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The Black Hole (1979)
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Krel
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 05, 2015 4:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bud Brewster wrote:


I'm sorry, this one is just plain creepy. Can you imagine seeing that coming out the dark towards you with those glowing eyes? VINCENT is pretty creepy looking as it is, if I see those big red and blue glowing eyes coming out the shadows at me, I'm reaching for my LASER.

I once saw a photo of the collar radios on a site. They were photos of an IC chip that were cutout and glued to a piece of plastic.

David.
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 05, 2015 11:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Krel wrote:
I'm sorry, this one is just plain creepy. Can you imagine seeing that coming out the dark towards you with those glowing eyes?

Ah, but you're not imagining him with Roddy McDowall's friendly and melodious voice! Very Happy

If I'd wanted this version to look creepy, I have drawn the eyes like this!




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Last edited by Bud Brewster on Fri Feb 15, 2019 1:16 pm; edited 2 times in total
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Robert (Butch) Day
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 12, 2016 11:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Harrison Ellenshaw filming the Cygnus:


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Maurice
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 19, 2016 12:32 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

This movie is so dumb. The stated mission is to "find habitable life" in space. Excuse me? You want to inhabit life? Are you a tapeworm?

The Cygnus exterior is amazing. The matte work in the rolling meteor scene is nearly flawless. The rest of the effects are a mixed bag, the low point being the cartoonish roller-coaster tube car ride. Some great production design in a few places but a lot of meh design otherwise. Maxillian is cool; the other robot designs are rubbish. The main title's propulsive unresolving motif played against a relentless ostinato representing the black hole is really effective even if the rest of the score is not
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Last edited by Maurice on Sat Mar 25, 2017 5:30 am; edited 1 time in total
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Robert (Butch) Day
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 19, 2016 1:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Maurice wrote:
... cartoonish roller-coaster tube car ride.

That was because The Black Hole was THE genesis of Space Mountain.
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Krel
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 19, 2016 7:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bud Brewster wrote:
Ah, but you're not imagining him with Roddy McDowall's friendly and melodious voice! Very Happy

Not really helping, RMD's voice could be pretty creepy at times. And coming out of that would definitely up the creepy content.

David.
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alltare
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 05, 2017 12:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I saw TBH in a theater when it was first released. I recall that it was preceeded by a cartoon called "Disco Mickey", which consisted of spliced together footage from several old Mickey, Goofy, and Don Duck cartoons. The old sound tracks were replaced with a catchy disco sound track. It was a pretty good cartoon, and as far as I'm concerned, it was the only high point of the otherwise disappointing show.

There is a Disney DVD called "Mickey Mouse Disco" that contains similar cartoons with the same pictorial footage, but with different, worse music. I have been unable to find a video of the cartoon that was shown with TBH.
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 06, 2017 7:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Maurice wrote:
This movie is so dumb. The stated mission is to "find habitable life" in space. Excuse me? You want to inhabit life? Are you a tapeworm?

My goodness, after disliking this movie since the first day I saw it a theater, I never caught this wacky statement until you pointed it out!

It's certainly not the worst flaw in this movie, simply because the competition is so fierce! Very Happy

But thanks for calling our attention to the flaw that was related to the horrible writing in this cinematic disaster! Shocked

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MetroPolly
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 07, 2017 6:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Have to say, I used to actually like this movie. I thought it was a wild sci-fi thing. Then I turned 15. I just stopped thinking it was fun, and started really paying attention. And I realized it's not great at all.

Where to start? The effects were ok, for '79. The robot designs IMO used to be cute, now they're silly. BTW, who thought using ESP as a robot control was smart? I guess nowadays we'd say the lady had a neural implant to act as a remote control.

Next, Ernest Borgnine makes a lousy baddie. Nuff said.

It really starts falling apart for me when they find out what happened to the crew of the Cygnus. Then it just gets creepy and not in a good way. (Just wondering, you think they named it the Cygnus after Cygnus X-1, the first confirmed black hole found?)

The ending to me was just a cop out for the writers. They didn't know where else to go, so they fell back to Dante-esque imagery and spoiled it.

BTW, I read the novelization of it and at least they don't put as much emphasis on the ending, IIRC.
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ralfy
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 15, 2019 5:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Great opening music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJaypC51Dds
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 15, 2019 1:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

Note to MetroPolly: That is an excellent post. I enjoyed it. D

Ralfy, your right about the John Barry music. I have it on several tapes, recorded from a friend's borrowed album. (Hmmm . . . did I remember to return that album? I'm sure I did. Ummm, I think I did. Damn, I hope I did! Shocked)

I'm going to download a few tracks Youtube and add it to my growing library of sci-fi soundtracks. Thanks, buddy!

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~ The Space Children (1958)
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Bogmeister
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 24, 2019 2:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

____________
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________________ The Black Hole Trailer 1979


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Adventure film in outer space — which is where it begins and ends. We never see Earth in this film.

The plot concerns a small crew on a spaceship which is returning to Earth, but they get sidetracked by the sudden detection of a black hole, as well as a huge ship which is 'stationed' near this cosmic devourer of deep space, a "Mexican Standoff" as so described later.

One of the crew, a journalist (Borgnine), prepares the audience with some brief mention of Dr. Reinhardt (Schell), who we meet soon on this mysterious ship, which is otherwise populated by a variety of robots.

THE BLACK HOLE was a big Sci-Fi picture of the seventies, and it had the same problems as a few other big sci-fi films of the time, such as the 1st Star Trek film, also 1979, and Saturn 3 (1980). The ingredients are all there, mostly bought with lots of money, but the final product ends up as less than the sum of its parts.

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Picture this: you get the best actors of the time, some even classy actors, such as Schell and Perkins, you plug in state-of-the-art special FX of the time, you work these into a sweeping sci-fi story, and you have a fine music score by John Barry. You even have a menacing killer robot.

And, the final results? Mediocre.

As in the couple of other big sci-fi films I mentioned, the filmmakers had all these great ingredients and just didn't really know how to put them all together to great effect. Much of the film has a very humdrum tone to it, lacking a needed energy to move the concepts along.

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With all that said, this does have its positives. I liked a lot of this when I was much younger and saw it in a theater. This was from the Disney Co. and a lot of this just transplants 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) into the far reaches of outer space, though this one is much more limited, confined to that one spot near the Black Hole for most of the film.

I didn't really care back then that the visualization of the black hole was far too literal, like some whirlpool in space. As an aside, I didn't like the visualization of space in the opening shots; it looked too much like a static 2-dimensional wall, as opposed to 3-dimensional space. Hell, the space shots on the Star Trek TV show looked better to me.

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But speaking of hell, there were — spoken outloud — continual analogies made between this ultimate force of universal nature and the concept of hell, Dante's inferno.

In the end, the connection between the two concepts was made literal. Since I first saw this film, my personal theory on what happens at the conclusion hasn't really changed. I figured that the nature of the actual black hole was so strange, in terms of other dimensions, that when Schell's character died, the black hole's energies merged him with the robot as he descended into the after-life.

Weird, huh?

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The one who steals much of the film is Max, the dangerous reddish-black robot whom everyone fears, even the mad character played by Schell, an outer space version of Captain Nemo. The robot-thing is a great visualization and very menacing-looking, very streamlined and slick.

Schell and Perkins are great actors, of course, and Borgnine is Borgnine, but the other three leads come across as very bland, kind of cardboard. In fact, the more entertaining scenes involve the competition and tension between the two main robots — the nice VINCENT and the mean MAX. Roddy McDowall voices the comical little robot, coming across as more lifelike than some of the humans, with another older robot voiced by Slim Pickens.

BoG's Score: 6.5 out of 10




BoG
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 24, 2019 2:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

This is one of Andrew Bogdan's (Bogmeister's) best reviews on his message board, The Galactic Base of Science Fiction, which he diligently maintained from the date of its creation in February 28th, 2010 until he passed away in July 2015.

And he wrote his review on March 6th, 2010 . . . more than five years before the first post that started this thread in on May 24th, 2015. And yet his review skillfully reflects the same opinions — both pro and con — that the members here have shared here.

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Pow
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 25, 2019 2:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A revolutionary aspect to this film was the creation by Disney of their ACES System.

Originally, Disney wanted to rent the Dykstraflex computer controlled camera system which was groundbreaking when it was first created for Star Wars.

However, Industrial Light & Magic, which owned Dykstraflex, & Disney, could not reach an agreement about Disney renting the system.

So Disney's FX team (Peter Ellenshaw, Eustace Lycett, Art Cruickshank) went and created their Automated Camera Effects System (A.C.E.S.) which turned out to be superior to Dykstraflex.

What It Does } This system allows the FX team to position a model between a matte painting and camera and then move the camera in front of the model and painting which then produces a spatial effect.

TBH was 5 years in development, 14 months in production and cost the enormous sum for its time of $20,000,000..

All the soundstages at Disney were taken over by the production.

TBH was nominated for Academy Awards for its Cinematography and Visual Effects.

What a shame that such time and attention was lavished on TBH, which had a weak script at the core of it all.


Last edited by Pow on Thu Dec 05, 2019 12:17 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 05, 2019 11:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

It's always interesting to see how a movie compares to the trailer which promotes it. Sometimes good movies have bad trailers, and bad movies have good trailers.

In this case, a bad movie has a bad trailer. It starts out dull, then get mildly interesting, but the flaws in the movie are all too visible; the dumb-looking robots, the cartoonish blaster effects, etc. Rolling Eyes


__________The Black Hole - Trailer (HD) (1979)


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