Tag Archives: Science Fiction

Capsules

CAPSULE: ZETA ONE (1969)

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Beware

AKA The Love Factor

DIRECTED BY: Michael Cort

FEATURING: Robin Hawdon, Yutte Stensgaard, James Robertson Justice, Dawn Addams

PLOT: While in bed with a blonde, a secret agent flashes back to his last mission, when he was in bed with a blonde while he was supposed to be out investigating a gang of female aliens abducting girls in miniskirts.

Still from Zeta One (1969)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: There’s camp value, and lovely birds in and out of teeny tiny miniskirts, in this soft porn parody of Barbarella and the Bond movies, but you have to sit through a ridiculous amount of padding to get to the “good” (and to the “weird”) stuff.

COMMENTS: When there are no naked women on the screen, you may try to entertain yourself during Zeta One by musing about Robin Hawdon’s mustache and its role in the plot. You see, in the flashbacks, alleged superspy John Word sports dashing soup strainer, but in the present time, he’s clean-shaven. But it’s not that the director simply forgot that he had a mustache in earlier scenes. The first time we see Word he’s wearing a fake mustache, which conspicuously falls off when he’s startled by Ann Owen, the sexy secretary from his secret agent office, who has snuck into his kitchen to pump him for information about the mission he just completed. To divert her questions, and to fill up time, the couple play a real-time game of strip poker: we watch them shuffle the cards, deal them out, consider their hands, draw, exchange bets and double entendres, lay down their hands, and then—the loser takes off her shoes! On to the next hand. This procedure burns up ten minutes of screen time, before they fall into bed and pillow talk turns into potential treason as Word flashes back to his last mission. It’s twenty minutes into the film, and the plot is just starting. That plot involves a race of all-female topless aliens who are kidnapping leggy young Earth women and training them to be the next generation of girlnapping topless aliens (for reasons I never quite puzzled out), while a portly supervillain-type is trying to horn in on the alien action (again, I have no idea why), and so hires a volunteer stripper to be abducted so she can scope out the alien civilization of “Angvia.” Once Her Majesty’s Service (or whomever) gets an earful of this scheme they call in Word, who, manly stache intact, just happens to be rolling around in bed with two naked blondes when he gets the call to action. But the plot continues without Word, who procrastinates by bedding another swinging chick, until he finally finds the time to go to central headquarters (where he encounters the film’s only funny joke, a wisecracking elevator). At no time does putative protagonist Word actually appear in the same scene with the villains, the aliens or the abducted stripper. His parts all appear to have been cheap padding added later. Which is a shame, because the few scenes the filmmakers managed to shoot for the sexy sci-fi parody they were making before the money ran out weren’t bad, and might have made a decently campy 45-minute film. That movie had geometric futurist sets decorated in bold primary colors, lots of those lava lamp/kaleidoscope freakout psychedelic effects (often incorporating nude women into the hallucinatory tableaux), and an army of kung-fu alien babes in bikini bottoms, pasties and pageboy wigs. The wraparound movie just has a smarmy would-be Bond lying in bed with naked women reminiscing about exploits he was not involved in in any way. But what about his fake mustache? My proposed solution to the facial hairpiece conundrum is to speculate that Robin Hawdon was called in for two separate rounds of padding: once when he was sporting a hearty lip bush, and a second time after he had shaved it off for another role. To explain the follicular discrepancy, they filmed a scene where he takes off a fake mustache, but they couldn’t think up any way to go back and insert dialogue in the earlier part of the film to explain why he needed a lip toupee to entertain Swedish stewardesses in his bachelor pad in the first place. But, why not just keep the fake mustache on for the new scenes? I have no good answer for that—maybe starlet Yutte Stensgaard refused to kiss a mustachioed man.

According to Nick Gillies at Den of Geek, the continuity director of Zeta One petitioned IMDB to have her credit on this film removed from the movie database!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…encapsulates everything that was weird and not-so-wonderful about the [swinging London] era.”–Gordon Sullivan, DVD Verdict (Blu-ray)

Capsules

CAPSULE: NIGHT OF THE HUNTED (1980)

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La nuit des traquées

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Vincent Gardère, Dominique Journet, Bernard Papineau

PLOT: A beautiful woman is imprisoned in an unofficial asylum housed in a skyscraper with dozens of patients; because they all suffer from short-term amnesia and can only remember events from the last few minutes, no one knows why they are there.

Still from Night of the Hunted (1980)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Jean Rollin. There’s not room for too many movies from this peculiar director on the List, and while Night of the Hunted is of oddball interest, it’s neither memorable enough not typical enough of the artsploitation auteur’s vampire-centric output to be the representative of his oeuvre.

COMMENTS: A woman has just been shot in a courtyard. A storm arises. We hear thunder rolling and a gale howls through the wind tunnel formed between two skyscrapers with an unnatural keening. We see shots of the brewing storm churning water in a fountain pool. Cut back to the dying woman. Her hair is gently rippling in a light breeze. It’s moments like these that make you wonder if the incongruities that continually crop up in Jean Rollin movies result from incompetence or sly surrealism.

In Night of the Hunted the director latches on to an intriguing idea: a group of people suffering from a persistent form of short-term memory loss that leaves them unable to remember what happened two minutes ago. Imprisoned in a secret asylum on the top floor of a tall building hidden in plain sight in the middle of Paris, the lost souls shuffle around the halls and the communal room, unable to remember each other, their children’s names, or where their room is. Their situation is uniquely tragic, bearing an existential dimension that’s reminiscent of later classics like Memento and Cube, while their submission to the doctor and his assistant suggests an anti-authoritarian political fable.

Rollin fashions surprisingly affecting dialogue out of  a conversation between two amnesiac women; doomed to be strangers forever, they make a desperate game out of trying to construct a shared past. And yet, there are so many problems with Night of the Hunted script, it’s almost hard to decide where to begin. The most obvious issue is Rollin’s insistence on inserting so many sex and nude scenes that the movie frequently turns from horror into soft porn. There is no doubt Rollin knows how to photograph a nude woman, but he doesn’t know how to gracefully integrate nude women into his stories. The movie’s porniness is at war with its artiness. In the opening, the beautiful amnesiac heroine, Elisabeth (Lahaie), has temporarily escaped captivity, together with a soon-forgotten companion—who is (inexplicably) naked. Robert (Gardère), a kindly motorist, picks her up and takes her—not to a hospital, or the police station—but to his bachelor pad. He’s lucked into a beautiful blonde with a blank mind who lives only for the present and doesn’t know any other man in the world exists but him. A five-minute sex scene (the kind where, no matter what new position the lovers try out, a potted plant always winds up between our eyes and their genitals) follows. The tender rutting completely breaks up any intellectual flow the story was developing. Furthermore, there’s really no way to spin this scenario other than that Robert is taking advantage of Elisabeth for an easy lay; yet, in the modern fairytale world of this movie, we’re supposed to view their love as pure. The gallant knight will spend the rest of the movie trying to rescue the forgetful princess from the tower where she’s been imprisoned.

And the funny thing is, the movie works on an emotional level, despite its essential illogic and sleazy interludes. We feel for Elisabeth and her predicament. All the usual complaints against Rollin—his ignorance of or disregard for storytelling conventions, proper pacing, and logic—are on display here. But there are also sublime moments, such as when a dying redhead’s tresses slowly fall down a nearby drain like spilled blood, that make you think there is a genius buried somewhere in there. Rollin’s flaws are the flip side of his virtues, and largely reinforce them; that’s what make his movies unique, and uniquely weird.

Rollin liked the atmosphere created by two women making their way through the world in a daze, reminiscing about a past they may have invented, so much that he reused the idea in Two Orphan Vampires (there, the girls try to remember past lives instead of the past minute, but since they are immortal and their time scale is different, the effect is the same).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…it possesses a wonderful and wonderfully disconcerting charm… In tandem with its bizarre storyline, the film offers a largely unique meditation on the importance and yet fictional nature of human memory.”–Gary D. Rhodes, Kinoeye  Vol. 2, Issue 7 (Apr 2002)

Capsules

CAPSULE: MESSAGE FROM SPACE (1978)

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Uchu kara no messeji

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Philip Casnoff, Peggy Lee Brennan, Hiroyuki Sanada, Masazumi Okabe, Vic Morrow, Makoto Satô, Etsuko Shihomi, Sonny Chiba

PLOT: A race of evil robotic samurai conquer a peaceful tribe of leaf-headed aliens, who send out eight magic space nuts to track down reluctant heroes to save their planet.

Still from Message from Space (1978)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Message from Space is so cheesy it should come with a warning: do not watch if lactose intolerant. But risible is not quite the same as weird, and despite its bizarre costuming choices (leaf-headed aliens versus robot samurai aliens?) and laughably conceived special effects, there’s not enough truly strange stuff here to capture the interest of most weirdophiles.

COMMENTS: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: an evil empire has kidnapped a space princess and imprisoned her inside a planet-sized death machine which can only be destroyed by piloting a fighter spaceship through a tunnel and hitting a one-meter soft spot; accompanied by a comic-relief robot, a motley crew of space rats assemble to save her, and the universe. Released one year after Star Wars, with an epic symphonic soundtrack by the Japanese John Williams, spaceships that look an awful lot like X-wing fighters and the Millennium Falcon, and several direct visual quotes from George Lucas’ mega-blockbuster (e.g. the ominous shot of the underside of a massive spacecraft as it glides by), Message from Space doesn’t try to hide its inspiration. In fact, hiding its inspiration would have contradicted its marketing strategy. It’s remarkable how cheeky robots, laser battles, aliens, spaceship duels, and almost all of the other basic elements of Star Wars also appear in Message from Space, and yet the former is a beloved classic while the latter is a space opera staged by the tone-deaf. It just goes to show how far the little things like characterization, acting, editing, passion, originality, and the ingenuity and funding necessary to put your vision onscreen can take you. But, while Message from Space doesn’t have any of the qualities that made Star Wars great, it does have a lot of features Star Wars lacks. For one thing, it has glowing space walnuts sent by the gods to wander the universe. It has nautical-themed spaceships with full billowing sails and a big wooden steering wheel. It’s got characters who actually use “space” as an all-purpose modifier (one guy worries about spending “three years in the space-clink” while another mentions that he was “born after the last space-war.”) It’s got a mixed Japanese/American cast, half of whom are dubbed (the space babe with the Joisey accent speaks her own lines, though). It’s got a cowardly rogue who dresses like a vaudevillian in a pink and orange leisure suit. It’s got a robot waitress with big pink plastic boobs. It’s got teenage heroes who grab hands and hop up and down in a cute little dance whenever they save the universe. It’s got… well, it’s got a lot of stuff, and although little of it is much good, there’s at least enough of it that you might be able to keep yourself from falling asleep. And, although it’s cheap-looking, some of it is pretty to look at; the samurai robots’ throne room looks like it might use backdrops left over from Kwaidan, selectively decorated with a props bought at Barbarella‘s post-production sale. If you’re of a certain age, and have a deep nostalgia for crap, Message from Space may just fit the bill. Personally, when I was dropped off to see this at a matinee as a ten-year old boy, I was so bored that I wandered out into the theater lobby to play “Space Invaders” instead. Although I liked Message better as an adult, now that I’m able to appreciate the camp value of failed entertainment, I am still impressed by my younger self’s ability to ignore the superficial glitz and sniff out a space-dog of a movie.

Despite helming this cynical work-for-hire, rushed into theaters to capitalize on a hit movie, Kinji Fukasaku is not a hack director. In 2000 he delivered the utterly original killer-kids cult hit Battle Royale.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a Japanese science-fiction film that’s so terrible it has a certain comic integrity… [the plot] is pleasantly indecipherable, and the screenplay seems to have passed through a food processor with a sense of humor.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: JOHN DIES AT THE END (2012)

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NOTE: John Dies at the End has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of All Time; the official Certified Weird entry is here.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Chase Williamson, Rob Mayes, , , Glynn Turman,

PLOT: A young paranormal investigator relates his strange and twisted backstory to a skeptical reporter. It involves alien creatures, a drug that gives its users heightened senses and psychic abilities, and a parallel universe whose twisted denizens are edging their way into our own.

John-Dies-at-the-End


WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Its labyrinthine plot and genre-bending themes make John Dies at the End an interesting experience, with plenty of bizarre characters and twists, but at times the film is just weird for the sake of being weird, forsaking good storytelling in the process.

COMMENTS: Blending the well-worn motifs of alien invasion, inter-dimensional travel, and the over-confidence of youth into a heady concoction of oddities, John Dies at the End isn’t easy to summarize, or even encapsulate. The narrative flits back and forth erratically as Dave (Chase Williamson) attempts to communicate his experiences to a bemused journalist played by Paul Giamatti. It all starts—sort of—with a late-night phone call from Dave’s excitable friend John (Rob Mayes), whose ingestion of an out-of-this-world drug known as “Soy Sauce” sends him down a time-traveling, mind-reading, future-predicting rabbit hole. Dave accidentally takes some Soy Sauce himself, and soon he is escaping from a hardened police detective (Glynn Turman) who suspects him of several gruesome murders, while trying to save John and two other high school friends who’ve been kidnapped by a demonic being from an alternate universe. And then a lot of other stuff happens, but not always in chronological order.

Without prior knowledge of the webserial/novel this is based on, John Dies at the End can only be a surprise. It rapidly transitions between wry humor, gross-out gore, paranormal mystery, hallucinatory freak-outs, and sci-fi adventure, all set amidst general confusion. This is the type of film that was made to be a cult classic, with little hope for or interest in appealing to a wide audience. At times this obvious intention to be weird means that the film’s comedic and mystery elements are sacrificed for nonsense, but if you’re looking for straight-up bizarre then it’s not a huge loss. The low-quality special effects are mostly excused by unique visual ideas and some well-placed animation.

With its nonlinear narrative structure and consuming focus on strange happenings, the film doesn’t spend too much time developing characters, and as the protagonist Dave is a little weak: for the most part Williamson just shows off his “Sarcastic Inner Monologue” expression or various reaction faces. He and Mayes are both very regular-seeming guys, the kind you probably knew in high school or college. They are surrounded by a charismatic supporting cast, including the lovably loudmouth Giamatti, the imposing Clancy Brown, the hardcore Glynn Turman, and the naturally creepy Doug Jones. Shuffled about by an intricate story and ever-uncertain motivations, they seem to relish the script’s absurdities.

John Dies at the End is uneven as a whole, driven to episodic distraction with an abundance of half-realized subplots and unanswered questions, but it has a way of worming itself into the brain that results in a kind of fascination. The twisted creatures, unexpected sight gags, colorful settings, and surreal visions create an idiosyncratic aesthetic that’s as funny as it is fantastic. Frozen meat comes to life, mustaches fly through the air, headless zombies attack, alien bugs take over unsuspecting drunk teenagers… By the time Dave and John leap into an alternate dimension populated by nude figures with eerie masks ruled by a giant hyper-intelligent spider monster, I was convinced of its Weirdness.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Everybody pretty much gets weird throughout this trippy head-shaker of a movie. It’s hard to be sure if the film adds up logically — seems doubtful — but it’s so bizarre you don’t much care.” –Tom Long, The Detroit News (contemporaneous)