Space 1979: The one with the Ice Castles lady, the guy from Endless Love and a producer who quit after making it

Title: The Falling aka Alien Predators

What Year?: 1984 (filming)/ 1985 (copyright)/ 1987 (US release)

Classification: Knockoff/ Mashup/ Anachronistic outlier

Rating: What the Hell???

This time around, I'm working from one of the major modern vectors of obscure pop culture, the rise of Netflix. By about 2010, streaming was well-established, and Netflix and a few other services were greatly expanding the catalogs of available movies, including a very impressive selection of infamous or forgotten 1970s and 1980s sci fi/ horror movies. For me personally, it was an opportunity to watch many movies I certainly knew about but never had the opportunity or sufficient interest to look up. But there were also some even I had never heard of until I ran across them in the online archives. This is one of those movies, and it is a doozie.

This story begins with a shot of burning wreckage, said to be debris from Skylab that landed in Spain. (It actually landed in Australia, in 1979.) The next few scenes, said to be 5 years later, alternate between a diseased cow and a trio of tourists driving through Spain in an RV. As this progresses, the two guys take turns harassing their female companion, while the cow is torn apart by a pack of dogs that suddenly begin disappearing one by one. By morning, the tourists have reached an isolated town and find that most of the locals have vanished, except for a handful that menace them with various methods including a large and outrageously dilapidated truck that appears and disappears like Michael Meyers. Then we are introduced to yet another plot thread, a scientist sent to investigate the disturbances. By the time the scientist and the tourists meet up, it is clear that the human populace has been infected by a pathogen that first makes them violently insane and then causes a parasitoid alien to burst violently from their bodies. The scientist reveals that the only hope for humanity is stored a secret lab (which he already visited and then left), and one of the tourists must go back to retrieve the cure. The film ends with the tourists making their escaped, only to discover the disease has already spread.

This is a movie whose production history ended up as strange and in some lights at least as interesting as the movie itself. It was filmed in Spain in 1984 by director Deran Serafian with mid-tier stars  Lynn-Holly Johnson,, Dennis Christopher and Martin Hewitt, plus veteran Spanish star Luis Prendes as the scientist. It was produced by horror director Carlos Aured, who would later cite the production as the reason he quit making movies altogether. It remained in limbo until 1987, when it was released under several equally incomprehensible titles, including the notorious US title Alien Predators. The movie's credits state that it was based on a script titled "Massacre at RV Park". Most evidence of its contemporary distribution (including the image shown here) comes from video releases, though Wikipedia indicates a US theatrical release with the humorously exact box office figure of $2,554.

Moving on to my personal thoughts, I must say at the outset that this movie fascinates me. It is certainly among  the most creative and well-made Alien knockoffs to crop up in the early 1980s. In the context of this series, the most interesting thing about is that it barely came out early enough to meet the ca 1985 time frame I have set. This is all the more curious as any number of elements feel like they belong in a significantly older film, including the cast. This contributes to some of the more effective moments, like a shot at parasitoid's eye level that hearkens back to early slasher movies (and I hate slasher movies!). The anachronistic feel is heightened by the strange choices in possible sources and visual references. On that front, the film comes across less like Alien than a cross between Duel and Dawn of the Dead, with touches of The Thing.

Most of the movie's further relative virtues lie in surprising attention to detail. The settings are convincing and well-used, if only because it seems likely that the film makers simply found locations to shoot live. The one location that is clearly a set is the secret lab, which is comparatively undeveloped but gives just enough detail to give a sense of clinical dread. The vehicles are used to further good effect, and the tourists' Iveco camper van is cool enough that I seriously considered covering it in the RVs of the Apocalypse feature on my old blog. The weakest elements are the gore and monster effects, to the point that I have wondered if they were simply worked in at some late point in production. Even here, there are effective moments. The scenes with the diseased cow are so exceptionally horrid the film barely bothers to tie it in to anything else. By comparison, the infected townspeople the tourists encounter are creepy in their own right, on the few occasions they appear. We see even less of the parasitoids, and the film does not suffer for it. The one explicit scene of an emerging parasitoid is so close to the end that the known VHS covers would qualify as a spoiler. It is genuinely ghastly and menacing enough, at least until it has a run in with a windshield wiper.

A little further comment is in order on the cast and characters. This is where the filmmakers clearly invested far too much not to achieve a high standard of mediocrity, yet the final product is uneven to say the least. Johnson, best known then and now for starring in Ice Castles, is inevitably charming, while character actor Christopher is no more annoying than he clearly intends to be. Hewitt, past his career peak in Endless Love, is a bit bland in comparison, and certainly not successful in providing romantic tension. The pleasant surprises all come from Paredes, a stage and screen actor whose career began in the 1930s. Dated innuendo provides an extra cringe factor with the benefit of hindsight. The most uncomfortable moment comes when one of Christopher's "jokes" becomes entirely lewd; Johnson completely justifiably blows up at him, but it is not at all clear that the audience is expected to be on her side. If possible, things get more awkward when the lady makes it clear she is interested in Hewitt's character. Regardless of what was intended in the script, the chemistry between the pair is so wonky that he literally retreats from her, as if in the role of a damsel who just found out that the interview isn't really for a "modelling" job.

Now for the "one scene", I am going with the one that definitely stayed strongest in my memory, and it features Paredes. After briefly passing the tourists, the scientist and a colleague go to the hotel room of an officer previously sent to investigate goings on in the town (without stopping to don protective gear that appears a little later). The military man, is introduced as "Lieutenant Lumpy", lies on his bed with an enormous growth on his face and neck. This is the film's best practical effect by far, as big as a soccer ball (which the scientist compares it to) and as ornately textured as a kit-bashed Star Wars ship. It is somewhat ambiguous whether Lumpy is dead, unconscious or comatose, but the growth throbs and makes strange sounds when the investigators approach. The doctor barely hesitates before opening the tumor, still without so much as a pair of gloves. He seems to do this with a scalpel, but after careful review I believe he simply tears with his bare hands. Of course, there is gushing and spurting,  plus extra throbbing and squirming, but whatever is inside remains out of sight, by all appearances happy where it is.

For the post script, this movie got a string of online reviews from about 2010 to 2013, almost all negative. While several reviewers reported seeing it on VHS in the 1980s, I have little doubt that this was driven by viewings on Netflix. It disappeared from Netflix as the site's streaming catalog contracted due to licensing issues, and dropped out of site until disk releases came out in 2015 and 2018. It has finally returned to streaming through Vudu, where I rented it for the purposes of this review. This is the shape of preservation in the digital age, with the threat coming not from moldering out of print tapes but petty legal squabbles, frivolous censorship, and companies that simply do not care. Whatever one makes of the movie, the fact that it remains available for the time being is a victory for everyone. For me, it remains an intriguing artifact, not by any means great or particularly good, but with just enough imagination and overall quality to be spared a worse fate.

Flor links, see reviews by Mondo Bizarro and Girl Who Loves Horror. The image credit goes to critconline.com, which has compiled a thorough collection of VHS art. See also the Introduction of this feature for my review scale, classification system and other details.

Giant Robot Review: The big red Robotech guy!

One of the main things I remember related to vintage toys is trading for things. I am sure this is a big part of how toys got distributed, and it was very much a double edged sword. Most of my memories on this vein came from spending time with a particularly capricious friend who did sometimes try to do something helpful. He was more than a little like Sid from Toy Story, and I had little doubt that many of the things I traded (including an extensive set of the original Start Trek: The Next Generation figures) ended up burned, broken or blown up. But he had what must have been an extensive collection of toys a few years old, and I was canny enough to negotiate for things I not only liked at the time but have held onto to this day. The one trade I can remember most clearly is when he apparently at random opened a box of random junk. I saw one particular item, and quickly started bargaining (I still can't think with what). As a result, I became owner of my one and only Robotech figure. Here's a couple closeups.

As mentioned previously, I grew up aware of Robotech but with a limited enough knowledge of the franchise that I assumed a couple unrelated toys in my possession belonged to the line (see Dropped Pilots). However, I never doubted that this one was the real deal, and it was awesome, notwithstanding the fact that my friend's dog had chewed off a good part of one foot. I visualized this as a wound from some legendary earlier battle, if it figured in my play at all. The big problem was that there were no weapons that fit him. Eventually, I mangled an ancient He Man sword to fit his hands, and for a while I had a big capsule-toy revolver that just about worked. Usually, he simply served as muscle for various villains, but I still thought of him as a hero. At one time, long after I was playing with toys (at least often), I had a vague ide of a storyline that would have featured him as the sentinel of an interdimensional portal against some vague monster from beyond.

Eventually, I acquired another figure at a ludicrously low price. Both before and after that acquisition, I looked up more information, and found that he was called the Bioroid Invid Fighter, later revived in the Exo Squad line. I further discovered that he is not highly thought of by Robotech fans and collectors, and I can appreciate their complaints. By the critics' accounts, he was either loosely based on a character from the show or merely a composite of several. He also represented a midpoint in size and price for the line. I have also personally concluded that the quality is a little bit hazy. The plastic is thin and has a brittle feel, especially in the limbs, though it is clear from the damage on my specimen (the worst of which won't even be visible in these pics) that it didn't simply break at a little rough play.

By the standards of 1980s toys, however, this guy was and is mind-blowing. In the growing nostalgia surrounding the era, it's easily forgotten how many things were out of reach of ordinary kids. Anything at all anime-related was especially elusive, with even Transformers being outside the price range I usually got in any size bigger than a Hot Wheels car. But the Robotech guy was big enough to stomp anything short of my Definitely Dinosaurs and the Dormei Godzilla, and he was detailed and articulate to boot. He certainly gave me more play than I ever got from most of the things I might have traded for him.

To wrap things up, here's a few more pics of my pair with the Truckstop Queen and a few others.

Robotech, Robotix, Robotix, Robotech...

Who needs guns when you can have a dance off?

For links, you can see the CollectionDX review of the figure. That's all for now!

Space 1979: The one where a killer robot blenders Norman Bates in a Disney production

Title: The Black Hole

What Year?: 1976 (pre production script)/ 1979 (release)

Classification: Runnerup

Rating: Downright Decent!

If there is a lesson from the study of ripoffs and "runnerups", it is that self-described creative minds have never worked in a vacuum. This is all the more true with the studio system. If two people arrive at the same idea, and the word gets out that one of them has a major studio interested, then of course a competitor is going to look into getting the other guy on board, and of course a couple more guys are going to come out of the woodwork claiming they had the idea first. With the further vagaries of production, it can be a matter of pure luck which movie gets to audiences first. One would be hard pressed to find a film with worse luck than the Black Hole.

Our story starts with a spaceship and crew travelling through the depths of space. We meet the crew, including a crusty spaceman, the token scientist, a lady with ESP and a charming little bot named VINCENT. After an opening rescue sequence, they discover they are approaching a giant black hole with a long-vanished ship already in orbit. They board the much larger ship and discover its commander, an obsessive genius who runs the ship with the aid of a platoon of robots led by the menacing Maximillian. VINCENT meets up with a battered older robot who leads him to question the intentions of the commander and especially his vague tale of the loss of the ship's human crew. As the finale approaches, the mad commander reveals his grand plan, to fly his ship into the black hole. His unwilling guests must race to escape before the predictably disastrous outcome, but Maximillian and the robotic guards have their own plans.

Per the lore, the roots of this production go back as far as 1974, when Disney's brain trusts proposed a live-action science fiction feature, original on the lines of something like The Poseidon Adventure in space. As the disaster movie trend mercifully faded, the project went in other directions, with a growing focus on a black hole. The project took shape soon drew an impressive array of middle rank talent, including Maximillian Schell as the villain Dr. Rheinhardt (surely a name more melodramatic than the character!), Ernest Borgnine of The Poseidon Adventure as the pilot, Yvette Mimieux of The Time Machine as the lady, Roddy McDowall and Slim Pickens as the uncredited voices of VINCENT and his friend BOB, and everyone's favorite Psycho Anthony Perkins as the scientist. Disney's in-house crew provided the sets, models and effects, John Barry provided the ponderous score, and the toy company Mego signed on for the merchandising campaign. When the finished product reached the box office, it was quickly discounted as a Star Wars ripoff, but still earned most $36 million off a $20M budget.

This film is etched in my memory as one I wanted to like long before I got the chance to see it. I particularly remember reading a comic/ graphic novel adaptation in very early elementary school, which I acquired a possible copy of for the image in this review, already close to a decade after the movie. In the early 1990s, I finally saw it on TV, and came out more confused than impressed. Fast forward to about 2015, and I rented and then bought it to watch on my rides to work (a saga in itself that I may tell sooner or later). Watching as an adult, I found I appreciated it far more, and with the benefit of hindsight I can finally give it a fair assessment.

I can say from the start that this is by almost any standard the most well-made film I expect to review, and in a good mood I could easily give it the highest rating possible. Of course, Disney paid far too much not to expect competence, but the money is put to undeniably good use, with convincing characters, decent dialogue, and well-realized settings. However, given rating system I have designed to be fair to films with far more limitations, these tend to cancel out, and this quickly becomes a case of an ambitious film that suffers from its flaws more than a bad one. The fundamental problem is that the production sets a realistic and generally serious tone that becomes increasingly incongruous, especially in the final act.  Elements that would be good fun in a tongue-in-cheek science fantasy like Star Crash, like a shower of asteroids that act more like the boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark (released 2 years later!), simply feel awkward here, while the set-piece battles became overlong if not tedious even when I watched the movie as a kid.

The big payoff her is certainly the leading bots, and how much goodwill one gives VINCENT in particular will probably settle if you like the movie He is usually held up as the central proof that the movie ripped .off Star Wars, yet comparisons are relatively limited and often favorable. This bot is as functional as R2D2, with extra anthropomorphic touches that don't quite push over into "cute"; as articulate as C3PO; and as capable and flatly deadly as any robotic protagonist short of the reprogrammed cyborg of Terminator 2. The fact that he shows no conflict of loyalties when blowing fellow machines to junk is just the right wrinkle to make him an interesting personality. His rival Maximillian is comparatively conventional but quite effective. His design is simple with a hint of mystery behind his glowing red gaze. His interchangeable arms prove to offer a variety of weaponry, with his favorite clearly being a set of whirling blades that make short work of Perkins' character. Of course, the finale sees the two in battle, and it is again as effective as anything before the Terminator franchise. Here, we finally see the kind of fast-paced and decisive action the movie deserves, set to an especially economical score that drones the same few low-key notes as the two machines size each other up before closing for the final grapple.

But the "one scene" had to be the one I absolutely remember, the ending, which was infamously written after shooting had begun. The finale sees the surviving characters dragged down into the black hole together. There, they are subjected to a series of explicitly religious visions actually foreshadowed in the film's opening scenes. Rheinhardt naturally falls into a hellish landscape along with Maximillian, culminating in an unforgettable shot of the doctor's eyes staring out from behind the bot's still-inscrutable visage. Meanwhile, the heroine experiences a somewhat more ambiguous trip through a cathedral-like tunnel of crystalline archways (suspiciously resembling the Tochata Et Fugue opening sequence of Fantasia) before emerging alive (or are they...???) with her crewmates somewhere in the depths of space. The credits roll on the final shot of an unknown planet directly ahead, transcendently illuminated by its partly eclipsed sun.

Thus, even at the end, this movie is a hot mess, weird and awkward but with more than enough good to remain interesting. It's exactly the kind of movie this feature was conceived to celebrate, and as a bonus I got to do a review I wanted to write of a movie I wanted to watch.

For links, here's a Good Bad Flicks history and review of the Black Hole, and a video by That Junkman on the toy line. See also the Introduction of the feature/ series for the rating system and other details.

The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs! Dino Riders/ Definitely Dinosaurs face off

In previous posts, I have mentioned the two main dinosaur toy lines of the 1980s, Dino Riders and Definitely Dinosaurs. It had the makings of a great rivalry, but it never really materialized. In hindsight, the wider world wasn't ready to support toy dinos as much more than a niche market. On a more immediate level, the two lines were too different for close competition. One was clearly aimed at younger kids, the other aimed for an older market, and few parents were going to pay for both. In my own experience, I was supplied a generous collection of Definitely Dinosaurs, and only once or twice made it known I might like a Dino Riders toy. By the wonders of online auctions, I have finally acquired a Dino Riders dino for comparison, and I know which one 8-year-old me would have chosen. 

The dino I acquired is a Dino Riders Styracosaurus, while the dino I brought out for comparison is a Definitely Dinosaurs Triceratops, in my book in the two or three best of the line. From the accounts of fans, the Dino Riders Styracosaurus was one of the most prominently featured on the show (which I saw once or twice at most). It must have been one of the better selling items in the line, because it is still quite cheap. I literally bought this one for less than the typical price of one of the "minifigure" pilots (previously covered in my Dropped Pilots post). The first thing that was obvious is that these were much smaller than Definitely Dinosaurs counterpart. Here's more picks of the two separately and together.

The most interesting detail of the Styracosaur is that he has a simple and decent action gimmick; if you move the tail, his head goes back and forth, and vice versa. On this specimen, it's squeaky and a bit difficult but still working. The downside is that the designers clearly sacrificed the realism and styling of the figure to have enough room for the mechanism. A further oddity is the position of the horns in the  frill, which are at quite unnatural angles to each other. Here's a few more detail shots.

Of course, the big Dino Riders gimmick is that they can carry a pilot. A set that still has the saddles and gear (never mind a figure) would have cost a lot more, but I did have the pilot monster/ villain from last time. But Definitely Dinosaurs came with their own riders, midsized caveman figures with saddles that I considered including in the Dropped Pilots lineup. Here's the two with riders.

Finally, here's a lineup of a few more Definitely Dinosaurs. The Tyrannosaur was big and nice enough to serve as Godzilla, but the Parasaurolophus was and is a thing of beauty.

Dino Riders and Definitely Dinosaurs have remained on disparate trajectories. The former remain very expensive, the latter are generally cheap apart from a large and rare Ultrasaurus I never even saw on shelves. But it's the Definitely Dinosaurs that are most likely to be out of the box, played with and clearly loved. Sometimes, the runnerups are best.

Space 1979: The one where a space station is destroyed by space seaweed

Title: The Green Slime aka Gamma 3 Space War

What Year?: 1968 (production and Japan release)/ 1969 (general US release)

Classification: Prototype/ Anachronistic Outlier/ Evil Twin

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!!

In this installment, I am making my first departure from my decision to cover 1970s-1980s films. I have done this in part to introduce not one but two new categories. The first is the fairly self explanatory Prototype, a film that introduced new concepts and new talent. The second and more elusive is the Anachronistic Outlier. What this means to me is a movie that feels like it belongs in a different time. As might be expected, the entries I have considered span equal and opposite extremes, from unexpectedly innovative gems to relics that were outdated straight out of preproduction. This particular item just might be both.

Our story starts with the discovery of a 600-million ton asteroid on a collision course with Earth, followed by a completely surreal theme song. When we return, we meet a tough-guy astronaut, a former friend who got a number of his men killed because of unmanly compassion, and a nurse who has been involved with them both, all of whom are inexplicably stationed on the same space station. They manage to work together well enough to destroy the asteroid, and in the process discover a mysterious green gunk that the tough guy specifically refuses to collect or study. The expedition returns with a blob of the organism on an astronaut's space suit. Soon enough, the space booger grows into dozens of strange creatures that feed on energy and electrocute anyone who gets in their way. After the sensitive astronaut blows up about a quarter of the station trying to stop the creatures, the tough guy takes over. In our finale, the two astronauts reconcile long enough to go on a final foray to self destruct the station, while the nurse and various extras evacuate to Earth.

The history of this one is more complicated than might be expected, In 1965-1967, an alliance of US and Italian filmmakers including director Antonio Margheriti pounded out four loosely-connected films featuring a space station called Gamma One, initially in hopes of laying the groundwork for a television series. The producers of several of these films turned to MGM and the Japanese studio Toei to make a fifth installment minus Margheriti. The resulting production was filmed in Japan with a multinational cast and crew. The monster suits were reportedly made by two former Toho employees. The film was released in a different form in Japan ahead of US release, with 12 minutes including the entirety of the melodrama between the main characters cut out.

The whole of the production is a smorgasbord of unaccountably prescient ideas entrapped in painfully dated production values and story telling. To start with, the quite well-executed space station makes it feel like an inferior clone of 2001, which actually came out the same year.. The encrusting muck that the monsters evolve from parallels The Andromeda Strain, which was published in filmed in 1971 from the 1969 novel. The central storyline of aliens loose in the confines of a spacecraft presents a possible "prototype" for Alien, while a few sequences even anticipate the hive shootout in Aliens, as monsters, astronauts and volatile equipment are caught in haphazard crossfire. Most curious of all is the asteroid that opens the feature, not only decades before Armageddon but a full 12 years before Luis Alvarez published the theory that an asteroid impact caused the extinction which killed off the dinosaurs.

The most curious part of the production is the monsters themselves. Their kelp-like initial form is formidable enough, at one point jamming a drilling machine with crud. When the slime-monsters appear, they not only prove virtually invulnerable to available weaponry but are also shown to have no obvious need to consume humans as food. What is most disconcerting on consideration is that they really don't pay much attention to anyone who doesn't attack or annoy them, and sometimes appear to ignore unarmed and harmless crew members. For aliens to be indifferent rather than hostile to humanity remains a unique and unnerving concept that has rarely been explored (perhaps in A Quiet Place). Here, however, it mostly serves to keep the heroes from being picked off before the story calls for a heroic last stand (in my opinion also a problem with the Quiet Place predators).

But the "one scene" was always going to be the expedition to the asteroid. It was a pleasant surprise to get a definite figure of 6 million tons from the script, which also mentions three "trimegaton" bombs. I confirmed that this would be 20 times the estimated size of the object that made Barringer Crater in Arizona, 60 times the size of an aircraft carrier, and just a bit larger than the Great Pyramid. In short, it is a large but potentially manageable size for a conventional response. With a few nukes, we could break up the main mass  and  maybe lose a city or to the leftover chunks. However, the script adds the complications that the asteroid will reach Earth within 10 hours (far less than it took Apollo astronauts to reach the moon), and then states that it has accelerated to reach Earth before the astronauts on its surface can evacuate (something that normally requires engines!).

And what an adventure the astronauts have! The landscape of the asteroid both in distance shots and close ups is conspicuously psychedelic despite a limited palette of earthy red and mucky greens. (There are also pools of water that would be inexplicable, unless we assume it's really liquid helium.) The expedition sets down in what looks like a cross between a rocket and a tank, then spreads out  over convincingly rugged terrain. Once they plant charges advertised to obliterate the asteroid, it becomes a race, and that much is convincing, at least until the astronauts activate a force field that is never mentioned again. The unforgettable shot is the explosion of the asteroid, which vanishes in a cloud of dust like a malted milk ball dissolving in a fish tank.

This is the sequence that got this movie's rating as low as it is. Everything else that is wrong with this movie is forgivable or at least forgettable mediocrity, especially for its time. But this is one of the first known representations of a genuine threat to life on our planet, and they get almost everything wrong. In the timeframe the movie shows, an object would be close to if not within the atmosphere. And while a nuclear response might prevent a civilization-ending impact, there would still be a monument's worth of irradiated rocks and dust raining on the happy ending. (The EMP effect from 9 megatons of nukes is nothing to laugh off either.) Like most of the tough guy's ideas, this sounds pragmatic on the surface but is really just preventing avoidable damage from getting worse and doing badly even at that. 

I have reserved the option to rate movies based on moral judgment, and this one absolutely offends me on a moral level. The most insulting part is that after more than 50 years, Hollywood has if possible gotten even dumber in its treatment of the subject. At this rate, the next big plan will be for a team of Egyptologists to fly a pyramid into space and knock the asteroid back into the void. If a Futurama plot doesn't make much less sense than a Hollywood blockbuster, we really are going to die, and we probably deserve it.

For links, see a review at Mark's Movie Cave (which does a good job outlining how dumb and amoral a central character really is), and a Moonbase Central post on a tie in toy for the movie.

Miniature Giants Part 6: Marx By Marxists???

This feature's back, with something that was literally a long time coming. In a previous installment, I mentioned that I had found an offer for Marx figures claimed to have been made in the former USSR. Very soon after that, I decided to order the lot for a quite good price, from a seller in a former Soviet "satellite" republic. Unfortunately, recent events have caused as much disruption over there as over here, and my package apparently ended up sitting at an airport for a good deal of time. Eventually, however, officialdom caught up, and I received my order, consisting appropriately of a Soviet infantryman with a less explicable group of "Wild West" figures. Here's some pics of the infantryman with other Soviet figures previously covered.

It should be apparent from these pics that the Soviet-produced figures are entirely comparable to authentic Marx figures. If anything, the unique dark brown color makes it somewhat difficult to capture the full extent of the detail. (The gun is a very good representation of the PPSh-41 submachine gun.) I also confirmed that the infantryman and one of the other figures has marks in Cyrilic, a clear confirmation that they were made somewhere in eastern Europe. I further assess them as made from harder plastic than vintage Marx specimens; my now standard "clack" test produced a uniquely resonant sound when the figures were struck together. Here are pics of base of the infantryman with a Marx figure and another from the lot.

The other figures, as noted, were Western-themed figures, but not what could be considered typical examples; they are specifically absent from known Plastimarx and later "afterlife" Mexican production. Marx Wild West designates them as a group called "Pioneers", likely based on army man-scale figures released in 1955 as a tie-in with a Davey Crockett movie. I have considered the possibility that the 6-inch figures were meant to tie in with the 1960 John Wayne production of The Alamo, though my own investigations indicate that no large-size figures were made before 1963. Their reappearance in the Soviet sphere might be related to the influence of "osterns", a genre of frequently revisionist Westerns made in the USSR and other eastern nations. Here are pics of one of these figures, noteworthy as the only one with a standard "cowboy" hat, with a vintage Indian for reference.

The remainder of the set all share a coonskin hat. I find them notably less dynamic than other Marx figures, though the designers were clearly trying to impart a sense of action. The inclusion of a histrionic "knife guy" only reinforces my assessment. Here's a pic of two more of them, and an extra reference shot.

"I am not affiliated with him."

"Chief say, don't make eye contact with crazy guy with knife."

Last but not least, we have yet another "casualty" figure, this time with an arrow instead of a bullet hole. It's all graphic stuff, though notably toned down. Here's pics front and back.

As with the specimen of the gunfighter, this figure has an exit wound that has impressed collectors. However, I find it a misfire, as it looks more like a funky barnacle. It also doesn't line up at all with the arrow, though I could put that down to imposed censorship. I suspect the placement of the arrow in the shoulder was at least partly a way to simplify production, as it puts the shaft on the seam between the halves of the mold. Marx must still be given credit for an extra level of messed up.

As for the deeper mystery of how these came to be, I admit I am currently at a dead end. Both the seller and other sources report that these and other Marx soldiers were made in Donetsk, Ukraine beginning in the 1970s,. It is claimed that this was under license from Marx, which I find reasonably believable simply based on the relative obscurity of the known products. A vivid recollection from a book called Everything Is Normal by Sergey Grechishkin recounts that Marx soldiers were especially valuable in the USSR and usually only available to those with political connections. Intriguingly, the author also mentions that more typical army men were of the infamous "flat" type, which Marx had produced in the very early 1950s. The big question mark is how long they were in production, with the most specific dates being 1991. If true, then the eastern copies outlived Marx itself by over a decade, a good run for a spinoff.

For links, here's the previous installments:

Part 1: Enemy Marx (Japanese figures)

Part 2: Marx Marxists! (Soviet figures)

Part 3: Marx on the Moon (Apollo/ astronaut set)

Part 4: The Good, the Marx and the Ugly (Wild West and "'casualty" figures)

Part 5: Not Marx Is Still Good Marx (Mexican Marx toys and other large-sized figures)

Space 1979: The one where James Bond hijacks a giant flying stone head

Title: Zardoz

What Year?: 1973 (pre production and casting)/ 1974 (release)

Category: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: Dear God WHY??!!

With this review, I will be introducing a new category, the Irreproducible Oddity. As outlined in my Introduction (done about the same time as my Critters review), these are not just especially weird movies, but ones that could only have been produced in a very specific time and place. The definition readily fell into place even for films I had not settled on covering: Only the 1980s could have produced Lifeforce, only the French could have produced Fantastic Planet, only the Italians could have produced Zombie, and only the combined warped genius of William Castle and Marcel Marceau could have produced Shanks. It was further apparent from these examples alone that the 1970s would be an even more target-rich environment than the following decade. With these parameters in place, it was clear that one movie was absolutely unavoidable: Zardoz. Dear Logos, Zardoz.

If one's going to try to summarize this film, you might as well start with the opening scene. On the ground, barbarians gather in the throes of hysteria, calling out the name Zardoz. As we watch, a huge object descends, in the form of a stone head. A bounty of guns (and presumably ammunition) spews from the mouth of the head, accompanied by a blunt command to kill others rather than reproducing. A barbarian named Zed manages to sneak aboard, kill the mysterious pilot, and ride to the source. There, he discovers a colony of immortals where procreation is detested and half forgotten, nonconformity is punishable by senility without death, and a growing number of rebels yearn for the return of mortality.

In hindsight , the most noteworthy thing about Zardoz is that it was the first science fiction movie to gather "big name" talent in front and behind the camera. It was written and directed by John Boorman, fresh from Deliverance among other box office successes, and of course starred Sean Connery (chosen after Boorman announced Burt Reynolds in the role).  The most genuinely memorable performances are from John Alderton as Zed's immortal ally Friend and Sara Kestelman as his nemesis May. Despite the assembled names, the whole thing was done for under $2 million. An additional artifact to come out of the production is a novelization that Boorman claimed responsibility for. (At the time of this writing, I am awaiting a copy for further investigation.)

When I first considered this feature, I made a few comments asking for suggestions on movies to cover. What intrigued me most is that most of the input I received were titles I was either already considering or had already decided to be unsuitable for inclusion. The exception was this film, which I was almost ready to set aside but then saw suggested repeatedly. Naturally, I had seen the film long ago, and would probably have seen it again fairly recently if it had been more readily available. For this review, I finally purchased a digital copy, if only because I was pretty sure I would be viewing it again just to be sure I had seen what I saw. Which, I must emphasize, is something that hardly ever happens to me.

My strongest reaction on viewing it is that the film isn't that complicated or convoluted in concept or story. Anyone who could keep track of most of the characters and events in  Message From Space or Star Crash will certainly have no trouble here. Furthermore, I remembered its main twists (particularly the origin of the name Zardoz) from my single previous viewing. This left me with the further difficulty of explaining just why it feels as strange as virtually everyone agrees it is. I think part of the answer is that it captures the feel of "far future" science fiction, still most closely associated with and perhaps only done effectively by A.E. Van Vogt. In this much, the film is unquestionably effective, despite a relatively unambitious date of 300 years in the future. The strangeness is heightened by the incongruously frank depictions of sexuality and violence, which make for an either gut-busting or jaw-dropping moment every 15 or 20 minutes.

Then there is the "one scene", and this movie was a lot harder than any other I have reviewed. What I have to go with is a scene around the midpoint where the immortals compel Zed to give an account of his life of barbarism and fanaticism. Their technology displays  his thoughts and memories as he recounts killing in the name of his god Zardoz. The result is a vision of a post-apocalyptic world more vivid and effective than many films achieve in their entire length. It culminates in the capture of a woman, at which point many a movie would either cut away or descend into trite exploitation. The scene instead ends with a closeup of the victim's face.

With all this said, readers may be wondering why I have rated the film as I have, the lowest on my scale of weird and/or bad. I certainly do not hold the film to be as bad as the likes of Inseminoid, but to me its flaws are all the more annoying. The deeper issue is that I cannot find a way to rate it other than I have and still give it a rating at all. The bottom line is that I may have reached a point where I can understand it, but I still cannot understand why it was made or why anyone would want to make it. In that, I suppose I must give it credit. I give up and move on; let other tales be told, for better or worse.

For links, here is a Space1970 catalogue of posters for the film, from which I took the one featured here.  For the record, I had no knowledge of this blog when I arrived at the name for this feature. See also my Introduction to this feature for an overview of the ratings system, classifications and more.