ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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A Middle Eastern laboratory that does questionable experiments on children, a starship crew who blow up stars, and a man who kills undead people!

Dear Lord, what kind of twisted movies has Phantom discovered?
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The Gamma People (1956)

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Odd combination of science fiction and comedy in a Ruritanian village where a nefarious scientist has set up shop in order to conduct gamma ray experiments on the local populace. This b-level thriller is briskly directed by John Gilling who manages to get more out what he has been handed than the modest budget allows.

American actor Paul Douglas heads the cast, probably as insurance for the U.S. market. Born in Philadelphia in 1907, the burly Douglas built up a successful career as a radio/sports announcer before becoming an actor on stage in the smash Broadway success Born Yesterday co-starring Judy Holliday. He was as acerbic in real life as he was on screen, fiercely protective of his career, the roles he was offered and the terms of his contracts. Why he accepted The Gamma People when it was offered is a mystery, but his thoroughly abrasive and unlikable character is probably a reflection of just what he thought of the movie. Billy Wilder cast him as the philandering husband in The Apartment, but Douglas died before filming started and he was replaced by Fred MacMurray.

Leslie Phillips, the comic side of the duo, was born in London in 1924 and played a series of stereotypical Englishmen until called to duty in WWII. After an early release from the military because of shellshock he returned to acting and became one of the most likable character actors on the British screen. In 2008 he was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) during the Queen’s New Year Honors ceremony for his services to the drama. At this date, Phillips is still alive and makes infrequent appearances, including the voice of The Sorting Hat in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2011)



An unlikely coincidence: the car in which they are riding breaks loose from the train at the same time that two mischievous boys switch the direction of the tracks.





Mike Wilson (Douglas) and companion Howard Meade (Phillips) make history as the first train passengers to arrive in the village of Gudavia in five years. The disgruntled Wilson becomes increasingly agitated when they discover that Gudavia isn’t on the map and there is no car to take them to their intended destination. He bullies Koerner, the flummoxed village constabulary, who ushers them to the hotel where they can rest for the night until someone can come up with a vehicle. Wilson may have reason to be abrasive about the situation but he treats everyone like a lackey. Without Howard around as a kind of befuddled Watson to Douglas’s nasty Holmes, this movie would be very difficult to digest.



Howard heads to the local telegraph office to post a message to friends waiting at their destination.

Howard: How much will that be?

Clerk: There is no charge, sir.

Howard: (delighted): When will it be delivered?

Clerk: It won’t be, sir.

Howard: Why not?

Clerk: There is no telegraph service here, sir.



The most chilling scene in the movie, children undergoing the gamma experiments of Dr. Boronski in his hilltop chateau overlooking the village. Selected victims of Boronski’s gamma ray treatment emerge with superior intelligence stripped of human empathy, the rest as moronic goons which the scientist uses as his “storm troops” to terrify the villagers into submission.



At the hotel, Wilson discovers Hedda, a young girl expertly playing a difficult piece of classical music while Hugo, a stern looking youth, stands over her. When the boy berates her for allowing emotion to guide her playing, she angrily launches into an even more difficult piece. The children are two of Boronski’s gamma geniuses. Hedda has emerged as a musical prodigy; Hugo is an unemotional martinet, the perfect acolyte who will follow Boronski’s orders without question.



Hugo is played by Michael Caridia, born in Norfolk, England in 1941. Although his film and television career lasted from 1954 until 1961, there is no detailed biographical information on him in the IMDb. His performance as the demanding and completely unsympathetic Hugo is flawless.



Mayhem in the streets. Someone has been murdered for talking too much. When Joe and Howard investigate they are briefly separated and Howard has an encounter with a gang of Boronski’s goons.



“The man looked normal but different”, he tries to explain to a skeptical Wilson. "They looked like ordinary men, but without minds."



At their meeting with Boronski, the scientist divulges that he is experimenting with gamma rays. Wilson, who was a reporter during WWII, recognizes the man as an escaped Nazi scientist.



Boronski’s successful subjects apparently have an artistic flare and are creating masks for an upcoming village festival. Hugo startles everyone with his subject. “Most of them are portraying the past. I’m portraying the man of the future.” In keeping with Boronski’s hidden background, Hugo’s man of the future looks uncomfortably like an emaciated concentration camp inmate.



Hedda and her father attempt to escape the village and are attacked by Boronski’s goons. He is killed; she is kidnapped and taken to the chateau.



The assault is witnessed by Paula Wendt, Boronski’s chief assistant who has been having second thoughts about his nefarious activities.



Paula is played by Eva Bartok, whose life reads like a Hollywood concocted tragedy. Bartok was born of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father in Budapest, Hungary in 1927. After her father vanished without a trace, she was forced to marry a Nazi officer to avoid being sent to a concentration camp. After the war, she entered the acting profession, only to face further persecution under the communists.

She escaped by marrying Hollywood producer Alexander Paal and for the next five decades her life was a roller coaster ride of career ups and downs, several marriages and a brush with death due to cancer. She died in London in 1998.



On Boronski’s orders, Koerner cancels the festival. Wilson survives an attack by the goons and confronts Koerner in front of the villagers who have had enough. They rebel by tearing down the “verboten” signs and rushing into the streets, singing and dancing in the spirit of liberation.



With Paula’s help, Wilson secretly enters the chateau to rescue Hedda and stop Boronski.



As they make their escape, Hugo arrives, blocking their way. He is undaunted when Paula tries to reason with him and remind him that she is his sister. Hugo pulls the alarm and flees into the lab.



The scientist turns his gamma ray gun on Wilson, Paula and Hedda, calmly but viciously describing the sensations they will feel as the heat increases and their minds dissolve.





At the window, Hugo observes Howard and the villagers he has rounded up engage in a desperate fight for survival against the goons.





If you have ever wondered what a science fiction opium dream would look like, this movie probably comes as close as any to answering the question. John Gossage and John Gilling provided a screenplay based on a story by Louis Pollock based on an original story by Robert Aldrich. The committee stopped there and left it up to Gilling to fashion the schizophrenic result into something coherent. We are fortunate he failed in the attempt.

A person could suffer whiplash watching the cascade of mad Nazi scientists, comic opera villagers, brain dead storm troopers and mind altering gamma ray experiments clashing in a tight 79 minutes. The movie is no one’s favorite but it is entertaining. Despite the lunacy of it all, it is not a bad film like the wretched Killers From Space and the equally abominable The Beast With A Million Eyes.

George Melachrino’s elaborate musical score is a definite plus, from the rather dreamy opening theme to the exuberant carnival furioso, not something you might expect from a b-level science fiction film.
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Dark Star (1975)
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https://i.imgur.com/P9Xm0IH.jpg[/img]

This was the lower half of a drive-in double feature. We went to see the upper half and to this day I don't remember what it was.

Everyone wanted to see it again. Unfortunately, it was the last show of the night and the drive-in manager couldn't be persuaded at the point of a gun (which we didn't have, anyway)

Never forgot it. For me, Benson Arizona is as iconic a theme song as Beware the Blob.

Snapped up the dvd as soon as it became available.

]The crew in their quarters, the food locker, after their sleeping compartment was destroyed in an electrical storm (or something like that). I'm guessing the sleeping quarters in Conquest of Space didn't look like this. An image of the duality of man; soaring through space in an advanced technological era and looking like they are barely out of the stone age.




The imagery they achieved on a budget of about $1.50 is amazing. The movie, begun as a student project, put Carpenter and O'Bannon on the road to far more ambitious projects.
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Their former commander in a cryogenic chamber. They can't raise the dead, but they can talk to them. It's too bad he's "forgotten so many things," but Doolittle's visit was certainly entertaining.
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Doolittle's conversation with a philosophical bomb whose one purpose is to explode is even less successful and leads to a line that raised the hair on my head all those years ago.
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Let there be light.[/size]





The ship destroyed, Doolittle's choice of death is to become a falling star. A touch of the poetic after all the madness.
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The Last Man on Earth



I saw this in ’64 on a double bill with some forgettable muscle man picture and didn’t like a frame of it. Avoided the movie for decades while Heston made The Omega Man (liked it even less) and Will Smith gave it a third and thoroughly disappointing try.

So, it was about time for a re-assessment, and lo and behold, Price’s journey through the landscape of the undead is much better than I remembered.

Price was on an AIP roll at the time, so how or why he ended up in Italy in an almost no-budget picture only he could have explained. We are lucky he made the decision; director Ubaldo Ragona is even more fortunate in enticing the highly respected and sought after American actor to accept the job. Price takes the role very seriously. There is none of that tongue-in-cheek approach he adopted for the latter part of his career that endeared him to his fans. In this Matheson adaptation he is world weary to the bone and deadly serious about his mission, exactly the right tone for a movie that he had to carry alone for the American audience.



Franco Delli Colli’s b/w photography gives the film a far more unearthly ambiance than the color remakes. Nightmares are meant to be in monochrome in which the eye is not distracted by a myriad of hues and shades. Mario Bava, an artistic genius, was one of the few directors to successfully marry disturbed dreams with floods of color.

This shot of a dead body, or possibly a vampire, is far more effective in b/w. Color would reveal make up and defects that never seem authentic when applied to one’s face.



Wild animals roam the empty streets in the beginning of Will Smith’s I am Legend. It’s a remarkable, memorable image, but conveys none of the unnerving devastation envisioned in The Last Man on Earth.





A few items from the IMDB pages: