Category: Film Review

Incident at Raven’s Gate (1988) aka Encounter at Raven’s Gate

IMDb runtime of 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated 5.4 by 568 cinematizens. 

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Alien incursion.

DNA: Strine. 

Verdict: Dark, very.  

Tagline: ‘It’s for you!’

In the trackless Outback (near Broken Hill whose energetic Tourist Board attracts film crews like flies) is a variant of Cain and Abel, two brothers, one wife.  The older married brother is determined to farm the sand, while his younger brother plows here and there.

Since Younger did time in the Big Smoke, the local copper pins every crime and misdemeanour on him, but mainly stealing the town football trophy (that is Australian Rules football to you, Mate!).

This copper is nuts, by the way, and obsesses over Verdi operas day and night, when everyone knows Puccini’s music is better.  

Assorted incomprehensible events occur that no one pays much attention to.  Birds fall dead from the sky.  A smouldering crop circle is cut into the desert flora and it seemed electrically charged. A house with an older couple in it implodes, killing them, and leaving behind… Yep, that’s right, the football trophy, which is found by another cop who is hard of hearing, and slow of thinking.  

It opens at the Parks Radio Observatory tracking something entering the atmosphere and a scientist is sent to find the remnants.  He is a midget and doubles as an ASIO agent (see Australiens for details of ASIO agents) wearing a tan, double-knit polyester safari suit.  

The loco local cop harasses a bar maid despite her repeated efforts to brush him off.  She dies at his hands. No one investigates. 

Water seems to be disappearing from tanks but no one is interested enough to investigate.  

The midget kills the hearing impaired cop, and no one seems much bothered. 

The married brother goes nuts, spouting Sunday school phrases.  His wife shoots him – dead.  No one seems much bothered.  

One of the two destroyed houses is rebuilt (and off camera I guess the five or was it six bodies are buried).  

We are left none the wiser.  By the way, this is an Australian outback devoid of aboriginals.  

The telling is thriller style, that is, disjointed and confusing to cover plot holes and the lack of character establishment or development.

A critic — me — summed it up thusly, turgid, baffling, inexplicable, uneventful, and incomprehensible. Moreover, the lens cap was on the camera for much of the run time, offering muddy, unintelligible, obscure images of murk, darkness, inky blackness, and less.

The one man seems to have done everything from producing, directing, writing, camera work, and catering.  No second opinion evidently was heard or heeded.  

Still it made me appreciate better some of the other turkeys I have seen because I could at least see them.  

Dans une galaxie prés de chez vous (2004)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 49 minutes runtime rated 6.9 by 1,200 cinematizens 

Genre:  Sy Fy; Species: Quest

DNA: Québécois

Verdict: Tabernac!  

Tagline:  Questions? Action!

Reader Advisory:  A longtime Radio Canada television parody of Star Trek–Red Dwarf spawned this ….misbegotten specimen. The 23-minute episodes are hard enough to watch but this prolongation is cruel and unusual. However, on with the show….

A group of misfits is the only hope for humanity! 

This Frat House in space is led by the dim but decisive Captain who, with budget constraints, has made his own mechanical man with a very long extension cord for away missions. There are two women who do not scream. Iago is the science officer busy undermining the Captain.  Don’t forget Bob who is not easy to forget, but it happens avec ou sans cheveux.  Then there is Serge 6; don’t ask about Serges 1-5.

Their mission is to find a new planet for humanity to occupy since Earth is used up. The spaceship looks like the tuna fish tins that it is made from. To land on prospective planets they fax themselves down, and a scanner malfunction got Serge – see above. 

There are many references to ice hockey in the terminology, especially the glory days of Gentleman Jean Beliveau and Blond Demon Guy LaFleur. The gear worn by the crew look like the hockey uniforms of Les Canadiens.

It is also replete with Québécois slang that the A.I. subtitler could not fathom, rendering much of the dialogue even more nonsensical than it is, and it is nonsensical to begin with. One example is ‘tatas,’ an idiom that means ‘idiots,’ but which the subtitles render as ‘goodbyes.’  And yes, ‘tata’ for idiot is a reference to English-speakers who say ‘Ta ta’ for goodbye. The humour is parochial and adolescent compounded by the subtitles.

Still the players and director inject plenty of energy into the proceedings. There is also some considerable humour as when the crew, off in deep space, discover….where all the stray socks from the wash have gone over the millennia. Truly an awe-inspiring moment!  The rival captain who appears late in the piece with his can opener is none too subtlety portrayed as an Anglo.  

In case of any uncertainty the maple leaf flag is everywhere, including underwear.  

It was so big in Montréal that a sequel was made called Dans une galaxy près de chez vous 2 (2008). The title indicates the anticipated audience would grasp that 2 follows 1, but nothing more complicated than that. There were rumours in 2019 of a ‘3.’  Tabernac, indeed! [Look it up.]  

Im Staub der Sterne (In the Dust of the Stars) (1976) 

IMDb meta-data is 1 for and 35 minutes runtime rated 5.4 by 399 cinematizens.  

Genre: Sy Fy

DNA: Romania, Rumania, or Roumania 

Verdict: Huh

Tagline: Did someone say Gulag?

It starts on the flight deck of a spaceship with no credits or preliminaries.  After that fast start everything slows down.  

The crew of four women and two men is commanded by one of the women who reminds them of the importance of their mission to save a planet from….?  They don’t know what just yet but these six are planet savers – ah huh, in their baby blue onesies.  

The women are young while the two men are not. One has gone pear-shaped and the other squints as he brushes his grey hair out of his eyes.  These six are from the planet Cynro. Does that make them Cynrovians? Cynroese? … [I could go on…] They are bound for Tem-4. Evidently it usually only takes six Cynros to save a planet.  

There is nothing to see when they arrive for the Tem-4s live underground.  However Pocahontas drives up in a Legomobile  to welcome them. Off they go to a reception where they learn their six year trip was for naught.  The distress call was a mere test of a now obsolete radio system.  Oh. Well time to go then.  But no, before departure, they attend – in matching latex outfits – a frat party to end frat parties.  

What follows is some repressed Romanian script-writer’s idea of a debauched western LSD party.  It goes on and on, and then on. The Fraternity Brothers found it tame compared to Greek Row on homecoming Saturday night.  

Meanwhile the Host is revealed to be (1) up to no good and (2) receiving orders over the earbud from Boss. The purpose of the party is to ensure that no more Cynroses come a-calling so they are drugged to forget everything except the need for colour coordination in clothing.  

We meet the Boss having his sparse hair done. He is that script-writer’s idea of a homosexual without being too explicit.  He is a little round guy who commands – well, it is fiction – the whole show.  His thugs sport Roman tunics and have bulging muscles for women to ogle.    

Being slow-witted enough to be U.N. Peacekeepers, the Cynrovians have at last figured out something is amiss.  Instead of barking orders the Commander listens to what the others say, including Mr Suspicion who has been off on his own going where he was not supposed to go and seeing what he was not supposed to see. Gulp! 

What he saw was a cast of scores of Romanian extras practicing for the Gulag by breaking rocks while being beaten by Nicolae Ceausescu. (See The Mole People [1956] for details.) By now the six Cynroites have read the script and realise that Host and Boss and their associates are from Tem-3 and have conquered Tem-4, enslaving the population to mine minerals to dye the Boss’s hair, or something.  Should they intervene or just leave? Tough one. Crisis of conscience renders them numb. Me, too, by this time.  

I voted for leaving, but they stayed when Host tried to sabotage their rocket, a low-budget shoot out of sorts follows.  Boss is done for.  

After explaining Bucharest fashions to the slaves, the Cynroists blast off.  

Yes, it is silly.  But it is also noteworthy for its omissions: there is no mention of Earth or Earthlings in a universe of humanoids irritating each others, nor are there any ray guns, nor hairy spiders, not a single scream from one of the women. It is notable for a lot of scantly clad women on Tem-4, for those matching onesies (inspired by ABBA?) worn by the crew, for a couple of crises of conscience. 

No Yankee crew ever worried about blasting some strangers with a ray gun after stomping on a hairy spider or two while the damsels shrieked. 

It is most notable of all for a female commander comrade in 1976 who does the job without either hysterics or histrionics!

The Fraternity Brothers kept rewinding to the scantily clad Romanians. I wondered about the slaps.

It is a pan red production spoken in German but with Czech, Serbian, Rumanian, East German, Polish cast and crew. For once Stanislaw Lem did not write the novel, screenplay, or lunch menu.  

Australiens (2014)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 48 minutes runtime rated 5.9 by too few cinematizens 

Genre; Sy Fy; Species: Alien invasion.

DNA: Strine. 

Verdict: More!

Tagline: Banana benders unite.

Brizzy and then all of Third-World Australia (except Tasmania) comes under an alien attack. The rest of the world including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, sits back to watch.  

Strine, yer on yer own! (Except for Tasmania.)

But it’s personal for the lead howler of the pub band Titanium Turtles (occasionally, Turdles) and she fights back, screeching at the alien scum!

High energy! Breakneck pace! Laugh a vulgar minute! Part parody, part tribute, all fun. It’s lean and mean compared to the ponderous and pompous Blade Runner franchise. It is adolescent in its humour, lacking the subtle sophistication of Kath and Kim. What’s not to like. Note to self: Do not ride a bike during an Alien apocalypse, not even at the gym. 

Also 20+ minutes too long in an endless end to accomodate the crowd funders.

A labour of love made on a shoestring, I ate it up with a spoon. If it had a commercial release I missed it. More’s the pity.

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.