ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Don't ya just love science fiction? Each different movie is a like Christmas present. You never know what' they're really about until you watch them!

Like the movie about a submarine . . . that cruises around inside a man's body!

Or the one about a monster that had no face . . . and no body either! Just a brain and a spinal cord that wiggled like worm!

And then there's the movie about a gung-ho astronaut who couldn't wait to get a rocket ship to fly into space — so he flew his experimental aircraft right up out of the atmosphere. . . and lived to regret it!





Yep, science fiction is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.
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Fantastic Voyage (1966)



Undoubtedly one of the most intelligent science fiction films of the 1960s and 1970s. The concept is unusual and fascinating; a mini-submarine containing a team of doctors is reduced to microscopic size by a new experimental process and injected into the body of a famous scientist who was injured while defecting from behind the Iron Curtain.





Stephen Boyd plays the government agent who brings the scientist to American (and then gets injected into him). Arthur Kennedy and Donald Pleasence are famous surgeons, Raquel Welch is the shapely surgical assistant, and William Redfield is the minisub helmsman.





Because "Fantastic Voyage" was made in the 1960s, the film makers felt obliged to include an espionage-saboteur element in the plot. This part of the story isn't too well done, and absolutely nobody is surprised by whom the saboteur turns out to be.





Through no fault of the film makers, some of the Oscar-winning special effects appear seriously outdated by today's standards. Too many visible wires can be seen on the miniatures, and too many full-sized sets look like sets instead of the human tissue and organs they are supposed to be.







But the matt paintings and composite shots (such as the minisub's passage through the lymphatic system) look wonderful.

Even the less effective special effects scenes succeed in clearly illustrating the events that comprise this truly remarkable story. Directed by Richard Fleischer from a screenplay by Harry Kleiner.

The plot does have one blatant bit of illogic. It violates the plot's own stated premise concerning the need to remove every trace of the submarine and its occupants before they automatically expand to normal size and kill the patient. Isaac Asimov's 1966 novelization of the screenplay doesn't make this mistake.



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Fiend Without a Face (1958 England)

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An invisible killer is stalking the people on an Air Force base in Canada and the civilians in the nearby town. Autopsies of the bodies reveal that their brains have been sucked out. The killers (which become visible as the plot progresses) turn out to be white crawling brains with antennas and wiggling spinal-cord tails which they rap around the necks of their screaming victims.

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Alien beings? No -- they're the product of a brilliant and noble scientist who experiments with the "materialization of thought" (shades of "Forbidden Planet").

But the experiment goes wrong, producing evil disembodied creatures. The brain creatures start using their own intellects to create more creatures!

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The stop motion animation creatures were done by a team of Austrians. Although it's not nearly as smooth as Ray Harryhausen's work, the jerky movements lend a weird quality to the bizarre creatures, enhancing the viewer's belief that these things are definitely not natural.

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Starring Marshall Thompson ("First Man Into Space", "It! The Terror From Beyond Space"), Michael Balfour, Terence Kilburn, Kim Parker, and Gil Winfield. From the same people who did "First Man into Space". Directed by Arthur Crabtree.
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First Man Into Space (1959 England)



A first-rate science fiction story, told on a modest budget.

Air Force officer Marshall Thompson is the Earth-bound brother of an undisciplined test pilot (Bill Edwards) who yearns to be the "first man into space". While testing a new rocket plane, the pilot kicks in all his reserve power and takes his ship right up out of the atmosphere.

In space he encounters a strange cloud of meteoric particles that smash through his canopy and envelope both his ship and his body in a flexible, asbestos-like coating. It alters his physiology, changing him into a creature that can survive in the vacuum of space but not in the suffocating atmosphere of Earth. He returns to Earth as a hideous monster (good makeup), gasping for each breath he takes.


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The tortured man plods along in a zombie-like state, breaking into hospitals to loot the blood banks, slaughtering everyone he encounters. The flexible coating has a razor-sharp outer surface, like broken glass embedded in tar, enabling the astronaut-monster to rip open the throats of his victims with a casual swipe. And the coating is tough enough to make him bullet proof.


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Meanwhile, Thompson and scientist Carl Jaffe discover that the metal of the wrecked spacecraft has been made brittle by the destructive effects of cosmic rays -- except the parts which were protected by the strange coating of space dust. The men conclude that the only hope for the space program is to synthesize the coating and apply it to the hull of all future spacecraft.


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The climax is a dramatic confrontation between Thompson and his hideously deformed brother. Don't miss this little gem, a thinking-man's science fiction film on a working-man's budget, from the same team that made "Fiend Without a Face". Directed by Robert Day from a screenplay by John C. Cooper and Lance Z. Hargreaves. Co-starring Robert Ayres, Marla Landi, Bill Nagy.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)