IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 30 minutes, rated 5.2 by 712 generous cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: UK (Wales).
Verdict: Oh Hum.
Tagline: B for boring.
We know they are scientists by their white coats which protect their clothes from stains while monitoring a radio telescope. Photons leave such a mess. These astronomers are bullied by a cartoon paymaster general who never wears a uniform and has uniformed military police (Red Caps) to open doors for him.
They get an SMS from Andromeda (and none of them has seen The Andromeda Strain [1971]) so they click on the link which gives them the directions to build, evidently from materials lying around, a super deluxe super computer in return for their banking passwords. (No they haven’t seen The Forbin Project [1970] either.) Even as this Lego project is going on the number of white coats is being reduced by deaths. Get it!
The computer they have built wants company and before you can say STUPID these astronomers have cultivated a humanoid in a bento box who looks just one of them, now dead.
Enough! It gets worse without getting better. There is a gratuitous side plot about the evil CIA. What would screenwriters do without this straw villain.
Just as the scriptwriters and director know nothing about armies they seem to know even less about science. Surprisingly, that is common after a hundred and fifty years of free public education.
I longed for some convoluted but amusing AI subtitles as relief from the pompous but trivial dialogue. The solution was to turn the sound down…a lot. Some of the photography of Wales is good but has nothing to do with the plot. Yes, I know the plot puts it in the Yorkshire Dales, but shooting location credits says Wales, so there!
Otherwise the camera work is monotonous with one headshot after another, so close up that one sees inverted hairs, acne spots galore, cocaine spots, and some pores that need purgation. At other times it is cinéma vérité jerky or even freeze frame, very distracting in many cases. Most film-school projects have better camera work.
Apart from so many unnatural deaths there is some ambiguity about what is going on, but that is obliterated by the persistent cartoonish representation of the mufti general. And of course the male lead is a high school stereotype: so brilliant that others abide his adolescent irresponsibility, so unorthodox that no one knows what he is doing, so handsome beneath the designer (get a new designer!) peach fuzz all the women fall before his myopic gaze, and so underwritten as to be a cipher.
The best thing about it is that it does not have Stephen Seagal in it. Admittedly, that is always a major plus. Sorry Fred, but that’s the truth. The 1961 television series was far more interesting. but does not now seem available. The reconstruction is, well, a poor thing.
IMDB meta-data is 1 hour and 17 minutes of runtime, rated 5.6 by 315 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
DNA: Soviet
Verdict: Melancholy.
Tagline: TMI or TLI.*
A craft on a deep space mission is trapped in the gravitational field of an iron star and cannot escape. Since they are stuck the elderly captain decides to answer a distress signal that comes from a planet in the iron star system, where they find one (or is it two other ships, it being hard to tell in the murk) and they are set upon by a cannibal cloud, suffering casualties, including the captain’s squeeze. Remember the cloud from The Wall (1967), this is its evil twin.
Meanwhile, back at HQ chaps with big chins dressed for Greco-Roman wrestling babble about compressing time. They watch a girly dance, sad to think those babes were long since dead before the video traversed space to reach them. Huh? The sun shines, the waters lap, everyone smiles all the time. It is exhausting to watch all this good humour. They seem only sightly interested in the fate of captain and crew.
Meanwhile, back at the Iron Star the crew finds fuel on the downed ships and pirate it to power their way out of the gravity grip and return. Hooray! Aged captain decides he has to live with the painful memories of this expedition, despite the suggestion of the on-board medic (who wears a crash hemet!) that she erase his memory.
The design, art work, and sets are marvellous. It looks like a considerable investment for what then seems to be a truncated movie. Was it intended to be the first episode of a series? Some reviewers entertain that speculation. Certainly there are many unexplained references like the Great Ring, Station 57, that medical helmet, and what’s for dinner? None of this is helped by the AI generated subtitles.
Those sets and designs would have attracted that film cutter-extraordinaire Roger Corman, but he seems to have missed this one.
What traps me is an iron sofa. A near approach and I am pulled into its gravitational field with little chance of escape for the next hour. Best to stretch out and accept my fate.
Of Beards and Men (2015) by Christopher Oldstone-Moore
Goodreads meta-data is 352 pages rated 3.65 by 165 litizens.
Genre: History.
Verdict: Occam did not do it!
Tagline: Male-Patterned History.
To beard or not to beard, that has often been the question. Whether it is nobler, sexier, scarier, holier, smarter, easier on the skin and chin to have a beard or not to have a beard. Or just more manly to be bearded.
In answering these momentous questions, men have turned to god, to science, to politics, and to women. They have also cast sidelong glances at each other.
If god gave us beards, then we are meant to have them, that is one recurrent school of hirsute thought. Another is that shaving is an act of obeisance to god. Is the beard natural, or a penalty for the fall from Eden? And so it goes. Priests have promoted conflict over this divide for millennia. Even the peace-loving Amish have fought over this question though the most persistent and violent these days seem to be the rabbis and imams.
The science is no less mystical. The beard has been related to – sit down and brace reader – sperm, muscles, and brains by hundreds of savants. Autodidacts like Caesar reasoned that when he was going bald on top, if he pulled out all the other hair on his body starting with his face, the hair would grow back on his head, so he plucked away, including [use your imaginations]. Dopey, yes but no dopier than many scientific explanations, see the reference to sperm above.
Just when scientists settled on one explanation or another for face hair, an adventurer would find nearly hairless indigenous men in the New World or apes with hair everywhere except faces to say nothing of bearded ladies. The wheel of explanation had to be spun once again, and again. Hygiene came into the question in the Twentieth Century. Did the beard harbour germs, parasites, or illegal immigrants?
Adolf Hitler, an exponent of the moustache, experimented with several different looks early in his career. The walrus moustache of a Bismarck was out, identified with the long-ago past. The spiky moustache of Kaiser Wilhelm was out, being identified with defeat. To be clean shaven was a sign of modernity, discipline, and the future to be sure, but the moustache yet retained a certain martial quality that he wished to evoke. Advised by his lifelong bromance and sycophant Joseph Göbbels, Hitler settled on the toothbrush mo. That toothbrush moustache more or less died with him. No one else wants to recall him, evidently, for not even dedicated Neo-Nazis can be seen with one. His mo is now identified with failure, too.
Although he was moustachioed, Hitler decreed his followers, including the army, be clean shaven modernists. Face hair was regarded as Jewish, Bolshevik, Slavic, or Gypsy. Not good. After the Night of the Long Knives, no other Nasty sported a mo. That shave was final.
Those Bolsheviks grew and shaved sideburns, goatees, beards, mono-brows, and moustachioes to elude Czarist police. No disguise could protect them from each other.
Stimulated by some primal memory of ferocious cavemen, generals have sometimes concluded that a bearded soldier is more frightening than a shaven man, and ordered the troops to grow a beard. Regiments of Napoleon’s cavalry were so ordered, with the further specification that the beard be long, glossy, and black. Not every horse-soldier could meet this standard and the entrepreneurs descended with black wax, false beards, and beard extensions that could be stuck on for parades and inspections. One regiment of the French Foreign Legion continues that tradition.
Later, shaving became a sign of military conformity and discipline. It was also an indication that the soldier had been near soap and water to keep clean. Though even then generals themselves often kept at least a moustache to evoke the primitive warrior.
Side Bar: In many creature feature films the monster is usually hairy. Are there any smooth-faced monsters on film? Submit answers below.
When King (1824-1830) Charles X in the French restoration turned the clock back to before the Revolution, the resurgent Catholic hierarchy, thrilled to be back bossing others around, ruled that shaving was god’s law. This edict was largely a reaction to all those bearded Protestants in the North. Chas X was hard to take seriously and soon on the Rive Gauche, in the student quarter (where I once lived for six months), it became an act of defiance to let it grow. Royal police arrived to fine the hairy, who then appealed to the courts. One case turned on the definition of a beard, for the defendant claimed he had forgotten to shave, been too busy to shave, had broken his razor and that stubble was not a beard when it came to paying a fine. In the modus vivendi that followed moustaches were accepted. They sprouted all over the Left Bank, and have recurred with each new generation of self-styled protestors. A similar story played out in the 1960s Stateside, during the Vietnam War. Hair everywhere was the norm for many against the army buzz cut and sub-dermal shave.
The last U.S. Presidential candidate to sprout face hair was…? New York Governor Thomas Dewey in 1948. He had a pencil moustache that was much discussed, especially by women. His wife proved exceptional in that she liked his mo but most others, as questioned by pollsters seeking the big news, did not. His mo was subjected to the intense and trivial attention that journalist still reserve for women, as when it was international news that the leader of the French Socialist Party appeared at reception in D.C. in flat shoes. Quelle horreur! Both French and American media had a feeding frenzy on that.
The last president to be furry? Go on, guess! Howard Taft (1908-1912) and his immediate predecessor Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1908). If a moustachioed Clark Gable had run for office, well he might overcome the hair barrier.
Mrs Dewey is not the only woman to rule on beards. Psychologists, social and not, have conducted endless experiments to see if a beard makes a man more or less attractive to women. As with much such research, the permutations of method are ingenious and meaningless. Our tax dollars at work. As with all social science the results are yes, no, and maybe.
There are also a few words on the carefully curated, meticulously cultivated Hollywood stubble look. It is a kind of a peach-fuzz version of the aforementioned Clarke Gable. (Gable, by the way, shaved his moustache and joined the Air Force in 1942 where he flew combat missions. He had no need to prove anything with a mo.)
The high priests of the gay fashionistas have ruled and misruled on face hair ad nauseam.This is followed by the rabbis and imams ruling on beards which is told in piteous detail. Like Hotspur they summon, but….who cares?
The book ends where I began. The return of the cheek fuzz today is an effort to assert manhood in an age when gender roles have been questioned, changed, made fluid, or otherwise challenged. The one thing a man has left to mark and make him a man is a beard. Pathetic I know, but that makes sense to me.
I had hoped for something about the evolution of shaving from dry blade to the micro-electrics today.
I wondered if Montesquieu had anything to say about beards and climate, but not enough to look for myself. Likewise the effect of the mass armies of 20th Century, setting the norm to shave in the name of hygiene.
In the French Army a grunt is called a ‘poilou,’ a hairy one. Explanations for its origin are vexed. One is that the mass conscription of World War I cleared the countryside of men who sported bushy mo’s as a token of masculinity like the stubble of today. The printing presses of the era spread the image and word far and wide. Another takes it back to Napoleon’s hussars who were as hairy as Twentieth Century hippies. Think Abbie Hoffman on horseback with a sabre. Scary, right?
Occam’s razor suggests that there was little shaving in the trenches. Whatever its figurative origin it became literal there.
I read this in the hope of finding out something about beards in Renaissance Italy of Machiavelli’s time. There is a reference that I will follow up but nothing in this book bears on my interest.
Kdo chce zabít Jessii? (1966) (Who wants to kill Jesse?)
IMDb meta-date is a runtime of 1 hour 20 minutes, rated 7.2 by 1099 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Comedy; Phylum: Zany.
DNA: Czech-o-Slovak.
Verdict: Droll.
Tag-line: Freedom for dreamers!
Dr He is plagued by problems at work and to relieve his frustration he reads the silly comic strip on the back of the technical magazines he has been ransacking for ideas which comics involve a blonde Amazon named Jesse, thwarting a Superman villain and his six-gun totting Subman associate with her mysterious gloves.
Meanwhile his wife, Dr She, is a medical researcher who has devised a means to monitor and edit the dreams of sleepers. Somnolentology can be used to make citizens work harder, better, and happier for the good of all. (Uh?) Did this discovery inspire the 2009 Hungarian movie 1 reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
There are sceptics about her device, so while Dr He dreams of the Amazon’s anti-gravity gloves that could solve his work problem, Dr She attaches her device to this sleeping head. She recoils at the sight of the Amazon in his dream, not realising that her attached device projects the dreams into the world, and Dr She storms off in a jealous rage as Dr He wakes up, even more confused and distressed than usual to find the Amazon is now a reality, as well as the two villains.
So far, so screwy, but wait there is more. All three of the cartoon characters communicate only in speech balloons. Cute. At one point, one of the speech balloons has to be turned so it can be read.
A crazy pursuit follows, up and down buildings, flying through the air, diving into sewers, destroying a lecture hall at Charles University (where I gave a talk once), all to get those gloves, followed by ever more Keystone police and officials. In the midst of this melée Dr He realises how the gloves work. In between scrapes he manufactures a pair of such gloves.
Amazon sees Dr He as her saviour, embroiling him ever more in her escapades to defeat Super- and Sub-man who are so two-dimensional that they cannot be reasoned with, bought off, or reformed. Much chaos follows, and much implied social criticism of the mindless routine of bureaucracy and of institutionalised petty corruption does too. Remember Closely Watched Trains?
Dr She blames him for dreaming of them, and Dr He blames her for objectifying them (per Hegel). Meanwhile, the cartoon characters continue their struggle over the those gloves.
It is fun to watch. ‘Zany’ is the right word. Nothing makes sense but the pace is so fast there is no time to Tsk, tsk. There are well-placed early hints about what is coming, say with the flies, and some nice sight-gags like the doctor smoking a cigar during a medical procedure. The characters are likeable. Even the Super and Sub villains are only acting the way they are drawn, right Jessica Rabbitt?
We escape reality in our dreams but when our dreams come true we are right back in reality! One of the toons does declare ‘Freedom for Dreams!’ While courtroom judge denounces free dreaming and demands the full weight of the law be applied to dreamers to maintain the social order. For more on this circle see the entry on the Hungarian film 1 (2009) elsewhere on this blog. Maybe dreaming was one escape from the heavy hand of communism.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 26 minutes, rated 6.6 by 77 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy FY; Species: Nuke.
DNA: Brazil.
Verdict: Didactic.
Tagline: Chernobyl next!
Leaks, mishaps, explosions from nuclear power plants have poisoned the earth of the Earth. Surviving humanity has retreated to underground hives. One such nest is in Brazil, which had embraced nuclear power with enthusiasm and the low bid contractors did the rest, no corner went uncut. Remember Homer Simpson worked in a nuclear power plant!
For oxygen supply and solar power, periodic forays to the surface are necessary, one scientist who performs this routine maintenance begins to realise that the crisis has passed and the surface is no longer dangerous. He tries to tell his superiors, who (1) don’t believe him (saying he is stir crazy), (2) don’t listen to him (because he shouts), and (3) discredit his data with 15-minutes of Google clicking. (4) Pox News weighs in, calling him a woke liberal snowflake in Brazil. Case closed. Remember Plato’s Cave?
He discovers that some others share his misgivings about the current arrangements, and they begin to plot…something. Their secret is safe with AI.
For some reason it suits Pox News to keep everyone else in the hives. I didn’t fathom that at all. The A.I. generated subtitles didn’t help, and the acting ranges from the blank recitation of lines to shouting for no apparent reason, though it seemed a surprise for most inhabitants to realise the very same scientists who run the hive are the ones that devised and applied nuclear energy, and so are responsible for the catastrophe (I think). It all seemed rather preachy about the evils of nukes like the climate change priests of doom today who never tire of hearing their own voices prophesying fire and brimstone for us all.
The hive is well realised with a couple of corridors (that reminded me of the Soviet nuclear bunker I once toured in Moscow) and lots of computer screens that in 1980 would have had novelty value.
Ok, ok, it sounds a lot like THX-1138 (1971) now doesn’t it, right down to the uniform white clothing. (Don’t these people ever eat soup?) Well yes it does. But there are no enforcers here nor did I get any sense of waist-down rebellion per Orwell. Maybe it was too subtle for me. A lot is.
IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 39 minutes, rated 5.6 by 493 cinematizens
Genre: Sy Fy: Species: Time Travel.
DNA: Korean, South.
Verdict: Kaboom!
Tagline: Trans-genre!
In the not too distant future a group of very young researchers in a deep-sea laboratory work on a time machine. (Someone should have told them about clocks.) The lab is astride a Blue Hole near the Marshall Islands because gravity in a Blue Hole ‘behaves differently.’ (So much for science.) The project is funded by a Russian oligarch in a wheel chair.
(1) Contrary to one reviewer, the Marshall Islands are in the middle of the Pacific, no where near Belize in Central America. (2) Is the duty free shopping in the sovereign micro-state of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (Pop. 58,500) good? (3) Why is a Russian funding SOUTH Koreans? What do NORTH Koreans think of that?
The Russian wants to send them into the future to bring back a cure for wheelchairitis. The lab is expensive and the Russian may have a hidden agenda, hidden at least from the subtitles. The scientists isolated in the lab look like four high school students and two teachers who all seem self-conscious about the age difference among them.
Via a zoom meeting with no lag, no drop-out, no incomprehensible error message, no black screen, no loss of synchronisation, no nasal shots (see, it is fiction) the Russians gives the submerged Korean crew a deadline. They travel a minute into the future. BFD.* I do that every 60 seconds without spending a ruble. The Russki wants more or he wants his rubles back. So they try a desperate gamble on the as yet untested equipment to go for a 15-minute projection into the future. That would be enough for proof of concept, and in such a short space of time, what can go wrong? [Psst, check the script.]
Two of them strap into the telephone box and the others push buttons. Everything gets convoluted after this and the genre changes from sort of Sy Fy to Total Disaster when the Kimchi hits the fan.
Spoiler Alert! Go further at your own risk!
It takes a lot of energy to project that Tardis box and sending it off drains the tanks, then it returns with a mighty jolt that destroys the lab before the SSRN Seaview with Admiral Harriman could get there.
The characters react in the way any well-trained, highly selected, wholly dedicated small elite group of individuals would do: they run amok, blame each other, blame Hillary, look for Hunter’s lap top, cry foul, eat canned food, smash computers which give the wrong answers, admire raging fires while keeping the sea water out, keep the sea water out while admiring the raging fires, inhale noxious chemicals while admiring the fire, recover from X-degree burns, beat up on each other with handy steel bars…this spectacle goes on at Hollywood length.
They should have tried Joe’s cocktail shaker from As Time Goes By reviewed on this blog.
The Ground Hog Day-repeated mayhem is as boring as it is exhausting to watch. None of the characters is developed enough to care about, despite an earlier scene of guitar strumming which was supposed to humanise one of the mannequins in the crew. It didn’t work.
But maybe I missed the subtlety of it all. The version I watched had AI English subtitles with the dialogue dubbed in Russian over the Korean, a combination that distracted me.
*All right, already when Joe Bogart time travelled back a minute from 10:26 it was a big deal in a small way. See As Time Goes By reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 40 minutes, rated 7.6 by 203,000 layabouts.
Genre: Sy Fy
DNA: Anglo
Verdict: Where’s Dagwood.
Tagline: [I forget.]
It’s all pretty mysterious, but Auriole Zen wakes up in Gotham City and concludes he is an amnesiac killer. Seemed obvious at the time. (See Sherlock Holmes The Woman in Green [1944].) He scoots before John Law arrives in the form of — wait for it — Inspector Bumstead, known as Dagwood to me.
The parenthetical reference above is relevant because most of the dark setting is 1940s: fedoras, ash trays, wide lapels, automats, cars, trench coats, and cold water walk-up tenements. Yep.
All of this is presided over by men in Gestapo coats and pancake makeup led by Francis Urquhart under a ton of makeup in a latex suit. Round and round it goes.
By some means or other, Zen and Dagwood team up, brokered by Mrs Zen. They find out Neo was right though his movie has not yet been released.
A great deal of eye candy with very little plot. Water is mentioned as crucial and then…forgotten. Yes, I got all the guff about the experiments and it made no sense. Ask Neo next year.
I saw a few refugees from more diverting material like Popov from Loveboy.
The doctor seemed laboured and superfluous, but we viewers are like that. Opinionated.
Yes, I know it is supposed to be about dreams, memory, and reality. If we don’t remember it, did it happen? If we do remember it, did it happen? Are our memories real or not? Does it matter? All very Marcel Proust, but — pssst! — no one seems to try very hard, say by writing things down, or cutting a hole in a sock, or breeding mayflies. Or even reading a book or eating a madeleine.
Roger Ebert waxed lyrical about it, both the look and content. Hmm. Not convinced myself.
The Gotham Tourist Board, by the way, claims the sun does shine there. Some times.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 36 minutes rated a measly 5.5 by a paltry 157 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Alien incursion
DNA: Strine.
Verdict: More!
Tagline: Play it!
A sun bleached surfer boy with a board travels 800 miles into the desert (near Broken Hill, again) to keep an appointment made for him twenty-five years ago (when he was born). That’s odd, but wait, there’s more!
Joe Bogart crash landed his extraterrestrial bar and grill smack dab in the middle of nowhere, 800 miles into the desert. Can this proximity be a coincidence? Hardly. Screenwriters don’t rely on chance.
Thanks to inhaling helium, this Bogart outdoes Robin Williams, spouting passages from films in the original voices lickity-split which explains a little, very little, of what is going on but which is fun to watch and identify, ‘my dear, if you give a damn.’ Meanwhile, the born again gloomy copper pursues some Mad Max wannabe’s led by a none too bright but half baked arch villain in spurs. Maybe the copper is so glum because he is pining for The Quiet Earth (1985) where he had even fewer lines.
There are many misunderstandings and much to-ing and fro-ing, but it always comes back to Bogart’s Bar out there in the desert.
The plots holes are many but there is too much pace to look back. When I caught my breath I listed these:
How did the baby survive unbeknownst to his father?
Where was the mother in all this?
Did the six count?
Where can I get a cocktail shaker like that?
What happened to the bow-tie wearing CSIRO man?
Did it hurt? (Hope so.)
Who cares? (Not me.)
And last but not least, was it that Strasser?
Despite these plot holes, it makes more sense than the ever so serious Incident at Raven’s Gate of the same year filmed in the same locale (at the same time?) with a similar storyline played entirely differently. And also used helium! Must of been on special.
As with Incident at Raven’s Gate this Australian outback is devoid of aborigines in any form.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours, rated 5.7 by 36 cinematizens.
Genre: SY Fy; Species: Musical; Phylum: Opera.
DNA: Sweden
Verdict: Bergman bleak.
Tagline: A Space Opera!
So static watch screen timer to be sure it is running because no one is inclined to move at first.
A group of leotard clad Swedes prepare to rocket off a dying Earth in 2038, despoiled by nuclear war, to join an established human colony on Mars, where they will live the Swedish Model so loved by Australian public intellectuals in the 1980s.
They prepare to immigrate by standing still and singing.
They board the rocket while standing still and singing.
The rocket goes off course as they stand still and sing.
Time passes. They stand still and sing.
More time passes: They stand still and sing.
The three week trip to Mars will last forever, as the next generation is born on the ship (with its endless supply of food, water, oxygen, Ikea parts). The party of eight thousand settles down to live our their lives in transit, rather as many Qantas passengers have felt at times. They take out their frustrations on each other. Situation normal.
The story started as an epic poem by Nobel Prize winner Harry Martinson so it is a science fiction poem of more than a hundred pages in the English translation. That is perhaps unique. On a long winter night, some one had the idea of rendering it as the libretto of an opera in 1959, which in turn sired this film, using the opera cast and most of its staging and direction. Lugubrious is the result.
He must be the only Sy Fy author with a Nobel Prize for Literature.
Beware! Killjoys can find the full text on line and insist on reading to you. It’s as preachy as a Green politician, and just as interesting.
It was remade in 2018, sharing the blame with Norway, and I can hardly wait to see that version.
Incident at Raven’s Gate (1988) aka Encounter at Raven’s Gate
IMDb runtime of 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated 5.4 by 568 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Alien incursion.
DNA: Strine.
Verdict: Dark, very.
Tagline: ‘It’s for you!’
In the trackless Outback (near Broken Hill whose energetic Tourist Board attracts film crews like flies) is a variant of Cain and Abel, two brothers, one wife. The older married brother is determined to farm the sand, while his younger brother plows here and there.
Since Younger did time in the Big Smoke, the local copper pins every crime and misdemeanour on him, but mainly stealing the town football trophy (that is Australian Rules football to you, Mate!).
This copper is nuts, by the way, and obsesses over Verdi operas day and night, when everyone knows Puccini’s music is better.
Assorted incomprehensible events occur that no one pays much attention to. Birds fall dead from the sky. A smouldering crop circle is cut into the desert flora and it seemed electrically charged. A house with an older couple in it implodes, killing them, and leaving behind… Yep, that’s right, the football trophy, which is found by another cop who is hard of hearing, and slow of thinking.
It opens at the Parks Radio Observatory tracking something entering the atmosphere and a scientist is sent to find the remnants. He is a midget and doubles as an ASIO agent (see Australiens for details of ASIO agents) wearing a tan, double-knit polyester safari suit.
The loco local cop harasses a bar maid despite her repeated efforts to brush him off. She dies at his hands. No one investigates.
Water seems to be disappearing from tanks but no one is interested enough to investigate.
The midget kills the hearing impaired cop, and no one seems much bothered.
The married brother goes nuts, spouting Sunday school phrases. His wife shoots him – dead. No one seems much bothered.
One of the two destroyed houses is rebuilt (and off camera I guess the five or was it six bodies are buried).
We are left none the wiser. By the way, this is an Australian outback devoid of aboriginals.
The telling is thriller style, that is, disjointed and confusing to cover plot holes and the lack of character establishment or development.
A critic — me — summed it up thusly, turgid, baffling, inexplicable, uneventful, and incomprehensible. Moreover, the lens cap was on the camera for much of the run time, offering muddy, unintelligible, obscure images of murk, darkness, inky blackness, and less.
The one man seems to have done everything from producing, directing, writing, camera work, and catering. No second opinion evidently was heard or heeded.
Still it made me appreciate better some of the other turkeys I have seen because I could at least see them.
