ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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What a great variety of science fiction concepts we have in today’s featured threads.

~ A test pilot pushes his aircraft to the limit and and breaks . . . The Time Barrier.

~ A construction crew on a Carribean island discovers two dinosaurs which an explosion freed from suspended animation in a subterranean cave.

~ Aliens invade Earth by causing a group of women to suddenly become pregnant with alien/human hybrids!

Whatever faults these movies my have, imagination was not one of them!

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Beyond the Time Barrier (1960)

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I've always looked on this one as an extended Twilight Zone episode — an Air Force test pilot (Robert Clarke, The Hideous Sun Demon) is flying his bird at a new altitude of 100 miles and breaks through the time barrier into year 2024.

Landing back at his base, he finds it to be derelict and empty of people. Close by, he notices what appears to be a futuristic city, but on his way there, he's zapped by a monitoring defense system. He finds himself captured by the last remnants of mankind, most of whom are deaf mute due to mutation. The ruler is called the Supreme (Vladimir Sokoloff), whose daughter (Darlene Tompkins, playing a mute) is swiftly enamored of the new man. Yet, the new arrival is still thrown into the dungeons with the rest of the more mutated prisoners.

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Eventually, it's revealed that some kind of cosmic plague wiped out most of humanity around 1971. The man from 1960 is then placed with a trio of other displaced travelers — two from 1994 and a female Russian pilot from 1973.

His goal is to, as expected, go back to his own time and prevent the plague. His main obstacle is probably the captain and chief of security (Red Morgan), who is suspicious of the visitors.

Besides the time travel angle, this offers a rather expressionist design for the futuristic city, dominated by triangles (made possible due to director Edgar Ulmer's filming at an exhibit of futuristic art-and-design at the 1959 Texas State Fair). Ulmer also made use of the abandoned MCAS Eagle Mountain Lake (northwest of Dallas/Ft. Worth) as a stand-in for the future abandoned Air Force base.

This has an action-packed and violent finale when the brutish mutants are freed. There's a final twist at the end that gives this a Zone-like, downbeat quality.

BoG's Score: 5.5 out of 10

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____________ Beyond the Time Barrier preview


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Beyond the Trivia: Ulmer's wife Shirley acted as a script editor while their daughter Arianne Arden co-starred as the Russian pilot.


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
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Dinosaurus! (1960)

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___________ Dinosaurus! (1960) - Movie Trailer


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Colorful and picturesque dinosaur movie set in modern times on a tropical island (filmed in the Virgin Islands), which isn't as well known as most other dinosaur films.

A construction crew is dynamiting in the area and uncovers a couple of dinosaurs buried in the water just off-shore — a T-Rex and a Brontosaurus. These are in a frozen state, but that night there's a storm and lightning strikes thaw out/awaken the creatures.

In addition, a caveman is awoken in a similar manner. These three out-of-their-time beings go their separate ways and cause their own kind of havoc, but eventually things come together, highlighted by a battle between the T-Rex and a steam shove (there's a lot of construction site machinery around).



The FX for the dinosaurs are kind of a rough, a less-skilled version of Harryhausen's, but it's interesting to see that some scenes — notably the T-Rex's first big scene — are copied in Jurassic Park (1993).

The T-Rex lowers its head to gaze inside a tram bus with people inside and then crushes it by stepping on it. This was virtually duplicated in the T-Rex's first scene in Jurassic Park. Many of the scenes, especially with the confused caveman, are on the goofy side (of course, cavemen & dinosaurs don't really belong together) and there's the usual annoying kid character.

But there's an entertaining villain and some notable action bits, such as when the caveman attacks the T-Rex with an ax, and an amusing scene of the caveman and a modern woman in a cave.

_____________________ Dinosaurus! (1960)


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BoG's Score: 5 out of 10

Dino Trivia: the Brontosaurus also made an appearance in the Twilight Zone episode, The Odyssey of Flight 33 - the FX crew filmed the TZ scene while they were working on this film. There was brief footage from this film - of the dinosaurs - showing in a theater in a scene from the monster parody Schlock (1973), also produced by Jack Harris, this film's producer.


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
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Village of the Damned (1960)

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________ Village of the Damned (1960) TRAILER


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This an adaptation of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos. One day all the inhabitants of the township of Midwich suddenly keel over unconscious. The entire area is inside some alien null field. Any person who enters this field instantly loses consciousness.

This lasts for several hours, then everyone inside the field wakes up, none the worse for wear, though there is this feeling of cold (a pilot does die when he is directed to fly too low over the area).

Months later, all women and girls of child-bearing age are found to be pregnant, and they all giving birth on the same day, several months ahead of the normal nine months. The new children also grow at a rate of about twice as quickly as normal Earth children and soon exhibit uncanny powers of the mind. The famous visual is their glowing eyes

It's also revealed that there were several other spots on our globe that were affected in the same manner — in Australia, Canada, and the Soviet Union.

The children in those areas were quickly killed for various reasons. In one affected area in the Soviet Union, the children were actually educated for a time, but then the area was nuked after the children's agenda of world conquest was found out. So, that leaves just the British area of Midwich.

This is a unique and chilling depiction of alien invasion. We never see the actual aliens, just their hybrid offspring. The children all have striking blonde hair and behave like a group mind, devoid of human emotion. They are obviously more intelligent than most humans, but this intelligence appears to sacrifice aspects of humanity, like compassion.

Children of the Damned (1963) is erroneously called a sequel, but the only similarity is the kids' glowing eyes. Otherwise the premise is very different. However, this movie was remade in 1995 by John Carpenter.

BoG's Score: 7.5 out of 10


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