Political theory and practice

IMDb: 1 hour and 24 minutes, 4.7 from 790 cinemitizens.
Pirates who steal a valuable space ship from a dock find on board a nine year-old boy who hid there when the raid started.

As required by the manual of ‘Star Wars’ knock-offs, the pirates are a mixed lot, one in a rubber mask, one a lady stick figure, one a cowboy without the hat, one New Age sensitive, and blah. Six in all, well, five because one is killed in the raid. One less pay cheque.
His death is one of the better scenes because it shows, unlike so many CGI shoot ‘em-ups the agony and the pain and the loss. However that mood is soon broken by endless games of Tron that follow.
Ben Casey is the leader of the pirates and at fifty-five he moves like he is older, though not wiser, or he would not be here. It is as painful to watch him as an action hero as it was to watch a sixty-five year old Dan Dureya do so in ‘The Bamboo Saucer’ (1968), reviewed elsewhere on this blog. The creaks were nearly audible in both cases.
To pacify the Brat Ben promises to return him home. This promise leads to the death of everyone on his crew, Ben included. That is the spoiler. The corporation from which the pirates stole the ship sends its thugs after the raiders. Because a reward is offered for the boy, entrepreneurial bounty hunters gather. Bigger villains would like the stolen cargo and so on and on.
There is no rapport among the pirates. They act like people waiting on a bus stop. The vacant boy remains vacant. The villains are cardboard, well, rubber masked in most cases while others are CGI robots, and look it. The CGI in space is, well, as boring as CGI always is. The stunts when our heroes roll around to avoid invisible lasers, look like a geriatric exercise class. Yes, that is right, by the way, there are no light beams for the lasers.
The fraternity brothers liked the late scene where Brat dresses Ben’s fatal wound with a glue gun. That is the Ben Casey touch! Let’s see the twelve year old ‘Good Doctor’ do that!
Wikipedia has it that Ben’s celluloid career took a hit because of his addiction to Dame Fortune. He was a gambler, and it consumed him. Didn’t he read the Fyodor Dostoyevsky story ‘The Gambler’ or meet Pete Rose?

Run time is 1 hour and 30 minutes of Dali time, rated 2.3 by 850 cinemitizens.
Verdict: guilty of a waste of celluloid.
When this title came up in research on another film, the fraternity brothers demanded it go to the top of the Watch Later List, and so it did. Their anticipation was raised by this tagline on one poster for the film: ‘It’s the battle of the sexes as savage planet women attack female space invaders!’

Slowly the hiss of deflation followed. There are no women to be seen on the pre-historic planet, despite several publicity advertisements featuring women clad in fur bikinis. Yes this was the Year of Raquel in ‘One Million Years BC’ (1966). Despite this let down there are some points of interest in this yarn. The redoubtable Wendell Corey has the lead and the ever present John Agar is the loyal and bored lieutenant.
They are leading a flotilla of three starships heading home after a long mission. The ships travel at ‘near optic speed’ but even so the ‘time dilation’ is considerable. Huh? Check with Einstein. While the explanation, given twice for the dunderheads at the drive-in, is that time is relative between speeding spaceships and rotating planets. While the crew will have aged 18 months on the mission, the folks at home will have aged 18 years. That is keeping it simple for the dunderheads reading this.
That explanation makes little sense but give credit where it is due. It is the only time in the Sy Fy thus far reviewed that time relativity has been mentioned. A C+ for trying.
On the note of trying, there is Comic Relief from which we get no relief. One of the crew makes crass jokes every ten minutes. The fraternity brothers had hoped the boiling mud would get him, but no such luck. Then the giant snake. Nope. Then the leaping spider. Not.
The Red Shirts again get it though; but it is unusual that in this film they have names, Owens and Harris. Another victim is Angel from ‘The Rockford Files.’
No less unusual, there are many women in the crew and none of the men make deprecating remarks about having them on board. ‘Can a woman really be a scientist, explorer, map reader, navigator, switchboard operator, or make tea?’ None of that. However, the women are treated as sex objects, yes, but their abilities are not questioned.
The tension among the crew is race, not gender. Yes, race. Some of the crew are Centaurians, apparently distant offspring of ancient Roman centurions, and they look Asian. Well, the Romans in Syria may have done what we are supposed to do in Rome. Some of the whitebread crew mutter about the barbaric Centaurians. The only specimen of this race we see on the ship freely wanders without about any evident duties overhearing these remarks and biting her knuckle in a barbaric way.
Then the third and last ship in the formation veers off course, and Admiral Corey goes into command mode. By the miracle of cross-cuts we see that some of Centaurians on the third ship have mutinied, though why and to what end it is impossible to judge or to care. Their rebellion caused the driver to blink and the ship hit a magnetic field and down, down, down it went to the planet Solaris. Stanislav Lem’s novel of that name was published in 1961. Did someone sneak a peak at it?
Corey decides to go after it. Note, the admiral slurs his words sometimes and the pea brains who comment on these things suppose he was drunk on set. Well, it would not the first time an admiral was sloshed, but in this case Corey’s biography on Wikipedia indicates his speech was effected by a stroke, and he died a couple of years later. He kept working up to the end because there is no pension plan for supporting actors and he needed the money.
John Agar has no such excuse for mumbling through his lines on the way to the pay cheque and the elixirs it would buy.
The rescuers land and discover many planet years have passed (but only a few spaceship months, see time dilation above). The alienated Centaurian, let’s call her Eve, on the crew takes off on her own to sulk, while a search party looking for the downed ship finds many perils and the Red Shirts pay the price, along with Angel. Regrettably, Comic Relief survived.
The editing is so badly done it is quite impossible to figure out what the search party is doing apart from tripping over props, as its number dwindles. Are they searching for the downed ship? For survivors from the downed ship? For descendants of the survivors? For inhabitants? For a McDonalds? For a better script? No luck.
Eve succeeds where the search party failed. She finds someone, whom we shall call Adam. He looks Asian, too. They get on well together. Ahem. He is a sensitive prehistoric planet guy who has kept his deceased parents from the mutiny ship frozen in clear ice blocks in his cave. Eve does not find this odd.
They continue to get on well together, while the search party number further dwindles. Then Adam and Eve are attacked by the barbarians who live on the planet, and slo-mo replay by the fraternity brothers found that they were all men. Not a bikini in sight. Much confused editing follows. This attack lasts about thirty seconds. No doubt timed for minimum payment to the two attacking extras.
The theme within the adventure thus far was race and racism, Class. Again unusual for the genre at the time, though 1966 was in the midst of the U.S. Civil Rights movement, and the year ‘Star Trek’ appeared with his ecumenical approach to race and nation.
Now pay attention because a spoiler is coming, and it will not be repeated but, yes, St Peter has it on the final examination.
The admiral gives up on finding Eve and the ship takes off leaving her behind with Adam. Got it so far? You got it.
Corey drones in the ship’s log that this blue planet shall be entered into the galactic charts as ‘Earth,’ and the camera pans over a globe with the Florida peninsula dangling. Did Erich like that or what! Adam and Eve were aliens. Why he chose to call it ‘Earth’ and not ‘Blue’ or Yuck’ is not stated.
Which was the worse crime to Alabama audiences, the fraternity brothers wondered? That Adam and Eve were aliens or that they were Asians. That was an entertaining thought.

The IMDb metadata is: 1 hour and 18 minutes of Dali time, rated 2.7 by 1054 who admit knowledge of it.
Verdict: only for the very determined viewer.
Cosmonauts landing on Venus encounter dangerous creatures and almost meet some sexy Venusian women who like to sun-bathe in rocks in 1970s hip-hugging skin-tight pants and seashell brassieres. Sounds better than it is.

How could this be? ‘Why didn’t NASA get there first,’ demanded the fraternity brothers? Good question. The answer is that it is a Roger Corman production. That fact explains the inexplicable.
Corman bought the USA rights to Soviet films because they were cheap and the Sy Fy ones had good space flight effects. He then industriously dubbed them, edited them, cut-and-pasted them, added new sequences, omitted footage and from one Soviet film he got two and sometimes three D-pictures. D is for the Drive-In market. In the course of these exercises he hired impoverished Film School students like Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich to do the work for the experience, not the money.
In this case the original was ‘Planet of Storms’ (1962) or ‘Planeta Bur’ in the original Commie, reviewed elsewhere on this blog. In it a multi-national crew sets down in a forbidding Jurassic Park with a giant robot and stumble around from one perilous situation to another.
Being members of the NRA, they tote six-guns and blast much of the local flora and fauna. They speculate that there may have once been a civilisation on this planet, but now long gone, though the wind, which somehow they hear through their fishbowl helmets and inside their cute little hover craft, sometimes sounds like a woman’s voice. If so, it is no woman the fraternity brothers want to meet.
This was Corman’s cue to add about twenty minutes of footage, interspersed throughout the film, of ‘Bay Watch’ inhabitants who slowly become aware of the invaders and think bad thoughts about them. The leader of this rocky beach party is Mamie van Doren who dons a chef’s hat when she is really mad. There are seven or eight women as described above who stare vacantly at the camera while they communicate via the telepathy of voiceover. There is no sound technician needed, and the women cannot act but they can stare vacantly.
Likewise much of the early going for the cosmonauts is voiced over to set the scene. Dubbing is more expensive than a voiceover.
Among the casualties of the cosmonauts shot-em up is a rubber bird that the women worship.
God is dead.
This causes them to put a hex on the invaders and a big storm blows up as a result. Mamie puts on the hat and the storm gets worse for the Cosmo readers, while for the women it remains California.

The Soviets just barely make their escape, leaving behind the big robot who had forgotten the laws of robotics and tried to save itself at the expense of its human companions. Bad Bot!
The cosmos and the prehistoric women never share a frame together.
The women find the remains of the robot which was disabled by the lava flow of an IOS update gone wrong and gather to worship it. On the Left Coast they will worship anything, Jerry Brown, Zinfandel, alfalfa, and a selfish scrap heap that once was a robot.
This film seems to have been the high point of MvD’s career, topping even ‘The Navy versus the Night Monsters’ (1966).
No doubt it was great fun pulling all this together, but not so to watch it. However, in reading about it, I discovered a whole cache of films about Prehistoric Women! The fraternity brothers have insisted this genre be explored in the coming weeks. At the top of the list is ‘Women of the Prehistoric Planet’ (1966) because it features the man who never said no to a bottle or a part, John Agar. aka Mr Shirley Temple.

IMDB data: 1 hour and 38 minutes, rated 5.5 by 31,661 pre-pubescent boys,
After many months on Mars, the crew of the Irish Space Commission are packing up for a rendezvous in nineteen hours to return to Earth. The digits on the clock flip. (Clocks don’t tick anymore.)

Wait! Irish in space? Well the production was partly funded by the Irish National Lottery and directed by an expatriate Irishman who will never return to Eire. Plus the logo on the gear is ISC. Nothing gets past the fraternity brothers.
The set-up in Act I is good. There is a large and mixed team that represented the variety of Ireland, though no one mentioned James Joyce. Having been on Mars for six months, they are tired, care-worn, testy, and eager for the return flight. The gear and procedures have verisimilitude. Jordan once again doubles for Mars as it did in ‘The Martian (2015) and ‘Mission to Mars’ (2000), both reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
But…., yes, there is a big ‘But’ coming. The production team evidently thought getting to Mars, landing on Mars, surviving on Mars, doing science on Mars, leaving Mars, making it back to Earth, that all of this is boring. So instead of teasing out the drama implicit in the list above the film swerves to a creature feature. Oh hum. This is Act II.
Turns out in the last hours, one of the crew out spelunking, finds life, a microbe, which infects him and goes on to infect others, turning them into Zombies! Sometimes they remain in their space suits and sometimes not as they wander the Jordanian desert. These Zombies want company, and get it by infecting others. Is this a case of the selfish gene?
Becoming aware of the microbe, the leader the mission gives all kinds of orders that no one obeys. It reminded this writer of trying to get the fraternity brothers ready for Monday. Pointless.
Needless to say this ineffectual leader is one of the first to turn, first dead, then animate again! That is the nature of the zombie, despite the liberties taken by many scriptwriters.
With all the yawning, I lost count of the crew, but say Ten Little Indians. They all succumb but one who makes the rendezvous in Act III. Is he a carrier? That would surely explain the Living Dead Trumpettes.
Did the Irish Film Board recover any money on the Irish Lottery investment? The money was spent in England, in Jordan and in the USA. The fraternity brothers did not hear any Irish accents in the crew above chewing popcorn and slurping sodas.

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.