Category: Film Review

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.  

U.F.O. The birth of S.H.A.D.O. (1970-1971)

26 episodes of 45 metric* minutes each, rated 7.9 by 3,690 televisualistas. 

Genre: Sy Fy; Subspecies: The Andersons. 

Verdict: ssslllooowww.

Tag line: ahead of and behind the times simultaneously. 

This is episode 1.

One-expression Ed convinces the world to fund S.H.A.D.O., well the Western European world. Though Russian food is labeled in one scene no reds were part of this stellar NATO.  Then there are the Arab, African, and Asian worlds more or less omitted.  Defending Earth is the white western man’s burden.

By the way, that is the Supreme Headquarters of the Alien Defence Organisation.

Instantaneous passage of ten years to or from (I forget which) 2056 and after an evident truce, it is now game on.

Neat idea to HQ it below a film studio that will explain the oddities. But we never see Stone-Faced Ed being his cover as movie mogul. Nor any movie sets used by the aliens to infiltrate humanity.

Neat idea that the aliens have come to harvest organ donors. Their brains got bigger than their other parts and they can no longer reproduce. Alan Jones often has said too much reading leads to impotence. Could he be one them! That would explain a lot.

That no relatives can ever know the truth of the incident from which their offspring disappeared. See organ donors above. 

No communication and no negotiation. Nor any effort at either.

The result is a humourless melodrama that is directed at a snail’s pace.

All the signatures of the Andersons are displayed. 

Actors whose cannot act like Ed Bishop and many others. Stuck among this dross is one superb actor who slums his way through, George Sewell, remember him from Special Branch, or Smiley’s People where he briefly stole the show from Alec Guinness.

In one scene stone-faced Ed berates a carefully selected, highly trained other rank for sticking chewing gum on a computer screen. The other rank hangs his head like an immature schoolboy. It’s a trifecta of bad writing, bad acting, and bad directing. 

The Andersons always thought, I have read, that the toy models and fashions were the stars. The actors were there to point to the models while wearing the clothes. They achieved their goals with the puppets in Thunderbirds. Wooden actors and plenty of toys.

In SHADO all the important stuff is on paper. Everyone smokes constantly even on Moonbase. Whiskey is free and on tap at the office, so none of the sots ever leave which helps security. 

Outlandish costumes in garish primary colours. For men style ranges from onesies with Nehru jackets to open weave mesh pullover shirts that reveal hairy chests.  For women it was aluminium foil micro skirts, oh, also those Moon-base purple wigs which are never explained, remarked, or otherwise integrated. Speaking of wigs, Ed’s decade transformation in one scene is by changing wigs from boyish blond curls to the ash grey of responsibility was cute and unconvincing.

Notably in one scene a man fetched coffee for a woman rather than the other way around. He was a West Indian and not a European so maybe it was colonial servility and not egalitarian courtesy in the dark ages of the 1970s. 

The camera is constantly on women from the back: up and down hips to heels, and from the front: up and down chest to head.  Sexism at its 1970s best. The fraternity brothers gave this show 10.0. There were no crotch shots of the men that I noticed, and I was looking! 

Model craft is an end in itself. In this case they are pretty good, though I can almost see the elfin Gerry Anderson pulling the invisible strings.  

Having watched with pleasure the French OVNI (UFO) a few months ago when this came up on You Tube, I watched it.  It is as bad as I remember it to be. Age has not improved this film.  

*As a meter is longer than an Anglo yard, so a metric minute is longer than an Anglo minute by 15 seconds with a total of 75 seconds in every minute. This fact can be verified at the World Institute of Time website. 

Abducted (2022)

IMDb runtime is 9 minutes and 34 seconds, rated 5.6 by 47 cinematizens.

Genre: Sly Sy Fy

Verdict: Atta Girl! 

The internet date turned sour, but, well, there is more to this than originally met the eye.  All those stories about disappearances gotta mean something, and they do.  

A masterclass in plot and character in less than 10 minutes with a big finish.

From DUST via You Tube.  

Expiration Date (2022)

IMDb is runtime of 6 minutes and 39 seconds with no ratings by anyone!

Genre: Sy Fy, Species: Comedy, Sub-species: realistic. 

Verdict: amen!

The merciless bounty hunter spots his quarry looming in the distance and raises his sonic blaster to ….  Good idea, cause its big and mean-looking brute.  Hunter checks the wind, sights the alien, looks over his weapon, and….

As he turns on his really big gun, a screen appears announcing that a software update is required before it can murder anything.  After many futile attempts to skip this update – Not Permitted! – delay it – Not Permitted! – reschedule it – Not Permitted! – the hunter sits down to wait for the update to download and install.  Since he is on a distant planet after an alien, it takes times. But when it is complete the update requires a patch!  Ugh!  

In desperation, using his interstellar phone, he calls the help number for crisis situations.  It rings the 800 times necessary and then a computer answers with a menu to direct the call about: planetary destruction, genocide, star demolition, personal weapons (for blaster press 4, for rifles press…) and then blasters (press 1 for disrupter, press 2 for neural,…. 5 for sonic).  Then he has to key in his user name and number.  Whoops only to discover his service contract for patch update care has lapsed and he is returned to the opening menu to renew his contact by keying in everything again with a Galactica credit card number of Google length, as the prey, now aware of his presence, targets him with a more primitive weapon. Poof! 

War of the Worlds (2019+)

IMDb is 24 episodes of 49 minutes, rated 6.4 by 15,000 cinematizens and counting. 

Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Yuk. 

H. G. Welles is at it again. This time it is played as a disaster movie with scattered survivors trying to keep alive, and over the very long and slow story arc they come together for better and for worse.  There are no Hollywood super heroes here. Nor is either Tom Midget or Tom Everywhere in it. That much is good. 

It starts off in the French alps near Grenoble and cross cuts to Lille and London. It is scenic and there is much outdoor travelogue. I liked those scenes in the woodlands on the slopes of the Alps. The dialogue is bilingual and the acting is superb. The UHD is crisp even in the motion shots with depth of focus.  In short, a first class international production. 

That is the molasses, now the vinegar.  The narrative is attenuated and repetitive, the latter being a function of the former over these episodes which amount to about 18 hours of screen time.  Every character goes through the same experience of fear, dislocation, primacy of family, and confusion.  The child is brought along only to be killed. Gratuitous. In the opening episode we get that played out six times.  If you watch the war news from the Ukraine every night, by the end of the week it no longer registers, does it.  Same here. 

Yes, the characters are varied, but their situations and reactions are not. And in the crisis, too few of them are focussed on the crisis, and more on the last argument a wife had with a husband, or long standing grievances that seem as important as the end of the world.  The crisis managers did not do their jobs.  Hobbes’s state of nature became instantly the state of me and mine period.  Yet when disaster struck the Ukraine many people stuck together and stayed on the job. Go figure. 

Although I did rather like the unintended irony in that after the invaders killed 90% of the population, the remainder set about killing each other in suspicion and fear.  That was Hobbes and the insanity of it seemed about right. The invaders were counting on not finding intelligent life on Earth and they were right. 

The dog, birds, cats survived. As I only made it to episode 4 that may or may not be significant.

There is far too much blood and guts as a substitute for a story, character development, or even a sense of place. We are spared nothing – mutilation, rape, infanticide, incest, score settling, cannibalism, and worse along with countless exploding heads (but not one of the elite troops in the Alps musses his hair do with a helmet).  And speaking of those troops at least they (mostly) stay on the job.  

I quit after four bloodbaths. If I wanted to watch senseless slaughter I could watch the evening news on television.

Of course the invaders intel before the invasion was none too great either, as readers of Wells’s novella will remember.  Maybe they should have watched the news. 

Although it cannot compete with the production or the acting, I prefer The Great Martian War 1913-1917 (2013), but it is hard to find. It is inventive. Or even the 1953 Cold War version when the common cold saved the world when rockets couldn’t.   

The End of Eternity (1987)

Konets vechnosti

IMDb runtime of 2 hours and 17 minutes, rated 6.0 by 242 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Red; Sub-species: Asimov. 

Verdict: Excellent!

Harlan works at the AllWhen Council with the Eternals who regulate TIME to ensure smooth sailing from Past to Future to Past again for the Timers who live and die there.  Dr Who is a stringer for this organisation. 

Viewers gradually piece this puzzle together because there is no numbing exposition at the beginning.  Hurrah!  It just goes…..  

Harlan is so inexperienced, so cloistered, so innocent, so naive that of course he thinks he knows everything until Woman. The first one he sees drains all the blood from his head and sends him over the edge. Adam when he saw Eve was sober and restrained compared to Harlan whose drool is embarrassing. She is a Timer who somehow works for the Council, too, and together….they do what men and women have done since time began.  This is strictly forbidden twice over, once because Eternals cannot do this period, and they certainly cannot do this with a Timer. I heard an echo of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four here about waist down rebellion. 

It was made in the USSR in 1987. Yet much of it seems criticism of a regimented society so dedicated to good that it makes things bad in its clumsy efforts.  The AllWhen Council parallels, it would seem, the Politburo, removed from reality, devoid of empathy or sympathy, and in reality dedicated more to preserving itself than doing any good. In the Council zone, which looks like a giant factory, there are black-uniformed police frowning every hundred meters. Informers work among the time-tinkering Technicians to be sure discipline remains perfect. Creativity is stamped out as dangerous. Iron discipline, sacrifice for the greater good, and pitiless discipline are the watchwords of the Eternals.  The only thing lacking is an external enemy in the evil capitalist west.   

The Eternals are just that and so have an eternity of committee meetings, budget reports, and cantankerous colleagues with which to contend.  One of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, perhaps Green Mars, is really good on this trade-off, more and more life….with more and more meetings with the same irritating people doing that same damn dumb things for centuries. 

What follows is part mystery and part science fiction as the coupling couple takes flight and discover the corruption endemic in the all-powerful and unaccountable AllWhen Council, read Politburo. For those that want the Cliff’s Notes version, eternity ended for Harlan when he fell in lust. In that emotional state he could not longer be an eternal – cold, detached, judicious, uninvolved, disinterested – and all those qualities of a Platonic philosopher-monarch. Although it might be remarked that Dr Who seldom manifested these qualities.  

In the film three distinct periods are presented, first, is the timeless AllWhen Council zone, then the 48th Century where music emanates from wine in glasses, and the Twentieth Century. Each was done very effectively even if the sets are small and repetitive.  What matters is that they are distinctive and resonate of what they are supposed to be.  There is no big budget in sight. Better, no Anderson fashions or toys.

This film is on You Tube in poor quality video (in two parts) and I cannot find it anywhere else.  Perhaps because of the rush of history in 1989 this movie may never have been shown at the Moscow Film Fesitval, or the one in East Berlin, and so was not seen by Western producers looking for cheap fodder, because this would surely have been snapped up. Maybe glasnost killed it. Irony check.  

There is also an earlier Hungarian version on You Tube but it does not have subtitles and our three days in Budapest a few years ago did not leave any Magyar behind.   

The film derives from, but doubtless paid no royalties for, the eponymous 1955 novel by Isaac Asimov.  While I have read many of his works since a teenager, this title was unknown so I did what we evil western capitalist do and went shopping.  Lo, I could not find it for the Kindle and I tried, believe me.  Yes, I know it listed as Kindle on the Amazon US web site but with a sidebar that says Unavailable. Very few of his titles are available for Kindle.  Odd that for future man to find his books in the past format alone.  

In the end I gave up.