ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Well, to be honest I guess the theme of today's Featured Threads would be "Movies That Could Have Been Better".

~ A story about an alien ship which is captured.

~ A bargain basement sci-fi film that promises a lot more than it can deliver.

~ A comic book character brought to life by a lovely lady.



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The Bamboo Saucer (1968)

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Pilot John Ericson is buzzed by a flying saucer which crash-lands in China.

The U.S. government sends a team into China to search for it, accompanied by Ericson and Dan Duryea. They join forces with a Russian team, and a romance develops between Ericson and Russian scientist Lois Nettleton.

Meanwhile the Chinese find the saucer and learn that the propulsion system has a lethal effect on spectators. The Russian-American team tracks down the saucer and battles the Chinese soldiers. Ericson and Nettleton survive, hi-jack the saucer, and take it on a whirlwind test flight around the Solar System.

The mediocre special effects rob the climax of the excitement it should have created, and the earlier parts of the story contain little to entertain science fiction fans. But that's not saying it isn't a good movie.

Written and directed by Frank Telford.
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Barbarella (1968 France/Italy)



Fans of young Jane Fonda's pretty face and well-displayed figure might enjoy this French-comic-strip-turned-movie.

Admittedly some of her costumes are extremely sexy, but the sets and props are both poorly designed and flimsily constructed, the special effects are amateurish, the characters are two-dimensional one-line jokes, and the plot is a lot of murky nonsense about energy forces that respond to sexual stimulation.

Director Roger Vadim works hard to make the film look like a wildly imaginative comedy, but Dino De Laurentiis did a much better job in 1980 with "Flash Gordon", using lavish sets and costumes, and giving us dialogue that was at least occasionally funny.

In 1968 Jane's strip tease during the title work was considered risque stuff, but today . . . ZZZZZZZZ. The screenplay is credited to eight separate writers, including Terry Southern and director Vadim.







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The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes (1955)



The title is a bit misleading; the alien (created by Paul Blaisdell) actually has only two eyes, but it takes control of a few dozen animals, using their eyes to spy on a lonely family which lives in a desert region of California.

Even then, that's not exactly a million eyes, but then Hollywood (a) loves to exaggerate, and (b) was never good at math.

The family is attacked by various birds and animals, including their own dog. Despite its technical flaws, the film is lauded by some critics as an effective science fiction yarn. Unfortunately the rock-bottom budget seriously flaws the film's appearance. Directed by David Kramarsky.

Executive producer Bert I. Gordon once stated in an interview that James Nicholson, AIP's co-founder, made up the title for the film and designed an ad campaign, complete with a poster showing a million-eyed alien, all of which he used to pitch the as-yet-unmade film to a group of exhibitors. The exhibitors were so impressed with the ads that they attended a preview screening after the film was finished.

They were appalled by what they saw.

There was no million-eyed alien, just an unimpressive, seldom-scene creature and an alleged "spaceship" which Gordon himself described as "a coffee percolator buried in the sand".

Still, you have to admire the way the poster artist actually depicted the creature they way it appears in the movie. Mostly.



One of the exhibitors, Joe Levine, offered to finance a completely redone version of the concept, one that lived up to the great ads. But James Nicholson demonstrated true American ingenuity by improvising a "special effect" directly onto the existing print — he literally scratched the film to add a "lightning" effect to the spacecraft scenes, effectively hiding the prop's unfortunate resemblance to a crude prototype of a Mr. Coffee.

The movie was released without further improvements.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)