1977 - CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND - on the big screen

Obviously re-released as a tie in to Spielberg's current fim Disclosure, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is almost 50 years old.  The film was made when Spielberg was in his early 30's and is an assured piece of work for a filmmaker at the beginning of his career.  Spielberg had finished shooting Jaws and was still something of an unknown quantity in Hollywood although people in the know recognized him as a potential major talent.

 

Spielberg was under enormous pressure during the making of the film.  The budget escalated from the initial estimates of 3 million dollars to 20 million dollars.  The studio Columbia Pictures was on very shaky financial ground and was constantly pressuring him to reduce the budget and wrap up the filming.  One of his producers had a significant drug problem and was apparently behaving erratically during the production.  But Spielberg stayed the course and remained true to his vision of the final film.

 

Close Encounters of the Third Kind also benefited from some considerable behind the camera talent.  Vilmos Zsigmond was the very talented cinematographer Spielberg had worked with on his first feature The Sugerland Express.  John Williams composed the score.  Michael Kahn was the editor working with Spielberg for the first time and would go on to cut almost all of his other films.  Douglas Trumball who had worked with Stanley Kubrick was in charge of the pioneering special effects. 

 

 

I remember when the film was released the critical reception was for the most part good.  However some critics were looking for another shoot-em up Star Wars type of film but Spielberg was too much of a humanist to go down that road.  Spielberg even got one of France's greatest directors, Francois Truffaut to play the part of Claude Lacombe the French scientist in charge of the UFO project.  

 

 

In spite of some of some dated technology in the film (reel to reel tape recorders, paper maps, land line telephones), this film still plays very well and is certainly one of his best films.

Spielberg for the most part wrote the screenplay with the assistance of five other uncredited screenwriters.  The film exists in  three different running times, the 135 minute original release, the 132 minute special edition and the 137 minute director's cut.

2025 - GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON'T DIE, amusing science fiction comedy

A time traveler from the future (where else) arrives at a diner in Los Angeles to save the planet earth.  He believes that some of the customers at the diner can help even though this is his 117 attempt at averting disaster.  What is exactly menacing earth?  Well Apple cell phones and AI of course.

This is an entertaining film coming from a very quirky filmmaker Gore Verbinski.  Verbinski had some big hits with his horror film The Ring and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films aka "the good ones."  The writer Matthew Robinson is an equally quirky guy.  He's written The Invention of Lying and Love and Monsters.  Unsurprisingly this is one odd ball of a film.

 

The cast is odd as well particularly Sam Rockwell as the man from the feature and Haley Lu Richadson whose job is to dress up as a sort of Disney princess to entertain little girls at birthday parties.  In a key plot point she has an allergy to cell phones.

 

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is an eccentric film that the studio dumped with a release in February.  Nobody at the studio clearly knew how to market it.  What a disappointment, this film really deserved to be seen by an audience. Hopefully it will be rediscovered in the streaming world.

 The running time is 134 minutes. 

2026 - PROJECT HAIL MARY, it's really long

Extreme over length finally kills what could have been a good science fiction story.  The directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have been very good providers of crowd pleasing entertainments with films like 21 Jump Street, 22 Jump Street, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs and The Lego Movie. They were fired off of the Star Wars spinoff Solo because they thought they were hired to make a comedy which apparently isn't what Disney wanted.  Believe me considering how Solo turned out their approach would have made a much better movie.

 

For Project Hail Mary they were working with a big budget based on a novel from the author of The Martian.  They mounted a very elaborate science fiction epic with a screenplay by a top writer Drew Goddard.  Ryan Gosling was cast as the hero astronaut who has to save the planet earth.  Current flavor of the month German actor Sandra Huller is the scientist in charge of Project Hail Mary  She plays the usual stoic who secretly has a heart of gold.

 

Even with all the elaborate and at times dazzling visual effects, Ryan Gosling is the whole show.  He has to virtually deliver a monologue throughout the whole film and act next to some kind of puppet rock creature.  He does this very well and keeps the film watchable for about an hour.

 

However Project Hail Mary is cursed with all of the problems these current big screen films have.  It has a very meandering script with a lot of plot exposition.  In this case there's  lots of jumping back and forth in time and a whole lot of screen time hanging out with the space alien.  This finally drags the film into major boredom.  It also has one of the worst issues all these recent big budget films have as well, the inability to know when to end the damn story.  There are at least three endings in the last half hour.  This film isn't bad it's just tedious.

Project Hail Mary runs 156 minutes. 

2026 - WAR MACHINE, science fiction action junk which is entertaining

The latest streamer action movie and there are a lot of streamer action movies is War Machine.  It's an entertaining time waster and no one will confuse it with Wild Strawberries.  War Machine is essentially a remake of Arnold's Predator action classic and it does have as it's star another man mountain Alan Ritchson.

Ritchson plays a soldier who gets admitted to the Army Ranger training program although in real life he would probably be considered a little old.  Ritchson is suffering from PTSD from a previous tour in Afghanistan but he's still one tough SOB.  Anyway on the final test of his Ranger training he and his classmates get dropped into the middle of the Colorado woods although Australia is the substitute for Colorado.  They run into a robotic killing machine released from where else space aliens who apparently want to take over the earth.  So now the plot sequels into a rehash of that other space alien invasion epic Battle:  Los Angeles.

 

Lots of shooting, ray gun blasting and chases the usual stuff.  The War Machine seems unstoppable until Ritchson finally gets his hands on a bulldozer.  So now the film borrows from the climax of Aliens which had Sigourney Weaver battle it out in a mech suit with the prime Alien monster.  The War Machine looks a lot like the ED-209 from RoboCop by the way.

 

There are really no original ideas anymore or so it seems in the movie business.  Still this film does a decent job with the action stuff. Alan Ritchson has been kicking around the film business since 2004 until he finally hit the big time with the "Jack Reacher" series.  I'll say this for Ritchson at least he's young, it's getting a little hard to stomach all these geriatric action stars still working, I'm talking to you Arnold, Sylvester and Harrison.  Time to take your millions and maybe retire to a turkey farm or something.

War Machine was written by Patrick Hughes and James Beaufort, the running time is 107 minutes. 

1970 - ASSIGNMENT TERROR aka The Monsters of Terror or Dracula vs Frankenstein

This film is review protected especially from the musings of this little blog.

In Spain, space aliens revive the bodies of two deceased scientists bringing them back to life for their own nefarious purposes.  The leader of the space aliens was played by Michael Rennie who had come a very long way from his previous alien character "Klaatau" from The Day the Earth Stood Still.  German actor Karin Dor who is probably remembered for her appearances in You Only Live Twice and Topaz if she is remembered at all is one of the resurrected scientists.

Well the space aliens plans to take over the world involves them resurrecting all of the great movie monsters.  Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy and of course Frankenstein's monster.  All the monsters end up in a Spanish castle ready to go to work for the space aliens and waiting to pounce on an unexpected mankind.

 

Fortunately for mankind Inspector Tobermann of the Spanish police figures out what's going on and confronts the monsters in the castle.  Inspector Tobermann's main squeeze Ilsa Sternberg has been kidnapped by the space aliens and brought to the castle.  So now Inspector Toberman must rescue his girlfriend and fight off the monsters. 

Assignment Terror does have nice color photography.

The film was written by Jacinto Molina Álvarez who apparently played a lot of monsters in his career including, Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolfman and the Mummy although not all of them in this movie.  The running time is a tidy 85 minutes. 

2018 - OCCUPATION, space alien invasion stuff from Australia

Yet another space alien invasion story.  Let's get this out of the way the film is clearly beholden to War of the Worlds, Battle:  Los Angeles, Independence Day and particularly Red Dawn.  Space aliens have landed on earth in particular the Australian Outback.  A plucky group of survivors flee into the woods and set up a makeshift camp where they learn survival skills and begin to carry out a commando war against the aliens who are up to a nefarious purpose.

You can't argue there isn't enough action in this film, it has lots of shooting, ray gun blasting, car chases and explosions to keep the non discriminating action freak satisfied.  There is some attention paid to characterization.  One guy suffers from depression, there is a pregnant young couple, an ex-con whose family has been put in an alien concentration camp, the usual stuff.  

 

The is a B-movie with a fairly decent budget but it's still a B-movie.  It's entertaining in it's own way and has the required big action climax which feels a little tacked on.  The acting is decent for the most part. The special effects are not that bad.  

 

An attempt is made to send a message of brotherhood between the earthlings and the space aliens but who the hell is interested in that.  Peace is peachy but fighting is more exciting.  There is actually a sequel to this thing called Occupation: Rainfall. 

The film was written by the director, Luke Sparke, the running time is 119 minutes. 

1988 - I LOVE MARIA, aka Roboforce

Filmmaker Tsui Hark is the producer and stars in this pretty wild film which mixes about every conceivable genre possible for one film.  The obvious inspiration for this film was Robocop but instead of just doing a rehash of that film I Love Maria is jammed with lots of crazy action and comedy scenes.

In brief, a criminal gang known as The Hero Gang has built an impregnable robot called Pioneer 1 who can tear through the police like a piece of paper.  The stated goal of The Hero Gang is to eliminate the police and create chaos.  In addition they have developed another more humanoid looking robot called Maria played by Sally Yeh.  Yeh was the actor who was the blind women in John Woo's The Killer but I digress.  Anyway a scientist from the police force, a former member of The Hero Gang and a goofy reporter manage to get control of Maria and take on The Hero Gang along with help from the robot girl.  

 

As with a lot of these Hong Kong action films from the 1980's the fighting and shootouts are very well done. However you have to sit through a lot and I mean a lot of some really dumb comedy.  But that's the price you pay when you watch some of these Hong Kong action films.

 

I Love Maria is an entertaining film and a very fun ride of a film for the most part. 

The film was written (if that's the word) by Yuen Kai Chi, the running time is a frantic and never dull 96 minutes.

2025 - PRIMITIVE WAR, the "B" movie lives on

It's 1968 and we're in Vietnam where an elite group of Green Berets have been sent to a hidden valley to find out what happened to a previous squad of soldiers.  Well surprise surprise the valley is full of hungry dinosaurs who are part of a time travel experiment the evil Russians have been running.  This film isn't called Primitive War for nothing.  Yes this is a cross between Jurassic Park, Apocalypse Now, Platoon and a whole bunch of Vietnam war movies I've missed. 

You can put this in the 12 year old boy category of films.  There's man eating dinosaurs, lots of gun play, evil Russians, people getting graphically eaten by dinosaurs and a goofy science fiction subplot to tie it all together.  The cast seems game and appears to enjoy shooting their guns because there is a lot a shooting of dinosaurs so we don't have to deal with pesky things like character development and dialog.  The film was shot in Australia which is obviously subbing for Vietnam.  The film's budget was 7 million dollars, B movies aren't that cheap anymore.

 

The special effects are of a variable quality.  The CGI dinosaurs look better in the dark than the light.  It costs a lot of money these days to make realistic phony dinosaurs.  The director/writer Luke Sparke must be a real auteur since he has his name on about every other title in the credit scroll.  This is very enjoyable foolishness and yes there is a woman in the film because there always has to be a woman in a film like this.  Primitive War is certainly more enjoyable than those recent Jurassic World films.

 

The film was written by Ethan Pettus and Luke Sparke, the running time is 133 minutes.

1987 - GANDAHAR, another interesting science fiction film from René Laloux

Another visually striking science fiction film from Rene Laloux.  Gandhar has a fascinating story and at times some weird visuals.  It's the third and final feature for Laloux which had been preceded by Fantastic Planet and Time Masters.

 Gandahar's story is set in a future earth like planet inhabited by a female lead ruling council.  The council's scientists has developed a sophisicated organic technology over a more machine based approach in their daily existence.  One day Gandahar comes under attack by some robotic men who appear to be programmed to destroy Gandaharian society.  Needless to say the organic science is no match for the robot men.  Sent out by the ruling council, Sylvain, one of Gandahar's agents is tasked with learning the secret of the robot men and stopping them if possible

 

Simply put the film just looks interesting from a design point of view. The creatures featured in this film have fascinating looks to them particularly a race of mutants.  The animation is little more fluid than the animation in Fantastic Planet and the story moves along without any slow spots.   Definitely worth a look for science fiction fans not scared off by the animated film format.  This film also exists in an English version called The Light Years which replaced the original French music soundtrack with a more American sounding score.  It's probably best to stick to the original film.

 Gandahar was written by Rene Laloux, the running time is 79 minutes.

1958 - WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST, sequel to THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN

The Colossal Beast is back in this sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man.  After having been presumably killed by a fall off a cliff into a river the Colossal Beast (aka Lt. Colonel Glenn Manning) is living in the hills in Mexico.  After being drugged and captured by the U.S. Army the Colossal Beast is taken back to Los Angeles where naturally he escapes and runs amok leading to the inevitable giant stop the monster climax.

This low budget but highly entertaining film comes from who else, American International Pictures.  There's hardly a dull moment. Unfortunate actor Dean Parkin is stuck running around in a diaper stomping on small sets in a tribute to Toho Studios.  To compound matters Parkin is stuck with some kind of gross makeup on his face to let the audience know he is one scary monster dude.

The director is the legendary "B" filmmaker Bert L. Gordon who pumped out this kind of cheaply made horror/science fiction/fantasy stuff his entire career.  Some of his titles include, Attack of the Puppet People, Earth vs. the Spider and Empire of the Ants throughout his film making career and Gordon had a long career he lived to age 100. 

The film actually borrows from The Wizard of Oz of all things with the last section of this epic changing from black and white into color. 

 

The film was written by  George Worthing Yates and old hand at this kind of cheap monster movie stuff, the running time is a brisk 69 minutes.

1957 - INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN, short and sweet

American International Pictures at their wacky best even for them.  This drive-in feature is a mixture of science fiction, comedy and bad acting but it sure is fun.

Space aliens land on earth near a lover's lane filled with teenagers making out. Except the actors playing the teenagers are way way past their teenage years.  The aliens get the attention of the United States Army who are expected to keep the flying saucer invasion under wraps.  A couple of con men stumble onto to the flying saucer one of who is killed by a space alien who's hands are claws that inject alcohol into him thereby overdosing him with booze.  

There are a couple of young lovers and I use the term "young" very loosely.  They try to alert the police to this alien menace which in these types of movies is usually impossible since the police are typically clueless.  There's a cow that the aliens try to kill by filling it full of alcohol and the Army which is supposed to keep all of this secret has a public relations officer for some reason.

 

With a little research it's nice to find out that none of this stuff was taken seriously.  The acting is not very good but that only adds to the fun of this film.  These cheaply made movies with their quick running times were a staple of the drive-in market in the 1950's and 60's.  It's easy to sneer at the low production values on this film but you could argue that they are a lot more entertaining than some of the made for streaming movies floating around on the internet, I'm talking to you Brazen, Mother of the Bride, The Kissing Booth and The Kissing Booth 2.

 

The screenplay was by Robert J. Gurney Jr. and Al Martin, the running time is a zany 69 minutes. 

1979 - STALKER, on the big screen

Showing at a revival theater near near me was Tarkovsky's science fiction epic Stalker.  The film is long and very intense visually and story wise.  To recap, Stalker involves the travels of three individuals into an area called The Zone.  The Zone apparently contains a room that will grant the wishes of people that can find it and enter it.  The three men traveling to this mysterious room are the stalker who is the guide through the zone, a writer apparently suffering from writer's block and a professor on a mysterious mission.

The movie is long and probably what would today be called slow moving.  Andrei Tarkovsky the director was a very serious fellow when it came to his art and he approached each of his films with a deliberate approach when it came to making films.  The visual elements in a Tarkovsky film were always carefully planned out.

 

This was a difficult film for Tarkovsky to complete, he apparently had lots of technical issues with film stock and after a year of work the first version of the film was scrapped and was restarted with a revised screenplay.

What's the film about? Well part of it is definitely about having faith in your life although this is a very simple explanation.  The best thing that can be said about Stalker is that it is considered one of the greatest films ever made.  It's certainly a very fascinating and interesting film and was made by a master filmmaker.

The film was written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.  The running time is a daunting 161 minutes. 

2025 - FANTASTIC FOUR FIRST STEPS, try try again

Marvel still trying to reclaim their box office glory comes up with another underachiever.  Fantastic Four First Steps isn't the film that is going to bring them back from the precipice.  As the critics and box office analysts have been saying for a while the superhero genre has just plain exhausted the viewer.

Still holding on to that meta universe verse stuff, we're on Earth 828 mostly because Marvel still insists on dragging all of their films together under one umbrella.  We are introduced to the Fantastic Four the prime members of the Marvel comic books.  Right away we are plunged into a confusing mess of storytelling with mentions of mole men and super apes which the team has apparently defeated. We are also dragged into a bewildering recap of their origin story.  After what seems like an eternity the Silver Surfer (who apparently had a sex change) shows up to announce the that the big and I mean literally big supervillain Galactus is coming to eat up Earth 828.  Will the Fantastic Four be able to defeat Galactus?  

 

For a film that was supposed to reinvent or restart the Marvel Universe Fantastic Four First Steps seems mighty derivative.  There are call outs to scenes from Star Wars ( a cute little robot, space ships flying around), that huggy feely stuff that we had to put up with in Marvel's Thunderbolts and oddly a North Korean monster movie called Pulgasari which featured another stiff stone faced giant stomping around.  Frankly the film seemed a little slow moving until the big battle at the end with the inevitable ending triumph.

 

What's good about this movie?  Well it looks cool with its blend of a mid 1960's look combined with some futuristic buildings.  The cast seems kind of game although in the back of my mind I couldn't help thinking that all of these rather mature adults dressed up as superheroes looked kind of silly.  I believe this film broke even financially but it's not the blockbuster success Disney and Marvel were apparently looking for. 

The film has four writers, Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer, a lot of writers is always a very bad sign.  The running time is 114 minutes

1993 - ROBOCOP 3, the "B" movie alive and well.

The third in the Robocop film series and also the last one until the remake in 2014. This movie was completely clobbered by the critics and the public stayed away when it was released.  But it seemed the critics completely missed the point.  This was a "B" science fiction/action film in the great tradition of Death Race 2000, Robot Jox and Ninja III: The Domination to point out a few of the many. 

Robocop 3 the movie has it all.  Scary street gangs, robot samurai warriors, a jet pack, a flamethrower arm, lots of explosions and much over the top violence.  Robocop 3 was directed by an expert in the genre, Fred Dekker.  Dekker was responsible for Night Of The Creeps, and The Monster Squad so he certainly knew how to mix violent nonsense with some goofy humor.  

 

I can't say it's a good film, but it is certainly an entertaining one.  Any movie that has a tech savvy orphan, a beautiful scientist and a monotone robot man can't be all bad.

 

The film was written by Fred Dekker and comic book writer Frank Miller, the running time is 104 minutes.

1973 - FANTASTIC PLANET, interesting, unusual science fiction film.

If you are looking for a fully fluidly animated feature film in the style of a Disney cartoon keep looking.  This is not a film that advanced the technique or art of animation.  However this is a fascinating science fiction film with a very interesting story.

On an earth like planet live two species.  The giant blue Drags who dominate a smaller humanoid species called the Oms.  The Drags treat the Oms as inferior pets at times almost like ants.  When one of the Oms escapes with a piece of Drag technology that educates individuals by directly transmitting information into their brains, the story becomes a metaphor for race relations as the Oms start to rebel.

 

The film has a unique look to it.  The animation may not be the pinnacle of full movement but the story and visual qualities of the film more than compensate for this lack of animation.  

 

The film was written by Rene Laloux and Roland Topor, the running time is 71 minutes.

1980 - THE DAY TIME ENDED, amateur hour science fiction tilm

Well here goes the plot.  A family living in some part of the American southwest desert gets trapped in some interstellar time and space warp.  That's about it for the plot of this low budget science fiction film.

The film is loaded up with has been and no name actors who I can at least say perform professionally.  Next to the decent looking special effects made on a tight budget it looks like the cast was the second biggest item in the film's budget because it sure the hell wasn't the story.

 

This film apparently employed a lot of special effects technicians who were underemployed or unemployed.  There are decent optical, stop motion special effects and old style matte paintings to give credit where it's due.  But overall the film has that look of an after school teacher assigned project.  You can thank the success of Star Wars for propagating stuff like this on the viewing public

There are amazingly enough three writers credited, Wayne Schmidt, J. Larry Carroll and David Schmoeller, the running time for a film without a story is 79 minutew.

2025 - THUNDERBOLTS, Marvel tries yet again

Marvel is still struggling to regain their superhero glory.  This story is the usual  group of super humans who don't particularly like each. They team up to defeat the evil Valentina Allegra de Fontaine who is trying to create a super being by experimenting on a sensitive guy named Bob.

 

There's lots of fighting particularly in the first half of the film.  It looks like Thunderbolts will be at the very least an entertaining action picture.  But with about an hour left in the run time, the film gets all soft and mushy as the team gets a conscience and tries to stop Bob who is now a full fledged powerful evil villain. There's  lots of hugging and talking about feelings in fact there is so much feel good stuff that after a while you wish people would start hitting each other again.

Really the only reason to watch this film is for the sly performance of Florence Plug as Yelena Belova who ends up being the leader of the new superhero group.  Pugh basically blows away nearly everyone in the cast even the blowhard character Red Guardian played by a very hammy David Harbour.  And who made the decision to cast one time Seinfeld cast member Julia Louis Dreyfuss as the evil Valentina?  I'm sure she's a fine performer but those years of playing Elaine Benes have seriously typecast her.  I expected to hear a laugh track whenever she spoke.

 In the early Marvel films they were able to mix action with humor.  Now it just seems like they can't get the mix right anymore.  In fact I would argue they are rehashing story points from early and better Marvel films. Thunderbolts  is mostly another sit in front of the TV with your computer and surf the internet movie.  A step up from the stupid Thor Love and Thunder and the horrible Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania but really not much of a step up I'm afraid. 

The film was written by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, the running time is an overlong 127 minutes.  They should have been able to knock this story out in 90 minutes.