Mud Songs

The Incredible Shrinking Man is an okay B-movie, notable only because of the special effects. A guy is enveloped by an ominous cloud while out on a pleasure cruise. Six month later he slowly begins to shrink. That’s it. There’s your movie. Eventually the guy has to live in a doll house. His cat attacks him. He escapes to the basement where, even smaller, he lives in a match box, washes under a dripping hot water tank, tries to steal food from a mouse trap, runs away from a spider — that kind of thing. It’s worth a look for the cutting-edge 1957 special effects, but it’s lacking in every other regard (even for a B-movie).

The entire movie can be viewed online at guba.com (I’ve never heard of it either).

It Came From Outer Space is one of the few 1950s science fiction B-movies I’ve seen to-date that actually has a coherent story, one that is strong enough to maintain the momentum of the movie without having to spice it up with cheesy special effects every 5 minutes. And it’s always fun to play Spot The Star Trek Actor, or even better: Spot The Professor From Gilligan’s Island. That guy shows up all over the place in these old “sci-fi” classics. So anyhow, a spaceship crashes in the desert and the aliens need time to repair their ship. So they make copies of some guys who work for the power company and tell the one guy who knows where they’re hiding to not tell anyone. They promise to free all the original people they made copies of as soon as they’re done fixing their ship. That’s coherent, right? The aliens don’t show their true selves too much, but when they do, they look like the one-eyed alien blob from Space 1999. All said and done, It Came From Outer Space is a surprisingly half-decent and entertaining B-movie.

James Berardineilli’s review of Hancock cuts to the case: “Hancock is a hodgepodge of intriguing ideas that, if developed further or presented as more than throw-ins to a confused production, might have made for a unique superhero film… Hancock is sometimes funny, sometimes clever, and occasionally involving, but it’s never brilliant and its edge is compromised by the neutering that accompanies the teen-friendly PG-13 rating.” Will Smith plays a homeless, alcoholic, belligerent super hero who grudgingly hires a PR man to improve his public image. So it’s a comedy, right? Or maybe an action movie? Maybe it’s a modern day Greek tragedy (I’m serious). Hancock had the potential to be a great movie in a class of its own, but it doesn’t know what it wants to be. So it’s a mess. It’s almost worth watching just to think about how good it could have been.

Destination Moon is the 1950s “sci-fi” B-movie version of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick may have borrowed from Destination Moon; check out the review I’ve linked to). Dramatically, the story about the first rocket ship sent to the moon is irrelevant. As usual, the acting is horrible and the production values are dated — but the fun is in watching how much is achieved through 1950s special effects. Long drawn out scenes showing the g-forces on the astronauts faces as they’re blasted into space; weightlessness as they float around the cabin; looking down on the earth; walking on the moon — it’s all impressive, in a cheesy, B-movie kind of way. Zero story, but interesting and entertaining special effects.

As a cheesy, “sci-fi” B-movie, This Island Earth doesn’t even approach the entertainment value of something like Forbidden Planet. (I have my doubts anything could beat Forbidden Planet. It’s impressive even outside the realm of B-movie appreciation.) There is a spaceship, an angry alien with a humongous brain and some humanoid people with big foreheads. All fine and good. The problem is boredom. The bad acting, the silly dialogue, the cardboard sets — you can only laugh your way through that for 10 or 15 minutes. Nothing cool happens until the last 20 minutes of the movie. That’s too much crap to sit through. Fast-forward to the 60-minute mark and you’ve got yourself a good time.

Forbidden Planet is the ultimate “sci-fi” B-movie. When one of the opening credits reads, “Electronic Tonalities by Louis and Bebe Barron,” you know it’s going to be a fun ride. Pick any five minutes from Forbidden Planet and you’ll see evidence of its influence on Star Wars, Star Trek and even Alien. It’s a total goofball movie full of blatant chauvinism and cheesy (yet spectacular) special effects and aliens that can read your mind, and a robot and a crazy spaceship and insane electronic tonalities — all kinds of fun stuff. Make yourself a big bowl and popcorn and dig in. Pretend you’re at a drive-in. You’ll have a blast.

A disease breaks out that causes mass blindness in an unnamed city. The blind are quarantined, left to fend for themselves in a hospital that’s surrounded by guards who shoot anyone who tries to get away. I kept expecting more from the story than Lord of the Flies in a mental institution for the blind. Written by Don McKellar, Blindness is based on the novel of the same name by José Saramago. If you’ve read the novel, you might get more out of the movie than I did because you’ll know more about each character’s motivation than what’s presented in the movie. But from what I saw on the screen, I couldn’t get into it. It fell just a little too short for me.

Last Night is written and directed by Don McKellar. It’s about the end of the world and how various people in Toronto decide to live out their last night on earth. Some people want to have sex, or pray, or be with family, or commit suicide before the sun explodes (though we’re never told why the earth is coming to an end). Others want to be alone. The film moves along at a calm, quiet, reflective pace that allows the audience to feel for these people who are facing not just the end of their own lives, but the extinction of all life on the planet. Although the main character is too intellectual to engender much sympathy, the final scene makes up for it. Last Night is an usual but memorable end-of-the-world movie, one that might leave you thinking.

Journey to the Center of the Earth (3-D) is a theme park ride for kids. The 3-D effects are disorienting. It’s difficult to focus on objects in the foreground when objects in the background are flying all over the place. Great for kids. I love Jules Verne’s original novel. It was fun to see certain scenes from the book come to life — the movie is faithful to the geography of some of the main scenes from the book. But otherwise, for adults, this is a lame night at the movies.

Even with some occasionally impressive cinematography, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem is unwatchable for anyone with an IQ over zero. It’s not even passable as a B-movie. Thank gods for the fast-forward button.

In The Invasion of the Body Snatchers #4, Nicole Kidman does her best not to fall asleep and become one of the Pod People in this science fiction thriller that adds nothing new to a story that’s been done too many times already. However, it does work as a contemporary B-movie. It’s so bad that it’s good.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of the best science fiction films ever made, and worth revisiting if you haven’t seen it for a long time. Steven Speilberg’s directorial style quickly became what you might call obvious later in his career, but in this early film he allows plenty of room for interpretation. He shows us but doesn’t tell us anything. The final encounter with the aliens is spectacular and mysterious (communicating through music is pretty darn cool). Too bad they don’t make movies like this anymore.

In Primer, some computer geeks create what turns out to be — I’m only guessing here — a time machine. They start messing with the space-time continuum and things go awry. It’s a science fiction movie with no special effects that begins with promise but quickly becomes frustrating by burying the essential drama of the story in unnecessary techno-babble.

The holy grail of production design and cinematography, Blade Runner is magnificent, brilliant and spectacular — to look at. The most compelling scenes are the moments when you can see the replicants thinking about their humanity and their existence. If more of the film had lived up to the potential in those scenes, Blade Runner would be a great film, not just a great-looking film. Still, if you haven’t seen it for a while, it’s worth revisiting. It’s never looked better than it does now.

I Am Legend is one of the best science fiction movies of recent years, which unfortunately isn’t saying much, but at least it’s watchable. Will Smith does a good job playing the last man on earth and you feel for the guy. He has to fight some vampire-werewolf people from time to time, which isn’t as stupid as you might think (the CGI isn’t always the best, but it holds up well enough). Most science fiction movies begin with great potential and then get stupid and change genres for the last act (e.g., Sunshine). I Am Legend, for the most part, manages to dodge that bullet. I can imagine a more accomplished science fiction director like Ridley Scott really digging his teeth into this one. There’s loss potential here. But I enjoyed it.

I used to think Star Trek: The Motion Picture was the worst of the original Star Trek movies because it foolishly tries to mimic 2001: A Space Odyssey, right down to the score over a black screen before the opening credits. But last night I managed to watch it all the way through for the first time since I got the director’s cut DVD a few years ago. So, for me, it’s no longer unwatchable. That’s an improvement, right?

The sun is going out and a spaceship is sent off to deliver a bomb that’s supposed to make things right. Recommended for fans of hard science fiction — with some reservations. The science behind the fiction makes it feel more real, but there’s not much character development, so, despite a few tense moments, the overall drama is minimal. Sunshine goes off the rails near the end and tries to become a horror movie with a message — which doesn’t work for all kinds of reasons. Someday someone might make an intelligent, adult science fiction film. This one almost pulled it off. Too bad.

Transformers may be the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It’s not even worth the trouble of a download just to see how bad it is (unless you’re 10 years old and don’t know any better; I thought Dukes of Hazzard was the best show on TV when I was 10). Star Wars: The Phantom Menace is a masterpiece next to this.

When Worlds Collide is one of the most watchable “sci-fi” B-movies from the early ’50s — and in colour! It’s about some scientists (or scienticians) who build a big rocket ship to take a group of people to the planet Zyra because the earth is about to be destroyed in a collision with some other rogue planet. Or something. 3 out of 4 stars on the cheese-o-meter. Couple it with Forbidden Planet, and you’ve got yourself a great double feature.

As straight up science fiction movies, Star Trek movies are kind of lame — but they’re fun if you can get into the whole Star Trek universe, and I do. That being said, Star Trek: Nemesis is a mess. Data has another evil twin? Captain Picard has been cloned? Why is this the first time we’ve heard of the Remans, and now we’re supposed to be scared of them? And how many women squirmed in their seats during Riker and Troi’s love scene? That was disgusting. It’s no wonder Nemesis put an end to the Next Generation movies.