ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Not a great movie. That's the nice way to put it.

A complete waste of time is the less-nice way -- except that the time you spend watching the animated aliens by David Alien will remind you how much you love stop motion when its done by the right guy.

You're probably better off just watching this Youtube clip below instead the whole move about a troubled teen who gets addicted to something other than plain old drugs, even though the end result is about the same.



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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Krel]

Makeup, and effects man Steve Neil built the LASER blaster, and played the Alien with the blaster in the beginning of the movie.

David.

[Bud Brewster]

The blaster and the aliens deserved a better movie!

And I wish the blaster's sound effect didn't resemble somebody clearing their throat by saying the word "quick". It's tough to be impressed by a blaster that sounds like it's spitting energy bolts instead of shooting them.

But those aliens are the bomb!






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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Gord Green]

Boy, did you call this one!

I just fast-forwarded the VHS to see the effects segments which WERE way cool!

[Bogmeister]

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______________________ Laserblast Trailer


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LASERBLAST! I saw this in a theater way back when it was released. A DVD was put out a few years ago. This sci-fi (sort of) film is emblematic of low budget sci-fi in the seventies, in that the filmmakers didn't have much money, but they didn't get very creative either. It's sci-fi exploitation, and the poster makes this look better than it really was.

Many sci-fi fans are familiar with it due to the stop-motion animation by Dave Allen, who presents two lizard-like aliens here. They're in pursuit of a humanoid fugitive in the desert as the film begins, another alien — maybe? (As with a few things in this film, no clarification is offered.) The fugitive is armed with a special laser bazooka.

The alien cops/bounty hunters zap their target but get spooked by a nearby airplane, so they depart, forgetting the bazooka and a pendant which their target was wearing around his neck.

Enter Billy Duncan, the local disaffected teen. He quickly figures out that the bazooka works while he's holding or wearing the pendant. The kid has a new toy! Zap-zap-zap!

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Kim Milford as Billy strikes a strange note in the role right off the bat. In his first scene, his mom leaves on some pleasure trip.Billy is a nice-looking kid in his late teens with a girlfriend (Cheryl Smith), yet he's sad that his mother let's him have the house to himself for a good spell.

There's something 'off' with most of the film's presentation. I'm guessing the people involved just weren't sure of what they were doing. In an awkward fight scene between Billy and a couple of bullies in a family room, Billy's girlfriend taps the big bully with a tennis racket — with the strung portion! The guy falls away as if he'd been hit with a brick.

The small bully is played by Eddie Deezen, the perennial nerd in all his other films; in this film, the cool-looking kid is the nerd.

The strangest and most mystifying element is the presence of Gianni Russo (most famous as the weasel-punk Carlo in The Godfather/1972). He plays a dark-suited government man who shows up out of nowhere in a dark sedan. He drives around, pokes at the remnants of the laserblaster's targets and acts threatening towards the local sheriff's dept. It's almost as if Russo strong-armed the film's producers into giving him this pointless role.

Then there's the two cops in that single-engine airplane who spot Billy in the desert and decide to shoot him on impulse. Or something.

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Anyway, the gist of this is that the more Billy wears the pendant and uses the laserblaster, the more mutated he becomes, resembling a zombie from George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (the make-up only extends to his face, not his body, however).

A good guess is that some kind of alien radiation from the alien weapon is responsible.

He ends up blowing up a few cars and getting rid of the few people who annoy him. He also develops this shambling gate, as if he's stoned. This may very well be a metaphor for drug abuse — stay off those bad drugs, kids, or you'll turn into a zombie-like killer!

Some of this may sound exciting, but there's a very slow pace for much of this. The filmmakers felt that showing cars and telephone booths getting blown up over & over would be sufficiently exciting. The conclusion is full of this, probably filmed on a city block studio set which was rented for a day or two. This may satisfy your Laserblast fix:

________LASERBLAST (1978) but only the aliens


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Roddy McDowall appears in a 5-minute role as a doctor who examines Billy; he doesn't get to pursue his findings, if you know what I mean.

Keenan Wynn has a couple of scenes as the girlfriend's grandfather. He's an ex-military man who seems to suffer from mild dementia. Though their roles are very brief, they do demonstrate the difference between professional actors and questionable actors. As a morbid postscript, I will mention that the two young leads died fairly young: Kim Milford in 1988 at age 37 and Cheryl Smith in 2002 at age 47.

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I will say that the lizard-like aliens are interesting. They pop up briefly in the middle again and then at the very end. They seem to be possibly descended from some dinosaur-like race. Their alien speech is unique and intriguing — we never know what they are talking about and have to make guesses based on the visuals.

Allen imparts to them a sympathetic air. Since this is another example of the film not bothering to spell things out, a viewer can judge this as either refusing to dumb things down for an audience or just laziness on the part of the filmmakers.

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Finally, this could just be my imagination, but I could swear that the audio in the very first sequence in the film (with the fugitive, the first user of the laserblaster) is lifted directly from the Star Trek episode, The City on the Edge of Forever; it sounds like the exact same moaning music/sound on that planet with the Guardian of Forever.

BoG's Score: 3 out of 10


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus

[Bud Brewster]

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IMDB has 18 trivia items for this movie. Here’s one I fouind that's interesting, in the blue text.
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~ Charles Band Productions announced a sequel, tentatively titled "Laserblast 2," in the 1980s. For years, it was described as in development and/or partially or fully completed. In the early 1990s, an ad in Variety magazine offered full sale of the rights to the film, but it is unclear if they were purchased. The film has never been seen.

Note from me: Intriguing idea. A sequel to this movie wouldn't be anyone's idea of a classic, but the idea that it was made and then "lost" makes me want to see it!
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Krel]

The sequel morphed into a similar, but different film called "Deadly Weapon" (1989). I haven't seen the movie, but this is the IMDB description:

An experimental gun powered by an atomic reactor is misplaced when the transport carrying it crashes into a river. The weapon soon falls into the hands of a bullied teen named Zeke, who uses it to get even with his persecutors. An army team led by the overzealous Lt. Dalton is sent to recover the weapon before it's unstable reactor overloads and causes a meltdown.

The only item of trivia:

Was originally envisioned by executive producer Charles Band as a sequel to Laserblast (1978) but after the fall of Empire Pictures the ideas were recycled.

David.

[Bud Brewster]

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Wow, Krel, thanks!

YouTube has the trailer and the full movie, and I sampled a few scenes to see how it looks. Not bad, not bad at all!

The weapon is a pistol with a metal-sheathed cable attached to the butt of the handle, with the other end attached to portable device that powers the weapon. The power pack and the gun are packed into an aluminum suitcase for transport.

The pistol fires a heat ray that can set a person on fire.

In one scene I watched, the teen who possesses it is attacked by a murderous drunk with a baseball bat (possibly his stepfather). The man corners the boy and his beloved dog in a storage area, and the man savagely kills the dog. Then he slowly advances while the boy aims the weapon and pleads with him not to come any closer. (The thumbnail for the trailer below is from this scene.)

Left with no choice, the boy fires the gun and the man runs screaming from the room with his upper body on fire.

The other scenes I looked at seem well-acted and well filmed. I've downloaded the movie, and I look forward to watching it.
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______________ DEADLY WEAPON 1989 Trailer


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__________________ Deadly Weapon (1989)


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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IMDB has several interesting trivia items for this production.
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~ According to the producer Charles Band, the movie was filmed over three weekends for basically no money.

Note from me: I'm shocked! As far I'm concerned every dollar spent on the making of this movie is proudly displayed on the screen! Both of them . . .

~ The stop-motion alien models were designed by David Allen and Jon Berg, and constructed by Berg. Although Allen is generally credited with the alien puppet animation, it was largely done by Randall Cook, who worked without credit.

Note from me: Randall Cook is credits with animation work on The Day Time Ended and The Crater Lake Monster. IMDB has an impressive list of FX credits on other productions.

I'm surprised that David Allen didn't do all the animation — then again we all know there are plenty of stop motion enthusiast out there who'd jump at the chance to hone their craft. Heck, even I did a few stop motion home movies as a teenager!


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~ The only film Michael Rae has ever directed.

Note from me: And he probably didn't tell any of his old classmates at his highschool reunion that he directed THIS one!

~ This is the film debut of Eddie Deezen.

Note from me: Eddie went on to be about the funniest thing in Steven Speilberg's big-budgt (small laughs) comedy, 1941.

Deezen made a career out of playing a nasal-voiced, annoying nerd. In Speilberg's 1941 he was sort of a "straight man" for a ventriloquist dummy that just appears next to him on the Ferris Wheel, looking a lot like Eddie himself.



~ Ironically, since the main character, Billy, played by Kim Milford, blasts a Star Wars sign, Kim Milford also appeared in Corvette Summer (1978), which was Mark Hamill's next film after Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977).

Note from me: I really enjoyed Corvette Summer at a drive-in with my family when it was first released. I was shocked by how different Mark's face was after the accident.

~ Steve Neill, who was makeup artist on the film, also designed and created the alien ray gun and the pendant.

Note from me: The ray gun was pretty good. The the way the "stock" is a tube that encloses the user's arm is quite novel. The makeup on the teenager was suitable for Trick-or-Treating, but that's about it . . .
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)