ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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We're sort of traveling back in time today.

First we go to 1941 to visit an unusual movie called The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942) a horror/comedy, if you can believe that.

Then we travel back to 1939 just long enough to crash a Zeppelin in the Arctic and falll sleep until the 24th century with Buck Roger.

And finally we journey all the way back to 1912 and return to the Arctic where we have a wild adventure with Georges Melies, stage magician and pioneer filmmaker.





Buckle up, folks. This is gonna be fun!
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The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942)



Most of the science fiction films from the 1940s were melancholy and somber, but this is a wild black comedy in which Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre poke fun at their own traditional screen personas.

At the time the film was made, Karloff had just completed a successful Broadway run of "Arsenic and Old Lace". The producers of "The Boogie Man Will Get You" wanted to take advantage of the public's new awareness of Karloff's ability to do black comedy.

Eccentric scientist Karloff is conducting strange experiments in the basement of an old colonial inn. The goal of the experiments is to develop a process that will turn ordinary men into supermen who can help win World War II. Numerous bodies in suspended animation lie around the lab.

His partner is Peter Lorre, an amazing jack-of-all-trades: doctor, real estate agent, local sheriff, financier. Karloff and Lorre persuade a naive salesman played by Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom -- (Ha! I'll bet you giggled when you read that name. I giggled when I typed it. ) -- to serve as their next subject.

The owners of the inn stumble onto the seemingly dead bodies in the lab, and they call the cops. The cops, in turn, stumble onto Karloff and Lorre while they are being threatened by a "human bomb" in the person of Frank Puglia, a fascist who demands the secret of the superman process so the enemies of democracy can use it.

The cops send the whole mob off to the loony bin!

Directed by Lew Landers.
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Buck Rogers (1939)

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[Also released as: "Destination Saturn"]

The 90-minute version of the classic serial, starring Buster Crabbe as an explorer whose zeppelin crashes in the Arctic, is not very satisfying as a feature film.

That's not surprising in view of the fact that it pieces together 12 episodic sections, each of which concludes with a cliffhanger that leaves out the reason the hero didn't die (as he appeared to) until the beginning of the next chapter.

Add to this the fact that the serial itself is not quite as good as the "Flash Gordon" serials.

Still, "Buck Rogers" is loaded with action and adventure. The villain is Killer Kane, chief of a world-wide gangster organization. As a bad guy, Kane "ain't a pimple" on Ming the Merciless, who oozed evil and plotted the destruction of planet Earth. That was a tough act to follow, and Kane doesn't quite measure up.
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Conquest of the Poles (1912)



Georges Melies (the stage-magician-turned-pioneer-film-maker who gave us "A Trip to the Moon" in 1902) wrote, produced, directed, and starred in this early sci-fi adventure about an international group of scientists who explore the North Pole in a newly invented aero-bus.

After crashing in the Arctic, the explorers encounter the Giant of the North (a full-sized, mock-up monster, manipulated by stage technicians). At the end of the thirty-three minute silent film the explorers return home in a dirigible.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)