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.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 49 minutes runtime rated 6.9 by 1,200 cinematizens
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Quest
DNA: Québécois
Verdict: Tabernac!
Tagline: Questions? Action!
Reader Advisory: A longtime Radio Canada television parody of Star Trek–Red Dwarf spawned this ….misbegotten specimen. The 23-minute episodes are hard enough to watch but this prolongation is cruel and unusual. However, on with the show….
A group of misfits is the only hope for humanity!
This Frat House in space is led by the dim but decisive Captain who, with budget constraints, has made his own mechanical man with a very long extension cord for away missions. There are two women who do not scream. Iago is the science officer busy undermining the Captain. Don’t forget Bob who is not easy to forget, but it happens avec ou sans cheveux. Then there is Serge 6; don’t ask about Serges 1-5.
Their mission is to find a new planet for humanity to occupy since Earth is used up. The spaceship looks like the tuna fish tins that it is made from. To land on prospective planets they fax themselves down, and a scanner malfunction got Serge – see above.
There are many references to ice hockey in the terminology, especially the glory days of Gentleman Jean Beliveau and Blond Demon Guy LaFleur. The gear worn by the crew look like the hockey uniforms of Les Canadiens.
It is also replete with Québécois slang that the A.I. subtitler could not fathom, rendering much of the dialogue even more nonsensical than it is, and it is nonsensical to begin with. One example is ‘tatas,’ an idiom that means ‘idiots,’ but which the subtitles render as ‘goodbyes.’ And yes, ‘tata’ for idiot is a reference to English-speakers who say ‘Ta ta’ for goodbye. The humour is parochial and adolescent compounded by the subtitles.
Still the players and director inject plenty of energy into the proceedings. There is also some considerable humour as when the crew, off in deep space, discover….where all the stray socks from the wash have gone over the millennia. Truly an awe-inspiring moment! The rival captain who appears late in the piece with his can opener is none too subtlety portrayed as an Anglo.
In case of any uncertainty the maple leaf flag is everywhere, including underwear.
It was so big in Montréal that a sequel was made called Dans une galaxy près de chez vous 2(2008). The title indicates the anticipated audience would grasp that 2 follows 1, but nothing more complicated than that. There were rumours in 2019 of a ‘3.’ Tabernac, indeed! [Look it up.]
Im Staub der Sterne (In the Dust of the Stars) (1976)
IMDb meta-data is 1 for and 35 minutes runtime rated 5.4 by 399 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
DNA: Romania, Rumania, or Roumania
Verdict: Huh
Tagline: Did someone say Gulag?
It starts on the flight deck of a spaceship with no credits or preliminaries. After that fast start everything slows down.
The crew of four women and two men is commanded by one of the women who reminds them of the importance of their mission to save a planet from….? They don’t know what just yet but these six are planet savers – ah huh, in their baby blue onesies.
The women are young while the two men are not. One has gone pear-shaped and the other squints as he brushes his grey hair out of his eyes. These six are from the planet Cynro. Does that make them Cynrovians? Cynroese? … [I could go on…] They are bound for Tem-4. Evidently it usually only takes six Cynros to save a planet.
There is nothing to see when they arrive for the Tem-4s live underground. However Pocahontas drives up in a Legomobile to welcome them. Off they go to a reception where they learn their six year trip was for naught. The distress call was a mere test of a now obsolete radio system. Oh. Well time to go then. But no, before departure, they attend – in matching latex outfits – a frat party to end frat parties.
What follows is some repressed Romanian script-writer’s idea of a debauched western LSD party. It goes on and on, and then on. The Fraternity Brothers found it tame compared to Greek Row on homecoming Saturday night.
Meanwhile the Host is revealed to be (1) up to no good and (2) receiving orders over the earbud from Boss. The purpose of the party is to ensure that no more Cynroses come a-calling so they are drugged to forget everything except the need for colour coordination in clothing.
We meet the Boss having his sparse hair done. He is that script-writer’s idea of a homosexual without being too explicit. He is a little round guy who commands – well, it is fiction – the whole show. His thugs sport Roman tunics and have bulging muscles for women to ogle.
Being slow-witted enough to be U.N. Peacekeepers, the Cynrovians have at last figured out something is amiss. Instead of barking orders the Commander listens to what the others say, including Mr Suspicion who has been off on his own going where he was not supposed to go and seeing what he was not supposed to see. Gulp!
What he saw was a cast of scores of Romanian extras practicing for the Gulag by breaking rocks while being beaten by Nicolae Ceausescu. (See The Mole People [1956] for details.) By now the six Cynroites have read the script and realise that Host and Boss and their associates are from Tem-3 and have conquered Tem-4, enslaving the population to mine minerals to dye the Boss’s hair, or something. Should they intervene or just leave? Tough one. Crisis of conscience renders them numb. Me, too, by this time.
I voted for leaving, but they stayed when Host tried to sabotage their rocket, a low-budget shoot out of sorts follows. Boss is done for.
After explaining Bucharest fashions to the slaves, the Cynroists blast off.
Yes, it is silly. But it is also noteworthy for its omissions: there is no mention of Earth or Earthlings in a universe of humanoids irritating each others, nor are there any ray guns, nor hairy spiders, not a single scream from one of the women. It is notable for a lot of scantly clad women on Tem-4, for those matching onesies (inspired by ABBA?) worn by the crew, for a couple of crises of conscience.
No Yankee crew ever worried about blasting some strangers with a ray gun after stomping on a hairy spider or two while the damsels shrieked.
It is most notable of all for a female commander comrade in 1976 who does the job without either hysterics or histrionics!
The Fraternity Brothers kept rewinding to the scantily clad Romanians. I wondered about the slaps.
It is a pan red production spoken in German but with Czech, Serbian, Rumanian, East German, Polish cast and crew. For once Stanislaw Lem did not write the novel, screenplay, or lunch menu.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 48 minutes runtime rated 5.9 by too few cinematizens
Genre; Sy Fy; Species: Alien invasion.
DNA: Strine.
Verdict: More!
Tagline: Banana benders unite.
Brizzy and then all of Third-World Australia (except Tasmania) comes under an alien attack. The rest of the world including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, sits back to watch.
Strine, yer on yer own! (Except for Tasmania.)
But it’s personal for the lead howler of the pub band Titanium Turtles (occasionally, Turdles) and she fights back, screeching at the alien scum!
High energy! Breakneck pace! Laugh a vulgar minute! Part parody, part tribute, all fun. It’s lean and mean compared to the ponderous and pompous Blade Runner franchise. It is adolescent in its humour, lacking the subtle sophistication of Kath and Kim. What’s not to like. Note to self: Do not ride a bike during an Alien apocalypse, not even at the gym.
Also 20+ minutes too long in an endless end to accomodate the crowd funders.
A labour of love made on a shoestring, I ate it up with a spoon. If it had a commercial release I missed it. More’s the pity.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 57 minutes, rated 8.1 by 778,000 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy noir.
Verdict: all show, no go
Tagline: Eye candy
So many plot holes, so little time.
Let’s start where it does: 2019. As prophecy it starts with a failure. Los Angeles has its downsides but none such as shown here. A future LA would surely be Hispanic not Japanese/Chinese/Korean. While Edward Olomos is there to represent the Latino cause, this fine actor is wasted with a few lines and the inconsistent, and distracting, use of a cane. He did not need that cane on the Galatica, now did he.
There is no doubt the prime interest in the film, both in production and viewing, is the eye candy. The detailed sets are, well, detailed, but when all is said and done that adds zero to plot or character.
Speaking of character. They all seem like automatons. Rachel suggests Deckard take his own test in a throw-away line. Right on! He seems as mechanical as the others, going through the motions because…he has no choice, an automaton who doesn’t know it! If not, then why is there no choice. Did someone lose that script page about free will?
If twenty questions is the norm, as Deckard said, why did he continue up to a hundred with Rachel? [Because the script said so.] There is no interior logic, to paraphrase Max Weber.
While we are apparently to sympathise, if not identify, with the replicants, I kept wondering about the twenty humans they had killed in escaping. In this I was apparently alone, because no else seemed interested. While the cops want them caught, the cops do not want them caught badly enough to do anything about it themselves, apart from commissioning Deckard as a bounty hunter. What bounty is that?
Nor do these mass murderers ever resort to weapons.
By the way, how does Deckard make a living when not in movies? Sulking? Can’t be much money in that.
Rutty is just as underwritten. At least twice he waxes on about the things he has seen, but we get no idea of what those might have been, or why we should care, or, even, why he cares, that is, if he does. Do droids have cares? Did the scriptwriter like the line and put it in for no other reason. So it seems.
Given the incoherence of the screenplay, the acting is all the more impressive, even if it serves no purpose.
The version I watched this time is labeled as the Director’s Cut. Oh dear. He needs an editor who knows how to use the machine to splice film. Some of the cuts are mid-dialogue, mid-sentence, and in one instance mid-word, others are blunt and out of sequence it seemed to his naif.
Like many big productions, there is little in the story and much in the posturing. Though they feel no pain, the replicants are sentient and intelligent, do they then have rights? How do they differ from Sebastian’s toys? Are they vacuum cleaners with feelings? Do they meet the McNaughton Criterion? (Look it up.) That is one underlying issue that is never aired. Philip Dick’s story turns on these questions, which are here buried under bizarre makeup and detailed street scenes. Nor, by the way, is there ever any explanation of the title. Why is a replicant hunter called a blade runner? Why not a Repli-Collector or a Repcol or ….
None of this puts me in mind to watch the Tarkovsky-length Blade Runner 2049 (2017) which will probably be 2 hours and 44 minutes of mayhem.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 31 minutes, rated 6.0 by 519 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy (sorta); Species: phenomenology
DNA: Magyar.
Verdict: intriguing.
Tagline: Why the pear? Good question, Einstein.
Our story begins with a dowager purchasing a book which her obliging chauffeur will later read to her on this dark and rainy night. Bear that in mind.
This emporium specialises in antiquarian and rare books wherein, as it is being closed, another customer appears from the interstices of the shelves. Oh, well, a customer is a customer. He asks for an odd and unusual book. To expedite matters at this witching hour, the proprietor takes this enigmatic individual to the back room to search for the tome, where they find that every book there has been replaced by large white book called 1 (perhaps from the white library at MONA). What’s more, when, in confusion, they return to the front of the shop 1 has also replaced every book there, too. The customer seems bemused by this substitution but the owner is enraged, blaming the faithful manager, the mute janitor, the customer, and Hillary. He demands Hunter’s lap top be seized.
The flying squad from the Reality Defence Institute arrives to check this anomaly in the space-time continuum, lead by a detective whose harrowed face makes Harry Dean Stanton look like a fresh-faced teen. Harrow chain smokes and yells at his subordinates because he suspects this affair is the work of the prodigious Pole Stanislav Lem! Bingo! Juan Luis Borges has an alibi.
1 is a summation of one single minute as experienced by all 5 billion humans, reduced to statistical data, e.g., in the global minute there were 37,000 electrocutions – several of which are shown, including one no man wants to see. There is data on the number of rapes, which we also glimpse. And so on.
The white book is part talisman and part samizdat. It must be suppressed least its tabular data causes confusion and panic. Quite why incomprehensible spreadsheets would do that remains itself a mystery. Soon the newshound are howling. Knowing nothing does not stop them from baying and braying. Hmm.
Soon 1 is everywhere. Journalists go ballistic, as usual.
In an effort to contain the fallout, Harrow whisks all the witnesses away to seclusion in an insane asylum for psychological evaluation. (Catch the sledgehammer metaphor as it goes by.) Incarcerated, they deteriorate and sleep. The transformation of the proprietor, the manager, the janitor, and the customer is a tribute to the makeup and the actors.
In sleep these confined witnesses communicate and plot. Meanwhile, Harrow grows ever more erratic, and soon is replaced by an ambitious underling, and himself confined, as a witness, with the others and he, too, deteriorates, though further deterioration did not seem possible in his case, it occurs. Soon he joins the others in somnolent hijinks. Yes, I thought of Sleep Dealer (2007) from Mexico, too.
Wait! Perhaps this all is the story the chauffeur is reading to madame. Life is but dream, right Neo?
Like most, but not all, of Lem’s stories it is circular with neither development nor resolution. All trip and no arrival but at least the trip is not Tarkovsky-length. Nor does it smack of the contempt for the audience that Tarko specialised in for it does try to explain itself but just does not do it very well.
As with many films from the red and once-red world much of the incidental paraphernalia is in English as a visual disclaimer, e.g., the titles on the spines of the books, the posters on the wall in the asylum, the street signs to suggest this strange tale is Western, and in no way applies to or reflects on the Red, now Pink, World.
Wellington Paranormal it is not. The gravitas is heavy. Very.
For those who must know the only Hungarian I learned in our truncated stay in Budapest was goulash, although we did not eat any.
Babicky dobíjejte presne! (Recharge Grandma on Time) (1984)
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 41 minutes runtime, rated 5.7 by 129 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Czechoslovakia.
Verdict: [TBA]
Tagline: Be careful what you wish for.
Wife does everything with the home and two energetic sub-teenage children while Husband nurses his talent. Moreover, she works all day in a pharmaceutical lab and earns more money than he does as a violinist in a radio orchestra. She is desperate for help at home and when the Joneses next door get a robotic grandma so they can party day and night, such is his hostility to the comfortably middle class Joneses that he agrees to buy a battery-powered grandmother to best them.
Wife goes shopping for a top of the line model so they can outdo the Joneses. A 50-page questionnaire has to be completed so that eGranny can be programmed before it is delivered. ‘It will expand on that basic programming with experience,’ said the salesman. Because she does exacting work all day, completing the questionnaire defeats Wife and she goes to bed leaving husband to complete it alone.
While he wants to one-up the Joneses he does not take the task very seriously. Nor did he pay attention to her report on the sales representative’s explanation because he is a man and already knows everything. On the questionnaire he jots down answers more to amuse himself without thinking about it.
Comes the great day and the ever-smiling Granny arrives, charges up, and goes to work. She takes over control of everything, and more. Because Husband has talent, as he said on the questionnaire, he must practice. Accordingly, Granny awakens him at 4 a.m. to exercise that talent on the fiddle.
The eGranny imposes her will on the children to do and re-do their schoolwork to keep them quiet (for his practice). She prepares one exotic meal after another, as per his request because the exhausted wife made the same thing basic dishes every night. Granny serves them hot curry, liquid something, spicy this and bitter that, and other unidentified things from the Middle East, Latin America, South Seas. She vacuums continuously.
All that is bearable, just, but she also expresses his animosity for the Joneses and, by expansion, the Joneses’ granny-bot. Soon the two granny-bots are at war, cutting clothes lines, jamming gates, and then murdering pets. They try to turn off the granny-bot but her emergency battery power kicks in and she recharges herself. When they call the manufacturer they are told that everything the granny-bot has done is in the questionnaire. Oh. No refund.
The Joneses are also overwhelmed by their granny-bot, who has them out jogging at dawn, cleans the house until she wears out the vacuum, and insists that they have parties whether they want to or not. She is also aggressive to the other granny-bot.
The two bots fight it out and destroy each other. The end.
N.B. in this Czech film the husband’s mother, a real grandmother, is in the background but she seems to know how lazy and self-indulgent her son is, and steers clear of this debacle.
In return for freedom from drudgery, higher status, and self-improvement one must surrender freedom to the Granny-state. The children find the granny-bot unpleasant. Her touch is hard and cold. She is forever harassing them with a pleasant smile and sweet voice. Is this metaphorical social commentary or what?
This Czechoslovak film is absurd and satiric. There is a Ray Bradbury story called ‘The Electric Grandmother’ filmed in 1982 that is sappy. Did it inspire this movie? No soft focus here. It has some amusing moments but it is one idea stretched thin. And it is downright unpleasant with the pet murders. The acting offers no compensation.
No Czech words remain from my visit to Charles University.
