Space 1979 Apocalypse How 2: The one with the animal apocalypse

 

Title: The Day of the Animals aka Something Is Out There

What Year?: 1977

Classification: Runnerup/ Anachronistic Outlier

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

 

For the next installment in the apocalypse lineup, I’m returning to a subgenre I’ve covered before, the “killer animal” movie. It’s a theme that can be traced to Medieval and Renaissance times, when artists like Hieronymus Bosch used vengeful animals as a symbol of divine wrath, outraged nature or just well-deserved comeuppance. It got an early start in modern horror and sci fi movies with The Birds, which was followed by ecological parables like The Frogs, Phase IV and Squirm. It all largely petered out with Jaws, which scaled the apocalyptic allegory back to the “straight” monster movie, as well as a resurgence of more conventional post-apocalyptic fare. But there was still one more egregious example from an offender we’ve met before. Here is The Day of the Animals, a film from the guy who gave us The Manitou.

Our story begins with a grim text crawl warning of the dangers of ozone depletion and what “could” happen. You might expect this to turn into a story about cancer or global warming, but in fact, we go straight to a party heading out on a nature hike. We’re quickly introduced to a cast of cliches and stereotypes, notably a newly divorced mother and her son, a bickering husband and wife, a wise Indian, and an ad man who’s already trying to act more macho than a Klingon gone native. As they make their way along, we get frequent shots of birds and beasts that seem to be trailing their party (of course including ominous “POV” camerawork). The party remains oblivious enough that they are completely unconcerned when they find an unoccupied campsite with coffee still brewing on the campfire. As the night passes, they find themselves under attack by wolves, cougars and other unpleasant creatures. Meanwhile, we learn that the world’s wildlife is going berserk and attacking people unprovoked, only at elevations over 5000 feet. As the new day dawns, the party must make their way back to civilization, now with a traumatized child in tow, but the ad man has decided he is in charge and would rather play by the law of the jungle. Will the party survive, or has man finally proved as deadly as the beasts?

The Day of the Animals was the second-to-last film by filmmaker William Girdler, who died in a helicopter crash shortly before the release of The Manitou in early 1978. The film was widely viewed as a followup to the 1976 film Grizzly, an arguable Jaws knockoff that proved profitable but entangled Girdler in legal battles for his share of the money. The cast included Christopher George and Richard Jaeckel (see The Green Slime) from Grizzly and The Manitou’s Michael Ansara (who played a Klingon on the original Star Trek), with Leslie Nielsen as the crazed Paul. The animal attack sequences were filmed mainly with live animals, including a trained bear, with optical compositing used for a sequence in which Mandy is killed by hawks. The movie made a very modest $2.8 million box office, which was still more than twice its $1.2M budget. The movie has long enjoyed a cult/ camp reputation, with a Rifftrax cut released in 2017.

For my experiences, I first heard of this one a long time ago. I finally watched it while working on the lineup for Repeat Offender week (originally slated to end with Prey). I went with other material, but was definitely interested. As I thought over the possibilities for the present list, it came right to the top, with only The Frogs really rivalling it. What kept this one more interesting is its deceptively late date, only five years after Silent Running and just one after Squirm, but beyond a canyon-sized gulf in terms of genre trends. This was literally the year when Star Wars was tearing up the box office, and a year before Dawn of the Dead started the late ‘70s-1980s zombie movie wave. After that double whammy, audiences wouldn’t come back to the grim ecological parable until well into the ‘80s (see The Nest). This movie was like the guy who doesn’t just come late to the party, but wanders in after the host has already gone to bed. With that disastrous timing in mind, it’s impressive enough this movie made twice its slim budget.

Moving to the movie itself, the unavoidable comparison is Planet of Dinosaurs, another movie from the same banner year that was a relic by the time it hit theaters. The formula is effectively the same, a group in a life-threatening environment who are all cliched, all dumb, and almost all devoid of any likeable qualities. Here, at least, the unqualified macho idiot who tries to take charge is cast as a villain, though the storyline still doesn’t really show the realistic and predictable consequences of his stupidity. Even so, this movie somehow falls short of that mindboggling low bar, perhaps all the more so with a cast and crew who clearly know what they’re doing. Planet of Dinosaurs was at least unintentionally amusing (not far from Maximum Overdrive), but this borders on willfully irritating. Anything of quality comes from Ansara, who keeps the same unaccountable dignity as a typecast non-Indian Indian that he did in The Manitou, and the completely surreal casting of Nielsen. The latter should have offered a good turn as a villain, especially considering his inspired performance in Creepshow just 5 years later, but this feels like finding out Frank Dreben is an alcoholic who murders call girls on the side, except that we could actually believe he had a dark side we don’t know about.

That leaves us with the animals, and that is where the movie fails at almost every turn. The pseudoscience about the ozone layer is obvious nonsense, and renders the movie far less effective than predecessors like The Birds (which still wasn’t nearly as good as the short story). What stands out to me is that any metaphors that could be drawn are wasted. Actual wolves and cougars are willy and elusive (and in the case of the cat almost entirely solitary), a potent analog for anything from the Apaches to the Viet Cong, but here, they practically come out and say howdy whether it’s the dead of night or broad daylight. An action sequence where wolves and at least two cougars seem to attack in unison is simply strange and oddly tame if you really know anything about the animals. It’s still not as bad as the ludicrous demise of Mandy, in which the woman has to be practically pulled aloft to appear to be in any danger, or an even lamer rat attack. The  one vaguely inspired moment is Leslie Nielsen’s last stand against a bear, who seems merely perplexed as he pummels it in rage while the survivors in his group run away. (Why they didn’t run away before is a whole other can of “cringe”.)

Now, it’s time for the “one scene”, and there was truly one that stood out all along. As the middle act meanders to a close, we catch up with a guy in the group who has been trying to take care of a nearly mute child. They finally reach an already deserted town, and the adult tries to find help. He senselessly leaves the child in the middle of a sidewalk with absolutely no cover or protection, and gets angry when she becomes distressed. He quickly repents, and takes her to a potentially secure vehicle where he locks her inside and promises to return. Of course, we know where this is going. He barely gets a few steps before the beasts are on his trail, and then tries to take cover where they are obviously waiting. He lasts long enough to scream for help, while the girl only stares.

In closing, this is a movie that left me conflicted. Judged on its own flaws and occasional strengths, it would get no more or less than a 2, and I came very close to leaving it about that. But there is something here that makes it far lower than the sum of its parts. It’s not as bad as plenty of movies I have viewed or reviewed (including, dear Logos, Grizzly), yet the more I scrutinize it, the more I feel personally annoyed. I see it especially in comparison with The Manitou, which whatever its flaws at least told a unique story in an interesting way, according to a bonkers kind of internal logic, and made us care about its characters to boot. This movie, on the other hand, is nonsensical in concept, dull and often incomprehensible in execution, and unable to make us want anyone except Ansara’s character and maybe the girl end up as anything but kibble. The fact that it is made with a minimum standard of competence only shows that those involved could and should have done better. The standing principle for my ratings remains that it is one thing to be bad, and another to be inexcusably bad. This is a movie that is not the worst, but has far fewer excuses than most not to be “good”, and that is what makes a film with no right to exist.

Retrobots Revisited: Droids!

 

At this writing, I'm closing on 2 years since I started this blog and about one year since it really got going. I've again been reminded that I have again gone a while without doing much with my robot features. To make up for it, I decided to do an extra post on something I'm surprised I didn't cover a lot sooner, the droids of the original Star Wars Kenner droids. These are the definitive representations of the most iconic and influential pop culture robots in history, and as we will see, the strange thing is that there really weren't that many of them. To start off, here's the tallest and arguably greatest of them all, IG88, with the Voltron mystery red guy and C3PO; he's okay, I guess.

 And here's a pic with the Truckstop Queen and Ken R. Wampa, plus a Rock Lord. Note the rock bot is about the same height; with both at full height, I think IG is still just a little taller.

Now, it's time to back this up. The lineup here represents about 3/4ths of the Kenner "vintage" droids I have. The other two are a worst-possible-condition R2 and an R5D4 I'm sure I have but couldn't find on short notice. The further backstory is that I picked up most of these, including IG, in mid- to late elementary school, well after the end of the Kenner line. I also recall I lost or broke specimens of IG and R5 then bought them again. (The latter was a victim of a carbon freezing accident.) IG was certainly the coolest, notwithstanding the fact that we never saw him in action in the movies. He's tall and streamlined, outside of the unnecessary molded detail. The one problem is that he isn't made the same as other figures. The arms are a bit rubbery, and need to be watched for breakage, while the legs feel slightly and unpleasantly sticky with age. Still, he's easily among the very best of the vintage line, and I'm sure kids put him through a franchise worth of adventures. Next up, C3PO and his weird cousin, the alleged Death Star Droid.

"Trust me, you're lucky you weren't in the cartoon...."

What I remember about these guys is that they were among my later acquisitions. I got C3PO second-hand in maybe 3rd or 4th grade, and didn't get the other guy until as late as high school.  I can further recall seeing the bug-eyed droid in an image in the Star Wars story book, as one of the broken-down droids in the Jawa sandcrawler. That in turn brings up one of the wonkier moments in the "Expanded Universe", when the droid handbook tried to explain the "Death Star droid" name as a "thing" in the Star Wars universe. Per the actual movies, even kids could work out, he was just a droid, and if it showed up in both the junk piles of Tatooine and the corridors of the Death Star, then they were already everywhere. And that brings us to what I suppose was my favorite, the power/ "Gonk" droid, pictured with Threepio and a Tomy bot for feature continuity.

As a kid, I absolutely loved this guy, and I still can't say why. He didn't really do anything in the movies, he looked silly, and the only things the toy added were the clicky gimmick in the legs and the antenna that's always missing. I can further recall deliberately pulling the antenna off mine because it annoyed me in some way, then throwing it away when it turned up in a sweep for loose accessories. To me, that just made him look more like he does in the movies, so I was happy. Here's a couple detail pics.

Finally, we have the medical droids from the Empire wave of the line, 21B and FX. Here they are together.

21B is besides R2 the only droid I'm absolutely sure we got new. I picked up the other droid already missing a couple arms. They were both awesome in my eyes. It's intriguing in hindsight that they made figures this detailed out of robots that were specifically shown as made to help people. (An extra factoid, 21B is the only droid besides Threepio to get any lines in English in the first two movies.) Of course, this went out the window in playtime. FX especially was great as an evil robot/ supercomputer, and it actually made sense for him to sit around while the evil scheme played out. Here's one more pic of him.

The thing about all this is that this brings us not only to the end of my collection but pretty close to the end of the droids in the Kenner line. The only droid I haven't covered released on card in the vintage line is Zuckuss/ 4LOM (I really don't care...), which I know my big brother or I must have had simply because I remember having his triple-barreled gun (which I usually gave to Bossk). The only new droids released for Return of the Jedi or the last-ditch Power of the Force wave were 8D8 and EV-9D9, and then mainly as add-ins for playsets. Throw in the probe droid from the Empire Hoth turret playset (which I was so unaware of I built my own to fill the gap), and you have only a dozen unique droids in the entire vintage line.  It would barely fill one wave of the Transformers or Gobots line, but clearly, they had influence far beyond their numbers.

Then fast-forward to the 1990s, when all things Star Wars were rebooting, and it was so... much... better. R2D2 looked like he did in the movie, 8D8 was findable, and we even got a probe droid. Here's a few pics of just a few I have lying around with vintage figures for comparison.

And one more...

"Did you say something about mini rigs?"

Now, I'm ready to wrap this up. If there's a lesson, it's that things can and do get better, but what came first can still hold its place, especially when you're old enough to remember when it was new. That's all for now, more to come!

Space 1979 Apocalypse How 1: The one with the truck apocalypse

 

Title: Maximum Overdrive

What Year?: 1986

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: Downright Decent! (4/5)

 

In planning out the last month, something I had in mind in advance was that I would have an extra week in the cycle. To round things out, I already had an idea in mind to fill the gap. The theme will be the apocalypse, and it’s a subject where my thinking goes off the beaten path. To me, apocalyptic fantasy isn’t just about the end of civilization or the human species, which have been covered plenty here already, but the reversal or collapse of the order of the world as we know it. Given this frame of reference, I’ve already semi-seriously mentioned a few that don’t fit the usual post-apocalyptic mold, like Killer Klowns From Outer Space and Squirm, and now I’m coming back with a few more I considered for a very long time. To start the lineup, I’m going with what is already the most iconic and egregious example, from the year that continues to mock me, 1986. And there’s no better introduction to Maximum Overdrive, a movie by Stephen King with Lisa Simpson.

Our story begins with a view of the Earth from space, shrouded in a green glow that a text crawl tells us is the tail of a comet. We then see the beginning of a seeming rebellion of machines, from profane LED signs to a lethal-slapstick pileup triggered by a bridge that raises itself. It quickly becomes clear that the spearhead of the rebellion are trucks that happily slaughter humans. That brings us to ground zero at a truckstop where our hero Bill works for a drawling redneck boss. As the trucks move in, he helps several bystanders to safety, including a lady hitchhiker who takes a shine to him. But as the onslaught continues, it becomes clear that the machines still need humans- as slaves! Can the humans turn the tables, or is their fate to pump gas until they drop? And I had a joke about how the director put a lame happy-ending text crawl at the end, admitted he had no idea what he was doing and then turned things around by writing Misery, but do we really need it???

Maximum Overdrive was the first and only film written and directed by Stephen King, based on his short story Trucks. The production was backed by chronic offender Dino DeLaurentiis (see Flash Gordon and Transformers), who previously produced The Dead Zone and Firestarter. The movie starred Emilio Estevez as Bill, Laura Harrington as his love interest and Pat Hingle as the presumably racist boss, with a supporting cast that included Yeardley Smith and African-American character actor Frankie Faison. The soundtrack heavily used the music of AC/DC, including the original song “Who Made Who?” The movie was plagued by production difficulties, including an accident that maimed cinematographer Armando Nannuzzi, as well as further censorship imposed by the MPAA. The movie was considered a box office bomb, earning a box office of no more than $7 million against a $9M budget and receiving Razzies for King and Estevez. King admitted being unable to handle his duties and further struggling with substance abuse throughout filming. It has long since become a “cult” hit on home video. It received a Blu Ray release in 2018, and is also available for streaming. The original story was adapted again for TV in 1997, simply as Trucks.

For my personal experiences, the story this one was based on was nothing less than the reason I started reading King at all. It’s a striking blend of horror and science fiction with a side of urban fantasy, with an “open” ending that only makes it more crushingly bleak. A year or so later, I found the 1997 movie, which I liked at the time and would still like to review sooner or later. It was a little later that I finally found the motherlode with Maximum Overdrive. Since then, I have not only watched it regularly but bought it and traded it back at least once before I finally bought it digitally. During that time, I have always liked it, while remaining very aware of its flaws. To me, watching it is like watching a court jester duel a seasoned knight and hold his own just by doing things a sensible professional would never think to prepare for. You could cover the vast majority of the running time with what it does “wrong”, yet there is very little that one could honestly say doesn’t “work” on the film’s own frequently warped terms. To me, the only things that really stand out are the goblin-faced central truck, which is far less frightening than the plain, grimy monstrosity of Duel, and the AC/DC score, which seems arranged to support the thesis that the band not only made the same album over and over again but the same song.

Meanwhile, the obvious pluses come in play with the very strong opening act, tellingly well before we see much of the “main” characters. Like much of the movie, it’s hit-or-miss, but the multiple inventive scenarios keep the law of averages in its favor. Things slow down a bit as the story settles on the truck stop, with the livelier moments coming from the side misadventures of Smith and her beau and a kid. Admittedly, the plot and pacing start to get strained once we get closest to the events of the original story. Still, there are plenty of good moments from the humans as well as machines, first and foremost from Hingle (nobody’s onscreen names matter) as he fights back with an actual bazooka. (On the other hand, is there an explosion in this movie they did right?) A good word is in order for Smith, who does the literal scream-queen bit to the hilt if you can get past her career-burying success on The Simpsons. Then Emilio Estevez actually finds his own facing down the trucks even as he does their bidding, like a cheeky waiter at a billionaires’ club. One more element worth mentioning is the arc of an ill-fated waitress, played by Ellen McElduff. She begins to snap when she literally screams at the trucks. The attack that follows is almost lazy, but the truly unnerving part comes as the rest of the trucks blare their horns in unison.

The obvious “problem” in all this is that there is simply no room in the story for an ending, happy or otherwise. On consideration, this is a recurring issue with King adaptations, conspicuously The Mist (one more I haven’t figured out a way to get to). It was understandable that King went for a more conventional resolution through an “escape” arc. It even works up to a point, complete one more creative highlight as the fugitives run into a restaurant’s talkative sound system. On consideration, what “should” have happened was for the characters disappear moderately hopefully into the distance on the vein of The Birds or Dawn of the Dead (in my opinion also what should have been done in The Mist). Indeed, that is more or less what we see, right up to the laughably cheery end crawl that completely short-circuits the internal logic of the storyline and fails even harder trying to be funny. We already saw the kid’s little league team get slaughtered by a vending machine (seriously…), but we’re supposed to believe an armed “weather satellite” stayed on our side?

That brings me to the “one scene”, and I suppose it’s one I might have forgotten without a viewing, if only because it’s the kind of thing the movie tends to break up. As the first act winds down, we come back to the kid, riding his bike through a residential street. At first, things seem quiet, even “normal”, apart from a few sprinklers that start and then stop for no obvious reason. We then begin to see the first of a series of bodies, while a radio warns of machines “operating by themselves or under the direction of some agency we don’t understand”. The kid proceeds to pass a wrecked VW (perhaps an homage to the story), a woman strangled by her hair dryer and even a dog apparently killed by a kamikaze remote control car. The radio further warns to unplug all appliances, grimly intoning that no machine can be trusted. (But of course you can trust us…) The kid reaches a cross street, and there’s a moment of silence. Then we hear… the ice cream truck.

In closing, I come as usual to the rating. Going in, I semi-seriously considered giving this movie the highest rating. Unfortunately, this is one where a repeat viewing never does any favors, a point that got driven home hard enough that I might have lowered the rating further than I did. I held the line where I have both for what the movie achieves and how much it had against it. It’s not great, it’s not good, but it’s still not the worst King adaptation, never mind a “worst” movie. My best further explanation is comparison with War of the Planets, the actual worst movie I’ve reviewed (though, dear Logos, still not the worst I’ve considered reviewing). I called that joyless mess the “anti-Italian” movie; this is the Italian movie on steroids. This is the kind of movie that screams, you can have CGI, big name stars, and a director with the faintest idea what he’s doing, but it still won’t be as memorable and as flat-out entertaining as this. With that, I am done and happy for it.

Image credit Happy Otter.

Crypto Corner: The man who cracked perpetual motion

 I’m rounding out the second-to-last week of a month of daily posts without anything lined up. To fill the gap, I decided it was time to get back to this feature. As it happens, there is one particular subject I have been thinking about recently, an incident from the formative days of modern science never fully explained, at least to the usual uneven standards of Forteans. I present the tale of Orfyrreus, a man who claimed to have found perpetual motion.

Our story begins in 1712 in a modest-sized German town, when an inventor appeared with a strange machine. His real name was Bessler, but by occult practices, he converted that into the suitably mystical name Orfyrreus. His machine was a large wheel, variously reported as six feet in diameter, that appeared to run entirely on its own power. Naturally, the mechanism was covered at almost all times, leaving it to the inventor to explain its workings. He maintained that his creation was nothing less than a perpetual motion machine, purportedly based on the principle of the overbalancing wheel, which even at the time had been investigated and largely disproved by the likes of Leonardo DaVinci. Nevertheless, he attracted enough interest from aristocratic donors and certain skeptical but interested observers to forge ahead with a series of larger machines, culminating in a colossal 12-foot wheel. His machines were run and carefully observed for weeks and months at a time, until even the skeptics agreed that a hidden human operator or other simple fraud was largely ruled out, notwithstanding the emergence of a disgruntled servant who claimed to have been just that. Alas, this and other setbacks were too much for the temperamental self-described genius, who finally destroyed the machine and disappeared into obscurity, leaving a mystery for generations to follow.

The case of Orfyrreus has long stood out to me first and foremost as the kind of anecdote that would be long forgotten if it didn’t fascinate anomalists like catnip. I first heard of it in a publication by Rupert Gould in 1928, then again from Colin Wilson in the 1980s (previously consulted on the case of Kaspar Hauser). What’s of further note is that it has never quite fallen into the realm of contrived supernaturalism that surrounds many purported mysteries. Nobody has suggested that the invention was either driven or inspired by paranormal agencies and influences, nor do the apologists necessarily argue that it was based on a technology unknown to later science. If anything, the favorite hypothesis has been that the inventor discovered a form of electricity or some other comprehensible power source, which can at least be considered as an factor in the bare belief that perpetual motion was possible. Much of the further fascination rises from the inventor, who by all accounts was so eccentric, paranoid and socially inept that many before and since considered him literally insane. The usual stated or implied dilemma is why someone so singularly unsuited to deception put so much time and effort into an invention he knew was a fraud.

Unfortunately, as with Hauser, this whole posited conundrum rises from dated conceits. On consideration, the romantic fiction of the polished and charming con man fares little better than that of a mysterious waif who must be royalty. On a certain level, it is only a flip side to the far more dangerous assumption that the mentally ill are incapable of guile and deceit. In reality, delusion and paranoia overlap with willful fraud so heavily it’s almost a chicken/ egg paradox, while the intelligent, empathetic “neurotypical” is in many ways the most vulnerable to their persuasions. Furthermore, it’s quite routine in science and academia in particular for elaborate and costly hoaxes to be carried out with no more than limited chance for material gain. The one real caveat in order is that offenders at this level tend to show a measure of belief in whatever they are trying to “prove”, making them more like fanatics than conventional charlatans.

With all that in mind, the central fact that emerges is that Bessler/ Orfyrreus is by any standard among the most devious minds on record. Whatever he may have lacked in personal graces, he more than made up for in convoluted deceptions, to the point that what can be known of his machine looks very much like diversions from other diversions. The whole posited theory of his machine was nonsense, and he was more than clever enough to know or suspect as much. (In a quick search for this piece, I found a video, unfortunately since removed from public view, demonstrating that the overbalanced wheel is in fact less functional than a regular wheel.) By my own further assessment, what it really offered was an excuse to put in a lot of complicated parts that could be presented to anyone shrewd enough to demand to see its insides. On top of that, the purported overbalancing mechanism appears to have generated a good deal of noise, perhaps drowning out other sounds that might have given away the actual power source. If it comes to that, the whole thing could in some lights be considered a parody of the perpetual motion machine, raising a dim possibility that it was at least initially a prank at the expense of the aristocracy and the still-new scientific “establishment”.

That brings us to in many ways the oddest part of the affair, the maidservant who might have discredited the machine. The lowly peon insisted that she and other staff and family were instructed to drive the wheel with a simple crank kept in a separate room from the machine. On neutral appraisal, however, this explanation is nearly too good to be true. The glaring problem is that the servant was unable to offer more than a vague explanation how this mechanism was connected to the machine, or especially how it went undetected in repeated inspections. In an unfortunate further irony, more thoughtful skeptics have had little trouble envisioning ways the wheel could have been driven by a conventional clockwork mechanism contained within itself. Thus, even the skeptical case would almost be stronger if the servant’s testimony were set aside, yet the problem reminds why she would invent the story, outside of personal malice or coercion. In my opinion, the simplest explanation is that Orfyrreus ordered the servant to work the machinery she described whether it had anything to do with the wheel or not. It sounds illogical, counterproductive and cruel, and it is, but the more I have studied the inventor, the less I can discount it as something he might have done simply as one more distraction.

Finally, we come back to the central problem of motive. If the skeptics are right, Orfyrreus must be counted as among the most skilled and intelligent minds of his time, certainly capable of  work far more profitable than his wheel ever was. The real problem is that they might be giving the inventor and the technology of his time a little too much credit. A recurring lesson of perpetual motion schemes is that it’s not that hard to make a well-machined wheel run for a very long time with only a little initial input, especially in a small-scale demonstration. Doing it with hand-crafted parts in a wheel the size of a naval screw, however, is a problem of a literally different magnitude. Meanwhile, the one scenario that might let us take the inventor on good faith is that he discovered something that he couldn’t develop or even understand without far more time and funding. Granting this very charitable scenario, the whole wheel scheme and all of its layers of faulty theory or flat lies could have been devised simply to get the money without admitting either what he knew or didn’t know about his actual discovery. What is truly disturbing is that, if this didn’t happen here, it certainly could have for any number of inventors with the intelligence or luck to make discoveries ahead of their time.

In closing, the most interesting aspect of the history of perpetual motion machines is what now seems the total distortion of reason and the burden of proof. The most insightful comment I have seen is a comment from a charming, sometimes chilling book titled Complete And Utter Failure: “What is most interesting about the perpetual motionists is the surprising sameness with which they present their discoveries. Whether in 1400 or 1900, there is a sly I’ve-got-something-wonderful-but-I-can’t-quite-show-you-because-you’ll-steal-it interplay that keeps the device just out of view of the skeptical observer.” It now seems entirely perverse that those who claimed to do what was deemed literally impossible could once dictate the terms of the simplest investigation of their claims, but this was in fact the norm until peer-reviewed science became the norm. It was the resulting paranoia that kept science from advancing through the Medieval and Renaissance eras, more than ignorance, superstition or conflicts with the church. The case of Orfyrreus should be a further reminder how easy it is for supposedly “modern” minds to go over the edge. A historic mystery is good fun, but when it requires considering whether a potential psychotic was in the right, it’s time to move on.

Super Movies! The one by Wes Craven

 

Title: Swamp Thing

What Year?: 1982

Classification: Runnerup/ Mashup/ Evil Twin

Rating: Ow, My Brain!!! (unrated/ NR)

 

As I write this, I’ve been doing movie reviews for a year. If there’s one thing I’ve learned along the way, it’s that no matter how well I plan, there’s always an element of chance, and it runs both ways. Sometimes, I run across something I wouldn’t have thought of reviewing that works. Sometimes, I watch a movie I have planned on for weeks or months, and I just can’t do anything with it in the time frame I have. This week, I’ve truly had the best and worst of luck: First, I got to a movie I had planned for this feature from the beginning, but just couldn’t deal with it. Fortunately, I had just watched another movie that fit in with another feature (see Galaxy Quest). Now, however, I still have an unfilled slot and I know I’m not getting back to this damn thing again anytime soon. So here is Swamp Thing, a DC movie directed by the guy who did Nightmare on Elm Street.

Our story begins with a scenic view of the swamps of the Deep South. We then are introduced to a group in military uniforms who kill bystanders with minimal provocation, and a scientist working with his sister to develop a formula that will accelerate plant growth. When the researcher is introduced to a well-endowed government auditor, they quickly take a shine to each other. Alas, it turns out  the paramilitary types are mercenaries sent to steal the scientist’s formula. An attack ends with the sister dead, the scientist burned and mutilated, and the visitor on the run. But the scientist’s formula allows him to return to life as a plant-creature with superhuman strength and invulnerability to gunfire and conventional weapons. The monster goes on a warpath, protecting his love interest from the mercenaries, until the scheming industrialist in charge uses her as bait. The creature and the lady must escape his mansion/ compound, but can they get past the villain after he takes the formula himself?

Swamp Thing was a 1982 film directed by the late Wes Craven, following successful pre-Freddy films such as The Hills Have Eyes, and produced by the prolific Embassy Pictures (see The Manitou… and Time Bandits?). The movie was the first live-action DC film following the successful Superman movies, based on a 1970s comic that followed Marvel’s Man-Thing (oh… Hell… no) and other swamp/ plant-themed comics possibly tracing to the 1940 Theodore Sturgeon horror story “It”. The cast was led by Ray Wise of Robocop as the scientist Alec and Adrienne Barbeau of Creepshow (see also Two Evil Eyes) as his lady friend Alice, with Louis Jordan as the villain Arcane. Stuntman Dick Durock was cast to take Wise’s place as Swamp Thing in some scenes, a role which was ultimately expanded to include the vast majority of the character’s screen time. The movie was made for $2.5 million, and unquestionably turned an immediate profit. It was followed by a 1989 sequel and 1990s TV series, with continuing representation up to the present day.

For my experiences, I’m sure I’ve been vaguely aware of Swamp Thing for most of my life. In retrospect, the character is a cliché that transcended itself, in fact post-dating a good deal of the material it represents. A good part of what I do know comes through Sturgeon, whose original story was odd and unsettling enough that I only read it a few times. (He mentioned accepting an award for his connection with the comic, but I have yet to find independent confirmation and no longer have the book where it came up handy.) I didn’t get to the movie until much later in life, as far as I remember when it popped up on a free streaming platform. Needless to say, I thought of it very soon after I came up with this feature, ideally as a companion to Superman IV and Supergirl, but it proved relatively difficult to obtain currently. I finally found it used earlier this month, threw in Superman IV, and got it all free to boot. It will also be needless to say, even on that budget, I wasn’t very pleased with what I got.

Moving on to the movie itself, the first and foremost thing I can say is that it’s the kind of movie that feels like too much and not enough. It’s full of scenes and sequences that are surreal, confusing or near-slapstick, yet the way it handles them is oddly tame. The action sequences are leisurely and widely spaced. The violence, gore and creature effects are limited and distinctly cautious. On top of that, the title character doesn’t do much more than pop out of the swap once in a while to wreak a few moments of PG-rated havoc. Then I can't decide if it's good or bad that it feels so much like an inferior twin of Creepshow I expect to see Stephen King turning to kudzu in the background. It’s only in the final act that the movie really starts to earn its cult/ camp reputation. The repartee between the hero and villain starts to work, especially as Swamp Thing conveniently explains the disastrous effects of his formula on one of the minions. Then things get into high gear as Arcane tries the formula, and I swear, the resulting creature looks exactly like my own design for Archididelphis invicta.

What’s really given me trouble with this one is trying to figure out what others see in it. I know lots of people like this movie, and I can kind of see why. As already outlined, there’s plenty of the kind of inspired strangeness that gets taken as “so bad it’s good”, even if it lacks the kind of energy that makes the best examples work after a fashion. On the other hand, it’s all suspended in a slush of filler that I can barely pay attention through. Then, inevitably, I find myself second-guessing if there is something I don’t “get”. It’s about the same place I ended up with Lady Snowblood, except this movie doesn’t have the excuse of coming from another nation and culture. And that must further balance against the fact that I often “get” Japanese films better than many things western.

That leaves the “one scene”, and I had more to choose from than usual. My pick is the transformation of Arcane into the Evil Possum. It’s standard fare even for the 1980s, except for the very refined villain and his surroundings. We see him pacing through the high-class mansion, until he comes to a flask of glowing green ooze. After a pause, he pours a bit into a wine glass and steps out onto the porch. He drinks, then buzzes for his staff. While he waits, he murmurs, “Not to be the phenomenon, but the thing itself.” When a woman arrives, who as far as I can tell doesn’t appear before or since, he addresses her as “darling”, then asks for a glass of brandy to be sent. After a cutaway to Swamp Thing, we see another, older woman arrive with the beverage, only to retreat as the transformation begins. What follows is one of the film’s better moments, yet still not as good as the buildup to it.

With that, I’m wrapping this up, and after what I went through to get here, it’s a pleasant surprise that I’ve gotten through in good time and actually had plenty of fun. Usually, I would say more about the rating, but at this point, my choice should be self-explanatory. There’s plenty of good in this movie, a fair amount that’s bad or awkward, and plenty more that just doesn’t connect with me. After writing this review, I think I can finally say I understand why fans like this movie. I might not get it, but I’m not going to judge you if you like this one. And with that, I’m done.

Movie Mania: E.T. debris!

 

I went into this week without a lot of plans, and one or two that are already falling through. So, for the midweek post, I'm doing a followup to (kind of) trashing E.T. As I already commented at length on reviewing the movie, E.T. The Extraterrestrial spawned a massive and successful merchandising empire that easily rivalled any number of official "franchise" movies. For this post, I will be covering what I remember of the pop culture trail that this movie left behind. This time I will be using pics and material from other sites and sources, which I'm telling myself will remain a one-time thing. With that, I start the lineup with the one thing I still actually have...

1. The Storybook!

While this is the one I have available for photos, I won't be putting a lot of time into it, in no small part because I had largely forgotten about it. The storybook is credited to William Kotzwinkle, who also wrote the official novelization. The copy I have has a signature from a family member that dates it 1982, and even that feels distinctly perfunctory; this was the kind of gift that got bought because it was "supposed" to be what kids were into. The condition is quite spectacularly bad, with the pages completely separated from the covers, which did somehow stay together. The best part is the cover, which captures the moody opening of the movie. As seen in the opening pic, somebody added a couple ET stickers. Here's another pic of the back.

I only had the heart to take a very brief look inside. What stood out to me, and definitely figured in what I remembered, is that a good chunk of the pictures are dedicated to the government agents and the hospital/ lab, easily the most frightening and arguably inappropriate for children (at least after ET drinking beer).  This part certainly shaped as much as I did remember of the movie, and one might think it maybe colored my opinion against it, but if anything, freaky was what kid me was into (so, no change). Here's a spread, and then I'm moving on...

2. The Bike!

If there was one thing about ET that made a favorable impression on me, it was the LJN toyline. What was most interesting about this was that the manufacturer didn't bother developing a core body of action figures with a consistent style or scale, but just put out a bunch of semi-random junk. I'm not sure how much I had, but the one I definitely remember is a toy bike with Elliott and ET aboard. Here's  a decent pic I found floating free.

From my recollection, my brother and I were still playing with this toy until at least 1986. I can recall a fair amount of detail, including the fact that ET was removable. Where I'm definitely hazy is the size of the thing. The best reference image I could find puts the bike at exactly 3 inches, which would leave Elliott not much bigger than an army man figure, maybe about the size of a Marx 70mm space guy if he could stand upright. I can further remember that at some point we dropped it out a window, fitted with an improvised parachute. That would sound like the end of the line, except as far as I remember, the toy actually survived. I can only guess what misadventure finally claimed the pair, but I must admit it's not likely they lasted much longer. And that leads us to...

3. The stuffed toy!

Of all the ET merchandise, the ones that were truly everywhere were the stuffed toys. From prevailing accounts, these were mad in a range of sizes by a company called Kamar, with the most frequently encountered specimens being small/ medium toys made from a smooth, vaguely leathery material. In an ironic twist, the best and most well-attested images are from the movie Critters, where a specimen gets ignominiously shredded by one of the invaders. Here's a pic credited to Horror Movie A Day; I politely disagree with the author's assessment that this is a knockoff.

"Sure you got four sequels, but my movie made over $2 billion adjusted dollars."

And this  is something where I have a possible Mandela effect. I have a very distinct memory of seeing a whole bin of stuffed ETs on sale. I don't believe I was particularly young, maybe in 1985 if not later, which would definitely be at the tail end for first-wave merchandise. What's entirely odd is that I remember them being in different, very bright colors, which sounds unremarkable except that I've never seen a single picture of an authorized toy that wasn't gray or brown like the movie portrays. Maybe it was a last-ditch recolor the people really into ET have forgotten about. Maybe they were actual bootlegs/ knockoffs. Maybe even my memory is hazy that far back. (But... I found Krull.) Now I'm just getting depressing, so let's move onto...

 

4. The video game!

This is of course the most infamous part of the ET vintage merchandise. It's now infamous as the worst video game of its time, and a financial bomb that possibly contributed to the collapse of Atari and the whole video game industry in 1983. Inevitably, some apologists have come forward. Two of the better works of revisionist scholarship come from Polygon, which covers the much wider context of the "crash", and the Video Game History Foundation, which does a run-down of actual contemporary reviews of ET and other Atari games. My own recollection is that I heard of this game reading a few hilariously ancient books on video games still on the library shelves in the early 1990s, without getting any hint of the disaster that would come out of the game. A few years after that, perhaps in 1995, I saw an actual copy on the shelves of a thrift store, quite possibly my latest sighting of an ET item "in the wild", and still had no notion of the infamy it would develop. In hindsight. it really took the age of the internet for people to be aware enough of old video games to talk about it. No pic; let's just move on to...

5. The... sequel???

Now we have the centerpiece of this exhibit. I remember seeing this on school library shelves, probably at least until around 1990. I now know it was written by William Kotzwinkle and published in 1985, which was practically current for a school library book. I am sure I never read it, but I believe I looked over the back cover at least once. Here's the cover in full glory, with the original novelization of the movie.

The novel is now notorious, if known at all, as the closest thing ET got to a sequel. It does indeed follow ET's adventures after the movie, but its tone and overall relationship with the movie comes closer to what would now be considered fan fiction. I haven't ventured to try to find or read it, but did find reviews at Branded in the 80s and The New Englander, neither of which is encouraging. It's safe to say if an official ET "canon" is ever hashed out, nobody is going out on a limb for this book.

Now, I wrap this up. I feel that I have at least better explained why I have no problem treating ET as a "franchise" movie. Consider this a further testimony to how we absorbed pop culture. There was no ebay, no Wikipedia, no official or unofficial dissections of canon, just whatever we saw on the shelves, and that was enough to keep the memory of a movie alive long after any hope of a sequel had sailed. For that, even I can give the movie a little respect. That's all for now, more to come!

Featured Creature: The one where Buzz Lighyear plays Captain Kirk

 

Title: Galaxy Quest

What Year?: 1999

Classification: Parody/ Improbable Experiment

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

When I started this feature, I openly acknowledged that it was because I had a movie that didn’t fit anywhere else. This time around, I’m back with another installment because certain other plans required me to retreat and regroup. Fortunately, it happened that I had recently watched another movie that looked good to fill the gap. It isn’t really what I’ve had in mind as the basis for a new feature, but on another level, it’s the epitome of the genre and trends that convinced me I needed something more than my existing features. For this review, I am incidentally adopting the Revenant Review/ Super Movies scale, which I previously held off on while making a few decisions about what this might include. With no further ado, I present Galaxy Quest, a Star Trek parody that managed to be as good as the actual Trek movies.

Our story begins with the credits of a clearly cheap and cheesy science fiction show that looks like it dates from the 1970s or early ‘80s. We then meet the cast of the show at a convention about 20 years on, including a woman insecure about being judged on her looks, a high-brow actor tired of his character’s signature line, an extra killed off before the credits, and the star, who’s still full enough of himself to sail along on pure ego. Things take a turn for the strange when the captain is contacted for what he takes as a new gig negotiating a peace treaty between a race called the Thermians and their enemies. Once he gets over his hangover, he realizes that the aliens are a real race who accept his televised adventures as history, and he has personally torpedoed the flagship of the leader of the bad guys, a sadistic overlord named Sarris. He is soon called on again for a rematch with Sarris, dragging the rest of the old crew along with him on a reconstruction of their ship. Their bonds are put to the test as they try to retrieve vital supplies from a hostile planet, but their greatest trial lies ahead when they find that Sarris has captured their ship!

Galaxy Quest was a production of SKG Dreamworks, several years before the studio’s breakthrough hit Shrek. The movie was developed from a script by David Howard, specifically as a satire of Star Trek, with Harold Ramis at one point selected as director. Ramis reportedly left the project in part over the casting of Tim Allen in the lead role of Jason Nesmith/ Captain Taggert. The cast was filled out by Sigourney Weaver as Gwen, the late Alan Rickman as Alexander Demarco, and Tony Shalhoub as the engineer, with Sam Rockwell as the potentially doomed extra Guy, Enrico Colatoni as the Thermian leader and Robin Sachs (d. 2013) as the overlord Sarris. The film was well-received critically, with a further endorsements from Ramis and William Shatner, but viewed as a financial disappointment with a box office of $90 million against a $45M budget. It went on to greater success as a “cult” movie on home video. In 2019, it was subject of a documentary, Never Give Up, Never Surrender.

For my personal experiences, this is one where I got in on the ground floor. I didn’t quite get to it in theaters, but I remember seeing a good part of it in a local video store and watching it with family not long after. My foremost reaction was that the movie and the posited show don’t really have that much in common with Star Trek. From what I know now, I’d say it’s more like what might have been in an alternate universe where the 1970s-‘80s Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers revivals had taken off (see… Super Train?). In any event, I liked it very much, and for the most part have grown to appreciate it far more over time. The only thing that has really weighed down my appreciation is that, to me, the premise of the movie simply doesn’t work on its own terms. The Thermians are supposed to have no concept of fiction, but they still clearly understand actors and dramatic re-enactment. Given that minimum framework, accepting William Shatner as Captain Kirk makes no more sense than confusing George C. Scott with Patton. What’s far more problematic is that the illogical leap feels like a joke at the aliens’ expense, as if Terran culture is too sophisticated for aliens capable of actual faster-than-light travel, though that is at least balanced out when Sarris gets a look at the “historical documents”.

With that out of the way, I can get straight to what I like about the movie and also why I chose to cover it here. I’ve already been an outspoken purist about what makes a “monster movie”, and my top rule of thumb is that aliens with at least industrial-level civilization and technology rarely if ever qualify. On the other hand, it’s not exactly an “alien invasion” movie either, and there are certainly more conventional “monsters” in the mix, particularly the nasty little cannibals of the middle act. Here, the story actually acknowledges the question of classification, without resolving their status. From what we see and learn of them and their surroundings, they could be settlers gone native or natives that ate the settlers, but it’s never important enough for the story to address it further. I mention this at length in no small part as representative of the quality of worldbuilding in the movie as a whole. Add in Guy’s ominous commentary, and we have an inspired send-up of the genre that quickly starts to work on its own terms.

What truly stands out is that all the conceptual work augments the dynamics of the characters rather than being supported by them. This is certainly helped by the topnotch cast, who get plenty of help from the story and dialogue. The central arc is Allen’s Shatner/ Kirk analog, who goes through his arc without ever being unduly dislikeable. The core irony is that he actually proves to be a good leader in his own right, raising the question whether he is rising to new challenges or just restoring what the crew once had. He’s well-matched by Rickman as a “good” actor who is at least equally arrogant in his own right, while Weaver handles herself impressively just by holding a separate orbit from the men (perhaps more so than her closest counterparts on Trek). One also can’t underestimate the aliens, well-represented by Colatoni and Sachs. It’s worth further note that they only directly interact in one scene, which I strongly considered for the usual “one scene”. The Thermian leader remains naïve yet confident even in defeat, while Sarris wavers between contempt and exasperation as he tries to unravel their tangled relationship with the Earthlings.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and my favorite remains the chase that follows Jason’s second encounter with Sarris. As Jason’s plans break down, a plaintive warning comes from Guy: “There’s a red thingy heading toward the green thingy… and I think we’re the green thingy.” The ship takes off, and we get a view both of the Protector and Sarris’ flagship, the latter surely modeled after the planet-killer from Trek’s “The Doomsday Machine” (in my top 2 favorite original series episodes). The commander orders more speed, aiming for an interstellar cloud that they reach just after the Thermian leader explains that it is a minefield. What follows is better seen than described, accompanied by my pick for the best rendition of the movie/ show theme. As with many things in the movie, it’s a comical parody that still works just as well as any number of “straight” sequences before and since.

In closing, I can only come back to my rating and my central complaint. I can freely allow this movie is as good and flat-out fun as plenty of movies I have given a higher rating. I might further allow that it is a parody whose flaws rise from pushing the limits of its own premise (see Hancock), except that there are just as many points where its problematic concepts aren’t questioned at all. What I can’t get around is that this could have worked just as well in something like a “straight” storyline, perhaps a Van Vogt-style “far future” setting where present-day Earth has slipped as far into myth as King Arthur or the Trojan War. The bottom line remains that those behind the movie made their decision, and still made an excellent movie. That should be more than enough credit, and with that, I can bring this to a close. Never give up, never surrender!

Image credit Horror News.Net.

Handheld Hotspot: Good LCD Games???

 

I'm just coming out of a rough week with franchise movies without anything new in mind that won't be a followup to my movie reviews. For the moment, I'm doing something different (except for the last time I did it), which happens to be what every blogger and Y*utuber has been doing forever: Looking at "retro" video games. But I'll be dealing not with Atari or NES, but with what are now commonly held to be the worst of the worst, handheld LCD games (and possibly some even more archaic and eccentric tech), starting with a lineup of entries from the most famous or notorious manufacturers. So were they "that" bad? Well, let's see, starting with the first item in our lineup.

Right off the bat, a major "myth" to correct is that Tiger Electronics wasn't the only player on the field, nor was it immediately clear that they were or would be the leading producer people remember them as. From my own recollections, many if most of the specimens I ever had at home were from Radio Shack, actually supplied by their parent company Tandy. Even for the 1980s, these were cheap and generic-looking. However, they were possibly the best in terms of reliable functionality: The controls were responsive and intuitive, the graphics were comprehensible, and it was usually easy to figure out what to do. This one is typical of their "'keep it simple" approach. You control a cyclist at the bottom of the screen, moving left and right Space Invaders style. Other bikers come down from the top, with a relatively sophisticated 3D perspective that was surprisingly common in these games. It wasn't a favorite, but I played it long and often enough to max out the high score, typically the only way to "beat" these games. The one flaw of the game is that it doesn't have an on/ off switch, so it simply ran until its one tiny battery ran out. I could change the battery with a screwdriver, but never cared enough to do it. Moving on, here's a game really from Tiger, and by consensus the good one.

Tiger has of course been ground zero for controversy and criticism, drawing the wrath of none less than the Angry Video Game Nerd. Having seen the onslaught of venting, my feelings have been mixed. Make no mistake, the critics aren't wrong, but they aren't giving the whole picture. The chief causes of Tiger's infamy are, first, that the company kept making LCD games long after they were "supposed" to be obsolete, and second, that they went completely overboard on licensing. What really happened was that the company went from making a relatively modest catalog of functional and sometimes entertaining games to a vast catalog of hastily churned-out titles that would have been as interchangeable as paper dolls if not for their idiosyncratic flaws in design and play controls. What's hard to assess is just how early this slide started and how long it took. They got on the tie-in gravy train very early, notably with a series of King Kong games in the early to middling 1980s (see Electronic Plastic and Handheld Museum for two comparatively intriguing examples). On the other hand, it didn't go into overdrive until as late as the 1990s, when they jumped on properties like Batman and Jurassic Park. To my best recollection, I got this one at the same time as the Jurassic Park game, and the difference is night and day.

What should have been a warning sign for that pair is that the Pinball game is dated 1987, at least six years before JP.  It was a simple, attractively designed game that must have sold well enough to stay in production for many years. The long-lost Jurassic Park game was by comparison quite possibly the worst LCD game I ever played, with a clunky layout (prominently featuring the pseudo-3D gimmick), overcomplicated graphics and gameplay, and stiff controls that were literally painful to work with. In further hindsight, the Pinball game had more than enough of its own problems, including unrealistic and oddly predictable ball mechanics. But compared to the 1990s onslaught of junk, it was a gem to be thankful for. Here's some pics I tried to take of the game in action.

That brings us to the final piece, easily the best LCD game I played. This was part of a series of LCD games from Konami, or so the labels say. Certain accounts say that they were really made by Tiger and released under the Konami name, but I have yet to see this substantiated. Konami's entries mostly stood out for their weird, oversized shells. Fortunately, this was more than made up for by their ergonomic shape, standardized controls and functional-to-good game play. The present item is noteworthy because it was the only Garfield video game I ever saw on sale as a kid. (I now know there was an NES/ Famicom game released only in foreign markets.) I begged for it and got it for Christmas, and it was... okay. But again, a handheld game had a really, really low bar to clear, especially if if had Garfield. Here it is in full glory.

One more forgotten virtue of LCD games that this one presents front and center is that the cell-animation sprites really looked like what they were supposed to be. Even on NES, the Ninja Turtles and Darkwing Duck suggested rather than represented the characters, but Garfield looked like he came straight out of the comics. What made it all the more appealing was that they built the game around one of the longest-running gags on the strip, Garfield's unwanted song-and-dance performances and the incoming barrages of the unseen neighbors. Of course, they still overcomplicated things by having you rescue Odie from the moon, which you can only do by collecting enough lasagna from John. The most unusual feature is that you actually have a health/ energy bar, which makes the game possibly too easy. Add in 6 stages, plentiful powerups and a score that maxes out at 10,000, and you have a game where you can blow through any milestones very quickly. Still, it's fun with enough challenge to set your own goals and still have an interesting time. Getting through in one life is a decent benchmark; in many ways, it works best to aim for a lower score like golf. I tried to take some pics, but alas, either the batteries are low or the screen is finally giving out. If you look really hard, you might see Odie.

So, are these games any good? The real question is, what kind of expectations you bring to it. If you're used to getting days and weeks of gameplay out of a title, then these will disappoint very quickly. If you want 10 or 20 minutes of entertainment at a time, and you happened to have one of the games that was functional and entertaining, then there were worse things to make do with, especially if you didn't have a console or TV. The bottom line is, even if you grew up with these things, you're not going to get much out of them in the era of smart phones, and you probably didn't really get much further even then. What the old games deserve is a little respect for trying to do something new and different, because without that spirit, we certainly wouldn't have gotten any further.