Electrophantasia

You know, writing these things is difficult.  It’s difficult for me to get up and just do it.  That’s partly why I’ve been doing it in the first place.  I need practice at motivating myself to write.  It’s nice to do it in this informal venue where I can type an intro like this and get away with it, because man it got me going.  When you don’t want to write, nothing better for actually getting you to like a short rant about how you don’t want to write.  It’s crazy that way.

So how about that movie The Road Warrior?  That’s actually just the name they retitled it with when they brought it to America because they wanted to distance it from the original Mad Max, which this movie was a sequel to.  I’m sure somewhere on the internet is evidence of people getting far too upset over what the title of the movie is.  If one of you is reading, I’m going to use the American title throughout this.  Just a warning so if that really grinds your shit, you can leave.  Okay.  Now that we’re alone…

The Road Warrior is an Australian production directed by George Miller.  Despite great success and directing all three Mad Max films, Miller hasn’t really done a whole heck of a lot.  He produced and wrote the screenplay for Babe, which I’ve always thought was a fun movie.  He also produced and directed Happy Feet, which is a little odd.  Those are the three main things he’s worked on, and not much outside of that.  Seems like somewhat of a short resume for the director of one of the most celebrated action movies ever made.  It’s also quite probably the most famous Australian film ever.  It does seem he’s directing the new Justice League movie to arrive in 2011, so I’m looking forward to that.  As long as the future of The Road Warrior doesn’t come true first.

The movie takes place in the very near future when most of society has broken down due to war and energy crisis. (eek) Max lost his family to a biker gang in the first movie, and now wanders the wastes of central Australia looking for gas and trying not to die. All he wants to do is be left alone, but due to circumstances beyond his control he might not get that chance.  It’s a great movie and you should definitely check it out.  As usual it’s on Netflix and available wherever fine movies are sold.  Or whatever.

Spoiler-Time to begin the fun.

At some point I’m glad I can’t get too in depth, because I think if one analyzes anything too much it’s not really a good thing.  However, I do wish I had some notes on this movie so I didn’t have to speak in broad generalities as much, but I’ll do my best with two recent viewings under my belt.

I almost shouldn’t need to tell you about the amazing stunt action sequences in this movie.  They’re just a tidge famous at this point.  The whole movie is basically one big chase sequence, and it ends in fantastic glory with the final oil tanker bit.  It’s even more impressive for the way it was done.  All stunt driving at actual speed and not a bit of green screen in the whole mess.  With all of that going on they managed such detail in a production with such a low budget.  All the vehicles used were fully functional, and every prop had thought behind it.  It probably helped that the setting was post-apocalyptic so everything could and should look like crap.  For an example, though, of the detail just look at Max’s clothes.  He’s missing one sleeve on his jacket because they cut it off in the last movie to tend to his arm after it was run over by a motorcycle.  Similarly he wears a leg brace because he was shot in the kneecap in the previous film.  It amazes me to no end that little things like that were kept consistent between films when most films can’t keep their stuff straight between shots.

Indeed, I would say it’s the detail of the film that puts it at a place above many other action films.  The detail and the quiet moments.  There are quite a few of those quiet moments, because there really isn’t that much talking in the movie.  Most of the stuff is communicated visually, and it’s extremely well done.  The scene with the Gyro Captain and the dog fighting over the dog food can is one instance I can think of.  The entire relationship between Max and the Feral Kid is another.  Neither of them speak in those encounters, and yet there the relationship is.  Formed with nothing but a hurdy-gurdy playing “Happy Birthday” and some facial expressions.  That’s great filmmaking.  (Yes I had to look up what that thing is.  I wanted to call it a music box, but I knew that wasn’t right.)

The other thing I loved about the movie was the great cinematography.  It’s not often in action movies that you can get these great wide open shots.  Some of the locations they shot this on were quite scenic.  The sky seems to go on forever at times, and gave me a sense not unlike how I felt standing in the Gobi Desert.  Since I have the movie on Blu-Ray and don’t know how to screencap it, I’ll substitute one of the pictures I took there.  I can do that because I’m in charge, you see.

I have a general weakness for that kind of stuff, as evidenced by the number of pictures I have like the one above.  I appreciate that the film takes time out from the chases to be so visually interesting.  Not just in the settings, but in the costumes and the characters we meet.  Without much dialogue everyone has to be unique to look at so we keep track of who they are, and they do that very nicely.  Though she never has a name, even in the credits, it’s not hard to know who “The Warrior Woman” is.

So there you have it.  It’s a great movie and I’d say it’s a definite must-see.  One last bit of advice is, if you have the ability, seek out the Blu-Ray of the movie.  I’ve seen it so many times on TV and once or twice on DVD, but none of it can touch what they’ve done on the Blu version.  I think these older movies are benefiting more from the format than the new ones, sometimes.  With the new ones with great DVD masters it’s sometimes more subtle about where the improvements are.  A side-by-side comparison will reveal exactly what’s up, but eyeballing it usually just tells you it looks better somehow.  With this movie, even though it has been probably nearing on a couple years since I last saw it, I knew instantly that this version blasted the others with a shotgun.  They must have cleaned up the original print.  I hope this is a sign that the HD market will inspire more movies to get a restoration job that they probably should have already gotten.  A bad print may fly on DVD, but on Blu-Ray studios have to do some work.  I can’t see as that’s a bad thing.

Next up will be the start of my ravings about Godzilla, so watch for it.  Catch you later.

I think at the end of the last post I made some promise about covering a good movie next.  Well I sort of lied and I sort of didn’t.  In any event at the time I didn’t mean to lie.  Regardless, let’s get this over with.

The Day Time Ended was produced by Charles Band, who is responsible for the Full Moon line of B movies.  I actually enjoy quite a few of those, so I’m not entirely surprised that this was a lot better than my usual crap.  It was directed by John Cardos, who’s main accomplishment seems to have been directing the 1977 horror movie Kingdom of the Spiders with William Shatner.  I’ve never seen that movie, so I can’t really vouch for the credentials, but it was nominated in the Saturn awards for Best Horror Film.  That might count for something, I suppose.  My gut feeling is the main appeal of this film comes from neither of those people, but rather the special effects crew.  The major name here seems to be Paul Gentry, who has worked on a myriad of things including Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Lost.  The vibes I got from the effects work in The Day Time Ended most echoed Laserblast and the Josh Kirby direct to video serial/series/thing, both of which he worked on.

It’s hard to summarize the movies for which I question the existence of a cohesive plot, but I try anyway.  The movie centers around an extended family on vacation in a solar-powered house in the desert.  All kinds of strange things begin to happen, and the movie follows the family as they try to puzzle out just what’s causing all the weirdness around the house.  That’s basically it.  It’s not a bad little movie, in my opinion, and you could do much worse, believe me.  It’s available on Netflix and Amazon.  If you’re buying, I’d suggest checking out the “Time Travelers” boxset by BCI Eclipse, since it comes with three other movies and I hear the video quality is better than the standalone DVD anyway.  Not really worth my time to check it myself as I own all the movies contained in various other sets.  For the record, I watched and capped the standalone release put out under the “Cult Video” label.

Now I get to do the spoiler thing.  Cover your eyes children, it’s not pretty.

The movie begins with some semi-ominous narration that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, but hey.  The family is introduced, they get to the house, and then the fun begins.  The little girl of the family, Jenny, gets a pony because her grandpa is awesome like that.  While she’s hanging out with the pony and possibly contemplating making it look even cuter through some heinous machination, a green,  glowing pyramid shows up and the pony disappears.  Relatively unphased she asks the pyramid politely to give her pony back.  And it does.  I gathered from this movie that the pyramid was a decent sort.

Various alien objects go zooming about the place, generally causing all sorts of fear and confusion among the adults, but delighting the lone child.  Another movie was obviously necessary to let us know how dumb we are not to listen to our kids when they tell us craziness.  This generally goes on for pretty much the length of the movie.  One of the best parts is a random scene where two stop motion creatures duke it out in front of the house.  Later on one of these creatures gets an especially funny scene where they knock on the door before menacing the grandmother.

The funny moments and interesting special effects really are the reason to watch this movie.  The characters and plot were only so-so.  There’s no way I can call much of this movie bad because I’m more-uh-”cultured” than that.  I know from bad.  My only regret is the plot didn’t make a tidge more sense so the ending didn’t feel like it happened out of the blue.  The characters’ reactions vary from smart to stupid to way too smart.  For an example of that last one you need look no further than the Grandfather’s cryptic line, “You know what this is, don’t you?  It’s a time warp.”  How does he know this?  His grandson says, “I don’t even know what that is.”  Grandfather sagely replies, “Maybe none of us do.”  I sure don’t, grandpa.  I sure don’t.

I said before that the special effects were quite enjoyable-and they are.  The only downside is they weren’t blended into the film very well.  This is especially noticable in one matte painting shot where the line between actual footage and painting is so glaringly obvious it hurts.  Very little effort seems to have gone into matching the live action and painted parts of the image, even right down to the colors.

They use a tricky technique of finishing parts of the set in matte painting, but don’t follow through with actually making it believable.  For examples of excellent uses of this technique look no farther than the older 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and fellow 80s movie, Blade Runner.

The ending hurt because it didn’t make sense.  I wanted it to make sense.  I felt it could easily make sense.  It didn’t make sense, though.  After being horrified the entire movie, the whole family suddenly stops being horrified with such suddenness that I was given cinematic whiplash.  The mother appears at the end talking like she knows all what’s what.  “I know what’s going on and everything’s going to be all right.”  I wish she’d let me in on it if she knows what’s going on.  Alas she doesn’t tell, and we never find out.  They go off to live with aliens or some such thing, and that’s the end of the movie.  My own little lingering question is simply:  What happened to the pony?  I thought they took all the horses with them at the end, but there’s no sign of the pony after the beginning of the movie.  I can only conclude a clay monster ate it.  Poor pony.

Since it’s not really either bad or good, it’s hard for me to figure out how I stand with this one.  I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it, but it just doesn’t reach that last little bit into the low tier of good movies.  I’d still check it out, if only for the fair number of laugh out loud moments and fun late 70s/early 80s effects.

I’m going to try to write up something on The Road Warrior next.  I might not get to it before starting in on my Godzilla stuff, but I’m going to try.  I’m all set to start the Godzilla series, but after writing this I need to take a bit of a break.  I also need to eat something today.  You people and your demands (who?) have kept me away from sustenence long enough.  Jerks.

Continuing on our obscure vein, we have this inexplicable film.  I’m going to start this tale with a trio of screencaps that show faces made by the cast of War of the Planets that probably reflect some of my own as I viewed the film.

As you can see it goes something like this:
Step 1: Confusion, Step 2: Horror, Step 3: Madness

Before we get to far into the discussion and I must throw up the spoiler warning (even though I find this particular film impossible to spoil), I would like to give some brief plot summary.  However, it is beyond my capacity to do so.  I shall instead turn to what it says on the back of the box, which I think is kind of what happened.  Mostly.

“Mike Leighton and his team of astronauts land on an alien world and agree to help its population battle a cyber entity that has taken control of the planet.  The planet is on a collision course for Earth that will spell certain disaster.”

I can’t vouch for that last collision course part, because I honestly don’t remember that factoring into the plot anywhere.

SPOILERS AHEAD.  This is your standard spoiler warning.  Anything beyond this point will reveal plot information, and in this movie’s case–big deal.

Two and a half minutes into this movie and I was confused.  That’s before the opening credits even ran.  When they did I was in for a treat, as there are some grand names here.  I’m not sure what it is about bad movies, but they seem to always have more than their fair share of funny names.  We have Max Bonus, who is surely a high scorer at the arcade.  Then there is A. Belly, who I imagine to be somewhat of a rotund personage.  Finally, there’s Charles Really, who really shouldn’t have gotten involved with this film.

As far as I’ve ever been able to tell the beginning has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, and seems to take place somewhere in the middle of the chronology, which makes it all the more confusing.  The movie really begins with what seems to be a random act of violence, after which the perpetrator is called a barbarian and then given command of a ship.  Okay.

Now we’re in space.  Somone is going for a space walk.  As this guy puts on his suit he remarks that as long as he’s going outside he’ll pick up some whiskey.  I guess this is funny because there’s no whiskey in space.  Har har.  During the space walk one of the most WTF moments of the movie occurs when for about 5 seconds and no longer a little song with vocals pops up.  No song like it is ever heard again.  Wow.  Our spacewalker is repairing something, when the captain finds out that he’s alone and chastises him, warning that if something goes wrong there’s no one to help him.  On cue, some battery acid leaks onto his space suit.  The captain informs him that he has exactly three minutes before the acid eats through his suit and he dies in the vacuum of space.  What an amazingly exact calculation considering the circumstances.  I must remember that acid + space suit = 3 minutes to live, no more and no less.  During this entire scene the man is groaning in terrible pain.  Why?  I guess because of the acid.  But if that’s so the acid would be inside his suit and he should already be dead.  Nevermind this.

Soon after this incident the crew receives strange signals from somewhere.  One woman remarks, “What the hell, what does it mean?”  Those perfectly echo my feelings on this movie.  They send the message back to Earth where the supercomputer known as “Wiz” (cute) decodes it.  How Wiz can do this, I don’t know, but it does.  It says that the signal is being sent by an alien force that “knows all” and it must be destroyed.  Okay.  So they send the ship to do that, I guess.  Can’t have those alien forces knowing all and shit.

The captain of the ship hates all machines.  Most of his lines in the movie are spent repeating this fact.  He initially resists the computer-recommended course of seeking out the source of these signals, but eventually he ends up accepting the mission.  They get to the planet where the signals are coming from, and after remarking that the atmosphere appears to be frozen, they walk out of the spaceship without space suits or even a warm jacket.  What follows is a fever dream consisting of mad robots, a race of Gollum-esque people, and a bunch of people dying who I’m not even sure what their names were.

I have a pretty high tolerance for bad movies, and this one tested me.  The average person would probably want to stay far away, but for the select few I still recommend a viewing if only so you can maybe explain to me what happened.  The original film was Italian and named Anno Zero – Guerra Nello Spazio, and a horrendous dub job might have greatly contributed to the confusion.  At the very least it’s not the worst movie I’ve seen.  I may get the nerve up to write about that one sometime later.  I’m planning on writing about a good movie tomorrow, so watch for it.  See you.

Now here we have a definite fulfillment of my promise to do a bit of obscure now and again.  If you’ve actually heard of this low-budget film from the 1930s, then I’d wager you are one of few.

Condemned to Live was directed by Frank R. Strayer, whose major achievement in life seems to have been directing a long line of movies based on the comic strip Blondie.  We won’t hold that against him too much here.  We’re loving that way.  The only other notable thing I can seem to gather about the cast and crew is the man playing the lead role, Ralph Morgan, is the brother of Frank Morgan who played the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz.  Cool beans.

I quite enjoyed this little movie with its 1930s horror ways.  As you can see from the screencaps I took (bottom of article), you have your vampire bats, your hunchbacks, and your angry mobs with torches.  What more can you want?  Most of the sets and costumes were actually re-used from the higher-budget Frankenstein pictures to save money, and it was done to good effect.

The plot revolves around a small European town of unknown geography in which a strange series of murders has taken place.  Young girls are having their throats torn out in the dark.  Grisly.  Rumors are spreading around the town that a giant bat is swooping down on people in the dark and carrying them off to its cave nearby, where the bodies are then found.  Professor Kristan, the learned man who the village people always turn to for help, is at a loss to explain the incidents and believes the stories might be true.  David, a young man in the village, doesn’t believe it’s a bat at all, but rather a man performing the hideous murders.  What is the truth?  Who will be the next victim!?  I love this stuff.

Now we are entering spoiler territory.  I will try to put a warning of this variety any time I do this for anything no matter how old.  It’s almost useless for this movie because the plot summaries I’ve seen pretty much give the entire thing away, but at least I can have the decency to warn people.  I should also say if you want to pick up this movie to watch before continuing it is on Netflix and Amazon.  Anyway, to spoilertown.

What I think I really enjoyed about this movie was how it doesn’t have a real villain.  There is no monster, just a poor man that can’t help himself.  It also plays a bit with outer appearances and what people expect.  The entire village becomes convinced at one point that Zan, the Professor’s servant, is the murderer simply because “no good ever came from a hunchback.”  The movie takes parts of Dracula, werewolf lore, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame to make something new that I’d say works successfully.

As we come to realize fairly early in the movie, the murderer is actually Professor Kristan, who has been plagued by headaches and blackouts as of late.  People aren’t dumb, it takes only one or two murders for many of the people close to him to either find out or get suspicious.  What makes it all the more heartbreaking is the Professor is really and truly a nice man.  His mother was bitten on the neck by a vampire bat just before he was born in Africa, and that’s what lead to his current sorry state.

The great tragedy is many of the murders could have been prevented if Zan had simply told Kristan right away what was happening, but with the best of intentions he kept it a secret and tried simply to stop further incidents from occurring.  Unfortunately, he only succeeds in the final attempt on the Professor’s fiancee.  I know it might seem kind of silly, but it felt just a bit refreshing to see a horror movie where everyone acts pretty straightforward and smart.  Usually only dumb people populate movies in this genre.

The movie is only 67 minutes long, and that allows a brisk pace.  The ending was quite sad when Professor Kristan finally realizes what he’s done during his blackouts, and runs to save Zan, who is about to be burned by a mob in the nearby caves.  Once he arrives, he announces to the mob that he was the murderer and they watch in shock as he throws himself into a crevasse.  Perhaps even sadder is Zan, who loved his master very much, jumps in after him.

Is it great cinema?  I don’t know.  I think it had a lot of heart on its side, though.  Especially when compared to some of the movies I’ve seen.  Anyway, once again I feel this post was a little lacking somehow, but I’ll probably always feel that way.  All I can do is try to do better next time, I guess.  See you next time.