Author: Michael W Jackson

1 (2009)

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 31 minutes, rated 6.0 by 519 cinematizens.  

Genre: Sy Fy (sorta); Species: phenomenology 

DNA: Magyar.

Verdict: intriguing.

Tagline: Why the pear? Good question, Einstein. 

Our story begins with a dowager purchasing a book which her obliging chauffeur will later read to her on this dark and rainy night. Bear that in mind.   

This emporium specialises in antiquarian and rare books wherein, as it is being closed, another customer appears from the interstices of the shelves.  Oh, well, a customer is a customer.  He asks for an odd and unusual book. To expedite matters at this witching hour, the proprietor takes this enigmatic individual to the back room to search for the tome, where they find that every book there has been replaced by large white book called 1 (perhaps from the white library at MONA). What’s more, when, in confusion, they return to the front of the shop 1 has also replaced every book there, too. The customer seems bemused by this substitution but the owner is enraged, blaming the faithful manager, the mute janitor, the customer, and Hillary. He demands Hunter’s lap top be seized.

The flying squad from the Reality Defence Institute arrives to check this anomaly in the space-time continuum, lead by a detective whose harrowed face makes Harry Dean Stanton look like a fresh-faced teen. Harrow chain smokes and yells at his subordinates because he suspects this affair is the work of the prodigious Pole Stanislav Lem!  Bingo! Juan Luis Borges has an alibi. 

1 is a summation of one single minute as experienced by all 5 billion humans, reduced to statistical data, e.g., in the global minute there were 37,000 electrocutions – several of which are shown, including one no man wants to see. There is data on the number of rapes, which we also glimpse.  And so on. 

The white book is part talisman and part samizdat.  It must be suppressed least its tabular data causes confusion and panic. Quite why incomprehensible spreadsheets would do that remains itself a mystery.  Soon the newshound are howling. Knowing nothing does not stop them from baying and braying. Hmm.

Soon 1 is everywhere. Journalists go ballistic, as usual. 

In an effort to contain the fallout, Harrow whisks all the witnesses away to seclusion in an insane asylum for psychological evaluation. (Catch the sledgehammer metaphor as it goes by.) Incarcerated, they deteriorate and sleep. The transformation of the proprietor, the manager, the janitor, and the customer is a tribute to the makeup and the actors. 

In sleep these confined witnesses communicate and plot.  Meanwhile, Harrow grows ever more erratic, and soon is replaced by an ambitious underling, and himself confined, as a witness, with the others and he, too, deteriorates, though further deterioration did not seem possible in his case, it occurs. Soon he joins the others in somnolent hijinks.   Yes, I thought of Sleep Dealer (2007) from Mexico, too.

Wait! Perhaps this all is the story the chauffeur is reading to madame. Life is but dream, right Neo?  

Like most, but not all, of Lem’s stories it is circular with neither development nor resolution.  All trip and no arrival but at least the trip is not Tarkovsky-length. Nor does it smack of the contempt for the audience that Tarko specialised in for it does try to explain itself but just does not do it very well.  

As with many films from the red and once-red world much of the incidental paraphernalia is in English as a visual disclaimer, e.g., the titles on the spines of the books, the posters on the wall in the asylum, the street signs to suggest this strange tale is Western, and in no way applies to or reflects on the Red, now Pink, World.  

Wellington Paranormal it is not. The gravitas is heavy. Very.    

For those who must know the only Hungarian I learned in our truncated stay in Budapest was goulash, although we did not eat any.  

Babicky dobíjejte presne! (Recharge Grandma on Time) (1984) 

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 41 minutes runtime, rated 5.7 by 129 cinematizens. 

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Czechoslovakia.

Verdict: [TBA]

Tagline: Be careful what you wish for.

Wife does everything with the home and two energetic sub-teenage children while Husband nurses his talent.  Moreover, she works all day in a pharmaceutical lab and earns more money than he does as a violinist in a radio orchestra. She is desperate for help at home and when the Joneses next door get a robotic grandma so they can party day and night, such is his hostility to the comfortably middle class Joneses that he agrees to buy a battery-powered grandmother to best them.

Wife goes shopping for a top of the line model so they can outdo the Joneses. A 50-page questionnaire has to be completed so that eGranny can be programmed before it is delivered.  ‘It will expand on that basic programming with experience,’ said the salesman. Because she does exacting work all day, completing the questionnaire defeats Wife and she goes to bed leaving husband to complete it alone.

While he wants to one-up the Joneses he does not take the task very seriously. Nor did he pay attention to her report on the sales representative’s explanation because he is a man and already knows everything. On the questionnaire he jots down answers more to amuse himself without thinking about it. 

Comes the great day and the ever-smiling Granny arrives, charges up, and goes to work. She takes over control of everything, and more. Because Husband has talent, as he said on the questionnaire, he must practice. Accordingly, Granny awakens him at 4 a.m. to exercise that talent on the fiddle.  

The eGranny imposes her will on the children to do and re-do their schoolwork to keep them quiet (for his practice).  She prepares one exotic meal after another, as per his request because the exhausted wife made the same thing basic dishes every night. Granny serves them hot curry, liquid something, spicy this and bitter that, and other unidentified things from the Middle East, Latin America, South Seas. She vacuums continuously.  

All that is bearable, just, but she also expresses his animosity for the Joneses and, by expansion, the Joneses’ granny-bot.  Soon the two granny-bots are at war, cutting clothes lines, jamming gates, and then murdering pets. They try to turn off the granny-bot but her emergency battery power kicks in and she recharges herself.  When they call the manufacturer they are told that everything the granny-bot has done is in the questionnaire. Oh. No refund.

The Joneses are also overwhelmed by their granny-bot, who has them out jogging at dawn, cleans the house until she wears out the vacuum, and insists that they have parties whether they want to or not. She is also aggressive to the other granny-bot. 

The two bots fight it out and destroy each other.  The end.  

 N.B. in this Czech film the husband’s mother, a real grandmother, is in the background but she seems to know how lazy and self-indulgent her son is, and steers clear of this debacle.  

In return for freedom from drudgery, higher status, and self-improvement one must surrender freedom to the Granny-state. The children find the granny-bot unpleasant. Her touch is hard and cold. She is forever harassing them with a pleasant smile and sweet voice. Is this metaphorical social commentary or what? 

This Czechoslovak film is absurd and satiric. There is a Ray Bradbury story called ‘The Electric Grandmother’ filmed in 1982 that is sappy. Did it inspire this movie? No soft focus here. It has some amusing moments but it is one idea stretched thin.  And it is downright unpleasant with the pet murders. The acting offers no compensation. 

No Czech words remain from my visit to Charles University. 

The Mysterious Wall (1968) (Tainstvennaya stena)

IMDb metadata is runtime of 1 hour and 19 minutes, rated 6.6 by 120 cinemaistas. 

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Red

Verdict:  Solaris before Solaris.  

Tagline: It’s a wall! It’s a cloud! It’s a dome! It’s a mystery!  

Opens with a vain TV host upstaging a panel of talking heads. So far so banal. The panelists don’t know anything but talk on.  So far so usual.  Could be on the ABC tonight, a poorly prepared journalist with a group of self-styled experts, a.k.a. public intellectuals, filling time. 

The subject is a mystery out there in the taiga, far, far away.  One of the scientist from the panel journeys there. Yep, he declares an hour later, it is a mystery. End.  Near Tunguska, you may ask? Dunno but that is implied.

The mystery is a wall in the title but not for the camera and in some of the subtitles (the only two words of Russian I mastered in our two weeks there were da and nyet) it is a cloud or mass of ground fog that in a blink appears, for a time, and then in another blink disappears right on schedule.

People who venture into the cloud get confused, have visions from their past that have been altered (I think).  The subtitles were hard to follow, the more so since I was doing a crossword puzzle at the time, and the video is very poor quality.  Even those near the wall get confused like this. Me, too.  In response the army has cordoned off the area in the tradition of science fiction movies, although the military presence seems to consist mostly one young officer.  

Through the haze of the film and the haphazard subtitles I never did quite follow the narration. There is a scientist on the scene with his wife, but since he is confused by the daydreams induced by the wall, he is supposed to be replaced by the scientist from the panel and return to Moscow for re-education in McKinsey managementese. However, he stays. Wall mystification is preferable to him, it seems, than another bout of McKinsey management.  Easy to sympathise with that.

The wall (or cloud, or fog, or sometimes dome) reappears like clockwork and covers several kilometres. Some suspect it is an alien intelligence trying to communicate with us and there are references to Mars and Martians strewn through the dialogue.  Finding intelligent humans is a long shot. Indeed it is pretty much all talk and no action and then it ends without exposition or resolution. 

See, just like Solaris.  

While the early scenes in a television studio would have been cheap to make, the later scenes in the snowfields would have been much more expensive, even if they were only a few miles from MosFilm HQ and not in the distant Siberian taiga. 

I always assume Soviet films had official approval, and so always wonder what the approving comrades thought they were getting and what they thought of what they got. Solaris, Stalker, and now The Wall, are each a case in point.   

Der schweigende Stern (1959) (The Silent Star)

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 19 minutes, rated 4.6 by 3000 cinemaistas.  

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: Mixed.

Tagline: Geriatrics in space.

It is a Soviet-Polish-East German co-production, known to American audiences as the First Spaceship on Venus. This latter knowledge is because Roger Corman bought the Western rights (cheap) and re-cut it into a Cormanite film with that title. I saw that a while ago and when I noticed this, seemingly original version on Kanopy I had a look. Yep it is the original with the actors speaking German and Russian.   

Liked the start with the long fall out Tunguska Event of June 1908. Unusual premise intrigues.

It has the standard tropes of the genre in that day: a square-jawed leader, a meteor storm, an Extra-Vehicular Activity episode, equipment failure, one woman in the crew.  Moreover it fits into a sub-genre that had been well mapped by then: the aliens destroyed themselves with nukes, see Rocket Ship XM (1950), This Island Earth (1955), Forbidden Planet (1956), and many others. But it lacks other tropes like giant spiders, hairy monsters, or any other creature in the feature. Moreover, these scientists seem interested in doing science, while in U.S. science fiction the astronauts, more often than not, found the whole thing boring and couldn’t wait to go home.  

No one smokes. Again in contrast to Anglo movies right to UFO.

There are several other important differences. In many American films featuring space flight in the 1950s there often was one woman in the crew. (Mike Pence always worried about that. See if you can figure out why) That, however, did not reflect any recognition of merit.  She was there almost invariably for the men to fight over, while they express repeatedly amazement that a woman could be a woman and a scientist at the same time, as though two beings occupied the same body. Admittedly, Italian science fiction movies set the international standard for this stupefaction. In this movie she just gets on with her job and the men leave her alone. Fact or fiction? Don’t these Reds have enough red corpuscles?

Moreover, in the Yankee spaceships there were only Yankees. In this Soviet movie and several others I have seen, the crew, as the viewer is repeatedly reminded, is visibly international.  Here we have a black African who navigates and hits Venus in the first try. An Indian mathematician who calculates his screen time. A Japanese who refers to Hiroshima four times, ahem, without naming the bastards who did it.  A Chinese who is a farmer at heart. A German engineer who puts everything back together.  And that square-jawed Russki who leads the pack in a most democratic way while extolling his love of peace. There is also a useless robotic contraption. This crew is so international it includes a Yankee! By contrast, if a Yankee science fiction film crew included a foreigner, you could be sure this foreigner was trouble, either by being a weak link or by being a commie in disguise.  

Moreover, while Yankee crews were invariably all white bread, this crew includes a black African who gets plenty of screen time.  Then there is the brown Indian and the yellow Chinese. Ecumenical or what?  But wait, there’s more.

The crew is also senior, and I mean senior. Hunched backs, shuffling steps, eye glasses, bald heads, and grey hair abound from geriatrics. They were recruited from superfluous retirees is my guess. Since most must be on the old age pension, they came cheap and expendable.

Harmony and goodwill rule among the crew, because at their age they have no energy to argue or to fight over that one woman. There is no tension on board, however, mercifully, they do not sing rousing songs, as I have heard in other Red science fiction. There is so much sweetness and light that it is enervating.

The pace accelerates once they get to Venus. The sets of the inky landscape are spectacular. No doubt that is why Corman bought the rights.  The glass forrest, the memory alpha, the ruined city, and the tar pit are all exceptional, even extraordinary. One reviewer said the Venus scenes were ‘awesome’ and that seems right, though the action is melodramatic, and hard to follow. It also violates one of the themes of the writer, the ubiquitous Pole Stanislav Lem. No spoiler on this one.  

Red science fiction movies of the Cold War concentrate on how hard, dangerous, complicated, and important spaceflight is. They tell the audience what it ought to know. By contrast, Yankees like Corman concentrate on thrills and spills for the Drive-In market, giving that segment of the market what it wanted (he hoped) for box office receipts. 

Why Venus is referred to in the title as a star is an open question.  That is one thing Corman got right in his re-edit.  Not something he made a habit of doing.

Zero City (Zerograd) 1989

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 43 minutes runtime rated 7.4 by 2,300 cinematizens

Genre: [Unknown]

Verdict: Nyet

Tag line:  oh hum

Engineer is sent from Moscow (not the one in Idaho) to Zerograd in the sticks to shape up a factory.  His first encounter there is with a briskly efficient receptionist who goes about business naked.  She types, telephones, and directs him to the CEO who is delighted to see someone from Head office. Unbeknownst to CEO the factory’s manager hasn’t come to work in eight months. That might explain the problem.

Engineer goes to dinner with the Marx Brothers. The food is so bad that the chef kills himself.  Did the engineer’s lack of appetite drive chef to take his own life?  Enter Franz Kafka, an honorary Marx.

By mistake engineer gets a guided tour of the local museum where history is what we say it is…today.  This goes on and on and ends with rock and roll. The gag is that the wax work figures are real people.  Get it?  (So what you may ask? Me too.)

Satire may be the intention but the result is boredom. It is as heavy handed as that which it mocks. Monty Python it is not. I gave up after an hour. A better person might get further. The best person would have been smart enough not to have ever started at all. When will I ever learn? No time soon.  

It is listed on some web sites as Sy Fy and that is why I went looking for it on You Tube.  That label is fake news.  Wacky would a more accurate designation.

Get this, per the IMDb, it was the Soviet Union’s official entry for the ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ at the 1990 Academy Awards (USA).  No wonder the Evil Empire fell.  

Kin-Dza-Dza! (1986).

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 2 hours and 15 minutes rated 7.9 by 13,000 members of the MosFilm web farm.  

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Turkmenistan. 

Verdict: [Fellinesque].

Tagline: ‘Koo,’ or is that ‘Ku.’

In the early evening of a mild winter’s day in Moscow Mrs Ivan sends hubby out to get some bread.  As he approaches the shopping centre he encounters a ragged, barefoot man, shifting from one foot to the other on the cold cement sidewalk, who claims to be an alien, talking to a feckless student with a violin case. The ostensible alien holds out a cigarette lighter which he says is his transporter. Ivan pokes it in derision only to find himself and Feckless now standing in a sea of sand that certainly is not the local Red Mini-mart in wintry Russia.Transported, indeed! Nice.

After that snappy start the descent thereafter is sharp and steep to incomprehensibility and indifference.

They encounter an Akim Tamiroff look-alike who says but ‘Koo.’  In time Ivan and Feckless work out some of the norms of this new planet of sand.  It is a rigid caste system for anthro students. All others may leave the room.

Even marooned on an unknown planet Ivan has unlimited supply of cigarettes to keep him puffing. Feckless has his fiddle, which he cannot play. [Made sense to someone, that did.] 

The IMDb User Reviews are ecstatic with their 10’s. How much did that cost the producers?  I got half way through the movie before I decided my toe nails needed trimming, a task requiring my full concentration.

Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (1979)

(Hukkunud Alpinisti’ hotell)

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 20 minutes, rated 6.6 by 1,500 cinematizens.

Genre: Mash-up of sy fy and krimi; Species: Estonian.  

Verdict: oddly intriguing 

Tagline: Big in Tallinn.

Ten little Reds are isolated by an avalanche that cuts off the mountain hotel, as the first guest gets murdered.  The copper who is spending the night there puts his square jaw to work.

The hotel has its exotic name from a previous avalanche that killed a skier. Subtle, not. More dead are on the way.   

The guests are the usual assortment at the castle of Otranto. A rock climber who climbs the hotel walls while boasting of his work on a top secret project. A vamp with a wig. An industrialist with a gut. A blow-in with bad hair.  A St Bernard dog that carries luggage. A recluse. A young couple, she with huge dark glasses at all times and he dead very soon.  She of the dark glasses finds the death of her paramour amusing and smokes dope to console herself. 

Are these people decadent westerners?  They must be since all the signs in the hotel are in French. I cannot take them as representatives of the Soviet Union in 1979, just before the Russian war in Afghanistan when the Cold War got hot again. There is a dance scene, or maybe it is group electro-convulsive shock therapy session that surely is western corruption. Further evidence of western decadence is that the note passed to the police officer is in French made up of letters and words cut from publications. That cutting and pasting would have taken hours.  Only a decadent western would have that much idle time.  Did the Swiss St Bernard dog do it? Hint – French is spoken in them there Alps. 

Spoiler alert!

It’s cryptic but I think it goes like this. Two aliens with two androids, all disguised as decadent westerners, are holed up in this remote hotel while their spaceship – built by the low bid contractor – gets repaired. They had earlier fallen among some criminals who have since pursued them for…? Stardust. So the aliens want to hide at this obscure Hôtel du Nord until the ETD to elude the crims.

The aliens were Gut man and She of the dark glasses. The droids were their respective paramours, wig woman and dead lad who is undead because it is hard to kill a droid. 

Cop does not believe any of this guff and calls in a helicopter gunship to blast them. They get blasted. The end. Maybe they were and may be they weren’t aliens. Either way they are dust now.  If only it had been that easy in Afghanistan. 

The film moves between brilliant white light of the snowfields to inky noir inside the hotel. The soundtrack is eerie, and the hotel itself is almost a character in its sharp angles and dead-ends.  The credits say it is an Estonian production filmed on location in Kazakhstan.  It is my second look at Kazakhstan in one week. 

What I found in the recesses of the web was an East German release.    

Infiniti (2022)

IMDb meta-data is 6 episodes of 52 minutes each, rated 6.8 by 403 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy, Species: Strange.

Verdict: I gave up

Tag Line: Shoot ‘em up!

The mystery was intriguing until I realised it was not going anywhere, and the mishmash descended into shoot ‘em with mysticism.  Remember the Blue Cowboy on the radio? No, well I do, so there.  

The Kazakhstan landscape was noteworthy but repeated so many times that I lost interest.  Likewise the Russian enclave(s) in the independent state of Kazakhstan were intriguing but just became an excuse for more mayhem and murder.  

Indeed much of the four or five episodes I watched seemed like an adolescent’s effort to shock with the carnage as the sympathetic characters were eliminated one after another. It reminded me of Vera where everyone is evil except herself.   

It was hard to follow because it obeys the law of the thriller and jumps back and forth in time to disguise the plot holes.  Continuity errors were more obvious as when the French astronaut on the run in high desert appears in a new and clean uniform from the Wardrobe Department.

Finally there is the mystical Zoroastrian soup which made even less sense than everything else.  

For those viewers who must have shoot ‘em carnage try the evening news.