Category: Film Review

UFOria (1984)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated 6.2 by 498 cinematizens.  

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Comedy.

DNA: Area 51.  

Verdict: Engaging.

Tagline: Believe!

Combine one part charming drifter with another of cynical revivalist preacher, and season with a bored supermarket check out woman…and the result is… a story about love and redemption. It brought to mind Jean-Paul Sartre’s hymn of commitment. He who had so many and varied commitments. It matters less what you commit to than to commit to something to give your life (external) meaning, weight. Put on gravity boots to compensate for the unbearable lightness of being. Not very discriminating that, but when the polysyllabic verbiage is pared away from Sartre that is what remains. This is the same Sartre who committed to Fidel Castro, Leonid Brezhnev, and other Gulag architects.

Some of the preachers’ followers believe in Jesus, others in UFOs, a few in both, and the drifter declares his god-given right to believe in nothing at all.  The plot might as well have been lifted from Leon Festinger’s sociological study, When Prophecy Fails (1956).  

The players are marvellous – Shirley from Laverne days, Gus Grissom from The Right Stuff, and Harry Dean Stanton from too many to name.  Harry Carey, Jr and Hank Worden also deliver on cue in support.

The Search for Simon (2013)

IMDb meta-data runtime is 1 hour and 37 minutes, rated 4.5  by 145 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: UFO.

DNA: England.

Verdict: Winning.

Tagline: ‘The Apollo 13 tissues were a bad investment.’

Nerd king is obsessed by the disappearance of his younger brother thirty years ago when they were boys. He is a one-man Search for Simon Foundation.  Living off savings and lottery winnings, Nerd searches for the UFO that abducted his brother. Yes, abducted, what other explanation would there, Erich? 

He pays for information, travels the world to gather UFO data, tries to penetrate secret agencies…all in his inept way, much ridiculed by the pub-aholics with whom he plays Dungeons and Dragons for relaxation. 

Slowly engaging, a little charmer, somewhat serious, and finally ironic.  Compared to the much bigger budget A for Andromeda with the same DNA, this has plot and character and several twists and turns. 

The opening sequence…has little to do with what follows, just enjoy the tank ride. Be patient. 

One amusement after seeing a handmade film like this is reading the condescending reviews on the internet by the trolls who need to denigrate someone to forget why they have never accomplished anything.

La Casa (1976) The House

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 37 minutes, rated 5.2 by someone.

DNA: Spain.

Verdict: [Zzzzzzzz.]

Tagline: Inanity for one and all.  

Six of the shallowest characters ever filmed drink, eat, and copulate. Sounds better than it is. When not otherwise engaged, as above, they play Jeremy Bentham pinball machines.  Such glamour! Such luxury! Only the slot machines were absent from this Leagues Club tavern in the sky.

The millionaire host invited two other couples for a dinner that lasts forever, or so it seemed to this viewer, for his home is a space ship. Something the guests did not notice when they drove up and entered.  Nor did they notice its takeoff into orbit.  His plan is to wait out in orbit the radiation of a nuclear catastrophe. They run out of food but not cigarettes or whiskey or electricity.   

After reading this script, they begin committing suicide. 

It’s so bad only Stephen Seagal could have made it worse.  

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).  

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 18 minutes, rated 7.6 by 211,299 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: USA

Verdict: Superb!

Tagline: ‘They were invited!’  

It’s not often a big Hollywood picture features blue-collar leads but this one does and both actors rise to the occasion with compelling performances.  The inclusion of François Truffaut is a warm and welcome tribute to that magician of cinema.  The meshing of the storylines is good and it steers just clear of turning the army into buffoons. Though the use of dust is straight out of Rage (1972).   

I did find some of this version attenuated. Wasn’t sure about that Indian chanting.  Roy’s obsession with gardening went on too long.  The build-up to the final rendezvous is stretched and then the rendezvous is anti-climatic. No idea why it was so important to exclude those invited but to suit up those in red? Still I liked it that things were not over-explained in a Hollywood science way. It is just presented.

Memo: Returning the abductees is nice, but having taken them in the first place ruined not only their lives but those of their family, relatives, and friends.  Who do they sue for compensation?

Compared to Asteroid City (2023) this seems grown up with something to say about the mysterious of the universe that is said well.  

It is old news, I know but I came across it and watched it as a reminder that Hollywood can do more than produce bubble gum for and by prepubescent boys with arrested development. I know there is a re-released edited version which I will get to.

Phoenix (2014)

Runtime of 12 minutes 33 seconds. Not on IMDb.  

DNA: Deutschland

Genre: SciFi

Tagline: Fear the Books

Verdict: Big in Florida.  

An homage to Fahrenheit 451 (1966) which opens with the incineration of a tweenage reader. That should make it popular in Florida where capital punishment for reading soon will be enacted in the name of small government to go with the mandated gynaecological examinations for women travellers.     

A friends and family production that offers more, much more, than Asteroid City, despite, or perhaps, because of the latter’s multi-million dollar budget and genius director.   

6/45 (2022)

IMDb is runtime of 1 hour and 54 minutes, rated 6.9 by 1301 cinematizens. 

Genre: Comedy; Species: musical.

DNA: South Korean.

Verdict: Manse!  

Tagline: Winning isn’t everything.  

It takes nerve to make a comedy with K-Pop musical interludes set in the most heavily armed border in the world, the misnamed Demilitarized Zone, which has more than a million heavily-armed, highly-trained soldiers poised for action along its 250 kilometres length, separated by no more than four kilometres at any one place. The DMZ is itself extensively mined by the armies of both Koreas in disregard of the treaty and though it is forbidden by the terms of the treaty both sides patrol in it…at night and plant those mines. Meanwhile there are eyes in the sky overhead in geostationary low earth orbits and down below the ground are equally forbidden tunnels. There have been many shooting incidents in these environs only a few of which are ever reported. While there were escapes over, under, and through the Berlin Wall, there have never been any such breaches of the DMZ.

A winning lottery ticket brings together a microcosm of those million soldiers in that environment, four North Koreans and three South Koreans. To retrieve the ticket wind-born into the north, the ROKs (that is, Republic of Korea soldiers) plan a military operation: analyse the enemy, probe, assess, decide on tactics, prepare, train, equip for stealth, and engage.  But the KPAGFs (figure it out) have home court advantage.  

Twists, turns, irony, and so it goes.  Beneath the armies’ discipline, the suffocating propaganda, and cultural alienation of generations, they are all the same.  

It’s longer than my usual watch-time but it whizzed along with plenty of laughs, offering insight into the Koreas where I spent a few months once upon a time at Korea University. I made two visits to the DMZ, set foot in North Korea, and walked through one of those tunnels. The title above refers to the lottery ticket draw.

It echoes, deliberately it would seem, JSA (2000), a deadly serious study of the differences between the Koreas and the Koreans in the DMZ. Like this movie, JSA is entirely Korean, ignoring the elephantine US Eighth Army of occupation.

Simulacra (2018)

IMDb meta-data is 13 minutes runtime, rated – by -.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: Israel.

Verdict: Compelling.

Tagline: Gone is gone.

A scientist tries to recreate her dead daughter in a cyborg with mixed results, assisted reluctantly by another, surviving daughter.  It is a slow process, and then it goes awry.  

It is a short story of love-loss-love-and-loss…again. Not rated on the IMDb by any of the usual trolls. I came across it on You Tube (but not on Dust).  

Ascension (2000) Death on Saturn’s Moon

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 27 minutes, rated 4.5 by 98 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Noir.

DNA: Yankee.

Tagline: Here we go again.  

Verdict: By the numbers.

A burned out police officer arrives at an isolated mining dome on Saturn’s moon Titan in 2057 to investigate the disappearance of the manager. Since no one can survive outside the dome, the missing man is presumed dead. Neither of the remaining two miners seems much bothered by or interested in the disappearance. They are as indifferent to the fate of the manager as managers usually are to the fate of underlings.  

The pace is slow, the dialogue repetitive, but we all know the conventions. Officer has a backstory that emerges slowly and none too clearly.  However muddled that is, it is more than we ever find out about the missing manager, or the two surviving miners.  

Nothing is made of the locale. It could be in Alaska.  

It is better than some I have seen— e.g., Music of the Spheres (1984) — but…, well, that is a left-handed compliment.  However, it does not bristle with the ideas that Spheres had despite its amateurish execution.

Sial IV (1969)

IMDb meta-data is four episodes, each of 24 minutes, rated 5.4 by an unknown number of cinematizens.  

DNA: Swiss.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: post Apocalypse.

Verdict: Molasses.

Tagline: Do electric sheep dream of androids?

By chance an engineer survives a nuclear war in 1970 and when he is unearthed and revived it is 2145, he awakens to a brave new world deep underground where the few remaining humans have created androids to do all the lifting. He finds that he prefers the honesty of the ‘droids who cannot tell a lie rather than the dishonesty of the people who can.

That summary makes it sound more interesting than it is. The acting is stilted; the direction worse, and it goes downhill from there.The Creation of the Humanoids (1962) is the same sort of story told a little better. It is reviewed elsewhere on this blog.  

This future society is Sial and the sector is IV, ruled by…Machiavelli. Yep. This Machiavelli is played by the old hand Marcel Dalio (the croupier from Rick’s in Casablanca [1942], and many other films including Catch-22 [1970]). With that name Machiavelli in it, I had to watch it.   

It is very high brow with quotations from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Saint Just. Nothing is quoted from Machiavelli. 

Those who are bored by freedom from want and work are treated as though they are sick and cured by drawing their emotions off onto androids who are then destroyed. Maybe that explains the bad hair. Among the sick are those who want to be sick. Who resist leisure and happiness.  It is their right to be unhappy, to suffer, to fight, and to be killed! Yes, they are freedom fighters, who will fight freedom wherever they find it. Ayn Rand Libertarians all!  

The whole thing is as absurd as an episode of the Avengers of the period but without either the humour or Mrs Peel.  [Sigh]

It makes Australia’s own The Stranger (1964-1965) look snappy.  

Dalio’s own backstory story as a Jew escaping from defeated France is far more compelling than this program.