Tag: sci-fi

It! The Terror from Beyond Space – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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I’ll give the plot of this movie in a very short synopsis.  The first manned trip to Mars ends with all but one of the ten-man-crew dead.  A rescue mission takes survivor, Col. Carruthers aboard to bring him back for a court martial for his alleged murder of his crew mates.  On the voyage home they discover that a Martian creature who must have been the killer of the first crew is aboard and is now killing them.  The movie is mostly about the crew’s attempt to kill the monster before he finishes them all off.

Alright, how do I hate this movie, let me count the ways.

  • The special effects consist of a big guy in a rubber monster suit, a couple of rooms outfitted with ship’s ladders and fake metal bulkhead hatches, really bad fake spacesuits, some star backgrounds with comets and meteors moving by every once in a while, and a model of a space ship. That’s it.
  • The script is seriously underwhelming. During the first quarter of the film most of the dialog is the crew taunting Carruthers trying to goad him into confessing to the murder of his crewmates.  After the monster comes on the scene all they do is walk around the small sets whining about how nothing they do seems to affect the monster and bemoaning the death of their shipmates.
  • On the second mission to Mars they brought girls! Sure, sure, I know, they’re nurses or something.  They’re always putting a bandage on Carruthers or an IV bottle on “Van.”  But they even had to start up a love triangle between the less homely nurse and Carruthers and Van.  Even in the face of imminent death at the hands (or three fingered claws) of “It!” we still have to endure hand holding and soul-searching looks into each other’s eyes.
  • The monster is ridiculous. Its face hands and feet are so obviously latex rubber that it’s embarrassing.  When he catches any of the crew, he pummels the victim by windmilling his ridiculous arms.  According to more homely nurse this treatment breaks every bone in the victim’s body.  But remarkably the victim isn’t killed.  Instead, the monster stows them in the ventilation system where they are retrieved so that the monster can suck the water and oxygen from their bodies.  Also, the monster sounds like he has asthma.
  • The movie is only 68 minutes long. Now normally that would be a fault.  But in this case brevity is a great virtue.

After failing to kill the monster with bullets, grenades, poison gas and bazooka they finally settle on emptying the ship’s atmosphere into space thus asphyxiating him.  They make a big deal of the fact that the monster has large lungs because of the thin atmosphere on Mars.  Why that would make him more vulnerable to asphyxia I couldn’t possibly say.  And once the air is all gone, he quickly expires as did my patience.

The fairly familiar character actors in this movie like Marshall Thompson and Dabbs Greer had an impossible task to make this turkey watchable.  It’s not as awful as ‘Plan Nine from Outer Space” so it can’t be watched for laughs.  It’s just schlock.  Unless you really enjoy bad old sci-fi, I recommend giving this one a pass.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 08 – For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky

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I prefer to call this episode “For the Show is Cancelled and I Must Call My Agent.”  This one’s a doozy.  We start off with the Enterprise under attack from sub-light speed missiles which are easily destroyed by the ship’s phasers.  Following the path of the missiles back they find that an asteroid about 200 miles in diameter was the source and that the asteroid is a powered ship on a collision course with planet blah-blah-blah V.  The asteroid is hollow with a breathable atmosphere within but somehow the Enterprise’s sensors can’t detect the inhabitants.

Before Kirk and Spock can transport into the asteroid a panicked call from Nurse Chapel to the bridge warns us all is not well in Sick Bay but before we can assume that McCoy has gotten grabby with the good nurse, we find out that McCoy is dying of plasmopneumohyposarcocorneomyelofruitrolleos and has less than a year to live.  After the shock wears off for Kirk all three intrepid officers head for the transporter while Scotty is left holding the bag trying to keep Sulu, Chekov and Uhura focused on their work instead of talking about their favorite boy bands.

The people on the asteroid dress like denizens of Studio 54 with their pastel and plaid patterned pajamas and phony looking swords.  But phony or not they easily overpower the landing party.  The rather pretty high priestess Natira takes a shine to McCoy and brings the three spacemen to the presence of the Oracle.  The Oracle looks like an elevator button on a plaster cast wall display.  But he packs a wallop.  He zaps our three friends just to show them who’s boss.

A subplot is Natira convincing McCoy to stay on the asteroid to live out his year with her.  The catch is that McCoy has to have an implant that allows the Oracle to read his thoughts and kill him if he commits sacrilege, as for instance if he tells anyone that they are living inside of an asteroid instead of a planet.  When Spock and Kirk retreat to the Enterprise to escape a death sentence for spying on the Oracle.  McCoy gets zapped by the Oracle when he tries to tell them about how to fix the faulty guidance system that is heading the asteroid toward a collision with planet blah-blah-blah V which is supposed to be the destination of the asteroid/escape ship.

Kirk and Spock save McCoy by removing the implant and then save Natira by removing her implant.  Then Kirk hits Ctrl+Alt+Del to shut off the Oracle.  Spock fixes the glitch in the guidance system and hopefully turns off the murderous Oracle permanently.  McCoy decides to go back to the ship so that he can find a cure for plasmopneumohyposarcocorneomyelofruitrolleos (not for himself of course, but for the good of all mankind) but Natira decides to stay with her people and colonize planet blah-blah-blah V.  By the way, no explanation as to why the inhabitants there won’t take offense at illegal immigrants showing up uninvited but we’ll let that pass.  And right at the last-minute Spock scans the memory banks of the ship and determines that the Oracle has a cure for McCoy’s case of plasmopneumohyposarcocorneomyelofruitrolleos.  After some grunting and groaning and a blanket over him on the sick bay bed so he doesn’t catch cold, McCoy is cured.  And just to show everyone he’s a sport Kirk tells McCoy that he’ll make sure the Enterprise is near to planet blah-blah-blah V in 390 days when the asteroid shows up so McCoy can make a booty call on Natira.

Alright, this episode isn’t a total loss.  Natira is a pretty babe wearing some kind of a two-piece metallic silk wrap-around garment which sort of works on her.  Beyond that?  Well, not so much.  The plot has a dozen holes in it.  How exactly can sub-light speed weapons even find the Enterprise when it’s travelling at some supra-light speed?  How in hell could Spock find the cure for plasmopneumohyposarcocorneomyelofruitrolleos in an alien database in less than a minute and a half?  Why would a cute babe be interested in McCoy?  Why are there still 16 episodes left in Season 3 for me to suffer through?  But this is still not the worst episode I’ve seen.

I’ll give it a 5 // 2.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 07 – Day of the Dove

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The plot of this episode has the well-worn trope of a creature that feeds off of human emotions.  In this one distress calls summons both the Enterprise and a Klingon warship to a planet with each side believing that the other side has destroyed one of their colonies.  But when they reach the planet the Enterprise landing party finds no evidence of a colony at all.  Somehow the Klingon ship is badly damaged with all but forty of the crew killed.  The surviving Klingons beam down and attack the landing party and force Kirk to beam them aboard the Enterprise so that they can take it over.  But Kirk alerts Spock using a warning signal on his communicator and the Klingons are beamed up but subdued.  The Klingon captain, Kang and his wife Mara, who is also the science officer, of course, rage against the questioning by Kirk about their supposed massacre of a colony.  But suddenly the Enterprise crew’s phasers are turned into really phony looking swords.  And the Klingons are also armed with swords so the two sides start hacking away at each other.  Simultaneously the Enterprise bulkhead doors on most of the ship seal, cutting off all but forty of the crew from subduing an equal number of Klingons.  It turns out any injuries from the sword fighting heal at a ridiculous rate so the sides always remain balanced.  And most annoyingly the ship is taken over by some outside force that speeds it up to Warp Factor 9 and toward the edge of the galaxy.  And finally, just for good measure, the dilithium crystals begin to degenerate and only have enough power to last until the end credits of the show appear.  After four or five times that we see some sort of translucent spinning pinwheel thingy hovering around the Enterprise set, we are told that a creature composed of “pure energy” is on board and feeding off the hate of the two sides.  It even controls the minds of the crew and puts false memories in their heads like Chekov believing that Klingons were responsible for the murder of his imaginary brother.  Even McCoy, Scotty, Spock and Kirk start bandying racial epithets and insults against each other, which is quite amusing.

Eventually Kirk snaps out of his emotional state and figures out that he must call a truce with the Klingons and stop the fighting before the dilithium crystals are all gone.  When Kirk saves Kang’s wife from being sexually assaulted by Chekov, he tries to convince her to help him reason with Kang.  After Mara sees the alien, she is convinced and she and Kirk beam into the engineering deck somehow or other and confront Kang with the situation.  After a sword fight with Kang, Kirk convinces him of the truth of the alien situation and they yell at the alien and tell it to leave and then Kirk and Kang start yucking it up together and backslapping each other and this hurts the alien’s feeling and it leaves in a huff.

Surprisingly, this pathetic story was quite amusing to watch.  The actor who portrayed Kang, Michael Ansara, was quite entertaining in his Klingon face paint and swaggering insolence.  And all the hysterical overacting by Chekov, McCoy, Scotty and of course Kirk was also highly entertaining.  Chekov’s attempt to make out with the Klingon woman and Kirk’s outraged attack on Chekov in her defense were equally hilarious.  And there was terrible fake sword fighting and bellowing charges of red shirts in all directions.  I would say the highlight of Kirk mockery activity was Kirk lifting up Chekov and carrying him away in his arms like a child after he knocked him out for groping Mara.

I won’t try to defend my opinion of this episode.  I openly admit that the plot was hackneyed and idiotic.  But it was just the right amount of idiotic to allow Shatner and company to do their thing.  Well done!  One of the best season three episodes so far.

Guest Contributor – Neil Dunn – Dune, Part 1 (2021) – A Science Fiction and Fantasy Movie Review

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I have been a fan of DUNE for over 40 years, having read the six books of the DUNE series written by Frank Herbert (and most of the satellite books by his son, Brian Herbert. and Kevin J. Anderson). Before this review, I confess that I had not reread DUNE or portions for probably 15 years. I have now reread some scenes and looked up several items on the internet (See links below).

The movie–DUNE, Part 1- exceeded my expectations by capturing the essence of the book DUNE, its complexity and the grandeur of a galactic struggle focused on the desert planet Arrakis (= Dune).

The movie portrays the political competitors–the emperor, the Atreides, the Harkonnen (i.e., the grand houses), the Bene Gesserit, the fremen and all their competing goals–ruling power, treachery, controlling the spice, water and ecology. All these elements are interwoven, struggling, and competing. And somehow this will all come to fruition in Part 2 (supposedly out in 10/2023).

Overall, the actors-actresses gave fine performances of the book’s characters–physically compatible, and highly believable. Timothee Chalamet (Paul Atreides) performs quite well as he matures, increases his self-awareness of his future, and hardens.  Oscar Isaac as Paul’s father Leto Atreides is regal and honorable. Rebecca Ferguson (Lady Jessica) does fine as mother and Bene Gesserit. Gurney Halleck’s role (Josh Brolin) is simplified from the book to being Paul’s arms trainer and warrior but with no baliset for singing.  Jason Mamoa (Duncan Idaho) performs well as the swordsman providing comic relief (which I do not remember in the book). Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) is well cast as the blubbery and evil villain. David Bautista (Glossu Rabban), the Baron’s muscle man and nephew, is fine but the role is limited. Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Liet-Kynes, the Imperial Planetologist, has a mildly significant role in the movie and does well. That Liet-Kynes character is female (book = male) is of no significance. Stilgar (Javier Bardem) and his crew of fremen are well cast and look menacing. Zenday (Chani), Kyne’s daughter, performs well both in Paul’s dreams and when actually with him, as part of the freman “greeting party” for Paul and Lady Jessica. Other actors, not named here, were ok in their roles.

The script fulfills its function quite well in carrying the story, providing information, and allowing the actors to develop the book’s characters. I did have some difficulty hearing some lines even with my hearing aids cranked up but my wife and I saw the movie twice which helped. I enjoyed the subtitles scattered occasionally throughout. I have read that online streaming (don’t remember by who) provides subtitles for the speech which would have been nice.

The visual aspects were extremely well done. Be on the alert as Director Denis Villeneuve frequently uses picture footage to tell the story. Also, Paul has dreams of what might happen = flash forwards (or “easter eggs?”) which I was not expecting, so it took a few times before I synched with the movie. At other times, he tells someone what he knows something about them pretty much out of the blue–e.g. I must have blinked and missed him telling Lady Jessica that he knew she was pregnant (my wife told me, so I was ready for the scene our second time– even then she nudged me). The computer graphics were outstanding and were not overwhelming as in many Marvel movies. Of course, the sandworm scenes were my favorites. The space ships were well done with different shapes, sizes, and movements. The ornithopters were impressive, but their blades movements were beyond my understanding of flight mechanics.

There were certainly some plot differences which are expected when transitioning from a book–>movie. Nothing really bothered me as I thought the movie plot flowed very smoothly. Since there is supposed to be a part two, I am not going to second guess the director on how he sets up (pt. 1) to film the sequel (pt. 2) for a unified, integrated, and coherent total adventure.

Side note: The movie ended with Chani and the fremen leading Paul and Jessica to Sieth Tabr.  My hard copy of DUNE has this occurring on page 280 of 474 pages total. This leaves 194 pages for part 2.  A part 3 has been mentioned but at this point, I do not see how this could happen, but then I never thought the Hobbit could be made into three movies.

Based on the above and more, for fans of DUNE, I think the movie is an unqualified, most enjoyable must! For general Sci Fi fans I recommend it highly, even if you may not be a fan of the book DUNE. For the general audience, the movie has all the elements to have an enjoyable fantasy adventure–plot, characters, special effects. My only concern is whether condensing this complex book to a movie sometimes makes it hard to follow.

Some Links:

More authoritative review article of DUNE pt 1 by Steve Sailer: https://www.takimag.com/article/dune-old-spice-in-a-new-age/

Background for movie DUNE pt. 1: https://screenrant.com/dune-movie-book-story-world-characters-spice-explained/

Plot of movie DUNE pt. 1: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1160419/plotsummary#synopsis

For fun: Google “nerdist dune” and get a bunch of DUNE links at nerdist.com  — just link away!

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 06 – Spectre of the Gun

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In this one, an alien race with telepathic powers decides to kill Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty and Chekov by forcing them to re-enact the Gunfight at the OK Corral as the Clantons.  I can see why CBS would be glad to film this episode.  They could reuse some of the old sets from their Rawhide series.

They were kind enough to throw in a pretty girl as the love interest for Chekov and we did get some western style background music.  The whole thing had a kind of Twilight Zone feel to it.  The plot device that is used to save our friends is the realization that none of the western setup is actually real so that if Kirk and friends know that the bullets aren’t real then they won’t be harmed by them.

So, the majority of the episode is Kirk, Chekov and McCoy interacting with the Earps and other townspeople while Spock builds a gas bomb that when tested on a skeptical Scotty doesn’t work.  But its failure confirms for Spock that the world they are inhabiting is an illusion that can’t harm them if they can ignore it.  At some point one of the Earps that is in love with Chekov’s girlfriend shoots Chekov and apparently kills him.  But at the end of the show when Chekov ends up alive McCoy explains it by saying that to Chekov the only thing that was real was the girl.  Now that doesn’t make a lot of sense because he did act like he had been shot when it happened but that’s what they give us to hide the plot hole so I guess we’ll have to live with it.

The climax is the gunfight.  Spock has prepared his human friends with the Vulcan mind-meld so that they will thoroughly believe the bullets are fake and so they will not be harmed.  The Earps blast away at the four Enterprise crewman and we see the fence behind the crewmen splintered by sustained gunfire as the Earps empty all their guns.  Then Kirk beats up Wyatt Earp and draws his gun as if to shoot him but then changes his mind and throws the gun away.  Almost immediately Kirk and company find themselves back on the Enterprise and discover that Chekov is unharmed.  The alien changes his mind about earthmen and decides he wants to be friends.  The show ends with Kirk and Spock discussing the violent nature of humans and how they have overcome it.

This is not a highly creative script.  The plot is similar to several that preceded it.  The acting and the dialog are just average and there wasn’t even much humor to make it more interesting.  Scotty did get to comment approvingly on the bourbon that the town had to offer for his drinking pleasure.  And Chekov was a source of amusement as the crew tried to drag him away from the woman who was infatuated with him. Shatner didn’t have much chance to show off his overacting ability.

I’ll give this a 5 // 2.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 05 – Is There in Truth No Beauty?

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Ah, finally a third season episode that doesn’t make you run screaming.  It’s not great but it’s far from awful.

This one involves a blind telepathic human woman named Miranda Jones who is the attaché of a creature called a medusan.  He is described as an energy being but he is so visually hideous that a human that looks at him will be instantly rendered insane.  For this reason, the medusan, Kollos,  travels around in a low, wide, rectangular, metal garbage can with a hinged lid.  But once the lid starts to open, we get a glimpse of Fourth of July sparklers and then scary music starts to play.

Spock and Miranda are in competition for the attentions of Kollos.  Miranda is jealous because if Spock wears a red filter over his eyes, he can look directly at Kollos without going mad, whereas Miranda, being blind, can’t see him at all.  If none of this makes any sense to you, welcome to the club.  Anyway, some other guy Lawrence Marvick, who both loves Miranda and designed the Enterprise is along on the trip.  He is trying to dissuade Miranda from going off to live with Kollos instead of shacking up with him.  When she rebuffs his pleas, this guy goes to kill Kollos with a phaser but, big surprise, before he can shoot Kollos he goes mad and runs away.

Marvick runs to the engine room and after beating up Scotty and three or four red shirts he hijacks the Enterprise and sends it out of the galaxy at Warp 9.5!  And as you well know that almost Warp 10!  He dies shortly after accomplishing this feat and the crew find themselves outside the galaxy in an area of intergalactic space where there are pretty lights and no highway signs.  We are told that they are in a space time continuum.  Of course, I thought we were all in the space time continuum, but whatever.  They are hopelessly lost!

So now the plan is for Spock to fuse his mind with Kollos because medusans have built in GPS in their sparkler.  This works but after getting them back into the galaxy and within satellite coverage, Spock forgets to put on his visor and sees Kollos which drives him mad.  Now he beats up Kirk and McCoy and Sulu and Chekov for a couple of minutes until Kirk stuns him with a phaser.  At this point Spock is dying and only Miranda might be able to save him by some kind of telepathic chiropractic manipulation.  But when time has passed and results have not been forthcoming Kirk runs into the sick bay and yells at Miranda and manhandles her a little bit.  This seems to have the desired effect and Miranda brings Spock back to his good old Vulcan self.  After that there are a few apologies and then Miranda takes her garbage pail and leaves.

As I mentioned, this is not an awful episode.  Some of the highlights are Scotty wearing his kilt to a fancy dinner for Miranda, Kirk showing off the Enterprise Florist Shop where he allows a blind woman to stick herself with a thorn on one of the lousy roses they have growing there. And let’s not forget the cool wavy lights in the extra-galactic dead zone.   But possibly the bright spot of the episode is Leonard Nimoy acting as Kollos during their fusion.  We see a very human and friendly character experiencing human senses and greeting all the people that he knows from being Spock as if seeing them for the first time.  It’s a naturalistic portrayal that I found enjoyable.

I’ll give this episode a 6 // 2.  There was very little hysterics from Shatner, thus the low number in the Shatner Mockery Index.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 04 – And the Children Shall Lead

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There seems to be a footrace on between finishing this third season of reviews and terminal Star Trek overdose.  Seriously, we had better reach a decent episode soon.  And this one is no exception.  My dog could have written this thing.  And I’m not talking about the smart dog.

The Enterprise is desperately summoned to planet blah blah blah.  Kirk, Spock and McCoy find all the adults have suicided and the children are happily unconcerned by the carnage.  After Spock detects alien life readings coming from a cave, he and Kirk enter it and Kirk becomes panicky like a whiny infant and runs out.  Spock relates the history of the planet including a race of space marauders that was destroyed by its victims.

McCoy spouts some psycho-babble about the kids being in some kind of denial shock over the death of their parents and warns Kirk not to ask them any questions.  Back on the ship the children prove to be a pack of creepy pushy losers who quickly alienate everyone they meet.  But when they’re alone the children reveal their awful secret.  They form a circle and chant some moronic doggerel about a “friendly angel.”  And an apparition appears that looks like a fat gay guy in a moo-moo.  This is the Gorgan, one of the race of space marauders that was supposedly eliminated long ago.  His life force is kept going by controlling the minds of other beings.  This creature forced the adults on his planet to kill themselves and has seduced the children with promises of unrestricted Nintendo viewing and endless dessert to help him hijack the Enterprise and bring it to planet blah blah blah where they can kill millions of people and corrupt millions of gullible children with the same lies.  Coincidentally some people have suggested that the actor playing the Gorgan looks like Alan Hale Jr., the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island.  But it’s not.  It’s Melvin Belli, a criminal defense and personal injury lawyer who must have been forced to play this part under a contempt of court ruling.

Anyway, the kids are able to make the crew see things that aren’t there and think things that they normally wouldn’t believe.  With the result that Sulu won’t allow anyone to change the ship’s course when it’s headed in the wrong direction and Chekov attempts to arrest Captain Kirk without cause.  But the most egregious example is that Kirk becomes panicked at the idea that he has “lost command.”  Once again, he starts behaving like a three-year-old who has wet his pants.  Finally, Spock has to call him “Jim” and rally his flagging manhood by telling Kirk that he’s in command.  Now re-invigorated in his knowledge that his authority had not been neutered Kirk pinches a few yeoman butts and jumps into action.

He uses a recording of the friendly angel chant to summon the Gorgan and then show the children video of their happy days with their parents and then photos of their parents dead to convince them that the Gorgan is a complete jerk.  Once they stop believing in the Gorgan his apparition begins to decompose and his face melts like wax and he disappears.  With everything back to normal Kirk orders Sulu to change course for Star Base blah blah blah.

The End

This show was trash from beginning to end.  I disliked everyone.  The weird kids, the Gorgan, the parents, the crew and especially Bill Shatner.  His unmanly panic attack was degrading even for the viewers.  He is an awful actor and deserves all the opprobrium I can think up.  But by the same token this episode has the highest Shatner mockery value that can be.  So, the show gets a zero and the Shatner index is a ten.  That is phenomenal.

0  //  10

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 03 – The Paradise Syndrome

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I’ve mentioned this before but I think it’s necessary to reiterate that the third season episodes are truly awful.

Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down to a planet that will be struck by an asteroid within a couple of months.  It is inhabited by American Indians.  Spock immediately chimes in that they are made up of a population that is a combination of Navajo, Mohican, and Delaware tribes.  Now, how in hell he’d know this looking at them walking around on the edge of a lake is a complete mystery to me.  And just to make the plot more absurd they have less than thirty minutes to get back to the Enterprise and travel at Warp 9 toward the asteroid before it’s too late to deflect the asteroid from its collision course.  So of course, while Spock and McCoy are doing whatever, Kirk manages to get lost.  He’s standing in front of an alien obelisk and when he communicates with the Enterprise it somehow activates a hidden trapdoor on the spot Kirk is standing and he falls into the hidden chamber where he manages to get electrocuted by the alien mechanism and loses his memory.  As an aside, for the “Shatner Mockery” rating of this episode it must be noted that Shatner performs one of his most spastic instances of the pain face.  This is the one he does when he’s really suffering badly.   It’s hard to compare these things but I’d say it’s one of his all-time worst occurrences.  This will earn him high marks for this episode.

Because Kirk is hidden inside of the obelisk Spock and McCoy waste precious time looking for him.  When they finally return to the Enterprise without him, they are already too late.  They reach the asteroid but neither their deflector beam nor the phasers are able to neutralize the threat of the asteroid.  In addition, the overloading of the Enterprise’s engines by the phaser bombardment destroys the warp drive and now the Enterprise, on impulse power, is barely able to stay ahead of the asteroid as they both head back to the planet on a trajectory that will take about two months.  Apparently, the crew will be barely a few hours ahead of the asteroid and will need to locate Kirk and attempt to find a way to save the planet.  As an aside while the Enterprise engines are being destroyed Scotty is lamenting their fate, moaning, “Oh my poor bearings!”  Apparently, the warp drive has ball bearings.  Who knew?

Meanwhile back on the planet, Kirk awakens inside the obelisk but he can no longer remember who he is or why he is there.  He wanders out of the obelisk and is immediately declared the first wizard deluxe (or at least a god) and assigned the task of stopping the darkening of the sky which is clearly the approach of the asteroid.  We find out that the Indians were placed on this planet by an advanced species that liked moving humanoids around the galaxy.  The obelisk is actually a very powerful deflector beam that is supposed to be controlled by the medicine man of the tribe.  But the present medicine man’s father died before passing the training down to his son.  Now seeing that Kirk (or Kirock as he painfully named himself while trying to remember his own name) is a god they make him the medicine man and give him the priestess, Miramanee to be his wife.  This supremely ticks off the medicine man because he’s not only lost his job but also his main squeeze.  The medicine man attacks Kirock with a knife and finds out that Kirk can bleed.  He taunts him with the phrase, “Behold the god that bleeds!”  This is one of two plot devices that this episode stole from classic movies.  This same device of the bleeding god occurs in the book and movie “The Man Who Would be King” by Rudyard Kipling.  The other theft occurs when Kirock is being considered for godhood.  A boy is brought into the wigwam by the women and they tell the chief that he was trapped under water and drowned.  The medicine man declares him dead but Kirock performs artificial respiration and saves the boy.  This clinches his inclusion in the pantheon of useful deities.  This scene is lifted from the movie, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre where the old prospector, Howard performs a similar resuscitation on a Mexican Indian boy.

So Kirock and Miramanee are shacked up and she is pregnant with James Tiberius Jr.  But the asteroid arrives and Kirock is dragged to the obelisk and is told to take care of the asteroid.  He stands there with his arms in the air telling the asteroid to go away.  When that doesn’t work the medicine man goads the tribe to start pelting Kirock with foam rocks about the size of cabbages.  It’s funny to watch them bouncing off of him.  Miramanee runs to protect him and is stoned too.  Just then Spock and McCoy beam down and the natives scatter and run for the hills.  Spock uses the Vulcan mind meld on Kirock to remind him that he’s Kirk.  Also, Spock has figured out that the entrance to the obelisk is sound activated so Kirk recreates his call to the Enterprise at the beginning of the story and the trapdoor opens.  Spock pushes a button and the deflector beams takes care of the asteroid.  Easy peasy.

But the highly advanced medicine of Dr. McCoy, the vaunted surgical techniques that could reattach Spock’s brain in the last episode, somehow are unable to repair or replace the damage that Miramanee sustained by being pelted with cabbage sized foam rocks.  So, she dies the beautiful death in Kirock’s manly arms.  A last note, the actress who played Miramanee is indeed a beautiful young woman.

The End.

This was even worse than it sounds.  Shatner turns his powers of bad acting up to eleven.  It’s all there.  Shoulder rolls and some kind of a stripper pole swing kick during his fight with the medicine man.  There are frequent expressions that are supposed to be painful struggles against amnesia but more resemble a case of constipation.  And when Kirock is semiconscious on the obelisk steps after being stoned he keeps calling out Miramanee’s name and it is truly maudlin.

So once again we have an episode that rates a very low number as a dramatic story but as an example of Shatner’s ham acting is a stellar sample.

Let’s say 2 // 10.

Season Three does it again!

Transatlantic Tunnel (1935) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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This is such an awful movie that I thought I should start off with a clear statement to that effect.  The script is unbelievably bad.  And with a script this bad it wouldn’t really help if the cast were first rate because even Lawrence Olivier would sound like an idiot saying idiotic things.  But this is not a first-rate cast.

Richard Dix “stars” as Richard McAllan a brilliant engineer who has already built a tunnel under the English Channel.  Not satisfied with that he’s now going to build a tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean from England to the United States.  Well, good for him.  But his wife is unhappy because the daughter of one of the financial backers has the hots for her husband and has blonde hair that’s blonder than hers.  And blondie keeps dragging her husband away to publicity shoots in New York.  So somehow this convinces her to go work in the tunnel as a nurse without her husband knowing.  And she ends up with “tunnel fever” and goes blind.  So, for reasons that don’t make any sense to the audience she leaves her husband and raises their son up alone until he’s old enough to get killed “working in the tunnel.”  Apparently, the tunnel designers picked a route that had an active volcano directly in the path of the drill.  And in order to contain the destruction caused by the raging volcano McAllan is forced to shut the isolation doors trapping McAllan Jr. and sending him to a fiery death.  When McAllan explains this death to his blind wife it sounds like he’s trying to find the bright side of this unfortunate situation.  It’s really quite extraordinary.  It’s as if the dialog were written by someone who had never met humans and had been raised by google-bots.

Finally, when the tunnel is somehow completed the President of the United States and the British Prime Minister announce it to their respective nations as if it were the second coming of the Lord.  Somehow the tunnel would bring on world peace and defense budgets would be slashed to nothing and prosperity would engulf humanity.  I’m really not sure why shipping things from Europe to America somewhat faster would achieve all that.  But there was a lot of cheering.  Go Anglosphere!  Next, I guess a tunnel between Australia and California would really make the world a greater place.  I think I’m really feeling that tunnel fever now.

And there are problems beyond just a bad plot and dialog.  The tunnel sets and the props like the pressure suits they wear are quite silly looking.  And the investors and the public gyrate between giddy elation and stark terror on an almost constant basis.    There’s even a murder plot going on between two of the venture capitalists funding the project.  It all seems to have been strung together from odds and ends out of a bucket of spare ideas for movie plot devices.  I would say, unless you really enjoy bad old sci-fi movies skip this turkey.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 02 – The Enterprise Incident

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So, the good news is that this second episode of Season 3 is a thousand times better than its predecessor, Spock’s Brain.  The bad news is that’s still pretty close to nothing.

The show opens up with Kirk walking around the bridge petulantly berating Chekov and Spock for being Chekov and Spock.  He seems irritated, as if his underwear had been sprinkled with crushed fiberglass or something.  Suddenly he orders Sulu to change course and enter the Romulan neutral zone.  Soon they pass through the neutral zone and enter Romulan space where they are quickly surrounded by three Romulan war ships that apparently were cloaked and monitoring the Enterprise before it entered Romulan space.  For some reason we are told that the ships are of Klingon design.  We are left to assume that Desilu didn’t have any Romulan plastic models laying around for Season 3.  Personally, I think they should have used potatoes.  I think potatoes would make great alien spaceships.  But I digress.

Soon the Romulan commander demands that Kirk and Spock beam aboard her ship and answer for their illegal incursion.  We find out the Romulan commander is a woman and she has the hots for Spock.  It seems that Vulcans and Romulans are related and Spock’s pointy ears do it for her.  During interrogation Spock volunteers that Kirk entered Romulan space without Federation permission and has been acting erratically.  Kirk reacts to this betrayal by foaming at the mouth and shrieking at Spock that he will kill him.

During a later encounter Kirk attempts to assault Spock but is killed when Spock uses the Vulcan “death grip.”  When Kirk’s body is returned to the Enterprise for composting, we discover that Spock only temporarily deactivated Kirk to make him appear dead.  McCoy operates on Kirk’s ears to make him look like a Romulan and then Kirk is transported back to the Romulan ship to assist Spock in stealing the cloaking device.

Meanwhile Spock and the Romulan commander are engaging in some kind of erotic hand touching.  Spock is holding his hand in the Vulcan salute configuration and I think she was too.  And they kind of move their hands together like it’s sex or something.  It’s really difficult to say if this is more ridiculous or annoying to watch.  Maybe embarrassing is the right description.  Anyway, the whole thing gets interrupted when word of Kirk’s theft of the cloaking device reaches the commander.

Spock is sentenced to death by a slow painful method which is not described but probably resembled the thing with the finger touching that we had to watch.  While Scotty displays his usual lack of engineering ability in taking way too long to hook up the cloaking device to the Enterprise’s deflector shield, Kirk attempts to provide him with enough time by running away at Warp 9.  You know I always thought they couldn’t go faster than Warp 8.  Maybe they got a new fuel injector.  Anyway, Spock is stalling his execution by providing a statement about his guilt.  He recites the Declaration of Independence and was just starting on the “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” when Scotty got the cloaking device hooked up and Kirk then lets the transporter crew beam Spock aboard.  The lady commander sees Spock starting to sparkle so she grabs hold of him and gets dragged onto the Enterprise with him.  Spock apologizes to her for playing with her fingers under false pretenses.  There is some joking about Kirk’s ear surgery.  Then it mercifully ends.

With respect to my rating, I give very high marks on the Shatner mockery scale.  When Kirk was flipping out about Spock’s treachery Shatner gave of his best.  His eyes were bulging out of his head and his mouth was twisted into a grimace of agony.  I think he was channeling his feelings about the show’s imminent cancellation.  As for the show as legitimate entertainment, it wasn’t that bad.  It was somewhere in the five or six range.

Let’s call it a 5 // 9.