Tag: sci-fi

Guest Contributor – War Pig – The Killer Shrews – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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Killer Shrews: Schlock at its finest. Poor special effects, hackneyed plot and ham acting. They used hand puppets of the giant killer shrews for up-close shots. They looked like an oversize stuffed mouse with chopstick fangs glued in and black ping pong balls for eyes. For action sequences, they used coon hounds with carpet and fur attached to them and never shot them close up. The coon hound shrews supposedly ate the token Black man in the movie, which would be protested today.

 

The premise is that a Swedish scientist was working on the then threatened coming food apocalypse. He had a Hispanic servant (Alfredo de Soto; more racist tokenism), a cowardly assistant (played by Gunsmoke’s Festus, Ken Curtis, who was an investor in the film and also a fine western actor and amazingly good singer), a beautiful Swedish daughter (played by the attractive Swedish actress Ingrid Goude) and an American assistant scientist played by Gordon McLendon. They are on an isolated island somewhere in the Atlantic hurricane zone so they can be left alone, especially by federal inspectors. James Best (most famous for playing Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrain on Dukes of Hazzard) plays the captain of the small motor ship bringing them supplies. With him is the faithful Black actor Judge Henry Dupree who is his first mate and apparently engineer, playing the character Rook.

 

A hurricane is approaching, so they have to anchor in the protected harbor and wait it out before unloading. The captain goes ashore to meet with the scientists while Rook runs extra anchors and has to tie the boat to a tree ashore. The captain is met by Ken Curtis’ character who is armed and takes him to the residence. There he is told what all is happening, that the experiment went astray and they accidentally created giant killer shrews who must eat their body weight daily to survive, that other animal food is running out, that the shrews are mostly nocturnal and that they will eat humans with gusto.

 

Poor Rook is chased and run up a tree by the coon hound shrews and the effects are so poor you can see the lines pulling the tree down supposedly under Rook’s impressive weight to his doom of being eaten alive. The shrews then surround the residence like the Little Big Horn and try to get in to eat the humans. They dig through the adobe walls and have to be shot or burned. One grazes the assistant scientist’s leg and they therefore find out that the shrews are also deadly venomous, as he dies shortly thereafter. The Hispanic servant also dies from a shrew bite. The shrews make a very distinctive noise that sounds something like “aaawk-ch-ch-ch!”. The shrews are also enthusiastically cannibalistic and will eat any form of meat, including each other, to quell their ravenous appetites.

 

The surviving humans decide they must escape and create a human-powered tank made of barrels roped together. Ken Curtis refuses as he is deathly afraid of the shrews and stays behind. Creeping in the tank the Captain, the Scientist and his lovely daughter make it, barely, to the water where the shrews, who cannot swim, leave them and go back to eat Ken Curtis who, instead of camping out on the roof and safe for a couple of days until the shrews turn on each other, stupidly tried to run off through the woods and he suffers Rook’s fate. As the shrews take him down he screams like a 12 year old girl with a spider on her face. The survivors swim to the motor launch and the Scientist declares; “In twenty-four hours there will be only one shrew left on the island, and he will die of starvation.”

 

This movie and it’s double feature The Giant Gila Monster made a surprising amount of money on the drive-in circuit. Although they were both low budget and schlocky even for 1959, I enjoyed the two movies at the drive-in. An amazing fact is that James Best reprises his role as the captain in the remake “Return of the Killer Shrews” in 2012, which was mostly a mockumentary of the original with even worse special effects and played for laughs. I am probably one of the very few people who have seen both movies. It is also a break of 53 years between the original and the sequel. Has to be some kind of record.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 37 – The Changing of the Guard

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Donald Pleasence plays Professor Ellis Fowler, an elderly literature teacher who has served over fifty years at the same prep school in Vermont.  We meet up with him at the last class before the Christmas vacation.  He chides his students for their lack of scholarly interest in his curriculum but he finishes by wishing them warm good wishes for their vacation.

But when the headmaster calls him into his office he finds out that he has been forced into retirement.  Going home Fowler reflects on the generations of boys he has taught but to his mind, he hasn’t accomplished anything.  He believes that the lessons he taught were of no value to the boys in his classes.  Reflecting on the end of his career to his housekeeper, Fowler considers himself a failure.  Afterward he decides to commit suicide with a revolver he takes from his desk.

He walks over to a statue on campus of Horace Mann that has the motto, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”  He says to the statue that he has won no victory and is ashamed but he will die.  But suddenly the class bell inexplicably starts tolling and Fowler follows the bell to his classroom.

As he stands in front of the empty classroom suddenly spectral forms solidify into young men at the desks.  One by one they walk up to Fowler and he recognizes them as the grown forms of some of his students.  Each of them tells the heroic circumstances of his death (in war or in the interests of humanity) and tells Fowler what lesson he learned from his Literature teacher that inspired him to the courageous actions he took.

Finally Mr. Fowler returns home and his students serenade him with Christmas carols outside his window.  Now Mr. Fowler tells his housekeeper that he is very satisfied to retire, the changing of the guard of the title.

This is a sort of a Twilight Zone version of Goodbye Mr. Chips.  Donald Pleasance does a good job and projects the emotions needed for the transition from despair to happiness.  This is another sentimental story drawing on the traditional values of the old pre-war world surviving into the present.  It’s slightly derivative but I’ll be a little generous and give it a B.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 36 – Cavender Is Coming

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This is a minor effort.  In fact, it’s kind of a reprise of another guardian angel episode called Mr. Bevis that featured Orson Bean as a daydreaming goofball that all the kids on the block palled around with.

Harmon Cavender (played by the immediately recognizable character actor Jesse White) is an angel who hasn’t earned his wings.  In fact, if he botches his next assignment he will probably be demoted (whatever that means).  He is assigned to help Agnes Grep (played Carol Burnett).  Grep is the clumsy kind young woman that all the kids in the rooming house come to for cookies and other treats.  Everyone likes her and she likes them.  But she can’t hold onto a job and so is always broke.  We meet her as she is losing a job as a ticket taker at a fancy movie theater.

Cavender’s job is to make her happy.  He shows up on the bus she is riding and tries to convince her of his angelic identity by means of small miracles.  He turns the bus into a horse drawn carriage and then a convertible.  He decides to make Agnes rich and famous.  He fills her bank account with cash moves her into Sutton Place on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and throws her a party filled up with the crème de la crème of posh New York Society.  Agnes is confused and ultimately bored and exhausted.  But when she tries to return to her rooming house apartment no one knows her and her apartment is occupied by someone else.  Cavender has cancelled out her old identity.  Now Agnes is sad and she begs Cavender to let her go back to her old life.  Reluctantly he agrees.  Now Agnes is deliriously happy but Cavender is in despair.  He has failed to change Agnes’ life and is sure to be demoted.

And sure enough, his heavenly superior officer is sadly disappointed in Cavender’s failure and is about to demote him when he looks down and sees how happy Agnes is.  And since Cavender’s job was to make her happy, then by definition he had succeeded.  Cavender’s boss praises him and says that Cavender will get more cases like Agnes.  As Cavender heads off he clandestinely smokes a forbidden cigar in Heaven.

This is one of those overly sentimental episodes that tugs on the heart strings.  But it’s also a comedy and it also has a good cast and the location is old New York of which I am a native and for the demise of which I mourn.  I’ll say I’m a sap for liking this episode but I do.  B.

Blade Runner 2049 – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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I saw Blade Runner in 1982.  It was a dystopic sci-fi story based on a Philip K Dick story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”  Harrison Ford is a cop named Rick Deckard whose job is to terminate runaway androids (replicants), he’s called a blade runner.  The movie was constructed as a film noir with Deckard in love with a woman that he knows to be a replicant.  The movie is full of dark violent imagery.  And the story has at its core the concept of the inherent dignity of all human life and the injustice of denying anyone freedom.  And Rutger Hauer was a lot of fun running amok as a brilliant homicidal replicant named Roy Batty.

Since this is Orion’s Cold Fire, I feel it is necessary to record here Roy’s final speech before dying:

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears…in…rain. Time to die.”  It’s effective, both dramatically and emotionally.  In point of fact it’s the best thing in the movie.

Blade Runner 2049 is the sequel to this movie.  It’s about thirty years after the first movie and K (played by Ryan Gosling) is a replicant who works for the Los Angeles police department as a blade runner.  While terminating a rogue replicant he detects a body buried under a tree on the replicant’s farm.  Forensic evidence points to the body belonging to the replicant that Deckard ran away with at the end of the first movie.  And the forensics shows that she gave birth to a child.  This is supposed to be impossible and so frightens the law enforcement establishment that they order K to find the child and terminate it and destroy all evidence of its existence.

But based on evidence associated with the child in K’s search he begins to believe that he is that child.  Because of the usefulness and efficiency of having replicants fertile, Niander Wallace, the wealthy, brilliant and evil CEO of the replicant manufacturing corporation wants to find the child in order to learn the secret of its ability.

This scenario sparks all manner of fights and chases and clues are found and people are hunted down.  Eventually K finds the woman who delivers the child and learns he is not the child.  He finds Deckard (reprised by Ford) and reunites him with his daughter.

I thought it was an awful movie.  It was full of off-putting action, boring and confusing dialog and unsympathetic characters.  Even as science fiction it didn’t make any sense.  We can currently read the entire genome of any human being.  How could it be possible for a future world that could produce synthetic humans not be able to make them fertile.  Also, since as we learned in the first movie, these replicants were born adult and only lived a few short years, how could having them gestate other replicants make any sense?  They would be born infants and take twenty years to mature.  Or even if in the meantime replicants now lived longer why were humanoid slaves needed at all?  The advances in artificial intelligence showcased in the movie made the need for android slaves nonsensical.

But honestly, all that is beside the point.  The movie was terrible.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 35 – I Sing the Body Electric

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Mr. Rogers is a recently widowed man with three lonely young children, Tom, Anne and Karen.  The children’s aunt tells Rogers that they need a mother not a babysitter but he doesn’t have an answer for that.  Tom shows his father an advertisement in a science magazine that announces robot grandmothers.  The family goes to the factory and learn that they can design a grandmother to look and sound exactly as they want her.  All are excited by the idea except for Anne who is angry at her mother for abandoning her (by dying).  Their electronic grandma proves to be lovable, wise and fun.  Everybody in the house is charmed by her except Anne who runs angrily out the door to escape.

When Grandma catches up to Anne, she tells her that she doesn’t want to have anyone else leave her.  Grandma tells Anne that she’ll never leave but the girl doesn’t believe her and runs into the street.  A speeding truck is on a collision course for Anne when Grandma shoves her out of the way and is struck instead.  Mr. Rogers is there to carry his daughter out of the street where she cries hysterically.  The truck driver is panicked when he sees Grandma sprawled in front of his truck but suddenly her programming resets and she gets up none the worse for her collision.

When Anne sees that her Grandma is indestructible a great fear leaves her and she embraces the robot.  Then we see the life of the children and their robot grandma and all the happiness she shares with them.  When finally, all three children have reached college age Grandma tells them she is returning to the factory to receive a new assignment or maybe e disassembled for parts.  She tells them that at some point she would be in a room with the other grandmas sharing wisdom.  And finally, she said that maybe in a few hundred years of service she would be granted the dream of becoming really alive.  Then the children tell her that she already is really alive now.  Then she tells them to go upstairs so she can leave without any sad goodbyes.

Serling got Ray Bradbury to adapt his short story for television.  But both versions are very strange.  It is a very original concept but it’s odd.  For originality I’ll give it a B+ but it won’t click for all tastes.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 34 – Young Man’s Fancy

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Alex Walker has just returned home with his new bride Virginia and before they take off on their honeymoon, they are preparing to have a realtor sell the old place.  But the more Alex looks at every old memento of his life with his deceased mother the less he likes the idea of leaving it.  Finally, he tells the realtor that he will have to think about the sale after he gets back from his honeymoon.  All this upsets Virginia terribly and we find out that she has waited for years for her deceased mother in law to die so that Alex would be willing to get married.  Now he walks around the house talking obsessively about his childhood life with his mother, about the songs she liked, the fudge she would make for them to snack on and how she took care of him after his father abandoned them.  Finally, he tells her that he will not sell the house but that they will live in it instead.

Virginia is so upset by this that she goes to get her things and leave.  But as she passes through the house, she notes that everything is changing into the version that had been there twenty-five years earlier; the telephone, stove and ice box.  Then suddenly she sees Alex’s mother standing on the staircase and Virginia tells her that she can’t have Alex, that he is a grown man and she hasn’t the right to keep him for herself.  But the mother says it isn’t her doing.  And from behind her a 10-year-old Alex appears and tells Virginia that they don’t need her and for her to go.  Virginia leaves.

Yikes!  This is a very creepy episode.  It reminds me of Psycho except without the murder and transvestitism.  Although I am quite repelled by the tele-play, I guess I’ll say it’s effective and probably quite original for the time.  Despite my reluctance I’m forced to give it a B-.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 33 – The Dummy

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Robots, mannequins and ventriloquist’s dummies.  Saints preserve us.

Cliff Robertson is Jerry Etherson, a ventriloquist and Willie is his dummy.  But Jerry’s problem is that sometimes Willie wants to do the talking.  And because of this Jerry has become an alcoholic.  Obviously, nobody believes him including his manager Frank (played by Frank Sutton of Gomer Pyle semi-fame).  Frank warns him that if he doesn’t conquer his drinking problem the delusion about Willie will persist.  Jerry tells Frank that the truth about Willie is what is driving him to drink.

Jerry thinks he has figured a way out.  He switches the act away from Willie by using his other dummy Goofy Goggles.  When Frank asks him why he is leaving early Jerry says he’s leaving for Miami and he’s leaving Willie behind in a locked steamer trunk.  Hearing that Jerry is running out on an engagement Frank ends his association with Jerry and tells him he needs a psychiatrist to solve his dummy delusion.

But when Jerry tries to leave the club, he can still hear Willie taunting him and telling him he won’t be able to get rid of Willie.  He rushes back to the darkened dressing room; rips open the trunk and smashes the mannequin down onto the floor.  But when he opens the light, he sees that he has destroyed Goofy Goggles.  And Willie is sitting on the couch mocking him.  When Jerry implores Willie to explain how a wooden dummy can live, Willie tells him that he did it by putting words into him.  Jerry bows his head in defeat and Willie laughs at him maniacally.

In the next scene we’re in a theater and the master of ceremonies introduces Willie and Jerry and from behind their backs we see the ventriloquist and his dummy going through their patter.  But as the position of the camera turns, we see that the ventriloquist is a living version of Willie and the dummy looks just like Jerry.

I suspect that Rod Serling was an actual time traveling sadist.  He had gone into the future and knew that I existed and if he would only create Twilight Zone episodes about robots, mannequins and ventriloquist dummies that can talk I would suffer horribly.  He must have been a monster.

And what about Cliff Robertson?  He was a reasonably successful and respected actor for what that’s worth.  And yet here he is wrestling with a dummy and being bested in a battle of wits.  I suppose there is a place for talking ventriloquist’s dummies in this wide wonderful world.  But what am I going to do in season five when I reach the second talking ventriloquist dummy story?  Am I supposed to pretend that’s alright too?  Besides this was the inspiration of the Chucky movies and who knows what future dummy abominations.  No, this will not stand.  D+

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 32 – The Gift

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In Madeiro, Mexico two policemen are sent to investigate a UFO.  When one of them comes across a fleeing alien they have a firefight and the policeman is killed.  His partner fires at the alien and wounds him.  When the policeman returns with his partner’s body, he warns the town that a dangerous creature is on the loose and telegraphs a message for the Army to come to Madeiro.

At this point a man that seems to be an American shows up in the cantina and asks for a drink.  He passes out and is discovered to be bleeding from gunshot wounds.  The town doctor removes the bullets and finds that this man (who calls himself Williams) very quickly recovers from what should have been fatal wounds.  Williams more or less admits to being the alien and claims that the police officer forced him to kill him.

A boy named Pedro who cleans the cantina befriends the alien and in return for this Williams gives Pedro a box which he tells him is a gift that Pedro should show to the doctor.  At this point, the Mexican Army shows up and a platoon of riflemen corner Williams.  When Pedro tells the crowd that Williams has given him a present, they grab it from him and burn it declaring that it is the work of the devil.  As Pedro and Williams walk toward each other, a woman yells out that the alien is going to harm Pedro and the soldiers all open fire on Williams, killing him.  When the doctor reads what is left of the gift it says “The following chemical formula is a vaccine, a vaccine against all forms of cancer.”  But that is all that is left.  The doctor says, “We have not just killed a man; we have killed a dream.”

First off, I’m really proud of Rod Serling for allowing someone other than Americans to be trigger happy xenophobes.  It’s sort of an achievement for Mexicans to be allowed to be the bad guys in a Twilight Zone.  It’s an acknowledgement of first world status to be responsible for oppressing somebody else.

Now, as to the dramatic quality of this episode, I’ve got some thoughts.  First off, Williams is something of an anglophile.  He can quote Robert Burns in the Scottish dialect.  I assume this is rare in space aliens.  Also, the panicked crowd of villagers were, shall we say, a little too excited.  After all the monster more or less looked and sounded like a guy from Cleveland.  And finally, why is it always cancer?  For once can’t it be high cholesterol or male pattern baldness?

Anyway, it was a little thin and there were a few too many stereotypes.  C+.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 31 – The Trade-Ins

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John and Marie Holt are an elderly couple and John has a medical condition that causes extreme and chronic pain.  In this future, medical science has advanced to the point that replacement bodies are commercially available for the price of $5,000.  The couple are interviewed by the salesman and he walks them through the displays of attractive young bodies that are available.  And he explains their satisfaction guarantee.  Within the first week if the patient changes his mind his old body is returned.

But when the Holts explain that they only have $5,000 the salesman apologetically informs them that government regulations forbid anything but a cash in advance payment.  Marie tells John to have the procedure done for him first and she will wait.  But John refuses saying that it will be all or none.  The Holts leave greatly disappointed.

John finds a shady high stakes poker game and goes into it with his $5,000.  He loses most of his money and in the last hand he can play the dealer asks him why he is risking his money in a game he obviously has no skill at.  He tells him his story.  Feeling pity for John he lets him win back his $5,000 and leave with what he started.

Suffering badly from his condition John relents and agrees to have his procedure first and earn the money afterward for Marie’s new body.  When John returns after his operation he is elated by his health and youth and exults to Marie about all the things they will do.  Every week an anniversary and every night a honeymoon.  And at first Marie shares his joy but then when she embraces him and realizes how old she will be compared to this youth she is shocked and filled with despair.

But John sees the look in her eyes and immediately goes back to the medical facility and has the procedure reversed.  He tells Marie if the price of being with her is pain then so be it.  John and Marie leave the building together with their love intact and their understanding of life deepened.

Joseph Schildkraut plays John and he is a favorite of mine for the comical villain he played in “The Shop Around the Corner.”  This Serling written story is a terribly sentimental drama.  Rod has shamelessly tugged on our heart strings with this story.  But I must confess I enjoyed it anyway.  B+.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 30 – Hocus-Pocus and Frisby

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Now this is more like it.  After those last two clunkers I was wondering if Season Three was all done.  But this will do.

Frisby (played by the unique Andy Devine) is a general store owner somewhere in the southwest named Frisby.  He is a spinner of tall tales and a terrible braggart.  According to him he has invented just about everything and has studied almost every field of science and engineering.  The customers of his establishment (one of whom is played by Howard McNear who was Floyd the Barber on the Andy Griffith Show) tolerate his lies because while he is pontificating, they are able to steal small pieces of candy behind his back.  We are subjected to an almost constant barrage of these tall tales in the first scene of the show.  Then a car pulls up to Frisby’s gas pump and while he fills their tank and regales them with the story of how he invented the rear mounted engine in their car the two men identify him as the man they are looking for.

Later on, as Frisby is closing his store he hears voices in the dark telling him to walk down the road to embark on a great adventure.  When he timidly refuses, he is levitated into the air and toward the destination that he was invited to.  On the desert floor we see a flying saucer (of course the one from Forbidden Planet) and the same voice invites him to enter.  Once inside, we see the two men from the car we saw earlier surrounded by other crew members.  They tell Frisby that they are aliens come to Earth to select a superior specimen for their menagerie.  After hearing of all his exploits and accomplishments they assume he is one of the most remarkable humans alive.  Frisby tells them that all the stories are lies.  But they do not understand the concept.  His lies have finally caught up with him.

When Frisby tries to leave they block his way.  When he resists and punches one of them in the face, the face cracks and is seen to be a mask hiding a strange non-human visage.  Seeing this Frisby faints.  When he comes to, the unmasked alien talks to him and declares that they will be leaving Earth momentarily.  To console himself Frisby begins playing his harmonica.  But the music has a toxic effect on the aliens and as they stagger back from the sound Frisby dashes for the door which they gladly open to allow his exit.  The saucer takes off to allow their escape from the “Death Sound” of Frisby’s instrument and he heads back to his store.  When he gets there the customers are throwing a birthday party for him.  He tries to tell them of his adventure but they laugh it off as just one of his wilder stories.

It doesn’t get much goofier than this one.  But it’s a great farce. A-