Alienator (1990)

Alienator is a very low-budget 1990 science fiction action movie directed by Fred Olen Ray. So you assume you’re going to have fun.

The title suggests that it’s going to be a rip-off of both Aliens and The Terminator. It doesn’t actually have much to do with either of those movies. But it does have an ultimate warrior android. It also owes a bit to The Astounding She-Monster (1957).

Jan-Michael Vincent is the Commander of a prison planet. This planet is in a distant part of the galaxy and although this is a humanoid civilisation it has no connection with Earth. No-one on Earth even knows that this distant interstellar civilisation exists.

A particularly dangerous prisoner, Kol (Ross Hagen), is about to be executed. The commander has no moral qualms about this. Any prisoner who has ended up on his prison planet has committed truly horrific crimes. The Commander has other things on his mind, like his assistant Tara (P.J. Soles). Or rather he has his mind on her cleavage. You can’t blame him.

Kol pulls off a daring escape, steals a spacecraft and ends up on Earth.

He encounters a bunch of college kids in an RV deep in the woods. Kol has been injured. The kids pick him up and take him to the cabin of forest ranger Ward Armstrong (John Phillip Law).

It soon becomes obvious that Kol is a pretty strange guy. He spins this story about being from another planet. And he claims that a deadly killer robot has been sent to hunt him down.

It soon becomes apparent that Kol really is from another planet and the killer robot from outer space is real as well. Ward and the college kids are not entirely sure about Kol but they seem to have no choice other than to try to help escape from the killer robot. They figure the robot is trying to kill all of them.

The robot, the Alienator, is a lady killer robot (played by female bodybuilder Teagan Clive). The Alienator seems to be unstoppable. Bullets definitely do not stop her.

Ward turns to the Colonel (Leo Gordon). The Colonel was in Nam. He’s a war hero and a super-tough hombre. The Colonel doesn’t buy all this outer space stuff but he’s a man who never runs away from a fight. The Vietcong didn’t scare him and killer robot girls don’t scare him either.

Of course Ward and the college kids and the Colonel have have all been operating on the assumption that the Alienator is the villain, or rather villainess. That might be true but the action on Earth is intercut with action on that prison planet and the situation might be a good deal more complicated.

This is a very low-budget movie which usually didn’t bother Fred Olen Ray who always figured (mostly correctly) that energy and enthusiasm could compensate for lack of money.

The problem here isn’t the crude spaceship models. The problem is the Alienator. She doesn’t look very scary in a conventional way. She looks like she’s hoping for a gig as bass player in a really bad 70s metal band. Her whole look is so terrible that it achieves a bizarre kind of greatness. And Teagen Clive does have a certain presence. She’s certainly memorable, and that’s what counts. Like P.J. Soles’ cleavage in the early scenes she gets your attention.

The overall tone is pleasingly odd, with everyone playing things as straight as they can no matter how goofy things are getting.

There’s no graphic violence and no nudity. It’s silly lighthearted fun.

Fred Olen Ray had a knack for getting away with movies like this. You get the feeling that he was having a great time. You’ll need a lot of beers and a big tub of popcorn but if you have those things you’ll have a good time as well. The Alienator is recommended.

My copy is a Spanish DVD release (in English with removable Spanish subtitles) and it offers a pretty decent transfer. I believe there’s a Blu-Ray release, from Shout! Factory.

Darkman (1990)

Darkman, released in 1990, was one of a number of comic book or comic book-inspired action movies made in the early to mid 90s. Other notable examples being Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer, The Shadow and The Phantom. All were expected to launch franchises but for various reasons this didn’t happen (although there were a couple of direct-to-video Darkman movies). Darkman was in fact commercially very successful.

Sam Raimi directed and co-wrote the script.

Genius scientist Dr Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson) is working on a new type of synthetic skin. His girlfriend Julie Hastings (Frances McDormand) is a lawyer but despite this she’s one of the good guys. She has tumbled upon a corruption scandal involving property developer Louis Strack (Colin Friels). She has an incriminating memo. A bunch of goons led by the sinister Robert Durant (Larry Drake) break into Peyton’s laboratory and then blow it up. Peyton is assumed to have perished but he survived, horribly disfigured. His new synthetic skin invention won’t help because it’s unstable. It disintegrates after a short period of time.

The skin however can be useful as a temporary measure and Peyton uses it it to get his revenge.

An enormous amount of mayhem ensues.

This movie was not based on an actual comic book. It was an original story by Sam Raimi. Comic books were a very obvious influence, along with 1930s pulp novels such as The Shadow, 1930/40s movie serials and the Universal gothic horror movies of the 30s. Darkman certainly achieves an extraordinary comic-book vibe. And since it’s an original story there were no pesky rights issues to worry about.

It was also clearly an attempt to ride on the coat-tails of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman mega-hit. Darkman has some traces of the urban gothic feel of Batman but it has a flavour of its own. It has an aesthetic perfectly suited to a comic-book movie.

Liam Neeson is an actor I’ve never thought about one way or the other. He’s fine here and does the brooding tragic thing well.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Frances McDormand’s performance but it’s too bland for a movie such as this which demands larger-than-life performances.

This movie is dominated by its villains. Colin Friels is deliciously oily and slimy. Larry Drake as Durant is properly menacing and sadistic.

What distinguishes Darkman from the other comic book style movies of the 90s is that Raimi was coming from a horror background so it has more overt horror moments, and the Darkman makeup effects are genuinely gruesome.

What makes it fun is that the horror is combined with so much goofiness and so many hyperactive action scenes.

You’re not meant to take his movie even a tiny bit seriously. There’s a lot of black comedy. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek.

Some of the action scenes are amazingly silly and totally unbelievable but it doesn’t matter. This is the world of comic books. The crazier the action scenes the better, as long as they’re done with energy. And this movie has immense amounts of energy. The suspended-from-a-helicopter scenes are ludicrously over-the-top and implausible but comic book heroes can do those sorts of things.

Raimi had a modest budget to work with. Some of the special effects are a bit iffy but Raimi figured that if they were done at sufficiently breakneck pace it wouldn’t matter, and he was right.

The production design, given the limited budget, is impressive. This is a cool dark fantasy world.

Don’t bother giving any thought to the plot. It’s a standard revenge plot and it’s full of holes but if you have plenty of beer and popcorn on hand you won’t care. There is an attempt to add a tragic aspect to the story and that works quite well.

Darkman is just pure hyperkinetic crazy fun. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. Highly recommended.

Darkman looks pretty good on Blu-Ray.

Yeti Giant of the 20th Century (1977)

Yeti Giant of the 20th Century is a Canadian-Italian co-production and it’s very very obviously a King Kong rip-off. That’s A-OK by me. I love Italian rip-offs of Hollywood blockbusters.

This time it’s not a giant ape on a remote island but a yeti frozen for a million years in the ice in northern Canada. Now I know what you’re thinking. That’s a long way from the Himalayas. But what if yetis were found across the whole globe at one time?

Billionaire tycoon Morgan Hunnicut (Edoardo Faieta) has funded the expedition to retrieve the yeti. His pal, palaeontologist Professor Wassermann (John Stacy), thinks the yeti can be revived. And he’s right!

Hunnicut’s teenaged granddaughter Jane (Antonella Interlenghi) and her kid brother are on hand when the yeti is brought back from the north. Jane thinks the yeti is really sweet. OK, he’s thirty feet tall but she’s sure he’s just as gentle and friendly as her puppy dog Indio.

The yeti really is friendly but he’s easily frightened and when he’s frightened he can cuse mass destruction.

Hunnicut’s plan is to use the yeti as a publicity stunt for his business empire. What he doesn’t know is that there is a traitor in his company, a guy actually working for a competitor that wants the yeti put out of the way.

Of course the bad guy manages to engineer a situation in which the yeti seems to have killed some people so soon the Canadian cops are hunting down the poor yeti.

Jane is determined to save her gentle gigantic snap-frozen friend. Much mayhem ensues.

So it’s all pretty close to the original King Kong.

This was clearly a low-budget effort but when Italians make a movie such as this you know that even if the special effects are cheap they’ll be fun. Italians in those days couldn’t make a dull movie if they tried.

There are some cool visual moments. The yeti locked in what looks like a giant red telephone box suspended from a helicopter is pretty cool.

Hunnicut isn’t really a villain. He wants to make money out of the yeti but he really does also want to help Professor Wassermann’s legitimate scientific research. And Hunnicut has no desire to see the yeti harmed. He has no desire to see anyone get hurt.

The acting in general is OK. There’s a nicely slimy villain.

Antonella Interlenghi as Jane is no Fay Wray (or Jessica Lange) but she’s likeable and cute.

I like Mimmo Crao as lot as the yeti. The makeup effects allow us to see his facial expressions and he does a fine job of conveying the yeti’s animal-like nature - a gentle timid creature but very easily spooked and inclined to lash out in fear. This movie needs a sympathetic monster and the yeti is very sympathetic indeed.

The major weakness is the lack of a really spectacular show-stopping visual set-piece.

The ending marks a significant departure from King Kong. It’s perhaps not entirely satisfactory but I think it works.

Yeti Giant of the 20th Century is sentimental but it’s good-natured and enjoyable and has some pleasing goofiness. This is a pure beer and popcorn movie. Recommended.

Yeti Giant of the 20th Century looks terrific on Blu-Ray.

Blind Date (1984)

The first thing to be noted here is that this review concerns the 1984 Nico Mastorakis-directed Blind Date, not the 1987 Blake Edwards movie with the same title.

Mastorakis has made movies in both his native country, Greece, and in the United States. Blind Date was shot in Greece.

Mastorakis was one of those guys who figured out early on that the secret to making money out of modestly-budgeted movies was to get involved in the production side so he set up his own production company. On most of his movies he’s the producer, director and screenwriter.

In Blind Date we are introduced to Jonathon Ratcliff (Joseph Bottoms), a young American now working for an advertising agency in Athens. At the office he meets Claire (Kirstie Alley). They sleep together. Everything seeks to go fine in the bedroom. Jonathon seems like a fairly regular guy with no particular hang-ups.

Except that there was that girl at the photo shoot. He thought he knew her. Or at least he thought she was a girl he knew in the past.

Something terrible happened to that girl in his past. But it wasn’t his fault. That’s what he was told.

And then we see Jonathon with a pair of binoculars, watching people through their windows. He appears to be a Peeping Tom. Which is a bit odd. He has a hot girlfriend. And she apparently has no complaints about his performance in bed. Guys with hot girlfriends and normal sex lives are not usually peepers.

Then we find him watching a young couple making out in a car. The guy spots him and chases him. That’s when the accident happens. The bizarre and unlikely accident that leaves him blind. So we have a Peeping Tom who is now blind. I think they call that irony.

And there has been a brutal murder, of a woman.

There are some hints that things may not be as straightforward as they appear. We’re not sure what is really going on with Jonathon. Maybe it’s not simple voyeurism but something to do with his obsession with the woman from his past. We have no idea if Jonathon is actually involved in anything genuinely disturbing or violent. Or if he ever has been. All we have are hints that could point in those directions but we’re aware that perhaps we’re being led up the garden path.

Another murder takes place. We still have no clear indication that this has any connection whatsoever with Jonathon.

What we have here is a setup for an erotic thriller, or perhaps a slasher movie. And then the cyberpunk elements kick in. Jonathon is given bionic vision. It’s like very crude 80s video game graphics. He cannot see any details at all. He cannot identify individual people. But he can now get around. The problem is that he will find himself in dangerous situations where he needs to see details. He needs to be able to identify people’s faces. It’s a nifty thriller plot mechanic.

It’s incredibly interesting that Mastorakis was playing around with cyberpunk concepts in 1984, at a time when cyberpunk was in its infancy. The movie Blade Runner had established the cyberpunk aesthetic but content-wise it was not full-blown cyberpunk. Wililam Gibson’s short story Burning Chrome had been published in 1982 but it was not until 1984 that his novel Neuromancer put cyberpunk on the map. But here we have Mastorakis dealing with at least some of the themes of full-blown cyberpunk in a movie released early in 1984, a movie that was presumably already in production before Mastorakis could have had any opportunity to read Neuromancer.

Mastorakis did something similar a few years later, in his excellent In the Cold of the Night (1990). That movie starts out as an erotic thriller with neo-noir overtones and then veers into cyberpunk territory.

Mastorakis was very good at choosing locations that provided production value without spending much money. He uses Athens rather well. This is not tourist Athens. There are no shots of the Parthenon. This is the Athens of the wealthy middle class but it’s still clear that this is a movie that is not set in LA or London or Rome or any other familiar thriller locations. There’s just that very subtle hint of the exotic.

Joseph Bottoms is an adequate lead. He is ambiguous, which is what was needed. It’s not a demanding role for Kirstie Alley but she is very good.

There’s decent suspense and the action scenes are made interesting by the fact that at times we’re seeing things through Jonathon’s primitive video game graphic vision.

Blind Date is an enjoyable thriller made much more interesting by the proto-cyberpunk touches. Highly recommended.

The Shadow (1994)

The Shadow, released in 1994, was one of several 1990s attempts to kickstart superhero franchises. Other notable attempts were The Rocketeer, Dick Tracy and The Phantom. All these attempts failed which is a pity because they’re pretty good movies.

The Shadow began as a pulp magazine hero was was featured in several movies in the late 1930s.

The 1994 movie wisely adopts for a period setting although it looks more 1940s than 1930s.

The movie gives us a backstory. Lamont Cranston (Alec Baldwin) is a very nasty American bandit operating somewhere in central Asia. He ends up as a prisoner in a monastery where he learns to deal with his inner demons. 

He returns to America to become a force for good as a masked crime-fighter.

He has one super-power. He can cloud men’s minds. This gives him virtual invisibility - others are hypnotised into not seeing him.

Now he’s up against Shiwan Khan (John Lone), a descendant of Genghis Khan who has some similar hypnotic powers. Shiwan aims at world conquest. He plans to get hold of an atomic bomb. Such things do not yet exist (we assume the setting is the United States just before the Second World War) but Shiwan knows of a couple of eccentric genius scientists who may be able to invent one.

Lamont Cranston has one possibly useful ally. Margo Lane (Penelope Ann Miller) is the daughter of one of the crazy scientists but she appears to have telepathic powers. Or at least she has the ability to make telepathic contact with Lamont Cranston.

I have a few reservations about this movie but they’re more matters of personal taste than actual criticisms.

Alec Baldwin is seriously lacking in charisma and charm. But given that it was decided to make Lamont Cranston a very dark tortured character constantly battling the darkness within him his casting works reasonably well. He does the tragic brooding ominous thing very well and overall his casting works.

I’m not sure that Penelope Ann Miller has the necessary star power. Margo Lane is more than just the hero’s love interest. She becomes his active ally. This movie needs a really strong female lead, especially with such a taciturn leading man. Compared to Jennifer Connelly in The Rocketeer, Catherine Zeta-Jones in The Phantom or even Madonna in Dick Tracy she’s a little bland. I can’t help thinking of several other major female stars of the period who might have injected bit more life into the character. Nicole Kidman perhaps. Or Sharon Stone (who had demonstrated in King Solomon’s Mines that she could be a delightful adventure heroine). On the other hand Penelope Ann Miller is pretty, she’s likeable, she looks very good in period costumes and hairstyles and there’s nothing actually wrong about her performance.

At times the visuals are just slightly too reminiscent of Tim Burton’s Batman, but I must admit that The Shadow does the 1940s urban gothic thing very effectively.

Viewers unaware of The Shadow’s long pop culture history were likely to dismiss this movie as a mere Batman rip-off. In fact The Shadow as a character pre-dates Batman by a decade.

The biggest problem with these 90s attempts to launch new franchises was that these movies were horrendously expensive. It was not enough for them to do well at the box office. To justify a franchise they needed to be gigantic hits, which they weren’t.

Australian-born Russell Mulcahy was a solid choice to direct. One of this movie’s great strengths is that it doesn’t suffer from the problems that afflict so many movies of recent decades - bloat and poor pacing. It keeps powering along and there’s always something happening.

The Shadow is heavy on the urban gothic noir vibe but with moments influenced by old Hollywood musicals and even (as Penelope Ann Miller quite correctly points out in her interview) some nice screwball comedy touches. The dynamics of the Lamont Cranston-Margo Lane relationship are structured in a very screwball comedy way.

It’s very special effects-heavy but they are done extremely well. There’s some CGI (CIG was around but still in its infancy) but Mulcahy preferred practical effects and that’s mostly what we get. It really is a great-looking movie.

The Shadow delivers dazzling visuals, thrills and adventure. That’s more than enough to keep me happy. Highly recommended.

Runaway (1984)

Runaway is a 1984 science fiction film written and directed by Michael Crichton and, as he did in his classic Westworld, he’s once again dealing with robots running amok.

The setting is a world in which robots are everywhere. They do everything for us. They have not only taken over many jobs they also run our homes, cook dinner for us, look after our kids. What’s interesting is that there’s no attempt to give the movie a futuristic look. This is just the world of the 80s, but with lots of robots.

It’s quite possible that this movie would have had a bigger commercial impact if Crichton had had the kind of budget Ridley Scott had on Blade Runner and could have given us an uber-cool cyberpunk world. But perhaps that’s not what Crichton would have wanted. He’s more interested in the ideas than the visuals. He thought of himself as a writer of techno-thrillers rather than science fiction.

And this really is essentially a techno-thriller. The robots are not hyper-futuristic. They’re the sorts of industrial and domestic robots that seemed likely to be available in the very near future. They’re not humanoid. They look like mobile fax machines or advanced vacuum cleaners. They either look boring and innocuous or they look cute. That’s what makes them creepy and scary. They look harmless until they start trying to kill you.

But moviegoers want science fiction movies that look like science fiction movies. They want either spaceships or futuristic cityscapes (as in Logan’s Run and Blade Runner). They want uber-cool robots, like the Terminator ones. They want sci-fi coolness. Runaway doesn’t offer that. It’s a cop thriller with robots.

I like the lack of the obvious sci-fi trappings but audiences didn’t. Runaway flopped at the box office.

Sergeant Ramsey (Tom Selleck) is a cop and he’s on the squad that deals with malfunctioning robots. The Runaway Squad. This is a world in which robots are ubiquitous and everybody relies on them but the damned things just don’t work properly. Sometimes when they malfunction it’s inconvenient. Sometimes when they malfunction they kill people. And it’s a world in which people just seem to take all this for granted.

In other words it’s like today’s world. Total reliance on very cool technology that works some of the time. And can at any time decide to kill you.

Ramsey has one small problem - he suffers badly from vertigo. As you might expect the plot keeps requiring him to be in scary high places.

Ramsey has a new partner, Officer Karen Thompson (Cynthia Rhodes). She has a crush on him almost from the start.

A very ordinary domestic robot has just started chopping people up. The owner assures Ramsey that the robot has not been modified in any way (robots tend to turn dangerous when people try to modify them). But someone had definitely modified this robot. There’s a chip there that shouldn’t be there and the police experts don’t know what it does. But whatever it does is probably bad.

It becomes obvious that there’s a super-villain involved. His name is Luther and he’s played by Gene Simmons. Yes, that Gene Simmons. Frontman for the band KISS. He may not be the world’s greatest actor but he knows how to ooze crazed evilness.

Ramsey gets a break. He has Luther’s girl in custody. Her name is Jackie (Kirstie Alley). She knows something. She’s definitely a femme fatale type, she knows something important and Luther wants her back and not just because she’s a doll. She has something he needs. If Ramsey can find out what it is he’ll be ahead of the game but his problem is that Luther is a tech genius, he can hack into any system and he knows everything that Ramsey is doing.

Selleck is very good. It’s a much more low-key than in Magnum, P.I. - he’s a nice guy but a bit on the serious side. Kirstie Alley is fun as the sexy bad girl. Cynthia Rhodes is likeable. Gene Simmons is good but Luther’s limitation as a super-villain is that his plans are not particularly grandiose.

This was 1984 so the special effects are old school. Despite the robots this is not a movie that relies heavily on effects.

I like Runaway quite a bit for what it is - a low-key techno-thriller. Recommended.

The 101 Films Blu-Ray looks very good. There’s an audio commentary but it’s probably best to skip it.

King of the Rocket Men (1949 serial)

King of the Rocket Men is a 1949 Republic serial that mixes crime and science fiction. There are those who consider it to be the last great Republic serial.

Super-villain Dr Vulcan is murdering scientists at a company called Science Associates. Professor Millard decides it would be safer for him to feign death. He and Jess King (Tristram Coffin) hope to uncover the identity of Dr Vulcan. They know he has to be one of the key members of Science Associates’ staff.

Professor Millard and King have one ace up their sleeve. It’s Millard’s new invention, a rocket suit. With its aid Jeff King becomes Rocket Man.

Being able to fly though the air is certainly a useful attribute.

There are quite a few gee-whizz inventions. There’s the rocket suit, a kind of death ray machine and Dr Vulcan has a few communications and surveillance gadgets.

The plot however is reasonably solid and isn’t too outlandish, being essentially a tense but straightforward crime thriller. The plot isn’t entirely reliant on the gadgetry. It’s a good formula. Adding too many fantastic elements was a temptation that made some serials seem a bit silly but this one mostly feels grounded in reality.

And in 1949 a rocket suit would have seemed like a plausible near-future scientific advancement.

The cliffhangers are not quite as imaginative as those that William Witney and John English provided in classic serials like Spy Smasher and Daredevils of the Red Circle but they’re still pretty effective.

The pacing is good, with plenty of action scenes. The fights are well staged. 

The hero and the villain seem evenly matched. Both are intelligent, both have some cool technology, both are determined.

Dr Vulcan isn’t a crazed megalomaniac. He doesn’t seek world domination. He just wants money. He’s a plain old-fashioned gangster.

The special effects are terrific. The flying sequences are exciting and look convincing. They looked convincing in 1949 and they still look surprisingly convincing today. And the flying sequences are imaginative. Clearly a lot of thought was put into coming up with ideas for ways in which the hero could use his rocket suit.

That rocket suit with its full-face helmet looks cool.

The stunt work is good as well.

Budgets for serials were getting tighter by this time but King of the Rocket Men doesn’t suffer too much from this. It’s slick and well-made and looks thoroughly professional. It manages to look more expensive than it was.

The pacing is pretty good and the action scenes are handled well.

You don’t win Oscars for acting in serials but the cast members acquit themselves quite satisfactorily.

This is not far future sci-fi in the Buck Rogers mould. This is more cutting edge super-technology in the present day sci-fi. Actual rocket back packs were developed at the beginning of the 1960s. It’s a crime thriller with futuristic gadgetry.

If you’re a fan of movie serials you’ll want to see this one. King of the Rocket Men is a lot of fun and it’s highly recommended.

This serial is available on DVD as a two-disc set from Cheezy Flicks. The transfer is acceptable.

Dune (1984)

Several attempts have been made to adapt Frank Herbert’s novel Dune to both the big and small screen. David Lynch’s 1984 version remains the most controversial, and the most interesting. Critics hated it and it tanked at the box office.

In my experience it seems that people who loved Frank Herbert’s original novel tend to hate the David Lynch movie, and people who disliked the novel tend to enjoy Lynch’s movie. I personally disliked the novel so I guess it was always likely that I’d enjoy the movie. The novel is a hodge-podge of all the craziest and silliest ideas of the 1960s. Only a madman could turn it into a movie. Luckily David Lynch is indeed a madman.

This is of course High Fantasy, not science fiction. It has antigravity, which is magic. The Bene Gesserit sisterhood are witches. The guild navigators use magic to travel through space. Spice is a magical substance.This far future society is a feudal society. The epic power struggle at the centre of the plot is the kind of power struggle between powerful aristocratic families that is straight out of the Middle Ages. All of the science fiction elements are pure magic.

The futuristic setting is mostly an excuse for the production designers and costume designers to go totally nuts and create a bizarre insane aesthetic. That aesthetic works for me. Maybe Blade Runner is the most visually impressive science fiction movie ever made but in its own deranged way Dune is just as extraordinary. There are hints of ancient Egypt and Minoan Crete but also some Buck Rogers influence. It’s an aesthetic drawn from multiple times and sources but it forms a coherent whole. It’s futuristic and it’s retro.

It’s important to remember that Frank Herbert’s novel was written in 1965. It was heavily influenced by the emerging drug culture, and by the growing interest in the occult, esoteric philosophy, alternative religions and hippie-dippie mysticism. Herbert threw huge amounts of this kind of nonsense into the novel. Lynch at least makes those elements fun.

I don’t think Lynch was particularly interested in finding good actors. He wanted actors with the right vibe. Kyle MacLachlan is not exactly a great actor but playing a young man who doesn’t really understand what is going on is the sort of thing he did well.

Siân Phillips really was a great actress and her specialty was playing dangerous powerful scheming women. As the head Bene Gesserit witch, Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, she’s an absolute joy. Sting has only a bit part. He was presumably given this part so that he could be featured on the posters. He certainly wasn’t cast for his acting ability.

The plot involves a power struggle between House Atreides and House Harkonnen, with the Emperor pulling strings in the background and with the Bene Gesserit pursuing their own agenda.

Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan) has a Destiny. He is some sort of Chosen One. Again, this is pure High Fantasy stuff.

The key to absolute power is control of the spice, found only on a single planet. House Atreides has wrested control of this planet from House Harkonnen. The Baron Harkonnen wants revenge, and wants control of the spice. The Harkonnen will fight to regain control of the planet. The odds seem to be stacked against House Atreides, they have a traitor in their midst, they suffer disaster. Paul can retrieve the situation only by accessing the powers he has as the chosen one. Accessing those powers may kill him but he has no choice. The power struggle is important but the real story is Paul’s attempt to achieve his Destiny.

The Harkonnen are obvious bad guys. That makes the Atreides the good guys. In theory anyway. It is worth pointing out however that Paul is also seeking absolute power. And he’s pretty ruthless. He’s not just a charismatic leader. He is a kind of messiah, foretold by prophecy. If Paul comes out on top that will be a good thing, as long as you accept that it’s a good thing for one man to have absolute power.

There’s a lot of voiceover narration but without it the movie would have needed lengthy expository dialogue scenes. That would have made it more like a straightforward science fiction movie. On balance the voiceover narration is a better fit for this movie. It also gives us more of a sense of characters driven by Destiny.

Lynch seems to have been attracted by the idea of filming Dune specifically because it’s not science fiction. He was not trying to make a science fiction film. The fact that all the pseudoscience is in practice nothing more than magic didn’t bother him at all.

One thing that distinguishes Dune from the average space opera is that it does not deal with a fictional futuristic culture. It deals with four totally separate fictional futuristic cultures. Each of the four planets involved in the story has its own entirely distinctive culture. Which requires an entirely distinctive aesthetic. And each of these cultures really does feel like a coherent culture.

It’s the visuals that stand out. They’re stunning. The production design and the costumes are extraordinary. And this is pre-CGI so the effects really do look cool.

And this a David Lynch movie. If you’re desperately trying to figure out what it actually means then you’re missing the point. That’s like trying to figure out what a dream means, or what an acid trip means, or what it means when you have a high fever and you’re delirious. You just sit back and experience this movie.

This was a Dino De Laurentiis production and one thing you have to say about Dino is that he was willing to back wild crazy projects. Without him there would have been no Barbarella, no Conan the Barbarian, no Flash Gordon. It’s unlikely that anyone else would have let David Lynch loose on a project like Dune, with a huge budget to play with.

Dune is a wild crazy ride but I enjoyed every minute of it. I love this movie. Very highly recommended. And it looks wonderful on Blu-Ray.

Mission to Mars (2000)

Mission to Mars is Brian De Palma’s 2000 science fiction epic and it’s a very very obvious homage to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The first thing that needs to be said is that De Palma was brought into the project late in the game when the previous director quit. The screenplay had already been finalised. The sensible thing to do would have been to drop the script into the wastepaper basket and start again but De Palma did not have that option. He was stuck with the script (which includes some horrifically awful dialogue). And the cast. De Palma was given an increase in the budget and perhaps that’s what tempted him. It’s a temptation he should have resisted.

The first manned mission to Mars in 2020 ends in disaster. Nobody knows what happened exact that whatever it was was strange and inexplicable. There is a possibility that one crew member survived.

NASA launches a rescue mission and it’s a fiasco. The survivors of the rescue mission do manage to reach Mars. They find the survivor of the first mission and he has a weird story to tell. Something about a force emerging from a mountaintop. He thinks he has found at least the beginnings of an explanation.

And then we find out what it was all about. It’s all deep profound cosmic stuff.

There are countless shots and images that are either direct homages to 2001 or are at least heavily inspired by Kubrick’s movie. Unfortunately Mission to Mars just doesn’t recapture the visual magic and inspiration of Kubrick’s movie. And, even though it was made more than 30 years later, the special effects are just not up to the standards of the Kubrick film.

Kubrick’s spaceship was cooler. Both Kubrick’s and De Palma’s spaceships are partially rotating to achieve artificial gravity. Both movies include scenes demonstrating the disorienting feel of astronauts living inside a rotating cylinder. Pe Palma manages these scenes quite well. Both movies include the kind of gigantic rotating space station that we were promised we would get in the future but the space station scenes in 2001 have a lot more style and wit.

In both movies the interplanetary spaceship runs into major problems. In 2001 the problems occur when the spacecraft’s onboard artificial intelligence, HAL, goes rogue. Very cleverly we never get a precise explanation of why he goes rogue. We are left to speculate. Was it just a random failure or does it have a much deeper significance? In Mission to Mars the spaceship runs into a meteor storm, just like in every 1950s sci-fi B-movie. This is not exactly inspired writing.

In both movies there’s an attempt to save an astronaut drifting helplessly in space, but in Mission to Mars it’s more sentimental and more corny and more conventionally heroic.

Mission to Mars also has an equivalent of the famous monolith from 2001.

There are elements homaged from various other science fiction movies as well. In fact there is nothing at all in this movie that could be called original.

Somehow, despite a vast CGI budget, Mission to Mars manages to be visually uninteresting. The better scenes are way too reminiscent of better scenes in better movies.

Both movies end up getting into philosophical and scientific speculation about our origins and our destiny. Kubrick’s movie ends on a mysterious enigmatic note. De Palma’s movie spells everything out, and it’s not worth spelling out. 2001 is a movie you can watch over and over again. It’s a movie you want to think about. Trust me, once you’ve seen Mission to Mars you will never want to rewatch it. You will never want to think about it. You will just want to forget it.

Given the awful script and cringe-inducing dialogue it’s difficult to judge the acting. The characters are mere clichés. I guess the cast members were doing their best.

The ending of Mission to Mars is unbelievably bad. It’s embarrassing and trite.

We all make mistakes. This movie was a very big mistake for De Palma. Perhaps science fiction was just not his forte.

I’m a De Palma fan but it’s difficult to recommend Mission to Mars.

I watched the German Blu-Ray which looks very nice.

It’s interesting to compare this film to John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars made about the same time. Both movies are generally regarded as misfires by major directors. Ghosts of Mars has some real problems but I think it’s the better film.

The Mind of Mr Soames (1970)

The Mind of Mr Soames is a 1970 Amicus production and it’s not at all what you might expect from that company. This is not an anthology film. It’s not gothic horror. It’s debatable whether it even qualifies as a genre film. You could call it a science fiction movie in the sense that it deals with science but it has a contemporary setting with no futuristic technology, expect perhaps for a tiny bit of speculation about surgical techniques.

It also deals with behavioural therapy of a kind which gives it a very tenuous link to A Clockwork Orange which came out in the following year. It’s certainly part of a whole range of movies starting in the late 50s which deal with the ramification of new psychological approaches which were gaining ground at the expense of increasingly discredited Freudian theories.

In fact a brief look at the plot synopsis might lead one to expect a kind of psycho killer movie but it isn’t that either.

It’s also untypical of Amicus’s output in being very low-key and rather cerebral. It’s even at times close to being an art movie.

His might account for the film’s descent into obscurity. It would have been tricky to market and movies that are tricky to market do tend to do poorly at the box office. It hasn’t gained a major cult following, again most likely because it’s so difficult to categorise.

And it has an intriguing cast.

Eminent American neurosurgeon Dr Michael Bergen (Robert Vaughn) arrives at the Midlands Neurophysiological Institute to perform experimental surgery on a 30-year-old man named John Soames (Terence Stamp). Soames has been in a coma since birth. Dr Bergen hopes to awaken him. If the operation succeeds Soames will of course be like a new-born baby. He will have to be taught to walk, to talk, to feed himself.

That’s the task of psychologist Dr Maitland (Nigel Davenport) - to put Soames through a crash course that will take him from babyhood to adulthood in a few months.

Of course the crash course runs into problems. Dr Maitland’s training regime is inflexible and rigorous. Dr Bergen on the other hand realises that Soames really is a child. He needs to play.

Soames eventually escapes and gets into a good deal of trouble through his total lack of understanding of the adult world. It seems that his escape could end disastrously or possibly even tragically, for Soames himself or for others. You think you know how it’s all going to end but this is neither a horror film nor a thriller so it’s wise not to assume that it will follow a typical horror movie or thriller trajectory.

What I like most about this movie is the number of times it sets up situations which the viewer will be sure can only play out in one way but the movie refuses to conform to our expectations. It’s just not the movie that you have probably assumed it’s going to be.

The film does explore issues about child-rearing and these may perhaps be intended as a commentary on wider social issues - individual freedom of expression opposed to social responsibility.

Dr Maitland is a believer in the need for discipline. Dr Bergen believes in freedom. These were issues that were in the air in 1970 (and again there’s that faint but tantalising similarity to A Clockwork Orange).

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Terence Stamp. I find him very mannered and I dislike most of his performances but if you cast him in a weird offbeat part he would give you a weird offbeat performance and on occasions that worked brilliantly. He’s perfect in William Wyler’s The Collector and in the Fellini-directed Toby Dammit segment of Spirits of the Dead. Stamp’s performance here works and I doubt if any other actor could have bettered it.

Nigel Davenport is good in the tricky part of Dr Maitland. It’s tricky because Maitland is a very unsympathetic character - he’s stubborn, he’s blinkered, he cannot admit to being wrong and he has no understanding of people. But he’s not a villain. He has no actual desire to hurt Soames. In his own way he means well.

Robert Vaughn is excellent as Dr Bergen. Vaughn of course had immense charm but this is not quite the debonair playboy charm of Napoleon Solo. Dr Bergen’s charm comes from a genuine human warmth. Vaughn makes Dr Bergen self-assured without being arrogant. He may not always be right but he means well.

There are no villains at all in this movie, just people who sincerely disagree on fundamental issues. We don’t really want anything bad to happen to any of these people.The film gets its points across without the audience ever feeling that it’s being lectured. The ending is typical of the entire approach of the film - set the audience up to expect one thing and then give them something else which is less obvious and more satisfying.

This film was based on a novel by Charles Eric Maine, a science fiction writer with no great reputation but I rather enjoyed his novel Spaceways.

The Mind of Mr Soames is offbeat and fascinating. Highly recommended. It’s on Blu-Ray, from Powerhouse Indicator.