutiny ten years later, let alone 40. From the standpoint of history, it is what it probably always was: Experimental, awkward, intermittently inspired, and ultimately not that good.

Timmee Tuesday: Nuclear guy and friends

 

I decided it was time for more Timmee, and I definitely knew what the next in line would be. Back when I introduced the Marx knights, I also introduced a guy I call the Timmee nuclear guy, and featured him again with the Marx 3 inch space guys. Now I finally have a more complete lineup of the set he came from, with an extra twist or so. To begin, here's a few pics with the Galaxy Laser Team commander and the 70mm Space Guy Who Doesn't Care.

The backstory of the nuclear guy is that I picked him up as a prize sometime in the mid to late 1990s, as I recall at a church carnival-style function. At the time, I genuinely thought of his getup as a radiation suit, and it still strikes me as what a kid would happily assume. What interested me most was his relatively large size. I previously estimated the scale as 60mm, a scale listed for certain Marx figures,. After some further eye-balling, I now am satisfied it is 63mm, a scale that was at one point "standard" for Marx army men. 

The big discovery came when I started looking up Timmee reissue sets, and saw my "nuclear guy" pictured as part of a firefighter set. I never got around to buying it up, and in more recent years it dropped out of sight again. However, when I went looking at online auctions, I found plenty of listings for both reissues and "vintage" specimens. The one that caught my eye, and was still quite cheap, was a bagged set with actual Timmee production marks. I got it a little while back and put up a few photos online but didn't immediately make time to give it a proper treatment on this blog. Here is a pic I took at the time of the bag, plus a close-up of the charmingly hideous and perhaps terrifying card art.

From the best available information, the Timmee firefighters were made in the early or mid-1970s; Toy Soldier HQ gives a year of 1975 which I believe is correct for the "set" as a whole. As usual, earlier production of some sculpts cannot easily be ruled out. Of more interest, Toy Soldier HQ reports that the set was being produced as late as 2004, which may have been boosted y the post-9/11 fervor. I consider that the likeliest date of the bagged set. That would further account for the cute/non-threatening police officer in the artwork, which in the current climate would be more fitting for a BLM meme. I would like to think that mustache was drawn in with a pen, but I very carefully looked for evidence of that without finding any conclusive proof.

With packaging like that, the figures should be almost anticlimactic, but that's certainly not the case. To begin with, they definitely have a cheaper feel than my nuclear guy, complete with the noticeable "clicky" sound during handling. They are also quite random, with the nuclear guy and at least one other figure missing entirely. Finally, there is a noticeable difference between the modern, masked figures and the "old school" style of the rest, which might indicate that some were added to an earlier set. Here's the pics of the lot.

It should be clear from these pics just how randomized the selections were. I suspect the nuclear guy was discontinued by this point, which would have been understandable given the further fears of nuclear/ biochemical terrorism at the turn of the millennium. What's less explicable is that several of the sculpts are clearly intended to form a group, as illustrated in the opening photo. I had to do this with the nuclear guy because a regular fireman with a hose nozzle is also missing, despite the presence of three  guys manning fire hydrants.

Finally, the set also includes a group of cops, reportedly released originally as a "SWAT" set in 1978. They are in army man scale, and inexplicably hideous. The inclusion of a lady cop is noteworthy, particularly considering that she is the meanest-looking and flat-out ugliest of the grim group. It can be assumed that the designers didn't intend for the figures to represent regular police, but this only adds to the unintentional terror factor. I may have to come back to these again to do them justice. For now, here's a couple pics.

All in all, the firemen are still worth acquiring. The cops/ SWAT guys, on the other hand, are to be avoided except as an example of absolutely hideous army man figures. It would be easy to take the latter as proof of how far Timmee went downhill, except they date from the same time as Galaxy Laser Team and years before Legendary Battles. The real lesson is that "army man" toys were truly among both the best and worst toys out there, whether it was the 1950s or the 1980s. That's why they stay in the memory long after more expensive toy lines fade away, and that's why so many of my posts are dedicated to them.

That's all for now, more to come!