Of the big streaming services, mostly because it’s given up on having any kind of 80s and 90s back catalogue, Netflix is currently the best place for new cyberpunk things to watch. So, when this Chris Helmsworth fronted drama, written by the team who did Deadpool randomly appeared on Friday I was all kinds of pumped up about it. And now I can happily report that it was mostly okay if you have time to kill. Continue reading
Because “Why not?”, and as it makes picking viewing easier, Trash Or Treasure is going through every movie in “Science Fiction – Double Feature”, the opening song for that trash culture classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
This week
Michael Rennie was ill, the day The Earth stood still. But he told us where we stand
Films made for the Sci-Fi channel have a reputation for cheapness, dullness, and zeitgeist abuse that is rivaled only by The Asylum mockbusters. It’s not that they’re bad, so much as they always make you think of a better movie that you could be watching. So, when sitting down to watch this film from the renowned Hallmark Channel Christmas romance director Tibor Takács (who also did the well-regarded The Gate back in the 80s), expectations were set to “please don’t suck”. Thankfully, these heady heights were surpassed.
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It’s time for an exciting three-way combo of amazing opportunity: a horror anthology with a bit of a cyberpunk taste to it! It’s also got a spectacular cast of “oooh, it’s them! From that film!” actors, and, in a random act of trivia, the music was done by J.J. Abrams. This can’t possibly go wrong, as nothing JJ Abrams has been involved in has ever been a shonky rip-off of better things that totally misses what made them good in the first place.
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Dark Planet is directed by Albert Magnolia, who also directed Purple Rain, Sign ’o’ The Times, and Tango & Cash. As such, it’s fair to say his carrier has been “varied” and that if you watched this without never having had me tell you that you’d call me a filthy liar. Then again, Michael York is also in it, so clearly a lot of people had cars to fix when the casting for this project was doing the rounds.
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Roll up, for an amazing example of what a psychotronic masterpiece of B-Movie filmmaking can be. Because I can’t remember the last time such a godawful film held my attention so utterly. This 1962, Wesley Barry directed, lump of sci-fi cheese swings between the profound and the pathetic faster than the Theremin vibrates in the soundtrack, and is worth every rotten minute of its nippy 75 minutes run time.
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Not quite sure how I didn’t know that Vincent Price and Diana Rigg started in a film together and that they both considered it some of their finest work. Probably something to do with Theatre Of Blood being a modestly budgeted British film, done half a century ago, and them having over 250 screen credits between them. The important thing is that I watched it as soon as I found out about it, and by reading this So Can You!
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So, for people taking notes at the back, here is the original “astronauts discover decadent, all-female (or almost all-female) civilizations on other planets” (according to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction). It’s a 1953 release that was shot in black-and-white and released in 3D, because the cycle of getting people to watch any old rot by bunging on a gimmick was strong back then and 3D is a trend that just won’t die (no matter how many times it shoots itself in the face). And, oh boy, is this a lesson in how things were different back then.
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When this was announced as the movie of the week, three people went “Oh, I think I’ve seen this” and none of them could remember anything about it. That is what’s known in the business as “foreshadowing”, and it give a decent sense of how this Stuart Gordon directed film ended up. This is impressive, given that the last film of his we watched was absolutely blinding From Beyond.
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Cards on the table, I’m a lifetime fan of the book Dune. Probably not the most committed of fans out there, but since I first found out the 1984 movie had a book to go with it I’ve read it roughly once every year. So it’s safe to say that I was really excited when I heard there was going to be another forlorn attempt at making The Film of The Book, and then when I found out if was Denis Villeneuve I was very excited to heard he’d be the person doing it wrong. Five years, $156 million dollars, and 156 minutes later and I’m happy to say that it isn’t the film or the book, and that’s great.
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