Slide, Vaquero! SHIP OF MONSTERS (1960)

It's spring in the pre-or-post disease era and, if you love bizarre old classic sci-fi musicals, time to crack open the YouTube and dive into my weirdest/best Mexican cinema discovery since La Maldicion del la Llorona (1963). Long unavailable on DVD, in English either dub or subtitles, it's now got quite legible subtitles on El Youtube -aqui!

For fans of classic matinee sci-fi/horror who'd rather have va-voom classic sex appeal in their sci-fi western comedies, rather than hokey Gene Autrey tunes (as one finds in that hokey 1935 serial The Phantom Empire - which is actually the closest thing this film has to a hermano), Mexico delivers Rogelio Gonzalez's Ship of Monsters. The plot: two glamorous Venusians coming home from a long quest rounding up fit male specimens from the galaxy to repopulate their female-only planet, make an emergency landing in Chihuahua, Mexico for their robot to make repairs. Perhaps you've guessed the rest. A freewheeling vaquero wins one of their hearts with his songs? Si, naturalmente, claro! 

I won't bore you with a list of the legion of 50s comedians who've gone to the moon or Venus to find all sorts of babes suffering from an extreme hombre shortage. Everyone from the Stooges to Abbot and Costello to Sonny Tufts went up to space and tangled with them. And that's the key difference - the ladies come here and meet the fabulous singing vaquero Eulalio González! Ay dios mio!  Pipporro! And he's cool!

Possessing a genuinely disarming smile, a naturalness in his awed reactions, a dewy twinkle in his dark glassy eyes, and a gently lilting yet masculine baritone voice that deepens to a questioning smolder at the end of every sentence, "Pipporro" has a great natural ease, a kind of twinkly-eyed singing caballero version of young Bob Hope; he also has a great kind of hippity-hop Elvis tango dance style that smolders while still being funny. An inexplicable juke box in his kitchen provides the instrumental back-up to his songs, which he performs to the agog wonderment of his alien women visitors (while their robot plays with his little brother outdoors). Gonzalez shows a great way with each of the ladies in turn: he's passionate, smitten, confident, and a little confused with the nice one; flattered but firm in his 'no!' to the (vampiric) one who comes onto him later. He holds fast in his ardor; if a spark flies, it's true love and worth being faithful for even if you just met them both at the same time. I never understood why Flash would turn down Aura when Dale is just some blonde earth woman he barely met an hour earlier.. until now. 

Ana Bertha Lepe is Gamma (the good one) and Lorena Velázquez is Beta, the bad one (she played many vampires and wrestling women in the course of her illustrious career, battling everyone from Santos to the Aztec Mummy). These ex-Miss Mexico beauty queens wield ray guns and rock tight-fitting uniforms and generally strut about the Chihuahua flats and into Pipporro's life in a way that puts most American beauties to shame. The alien monster male samples kept on ice from other planets are each unique and cleverly-if-cheaply--constructed. All are done with a mix of art class-level papier mache and giddy imagination. And they talk! They make rational decisions, and can make love as easily as they kill. Even a sabre tooth tiger skeleton man gets his opinion considered (and has a great Tom Waits-style croak of a voice). But the alien girls are always in control, able to pause Emilio in mid sentence to check up on the words he uses that they don't understand, accessing what we in our futuristic world might call Alexa reading from Wikipedia. My favorite line is when the narrator of the video they're watching on their laptop to learn about Mexico notes (while showing scenic travel footage) that's it's a lovely country and "for all they've tried, the Mexicans haven't been able to destroy it."

I have fallen in love with this film so much I don't even mind that Lauriano (Gonzalez's character's name) has a little brother, Chuy, (Herberto Davila, Jr) with whom he lives alone on a big ranch outside Chihuahua. I generally can't stand sci-fi films set in southern climates as they always have cute impish kids in them, but Chuy is no imp who should be in school instead of acting as guide for the American hero. Chuy is an able assistant around the ranch, going off to play with the robot when the talk gets adult but when the monsters fly into action, Chuy even tackles and kills one of the monsters all by himself with the fury of one of the kids in Over the Edge or The Bad News Bears! Imagine Abbott and Costello doing anything but running in a similar situation and you begin to understand what the males of America are up against. And these two women aren't afraid to either kick ass or make love to the monsters right there on camera.

That's basically all there is... what else... hmm, some outfits worthy of Artist and Models (I could see this film as a collaboration between Tashlin and Bunuel) and some lovely female flesh on display--but each woman is resourceful, intelligent, strong and assertive. There's never a thought of turning the good one into a household drudge at the end, the way there would be in a Hollywood product. No, amigo. Would it was available on one of those great discs from the (now sadly defunct) La Casa Negra DVD label. Or, ideally, Criterion!

Man, am I losing my mind? I've been watching Tarkovsky, Godard, and Suzuki on Criterion too. I swear ta god: I'm fancy. I'm a highfalutin' intellectual.  Criterion should have me do one of their "Adventures in Moviegoing" collections. I'd frickin' nail it.  Ship of Monsters - front and center. This is Erich saying, I'm losing my mind and in the process found something better.

Gettin' Ripped: Luigi Cozzi's PAGANINI HORROR (1989)

If ever there was a time to order Blu-rays of things you want to see on your desert island after civilization's you-know-what, it's now, for the canon of Luigi "The Italian Ed Wood" Cozzi is nearly all fully available from one label or site or another. I've already blathered praise for his two masterworks Starcrash and Hercules.  Now the lunatic eye slash-cum-time warp-devil-dipped and Pleasance-lipped, slippery dippy house bash Paganini Horror (1989) is available on a stunning Blu-ray (via Severin), so the circle is complete (almost). I hope, by the way, you don't think my praise of his crude genius is snide or mean-spirited - quite the opposite. If we can't laugh at Italian versions of our basest music class fears, see them bounced hurly burly into cosmic prisms, fall into slime pits in a universe where time loops are illustrated by giant floating hourglasses and spray-painted physics equations on the drywalls, we may as well hang shop and close up ourselves. 

It's as threadbare a production as they come. It's clear the money ran out somewhere along the line for Paganini Horror in ways it didn't for his other 1989 masterpiece, The Black Cat. Still, budget be damned, no way is Cozzi going to just give us girls in a rock band disemboweled with a bladed violin. L'Italiano Wood has bigger things on his mind. Tell him to make a cheap slasher movie that ties in Paganini to get some free associative publicity from a big budget Paganini biopic in the works at the time and he'll give you the universe. No budgetary constraints can stop him from grabbing at the cosmic ring, even if he knows his horse is out miles too far for his budget's arms. 

Maybe you saw the DVD cover, with the skeleton playing violin (left) and drew some cheap late-80s punk-meets-slasher impression from it. Maybe you figured it would be the usual tactless ladle of topless broads and denim-jacketed idiots offed gorily in some house where money for the electric bill grows on trees. Your conclusions couldn't be more wrong. Instead, Busto Arsizio's favorite son delivers all his usual tropes and tics: plenty of strong women with wild hair, planetary shifts, portentous gazes into nowhere; lasers, wild light effects, godawful dubbing, spiritual homage-paying (the spirits of Jack Kirby, Ray Harryhausen, Alex Raymond, and Bernie Krigstein all watch over Cozzi's shoulder in numb surprise), only in a 'house' that's really more like a half-finished set, drywall only half-painted, buckets laying around, sheets everywhere....  Man, I am talking myself into watching this all over again.... again? 

Bad though it is, in many ways, Paganini Horror is never dull or lacking for color. As in the same year's Black Cat, it reaches a climax at around ten minutes in and just keep building from there until we're too far out in space, riding a cosmic hourglass around the moon, through the moldy mud, through to the same room we left, only now covered in candles. And then someone stabs us with a violin. 

Dario Nicolodi gets star billing as Sylvia, the owner of the fabled "House in the Key of G" (where Paganini lived) which she rents out for cash. This week she's hosting a music video shoot for "Paganini Horror" the new song based on the mysterious last piece of written music by our titular virtuoso. Goosing up the atmos, Nicolodi announces Paganini conducted black mass rituals here in the 19th century. He disemboweled his bride and used her intestines as strings for his Stradivarius! That's how he hit those weird notes only he could hit! It's the screams of his bride forever trapped in the strings! Lead singer Kate  (Jasmin Maimone) exclaims that their 'House in the Key of G video' will be "like Michael Jackson's Thriller!" Bitchy manager Lavinia (Maria Cristina Mastrangeli) hires horror director Mark Singer (Pietro Genuardi, who plays the same character in Black Cat) who decorates the shoot by spray painting the song title onto white sheets on the wall. Their most bodacious of bassists, Rita (Luana Ravegnini) wears a devil mask; there's also all-seeing eye lamp, a cosmic hourglass Cozzi must have brought from home, and candles. There's a mention of substituting mannequins as the band members start to disappear, but there's no time to follow up on that, as the disappearances keep happening as more and more people are sent off to look for the missing.... until everyone is being lured into the evil Paganini's clutches.

There are two real crimes to this movie. One, is that most beautiful bassist in all the world, Rita, is the first to die. Why her?  Why not literally anyone else in the cast? It seems very spiteful of our Paganini! Every second with her is precious. The doe-eyed assistant manager boy is next (lured to his death by a wet-haired version of Rita's ghost); but soon there's way more going on than just violin stabbings and standing around, with lots of weird mask cutaways. Holes open up under people's feet; electric energy pulses through those who fall into it or who try to escape the force field surrounding the house. Meanwhile Albert Einstein looks on, balefully, from a tacked-up poster, tongue hanging out in mock disapproval. Just to let you know, weird physics be happenin'.

As for that final piece of music, the one Paganini supposedly wrote that the doe-eyes assistant pays a fortune for from Donald Pleasance, well, no one ever called the film's composer Vince Tempura a modern Paganini. He does okay with the non-diegetic part of the score, not so much the Paganini-attributed song, though it is serviceable certainly. If Paganini is the Jimi Page of his era, this would be the theme from Death Wish II. 

Paganini himself is really the weakest part of the film: naturally the knife he uses has a treble clef-shaped handle, and also his metal Stradivarius switchblade likes to stick into expose bellies, i.e. sweet, sweet Rita's. He also has a huge cello case (no cello) to lock up our final girl and it's then set on fire. In addition, guitarist Elena (Michel Klipstein) gets infected by "a special fungus... like they discovered in the 1800s, on logs... floating along...  certain European rivers," notes Lavania. 'This infected wood.. was used to make a special kind of violin, the Stradivarius." Elena becomes a hideous fungus-covered monster; Lavinia says "this is the fungus, for sure... I saw it... magnified... in a TV documentary." 

Music is magic. We get an update on the harmony of the spheres. As with everything in the Cozzi canon, we get way more than you might expect. It may not all fit, but everything's here - even Cozzi's beloved cosmic hourglass! The name Lavania is also similar to Lavana (from The Black Cat). It's all here. 

If an analyst tells you why all traumatic childhood flashbacks occur in

 red bathrooms, kill them instantly.

We open on the ominous synth notes dotting along as a strange young girl rides up a foggy Venice canal; we dig the look of satanic royalty in the way she sits, with the violin case in her lap, the gondola like some kind of fast moving sea serpent, snaking through the lonely mist as Vince Tempera's soundtrack pulses like Tangerine Dream guiding Roy Scheider's nitro truck through the Sorcerer mud. At home, amidst her collection of weird dolls, the music echoes with vocals, the girl picks up a Barbie-sized doll with a brown skull face and long white hair (a ringer for the Paganini spirit to come) and stirs mom's bath with it. A stark red wall is behind them...

After the untimely death of Rita, the second most unconscionable choice is that Donald Pleasance is dubbed by someone else!! His replacement does an okay enough job - especially in his rant about demons as he climbs up to the top of an under-reconstruction clock tower in Venice and throws all the money he got for the Paganini score to the wind, trying to keep a straight face while talking to money ("fly away, demons, so the real ones can take your place... so what happens with Paganini will repeat itself.... extracted by the one to whom it belongs, his majesty, Satan!") makes for a pretty well modulated rant, but what's the point of even having the Donald in a film if not for that deliciously silken, fearful but scarily seismographic voice?

All of the dubbing is pretty bad in both the Italian and English versions. English dubs especially have been Cozzi's Achilles' heel - be it the lame Texas accented robot and shrill Stella Starr of Starcrash, or the grating storytelling narrator in Sinbad and the Seven Seas, the result is that kind of lazy mixing where everyone sounds like they're right up on the mic in a quiet sound booth rather than out in the actual environment depicted. One side effect of it all is the hilarious near-constant screaming of Cozzi's nearly all-female cast. There is so much screaming that the actresses seem to be running out of breath; their screams trail off into hysteria, like they're barely trying to keep a straight face, the way a child who's been crying for hours starts to almost laugh with their crying voice. 

What makes it a true gem is Cozzi's infectious, palpable love and respect for fantasy, for strong women, and moviemaking.  When Ravegnini and the other girl band members gaze into the camera for their music video, you can tell they're feeling happy and part of the Cozzi family pack; they're not taking it very seriously but they love it.  There's no vibe of having to fight off pervy producers or rote macho objectification. These girls glow. Franco Lecca's deep yellow and red-accented cinematography makes everyone seem lovely with natural skin color (rather than the ghastly pale or gaudy tan we sometimes get in Italian horror films) and the Venetian architecture hums in burnished oranges and browns. 

Too bad when they go outside it's all bad day-for-night that makes everyone look purple and green. Why?

Ugh, why, Paganini, why kill Rita first? Why not get Pleasance to do his own dub? Why the bad day-for-night? Why the bad vibe ending? If it didn't have these things I would have seen it a dozen times already, instead of only twice.

Regardless, there are still enough gateways to other dimensions, electrical charges, melting hands, green glowing lights, and strange doorways to hell and all the other Cozzi trimmings to make six ordinary movies, even if full half the film is just one girl or the other walking up and down stairs and down halls, or screaming. We can't blame the master if some turkey distributor who didn't get what he wanted, so took out all the cosmic cutaways. We sure can wish for a full restored director's cut. Wishing is free.

BLU-RAY EXTRAS:

There's a nice interview with Cozzi at his sci-fi store; and the footage excised by the producer fills in a lot of the blanks  (would there was a copy with all the original shots -love the hourglasses floating in space - recycled from Hercules) and an explanation of why that too-trusting kid assistant would shell out a bag of money to some sinister Hobbes Lane type for an alleged authentic Paganini score.

Anyway, Severin has done wonders with what they got (Did the color grading just give out for the exterior shots, or was it supposed to look like that?) All we need now from Severin (here's hoping it's coming soon) is Cozzi's unofficial meta-Suspiria-sequel (recently re-available on Prime), The Black Cat (aka Demons 6: Anus Profundis) from 1990. (PS they released it this year, 2021!). 

And while we're on the subject, what about that crazy shot-on-video quasi-autobiographical Blood on Melies' Moon? (PS it came out this year, 2022! I'm quoted on the back label!)  I saw a clip wherein the great one himself ruminates in his bedroom about coming to terms with being labeled "The Italian Ed Wood." I guess I'm not the first to call him that. But hey Luigi, if you're reading this, know that a lot of us fans love Ed Wood way more than a more highly regarded artist like, say, Fritz Lang. I have a billion theories why that is but the main one might be the Brechtian distancing opening us up to the interplay of our own imagination, like having the curtains around your favorite play suddenly flung open. We get a bit of that in, say, Bergman's Magic Flute or Olivier's Henry V but it's intentional and hence a little pompous compared to the accidental Brechts like Wood and Cozzi (Godard--erasing his auteur footsteps around the sudden exposure of Brechtian mechanics as if Danny Torrance slinking backwards in his own tracks--is the Mr. In-Between.)

Maybe it's all too short with a hyper-ironic, unsatisfying ending that makes all the parts click into perfect place, the way some insane carnival ride turns out to be "Take the A Train" all along in a Charles Mingus composition. Maybe it was trimmed of its cosmic portent, maybe Rita died too soon, maybe Donald doesn't dub himself, but the Cozzi magic is still there and this film must to be treasured for a lifetime of Cozzi binges to come. Who knows how long that lifetime will be? Einstein on the poster knows! He says, honey, you better pounce while you still have all your own strings. 

For the Complete Cozzi Cannon, click here!

Retreat to Move Forward: YOR, THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE (1983)

We live in a mighty strange time but, when things look bleakest, don't forget about our ace in the hole: a movie from 1983 laden with strangely wondrous lines like "we learned a lot about you from your medallion," "Damned talking box!" and "The machine speaks the truth!" YOR, THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE (1983) is a stellar example of Italy's low budget post-CONAN barbarian surge. When we were still crawling out of the slasher mire with the help of Conan and The Road Warrior the year before, Italy was already looking ahead, splitting the difference so that pre-diluvian and post-apocalypse touched to a wild hair metal anthem. Now that the social sphere has shrunk to no bigger than a snapchat window, let YOR come smash it wider! Whooo! 

Antonio "Anthony Dawson" Margheriti ("Mar--garehhh-tee") directed, so you can bet its slam bang action will come to you buoyant but deadpan, guileless if sincere but and bedecked with dinosaurs and lasers, mirror halls, and gorgeous and interesting girls--in other words everything and anything men aged 10-18 will love well into their 50s. File it next to FLASH GORDON (1980), THE APPLE (1979), and SHE (1982) and you'll never want for giddy (but too deadpan to be straight-up camp) qua-glam rock-and-roll, post-reality, early-80s sci-fi action madness.

There's no explaining it to those who don't get the need for a good stone knife plunged between the eyes of a dinosaur. Paleontologists never tire of reminding us cavemen and dinosaurs lived millions of years apart, so I always wondered why-60s/70s Hammers like ONE MILLION BC, WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH, and PREHISTORIC WOMEN foolishly tried to appease them, filling their films with too much ponderous and dour tribal place-jostling, celebratory dancing, and savage landscape wandering as if solemn grunting would convince archaeologists of their sincerity and merit. On the other hand, that approach has aged way better than the campy winks, bad puppets and augmented cleavage of later caveman/dinosaur opuses. YOR is the only one of the type who sees beyond both pitfalls. It swims in a world where past and future happen at once, and there's no time to (conspicuously) leer at boobies (ala Olen Ray) or argue with the tribal elders (ala Chaffey, and even Corman). Instead it just hangs glides into a den of homicidal purple-faced ape giants on the wings of a giant dead bat, while 80s rock suddenly surges on the soundtrack. 

The moment the "De Angelis'" rock opera anthem theme song churns to life you know this here's a special ride: "He is a man from the future / a man from yesterday / his game is destiny!" You start making room for the film in your top ten of emotional rescue go-tos almost at once:

Proud and we desire (..?)
He's never seen the sun!
He's always on the run!
The list goes on and on.

Barely have the opening theme's last chords ended when Yor (Reb "the real Captain" Brown) has already killed a life-size papier mache triceratops/stegosaurus combination monster in a vivid, up-close battle. It's one of the best, most realistic struggles between man and dinosaur ever. Yor is right in there, stabbing away, blood dripping down, its eyes wild with fear and fury. We feel complex emotions-- it's a stegosaurus and thus a plant eater, merely trying to protect its young cub caught in a trap set by some gateherers. It's a tough world. At least Yor's kill of the big beast feeds the whole village. Woo-hoo! He eats the heart and cuts the "choice" meats. He and his new friends dance around licentiously and party in ways that the grunting bunch of neanderthals in ONE MILLION BC never would.  You can't help but feel Yor is having a good time, genuinely. And it's terrific because hey, it's rare in this murky kill-and-be-killed era. Conan smiles what, one time in the whole movie? It's rare too to see a bro like Yor rocking out and not kind of think he's a tool. But Brown, with his big Treat Williams jaw and blonde hippy hair pulls it off. He can still drop his bowl and pick up his stone axe if the tall ape men decide to raid. It's all in the balance. He conveys that switch on moment when the first flush of whiskey hits and people around you go from strangers to friends in a celebratory alchemical instant.

It's clear though he loves to rock out, Yor doesn't quite fit, because, you see, he's blonde and everyone else is brunette - and what's that strange medallion on his neck? He doesn't remember. He's got some weird past he has to find out about. But for moment - Woo! Some celebratory dancing, crazy drumming, and licentious bonding with the statuesque if slightly weatherbeaten Corinne Clery as Kalaa (!), and we're already feeling the love.



Kalaa's guardian is the trusty Pag (Luciano "Italian Peter Lorre" Pigozzi) who ambles along on the adventures, rounding out their new wandering threesome. Over desert hill and rolling cliff they wander, meeting new faces all the time, and if the goddess of fire worshipping lepers Roa (the comely and overly-made-up Aysha Gul) turns out to be a real hottie, if you'll forgive the expression and if, like Yor, she thought she was the only blonde with a round medallion in the world, then nature must take it's course. Paag reminds Kalaa that in this realm a man may take many wives (Woo!). In other words, this is Flash Gordon if Flash wasn't such a prude, i.e. so he'd throw Aura, Ming's sexy daughter, a well-deserved lay, instead of refusing her come-ons out of loyalty to a jealous Earth girl whom he literally just met only hours beforehand. Yor's no prude, bro. He's got time for everyone. This is Italy, or Israel, or somewhere sex isn't for lewd snickering or indignant eye rolls. it's just a thing that happens and is ver-a sexy when it does.

There will be other women in Yor's life before it's all over: Carol André shows up in the third act, on the mysterious island where lasers and complex machinery rule the day. And the beguiling Marina Rocchi, whom Yor saves from a (again admirably life-size) dimetrodon, of the shell people. Yor has time for all! 

One thing that stands out, that really makes this unique is the use of life size dinosaurs, all of which seem very much in their natural element. A lot of the stop motion dinosaur action we get, via Harryhausen, for example, can err on the side of simplicity for staging: we see dinosaurs fight and hang out in the midst of barren desert, i.e. how their habitat looks now, all these millions of years later, making us wonder how they can possibly survive with no vegetation or cover. In YOR, the beasts emerge from behind rocks and jungle canopy and it's hard to tell where they end and their surroundings begin at first. Their natural camouflage means they strike from within deep thickets and pond murk, with Yor and Kala climbing all over these giant (life-size) heads, hacking away, the beasts dying but slowly, from loss of blood, savagely stabbed (or shot with Pag's arrows) in their soft tissue areas. There's no glamorous Harryhausen flourishes to their death rattles - these things don't go down without a fight, leaving everyone involved doused in gore by the end.

Man, what a film. Where has it been all these years? I remember the commercial for Yor! One Saturday morning or late Friday night in the 80s and thinking: Conan with lasers, dinosaurs and Reb Brown hang gliding off a dead bat creature into the thick of a bunch of ape men, looking kind of like the Marvel character Ka-Zar. I mean, I could tell it was pretty low budget, but its imagination and gonzo gumption was clear. We who loved bad sci-fi and dinosaur movies could hardly believe it would ever be as great as it looked. And then, after that one ad, we never heard from Yor again until it showed up on Amazon streaming 30 years later. Had he just been a foolish dream>

Hell, 30 or so years isn't too long and ten bucks ain't too high.

In short, Yor- your time has come. If you love Conan, Flash Gordon, and even--despite its dour tone--the 1966 remake of One Million BC, as much as I do... and if you sneered like Johnny Rotten when when someone tried to fob some hyper-banal mainstream imitation like Ladyhawke or Legend off on you instead... now is your time of deliverance.

Competition of Kalaa (from top); Marina Rocchi, Aysha Gul, Carol Andre

And like Luigi Cozzi's so-bad-it's-sublime Hercules, YOR scores big with me as there are more women in the cast than men, or it's at least the numbers are even. And though they do get rescued now and again they nonetheless are warriors, net-weavers, and/or holding significant scientific positions. 

A special shout to Reb Brown as Yor! He would have been perfect as Flash Gordon, as he lacks the kind of self-conscious aww-shucksitude apparent in Sam Jones' twinkly eyes. Not that that film isn't the best or that we don't all love Sam Jones, but Reb Brown would have crushed it. There's not a gram of self-consciousness in him. I dig that he also encourages those he meets to drink the blood of the slain triceratops in a dim nod to Siegfried. "Drinking the blood of your enemy gives you their power." It's just one of the fantastic little details Marghareti peppers the film with. Not all his films hit the mark but over the years he sure has given us a still under-appreciated canon of energetic termite art. Woo! Proud and we desire!  We have all the time in the world to scan their silver discs and figure out if they are our grandfathers or are great-grandchildren. At this point in human history, we could go either way and still be proud to have a YOR in the tree. John Steiner, you're once again going down! 

Retro-Futurism was Sure to Go: 10 Cool International 60s Sci-fi Trips Streaming on Prime and Criterion

 Lately I've been unable to escape a yen for all things sci-fi mid-60s --the stretch between Sputnik and the moon landing--when an ex-Nazi rocketeer named Werner released (through Disney!) a series of speculative documentaries about NASA's plans for ze future: moon landings, orbiting satellites, revolving space stations, little robot-armed one man capsules, and maybe even explorations of Mars and Venus. Movies of the time borrowed all his ideas and plans, specifically the revolving space station idea. Science later realized a lot of his proposals wouldn't work (like you couldn't duplicate Earth gravity that easy), so Werner's Disney collabs don't get trotted out too often in SCI channel documentaries. But we've got the movies that sprang from them--reminding us of a time when space seemed like a swinging cocktail jazz bar waiting to happen--and now they look better than ever, streaming through the ether to your little credit card-thick phone! Disney and von Braun never imagined that!

Von Braun points out his plan for a new space station in a 1955 Disney film. 
This round revolving shape would henceforth be the go-to design
for the next decade+'s science fiction space stations. 

more post-Axis sci-fi: X FROM OUTER SPACE, THE

This era between Sputnik and Apollo became known in comic book circles as the Silver Age: the era when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby replaced bland square jawed superheroes with dudes complex, tortured, relatable, with a cohesive universe full of crazy Steve Ditko abstraction. Onscreen, the squaresville atomic caution of the golden 50s was being replaced by colorful space opera cocktail decadence. Strong female characters no longer had to fight sexist blowhards to be respected as officers (see: Angry Red Planet, Rocketship XM). Now they could heads of communications and operations, doctors in astro-biology and chemistry; they could be pretty without having male crew members snicker behind their backs or wolfishly lick their lips. I've deliberately eschewed any movie from this list that contains even a hint of that type of dated 50s sexism.  I've also avoided any streaming titles of less than watchable quality, though your mileage may vary. So.... What are we waiting for!? The future ain't gonna get much older!

1. CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS 

(1962) Dir. Wesley Barry

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A

I'm beginning to understand the fuss about this being Andy Warhol's favorite movie. It's fast becoming one of my favorites too! It contains everything I love in a late night sci-fi chill-out film and nothing I don't. Deep dark reds and grays, extendable tubes, silver eyeballs, skeletons, space age decor, pulp novel skies, heightened theatricality, an 'all in a single night' time frame, and spooky analog sci-fi music. I love the total absence of exterior shots and that it all occurs against painted backdrops that seem lifted right out off the covers of early-60s space age paperbacks (including great lighting, colors, and cinematography from the legendary Hal Mohr). It also has an endlessly fascinating premise that warrants its talky nature. Set in a post-nuclear future where cities have become more advanced than ever and most humans are sterile, robots have become highly advanced and do most of our work and have taken on human form, albeit with gray skin, silver yes, and bald heads. Don Megowan stars as "the" Craigis, a member of the Order of Flesh and Blood, a space age luddite hate group out to halt the production of humanoid-looking robots as they're too much like "us" for these racist/homophobic-style comfort. They hassle robots on the street and strut around in fascist sashes and Civil War caps. Meanwhile, Dudley Manlove--in his second best sci-fi role--is one of the robots, cementing the film's queer-coded message (i.e. 'we're closer than you know, we mean you no harm, and we don't intend to stay in the shadows much longer'). David Cross (no relation) is Pax, the 'clicker' (as the robots are derisively called) in 'rapport' with Craigis' sister more liberal sister Esme (Frances McCann). Cragis tries to get her to break it off via a 3 AM visit, but not everyone is afraid of having all their needs met by a mechanical device in this most perfect of all eternal nights. She just happens to be up having cocktails with her friend !  Doesn't anyone sleep in the future?

Beautiful to look at and never boring (even if no one seems to ever 'move'), this is clearly a real labor of love from director Wesley Barry. I like to imagine it got workshopped at some off-off-Broadway East Village coffeehouse all through the 50s as--for all its measured talkiness--it's never dull, uneven, or repetitive. Occasional deadpan jokes ("we did make you a bit thinner,") land like gentle spiders amidst the vocalizing space age echoes on the soundtrack (courtesy an uncredited Edward J. Kay). The serene George Milan is Acto, the head robot. Able to seem comforting yet otherworldly at the same time, Milan makes a great team with Manlove as his right hand "man" - droll, laid-back, and unfazable.  I urge you to watch it late at night, with a loved one sleeping next to you, so you can gaze down at them occasionally and wonder...

2. WAR BETWEEN THE PLANETS 

(1966) Dir. Antonio Margheriti

*** / Amazon Image - A

An instant immersion in a future world of moon bases and orbiting space stations, anti-matter bombs, and astronauts soaring through black soundstage space on visible wires onto planets that breathe out through their craters. The ever-marvelous Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Kill Baby, Kill) is Commander Rod Jacskon, in charge of the Gamma One space station, tasked with finding the gravitational disturbance that's destroying Earth's weather patterns. Sultry-eyed Terry Sanchez (Ombretta Colli) is his head of communications and an organized officer. Rod loves her, but his needy cat-eyed fiancee (Halina Zalewski) on Earth ("a no-good ground chick!" as his pissy right hand man calls her) happens to be the daughter of General Norton  (Enzo 'Italian Burt Lancaster' Fiermonte)! "It's too involved" Rod tells Terri. There's no time for that now, though; if they don't find the source of the disturbance there'll be no Earth to go back to, and--as the ineffective Norton puts it--"it's not a matter of days, but hours!" As with all the best science fiction films, we barely see Earth or exterior shots at all aside from some disaster shots on the monitors and a coda funeral/memorial. Instead director Anthony Dawson (Antonio Margheriti) makes sure everything is space ships and soundstage space, full of odd sound effects and eerie music.

The wild planet they find causing the trouble is an uninhabited but impressive red ball, 25 miles in diameter, with fields of cold red gelatin quicksand and islands of hairy ground surrounding craters breathing out plumes of cold steam. They descend into one of the craters to plant anti-matter charges and find themselves attacked by white tendrils that bleed but repair themselves as soon as Rod stops hacking at them. It's quite a destination!

I love this crazy movie. It has some of the best dubbing ever, matching the lips with weird hesitance and fast-talking when necessary. Dialogue is rich with technical savvy, using the weird pauses of the actors to create mood and drama... rather than just making them sound drunk (though there's that too): "Read your retros - don't get clogged, Mack!" / "Who's got the flagship?!" / "I'm engaged to her, Terry... not that... I want to be."

The imdb score is unfairly low, and perhaps based on old faded VHS pan and scans (I remember hating it when catching it on early morning TV back in the 70s) but the Prime print puts it on a whole other level. The deep blacks and reds that make up the bulk of the colors look really rich and alluring now, making Gamma-1 seem the place to be, way cooler than the Enterprise or anyplace like that. So if space opera style drama and mature adults doing work as an organized group in constant radio communication is your bag, with plenty of women in capable professional positions. Rod doesn't really even try to stop Terry from going along on all the dangerous missions, instead just telling her "it's every man for himself." In other words, though far, far from perfect, this film should be the cornerstone of your spiritual Euro-6os science fiction pyramid. As Commander Rod says "use your retros!" And then seek out the others in the series: Wild Wild Planet, Battle of the Planets, The Snow Devils and The Green Slime as well as Battle of the Worlds (below),

3. VOYAGE TO THE PLANET OF PREHISTORIC WOMEN

(1968) Dir. Peter Bogdanovich

*** / Amazon Image - D+

When I can't sleep in a foreign land I like to fall asleep to this crazy movie, with Mamie Van Doren and assorted Venusian blondes indirectly encountering cosmonauts from a relatively expensive-looking Russian science fiction film (Planet of Storms). As the cosmonauts encounter man-eating plants and various dinosaurs, the hippie mermaids watch and sing, swim, spy, eat raw fish while treading water, worship a pterodactyl, and wait to see what happens. When the cosmonauts shoot down their pterodactyl god (in self defense), the ladies take action, get really  mad and create volcanos and floods through chanting like witches. 

The story of this brilliant melange is cinematic legend: Roger Corman tasked young Peter Bogdanovich with dubbing one of the Russian sci-fi films he'd recently acquired into English and adding Mamie Van Doren and a cadre of her fellow blonde sea nymphs (with great hip hugger green lame flair slacks subliminally evoking mermaid tails -- a truly inspired high-fashion solution courtesy Alice Mitchell) to jack the sex appeal. In addition to the dubbing, the new soundtrack washes over one in a near constant flow of ocean sounds, eerie pitch-shifting electronic wind, spooky-swooping two-note siren singing, t satisfying ambient noises, the deep mechanical voice of John, the ship's boxy robot, occasional bursts of Keith Benjamin's score, and Bogdanovich's hipster narration as the younger, romantically inclined cosmonaut (proving it's the Bog by assorted allusions to Welles in Lady from Shanghai). Take all those sounds overlapping together and you have the best white noise machine in the galaxy.

Some of the ways Peter (and production coordinator Polly Platt) merged new and old footage is ingenious: a Hollywood-made rubber pterodactyl corpse washes up in the surf for the girls to find, pray over and send back... back to the sea (after the far larger and more elaborate original is shot down by the cosmonauts in the Russian footage); nice undersea flourishes like a cloth octopus, merging with our LA sirens spying and undulating; the robot washing up into the new footage caked in mud; the chef's hat Mamie wears when praying (evoking the hat worn by the one Venusian we see in a reflection at the very end of the Russian version, etc. It would have been easy to just half-ass it the way the earlier Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet did (using the same footage, but adding different American scenes) but the Bog really tried to make it special and leave some kind of a personal stamp on it, which is appreciated. 

In short, I love this terrible movie. Sure the Russian film (now available and seeable on YouTube) is fantastic on its own. I love the giant man-eating plant, the attack of the man-sized Allosauruses, a passing brontosaur. But also I love the dopey, near muppet-like voice (uncredited) of Commander Lockhart and the dreamy telepathic voice of van Doren's character. I love the way when we first see the sirens they  completely blend in with the rocks around them, like sleeping seals. In short, watch Planeta Bur / Planet of Storms if you want good science fiction. Watch Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women if you want to fall into a pleasant alpha wave trance on your next flight. 

4. PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES

(1966) Dir. Mario Bava

**** / Amazon Image - A+

Fourth on the bill, Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires is actually the best as far as gorgeous cinematography and clever, if not always successful, in-camera effects. The storyline fuses elements of Last Man on Earth with Invasion of the Body Snatchers and looks forward to Night of the Living Dead, and most notably Alien (which it partially inspired). It's gorgeous and fascinating film that would be worth seeing even if you had to see it in Italian without subtitles, just cuz it's so beguiling to look at. The plot concerns a rescue mission to a strange foggy planet where the soon-dead crewmen are taken over by fourth dimensional aliens eager to hitch a ride off their dying world. The co-ed crew wear sexy high-collared black leather uniforms with deep yellow trim (the coolest and most high fashion space crew uniforms ever), and their ship is a huge minimalist black floored matte and mirage wonder. The outside miniatures make the ship look at times like soap on the rope anchored to the bottom of an aquarium (but that's not a debit) and the planet is a bizarre landscape or red and blue gels, swirling fog, petrified tentacle tree rocks, quicksand type burbling pits, and weird noises and disembodied voices barely audible in the whooshing winds. Sublime. The shots of the outside guards looking deep into fog for signs of life are some of the most eerily beautiful in all of science fiction. The dubbing is good (lead Barry Sullivan does his own) and the music is super eerie. It just gets better with every viewing, especially in this HD color-restored super-marvelous shape.

5. QUEEN OF BLOOD

(1966) Dir. Curtis Harrington 

*** (image quality: A-)

A tale of first contact with Mars, we're in a near future where space exploration is done mostly by young people played by hip Corman company future-stars like Dennis Hopper and John Saxon, in a big international space center led by Basil Rathbone. The mission: escorting a female vampire alien from a Martian moon to Earth after her ship crash lands. As with the above Prehistoric Women, it's a case of reverse engineering as another Corman protege, Curtis Harrington, intercuts footage from Corman's imported print of Soviet bloc sci-fi film MESTRE NASTRESHU. Acting as a fine mirror to issues of gender as well as Soviet-American relations of the era, the footage is matched brilliantly to its respective sides: the Dionysian and ornate deep red Russian footage for the female vampire Martian ship and the "Red" planet surfaces / the Harrington-shot Earth scenes and space ship interiors a nice powder blues with cafeteria grays on threadbare Apollonian sets; the combination works perfectly - allowing for an artistic level of special effects quality and, for devotees, a chance to marvel at the ingenuity Harrington used in matching the footage. The end result is not only atmospheric and strangely sexy, it's coherent, and looks way more expensive than it probably was, not to mention there's a uniquely bitchy silent antagonism between Florence Marly's classy, mute green-skinned queen and Saxon's girlfriend (Judi Meredith), who seems to wear even more make-up than the green skinned queen! Indeed, her lipstick and eyeliner alone can cut through any amount of interplanetary white noise. We can tell, since the Prime print comes in blazing restored colors. See it a few times and then realize that--in warning of the short-sightedness science, the prioritizing of bringing the human-devouring, egg-laying monster back alive no matter how many astronauts die along the way--this is, like the previous entry on this list, one of the influences behind Alien.  It's also short (79 minutes), and damned nice to look at it late at night while drifting towards dreamland. 

6. TERROR BENEATH THE SEA

(1966) Dir. Hajime Sato

** / Amazon Image - A

Thanks to an amazing Prime HD image, this sexy-terrible Japanese fusion of underwater Bondian supervillain lair-trashing and Jules Verne-style fish people enslavement (ala AIP's War Gods of the Deep, Japan's Atragon, the Philippine's Beyond Atlantis, and Italy's Island of the Fishmen (AKA Screamers - also on Prime) is finally worth seeing thanks to a spiffy HD remastering. A young Sonny Chiba and a cute blond gaijin named Peggy Neal (The X from Outer Space - see below) star as a pair of intrepid diving reporters who follow fishmen tracks in search of a missing scientist while their contact in the American Navy (Franz Gruber) tries to get clearance to help them. While he berates Navy protocol, the interracial lovers find a grotto underwater, run into a squad of fish men; then wake up at a secret lair on the bottom of the sea, their wetsuits replaced by sleek white tunics. Youthfully gorgeous and well-lit as they are, you can understand their horror when the evil sunglasses-wearing villain starts converting them to ugly fish people -"with no differentiation between the sexes"!  Biloxi-born Neal's revulsion at being "scaly" (actually more like sudsy) is hilarious, as are the fish people -- they have opaque black marble eyes set too close together and skin looks like that silver plastic foam wrapping your toaster comes in. 

Naturally things go wrong and they run amok, shooting everyone in sight and carefully fighting hand-to-hand (their fish suits get torn up really easily - as the now glistening HD print shows all too clearly). Meanwhile Gruber still labors to convince the top brass to send a search sub once the pair go missing. But will he find them in time?

Towards the wild climax the editing gets really wonky--each shot last whole seconds longer than it should; asides and pauses for no reason drag the usually frenzied editing scheme of an 'underwater lair about to implode' kind of climax to an agonized crawl. The time between a shot of someone looking at something and a shot of what or whom they're looking at is stretched past the point of abstraction. When the good guys are trying to escape and battling the bad guy's minions for space on the emergency elevator, this sluggish pace--as each new emotion is formed on the actor's faces--is super aggravating. I haven't seen it enough times yet to appreciate it for its deep pocket badness of all that, but I already love the way Chiba has to carefully fight with the monsters so as not rip their tissue paper-thin silver skin. And while he's suffering blow after blow in that pristine white hallway, the professor and Neal just stand there, for minutes on end, looking 'horrified.' Never thinking to help him or try to save their own lives. 

Lastly, though there are one too many unflattering close-ups of the sunglass enthusiast / megalomaniacal gaijin master villain Dr. Moore (Erik Nielsen) and the snaggle-toothed assistant scientist (Mike Daneen), it evens out as there also many lovely close-ups of Chiba and Neal, whose blazing white form-fitting tunic and villain-issued beige slacks hang on her just perfectly. Beaming with vitality and poise, flipping her short bob of a blonde hairdo, she's a perfect gaijin counterpoint to Chiba, whose deep dark eyes can drown any unsuspecting viewer who gazes into them too long (and we have plenty of opportunities). So see it anyway. Shunsuke Kikuchi's memorably groovy score and the gorgeous evil lair lighting on Prime's flawless HD print makes experiencing TERROR BENEATH THE SEA worth the time, as long as you don't forget to anchor yourself to rock bottom expectations.

---------

 7. BATTLE OF THE WORLDS

Il Pianeta degli uomini spenti / Translation: Planet of Extinct Men

(1961) Dir. Antonio Marghereti

**1/2 / Amazon Image - C

There is a stand-alone version of this PD title on Prime (the "Comic Book Edition") but it's been so yellowed by someone's idea of color grading (for the old yellowed newsprint effect of old comics?) I find I prefer Prime's "Double Doses of Sci-fi: Hostile Planets and Doomsday" version (starting on the 0:17 mark - ending 1:22). It's a shoddy looking analog transfer clearly taken from a VHS tape but--as with the above Planet of Prehistoric Women--there is no good HD upgrade available as of this writing. Take what you can get, and say thank you to the nice Prime. (PS 6/22 - a better looking print is floating around YouTube last I checked)

Sort of the prequel to Margheriti's 1966-7 "Gamma One" Tetralogy (note its American title is Battle of the Worlds, and is not be confused his War Between the Planets or War of the Planets, both of which came later). This one has a runaway planet entering our solar system and taking up orbit around Earth, all predicted by an aged, vaguely portly Claude Rains in owlish spectacles, hamming wildly, but dubbing his own voice so it's great, as a mathematics expert. Such a team player is our Claude, he sells the dialogue like its Shakespeare and even wears a space helmet during the big alien planet-landing climax, racing around like a kid in a candy store through miles of alien tubing and red gel lights while issuing grating 'music of the spheres' from his portable synthesizer. (The alien UFOs are maneuvered via soundwaves, leading to lots of overlaid asynchronous tones as ships race into heavily-edited dogfights ).

Mixing Mycroft Holmes and Peter O'Toole doing Henry II, Raine's mathematician physicist is so brilliant he can just write an equation on the observatory floor in chalk for all the world's leaders to see (via camera set-ups from around the world) and he convinces them to give him complete control of the coming battle. Meanwhile the young couples (a pair from a Martian outpost, and a pair from his own observatory) fawn over him, stand around in awe and then saddle up when it's time to ride out of orbit and take on "the Outsider" (as Raines dubs the interloping world). 

Mario Migliardi's score smoothes over any soft patches and helps to give the rocky island scenery a proto-giallo sense of class, though the barrage of synth noises in the second half may wake your sleeping girlfriend if you don't keep the volume low. Long a PD title, one can dream of seeing this one day remastered to look as good as the (above) War Between the Planets. What else is the stuffing of the stars, Professor? Dreams all come true, eventually, it's just a matter of when. 

8. LIGHTNING BOLT
Operazione Goldman / Operation Goldman

(1966) Dir. Antonio Margheriti

*** / Amazon Image - A-

In this, a superior example of one of the countless international spy thrillers that proliferated in the mid-60s (due to the astronomic success of Thunderball), we get both rocket toppling and a trippy undersea lair powered by an undersea volcano, via the directorial coolness of that inexhaustible maestro Antonio Margheriti. Packed in amidst the quips, drinks, and car chases lurks some exciting footage of real-life Nasa rocket failures, with Anthony Eisley's staggering around in front of an ocean of fire. The rest of the time he's either being shot at by a lovely blonde (Wandisa Guida) or trying to score with his lovely handler, Captain Flanagan (Diana Lorys) in what's supposed to Florida but sure looks Mediterranean. A long forklifter chase/brawl through a brewery, from the loading docks all the way down the grain silos, is a big highlight. And the supervillain's ocean floor lair is an amazing expressionistic maze worth the price of admission itself.  So many of Europe's countless mid-60s Bond imitations were encumbered with endless travelogue footage, stripteases, talking heads, comic relief, static plot-heavy dialogue, trite pick-up lines, and fashions so dated and sexist you can smell the cheap cologne lingering in the air for weeks after you watch it, but Lightning Bolt is worth standing in the rain for. Riz Ortolani spy music is on-point and on-message throughout and the sublime HD prime print makes the old new again.

9. FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER

(1965) Dir. Robert Gaffney

**1/2/ Amazon Image - A

Puerto Rico really needs your help right now, but Frankenstein Conquers the World isn't the reason, entirely. Sure, some fancy critics give it a bad rap and, sure, it's a little too aware of its own Party Beach hotrod absurdity, but some of the scenes have same kinetic weird nouvelle-pulp energy we fist saw in Rollin's Viol du Vampire and Franco's Diabolical Dr. Z, while still staying as gosh-darn American as a NASA-sponsored apple pie (filmed in Puerto Rico!). The plot follows a pair of evil aliens--the bald pointy eared, vaguely Uncle Fester-meets-Jon Lovitz Dr. Nadir (Lou Cutell) and the aloof Princess Marcuzen (Marilyn Hanold)--as they abduct a bunch of bathing suit wearing, cocktail drinking, pool party frugging, party girls to back to their sterile post-war planet. Threatening any resistors with their pet space monster, they're quite the hammy pair, milking every line to the point of dryness. But in contrast there's a nice current of realism with footage of driving past real-life NASA's gates and a funny press conference with their newest astronaut Col. Saunders (Robert Reilly), who freezes up halfway through the Q&A-- we find the secret: he's a robot! When his ship crashes (thanks to the alien's toppling powers), Saunders falls to earth a burnt robot amnesiac who proceeds to run amok until his creator (the great--always deadpan--James Karen) and his girlfriend (foxy Karen Grant) fix his circuitry and turn him around against the alien threat. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the title match is coming as the space monster is warmed and readied for Frankie's visit and Grant is next on the conveyor belt to Nadir and the Princess's home planet. The military arrives but daren't attack while all the girls are inside the (parked) ship. 

Man, Puerto Rico seems like quite the spot! Never before has military footage from our Air Force and Army training maneuvers been so seamlessly interwoven with western poolside garage rock decadence! Those teens who first saw this funky gem at the drive-in probably thought they were dreaming. Cutell's Dr. Nadir makes Dudley Manlove's Eros in Plan Nine seem a model of deadpan cool; and scenes of him and Marcuzen examining the visibly uncomfortable swim suit models (from the Miss Puerto Rico contest!) veer close to icky; but once everything is sorted and the credits start their roll, the ever-cool James Karen and his lady friend enjoy a leisurely moped ride through sunny San Juan as the romantic harmonies of The Distant Cousins walk us out, 

Now Come with me to Criterion Channel...!

10. THE X FROM OUTER SPACE

Uchû daikaijû Girara

(1963) Dir. Kazui Nihonmatsu

*** / Criterion Channel Image - /C

A happy astro-theme song and groovy lounge soundtrack (courtesy Taku Izumi); cheerful blue colored outer space backgrounds; cute-if-unconvincing space miniatures and sets--X From Outer Space has my early-60s international sci-fi number, and yours too if you but let it. Once again where in that seemingly inevitable future (as envisioned by von Braun) of permanent bases on the moon, operated by a United World Order, where young people of both genders hold high-level positions on orbiting space stations and meet after hours at the space lounge to dance and be interrupted by urgent news. Cute blonde gaijin astrobiologist Lisa (Peggy Neal - see Terror Beneath the Sea above) is the girl in a group of four bound for Mars, stopping off on the moon to party with cute Michiko (Itoko Harada), whose got a crush on Capt. Sano (Shun'ya Wazaki), who crushes on Lisa (Neal) who likes him too but knows Michiko crushes so much harder. Franz Gruber (also back from Terror) sports a goatee as a high-ranking scientific advisor (he also counsels Lisa when hearts gets too heavy). 

Grooving at the moon's astro-lounge

Planetary danger erupts when Lisa collects a tiny alien spore she found stuck to the ship's tail fin and brings it down to earth in one of those sample jars that alien spores tend to escape from when everyone is off having more cocktails. This one leaves a chicken-size footprint etched in acid on the floor and immediately grows kaiju massive. Though joyful and triumphant, Guilala's attacks are a bit on the weaker side compared to his more esteemed Toho comrades, but with all the fun jetting back and forth from the moon to Earth--set to that swingin' pop score--plus visiting soap dish UFO visits, nicely arranged widescreen medium shot compositions, luminous glowing skin of the two lead actresses, and Guilala's aerodynamic head curling its edges when blasting laser spitballs--the balance is more than made up.

The Criterion image is way too soft but hey - if not for their "It came from Shochiku" Eclipse series, it wouldn't be out on anything but a $60 Japanese import (PS - I found the Blu-ray version on ebay-- the colors and image are so much crisper). To think, I may never have known it.  Man, I'm sick just thinking about it, because if there are cocktails being served on space stations or the moon in a 60s science fiction film, I shall be there, insatiable. There is no 'counting days' in space --there are no days to count! 

BONUS

SOLARIS

(1972) Dir. Andre Tarkovsky

 **** / Criterion Image - B

Tarkovsky's acclaimed science fiction masterpiece (which seems like a 60s film, due perhaps to the slower pop trendshifting behind the Iron Curtain) is set in a future on space station orbiting above an all-ocean, possibly sentient, planet that's started causing long dead lovers to re-appear, out of nowhere. Based on a novel by Polish sci-fi novelist Stanislav Lem, it's slow, depressing, and long, yet never less than compelling. It's certainly no slower or less ponderous than its western counterpoint, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Less trippy, though, unless you turn up the volume and pay close attention to the sound mix. Once you let the slowness hypnotize you, which is what it's for, weird things start to happen. The long drive through Moscow's tunnels and elevated highways to the the airport for example, becomes otherworldly when you tune into the way the sound of the traffic begins to discombobulate into the rush of rockets and radio static. The slow pans around rooms show Kris's (Donatas Bationis) dead ex-wife Khari (Natalya Bondarchuk) appearing in different points in time and space in ways you might miss if not paying the kind of deep half-asleep attention Tarkovsky demands. I've seen it five times and only managed to stay awake to the end once. Any Big Message is entombed in its weird mise-en-scene of ever shifting memory, with Tarkovsky cannily avoiding any attempt at momentous narrative or some wild "Beyond Jupiter" light show climax. But with regularly mismatched glimpses of things both there and not there, he does evoke the bathroom/bedroom rebirthing scene of 2001... if you stretch it to three hours and add a girl and a film rotectorssa..

Did I nod off?

But what better film to wake up to? It's long enough you can wake up from a sound nap after trying to pay attention for an hour, to find it's still playing! If that happens to you, do as I did: just sit up and keep watching where you woke up from, don't try to rewind. To watch it in between bouts of consciousness, to blank out right in the middle of some portentous cosmic revelation, is to become one with the screen in the engulfing silence of space--is this perhaps the ideal frame of mind fo Solaris? 

Nyet to whatever the answer is. Nyet.

So that's it for the Sixties! Adieu to the cautious cocktails and radiation-eating hopes of the space age. Adios to swinging astronauts being hoisted around on wires while saving the day. Dasvidaniya to the idea of a perfect romance with a mystical anima projection in the form of an ex-wife at the prime of her hotness. Such is the realization of Tarkovsky's most surreal film. It takes ideas similar to those in many other older science fiction films (including Ib Melchoir's Journey to the Seventh Planet) and drafts a meaning so high and profound it can use swirls of algae on still water, wind-rustled plants, stormy clouds, trees hanging over empty space, and a beautifully knit autumnal-colored afghan wrap held against the glow of a round space station window, to evoke the inscrutable majesty of that alien otherness beyond even the reach of our sleeping unconscious, past the light behind the dark behind the man behind the curtain, to reach at last that fractal form of probing consciousness we damage the minute we behold it, the way water crystals change just from our looking at them. 

Such things lie far beyond the limits of special effects, and even human imagination, to interpret in any concrete form.

So we bid farewell even to the most.... basic.... functions...zzz

 (If you refuse to watch SOLARIS, let the tenth film on this list be Criterion's DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (1968- Dir. Ishoro Honda) Yeah, boy, Akira Ifukube's pounding score, female aliens (above) turning into rocks, and a full roster of kaiju favorites uniting to really stomp the shit out of Ghidorah. Get Criterion channel now!! I also recommend GHIDORAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER (1964), also on Criterion, which has a cool alien possessed princess side plot! 

FURTHER OUT:

For other cool Communist sci-fi films from the 70s that seem like they're from our 60s, I highly recommend these two films from East Germany (avail. only in OOP DVD and sometimes youtube)

THE DUST OF THE STARS

Im Staub der Sterne

(1978) Dir. 

*** / DVD image - B-

Gehen sie (for my review) hier

+

ELEOMEA 

(1972) Dir. Herrmann Zschoche

*** / DVD image - B-

Gehen sie (for my review) hier

10 "Other" Retro-cool sci-fi opuses streaming on Prime click hier 
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Retrofuturist Pharma III: The "Metatextual Cigar" Edition (Dec. 2014)

Sex, Drugs, and Quantum Existentialism: The Acidemic 60s Star Trek Short Guide (June, 2012)

Psychedelisexploitation of the Virgin Whore: BARBARELLA (1968)

James Bond Movie Reviews (Complete Guide)(Nov, 2015)
Tales from the Haunted Pharmacy: BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW, THE MACHINE