ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Well, guys, we got past The Curse of the Movie Titles that Began with the Same Letter — but now we have The Curse of the Titles that All Have Numbers!

As before, I didn't even notice this fact until I picked the top three posts from the list I'd prepared. And what do see when I plugged them into this post below? Well, going from least to greatest, we have —

~ A movie about a nuclear holocaust that resets all the calenders to ZERO.

~ A movie about about a small scale alien invasion that strikes out eight time and then takes one more crack at it.

~ A movie set in an when there are no calendars, no aliens, and no English language!

But it has this young lady — who, according to a Google search, sports the numbers 37, 24, and 36.


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I have no idea if tomorrow's three threads will have some strange new pattern . . .and I'm afraid to look.
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Panic in Year Zero (1962)



Ray Milland directs and stars in this tale of a family on a fishing trip who learn that nuclear war has destroyed nearby Los Angles.

Milland must protect his family (Jean Hagen, Mary Mitchell, Frankie Avalon) from looters and rapists (his daughter is assaulted). Milland and Avalon rob a small store at gun point to get supplies, then they set up residence in a cave.

Milland's character is grimly determined to take every precaution against the dangers he knows his family will face as civilization breaks down. This is an intelligent and well-craft film that takes a close look at a determined family's struggle to survive. Highly recommended.

[Also released as: "The End of the World"]
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Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

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Generally accepted as The Worst Movie Ever Made. No argument.

Transvestite director Edward D. Wood, Jr. is the artist who painted this masterpiece, one of many such cinematic black eyes. "Plan 9 from Outer Space" has earned its worst-ever-made reputation because so much of its badness comes close to resembling satire: the bad acting almost looks like good actors making fun of bad acting, the special effects are so bad they look like statements on bad special effects, etc.

Everybody knows the story about how Bela Lugosi died during production and was replaced by a chiropractor who kept a Dracula cape over his face. Because the film seems almost deliberately bad, "Plan 9 from Outer Space" isn't really Wood's most inept film, nor is it his most offensive. Those honors must go to "Bride of the Monster" and "Glen or Glenda", respectively.

But "Plan 9 from Outer Space" is undoubtedly Wood's most famous — and perhaps this is some consolation to the unfortunate actors who make up the cast: George Wolcott, Mona McKinnon, Joanna Lee, Lyle Talbot, Tor Johnson, Vampira, guest prologue-epilogue spokesman Criswell the physic, and Dudley Manlove (a deservedly obscure actor who plays a sissified alien named Commander Eros!).
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One Million Years B.C. (1966 England)



Perhaps the least satisfying of all Ray Harryhausen films, despite a wealth of high quality stop-motion animation.

It's a remake of "One Million B.C." (1940), and both versions attempt an odd gimmick: no English dialogue is spoken by the prehistoric people, just unintelligible "caveman" words. The same thing was tried in "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth". (In both films the cavemen frequently use the word "Akeeta" -- but the word is never applied with enough consistancy to indicate what it means!)

The actors struggle to tell the story with pantomimed gestures, a trick that gets a bit tiresome after awhile.

In 1981 Ringo Starr, Barbara Bach, and Shelley Long starred in "Caveman", a hysterical spoof of "One Million Years B.C.". It had excellent stop-motion animation and a "caveman language" which the audience actually learned to understand during the movie, because the words were applied so consistently ("ul" means food, "alundi" means love, etc.).

During a lecture at Georgia State University in 1981, I asked Ray Harryhausen what he thought of "Caveman". He replied, "I don't like send-ups."

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