So we come to end if the collection and boy was the very ending rough. Six films and of those 5 were actually watchable, but the last one, well we’ll get to that.

A very optimistic view of where the space program might be six years after the films release.

The next movie was 1959’s Battle In Outer Space. now given the type of film being made, particularly SF films from Japan, this one wasn’t too bad. Earth has a thriving space exploration program complete with a nifty ring space station. (While the model maker put the windows on the rim of the ring, the set people curved the floor showing that they, at least, understood how a spinning station works.) Aliens come along and blow it up. Guess we got straight to the title. Anyway, there’s lengthy exposition – something about these 50’s and early 60’s SF movies felt that they had to explain everything and in doing so get so much wrong. Bringing atoms to absolute zero doesn’t negate gravity. nope. After the exposition, two rockets are sent to the moon to do battle with the aliens in their base. There are setbacks – after all the aliens can mind control people — the base is destroyed and the earth prepares for the final showdown. More aliens arrive there’s a big battle and eventually the day is saved. Not great cinema but watchable.

Iguana-don is not frightened by your puny matches.

The final film on the set they saved for the worst, Valley of the Dragons. In theory, this is adapted from a poor Jules Verne story, but the movies is a dull plodding affair with too much stock footage and too little story. Like 12 to the Moon, this is a sequence of events that really don’t add up to a complete story. An Englishman (Michael) and a Frenchman (Hector) are about to have a duel while a passing comet strikes the earth and the two men awake to find themselves marooned on a planetoid hurtling away into space. I wish I could say quickly but nothing in the film feels fast, they work out that the planetoid is really a fragment of the Earth knocked loose into space earlier in history and is populated by dinosaurs, cavemen, and neanderthals. They work together to survived, become fast friends, find sexy young women to fall in love with, and if all that wasn’t enough, stop warring tribes of cavemen, bring peace to the humans trapped on the fragment. This sounds like a lot fo action stuff, but it’s turgid and slow and boring. At an hour and twenty-two minutes this thing felt longer than a Peter Jackson uncut expanded Blu-ray.

So after waking up this morning with a splitting migraine and double dosing on my meds to kill the damned thing, I stayed home from work. Now that I feel a wee bit better I’ll give you the next installment in my bad movie watching.

I am watching the movies in disc order so next up was a little Japanese horror film I had never seen The H-Man. Given being on the receiving end of two atomic bombs and having fishermen caught in the fallout from US fusion testing the Japanese have always had a keen interest and utilization of radioactive horror in their post-war cinema. The H-Man is a lesser contender for the fare then the better known and better produced films such as Gojira, known to the rest of the world as Godzilla.

In a better movie that cop was a one-eyed scientist.

The H-Man is sort of like a mashing together of a mob/crime picture with The Blob. A crew of a fishing boat encounters a deserted ship and discovers a fluid monster. The monster eventually makes its way to Tokyo and begins massacring mobsters. There is never any reason given for the predilection for gangsters, but hey that’s what it is. The movie’s character are rather stock, the idealistic young scientist who figure it all out but has a hard time convincing the police. A mob gal/nightclub singer who’s really a good person and had no idea her boyfriend was selling drugs. The tough a nail cop but with a good heart and of course, the gangster who is deadly, violent, and develops a sudden third act need for the dame.

The monster is like the blob but man-sized, which makes the resolution of the story rather problematic. In order to get this thing that has killed four or five gangsters the police and authorities burn down an entire section of the city. In addition to the overkill ist is all anti-climatic as they get the monster on their first attempt. I haven’t been more underwhelmed by the end of a movie monster since The Blood Beast Terror when the giant killer moth threw itself into the bonfire.

Next up was 12 To the Moon from 1960. In addition, to the usual terrible exposition, silly science, and overly cardboard characters what aspiring writers and filmmakers can learn from this movie is simple: a series of events do not a story make.

A little know lunar danger – quicksand.

This is a movie about the first trip to the moon, but with a gigantic crew, 12 international top scientists. A cast this crowded in a large production with a big budget would have a difficult time fleshing out all the characters. (To wit; The Hobbit movies) With a limited budget and poor writing the trouble is only compounded. The dangers are mostly standard bad SF movies fare, frequent meteor swarms (I have to comment that perhaps my favorite science error is the constant shooting stars on the lunar landscape.) There is also a love story that come out of nowhere and is equally dispatched back to nowhere, and of course aliens.

While the characters faces constant challenges and the entire North American continent is threatened. (Apparently the aliens fell everything else is not so much a danger) the film has no narrative throughline and as such is simply a collection of and then this happens and then this happens until the story ends. The writers certainly took up sides for the cold war, but then as suddenly performed a reversal that in a better script would have been interesting. In this movie is was just another iteration of ‘and then this happened.’

So last week in a fit of impulse buying – thanks Amazon one click – I purchased a 2 DVD set of six ‘vintage’ SF films for $7.

Friends and acquaintances are perpetually perplexed my by hobby of enduring bad cinema, but the truth of the matter is really quite simple. Beside the ‘so bad it’s fun’ category such as Plan 9 from Outer Space, bad movies can be very instructive. From them you can learn all about bad exposition and info dump, poor dialogue, poorly plotted stories and hosts of other failures. Learning why they are bad, the mechanics of the mess can lead to improvement in your own craft. In many ways it is easier to learn from someone else’s failure than from a work of genius.

The first movie in set I had seen before but I still watched The 27^th Day Again.

Kodos the Destroyer hands out free weapons to random humans.

Calling this film ‘bad’ is perhaps too strong. It is weak with a foundation of science that had been laid out on beach sand. (Particularly when The Alien announces he is from another Universe and all he means is planetary system.) However, the plot is actually rather intriguing.

The Aliens face the destruction of their world, their high ethical standards prevent them from invading and just taking the Earth, so they give five people capsules that are fantastic weapons. IF the humans manage to NOT kill themselves off with the weapons then the Alien will lose and humanity will survive. The movie can be looked at as a poor man’s The Day The Earth Stood Still, but played out – despite budget restrictions – on a global scale.

The ending, though adapted from the novel by the original writer, is very weak and it is a shame that the production did not stick closer to the novel’s more ‘uplifting’ ending.

The second movie up, The Night The World Exploded was not as good. There aren’t very many movies that present minerals as the principal threat. The only other one that springs to mind is The Monolith Monsters– a film worth watching.

Seismologists demonstrating proper earthquake protocols.

The Night the World Exploded starts with one advance in science – earthquake prediction – and quickly moves to a world threatening danger as a new elements building to a detonation that will destroy the planet.

With even worse science and a lower budget this movie is not enjoyable to watch, but there is at least the core plot of a story and even characters in transformation, something that is often lacking in SF films of the 50s. Still it has a lot of stilted dialogue, sexist tropes, and for a global disaster movie a disappointingly lack of spectacle.

Two down – four to go.

Sorry for my prolonged absence this part of the year is the very busy time at my day job, six days a week, ten hour day are quite common. (I don’t even work retail, it boggles the mind.)
For my first post in weeks here is my no spoilers review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
First off let me say that Star Wars is back. This film vindicate my theory that J.J. is a far better fit for the Star Wars universe than he ever could hope to be for the Star Trek setting. The Force Awakens is fun, fast, and takes placed in the familiar lived-in look that permeated the frame in the original trilogy.
TFA takes place many years after the end of the original trilogy and starts off with new characters and new situations. In the years since the Rebellion’s victory over the Empire the victors have reestablished the Republic, but a number of system defied the Republic and have formed the New Order, a government that seems to follow the precepts of the Empire but does not claim a direct lineage. The Two government appear to be co-existing in a cold war sort of peace that is disturbed by a Resistance force with the New Order.
Non of that is spoiler and should have been clear in the film’s opening crawl, sadly it is not.
As I stated earlier the movie quickly reclaims the sense of fun, grandeur, and adventure that the original trilogy mined so well and that the prequel trilogy simply forget existed. The new characters are fun, interesting, and have more fascinating backstories that the original characters. The film has many callbacks to the original films, performing superior fan service.
The weaknesses of the movie really come down to two major points.
1) It is very much a retelling of A New Hope, much as Terminator 2 retold the story, and less well, of . Here is may be that Disney and the film makers are taking time to assure us that they know what Star Wars is supposed to be. If the next movie charts fresh territory then this film will be tonally perfect, if the next film is a remix of The Empire Strike Back, then the new series will be damaged goods. (Much as J.J. damaged Star Trek by remixing The Wrath of Kahn.)
2) There is an extended sequence involving bounty hunters and underworld criminals that is utterly unneeded. You cot has action and laughs and gag but it is waste of valuable screen time that could have been used exploring the characters and their situations.
Aside from those two points I think the film works and was a lot of fun to watch. Do see it and see it in a theater.