Category: Film Review

IMDb 1 hour and 35 minutes, rated 6.1 by a paltry 179 ra(n)ters.
Jack and Jill are about to get married on a fine spring day somewhere in Europe. Jack buys flowers for Jill as he hurries to the get himself to the church on time. In the street a one-note newsboy shouts, repeatedly, ‘War declared!’ Jack only has ears for church bells and ignores this declaration, while others in the street react in alarm, amusement, and denial.

The release title was ‘Rat’ which is ‘War’ is Serbo-Croatian, the language in which the film was made in Zagreb of the Tito’s Legoland Yugoslavia.
Mistaking him for Kevin, everyone asks Jack what will happen. His parents must have been Pollyanna and Dr Pangloss because he is exhaustingly optimistic about everything. For him an empty coffee cup is an opportunity to do without coffee, and not a life threatening disaster. Figure that out! Everything is fine. Everything will work out for the best. All is good. All is ad nauseam. He is the kind who would grin through a 360 degree review, because he enjoyed it!
While Jack and Jill are at the altar the bombs start falling. He keeps smiling. As they leave the church with you-know-what-in-mind he is press-ganged into the army. Next thing you know he has changed costume and is parading around in a uniform with a firearm. More bombing occurs, but Jack is sure wiser heads will prevail. As if.
While in a bomb shelter he suggests people proclaim their desire for peace. They do. He is then a traitorous ringleader in a rebellion, apprehended, and sentenced to be shot. He keeps smiling, while inviting the firing squad and the sentencing officer around for dinner when all this is straightened out. Which it will be very soon!
But then it gets brighter than a thousand suns. Afterwards while crawling around in the rubble, Jack meets the Prime Minister who assures him that war was the will of the people per the ‘White Book,’ on which more later. The shock wave blew off most of Jill’s clothes and that briefly piqued the interest of the fraternity brothers. As the radiation washes around them, Jack and Jill retire to their new apartment – a ruin – and he sets about making coffee. She does a swan die. Will Jack wake up to reality now? Fade to black.
The end.
Well, it is an anti-war film of sorts, with special reference to atom bombs, coming out of the precariously non-aligned patchwork that was the workers paradise of Yugoslavia. Given the post-Tito blood bath of that part of the world, I wondered if a contemporary audience in Belgrade would have perceived the origins and ethnicity of each of the players. Is that why Jill is played by a Pole? To confound that ethnic typing and residual animosity there in paradise? Or to gain it box office in Warsaw?
There is a cast of thousands, and it looks like the army cooperated, given all the marching men, weapons on parade, and fly overs. In the time and the place that cooperation would make it an official government film in all but name. It was bought, edited, and dubbed for the US drive-in market as background to anatomy lessons.
The cast and crew were among the best in Belgrade but this is not their best work. Most of the failure goes to Cesare Zavattini, the script writer who settles for simple-minded nostrums and witless Chaplineque situations, though that may have been what the producers wanted. Hard to believe the same typewriter produced ‘Shoeshine’ (1946) and ‘The Bicycle Thief’ (1948).
The ‘White Book’ the grovelling prime minister carried, seemed to be a report on public opinion regularly prepared for him. Gallup was not involved. A short search on Dr Google produced no enlightenment on the subject. But the combination of ‘White Book’ and Yugoslavia produces many hits, false positives.
The comparison has got to be ‘La Jetėe’ (1962), reviewed elsewhere on this blog, which is far more imaginative, creative, enticing, and enigmatic. It gets across more in its running time of twenty minutes than this feature length film does in ninety minutes.

IMDb 1 hour and 40 minutes, rated by 527 cinemitizens at 4.8/10.
In the year 2015 the first mission to Mars consists of Canadians! Well, they know cold weather and there is plenty of it on Mars, despite the sunbathing of ‘Robinson Crusoe on Mars’ (1964), reviewed elsewhere on this blog. The Canucks are employees of a corporation. Shades of the Alien franchise.

With neither a creature, sex, nor a Hollywood name, its 4.8 is the result. It moves slowly and there is good deal of the science and engineering of spaceflight. The Laws of Physics are so hard and implacable that no creature is needed to complicate things. These Laws kill without hesitation or mercy. They are like a McKinsey manager managing.
We have five crew, two women and three men, one a Russian. We are guided along the way by a television news announcer. Everything is played up to satisfy the corporate sponsor who has invested frequently told billions of loonies in the enterprise.
They make it to Mars and land. Together the co-commanders (one for flight and the other for ground). a man and woman, take the first steps on to Mars. This was a nice touch. The exaggerated television account was a gentle satire that escaped the reviewers consulted.
Then the Band of Five are struck by a pile of clichés, namely meteors, which do not burn away in the thin Martian atmosphere, and pelt the landing craft – a shuttle mock up. Oh oh, even as all the onboard systems fail one by one, the crew gamely sends back to Earth upbeat video messages to satisfy the KPIs in their contracts which require them to remain plucky unto death.
Yes, it is starting to sound like ‘The Martian’ (2015) but there is much less scientific detail here and much more about the tensions among the crew in this dire situation. Ergo it is a character study of this crowd on the planet Otranto, and how they — individually and collectively — react to the dread they face.
It is all very Canadian. Low key does not quite describe it. Catatonic is closer. No one goes all Hollywood ballistic. Nor, thank the stars, is there any comic relief. A comparison might be ‘Operation Ganymed’ (1977), reviewed elsewhere on this blog, but this latter film has more mystery and drama. It, too, is about science, not CGIs. But the fraternity brothers liked the name of the mission, Sagan, and that it was not explained. Either one gets it, or one doesn’t. It is not often they respond to such subtlety but they did this time.
There is spelunking and in a cave is to be found a biochemical reaction that bespeaks water. Sure enough there is a drip. No! Wait, that is the director. ‘The Europa Report’ (2013) compares on this point. It is reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
All problems are solved when one of them dies. Without him, they have food and fuel to ascend and return which they do. It seemed all too easy after the built-up of the hopeless situation. Likewise, there was talk earlier of contamination which disappears in Act III.
It was filmed in Winnipeg, of all places, but they know cold there, too.

IMDb information 1 hour and 24 minutes, rated 4.8/10 from 272 cinemitizens.
Norwegians in space!
Well, why not. All that oil revenue had to be spent on something. Why not space flights in 2054. Although the fraternity brothers recommend better footwear for inter-planetary travel than the Nikes one of Wegians was wearing.

Thanks to the discovery of an alien Tesseran ship years ago inter-planetary and inter-stellar flight is common. The key discovery was….a scriptwriter!
Fox News got the first ship and its life support keeps,,,, [Use imagination here.]
Now the Wegians have come across a second Tesseran ship it seems. Fox News dispatches one of trained killers to eliminate the Norse and get the ship. So far, so News Corp.
But the killer is Pentan, a female cyborg, who turns. That is turns with a capital ’T.’ She strikes several blows for the sisterhood, as inane screenwriters get the chop. There is quite a backlist of hacks for her to thump. Oh, that was wishful thinking on my part.
In between murdering her fellow employees come to fetch her back, she says she is sorry. Not very. This is one Cubicle Cutie to avoid at all costs.
She hires Han Duo to fly her around because he sports aviator glasses and chews gum. Must be a hot shot like the midget from ‘Top Gun.’ Off they go. A smart girlfriend is a good thing but a killer….? That takes getting used to for HD. Though she is fully functional.
Hitch! Once she turns. an editor from News Corp switches on the in-built destruction system in her head which will relieve all pain in seventy-two hours. She and HD head to Dr Nooniun Sing (or is that Sung) to fix this up and find him but they forgot to ask him to turn off the bomb. Ooops. Tick! Tick! Somewhere along the way this death-threat vanishes from the story or maybe my attention first vanished.
In between punching out villains, Pentan muses on her back story — boring — and ruminates on life, liberty, and stadium coffee. Did I mention boring? Far too often we hear the death knell of interest, ‘As you know….’ We didn’t and don’t want to …know.
Although, we do learn that Cyborgs like a change of clothes and a shower. We also learn that handsome scientists on lonely, desolate moons keep on hand changes of clothes for passing lady Cyborgs, and are careful not to refer to her as a replicant for fear of IP and the descent of the trial lawyers. But does a Cyborg sweat? The Terminator never needed a shower and look at his body-count. Did Philip K. Dick cover that?
The showdown is a boring Tron game. All her missiles hit targets and the villains miss every time. Send them back to Villain School!
All trip and no arrival because Tesseran space ship just sits there.
This is an independent production, so the fraternity brothers cut it slack. But the direction is lethargic with many pointless close ups of actors who are silent. Is this deep thought? Is this waiting for the director’s cue? Is this waiting for the one camera to move? Most of the acting is leaden to match the pace.
Twenty years later the director re-cut, re-edited, and added many CGIs to the film and turned up the soundtrack for a second release aimed the brain-dead pre-pubescent audience at a theatre nearby. The You Tube version that I watched seems to be the original. The fraternity brothers liked the kick-boxing female.

They also liked the reptilian regalia of the henchmen, as pictured above, though they were so slow…. must have been, under all that gear, emeritii henchmen.
There was no explanation of the title, and the re-release had two different ones, which likewise made no sense, namely ‘Star Quest,’ ‘Black Moon Rising,’ and ‘Outer World.’ Go figure.

IMDb 1hour and 43 minutes, rated 4.9 by 2032 raters.
A spin on the post-apocalyptic genre. ‘Having exhausted the Earth’s resources Nature took its revenge in a cleansing wind, the Slipstream,’ says an opening voice over. Social order has decayed to tribal groups who can only live along the Slipstream, away from its effect the air, earth and water are poison. It is a nice kick-off.

Two self-described law officers — though what law exists in this world of detached tribes is an open question — apprehend a pin-stripe suited and passive Ray. He is quickly taken from them by a bounty hunter called Bill. Thereafter, it become a road movie as Ray and Bill bond in their misadventures among the tribes they pass through along the Slipstream. At first the destination is to turn in Ray somewhere, but later the goal is to get away from the two pursuing officers.
These two officers are a near albino Luke Skywalker and a pencil thin woman; they leave a trail of dead bodies behind them.
Ray and Bill encounter Robbie Coltrane in a hot tub, Murray Abraham in at a Viennese soiree, Turkish peasants, and others in a pastiche that has neither rhyme nor reason and most of the guest stars are cameos with no character or purpose. The unstated premise is that in a post-apocalyptic world like-minded people would seek each other out and set up their own communities. Think of Robert Nozick’s ‘Anarchy, State and Utopia’ (1978), that missing Oxford comma a constant irritant. Our two murderous officers represent the Night Mare, er, Night Watchman state Nozick posited. Though how like-minded people could find each other in a post-apocalyptic world is left to the imagination.
As the fraternity brothers fidgeted, the plot thickened because the passive Ray feels no pain, has inhuman knowledge, and wears a necktie, all sure signs he is weird.

Ray finally has to tell the thick Bill that he — Ray — is an android. A nice twist.
Thereafter, Ray discovers the pleasures of the flesh, finds he is fully functional, and falls asleep for the first time. Bill releases Ray just as the two albinos kick-in the door. There is a pointless and incompressible shoot out. (Who would have guessed that?) More flying and crashing, and finally the End.
In sum, a good kick-off and a nice plot twist, but, well, there isn’t much of a plot to twist. The enigmatic Ray, played by the revered Bob Peck, remains a cipher thanks to the inane screenplay. Ditto all the others. The peoples and places they pass through are a vapid travelogue through a poor imagination.
There is compensation is some very nice aerial photography, part of it over Cappadocia in Turkey where we went hot air ballooning in 2015. Bob Peck, of course, commands attention even if the material does not.

From IMDb 1 hour and 29 minutes, rated 4.2 by 328.
RAAF officer Wagga Wagga Jones is assigned a secret and mysterious flight by Nemesis, an old rival, in August 1945. WW Jones has foresight, because even as he takes the assignment, he knows the war is about to end. This fact is something that no one else knew at the time, when feverish and enormous preparations were being made for a million-man invasion of the Japanese homeland with the expectation of a terrible price. Nemesis makes threatening noises and WW laughs them off. The fraternity brothers groaned with boredom already.

The cargo for this flight include an American general in an anachronistic uniform, a C of E vicar, and a couple of grunts, oh, and big wooden box with a very large label that says Do Not Open. (Wanna guess what happens?) Off they go in a Dakota (Douglas C-47) but no sooner do they set about bickering among themselves than they run into a CGI storm that throws everything about and they end up the water where the Red Shirts die. It seems one of now deceased grunts opened the box to find a light for his smoke. This individual was the product of free public education and carefully selected for this super duper top most secret mission, he evidently could not read the label.
Thereafter it descends into a delirium of images floating by, Easter Island Heads, Bermuda shorts, Stonehenge parking lots, an IBM selectric, Old Faithful, and Old Yeller, too. There is no rhyme or reason to it, but one thing is clear…..! Erich did it! Yes, ‘what other explanation could there be, but aliens?’ Well, could be the scriptwriter was chemically enhanced at the keyboard!
There is no whip, but there is a large pistol, a leather jacket that WW seems to wear even under his scuba driving gear, which he carries in the map pocket of his Lands End chinos. The sets are barren. Three is a crowd. The uniforms are inaccurate. WW’s mystique is sadly lacking. The haircuts are not military. There is a mixture of Indiana Jones and Mad Max in a pastiche of scenes that seldom connect one to another from Ayers Rock (unseen) to a cave on Easter Island (in a Melbourne sound studio).
There is a love interest who screams and faints in the 1950s manner. In frustration she assaulted the scriptwriter and quit the business. Whoa. Just made that up. But she should have. She did quit.
At forty-one WW remains a lieutenant. At forty-one he is greying at the temples. At forty-one he is creaking at the joints on some of the moves he makes. But at forty-one he is John Hargreaves whom the camera always loved and does so here. It is pretty clear he is in on the joke and makes sure any unfortunates who paid to see this blur get it, too. Bill Hunter injects some gravitas. Sky Pilot Max Phipps tries way too hard.
Why it is called ‘Sky Pirates’ is anyone’s guess. There is plenty of sky, but no Johnny Depp to be seen.
The only Sy Fy element is the reference to aliens, but since it came up in a search for Sy Fy, I had to watch it to be sure. The IMDb give its genre as Sci-fi as well as Adventure.

IMDb 1 hour and 5 minutes, 3.9/10 from 395 addicts.
Novelty value there is. This is a Swedish-American co-production, a rarity of the time. Moreover, it is set in the far north, Lappland, and features Sami in their costume. The ‘Seventh Seal’ also gets a look in. For the denouement read on.
A Yankee lobby card.
A Swedish lobby card.
Prof is at a conference in Sweden and his niece, an Olympic athlete, is training up north, when a meteor strikes Sami country. Prof just loves meteors and takes no convincing to go look at the object that may have come ’from another world.’ It is a nice line and delivered with conviction by Robert Burton, instantly recognised from countless 1950s and 1960s television programs where he invariably played authority figures: judges, senators, colonels, deans, and even professors.
Barbara Wilson is the athletic niece who starts off confident, poised, smart, determined, and no nonsense, which fits the Olympic achievements, and she can skate and ski. After her character is established it is thereafter destroyed by endless demands to scream and faint, four times that were counted by the fraternity brothers between trips to the beer fridge.
What is all the screaming about?
Prof joins with a Swedish love interest for his niece and some police officers to go investigate. Many shots of the white blankness of snow fields and of Lapplanders in their curly-toed shoes and frilly hats, each designed to deal with the snow. While the testimony of the Lapps is treated seriously by the Swedish authorities, pretty boy is dismissive.
What testimony?
They say that the meteor glided in at a low angle for kilometres and then skidded for a distance on a nice soft snow bank. Gasp! It sounds like a controlled descent. Sure enough, Prof confirms it. Meteor just hit. Wallop! No gradual descent. Pretty Boy shrugs. This gesture turns out to be his dramatic range but he speaks English.
Just where the Lapps said, the Prof’s party finds the object and it is no meteor. It is the same ship that featured in ‘It Came from Outer Space’ (1955). Only part of it is visible in the snow bank. Much musing follows. Meanwhile, Hairy turns up. Hairy is big and hairy. BIG. He wanders around leaving enormous footprints which the investigators finally notice. Gulp. More musing.
The party divides. Some will stay on site. Others will go for help. Many will wait off camera.
Hairy grabs Niece who goes through her repertoire of screaming and fainting. It is King Kong all over again once more and anew. Hairy has found love and when she screams ‘No!’ he knows it is a come-on, and means try harder. He stashes her in a ice cave, and wanders around some more smashing balsa wood miniatures that someone spent hours making. Such are the frustration of interspecies love. Naughty, Hairy! But he is meeting his Yeti KPIs, that is Ka-blooie Performance Indicators.
Then his managers show up, and this is the best part of film. Three sketal skin heads in hoodies with bleached faces silently surround Niece, who…. [yep, screams and faints]. They do look like Death who played chess with the Knight in the ‘Seventh Seal’ (1957).
The Hoodies.
They an silent and stare at her. She screams and faints. Again. When she recovers, they point at an enormous footprint, and she screams and faints. Again. (Is it any wonder Barbara Wilson quit acting after this outing?)
They leave. Who knows why and where? Not the scriptwriter for sure.
Hairy returns and scoops her up as required in creature features. By this time the Samis are mobilised with torches. Remembers that scene from ‘Frankenstein’ (1931). Like that, except it is bright daylight on blinding show. They corner Hairy on a cliff edge over an abyss. Hairy thinks, ‘What would my hirsute brother King Kong do in a situation like this?’ To think he puts down Niece on a nice bed of snow.
While he is thinking the Lapps fling so many torches at him that all that hair he has catches on fire and on the ensuing excitement he falls over the edge into the abyss.
Pretty Boy then scoops up Niece and Prof muses over what just happened. So did I. ‘Dunno’ was the unanimous conclusion of the fraternity brothers.
Were the skin heads keepers of Hairy? Did Hairy escape and were they looking for him? If so, such inept aliens should have stayed home if they could not spot a thirty foot pile of black costume hair against the white backdrop. Or was Hairy a local and the skin heads wanted to Yeti-nap him for a zoo back on home world? But there was nothing earlier to indicate the neighbourhood had a Yeti problem. Were the skin heads surrogates for Commies, all quiet and insidious. Was Hairy a metaphor for….the Welfare State, Volvo hegemony, IKEA tyranny? Pick one! Pick two!
Apart from its resonances with other films of the ilk, it is distinguished by the exotic locale, long before SBS brought Norseland to the a television near everyone. All that snow. All those Swedish accents, and some Swedish spoken. (A film with even one untranslated sentence in a foreign language was often regarded as a box office killer in Hollywood.) The Swedes wear Swedish clothing. It looks like it was filmed there but the backstories on the web are not decisive.
There were two subsequent re-editings for the USA drive-in market. One is by Jerry Warren and the other by the unstoppable Roger Corman and released as ‘Invasion of the Animal People’ in 1959 with an opening voice over from John Carradine, who never said no to a gig.
The Corman lobby card.
In these two versions nothing is left to the imagination. The Beast has come for women. He is looking for fraternity brothers with whom to party and needs a date.
Web critics disparage both versions. The IMDb does not distinguish among these derivatives. The You Tube version I found looks like the original.

IMDb data: 1 hour and 23 minutes, rated 6.7 by 5824.
‘The End of Days is nigh!’ The Earth is doomed! Repent ye GOP voters!

Yes, astronomers have once again spotted a heavenly body intent on smashing the Earth, styled ‘Bellus’ and its attendant satellite ‘Zyra.’ Travelling thousands of kilometres a second, they will pass close to Earth in a few months and the passages will wreak havoc on Earth. The oceans will rise in giant tsunamis. The mountains will crack open to spew lava. The plains will continue to vote Republican. Much stock footage will be shown.
Or so claims the Lone Voice, while all his colleagues fatten their CVs by debunking his claims. Nonetheless Lone Voice pressed on and his conviction and data convince some backers to fund his fantastic scheme. Larry Keating of ‘Mr Ed’ played Lone Voice with great integrity and authority.
The plan is to build a rocket ship and hop onto Bellus as it passes. One of his financiers is a hard case, played by the ever reliable John Hoyt who gives the best performance in the ensemble. A team of six hundred specialists is recruited to build the ship and from those ranks, forty will be chosen at the last minute to make the flight. At every point the risks and uncertainties are emphasised. It is all rather Calvinist. Work as if chosen, but nothing can insure it. Most will have laboured in vain.
To equip the ship with knowledge a team of women sit at 1951 photocopiers rendering a reference library into microfilm. That was a nice touch. Though I did not notice Plato’s ‘Republic’ being included. Now where will they be packing the 1951 microfilm reader?
Everyone on Earth will die, that being the only way to kill the GOP virus.
Those that take flight may perish in the flight, die in a crash on Bellus, default on their AMEX payments, or find Bellus uninhabitable. Note, while passing by it will destroy Earth, but Bellus is unaffected in scriptwriter’s logic. The number forty was decided by bodyweight ever so finely calculated, though at the end Lone Voice added Barbara Rush’s boyfriend, a waif, and the waif’s pet dog. But to make way for them he stayed behind with the troublesome financier to face certain death. Is this noble of what. Babs, by the way, went on to ‘It Came from Outer Space’ in 1955 to cement her Sy Fy credentials.
The fatalism is out of time for 1951, when most Sy Fy movies overcame all odds.
There are conflicts among the rocketeers who are widely mocked by the ever responsible media, until the Earth moves under their feet. Then they mob the rocket site and have to be fended off. Good thing there was an arsenal included in the research grant. The testy financier had predicted this reaction and prepared for it while dreamy scientists had not.

For reasons known only to rocket science the passengers wear a uniform of brown sweat suits and fly economy class without overhead storage bins for roll-aboards.
When the crunch comes, despite all efforts to avoid conflict, conflict occurs and the launch is compromised, but the ending is upbeat. While the Earth is split in an apocalypse, Bellus is green fields and blue skies (in pictures that look like they were ripped from a kindergarten classroom wall, as what must have been a late addition to the production, so out of keeping they are with the forgoing standard).

They made it and humanity can start its cycle of destruction anew! Whew!
There is much location shooting and an altogether big budget, mostly spent on the effects and not on big name actors.
The opening scene is an observatory in a remote South African location, and there are several subsequent references to other spaceship projects in other countries, but there is no technology transfer or cooperation among them. That seems realistic. There are never KPIs for cooperation.
The draw of the final forty seems to have been random, so it might yield forty tech heads who have never seen a vegetable or daylight. Neither does the six hundred nor the forty include any brown, red, yellow, or black faces. All whitebread, though, credit where it is due, many are women. For a New Eden science declares women are necessary. Amen, sighed the fraternity brothers.
Another Sy Fy offering from producer George Pal, known as the Happy Hungarian for his sunny disposition. He has many Sy Fy credits, some excellent, like ‘Destination Moon’ (1950) and the execrable ‘Conquest of Space’ (1957). Both are reviewed elsewhere on this blog. He tried to get the science right within the limits of the genre, the budget, and the capacities of the cast and crew.

IMDb metadata is runtime 1 hour and 18 minutes, rated at 5.8/10 by 1392 raters.
An asteroid approaches Earth and science is mobilised!  With flashing slide rules and pocket protectors, the equations lead the nerd brigade to only one conclusion. Blast it!  (‘Haven’t we seen this before,’ whined the fraternity brothers?  Patience, please.) But this asteroid uses the Delta Manoeuvre to elude the rocket’s red glare!  Oh, oh!  It seems intelligence is at work! Then the asteroid harmlessly slides into the Pacific Ocean off Baja California. Whew! 

While it was passing over the desert south west (where the aliens get a special discounted rate) an orb split off and seizes the mind of the director of the nearest top secret defence laboratory.  Sure. This new zombie had previously led a crew to Mars in ‘Rocketship X-M’ (1950), reviewed elsewhere on this blog.  In that picture he was supposed to land on the Moon but missed it and hit Mars.  Grounded!  Once zombied he engages in silent communion, ever so cheap to film, with….Kronos! Kronos? Kronos.
While his soul is being devoured, his three top minions go to Mexico to observe the asteroid in the ocean. They observe each other, too.  All is quiet on the asteroid front, so they get on with mutual observing, until…  yes, right on cue a dome appears in the waters, and, no, it is not another water park, but a Kronos factory that emits Kronos 1.0.

People have noticed that Dr Zombie is not his usual self and that Sy Fyian extra-ordinarie Morris Ankrum fails to collect on his bill!
Pause.
Kronos is a big TinkerToy.  The trio borrow a handy Mexican helicopter for a closer look and land on the contraption just as it seems to stir, after a long-distance communion with Dr Zombie.  They scoot and Kronos sets off, stomping through stock footage from a variety of locales, none of them Mexican. There is no further attempt to share Kronos’s pain.
Kronos sucks down electricity as it goes.  It follows the grid to Lost Angeles! 

In so doing it by-passes the much closer San Diego, because more stock footage of Lost Angeles is available.
The slide rules flash again, the giant main frame computer from ‘Desk Set’ (1957) flashes lights and what other conclusion could there be! Blow it up.  More stock footage of boy toys.  The attack of the boy toys does not slow Kronos.  If only there had been a wall to keep out the Greasers! Kronos would have then stayed down Mexico way, supping on wattamales and voltstadas.
Somehow Jeff Morrow (after his frontal lobotomy addition in ‘This Island Earth’ [1955] [reviewed elsewhere on this blog] which by the way turned his hair white) figures it out.  The Kronosians must have depleted all the non-re-newable energy sources on Krono and have come to Earth to stock-up.  He also figures how to stop Kronos with wind farms and solar panels. 
Remember ‘Clockwork Orange’ (by the way a giant Jackson No-Prize to the first person to explain why ‘A Clockwork Orange’ is called ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and not yellow or cerise)?  Jeff did, and he gluts Kronos on so much juice not even Mylanta can help.  
The female lead, who does not even have to scream, finally gets her big line to ask if more Kroni are coming. Jeff said all deadpan, ‘Dunno, but if they are we’ll be ready!’ The end.
Sorry, Jeff, but there was no vote of confidence from the fraternity brothers for that encomium. What we saw was comprehensively unready. The super top secret defence lab was penetrated by a truck driver with a wrench. The biggest scientist was zombied with a couple of flash lights. Mexico was drained of juice in a few hours. Lost Angeles had to be nuked. This is ready?
It is on the cusp between Sy Fy and creature feature. Kronos is not much of a creature, no drool, no fangs, no GOP ugly look, no Twit in Chief leer, no grabbing tentacles, and ‘it does not carry off a woman, as is mandatory in a Real Creature Feature,’ declaimed the fraternity brothers. Nor are the electricity effects up to Dr Frankenstein standards. More like a bulb going out in the frat house than an eye-popper.
On the other hand, the acting is uniformly good. Jeff looks interested in the science de gook, and the Zombie’s inner turmoil is apparent, and Morris Ankrum is also pitch perfect, as always. The director keeps it moving. But the stock footage is not well chosen, nor well integrated. The miniatures for Kronos are nothing special, even for the times.
Interpretions of the symbolism can keep the fraternity brothers happy for hours. Is Kronos, the accumulator of energy, a metaphor for the unbridled consumerism of the era? For the insidious effects of Communism? For creeping managerialism that leaves empty KPI husks behind? For the spectre of technological growth represented in this film by a computer system called SUSIE that adds nothing to the proceedings? Or is a Trojan TinkerToy? Is Odysseus inside?

Computer hackers get control of Siri and Alexa!
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 22 minutes, rated at 5.5/10 by 822 raters.
The third and last of producer Ivan Tors loose sequence of stories about the fictional Office of Scientific Investigations, represented here by Richard Egan, who is summoned to shoot trouble.

Deep in the desert southwest, where else, in an underground laboratory, designed to withstand an atomic blast or one speech by the Twit in Chief, that nation’s best scientists labour to bring forth the first space station, before ‘They do.’ Yep, 1954, with the Korean War still Red and raw.
The Yankees have entrusted this super-duper top most secret facility to a one legged Brit by the name of Herbert Marshall, with his owlish eye glasses. Immigrants even in those days took American jobs!
‘What’s the trouble?’ The scientists are being murdered! Two were frozen, one after another, in the cryogenics lab. A radioactive pot plant crisps another. The whirly gig takes out two more. The body count rises in the Laboratory of Otranto, while Egan tours the several levels of the bunker. Is he bad luck or what?
The whole establishment is run by an IOS Home computer called NOVAC, which has two robot minions, Gog and Magog. Why names from the Book of Ezekiel are used is anyone’s guess. There is no explanation in the film.

These robots are precursors of Daleks with their waving arms and tank treads. They are as useful as Siri and Alexa. They can open doors, hand over screwdrivers, and strangle Mr Pomfrit. In addition, the lab has solar energy in use, and a sound laboratory full of deadly tuning forks. Yes, it is a lavish and inventive production.
The body count rises. Turns out NOVAC has been hacked by ‘Them’ and is itself destroying the Nobelists by using Siri and Alexa before they can give long, boring, pointless speeches, forgetting to mention the underlings who did all the work. Egan figures this out about an hour after the fraternity brothers did, and sets about thwarting it. How?
He calls in the USAF to shoot down an airplane that is always overhead. See, what I said about slow. The evil virus code is being transmitted from that aircraft. Stock footage of Saber jets taking off and in mid-air transformed into Thunderbirds. Kaboom! So much for that TWA flight.
Before that crescendo, Egan has to fight both Siri Gog and Alexa Magog mano à mano, well, with a flame thrower. Just the sort of thing to keep around super-duper top most secret deep underground laboratory working on space flight. In fact, they have two of the contraptions that have always killed more operators than enemies.
But wait, the plot thickens. How could good old American code be hacked? In the world of defence contracting it turns out Heidi built the robots in the Swiss Alps, and it must have been there that ‘they’ infected them with a virus which the bots in turn imparted to NOVAC. Moral? Build your own robots. That is a new twist on Cold War paranoia, blame the Swiss neutrals. Boycott Lindt!
In the interest of science there is some concern about radiation. Everyone wears a badge that reacts to it as a warning of exposure. When the killer pot plant is approached, the technician wears a hazard suit and uses some long kitchen tongs, dropping the killer ingot into a lead lined box. Good. Trouble is Egan, his girl Friday, and several gawkers peer over the hazard suit’s shoulder to watch the proceedings from two feet away.
Later they recover from a little radiation by lying down with aspirin.
Much of the first thirty minutes is an exposition of the different parts of the facility and an introduction to the scientists who occupy them, leading the viewer to suspect that the culprit is among them. Indeed, Egan says that at one point. That was a nice bit of indirection.
The scientists are all just west of mad and most have highly suspicious accents. Each has the ego of brain surgeon and the personality of a CPA at tax time. They have accomplished such astounding things as burning balsa wood models. No wonder they think so highly of themselves. Although, come to think of it, that is more than some egomaniacs of my acquaintance have done.

IMDb metadata: 1 hour and 23 minutes, rated 5.2/10 from 2356 opinionators.
Rocket M1 is en route, that is Mars One. It left Earth more than two months ago and nothing has been heard from it since it was scheduled to land on M A R S! Then it appears in the sky, Earthbound. Putting new batteries in the remote control, ground control lands it by pushing a lot of buttons. The procedures of the operation are shown in some detail, including concern for radiation.

Turns out things did not go well on Mars. There were four crew members, but in return only two remain alive, and one of those has been slimed. Wow! The details emerge in flash back from Irish Iris, who is traumatised by the screenplay. Who can blame her. She is a many PhDed biologist who is consigned to screaming.
The original crew also included Jock, who is the working class comic annoyance, Doc who smokes his pipe thoughtfully, and male lead, Gerald Mohr, who made a career in B-movie land out of a vague resemblance to Bogie. And Iris(h) makes four.
The crew on Mars.
The players are all experienced and able. The direction is adequate, apart from the comic annoyance. Whenever he appeared the fraternity brothers cried, ‘Cut!’
They land on a very red Mars.

This is 1959 and there are Reds under the beds as it is. Why go looking for more? There is no answer as to the purpose of the expedition.
What they find is a red jungle. Donning overalls with scuba masks, they venture out into the red filter and find… a jungle. Iris collects samples galore, and one of them tries to collect her. While Gerald has a six-gun — that he loaded before cleaning in the NRA-approved method! — and a sound bazooka, that is so cheap it does not make a sound. It wilts the plant. (By this time the space suits made for ‘Destination Moon’ [1950] must have been worn out from use in so many other films.)
Earlier they had to spray a bat-rat-spider (who knows). They espy the spires of a city in the distance across a lake. Yep, a lake wherein dwells an ugly Republican Senator who devours Jock. A word of thanks came from the fraternity brothers.
Now they rush back to the ship. It seems stuck but they struggle for lift-off, much as I did this morning, and while so doing, a voice comes over the speaker, a pleasing baritone, that tells them to scat. ‘No destructive Earthling immigrants are wanted on Mars’ gardening and exterminating. ‘Stay on Earth and kill each other,’ says the voice.
In the whirl, Gerald got slimed and retires to his cot. Doc and Irish throw a lot of switches and blast off, without following the checklist of procedures, with the result that Doc is crushed, pipe in hand. Iris did buckle up and survives but is rendered unconscious. Gerald has a green arm. Is he an incipient Green-voting bore in the making?
All of this is told in a flashback that is far from flashy.
Once back on Earth, Iris figures out what’s wrong with his arm and kisses it better. The end.
Huh? Can Reds on Mars exclude freedom-loving Yankees from Mars? No way! Is Mars a metaphor for Eastern Europe behind the Red Curtin. Time for Radio Free Mars to go on the inter-planetary airwaves. Drop gardening manuals and blue blockers to open the eyes of the downtrodden. The blue blockers will cut the red mist. Some gardening will make the lush Martian jungles Yankee-friendly. This is the Martian Plan.
We never see the Martians, just their pot plants and house pets, and the distant spires painted on a matte. But who are they to say ‘Yankee go home, and stay there!’
The word is that it was done in ten days, using a new filter that sometimes makes Mars and the space suited crew look like cartoons. This look was unintended but there was neither time nor budget to do anything but go with it. Likewise the creature models were not quite what the director expected but he had no choice but to use them.
Speaking of the director, it seems that he and scriptwriter have since duked it out in conventions and screenings for thirty years over which one was genius responsible for the film. Really. Say no more.