Post by Quorthon on May 1, 2006 18:49:43 GMT -5
Quickshot Collection X: Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Runaway, Fantastic Voyage
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
1956
Unrated
Damn, the fifties was a grand time for movies, wasn’t it? Anything seemed possible! And anything was! Screenwriters just didn’t know any better! Well, a slight cut above the rest lies Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. No, this movie isn’t great—it’s clearly not the best of the genre—but it’s clearly not the worst, either.
In this film, suddenly, one day, flying saucers show up on earth. The manage to communicate in a most cumbersome manner with a scientist who’s busy sending satellites into space. But so far, the aliens have gone and shot all of ‘em down. Apparently, despite being vastly superior to us, they still couldn’t manage to see that the satellites posed no possible threat to them. Unless studying weather is detrimental to alien health… At any rate, they try talking to the scientist and in classic 50’s fashion, the aliens are actually here to invade. Wow. Didn’t see that shit coming! Well, the scientist figures out how to fight ‘em with, of all things, high intensity sound waves… or something.
This film is average at best for the time. It’s wildly inferior to some classic 50’s SF, like Them!, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc. But superior to shlock like The Man from Planet X or The Giant Claw, and about on par with This Island Earth. The UFO’s are done by none other than Ray Harryhausen, and they look pretty good. High average for the time, you could say. Decent compositing, but as usual, pretty laughable aliens. Their “space suits” are immensely clunkly and dull—I got the feeling that they were a very stagnant dark brown—though the film is black and white. They don’t even have elbows! Oddly enough, the aliens themselves, to ruin a surprise, are pretty close to the standard “grays” that apparently like sodomizing gullible people these days. The writing is passable and occasionally pretty dumb, the atmosphere and cinematography are average for the time. A decent watch for SF fans, but nothing super special. Cool final sequence of flying saucers crashing into buildings.
Nostalgia Score: 7/10, Modern Score: 4/10, Overall: 5/10
Runaway
1984
R
This thing was written and directed by Michael Crichton, long before he was dishing out cloned dinosaurs and feasible plots. What we have here is a world, apparently the current era (i.e. the mid-80’s) wherein, there are robots everywhere that are super helpful to humanity. Just like the apes in one of the Planet of the Apes movies. The robots don’t look too bad, thankfully, they aren’t androids, so they’re a wee bit more believable. They’re built to be functional… and cumbersome.
At any rate, Tom Selleck is a cop on the “runaway robot” beat. See, anytime a robot goes haywire, ol’ mustache here gets called in to shut it down. Well, pretty soon, it’s not about runaway robots, it’s about some lunatic (Gene Simmons—no shit!) who is developing “evil” chips to go in the robots to turn them into killing machines. And Tom Selleck suddenly finds himself running around trying to find and defeat the Demon from KISS.
Overall, this film isn’t too bad. It’s cheesy as all hell and rampant with unexplained phenomena. Like Tom Selleck running around doing stuff that doesn’t seem to be connected to catching crazy robots. The robots themselves are pretty odd, and only somewhat believable. Maybe if the film took place in the distant future, say, 2010 or something, it’d be a bit easier to swallow. But the robots seem to have massive computing power and skill at a time when they could barely assemble parts of cars—when preprogrammed to do so. The film also has trouble shaking the image of being a somewhat weak “cop drama” kind of film. Gene Simmons is pretty funny, even though I don’t think he’s supposed to be. The atmosphere is decent and the special effects are entertaining (lots of explosions), and there is brief nudity. Sometimes the acting is a little hard to swallow. Almost like the actors didn’t really buy what they were saying or doing, so they just “made the best of it.” Not Crichton’s best work.
5/10
Fantastic Voyage
1966
PG
Out of this set of Quickshots, this is arguably the most “classic” film. It’s well known, it was creative, it was all fancy-schmancy, it’s in color…
It was about this guy that’s super important and requires an emergency operation—one that can only be accomplished by taking a team of specialists, shrinking them down inside an equally shrunk “submarine” and injecting it into him so they can make a farciful, er, fantastic voyage to the problem in his brain. Wherein they’re going to use a snazzy laser to blast away the problem (which is a clot or tumor or something). Well, the film is largely done in “real-time” and follows the crew as they have an hour of misadventure and endless difficulty in finding their way to the brain. Why an hour? Well, after that, they re-big-ulize inside the comatose dude.
Well, I’m sure that for the time, the special effects here were just awesome. But now, by god, they’re pretty awful. What we have is a collection of “acid trip” cinematography somewhere cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and a lava lamp. For whatever reason, the inside of the human body is awash with the color blue. And rather than specific terms, an awful lot of stuff is referred to as “corpuscles.” Occasionally, the imagery is pretty neat, but a lot of it doesn’t make much sense. Apparently, the inside of the human body is filled with some sort of atmosphere somewhere between liquid and gas as our heroes spend a lot of time “swimming” through open areas. Also laughable is the technology on hand. Who knew something as complex as shrinking a bunch of people down to travel inside the human body could be done without a drop of actual technology. Instead of futuristic TV/Computer screens, we have mirrored reflectors a la an overhead projector in a high school. The best we have is “extremely futuristic” black and white images which make up the maps of the human body with a little light in the background showing, apparently, the position of the craft. Needless to say, time has not been kind to this film. The writing is occasionally nerve-rackingly inane and the atmosphere is painfully light. To top it all off, the film kind of drags and it occasionally pretty dull. To add insult to injury, Raquel Welch never really wears anything revealing or body-hugging! For SF purists or film buffs only.
Nostalgia Score: 7/10, Modern Score: 2/10, Overall: 4/10
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
1956
Unrated
Damn, the fifties was a grand time for movies, wasn’t it? Anything seemed possible! And anything was! Screenwriters just didn’t know any better! Well, a slight cut above the rest lies Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. No, this movie isn’t great—it’s clearly not the best of the genre—but it’s clearly not the worst, either.
In this film, suddenly, one day, flying saucers show up on earth. The manage to communicate in a most cumbersome manner with a scientist who’s busy sending satellites into space. But so far, the aliens have gone and shot all of ‘em down. Apparently, despite being vastly superior to us, they still couldn’t manage to see that the satellites posed no possible threat to them. Unless studying weather is detrimental to alien health… At any rate, they try talking to the scientist and in classic 50’s fashion, the aliens are actually here to invade. Wow. Didn’t see that shit coming! Well, the scientist figures out how to fight ‘em with, of all things, high intensity sound waves… or something.
This film is average at best for the time. It’s wildly inferior to some classic 50’s SF, like Them!, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc. But superior to shlock like The Man from Planet X or The Giant Claw, and about on par with This Island Earth. The UFO’s are done by none other than Ray Harryhausen, and they look pretty good. High average for the time, you could say. Decent compositing, but as usual, pretty laughable aliens. Their “space suits” are immensely clunkly and dull—I got the feeling that they were a very stagnant dark brown—though the film is black and white. They don’t even have elbows! Oddly enough, the aliens themselves, to ruin a surprise, are pretty close to the standard “grays” that apparently like sodomizing gullible people these days. The writing is passable and occasionally pretty dumb, the atmosphere and cinematography are average for the time. A decent watch for SF fans, but nothing super special. Cool final sequence of flying saucers crashing into buildings.
Nostalgia Score: 7/10, Modern Score: 4/10, Overall: 5/10
Runaway
1984
R
This thing was written and directed by Michael Crichton, long before he was dishing out cloned dinosaurs and feasible plots. What we have here is a world, apparently the current era (i.e. the mid-80’s) wherein, there are robots everywhere that are super helpful to humanity. Just like the apes in one of the Planet of the Apes movies. The robots don’t look too bad, thankfully, they aren’t androids, so they’re a wee bit more believable. They’re built to be functional… and cumbersome.
At any rate, Tom Selleck is a cop on the “runaway robot” beat. See, anytime a robot goes haywire, ol’ mustache here gets called in to shut it down. Well, pretty soon, it’s not about runaway robots, it’s about some lunatic (Gene Simmons—no shit!) who is developing “evil” chips to go in the robots to turn them into killing machines. And Tom Selleck suddenly finds himself running around trying to find and defeat the Demon from KISS.
Overall, this film isn’t too bad. It’s cheesy as all hell and rampant with unexplained phenomena. Like Tom Selleck running around doing stuff that doesn’t seem to be connected to catching crazy robots. The robots themselves are pretty odd, and only somewhat believable. Maybe if the film took place in the distant future, say, 2010 or something, it’d be a bit easier to swallow. But the robots seem to have massive computing power and skill at a time when they could barely assemble parts of cars—when preprogrammed to do so. The film also has trouble shaking the image of being a somewhat weak “cop drama” kind of film. Gene Simmons is pretty funny, even though I don’t think he’s supposed to be. The atmosphere is decent and the special effects are entertaining (lots of explosions), and there is brief nudity. Sometimes the acting is a little hard to swallow. Almost like the actors didn’t really buy what they were saying or doing, so they just “made the best of it.” Not Crichton’s best work.
5/10
Fantastic Voyage
1966
PG
Out of this set of Quickshots, this is arguably the most “classic” film. It’s well known, it was creative, it was all fancy-schmancy, it’s in color…
It was about this guy that’s super important and requires an emergency operation—one that can only be accomplished by taking a team of specialists, shrinking them down inside an equally shrunk “submarine” and injecting it into him so they can make a farciful, er, fantastic voyage to the problem in his brain. Wherein they’re going to use a snazzy laser to blast away the problem (which is a clot or tumor or something). Well, the film is largely done in “real-time” and follows the crew as they have an hour of misadventure and endless difficulty in finding their way to the brain. Why an hour? Well, after that, they re-big-ulize inside the comatose dude.
Well, I’m sure that for the time, the special effects here were just awesome. But now, by god, they’re pretty awful. What we have is a collection of “acid trip” cinematography somewhere cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and a lava lamp. For whatever reason, the inside of the human body is awash with the color blue. And rather than specific terms, an awful lot of stuff is referred to as “corpuscles.” Occasionally, the imagery is pretty neat, but a lot of it doesn’t make much sense. Apparently, the inside of the human body is filled with some sort of atmosphere somewhere between liquid and gas as our heroes spend a lot of time “swimming” through open areas. Also laughable is the technology on hand. Who knew something as complex as shrinking a bunch of people down to travel inside the human body could be done without a drop of actual technology. Instead of futuristic TV/Computer screens, we have mirrored reflectors a la an overhead projector in a high school. The best we have is “extremely futuristic” black and white images which make up the maps of the human body with a little light in the background showing, apparently, the position of the craft. Needless to say, time has not been kind to this film. The writing is occasionally nerve-rackingly inane and the atmosphere is painfully light. To top it all off, the film kind of drags and it occasionally pretty dull. To add insult to injury, Raquel Welch never really wears anything revealing or body-hugging! For SF purists or film buffs only.
Nostalgia Score: 7/10, Modern Score: 2/10, Overall: 4/10
