Political theory and practice

The Mysterious Wall (1968) (Tainstvennaya stena)

IMDb metadata is runtime of 1 hour and 19 minutes, rated 6.6 by 120 cinemaistas. 

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Red

Verdict:  Solaris before Solaris.  

Tagline: It’s a wall! It’s a cloud! It’s a dome! It’s a mystery!  

Opens with a vain TV host upstaging a panel of talking heads. So far so banal. The panelists don’t know anything but talk on.  So far so usual.  Could be on the ABC tonight, a poorly prepared journalist with a group of self-styled experts, a.k.a. public intellectuals, filling time. 

The subject is a mystery out there in the taiga, far, far away.  One of the scientist from the panel journeys there. Yep, he declares an hour later, it is a mystery. End.  Near Tunguska, you may ask? Dunno but that is implied.

The mystery is a wall in the title but not for the camera and in some of the subtitles (the only two words of Russian I mastered in our two weeks there were da and nyet) it is a cloud or mass of ground fog that in a blink appears, for a time, and then in another blink disappears right on schedule.

People who venture into the cloud get confused, have visions from their past that have been altered (I think).  The subtitles were hard to follow, the more so since I was doing a crossword puzzle at the time, and the video is very poor quality.  Even those near the wall get confused like this. Me, too.  In response the army has cordoned off the area in the tradition of science fiction movies, although the military presence seems to consist mostly one young officer.  

Through the haze of the film and the haphazard subtitles I never did quite follow the narration. There is a scientist on the scene with his wife, but since he is confused by the daydreams induced by the wall, he is supposed to be replaced by the scientist from the panel and return to Moscow for re-education in McKinsey managementese. However, he stays. Wall mystification is preferable to him, it seems, than another bout of McKinsey management.  Easy to sympathise with that.

The wall (or cloud, or fog, or sometimes dome) reappears like clockwork and covers several kilometres. Some suspect it is an alien intelligence trying to communicate with us and there are references to Mars and Martians strewn through the dialogue.  Finding intelligent humans is a long shot. Indeed it is pretty much all talk and no action and then it ends without exposition or resolution. 

See, just like Solaris.  

While the early scenes in a television studio would have been cheap to make, the later scenes in the snowfields would have been much more expensive, even if they were only a few miles from MosFilm HQ and not in the distant Siberian taiga. 

I always assume Soviet films had official approval, and so always wonder what the approving comrades thought they were getting and what they thought of what they got. Solaris, Stalker, and now The Wall, are each a case in point.   

Der schweigende Stern (1959) (The Silent Star)

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 19 minutes, rated 4.6 by 3000 cinemaistas.  

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: Mixed.

Tagline: Geriatrics in space.

It is a Soviet-Polish-East German co-production, known to American audiences as the First Spaceship on Venus. This latter knowledge is because Roger Corman bought the Western rights (cheap) and re-cut it into a Cormanite film with that title. I saw that a while ago and when I noticed this, seemingly original version on Kanopy I had a look. Yep it is the original with the actors speaking German and Russian.   

Liked the start with the long fall out Tunguska Event of June 1908. Unusual premise intrigues.

It has the standard tropes of the genre in that day: a square-jawed leader, a meteor storm, an Extra-Vehicular Activity episode, equipment failure, one woman in the crew.  Moreover it fits into a sub-genre that had been well mapped by then: the aliens destroyed themselves with nukes, see Rocket Ship XM (1950), This Island Earth (1955), Forbidden Planet (1956), and many others. But it lacks other tropes like giant spiders, hairy monsters, or any other creature in the feature. Moreover, these scientists seem interested in doing science, while in U.S. science fiction the astronauts, more often than not, found the whole thing boring and couldn’t wait to go home.  

No one smokes. Again in contrast to Anglo movies right to UFO.

There are several other important differences. In many American films featuring space flight in the 1950s there often was one woman in the crew. (Mike Pence always worried about that. See if you can figure out why) That, however, did not reflect any recognition of merit.  She was there almost invariably for the men to fight over, while they express repeatedly amazement that a woman could be a woman and a scientist at the same time, as though two beings occupied the same body. Admittedly, Italian science fiction movies set the international standard for this stupefaction. In this movie she just gets on with her job and the men leave her alone. Fact or fiction? Don’t these Reds have enough red corpuscles?

Moreover, in the Yankee spaceships there were only Yankees. In this Soviet movie and several others I have seen, the crew, as the viewer is repeatedly reminded, is visibly international.  Here we have a black African who navigates and hits Venus in the first try. An Indian mathematician who calculates his screen time. A Japanese who refers to Hiroshima four times, ahem, without naming the bastards who did it.  A Chinese who is a farmer at heart. A German engineer who puts everything back together.  And that square-jawed Russki who leads the pack in a most democratic way while extolling his love of peace. There is also a useless robotic contraption. This crew is so international it includes a Yankee! By contrast, if a Yankee science fiction film crew included a foreigner, you could be sure this foreigner was trouble, either by being a weak link or by being a commie in disguise.  

Moreover, while Yankee crews were invariably all white bread, this crew includes a black African who gets plenty of screen time.  Then there is the brown Indian and the yellow Chinese. Ecumenical or what?  But wait, there’s more.

The crew is also senior, and I mean senior. Hunched backs, shuffling steps, eye glasses, bald heads, and grey hair abound from geriatrics. They were recruited from superfluous retirees is my guess. Since most must be on the old age pension, they came cheap and expendable.

Harmony and goodwill rule among the crew, because at their age they have no energy to argue or to fight over that one woman. There is no tension on board, however, mercifully, they do not sing rousing songs, as I have heard in other Red science fiction. There is so much sweetness and light that it is enervating.

The pace accelerates once they get to Venus. The sets of the inky landscape are spectacular. No doubt that is why Corman bought the rights.  The glass forrest, the memory alpha, the ruined city, and the tar pit are all exceptional, even extraordinary. One reviewer said the Venus scenes were ‘awesome’ and that seems right, though the action is melodramatic, and hard to follow. It also violates one of the themes of the writer, the ubiquitous Pole Stanislav Lem. No spoiler on this one.  

Red science fiction movies of the Cold War concentrate on how hard, dangerous, complicated, and important spaceflight is. They tell the audience what it ought to know. By contrast, Yankees like Corman concentrate on thrills and spills for the Drive-In market, giving that segment of the market what it wanted (he hoped) for box office receipts. 

Why Venus is referred to in the title as a star is an open question.  That is one thing Corman got right in his re-edit.  Not something he made a habit of doing.

Zero City (Zerograd) 1989

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 43 minutes runtime rated 7.4 by 2,300 cinematizens

Genre: [Unknown]

Verdict: Nyet

Tag line:  oh hum

Engineer is sent from Moscow (not the one in Idaho) to Zerograd in the sticks to shape up a factory.  His first encounter there is with a briskly efficient receptionist who goes about business naked.  She types, telephones, and directs him to the CEO who is delighted to see someone from Head office. Unbeknownst to CEO the factory’s manager hasn’t come to work in eight months. That might explain the problem.

Engineer goes to dinner with the Marx Brothers. The food is so bad that the chef kills himself.  Did the engineer’s lack of appetite drive chef to take his own life?  Enter Franz Kafka, an honorary Marx.

By mistake engineer gets a guided tour of the local museum where history is what we say it is…today.  This goes on and on and ends with rock and roll. The gag is that the wax work figures are real people.  Get it?  (So what you may ask? Me too.)

Satire may be the intention but the result is boredom. It is as heavy handed as that which it mocks. Monty Python it is not. I gave up after an hour. A better person might get further. The best person would have been smart enough not to have ever started at all. When will I ever learn? No time soon.  

It is listed on some web sites as Sy Fy and that is why I went looking for it on You Tube.  That label is fake news.  Wacky would a more accurate designation.

Get this, per the IMDb, it was the Soviet Union’s official entry for the ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ at the 1990 Academy Awards (USA).  No wonder the Evil Empire fell.  

Kin-Dza-Dza! (1986).

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 2 hours and 15 minutes rated 7.9 by 13,000 members of the MosFilm web farm.  

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Turkmenistan. 

Verdict: [Fellinesque].

Tagline: ‘Koo,’ or is that ‘Ku.’

In the early evening of a mild winter’s day in Moscow Mrs Ivan sends hubby out to get some bread.  As he approaches the shopping centre he encounters a ragged, barefoot man, shifting from one foot to the other on the cold cement sidewalk, who claims to be an alien, talking to a feckless student with a violin case. The ostensible alien holds out a cigarette lighter which he says is his transporter. Ivan pokes it in derision only to find himself and Feckless now standing in a sea of sand that certainly is not the local Red Mini-mart in wintry Russia.Transported, indeed! Nice.

After that snappy start the descent thereafter is sharp and steep to incomprehensibility and indifference.

They encounter an Akim Tamiroff look-alike who says but ‘Koo.’  In time Ivan and Feckless work out some of the norms of this new planet of sand.  It is a rigid caste system for anthro students. All others may leave the room.

Even marooned on an unknown planet Ivan has unlimited supply of cigarettes to keep him puffing. Feckless has his fiddle, which he cannot play. [Made sense to someone, that did.] 

The IMDb User Reviews are ecstatic with their 10’s. How much did that cost the producers?  I got half way through the movie before I decided my toe nails needed trimming, a task requiring my full concentration.

Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (1979)

(Hukkunud Alpinisti’ hotell)

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 20 minutes, rated 6.6 by 1,500 cinematizens.

Genre: Mash-up of sy fy and krimi; Species: Estonian.  

Verdict: oddly intriguing 

Tagline: Big in Tallinn.

Ten little Reds are isolated by an avalanche that cuts off the mountain hotel, as the first guest gets murdered.  The copper who is spending the night there puts his square jaw to work.

The hotel has its exotic name from a previous avalanche that killed a skier. Subtle, not. More dead are on the way.   

The guests are the usual assortment at the castle of Otranto. A rock climber who climbs the hotel walls while boasting of his work on a top secret project. A vamp with a wig. An industrialist with a gut. A blow-in with bad hair.  A St Bernard dog that carries luggage. A recluse. A young couple, she with huge dark glasses at all times and he dead very soon.  She of the dark glasses finds the death of her paramour amusing and smokes dope to console herself. 

Are these people decadent westerners?  They must be since all the signs in the hotel are in French. I cannot take them as representatives of the Soviet Union in 1979, just before the Russian war in Afghanistan when the Cold War got hot again. There is a dance scene, or maybe it is group electro-convulsive shock therapy session that surely is western corruption. Further evidence of western decadence is that the note passed to the police officer is in French made up of letters and words cut from publications. That cutting and pasting would have taken hours.  Only a decadent western would have that much idle time.  Did the Swiss St Bernard dog do it? Hint – French is spoken in them there Alps. 

Spoiler alert!

It’s cryptic but I think it goes like this. Two aliens with two androids, all disguised as decadent westerners, are holed up in this remote hotel while their spaceship – built by the low bid contractor – gets repaired. They had earlier fallen among some criminals who have since pursued them for…? Stardust. So the aliens want to hide at this obscure Hôtel du Nord until the ETD to elude the crims.

The aliens were Gut man and She of the dark glasses. The droids were their respective paramours, wig woman and dead lad who is undead because it is hard to kill a droid. 

Cop does not believe any of this guff and calls in a helicopter gunship to blast them. They get blasted. The end. Maybe they were and may be they weren’t aliens. Either way they are dust now.  If only it had been that easy in Afghanistan. 

The film moves between brilliant white light of the snowfields to inky noir inside the hotel. The soundtrack is eerie, and the hotel itself is almost a character in its sharp angles and dead-ends.  The credits say it is an Estonian production filmed on location in Kazakhstan.  It is my second look at Kazakhstan in one week. 

What I found in the recesses of the web was an East German release.    

Infiniti (2022)

IMDb meta-data is 6 episodes of 52 minutes each, rated 6.8 by 403 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy, Species: Strange.

Verdict: I gave up

Tag Line: Shoot ‘em up!

The mystery was intriguing until I realised it was not going anywhere, and the mishmash descended into shoot ‘em with mysticism.  Remember the Blue Cowboy on the radio? No, well I do, so there.  

The Kazakhstan landscape was noteworthy but repeated so many times that I lost interest.  Likewise the Russian enclave(s) in the independent state of Kazakhstan were intriguing but just became an excuse for more mayhem and murder.  

Indeed much of the four or five episodes I watched seemed like an adolescent’s effort to shock with the carnage as the sympathetic characters were eliminated one after another. It reminded me of Vera where everyone is evil except herself.   

It was hard to follow because it obeys the law of the thriller and jumps back and forth in time to disguise the plot holes.  Continuity errors were more obvious as when the French astronaut on the run in high desert appears in a new and clean uniform from the Wardrobe Department.

Finally there is the mystical Zoroastrian soup which made even less sense than everything else.  

For those viewers who must have shoot ‘em carnage try the evening news.  

U.F.O. The birth of S.H.A.D.O. (1970-1971)

26 episodes of 45 metric* minutes each, rated 7.9 by 3,690 televisualistas. 

Genre: Sy Fy; Subspecies: The Andersons. 

Verdict: ssslllooowww.

Tag line: ahead of and behind the times simultaneously. 

This is episode 1.

One-expression Ed convinces the world to fund S.H.A.D.O., well the Western European world. Though Russian food is labeled in one scene no reds were part of this stellar NATO.  Then there are the Arab, African, and Asian worlds more or less omitted.  Defending Earth is the white western man’s burden.

By the way, that is the Supreme Headquarters of the Alien Defence Organisation.

Instantaneous passage of ten years to or from (I forget which) 2056 and after an evident truce, it is now game on.

Neat idea to HQ it below a film studio that will explain the oddities. But we never see Stone-Faced Ed being his cover as movie mogul. Nor any movie sets used by the aliens to infiltrate humanity.

Neat idea that the aliens have come to harvest organ donors. Their brains got bigger than their other parts and they can no longer reproduce. Alan Jones often has said too much reading leads to impotence. Could he be one them! That would explain a lot.

That no relatives can ever know the truth of the incident from which their offspring disappeared. See organ donors above. 

No communication and no negotiation. Nor any effort at either.

The result is a humourless melodrama that is directed at a snail’s pace.

All the signatures of the Andersons are displayed. 

Actors whose cannot act like Ed Bishop and many others. Stuck among this dross is one superb actor who slums his way through, George Sewell, remember him from Special Branch, or Smiley’s People where he briefly stole the show from Alec Guinness.

In one scene stone-faced Ed berates a carefully selected, highly trained other rank for sticking chewing gum on a computer screen. The other rank hangs his head like an immature schoolboy. It’s a trifecta of bad writing, bad acting, and bad directing. 

The Andersons always thought, I have read, that the toy models and fashions were the stars. The actors were there to point to the models while wearing the clothes. They achieved their goals with the puppets in Thunderbirds. Wooden actors and plenty of toys.

In SHADO all the important stuff is on paper. Everyone smokes constantly even on Moonbase. Whiskey is free and on tap at the office, so none of the sots ever leave which helps security. 

Outlandish costumes in garish primary colours. For men style ranges from onesies with Nehru jackets to open weave mesh pullover shirts that reveal hairy chests.  For women it was aluminium foil micro skirts, oh, also those Moon-base purple wigs which are never explained, remarked, or otherwise integrated. Speaking of wigs, Ed’s decade transformation in one scene is by changing wigs from boyish blond curls to the ash grey of responsibility was cute and unconvincing.

Notably in one scene a man fetched coffee for a woman rather than the other way around. He was a West Indian and not a European so maybe it was colonial servility and not egalitarian courtesy in the dark ages of the 1970s. 

The camera is constantly on women from the back: up and down hips to heels, and from the front: up and down chest to head.  Sexism at its 1970s best. The fraternity brothers gave this show 10.0. There were no crotch shots of the men that I noticed, and I was looking! 

Model craft is an end in itself. In this case they are pretty good, though I can almost see the elfin Gerry Anderson pulling the invisible strings.  

Having watched with pleasure the French OVNI (UFO) a few months ago when this came up on You Tube, I watched it.  It is as bad as I remember it to be. Age has not improved this film.  

*As a meter is longer than an Anglo yard, so a metric minute is longer than an Anglo minute by 15 seconds with a total of 75 seconds in every minute. This fact can be verified at the World Institute of Time website.