Category: Film Review

Out There (1995)

IMDB meta-data is runtime of 1h and 38m, rated 5.3 by 537 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: USA.

Verdict: Trailer trash prevails.

Tagline: The truth is out there. 

One-hit wonder photographer collects old cameras and occasionally they have film in them, which he develops, invariably family snaps.  After a particularly bad day, for diversion he buys a Box Brownie from a yard sale, a camera of no interest but a salve to his bruised ego on the day, and, yes, it has film in it, and, yes, he develops it, and…..these are not family snaps.  

The Brownie film, conveniently dated to August 1969, shows, yep, an alien abduction of two good ole boys who were out deer hunting in the primeval forest dark and deep. Conscientiously, the snapper tries to interest the Air Force in investigating, but Project Blue Book, which was never a book and not blue, has been closed.  No budget for checking every cockeyed hysterical claim. Then he tries selling them to a news agency executive who laughs them off as fakes.  

Fakes they may be but strange things start happening around him, and off he goes with the now grown-up daughter of one of the supposed abductees who never did return home.  The plot is a Möbius strip that keeps returning to the point of origin, until…!  

There are many smiles and few laughs along the way, and some star turns by some stars, including a caricature of Jean-Paul Sartre, and Tiffany Case. (See the full cast list.)  

Unpretentious, unassuming, diverting, and sharp with an appealing cast and some complicated plotting.  Moreover, it has a nice story about — believe it or not, Ripley! — Richard Nixon. 

Pedants corner: yes, I know why it was called blue.  Do you?

Cast a Deadly Spell (1991).

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 36m, rated 6.4 by 4,900 cinematizens.

Genre: Noir plus.

DNA: Hollywood and Vine.

Verdict: I ate it with a spoon!

Tagline: It’s magic!

LA 1948 where the latest trend, everyone is doing it, is magic.  That is MAGIC. It’s the newest technology of the day activated by a snap of the fingers or an incantation. Most of it, most of the time is white magic, little conveniences, but where there is white…there is also black. Very.

Gumshoe Gus Grissom is on the case, using the nom de noir Phil Lovecraft.  And what a case it is, the recovery of an overdue book purloined from Croesus.  Phil may not be sharpest number in the phone book, but he is clean and honest.  

Clean? He doesn’t use magic! That puts him in the same minority today that eschews mobile phones and scanners: as they are technophobes so he is a magicophobe.  That makes him the right man to recover this book of the dark arts, because he won’t be tempted to use it.

Off he goes with his $40 a day and gas money, encountering a unicorn and, even more rare in Hollywood, a virgin.  Everyone is up to no good apart from his landlady Hippolyte Kropotkin.  That name, like many others draws on the Mythos of H P Lovecraft for the cognoscenti.  

The screenplay has gaps but the direction is confident and brisk to keep things moving, and move they do.  Part tribute like Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and part pastiche like Chinatown, and wholly original.  Recommended to all Noiristas. 

Pedant’s corner: yes, yes I know about Prince Kropotkin. I read his book Mutual Aid. Bet you haven’t.

The Man from the Future (2011) O Homen do Futuro

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1h and 46m, rated 7.0 by 7,100 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: Brazil.

Verdict: Tiremos o chapéu! 

Tagline: Zero is something!  

Fired by idealism Zero sets out to invent a cheap and green energy source only to create by accident a time machine. With it he decides to go back and correct his life for the better.  

If only he knew what ‘better’ was.

In so doing he obeys the law of unintended consequences the first time. So he tries again…with even worse results. Then he remembers that old Doris Day song, ‘Que sera, sera.’ 

The journeys to and from the past are full of twists and turns, played with high energy. The acting from the two principals is superb. He is barely recognisable from one iteration to the next, and likewise his lady love (who does a star-turn as a hardened convict).  

***

The film is set in a pristine, ultra-moderne Brazil that has touches of Brasilia, but it is not expressly so situated, well, at least not to my ears and eyes.  We watched a Wondrium documentary a few weeks ago about Brasilia so that makes me an expert!

I would be glad to find more genre films from Brazil. I used an episode from City of God (2002) to illustrate Thomas Hobbes on the state of nature a long ago.  

Punch the Clock (2016) A Repartição do Tiempo 

IMDb meta-data is 1h and 40m, rated 6.0 by 140 cinematizens. 

DNA: Brazil.

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: McKinsey management par excellence.

Tagline: Suspicions confirmed!

The central patent office in Brasilia is a national disgrace. The work routine is so slow that it takes more than eight years to approve a fully documented simple submission. Its staff members draw comics, smoke dope, sleep off last night’s drunk, fornicate, watching telenovelas, flip through an enormous pile of glossy magazines, use the office phones for personal long distance calls, anything but work.

The result is a mountainous backlog. Meh. 

Then the media attacks and it is time for desperate measures. The manager feels the political heat to do something. Consulting his McKinsey manual, his first thought is to redo the façade of the building to deflect attention, but turns out that is the wrong move.  Then thanks to an invention that looks like a punch clock for employees buried deep in the basement awaiting patent approval is a device that clones individuals.  

Aha! Fresh from a McKinsey seminar, manager has a brilliant idea.  He will trap his staff members in the hidden bomb shelter below the building and enslave them to work, while populating the office with clones who can continue to do nothing.  The slaves below have to work to get food and water. In the bomb shelter one of the employee suffers a terminal allergic reaction from exposure to work for the first time.   

Those imprisoned try to escape. The upstairs clones slowly realise something is amiss when work gets done. 

***

It is a merciless critique of rule-bound bureaucracy that emphases everything but getting the job done. The desperate phone call to emergency services is a cackle, but too convoluted for summary.  The gist of it is no matter what is said, the response is that it is someone else’s responsibility.  Call another number. (The joke is that the same operator answers all the numbers in the run-around.)

This also applied to the Mutt and Jeff police officers who eventually arrive and interview the informant, not about the crime, but about the definition of the situation to see if it is really their responsibility.  The arguments about definitions reminded me of too many seminars where we never got to the point.   

The machine is referred to as a time machine but it is easier to explain with cloning.  

Signale – Ein Weltraumabenteuer (1970)

IMDb meta-data is 1h and 30m, rated 4.4/10 by 240 generous cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: East Germany and Poland.

Tagline: Bland on bland.  

Verdict: Painful. 

In the middle of the Twenty-first Century a Red spaceship near Jupiter reports…alien radio contact, maybe, but then it goes dark.  Another craft is dispatched with a hastily assembled crew to investigate.  

That may sound promising.

What follows is…a slow, meandering trip without any sense of urgency as when the crew of the rescue vessel plays with a robot or makes home movies for fun.  

Didn’t they read the script?

As the end of runtime draws near, they find the mangled remains of the first ship which was hit by the screenwriters old friend, the meteor shower, and rescue the crew who emerge from an elevator where they were stuck for just over an hour. None is comatose. None is mangled.  None is on a stretcher.  None is swathed in bandages. None has blast burns or collapsed lungs. None is dead, Jim.

The end.

There is no further mention of the alien contact.

***

Iron Curtain Sy Fy was always more cerebral and scientific, to be sure, than the Western counterpart of space cowboys but it was also usually more credible than this pleasure cruise. It does show its Red credentials in that everything is a team effort, from the very large group of survivors to the rescue ship. No impetuous individuals of the James Kirk ilk are to be found.

However – and this is a unique event – the captain of the rescue ship faints from the pressure of his duties. Yep. What is even more impossible to believe is that when he reappears on the bridge everyone obeys him, instead of pointing and laughing at him.   

Can you picture Captain Kirk swooning from his weighty duties?  Go on, just try.

Fortunately, when this captain swoons, everyone else just carries on, almost as if he were irrelevant.

Speaking of Star Trek, there is also an anticipation of Counsellor Troi here in that the medical doctor also monitors the mental health of the crew, but then doctors have always done that. Check out the Caine Mutiny. 

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018).

IMDb metadata is 2h and 12m, rated 6.3 by 22,000 cinematizens.

DNA: Spain via UK.

Genre: Serio-comedy.

Verdict: Dreamy.  

Tagline: The Life of Brian Quixote.  

In the interest of making a film, a director convinces a shoemaker that he is Don Quixote!  To some degree he also convinces other amateur actors in the village where he shoots the film that they are the characters they portray.  When the film is done he leaves.

By coincidence returning ten years later he finds, during his absence, that the illusion has become reality or is it a fantasy, that he gets caught up in.  Adventures follow.

***

I found it diverting, amusing, entertaining, touching, and puzzling, but many IMDbasers went nuclear on it, evidently because it is not the movie they would have made, if they had made a movie. Uh huh. Ditto some professional reviewers.  It’s a love child of Terry Gilliam, hence the tagline above.  

The village is ‘Los sueños’ and that says it all: The Dreams.  I also found it far too long. Still it offers in addition to the list above a spectacle, with surprises along the way.  

I read an abridgement of the first volume of Don Quixote in a Euro Lit class as an undergraduate and I have never been tempted to return to it. While I enjoyed this outing, I remain content with that situation.  

Gosto iz galaksije (1982) Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy

IMDb meta-data is 1h and 22m runtime, rated 5.9 by 555 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: Croatia.

Tagline: Watch out for Mumu!

Verdict: Mixed messages. 

Hotel reception desk clerk by night, and aspiring science fiction writer by day, Hero gets into the mood by donning a pretend space helmet while pounding the typewriter or dictating into a walkman (remember that?).  His obsession with the story he is trying to compose and the helmet annoy his girlfriend no end, and she enlists his mother to talk some sense into him; to no avail.

After a row with those two he sulks around the apartment, when….a voice from the walkman calls to him. It is Andra, the protagonist of his story, who says she is on the island just off the coast! Zounds!Off he goes to find the characters from his story have come alive from his brow and are impatient for him to finish the story.  Oh, and they also brought along Mumu. Not good. 

***

This sounds kinda like fun but the message is mixed.  There is shoot  ‘em up with corpses, enough nudity to give Mike Pence apoplexy, and dead-end subplots.  Still the direction is brisk and there are sight-gags along the way, and some spicy sarcasm, as when Hero warns the aliens not to show themselves because the townspeople would tear them apart for souvenirs.  

A writer becomes so obsessed with his characters that they blot out the reality and people around is a theme in films, like Les Créatures (1966) and Le Magnifique (1973). 

This film was produced in 1981 by two countries which no longer exist, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in Dubrovnik, hence Croatian.  

Aliens & GUFORS (2017)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 29m, rated 5.8 by 113 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: Yankee.

Verdict: Goofy fun. 

Tagline: Follow your dream (over the cliff).

A twenty-something computer whiz, a physics major, and an MBA team up to run a business: Global Unidentified Flying Object Research and Services in Flat Rock on the Mojave desert of the USA.  They soon become a magnet for all manner of nut cases and comic relief for the townsfolk. 

Japanese lanterns, balloons, mirror reflections, cloud, and vapour, all are dutifully examined, while the testimony of a string of people who have sighted aliens, swapped recipes with them, been abducted and rejected, parade before their video camera.  

Misadventures follow as they try to deal with a vexatious landlord, romance some local girls, deal with smog-mouth (figure it out), puzzle over the string of code that appears on the computer attached to their satellite dish.  Oh, and watch the sky day-and-night.

***

I found it diverting with likeable players, and some fine moments, e.g., when Bo talks about the telephone call that was never made.  

 A Gen-X version of OVNI(s) from France, reviewed elsewhere on this blog.