Tag Archives: SF

Stupid Movie is Stupid

So this past weekend I ended up watching a fairly stupid film with a friend of mine. After watching a documentary on Australian Exploitation movies, I had started seeing how many of these I could get from Netflix or streaming services. (Answer: very few.) However, I did disover a listing for an odd 70’s genre movie called Chosen Survivors.

chosensurv4Ten people, selected by computer, are nabbed by the government and shoved into a shelter 1700 feet underground to survive the global thermonuclear war and restated humanity afterward. Sadly due to an oversight, the caverns that were selected as the receptacle for the shelter is infested with hungry, aggressive, vampire bats. Trapped, the survivors must find a way to contend with the threat.

Now, this looked to be bad. I had never heard of this movie, and I was under no illusions when I had Netflix ship it to me. Sometimes bad movies are their own entertainment.

What did surprise me was the amount of talent in the film. Jackie Cooper, Bradford Dillman, Richard Jaeckel, Diana Muldaur, Barbara Babcock, (that’s two from Start Trek’ TOS) combined with the others for a total count of more than 700 acting credits according to IMDB.

In theory the people were picked for their essential skills and breedability , but the selection clearly makes a hash of that straight away. A wall Street financial guy? (Cooper) a Congresswoman (Muldaur) a novelist? No one would make-up their post-apocalypse survival team from such characters.

So they get nabbed (off screen to save budget) drugged (to save them from the shock and horror of the world’s ending), shoved into an elevator and dropped 1700 feet into a gleaming stainless steel complex. Almost at once the threat appears when the bats manage a bit of birdy-horror by killing all the parakeets in a cage. (It is never explained how the bats got into or out of the birds’ cage.)

Five men and five women they natural pair off into couples except for a few. They squabble and yell exposition at each other, fight over who’s in charge, with Cooper’s character insisting the thing stink of a set up. They make poor choices in dealing with the bat threat and things get worse.

Cooper’s character shows tremendous constitution by finishing off a battle of hard liquor, going around in a drunken rant yelling and insulting everyone, before ending up in Barbara Babcock’s room because he wants to ‘talk’ to her. Yes, you can see where this is going. He attacks her, she can’t fight him off, and in that strange view found only in really bad writing, goes from fighting the rape to participating. This is horrid enough writing, but it’s compounded by the rest of the movie where it has absolutely no effect upon the plot what so ever. You could literally snip out the scene and the film will be unchanged. No one line of dialog would sound out place. It is a small grace that it is shot without nudity and not in a titillating manner.

Sobering up, Cooper’s character then proceeds to destroy the ‘alarm’ that they have rigged to warn about bats, and open up a nice wide passage letting in lots and lots of the flying blood-suckers.

This is too much for Bradford Dillman’s character, whose confesses that he works for the government and that there has been no thermonuclear war, that this was a proof of concept experiment for the shelter program. (Can’t wait for the congresscritter to get back to her job after that.) He tried and fails to signal for an emergency extraction, leaving it to the athlete to climb the 1700 foot elevator shaft and signal for help.

He makes the climbs but the bats kill him after he completes his mission, the bats get into the shelter a couple more die, and then the air force shows up and rescues everyone.

Personally I had hoped that the end of the movie would be that during the week that they were trapped the war had broken out, but no, the final scenes are the character being flown away by the Air Force.

Stupid movie is stupid.

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The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the 1980s

So here am back at my irregular series on the most influential SF films, by decade. The 1980s are a particularly target rich environment for discussing SF and genre movies. After the explosive popularity of Star Wars in the 70’s, a popularity that followed through into the 80s with The Empire Strikes Back and The Return Of The Jedi, studios turned to genre film as the path to the next mega-blockbuster. The decade so film that had big budgets with full studio backing, and small Indy movies that challenged the big boys at the box-office. So picking just two and the most influential is a daunting task.

Neither film that I selected were major hits at the box office, but their impacts far out reached the lack luster initial performances.

220px-Blade_Runner_posterBlade Runner (1982): A dark, film noir SF movie from master filmmaker Ridley Scott, Blade is a rather loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s stranger and thought provoking novel, Do Androids Dream of electric Sheep? The film cratered at the box office, when audiences were in the mood for light escapist fare, and had already been conditioned to accept Harrison Ford as an ‘action hero’ this psychological detective story about the qualities of humanity, love, and compassion, found itself serious out of step with the times. However the filmmaking was revolutionary. The look, feel, and future presented in Blade Runner inspired filmmakers for decades. Christopher Nolan is said to have used it as a touch stone for the look at ‘Batman Begins.’ Later it gained a cult following, and eventually critics noticed the serious thought and themes running through the film, but almost from the start filmmakers fell in love with it and copied it. Now regarded as a classic, and one that prompt endless debates about preferred versions , endings, and character natures, Blade Runner is a film that has stood the test of time.

TheLastStarfighter_quad-1-500x376The Last Starfighter (1984): Star Wars produced a glut of young men leaving home and becoming heroes in the vastness of space stories, and while this one is quirky, fun, and has some tremendous performances, overall the story is not that ground breaking. What marks The Last Starfighter as the innovative and formative movie that it is comes from its production. This was the first film to attempt and utilize photorealistic computer generated imagery for nearly all of the special effects produced in the movie. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan broke ground with the CGI of the Genesis effect, impressive work that holds up to this day, but it was less than a minute of screen-time while the rest of the film used traditional model photography to achieve the shots of dueling starships. The Last Starfighter has no miniatures or models, all the starships exist solely as CGI imagery. While that CGI is painfully dated by todays standards, it is hugely important in the history of film. It proved that it could be done and that audiences would accept the effects. From there we lead into Babylon 5, Jurassic Park, and every genre film made today. They are all building up in the work done in this film.

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Considering a different sort of contest

So, for quite a few years I have been entering the Writers of the Future contest. It a contest for SF and Fantasy writers, those who have not met the criteria for being a ‘pro,’ and I haven’t done terrible but neither have I won it. (three honorable mentions and three semi-finalist.) Now in addition to that I am considering something new.

Writing a play.

I have seen plays, I have read plays, I have studied — lightly– play structure, and I have even been in a play that people paid to see.  (And I am not talking about a school play where the parent show up out of sense of obligation vs people coming for entertainment.) However I have never attempting the writing of a play.

A friend of mine — thanks Marc Biagi —  shared a link on facebook to contest for original SF plays. It happened just as I was revising an older story of mine that as luck would have it, takes place in a single setting and pretty much in a single scene. (It’s a very short story a mere 1500 words.) My brain has been firing all day in an adaptation process for turning it into a single act play.

The deadline is far enough off that I think I could pull this off, even with the loads of OT I will be doing at my day job.

Dare I do it?

 

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My wittle mind is blown

Of all the possible works by SF Grand Master Robert A. Heinlein to adapt into a film this would have been near the bottom of my list. Not due to the quality of the story, it is a classic in time travel and it’s inherent paradoxes, but the mind-blowing inside-out nature of the plot is not something that lends itself to a film…

 

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The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the 1970’s:

There has been a rather lengthy hiatus in this series as I dove into edits of my novel and composing a new short story, but I have returned to the topic, coming around to perhaps the most important decade in SF cinema except for the 1950’s.

First up I’ll discuss the moon-sized shadow eclipsing all SF films of the 70’s and later;

Star Wars (1977)Original-Star-Wars-Poster-1977

I think it is difficult for people who came of age later to appreciate just how monumental Star Wars was in the history of cinema. It is part of the triumvirate that created the block-buster phenomena that Hollywood continues to chase to this very day. (The other two films being JAWS and THE GODFATHER.) Science-Fiction simply had never been as big as Star Wars before and that sort of success casts a might long shadow.

Looking at SF films of the 70’s everything before Star Wars gets lost in the uproar of that space fantasy and everything after it is compared to it. While Hollywood had been moving in fits and starts towards adult science-fiction in the 1970’s with film such as The Omega Man, The Andromeda Strain, and Logan’s Run, the arrival of Lucas’ baby shunted all that aside for a generation as the studios chased after the next massive box-officer adventure.

However the influence of this movie reaches far beyond the pale imitations hurried into production and the senseless pursuit of massive runs, how we watch , hear, and make films changes because of George Lucas.

Today’s theaters packed with digital projectors, multi-channel sounds systems, and comfortable seating owe a great deal of their evolution to Lucas’ and his foresight and insistence on exhibition as well as film production. Behind the scenes, Lucas’ advanced the technology of film making more in the twenty years post Star Wars that in all the years following the introduction of synch-sound, Digital effects, digital processing, non-linear editing, these are tools that make todays production look vastly different to films short and edited traditionally. When you shoot a home video on your camera phone and edit it on your home computer you are participating Lucas’ revolution, it’s that massive.

Selecting a second film for the 1970’s is a very tough thing. Any film produced and released before Star Wars pretty much had any lasting impact erased by the tidal wave that is Star Wars, any film made after Star Wars nearly always is following and in some case just bolding stealing, from Lucas’ massive hit. Personally I came down to two post Star Wars films for my second choice; Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Alien. Alien has been copied endlessly since it’s stellar release in 1979, but I think the broader impact it had was that in theatrical films it pretty much, singlehandedly, destroyed the professional explorer set-up. Before Alien interstellar travel was the domain of military and para-military experts, after Alien’s ‘truckers in space’ approach the professional explorer for all practical purposes vanished from feature films.

However I am going to go with

sttmpuniformsStar Trek: the Motion Picture (1979)

After the success of Star Wars Paramount decided that the pilot that they had been planning for a new Star trek television series needed to be a feature film. The script wasn’t in great shape, and Roddenberry wasn’t an experience hand at feature film production. The $20 million dollar budget quickly vanished as the studio spent $40 million, the script was re-written as they filmed, and the production was troubled from the set to the special effects, but still the film was a hit, spawning a franchise of feature films that continue to this day, but I would argue that is not the lasting effect of Star trek: The Motion Picture.

The lasting effect came from the firing of Gene Roddenberry. Now out of the loop in the feature film department, he returned to his true love, television but this time with a Radical concept, a television show that would be sold directly to the stations, instead of a network, Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The success of the show paved the way for a flood of directly syndicated programming, most of it genre, laying the ground work for the fertile and rich television landscape we have to day in SF and fantasy. I don’t think we would have any of this with Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

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The Brain Will NOT Turn Off

So John Scalzi, SF author, had a book event at Mysterious Galaxy last night, and even though I was suffering a sore throat my wife and I attended. It was funny, and fun, and well worth the time, however that’s not the point of my post.
Mysterious Galaxy is also the locale where my writers group meets, thank to the lovely hosting from the store. at the meets we take turns reading about 1500 words from out works and listening to feedback from the other members.
John read out about 1500 words of a new piece and i could not for the love of god shut down the critique parts of my brain. I did not say anything, I do have self-control no matter what some people may think, but my minds raced along making notes just as it would for anyone in my writing group.
‘hmm too many dialog tags’
‘it’s a little info dumpy in the middle that can probably be crunched down’
‘overall a good scene that clearly advances the plot, just needs a bit of tightening.’
I am sure the last thing he needs to hear is my opinion.

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Sunday Night Movie: Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

I am quite tardy in posting this essay, but I did finish the original franchise out as I had intended.

battle-for-the-planet-of-the-apes-noah-keenSo after the racie war implications driving the plot of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, 20th Century Fox, fearful that they had driven the kiddie away, took the next, and final, installment of franchise in a lighter and more optimistic direction. The screenwriter for the previous two sequel relinquished his duties, in part due to the dark nature of his proposed script and in part to ill health, while the husband wife team that penned the screenplay for The Omega Man came onto the scene.

In many ways this film is the most direct sequel of the entire franchise. Where Beneath the Planet of the Apes introduced a new astronaut the Ape Planet, nothing in the first film set up the silly concept of a rescue mission. Escape from the Planet of the Apes heavily violates continuity by introducing an unknown Ape genius “Milo” who is able to repair and launch Taylor’s crashed spacecraft. Conquest played buffet with elements put forth in Escape, picking and choosing what they wanted to tell a story with some of the same characters, and throwing away anything that didn’t fit. (retconning long before the term became standard in fandom.) That is not the approach with Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

Battle takes the situation and characters established Conquest and continues the story, playing mostly fair and extrapolating from the scenario already in motion. Despite this, or perhaps even because of it, Battle for the planet of the Apes is the least ambitious, least transgressive, and least daring of the franchise. The budget was again cut, and the situation reduced to the most simplistic elements. A colony of apes, lead my Caesar from Conquest, is building an ape community with humans as second-class citizens, but not slaves or property, amid the ruins of a nuclear war. Racial animosity against the human divides the apes, while a colony of surviving humans, scarred by the constant exposure to radiation in the bombed out city, led by a brutal security man from Conquest, plots a war of ape extermination.

The too small budget hampered the production, reducing the screenplay to one rather lackluster battle and a few set locales. The film ends on a note of optimism, putting it in direction conflict with the tone of the series while implying that the events of the first film were no longer possible.

While the franchise limped on with a short lived and poorly conceived television series, this film represented the end of the series until the terrible attempt at a reboot with Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. That failed and the franchise again went dead until the next film Rise of The Planet of the Apes, a success which in many ways was a rebooting of Conquest in that it told the story of how the planet got started on the path toward humanity’s fall and the rise of the apes.

This year saw the next film in the new franchise, Dawn of the Planet of The Apes, and in reality it is a rebooting of Battle, but done with real style, a real budget, and far better written. I will be interesting to see where this new franchise series goes.

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Sunday Night Movie: Conquest of the Planet of the apes

Now in my re-watch of the original Planet of the Apes franchise I have arrived at my conquest-the-black-mans-burdenfavorite film of the series, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. While I love me Planet of the Apes and it is wonderful film, more often than any other in the franchise I will pull out the blu-ray of Conquest and sit back to watch it over and over. Once I did get it on Blu-ray I also stopped watching the theatrical cut and exclusively watch the unrated directors edition. When the film was released in 1972 they had hopes of getting a ‘G’ rating, but thee scene of revolution were so intense the studio feared they might get an ‘R’ and ordered the ending re-written and the footage edited to be considerably less graphic.

Conquest is set twenty years after the end of Escape from the Planet of the Apes. During the twilight years of Bush 41’s presidency (that’s snark because the film is set 1991, now more than twenty years in out past) apes have become a slave population, having 1991thumbnailImageprogressed from pets, replacing the cats and dogs that died in a global pandemic into a servant and slaves. Armando, the kind hearted circus owner last seen saving the time-traveling apes’ baby has returned to the city, bring the circus for a need tour, and along with it the now adult intelligent ape Caesar. (Whom was named Milo as a baby in the last film but hey retcon is nothing new.) thing go badly and before long Ceasar is a slave himself, alone and friendless, subject to the same brutal treatment as his ape brothers and sisters, including the producer’s wife in appearance number 3 in the ape movies. In the end Caesar lives up to his new name and leads a revolt overthrowing the fascist power structure in a brutal, bloody, and revenge filled night. The film ends with images of the city burning and nearly all of our principle human characters dead.

It is grim, dark, and very deliberate metaphorical statement on violence generating more violence. This is an example of 70’s cinema that I truly enjoy. It is dark, it is grim, it is cynical, but it is also stuffed with ideas. This is a film that using the pretext of science-fiction and adventure tries to talk about the very real troubles and issues plaguing the United States then and today. SF films of the 70s really began to turn to adult themes and ponder serious questions, and even a film such as this one, with limited budget and an eye firmly fixed on the bottom line, did not jettison the idea for the spectacle. Today all too often SF movies are nothing more than extremely big budgeted action films devoid to content and thought. (I’m looking at you Transformers and pretty much anything from Michael Bay.) If you have not seen this film, or it has been many years, get the blu-ray and watched the uncut version. It’s quite a shocker. (next up, shudder, Battle for the Planet of the Apes.)

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Mini-Review: Guardians of the Galaxy

So this weekend Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe launched with the release of Guardians of the Galaxy. (Phase One lead up to Avengers, Phase Two leads to Avengers: Age of Ultron.)

hr_Guardians_of_the_Galaxy_46Guardians of the Galaxy (GotG) must count among the strangest concepts ever used to launch a major franchise. GotG concerns a collection of criminals and riff-raff that are thrown together with conflicting motives with the fate of the galaxy resting on their actions.

There is one actual human character for the audience to identify with, Peter Quill, and the rest of the main character cast are various aliens. Some or rendered with traditional make-up effects while other exist solely as CGI creations. When major characters include a modified raccoon and a talking-tree, you know that you’ve taken a journey to the far reaches of high-concept. The amazing thing is that it all works.

My reaction to GotG is very similar to my initial reaction to 1977’s Star Wars. This film is also a space-opera, not science-fiction, and one it gets going it never slows down. The action speeds like a meter heading for planetary impact. The non-stop action however is masterfully paced keeping from numbing the audience and allowing enough space so that each and every one of the major characters has moments to shine not only in physical prowess but also in heart-touching scenes of inner motivation.

This is a film I keeping thinking about not in a deep philosophical manner, but rather in a ‘wow I had fun’ mode. Your mileage, of course, may vary, but if you remember the sense of scale and deeper universe that the original Star Wars created while giving  thrilling action then this film is for you.

My biggest complaint is that for the first time the post-credit scene exists entirely for laughs and in no way sets up another story in this expanding universe.

(This post has been edited because the author is overly fond of typos.)

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Sunday Night Movie: Planet of the Apes(1968)

I guess my essay series on influential SF films has –eh hm – influenced my selection for this week’s Sunday night Movie.
planet-of-the-apesReleased in 1968 Planet of the Apes would certainly be on the short list for best SF movies of that or any decade, but I can tell you that it is not one of the two films I selected as most influential from the 1960s.
While Planet of the Apes spawned 4 direct sequels, two television series’, 1 re-make and 2 sequels to the remakes, I would say that it’s impact beyond the franchise is limited primary to its advancement of special effect make-up.
The said it is a marvelous piece of political parable, taking the explosive issues of race relations and dealing with it under disguise of SF adventure.
The film concerns a crew of astronauts launched from Earth in the early 1970’s, ah the halcyon optimistic days when we simply assumed that our trajectory in space exploration would bend upward as sharply as a Saturn V thrusting for the moon, that through traveling at near the speed of light and by the use of cold-sleep, find themselves thousands of years in the future, crashed on a planet orbiting a star in the constellation Orion.
The surviving crew is made up of a scientific idealist who would ‘walk naked into a volcano’ if it meant he learned something no one else every knew, a egotist for whom glory has driven him to this one-way mission, and a misanthropist for whom mankind is something to be despised and dreams of finding something better than humanity amongst the stars.
Aside from a crashed ship, limited supplies, and inter-personal conflict, the mission is threatened when the crew discovers that this planet has humans, but one that have never progressed beyond mute animals, and that the dominate life are apes.
Captured and experimented upon, it reduces down to one survivor who eventually unlocks the puzzle of the planet, and despairs as the answer.
Truly a classic film, this one is well worth the viewing, and I am quite happy to have it on blu-ray. (As part of a boxed set containing all five of the original films.) If you have never seen it, crawl out from under that rock you hide under and do see it at once.

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