In this section we list a few of the films we believe deserve mention, due mostly to their enjoyment factor, with little attention paid to the typical "critical" factors film critics would use to analysis a movie. Hey if all we ever produced were critically acclaimed or academey award winning pictures, nearly all science fiction would be reduced to only the effects and very little needed from the actors.
In fact, an avid sci-fi buff has usually learned by the time they are teenagers that a good sci-fi film is probably going to be panned by many of the critics out there. We at Science Fiction Gallery also tend to be a little over-critical. However, we make our comments from a different viewpoint, we love all sci-fi films (at least 99.9%) and are only using our analysis to justify (or perhaps just to rationalize) our enjoyment of one film over another.
In fact, if we mention a film, it is because it has already passed through our enjoyment criteria. If it does well "under analysis" then it is obviously a pretty healthy sample of good science fiction.
So...on with the listing:
Title Brief Description
The Puppet Masters From a thrilling novel by Robert Heinlein
The Omega Man Charlton Heston is the last man on the Earth
The Highlander The immortals must kill other immortals to
gain their power, "There can only be one!"
Phase IV Scientist studies a very intelligent ant
colony.
Enemy Mine Space fighter (Dennis Quaid) meets his enemy
Day of the Triffids A meteor storm brings blindness and rather
nasty alien plants.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers Nasty Pods clone people who then take over
everywhere.
Millennium A time traveler takes people who are
destined to dye out of plane crashes.
Planet of the Apes Astronauts land on a planet where Apes talk
and rule humans.
Scanners Several Sequels, mind reading and mind
control
The Shadow An excellent rewrite of the radio show and
1937 B&W film
Soylent Green A cop stumbles across the formula for high
protein wavers future city dwellers live on.
The Fury A bloody film about a young man who is found
to have telekinetic powers.
Little Shop of Horrors A musical, alien plant vampire invades West
End Story.
Time Bandits Sean Connery stars in a film about a band
of diminutive time travellers.
Despite a last minute thrill, the film is a bit slow in places and takes some concentration on the subject matter in order to stick with it. The story line is quite good though, and there are enough twists and turns to keep your interest. This is not space opera though, and does require a little thought.
The scientist and assistant setup a special habitat which has air conditioning
and power and tends to be pretty self-sufficient. Unfortunately however, the
ants discover their "blind" and make it a point to get in and get rid of the
watchers.
The film is not a thrilling actor's opus, but is however quite worth watching,
especially if you are a horror fan. In one scene, the professor goes to
inspect the remains of a farm, and finds a dead human on the ground. Turning
the human over, he sees a little hole in the hand. As he inspects a little
closer, an ant comes crawling out the hole, just as if it were an anthole in
the ground... obviously the ants have burrowed deep into the body. This had
some nasty effects on people watching the film...everything from groans to folks nervously rubbing their hands and grimacing.
Knowing that, you have the majority of the scenes in the movie, people
"infected" and people not. The "nots" are trying to figure it all out and
eventually come up with a way to kill off the snatchers, or so we hope.
While the horror element is strong in the color version of the film (one
black and white version was screened in the early sixties), the plot is
pretty worn the efforts to hold the audience is only fair in comparison to
other films like Alien, a much stronger example of the genre.
The film also features some very skilled talent in Donald Sutherland, Leonard Nimoy,
Jeff Goldblum, Brooke Adams, and Veronica Cartwright.
A similar film is Day of the Triffids (1963 - ****) where strange orchid like beasties invade the
earth (during a meteor storm?) and capture their prey by spraying them with
spores. This story begins in a similar vein to another apocolyptical film,
with a meteor shower blinding all but a few folk, leaving them to fend for
themselves against gangs of blind street thugs. The film follows the novel
quite closely.
The film doesn't ring true in the first few minutes, the space jockey trading
jokes with his copilot while blasting bad guy lizards with the guns of his
ship. The ships and the space suits all reflect a kind of sixties or early
seventies view of space travel... the ships are not sleek nor particularly
spaceworthy, and the suits are reminiscent of scaled down moon suits, complete
with bubble helmet. I suppose at the time the suits added a sense of
reality to the movie.
In any case, the acting by Gossett is great and the challenge created for the
two antagonists is superb. Note that a similar plot is used in a
STNG episode on television, where Picard is transported down to a planet with
the Captain of a wholly non-understandable alien race. Again the two must
learn to work together to survive.
The fourth film, The Showdown (1995), does some nasty facial and body effects which
depict tearing flesh as well as a kind of flesh burning. This is a battle
technique learned by scanners, but appears only to work on other scanners.
It essentially is similiar to the idea in The Highlander
The story in the first and third films holds together quite well, with the
second film being a strange offshoot, adding a whole other dimension to the
conflict emphasizing a stricter science fiction element rather than the
mystical fantasy elements in the first film. The second film suffers from this
in story line, but still brings the excitement of the chase, battle, and
quickening to the audience.
The most recent (third) film pits the Highlander versus the nasty Ghengis Khan
character (played by Mako), who was a wizard trapped in a Japanese cave thousand of years ago.
A Japanese excavation for a nuclear reactor stumbles across an interesting
archeaological find, and accidentally uncovers the living tomb of the
wizard, releasing him to wreak havoc upon the 20th century. It makes for an
interesting side story as the female archeologist becomes a love interest for
the highlander, and the magic of the wizard is as strong as in the past, giving
the highlander serious problems in taking his head.
The effects are great, including some rather incredibly matte paintings that
take your breath away, as well as a heroine (Penelope Ann Miller) who does nearly the same. Tim Curry
plays a twerpy villian, and at several points his intensity practically takes
the show away.
The film had no less than 4 sequels, one a year during the period 1970 thru 1973.
The best of the sequels was probably Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970 - ****) which featured James Franciscus as another astronaut sent to find the
missing ones. He finds Apes above ground, mutants below ground. An interesting
twist to this story is the fact the mutants worship a huge rocketship complete
with a nuclear bomb.
Directed by one of the Monty Python crew, it's no surprise the film doesn't have your
usual "good guys win the day" ending. Not to give it all away, we will
say that the sprit of evil shows up to try and sell our heros and their
young English friend a self-cleaning kichen from the future, you know
the movie's gonna be wierd. (Thanks to RodIII@aol.com for the write up!)
Phase IV (1975 - *** 1/2)
A scientist is out to investigate a peculiar breed of ants who appear to have
become quite resistant to a number of insecticides. His young assistant is
mortified to find that the ants have invaded a small community and killed
all the residents. The ants are quite prolific, and it soon appears that they
adapt to new insecticides within in a generation, a very short time indeed
for most ants, and damned fast for these critters.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 - *****)
This horror film (based upon an earlier 1956 classic) postulates strange biologicals... pods that land on the
earth. The pods are able to clone people, taking their original bodies as
food. The cloned humans are then set back in society, their main task to
bring more people back to the pods so they can continue to multiply.
Enemy Mine (1985 - ***)
A Wolfgang Peterson directed film, Enemy Mine crash lands a hot space fighter jockey (Dennis Quaid)
onto a planet where his prey,
a lizard like humanoid called a Draq (an awesome potrayal by Lou Gossett, Jr.) has also
crash landed. The pilot's hatred for the enemy is temperered a bit at a time
as he and the alien must learn to work together to survive on the desolate
planet which is frequented by huge meteor strikes and some fairly nasty
life forms.
Scanners - (1981 - ****)
An interesting series of films dealing with the power of mind control. A rather
bloody first movie gave way to a second even more bloody sequel. The latest
(is it number three or number four) called "The Showdown", features a scanner
cop, something of a surprise, since in the previous films scanners appear to be
way outside society. Here's why. The scanners were created by a drug used
during woman's pregnancies. The drug unleashed a herebefore unknown mental
facility that allows other humans to "hear" the thoughts of other humans.
When so many "voices" intrude, the scanners are driven nuts. No surprise
there. But a drug called Emphenol is found which reduces almost entirely the
ability to read, thus relieves the maddening voices for scanners. Unfortunately
some wacko scanners find that they can control others by concentrating in
just the right way. Emphenol reduces the power of scanners to control, so
the wacko's refuse the treatments, and thus get more wacko. Imagine a
substantail group of wacko's who can control other's minds and who are
constantly getting more and more crazy, and you now understand the world of
"Scanners".
Highlander (1986 - **)
Note: I disagree, the rating should be *** 1/2.
This tale takes us back into the times of epic heroes in England and the
Scottish highlands are afire with battle. A young highlander, Duncan McLeod
(Christopher Lambert) is killed in battle, only to awake after his wake. He is quickly ostracized and goes to live by himself in some far off place. He meets and marries a fine
young lass. He also meets another immortal (played by Sean Connery) who teaches
the young warrior the facts about being an immortal and the phenomenon called
"The Quickening". His mentor also explains that there are many immortals in
the world, and how there can only be one left at the end of battle. The victor
chops off the head of the other, thus releasing the life force to the
winner. Each victory makes the victor stronger and more deadly. Great
rewards await the last remaining immortal, and thus there are those actively
seeking the heads of the other immortals.
Millennium ( 1989 - **)
In this spooky film, a lady time traveller(Cheryl Ladd) comes back into her past our near
future, and goes aboard aircraft which are destined to crash, and pulls off
passengers who are fated to be killed, and yanks em into the future.
The film's avoidance of the typical
paradoxes is unique. But a air safety expert starts running into clues into
the strangeness of some crashes and the futurists' plans begin to unravel.
Soylent Green (1973 - ****)
Star Charleton Heston as a streetwise copy well into our future. A future whereold folks can volunteer for euthanasia to help reduce the population, a reduction necessary cuz the world can hardly feed everyone today. Heston finds out, as
part of a murder investigation of an important official, that the food the all
are eating...well watch the film and see. Excellent protrayal of the ultimate
destiny of woman without rights, they become "furniture". An interesting
co-star in this film is Edward G. Robinson as well as the infamous Rifleman
Chuck Connors.
The Shadow (1994 - ****)
A rather classy recreation of the popular radio show, this film stars Alec Baldwin as Lamar Cranston, who was turned from evil by a monk in his domain in China,...but wait! Cranston is really a rich kid from New York and his uncle (Jonathan Winters playing an almost serous role!) is the police chief.
Planet of the Apes (1967 - **** 1/2)
This extremely interesting story has a number of twists and surprises as well
as boasts of a number of fairly successful sequels and an interesting TV
series too. The film is based upon the idea that several astronauts go a
flying across space, enter some cataclysmic event, and are thrust of onto a
planet where Apes are the masters and chimpanzees, while being quite intelligent,
seem to be ruled by the Apes. Oh and by the way, everybody talks except for the
savage primitive humans. Of course our erstwile astronaust don't fit in too
well, being highly civilized and excellent speakers. Stars Charlton Heston
and Roddy McDowall (McDowall plays in full facial makeup as a chimp).
Little Shop of Horrors (1986 - ****)
A remake of a 1960 film which starred a teenage Jack Nicholson. The 1986 film
directed by Roger Corman, is a musical set in a plant store. The protagonist,
played by Rick Moranis, and feature Steve Martin as a sadistic dentist, and
Audrey the man eating plant played by the puppeteer shop of Jim Henson (The
Muppets) featuring the voice of Frank Oz.
Time Bandits (** 1/2)
Sean Connery stars in this fun film about a bunch of small folk who used to
work for God designing new spices. They decide to steal a map of the Universe
from the almighty and use it to find several holes in the fabric of reality.
They figure out the holes can be used as time portals and being greedy
folk, they use this ability to steal all the great treasures of time.
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Last Update: 9/3/95