ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Ah yes, the Goiden Age of Science Fiction, when we got great movies which explored fascinating concepts like the possibility of life on the Moon — in the form of women dressed in black leotards.

And then there was the tale of subterranean threat which resembled mobile mud which was radioactive . . . naturally.

But by 1976 the intellectual concepts had gotten even more complex, such as the yarn about a post-apocalyptic utopia (a novel idea all by itself) in which everybody was young, nobody had to work, and a benevolent supercomputer maintained peace and harmony.

Everybody was given a wonderful 30th birthday party, during which they all got high. I was quite a blow out! /size][size=12]



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Cat-Women of the Moon (1954)



Mission Commander Sonny Tufts and his crew of space explorers brave the perils of a hostile Moon. They are threatened by a giant Moon spider and captured by telepathic lunar Amazons in black tights. A love triangle develops between Sonny, one of the Moon women, and a fellow crewperson (Marie Windsor). But eventually the Cat Women let the astronauts go home.

Okay, so it's not a great movie, but it was originally filmed in 3-D, and the music is by Elmer Bernstein (who scored both the The Ten Commandments and Robot Monster. What a career!).

Directed by Arthur Hilton. The 1958 film Missile to the Moon is a remake, complete with the giant spider. The only improvement it made on the original was to give the girls more appealing costumes. But the colorized version of that remake turned all the girls blue!

Gosh, I've have never found blue women very appealing. But that's just me, I guess.

YouTube has a fine video of Cat-Women of the Moon. Enjoy it!


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X The Unknown (1956)




Two years before The Blob scared the wits out of America with a story about a slimy, formless lump of sludge that ate people, X The Unknown did the same thing in England.

But the similarities pretty much end right there. Consider these facts.

The Blob was both creepy and funny at the same time. The main characters were ka-razy American teenagers enjoying a swingin' night in a small town. The titular creature was a gelatinous alien. The movie was shot in color, and the title theme earned an 85 on American Bandstand because it had a good beat and was easy to dance to.

X The Unknown is deadly serious, and the main characters are hotheaded Scotsmen who argue a lot. The strange "monster" is just a mass of mobile mud with a hankerin' for radiation. The film was shot in black-and-white, and the music is just as hard on the ears as every other movie from England back in the 1950s because it always sounds like the brass section consisted mostly of kazoos.

The photography is good, but black-and-white was a big mistake in this case. I'm not a fan of colorization, but this one could certainly benefit from it. Consider the effective use of color (especially red) in The Blob, compared to this scene from X The Unknown, when it breaks out of the concrete the military used to fill the crack from which the Mud Monster emerged.





* The wet stuff in the middle is the star of the movie.

Or how 'bout this climatic scene of the Crud Creature crossing a parking lot, cleverly disguised as a mud puddle.





I'm not saying this British movie is bad. I'm just saying that our Blob could beat up their blob. So there.

Still, it does have its own roguish charm. Dean Jagger (as a Quatermass-like scientist) lends a touch of Americana to this eerie English creeper. It was directed by Leslie Norman from a screenplay by Jimmy Sangster (his first, in fact).

IMDB describes Sangster as "One of the driving, creative forces behind the legendary Hammer Studios." (I'll bet that looks great on his resume! )

The story is very intelligent, and the movie offers a serious science fiction concept, well directed and well acted.

Dean Jagger was included in the cast to make it easier for American audiences to identify with the character. He's a fine actor and does a good job, and I like him in this almost as much as I do in White Christmas.

The cast suffers from a sad lack of charming heroines, but Marianne Brauns has a small role as an amorous nurse who sneaks into the hospital's radiation lab for a romantic rendezvous with a young doctor.

Miss Brauns looks like the picture on the left in the movie, but the young doctor probably imagined her more like the picture on the right . . . until good old X showed up and melted the poor guy —


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— and left sweet Marianne looking like this.





You can tell a lot about an actress from the way she plays a scene like this. Note the convincing look of terror, the effective use of the claw-like hand, and the obvious fact that she carefully brushed and flossed.

A true professional, all the way back to her wisdom teeth.

Young Anthony Newley has a small role as a young soldier named 'Spider' Webb. (No, seriously.) Anyone who ever heard Anthony Newley sing will be very glad to know that in this movie, Anthony Newley does not sing.

The special effects by Jack Curtis and Bowie Macurtte are pretty good, but you don't get to see them until close to the end.

The cast includes Leo McKern, Edward Chapman, William Lucas, and Peter Hammond. If you saw this one at a drive-in back in 1956, the second feature was The Curse of Frankenstein and you slept with a light on in your room for the next few weeks.


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Logan's Run (1976)


This one didn't exactly knock my socks off when it first came out, but I've warmed up to it over the years. Star Wars[/si] was just a year away, but nobody knew that except a few thousand people who were working on it — and how weird that must have been. Sort of like being the planners of D-Day, knowing how it would change the tide of World War II.

Although the sets are a mixture of full-sized sound stages, miniatures, and borrowed locations like glitzy shopping malls, they work together well. But today's audiences are used to seeing multi-million dollar sets that are as solid as real architecture, seamlessly combined with green-screen CGI. Compared to these, the full-sized sets in [i]Logan's Run tend to look a little shaky, and the miniatures are blatantly . . . well, miniature.

That's not the movie's fault. Times change and standards change with them.

But there's no denying that Logan's Run is a delight to the eye. Allowing for the era in which it was made, it convinces the viewer that this futuristic habitat has been polished to a high luster.















The characters are interesting and appealing, too. Jenny Agutter is a pure delight, and Michael York is both macho and classy — a rare combo indeed.









Veteran actor Peter Ustinov makes aging look cool and poetry sound intelligent. (I'm not a big fan of either one, so that's quite a feat.)





I'm not sure if the scene below was shot on a set built for the movie or a location they borrowed because it was 90% neon and just looks good.





I wasn't too keen on Box, the mirrored robot, when I first saw him, but I admire his glitz and glitter. If he hadn't shaken around so much when he tried to move, he might have been more convincingly hi-tech. Maybe a floating version might have worked better, but that wasn't so easy to do back in 1976.







Farah Fawcett was just another Hollywood blonde back in 1976, but a certain Aaron Spelling cop show started the same year the movie was released, and before you could say, "Good morning, Charlie!" she was the subject of a decorative poster that was more popular than the Power Ranger actions figures were in 1994. (Remember that marketing fiasco?)



I haven't heard anything official yet, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts Hollywood is going to get around to a remake of this movie before the current crop of hot young directors turn thirty!

No doubt about it, Logan's Run is high on the list of well-done science fiction movies that stand the test of time. Jerry Goldsmith's score provides the perfect soundtrack for this enjoyable adventure into the FUTURE . . . Future . . . future . . . future . . .


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