FILM REVIEW: BATTLESHIP (2012, SKY)

This is one of those movies which opened to a barrage of shit hurled at it by critics but when you actually watch it is surprisingly fun. Taylor Kitsch (who really ought to have changed his name as that's just asking for trouble) is the lead as the problem kid who rises to the occasion and Rihanna is a large gun-carrying grunt whose performance (despite all the crap heaped on her) is adequate to the role. The cast also includes Alexander Skarsgard and Liam Neeson (who, judging by the number of films he makes, is clearly trying to build a nice little nest egg for his impending old age).

Okay, it completely ignores the laws of Einsteinian physics by having a message encoded in a laser burst sent to an earth-like planet which has to be at least more than 4.4 light years away, Alpha Centauri not having any earth-like planets. However, not more than five years is enough time for the inhabitants of said earth-like planet to receive and understand the message and prepare an exploratory strike force and get it to Earth. However you just have to put up with things like that in popcorn movies. There are other dumb things in it but what the hell.

There are nice touches like the aliens being believably humanoid without being human and if you don't fire at them they won't fire at you. Their communications ship is critically damaged by ramming a large earth satellite (they were travelling very fast) and thereby allows great chunks of it to devastate Hong Kong in great detail. It also means that they have to use the communications station on Hawaii (where, conveniently our heroine -Brooklyn Decker of whom I've never heard- and a disabled vet are having a walk nearby) to send the message home -come on over boys, the Earthians are a pushover.

It takes a while to go get going but once it does it holds the attention until the end. 

Well, okay, it is a load of crap, but it's a fun load of crap and I had a good time watching it.

PS.

There's an unexpected scene after the credits which has a completely different tone from the rest of the movie and is actually a little gem.

DVD REVIEW: SCI-FI INVASIONS (MILL CREEK, 2011, 12 DISCS), PART 2

Introduction.

See previous post for the general intro to this box set. I should have mentioned that the transfers are generally so poor that on my 23inch monitor they look blurry so I generally reduce the size to less that half in order to get a picture that is watchable. As for things like subtitles; you must be joking.

 The robots

The villains

The good girl

Our hero (centre)

Disc 2

War Of The Robots (1978)

This is actually the second film on the disc but I couldn't find photos for the first on Google, but these are better anyway. This does count as invasion though it's the humans invading the alien planet in search of the kidnapped scientist who is the only one who knows the codes to stop a nuclear meltdown (sloppy organisation there) and the hero's girlfriend. Spoiler alert: see above, it's the photo labelled 'the villains'. The good girl is hopelessly in love with the hero who only has eyes for his siren girlfriend (who the scientist has the hots for) and at the end has to choose which one to save. Spoiler alert: there's a happy end. The space battles are excruciatingly bad (a year after Star Wars). The dubbing is by English actors including one who has to adopt a southern drawl. The robots are terrible shots, probably because their guns go poo poo wing! as opposed to the humans whose guns go wing wing poo! and hit every time. The sets are terrible though a couple of Italian (probably somewhere in Rome) external locations look okay. There is a story but it really isn't worth repeating.

Hands of Steel (1986)

Not an invasion film. In the near polluted future, an evil polluting industrialist (John Saxon in a guest role) sends a cyborg to kill an elderly  blind crippled environmentalist -what a stinker! But the cyborg is starting to get his human memories back and only puts the ebce in hospital and so has to go on the run from everyone. The first half of the film isn't really interesting but around the halfway mark the action picks up and just doesn't stop. We find out that the cyborg (our hero) is invulnerable to bullets but he can get beaten up pretty badly. There's also a demented female cyborg who kicks the crap out of him in a really good scene. This isn't a good film by any standards, though it is half an acceptable action movie with some good fight scenes.

984: Prisoner of the Future (1982)

After ten minutes I checked IMDB to see if this film was what I thought it was and I was right. It's a bleak nihilistic totally depressing Canadian art movie with no entertainment value whatsoever. I flicked to the end to watch the final scenes as mentioned in the solitary (no surprise there) review. I also learned from IMDB that this was commissioned as a pilot. Jumping Jesus Christ! I'm surprised this film wasn't buried the first time anyone saw the complete cut.

Top Line (1988)

Spoiler alert: This Italian movie, filmed in English, actually is an alien invasion movie. Franco Nero finds (after 20 minutes in which nothing of interest happens) an alien spaceship buried inside a mountain and then finds that pretty much every authority in the world is after them. And then nothing much of interest happens again for a while until he and his new girlfriend get chased by a cyborg which, in true Terminator style, gets half his human face ripped off revealing a robot eyeball which moves from side to side with a whirring noise until the cyborg gets dismembered by a pissed off bull. An even better scene is when he's confronted by his beautiful ex-wife who metamorphoses quite gruesomely into an alien and he learns the real truth about the world. Sorry but even I have limits. You'll have to watch the movie to find out what it is. (But you can probably have a good guess.)

DVD REVIEW: SCI-FI INVASIONS (MILL CREEK, 2011, 12 DISCS), PART 1

Introduction.

Every so often I indulge myself with one of these multi-movie cheapo box sets from Mill Creek. Usually it's a horror compilation, this time it's science fiction with theme (according to the set's title) of invasion. Now even using the word invasion in it's broadest sense which, in this context, I'll take to mean unwanted intrusion by someone or something not native to the movie's environment (you'll see what I mean as we go through the individual films), there are a few which don't fit the category by any stretch of the imagination.

Now if all the movies aren't in the public domain which, I suspect, is most of them, then Mill Creek got the rights for peanuts. None of them have ever been remastered, just copied directly to DVD, and tend to look shoddy. Usually they tend to be quite old from the 50s to the 70's, some even earlier. In this box they're mainly from the 70s & 80s with one dating 1991 and the earliest from 1936. And the chances are that most of them won't be very good but at a cost of about 25p per film, so what. I'm looking for diamonds in the rough.

As usual I watch them on my pc and when I get bored (often) I'll use the slider to move it along a minute or two and can watch a 90 minute movie in 20 minutes. Normally I pick my way through these set by choosing the film I'm most interested in. However, as I'm intending to review the whole box set, I'll do it a disc at a time, starting from the beginning. And here we go.

Disc 1.

Brain Twisters (1991).

Scientist drugs students to turn them violent. Dull, no nudity/sex, minimal gore, no invasion except of the bloodstream. Flicked through it very quickly.

The Head (1959)

A black and white cheapo from an independent studio, though studio is hardly the right word. A scientist manages to a keep a dog's head alive. His mad scientist assistant keeps his head alive when he dies of a heart attack so the scientist can help him transfer the head of a hunchback nurse he's fallen in love with onto the body of a stripper. Which is what happens, though it all, naturally, ends badly. The limited budget with most of the film shot at night, the small sets, and the adequacy of the actors give this an oddly engaging and claustrophobic feel, despite the cliched melodrama. It's not good but it's better than I expected.

The Day Time Ended (1980)

This is the first which actually involves aliens invading, though they only invade an isolated modernistic house and barn where a family live. I saw this on video in the early 80's. It stars forgotten (by me at least) character actor Jim Davis (a name I associate with the creator of Garfield) and (the less forgotten) Dorothy Malone. Things in it include: a time and size-shifting glowing green pyramid, a tiny friendly alien, a hostile small space craft, two stop motion monsters fighting with the winner attacking the family, lots of flashing lights, and the family getting zapped to the future for a happy end. (Oh, spoiler warning.) It's engaging enough in a low key way.

Eyes Behind The Stars (1978)

Some dubbed Italian crap involving a couple being chased by government agents after accidentally photographing an alien space ship. I had to switch if off half way through and felt absolutely no desire to find out what happened at the end.

Films

Abraxas - Guardian of the Universe
The Alien Factor
Alien Prey
The Amazing Transparent Man
Assassin
The Bat (1959)
Battle Beyond the Sun
Beyond the Moon
Brain Twisters
The Brother from Another Planet (yes, the John Sayles movie)
The Crater Lake Monster
The Creeping Terror
The Day Time Ended
Death Machines
Escape from Galaxy 3
Evil Brain from Outer Space
Extraterrestrial Visitors
The Eyes Behind The Stars
Fugitive Alien
Future Hunters
Future Women
Galaxina
The Giant of Metropolis
Hands of Steel
The Head
Horror High
Hundra
Hyper Sapien: People From Another Star
Invaders From Space
It's Alive (not the one you're thinking of)
Life Returns
The Manster
Mission Stardust
Morons from Outer Space (yes, the British film with Jimmy Nail)
Night Fright
Night of the Blood Beast
Primal Impulse
R.O.T.O.R.
Raiders of Atlantis
Robo Vampire
Rocket Attack U.S.A.
Slipstream (yes, the one with Mark Hamill)
Star Knight
Star Pilot
Top Line
Trapped by Television
War of the Robots
The Wasp Woman
Welcome To Blood City

"Oh what fun we had."

To be continued...

VINTAGE SCIENCE FICTION MOVIE POSTERS

Well, that was quick, wasn't it?

 

 

 

 

This is one of the rare examples, like This Island Earth, where the movie was better than the poster. Usually it's the other way around which is why I like these posters so much.

 

Special effects by the legendary Ray Harryhausen.

DVD: MOON

 Rewritten and expanded from a 2-star Amazon review.

Caution, one spoiler is mentioned because otherwise I couldn't begin to explain why I didn't like this film and I am a fan of science fiction. No, make that complete spoilers are mentioned.

On the moon, one man monitors automated mining. He is coming to the end of a three-year stint and is shortly due to be taken back to earth. When he leaves his base to check on a problem, he has an accident from which he can not be rescued as there is no-one to rescue him. He then 'wakes up' back at the base and doesn't remember the accident.

What happens next is pretty obvious to anyone with even the slightest familiarity with SF, including the nature of the individual who wakes up. You can work it out without too much difficulty from the four sentence synopsis of the first 30 minutes. But, I'm going to do it for you.

The man who has woken up has to be a clone. If he is a clone then so is the first man. Why?  The main reason is that if you can make a clone with mostly intact  (plus false) memories of the original then there is no need (as we find out) to send the original in the first place. Also, because there is supposed to be no direct contact with Earth so Man 1 has only received relayed messages from his wife while we has seen/heard the computer talking directly to Earth. If he is on a 3-year cycle then the clone is programmed to die at the end of that period and be replaced.

All this is born out when Man 2 manages to get out of the base and rescues Man 1 who is deteriorating physically and mentally, far more so than his superficial wounds would cause. The interaction between the two clones plus the computer takes up over half the film.

This is a short film padded out to interminable length. While it does develop logically within its basic premise, sadly it is also boring and it is obvious and I really found it to be a big disappointment. It would have made an excellent 45minute tv drama but certainly no longer than that. 

CINEMA: AVATAR -REVISITED

 

If you haven't read the review I wrote yesterday, check it out first or this might be a bit incomprehensible.

The review was written in a rush and I had to hurry it towards the end as Susan rang, wanting me down at our charity shop. Now I've had a little more time to process it so here are my thoughts on certain aspects.

One possible criticism is that it takes a human (white man) to save the noble savages and it is something which occurred to me (cf  Dances with Wolves, though in this case he ultimately fails). However the archetype of the Man of Two Worlds is common in SF and probably in myth (though I haven't checked and it's decades since I read Fraser's The Golden Bough) and, in the context of the movie, it's only the Man of Two Worlds who is in a position to save the Na'vi as they can't comprehend the nature of their enemy -to them, the humans are insane. Only the Man of Two Worlds understands both and, ideally, should be able to mediate between the two; but then the movie would have a massive anticlimax.

What I like is that Avatar is a genuinely Science Fiction film which takes as its premise that the alien world has a unifying environmental intelligence. When our hero attempts to get it to attack the human invaders, his lover Neftiri tells him it would only act when the balance is upset -so when the humans blow the shit out of the Na'vi, it's no real surprise what happens next. Cameron develops everything consistently with the premise -though I'm still waiting for an explanation of the floating mountains.

There are subtle references to other Cameron movies, most notably reversing the situation whereby it's the villain in the loader type robot and it's the alien (in this case Neftiri mounted on a savage carnivore) who is the goodie and it's a thrilling sequence as you're urging Neftiri to kill the bastard.

Once open warfare is declared by the humans the result is a series of the most exciting action scenes I have ever watched. That's it. They are and even attempting to describe them would be pointless. But what makes them even better is that Cameron has dragged you into the movie so much that you genuinely care about the characters and those scenes with the leads completely involve your emotions -the scene cited above is a perfect example.

Hmm, maybe it does deserve the Oscar for Best Picture after all, and maybe it is one of the best SF movies ever made. Whatever, I can only echo what millions of other people have discovered: go and see it at the cinema on the biggest screen you can find -it's worth it.