ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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The three movies below are very educational.

~ The first one describes the most effective way to preserve the deceased.

~ The second one details a procedure for boosting memory and intelligence.

~ The third one shows a research team who turns a television into a time machine. Follow the step-by-step instructions and you could do the same to yours!




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The Frozen Dead (1966)

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_____________ The Frozen Dead (1967) Trailer


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The Frozen Dead is a slow-moving film about the possibility of reviving frozen Nazi officers 20 years after the war ended.

The film is almost like a prequel to the seventies sci-fi/horror flic Shock Waves, which was about defrosted Nazi zombies on an island.

But, there is only the suggestion and potential of reviving Nazis in The Frozen Dead — it never moves beyond that.

Dana Andrews stars as a German scientist who had developed the process to freeze the Nazi soldiers 20 years earlier. He has three of these frozen specimens hanging in a hidden chamber in his secret lab. Only, he hasn't worked out the process to defrost them safely — the subjects either die or come out mentally damaged.

His own brother (Edward Fox in an early role) is one of the unstable results, prone to mindless violence.

Then, he's contacted by other leaders of the leftover Nazi regime and informed that there are about 1,500 frozen Nazi elites spread out over the world. The time has come for unfreezing the 4th Reic . . . maybe.

But he still is unable to accomplish this, as he informs the disappointed leaders. To complicate matters, his niece (Anna Palk) arrives from school with a frien. She knows nothing of her uncle's experiments.

Though the prospect of a new Nazi threat is chilling, the story is boring. It does get rather ghoulish in respect to the niece's girlfriend from school. She is the victim of the scientist's assistant, the one who causes most of the problems in the film, either through incompetence or nastiness. He kills her in order to provide the scientist with a fresh brain to experiment on, and she ends up as a still-living head for the rest of the film.

There's no sympathy for her, even from the story's nominal hero, a newly-arrived fellow scientist who also sees her as just another groundbreaking experiment.

There are also scenes of various limbs, usually arms attached to a circuited wall, to lend further gruesomeness to the proceedings. It all comes off as another variation on the Dr. Frankenstein model. The female head obviously recalls similar scenes in The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962).

BoG's Score: 4 out of 10


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
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Charly (1968)

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Cliff Robertson won the Oscar for his role as the title character — a mentally retarded man who undergoes a new experimental procedure which transforms him over the course of several weeks into a genius.

The reason that Robertson won is obvious: he essentially plays two different characters in this film and the differences are staggering. It's also startling to see such two opposites in one film. He depicts the gradual change in Charly as he becomes smarter.

This is not some lurid sci-fi/horror film (a la Frankenstein) or even very much of a sci-fi story, it's more of a psychological study of the human condition through the prism of such a radical metamorphosis — the change is in the mind, not the body. The sci-fi element is this miracle treatment, yes, but it's merely the catalyst for most of the story.

_____________________ Charly (1968) clip


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The most interesting scenes are when Charly begins to get smarter. Most of the stuff before and after is kind of dull, including his eventual romance with Claire Bloom's character (his doctor/psychiatrist), though there is always something of interest.

The film also relies way too much on that multiple-screen-images technique so prevalent in the late sixties in film. There's a montage when he runs off to find himself, joins a motorcycle gang and becomes a swinger. It's brief and comes off as silly — it should have conveyed a long stretch of time, but it fails.

There is, however, a riveting scene near the end when Charly is presented on stage to a large group of scientists. The main thing about this film is that it causes a viewer to think things over afterwards.

_______________________ Charly questions


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BoG's Score: 7.5 out of 10


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
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Journey to the Center of Time (1967)

______________ Journey to the Center of Time


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All this and LYLE WAGGONER too! (not to mention Teddy Roosevelt).

Perhaps the greatest time travel sci-fi film ever — building on the concepts of THE TIME MACHINE (1960) and expanding on them... no?

Did I have you going there?

OK, in truth, this is probably the worst movie about time travel, and on my crap list for a long time because it's such a blatant redo / rip-off of THE TIME TRAVELERS (1964), which itself was quite low budget. It's as if some producer in the mid-sixties thought —

"Hmmm . . . we need an even lower-budgeted, slower version of that cheap sci-fi pic about time travel."

However, it's not as bad as I remembered . . . before the "action" there's a lot of theorizing (by Sofaer as Doc Gordon) about time travel being the 4th dimension. Fans of such sci-fi discussions will no doubt be at least mildly entertained.



There is one near-brilliant moment which I forgot about until I watched this again, at the 8 minute 45 second point of the DVD version I have. As the scientists are busy fiddling with their controls, the spider-rat monster from ANGRY RED PLANET (1960) pops up on the view screen for one second. The scientists don't see it, but the audience does (see above picture, right). But, this is one second out of an eighty-minute film. Most of the movie crawls at a very deadly pace.

In the plot, there's a cheap movie version of The Time Tunnel experiment seen on TV at about the same time, with four people accidentally going on a trip to 6968 AD.

There we meet visiting aliens led by Vina (Poopee Gamin). Here's the poop: the aliens, looking for a new home, had picked the wrong time to try Earth, which is in the middle of a nuclear war. The chat is interrupted by . . . basically, by scenes copying stuff from THE TIME TRAVELERS (did I mention this is a remake of that?). So the time travelers flee and end up in Earth's prehistoric past.

Sounds exciting, yes? It isn't.



Scott Brady as Stanton is the rich, obnoxious businessman on this journey who makes a mess of things every 15 minutes or so. His final fate is what elevates this above the bottom of the dung-heap of the truly worst sci-fi, but it ain't much.

A lot of people are credited for this (in the very long, slow credits) but I'm thinking none of them did very much — especially the production designer. We're talking very minimalist sets, to put it kindly. There might be some charm in detecting the various steals/homages to better time travel films — at one point, a character states "I have all the time in the world."

BoG's Score: 2 out of 10


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