Electrophantasia

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.

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