Some time during my You Tube browsing, lately after three hours of physiotherapy, I came across DUST, a You Tube channel. Recommended. It features science fiction short films from five minutes to twenty-five minutes or so. Some are quite good, but not all.
The good ones have a story to tell and use some of the conventions of SciFi to do so. Some of the stories are imaginative, though not all. In the imaginative ones the SciFi element is central to the situation, the conflict, the paradox, …whatever.
I have scanned a lot of them, sometimes with the mute on without keeping track of the titles. But some of the good ones were these.
One concerned Nikolas Tesla’s discovery of time travel in nine minutes. Very amusing with the punch line at the very end. There are many films on DUST with Tesla so it will be hard to find. Found it : Room 88.
A second concerned an interminable traffic jam which executes population reduction without discrimination by random harvesting of motorists. Think of the Spit Bridge without warning raising at random times and all the cars and occupants on it are vaporised and you have it. This one I think was Danish. The Bridge?
Third, while most of the shorts are serious, some dead serious, and others worse, I came across one that was humorous, Alientologists. with tap dancing blue aliens. Great fun.
Four, Hashtag about the ephemeral nature of celebrity on social media. This one cuts to the bone.
Finally one concerned two astronauts exploring a dead world only to find skulls. Slowly we come to realise this desolate planet is in fact the Earth and the astronauts, despite the biped appearance and easy banter, are not human. The title is Unearthed.
All of these and many others are far superior to the overblown, CGI trash, incomprehensible, deafening, and pretentious marathons that come from Hollywood starring the same handful of actors. Yes, I am thinking of Christopher Nolan’s oeuvre. Among others.
Most of the dozens of shorts I have scanned lack a story. Many are shoot-em ups of one kind or another, and others are just talk, talk, talk, and more talk. They have the cinematography and the CGI down pat, but they have nothing to communicate except to display the technical ability of the producer. Perhaps they are film school projects. In any event, they are all form and no content, leaving it to viewers to interpret. Beyond the gates of film schools most viewers want the film to do the work of imagination.
Length is irrelevant some of the five minute ones have a story and some of the twenty-five minutes do not. Then there are the two and half hour flightless turkeys from Hollywood. More is no indicator of better.
DUST has an extensive web site for those interested.
IDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 44 minutes rated 7.0 by 8882.
Genre: Pastiche.
Verdict: Whoosh!
Fantômas is a supervillain with a vast criminal organisation headquartered in an underground lair equipped with all mod villainy cons of 1964: intercoms, sliding doors, closed circuit TV, ear-popping elevators, hot and cold-running thugs, a dungeon, and the mandatory femme fatale. He only leaves home to pull off spectacular heists. Oh, he is also a man of a thousand faces, but when relaxing at home torturing victims he looks like a bald, blue alien. That look is never explained.
Fantômas is very concerned about his public image and beats up a journalist whose reports on his doings have been disrespectful. Ouch. He doubles down on Journalist by kidnapping his girlfriend and committing an audacious crime disguised as Journalist. Energetic Inspector Clouseau puts un et une together and pursues Journalist because he IS Fantômas. The last hour is all chase.
In the end Journalist is exonerated and girlfriend rescued, but Fantômas gets away. In an explicit parody of the last scene in Dr No (1962) Journalist and Inspector are floating away in a rubber raft bickering with each other.
Jean Marais stars as both Journalist and beneath the make-up Fantômas. By train, motorbike, helicopter, automobile, submarine, speed boat he pursues himself who is always one step ahead of him. Is this post-modern or what?
The End.
It is high octane and totally silly as they zoom around Paris, the Ile France, and the Med. The humour is broader than in Dr No and the pace is faster.
I also watched Fantômas Unleashed (1965) and Fantômas against Scotland Yard (1967). More slapstick, more chase, and ever more make-up.
Prior to World War I two journalists, Marcel Alain and Pierre Souvestre, cranked out thirty-two books featuring the ruthless, murderous, diabolical arch-villain Fantômas. They were snapped up by the nascent film industry and rendered as Gothic horror films wherein Fantômas was portrayed as a shadowy figure with arms stretched overhead about to swoop on a victim. Both the books and the films were very popular. They are much darker and more macabre than these 1960s films.
Marais was a writer, sculptor, stuntman, and actor who was Beast in Jean Cocteau’s ethereal Beauty and the Beast (1946). He is completely without ego in his willingness to act in concealing make-up as Beast or Fantômas. No Hollywood A-lister would have done that.
IMDb meta-data is ten episodes of 50 minutes each, rated 7.9 by 229 viewers.
Genre: Documentary.
Verdict: Addictive.
Architectural historian Dan Cruickshank set off on a five-month journey around the world to bring to viewers’ attention eighty treasures that define epochs, cultures, and civilisations. Singularly and collectively they represent instances of the highest achievements of our species. The itinerary went through thirty-four countries on all of the inhabited continents, considering about 400 objects for inclusion in the top 80. They ranged from massive buildings to vast irrigation schemes to buildings to intricate carved miniatures to manufactured goods to symbolic gestures to practical engineering.
The choices are in some cases, obvious, like the Taj Mahal, and others at the end of a long bow, like the Colt-45. But each of the candidates is interesting and the research, explanation, photography, and travelogue to put them into context are engrossing. There is no doubt that each of the candidates are themselves treasures, but, perhaps as a boy, inspired by Jules Verne, Cruickshank limited himself to eighty. The time constraints, the budget constraints, viewers’ attention spans, the limitation to eighty, combine to produce focus and discipline.
Other among the eighty are the Incan Salt Pans, Nazca Lines, Monticello, St James Church, Kakadu Rock Art, Ankor Wat, samurai sword, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, Giant Buddha, Jantar Mantar Observatory, Lalibela, Samarkand tiles, Petra, Dogon Mask, Tuankhamun’s death mask, Hagia Sophia, VW Beetle, Guernica, and more. As the list indicates, many are religious in one way or another. The Wikipedia entry lists them, and the DVDs are still available.
At fifty-six years of age, Cruikshank is intrepid, abseiling up rock faces, descending in a crouch for hundreds of meters down damp, slippery, and poorly lite shafts, ascending rocky scree for hundreds of metres in the Sahara heat to reach a treasure. Of course the unseen and unacknowledged camera operator and sound engineer always go first. Always Dan has a notebook in hand to record the details, always sports a neck bandana, and always whispers.
Like many others I find the whispering annoying when it is not done out of consideration of the environment. To whisper while observing a religious ritual is appropriate, but not when standing in an isolated locale talking about rock art. But whisper often he does, reminding me an Australian celebrity academic who always whispered, a technique to make the audience to lean forward and listen to his priceless banalities. I had the misfortune a few times to share a conference panel with this poseur.
At times, Cruikshank seems to go off script with visits to local bazaars and haggling over the price of hat or a meal. More exposition of the candidates and less beating down the locals in price would have been better.
We watched these in 2009 and reviewed them again recently.
The pompous, opinionated, and ignorant troll criticisms on IMDb attack his clothes, his accent, his inflection, his explanations, his choices, his hat, the bandana, the whole project and in some cases all of the above and more. Armchair trolls indeed.
IMDB meta-data is 13 episodes of 30 minutes, rated 6.5 by 163 cinematizens.
Genre: SyFy.
Verdict: A winner (see the last paragraph below before ordering).
Thanks to the physics of script writing a distant planet shifts into the solar system. Astronomers notice this aberration and squint into lens. This planet is Medusa which is ruled by women who regard men as noisome necessities to kept in their places as stronger and bigger but less intelligent, less rational, less stable, less disciplined, and less creative than women are. All of this is made clear from the many condescending, patronising, and sexist remarks the women make about men as dumb, flighty, unstable, vain, inattentive, hysterical and so on, applying to men all the stupid and sexist remark contemporary men applied to women. Though absent are the sexual innuendo and double entrendre common to the era.
Medusa’s women wear Sylvia Anderson styles (though she is not credited the wardrobe and sets shout her name) with clear visors, thigh-length boots, six-inch high heels, floor-length hair, elbow gloves, face studs, glitter, sparkle, and hot pants — all in primary colours: All 1970s.
By the osmosis of the script, word passes among the kept, domestic pet-men of Medusa that Earth is ruled by men! Psst, pass it on. An underground Mens Liberation Front takes form, led by Gareth Thomas, and Pierre Brice who decide to escape from their feathered life and steal a spaceship. They land on Earth and bumble around.
Can’t have uppity men stealing and leaving – never quite sure which was the more important crime: leaving or stealing – and so two women set off in slow pursuit and thus the two worlds come into contact. Each society changes a bit as a result. The end.
I may have missed some of the subtlety because at times I engaged the mute during some episodes.
Star Maidens was an Anglo-German production. The German actors, some of whom are Swedish, all speak nearly accent-free English, diluting any exotic element.
Men are such pains!
It is all played deadpan with awkward scenes, inconsistent characterisations, black holes in the plot, and timidity in the basic idea of gender role reversals. On this point more below. Along with the clothing fashions, the model work of space ships and alien cities – Sylvia again, I suppose – intrudes.
On the credit side, Medusa is not trivialised into either a paradise or a hell. Beneath the matriarchy normal emotional relations exist, just as they do within the Earth’s patriarchy. Though no children are ever seen on either planet. Hmm. There are no villains but collisions among differing ways of life. No shoot ‘em ups, no flames in space, no usual SyFy nonsense. It is all very low key for the most part and when that is combined with pedestrian writing, distracted acting, leaden direction, and butchered editing it is no wonder it died on release.
There are some nice, if heavy handed, role reversal moments. As when the hairy-chested Medusan runaway Brice on Earth has a coffee klatch with neighbourhood wives and shares recipes he got from his father and grandfather. Indeed most episodes are variations of the battle of sexes with nary a hint of science fiction. There are two exceptions, one involving self-conscious computer AI and another about time stopping. In addition, a promising idea set out at the start disappears, namely why the surface of Medusa is uninhabitable. It was implied in episode one, I seem to recall, that the surface was rendered uninhabitable by human action, though the opening background under the credit belies that. Oh, and by the way, recalcitrant men are assigned to work on the horrible surface though what they are doing there apart from whinging is never made clear.
Sylvia styles.
Certainly the gender role reversal motif was daring at the time but the execution is half-hearted. After all it must still be the women on Medusa who bear children and somehow that is elided. There is nothing about domestic violence, unwanted children, child care, sexual abuse of children, abortion, slave labour, rape (in marriage), or any of the unpleasant reality of permanent domination. Entrenched matriarchy is likely to produce such corruptions as entrenched patriarchy, but in the 1970s these realities were far beyond the outer limits.
Gareth found fame later in the seldom seen Blake’s Seven. This seems to be Brice’s only credit in English, but he was Winnetou in eleven German western feature films of the 1960s based of Karl May’s books which I have noted elsewhere on this blog. Thomas is perfectly cast as a dolt, and does it convincingly. Brice frequently looks like he wants a stern word with his agent. In one episode the larger than life Terence Alexander is woefully miscast as a Soviet spy in a three-piece pin-stripped suit with a Scots accent.
The IMDb rumour mill has it that the episodes were originally prepared as 50-minute programs, but no one would pay or run them for that length, and so each episode was re-edited and cut to 25-minutes. It shows. The result is cryptic to say the least.
Among the cognoscenti rages an argument over which is the worst ever Brit SyFy television series. True, SyFy offerings are few — leaving aside the good Doctor (Who) — from within that small number there are many candidates for this accolade. Blake’s Seven springs immediately to mind only to be displaced by Space 1999 (1975), but then what of UFO (1970)? Indeed, what of it? And there is the reigning champion, Starlost (1973). But Star Maidens might give it nudge. Whatever its intentions the result is serial inanity. Needless to say some viewers think it is great. Indeed, one user’s review on IMDb takes the whole thing as ironic, showing how terrible a woman’s world would be.
The Case of the Ancient Astronauts, BBC Horizon (1977) and PBS Nova (1978).
IMDb meta-data is 50 minutes, unrated.
Genre: Documentary
Verdict: Gravity is not a matter of opinion.
This episode offers a root and branch refutation of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods. Researchers for the production company visited each of the places and sites EvD asserted as evidence of mysteries that could only be explained by alien intervention and refuted his childish claims point by point. Accomplishments that were beyond ‘these primitive people’ (a favourite EvD phrase) were readily and easily explained. Throughout his main argument is: ‘What other explanation could there be?’ To find out what other explanations there were the producers went to those sites and showed how it was done. Building pyramids required a stick and string to make a false horizon, water (hot and cold), mallets, and pegs to quarry stones, sand dunes, well organised work gangs with incentives (but not Cecil B. DeMille’s whips), and a broad social commitment. These combined with the close observation of nature to equip those so-called primitive people to do the work.
The Nazca lines, Easter Island Moai, Palenque slab, and more are considered, including interviews with scholars who have made each subject a life’s work. Every time they found that the unfathomable mysteries that EvD attributes to aliens arose from human ingenuity and social organisation, and sometimes compounded by the megalomania of a ruler and ruling class.
The Nazca lines, for example, expressed the ambition of the ruler to placate the gods with the images, as many other rulers have done with animal and human sacrifices. In other words, he had it done because he could. Sound familiar?
Such was EvD’s confidence in the gullibility of his audience that he agreed to take part in this program. When confronted with simple alternative explanations he declared them to be beside the point, the term ‘fake news’ had not yet been coined. He simply asserted that it was not done that way, as though he were an eye witness. When he pointed to an object as evidence of alien artefacts, the Horizon researchers produced the local artisan who had made the very exhibit that EvD used, which he then dismissed as an example. His confidence in the credulity of the audience is, well, incredible. And, accurate.
But he was right, was he not, i.e., about the credulity of the audience? Remember that Time-Life promoted The Chariots of the Gods (1970), and published the companion books that were sold in supermarkets far and wide, one source puts the sales in the 1970s as eight million. No doubt many more millions have been sold since. For the current state of play see the Wikipedia entry which is edited almost daily in a low-level Wiki war.
Others have since also tried a hand at refuting this nonsense.
Love the first two titles.
As late as 2018 EvD was dining on the credulity trail, speaking at conferences on aliens, and signing his books. In Pasadena three thousand people paid to hear him lie to them. Meanwhile, Season 13 of Ancient Aliens was aired in that year, and is available on Amazon Prime. He collects royalties from this series; he is proud to say.
There are many You Tube videos about EvD, and reading the comments they elicit is depressing. There is so much idiocy, despite more than a century of free public education, it is quite impossible either to correct, disabuse, or fathom. Alas, stupidity seems to be a virus that is ineradicable.
I came across my copy of this video (which I acquired decades ago thanks to the diligence of a librarian) on the office shelf when looking for something else, and watched it again while munching lunch. The quality of the video I have is terrible but I noticed that it is available on Amazon Prime in the USA (in what I hope would be a better video quality) by Nova on PBS but not here. Tant pis for me.
I fear that the effort the librarian put into finding this obscure film for me was at the expense of the KPIs, which would not have included investing so much time on one customer’s inquiry when there were so many meetings to attend about customer service.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 6.1 by 406 cinematizens
Genre: ODH
Verdict: Whoosh!
C Henry Gordon
Firecracker Joan Blondell plays a nurse in an Old Dark House inhabited by odd balls from the hunchback butler to the squinting, sinister maid, and the suspicious looking doctor (C. Henry Gordon who always looks dyspeptic). The Nurse’s Secret (1941) was a re-make almost word for word, and is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
Blondell gets top billing and dominates the camera, as usual, as she gathers the pieces of the puzzle. The plot is…., wait, what plot? Nor is much made of the ODH, more is the pity. While there are plenty of menacing shadows to rouse a scream, there are no sliding panels, hidden chambers, eyes moving on portraits, ejection seats, or any of that good stuff. Instead we have repeated shots of those shadows. Oh hum.
Indeed, it is a vehicle for the winning ways of Miss Pinkerton, as she is nicknamed.
A prize goes to the viewer who can infer what the dying statement of the mother revealed, because it is not revealed in the film, though much is made of it.
IMDb meta-data is: broadcast on 19 September 1964 for 52 minutes, rated 7.9 by 426 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: Meow!
This IMDb summary leaves out the best part: A soldier from the far future is accidentally teleported through time back to 1964. The psychiatrist assigned to examine the soldier realizes that he has been bred purely as a killing machine, but tries to reawaken the warrior’s humanity. Meanwhile, a second soldier arrives, dedicated to hunting and killing his enemy. Yada, yada…
There is an opening scene on a vast no man’s land, potted with shell holes, mangled trees, laser blasted rocks, and a miasma hangs over it all as Cochise in body armour with a visored helmet creeps from shelter to cover.
Just as Cochise closes in to kill Enemy in single combat, the two of them trip over a script and are hurled back in time 1800 years to era of the Yankee Dynasty in MLB. Poor saps. Once there an emeritus Mike Shayne sets about boring Cochise back to his lost humanity. There is marvellous scene when the suspicious Cochise, who thinks he has been taken prisoner by a clever and deceitful enemy disguised as an inept pensioner, sees a house cat and tries to communicate with it to escape these fiendish do-gooders. This, however, is not a battle cat and scoots to the bowl.
Mike Shayne feels very smug in rekindling Cochise’s suppressed humanity with psycho-babble, right up until Enemy from that no man’s land arrives in his living room! Human or automaton, a stereotype has got to do what a stereotype has got to do.
After seeing this episode, no cat will ever look the same. I watched it again recently when I found it, after some searching, on Daily Motion, where finding anything happens by chance.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 2 minutes, rated 5.9 by 290 cinematizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Woof!
The dogs have been replaced by the design of a warplane, but much else is word-for-word of The Kennel Murder Case (1933). In recognition of its original two dogs feature in this version.
After twice-over befuddling the inept secret police of an unnamed foreign power Philo (autocorrect insists that he is ‘Photo,’ regrettably we know better), Philo returns to the Big Apple to thwart the nation’s Republican enemies on home soil.
While in the European power’s inner sanctum he had learned that the plans of a top hush Yankee warplane were already on file there. How did they get there? Can we close the barn door now that Pegasus has bolted? ‘Do we care,’ chorussed the fraternity brothers on the way to the beer refrigerator in a well-worn path?
This rather brash and energetic incarnation of Philo inserts himself into the household of the aircraft owner and designer only to find him dead – three times over. He was clubbed, stabbed, and shot. This is a man with enemies. Was he a dean?
Suspicion falls with a thud on the victim’s errant brother who is nowhere to be found until, thanks to one of the dogs, someone opens the hall closet. Thump. Body number two.
Not to worry, Philo sorts through it all. The jilted girlfriend, the grasping sister, the fiancée, the ever-present butler, the next door neighbour and her dog, his own dog, his buffoon sidekick who is stuck with some terrible lines but mans-up for them, and others now forgotten.
In the great tradition, the least likely suspect did it as revealed in a final punch-up.
Among the cognoscenti there are those that claim to prefer the 1933 original in which Philo was played by William Powell, who finally learned his lesson and never did that again. Me, I am agnostic on this important question, at least until I can watch The Kennel Murder Case (1933) again. N.B. I tried reading it and found it so mannered, laboured, forced, and fey that I stopped when the Kindle sample ended, leaving me a wiser and happier man.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 4 minutes run time, rated 5.8 by 150 cinematizens,
Gerne: ODH
Verdict: Lee!
After superb opening credits with an animated, silhouetted nurse in white casting the light of a torch around an Old Dark House, Lee Patrick comes to the rescue as the nurse. It seems that in the ODH the heir apparent has had his brains blown out: suicide, accident, or murder?
The deceased was a caddish wastrel unloved and unmissed, but a mess there on the floor. While there was no money to inherit from his bed-ridden mother there is a whopper of an insurance policy on Cad himself, which will not be paid for suicide! So the household preference is for accident. He shot himself in the back of the head while cleaning his finger nails. Sure.
Bernie Olds is too smart to fall for that old dodge and he insinuates into the household his squeeze, the one and only Lee Patrick to nurse the bedridden mother. She takes the lead from there on in. A steam roller she keeps at it despite roadblocks, disincentives, threats, assault, and another assault. It is her picture and the better for it.
Skulduggery abounds. Who can be trusted? The peeping butler? Cad’s jilted girlfriend? The girlfriend’s paramour de jour? The secret wife of Cad? The gloomy doctor? Assorted retainers? The ever so correct lawyer?
No prizes for guessing. When everyone else is eliminated that leaves the ever so correct least suspicious one as the cape-wearing shadow. Though it is hard to picture this geriatric villain carrying around a roof ladder.
It was released on 21 May 1941 when theatrical newsreels featured the German victories in Crete and Libya. While secretly in Moscow, the Soviet head of military intelligence argued that Germany was preparing to invade Russia. Stalin rejected the assessment and when the intelligence officer insisted, Stalin had him arrested and shot. When will that happen in DC now that the Thief-in-Chief has unlimited power.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 22 minutes of run time, rated 5.7 by 470 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Bland leading the bland.
The chic fashions of Eastern Europe1972 abound, whence space flight is routine as far out as the Third Ring. (I took that to be a reference to Asteroids, but I’ll never know.) Then a number of space ships bound for a space station disappear. (The actors say ‘acht‘ but the subtitles say ‘ten.’) No distress calls, no nothing. Well, a lot of nothing. Then the space station itself goes dark.
Back on Earth high command ponders in a plenary session where Asians and Africans are conspicuously numbered among the socialist siblings. On the one side is Belle who wants to stop all flights and send a rescue mission. On the other is Tubby who prefers to continue as usual and wait and see. She prevails. Stress that: the head of operations is a woman and in 1972 she prevails against a male colleague.
The rescue mission sets off with Belle on board. By luck en route they encounter one the missing ships and try to board it, but it rockets off; apparently it is not a ghost ship. They continue on to the vast space station, part refinery, part parking garage, part YM/WSA (Young Men’s/Women’s Socialist Association), part science lab. It is about the size of the IKEA store in Tempe, vast and largely uncharted.
They find only starving laboratory animals, but then half of the station is sealed off, that is, the parking garage. Belle and the rescue crew show no interest in what is behind that green door.
There occurs a comic interlude with a tin man that is completely superfluous and annoying.
There has been a sidebar with a bored space miner on asteroid who misses Belle. (Who wouldn’t.). Many flashback to the good old days on Earth. Many. Too many.
Among the flash backs are some with Tubby who muses about Eolomena, which is the name acolytes have given to a point of light that appears every twenty-four years in the starry night sky. Is it a signal? He wishfully thinks so for no discernible reason. Why that name and rather than, say, Light in Sky was not explained within my attention span.
Now back to the space station for the denouement replete with SPOILERS. Tubby has by unknown means convinced the ten missing space ship crews and all the space station personnel to take one-way tickets to Eolomea. They have been sanding the wheels on their space ship wagons in the garage getting ready to blast off, while their ostensible rescuers wander about in Space Station IKEA. When the bored miner is offered a one-way ticket, he forsakes Belle and goes along. (‘What an idijit,’ cried the fraternity brothers! ). So the numerous, lengthy flashbacks to their courtship come to naught. End.
It is mercifully free of any AgitProp, beyond that implied by the composition of the plenary session where the Third World members sit quietly waiting for the assistant director’s cue to vote for Belle.
Points of interest…are two. In 1972 it portrays two things unusual for the time. First and foremost is that Belle is in charge and stays that way. There are no demeaning asides from the chaps as there were in innumerable 1972 films. Nor is she riven by self doubts – scientist versus woman – that mar so much Hollywood and Pinewood tosh from the day. Full Ost Marks for that.
Der Boss.
Second, asteroid mining is dreary, dull, and boring blue collar work. There is no glamour in space. When Ridley Scott made space flight industrial in Alien (1979) he hailed himself a genius, but it was old news.
But overall, there is zero tension in Eolomea. There are no equipment failures, but then there were probably no low-bid contractors in the script, to generate some tension. Meteors seem to have taken the day off because there are none of them either. The debate between Belle and Tubby is oh-hum. That Tubby has suborned all those people into a one-way mission is taken as Red without explanation. Bland is the word.
