Midnight Movie of the Week #202 - Invasion of the Body Snatchers

"In an hour... you won't want them to. In an hour, you'll be one of us." 

 (1978)

Starring: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Virginia Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum.

Directed by Philip Kaufman.

Rated PG for not-quite-nudity, gooey huge fetuses, Veronica Cartwright's tears, rat turds, and lots of screaming.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers in Six Words:

Pod People seduce '70s San Francisco.

Why You'll Love It:

I doubt any film has had two better remakes (this one and Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers) than Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The original film still packs a punch despite some heavy-handed politics, but Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake stands on its own as a thoughtful and dramatic retelling of the original story. Kaufman's film is dark and serious, with only a few nods to the original's tone (like the cameo by original star Kevin McCarthy). It's a rather intense tale of lost identity that adapts well to its new setting, with a great cast led by Donald Sutherland and Leonard Nimoy offering excellent performances.

The Highlights:

• Any scene featuring a young Jeff Goldblum, who reacts in a perfectly cynical manner to the idea of pod people. He's only a small part of this film, but it's easy to see how he became a star through this performance.
• Going along with that point, a mid film scene in which the female leads discuss the possible infestation and its floral roots with a skeptical Goldblum starts to bring the film together as it prepares for a high paced finish.
• I've never been entirely fond of the film's final ten or fifteen minutes - I think I want more from the story than this rushed finish - but most will tell you the final scene is one of the most iconic moments in modern sci-fi/horror.
• Also there's the human faced dog. Yeah, you gotta see it.

Also Worth Knowing:

• Donald Sutherland was hit by a Volkswagen beetle while performing his own stunts for the film. Who wants to be the guy who hits Donald Sutherland with their car? Not this guy.
• As noted earlier, this is the first remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Ferrara's Body Snatchers was released in 1993, and the forgettable The Invasion, starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, and a returning Veronica Cartwright, was released in 2007. So we can probably bet on another version by 2019.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is for Fans of...
Spock, curly haired Sutherlands, paranoia, San Francisco based cinema (Has any city had more great movies set in it? I say NO.), cynical sci-fi, and human faced dogs.

If You Like This, You Might Also Like...
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) (Obviously.)
Village of the Damned (1960)
The Mephisto Waltz (1971)
Magic (1978)

Midnight Movie of the Week #192 - The Brain That Wouldn't Die

There are a lot of genre films out there that succeed because they take a ridiculous idea far too seriously. Movies about time travel, killer animals, invaders from space, vats of liquid Satan (Prince of Darkness, represent!), and plenty of other wacky things can be great cinema when the right filmmakers and cast members are willing to believe in an unrealistic premise. Nobody, save the extremely nerdy and critical, blinks twice when an '80s kid travels to 1955 in a Delorean or when a scientist turns a preserved mosquito into an island full of dinosaurs, because the filmmakers behind these movies distract us elsewhere and don't give us time to think too much about how crazy the whole darn movie is.

The Brain That Wouldn't Die is not one of those movies. If anything, it's the exact opposite. It spends too much time making us think about what's going on - thanks to some poor pacing and a tendency to just let the characters talk about the plot instead of having them do anything - which makes it an easy target for skeptics, such as the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew that once mocked it thoroughly on television.  (In the film's defense, it's hard to have a character who is only a severed head "do anything." We'll talk more about that later though.)

If you don't know The Brain That Wouldn't Die, a drive-in stalwart that was released in 1962, it's the story of a power hungry doctor who specializes in Frankensteiny experimental medicine and the woman he loves - a woman who is beheaded in an automobile accident while he is driving erratically due to his lust to get to his science. Fortunately - or unfortunately, depending on who you listen to - that same science allows our narcissistic doctor to keep that head alive, living in a few clamps and a tray of serum (or, as the MST3K guys called it, "neck juice"), while he searches for a body that he can use for a transplant. Oh, and there's a "thing" living and groaning in the closet too. You gotta wonder if that's gonna come in to play later on.

Now, most will scoff at that premise - a severed head suspended in a pan while an evil doctor hunts for a victim - but I can see a good movie inside of it. And one of the things I love most about The Brain That Wouldn't Die is that it's clear that writer/director Joseph Green believed there was a good movie in there too.  The film's script has plenty of dialogue that misses the mark or is delivered awkwardly - like the disfigured character who keeps repeating how she carries memory of her past around with her or the lab assistant who shouts things like 'You're nothing but a freak of life! And, a freak of death!" - but there are also moments in the film where the script stumbles upon slightly profound comments on science and the doctor's meddling nature.

Virginia Leith - who stars as both the full bodied girlfriend, Jan, and as "Jan in the Pan" - is given most of the opportunities to monologue about right and wrong, and she's clearly not excited to be preserved as a captive cranium. As she rants about her captivity she eventually stumbles into one of the film's more interesting arguments, discussing her "power" with the lab assistant and the creature in the closet. The empowered version of Jan, like most of the characters in the movie, spends more time talking than she does achieving, but she still seems a lot more interesting than the rest of the characters in the film. Maybe it's Leith's smoky delivery of her lines, or maybe it's just the fact that she's a severed head in a pan with fantastic eyelashes, but when she rasps "like all quantities, horror has its ultimate...and I am that" I definitely can see that Green had some good ideas up his sleeve when he made this movie.

Then again, most of the flaws - like the awkward catfight and the doctor's doomed search for a body - are the things that make The Brain That Wouldn't Die a must see piece of flawed drive-in history, and by the time that closet opens up late in the film I think most fans of pure cheese will find themselves having at least a little bit of unironic fun with this film. Those hints of something smarter in the dialogue - even throwaway lines like "The corpse is yours, do what you want to do" seem like they would get a laugh in a less serious film - and Leith's presentation of tabletop anger that keep me thinking about how perfectly imperfect the tone of The Brain That Wouldn't Die is, and that tone is what makes this film so memorable to me.

Well, it's that tone that makes it memorable....and it's also the talking severed head that's floating in neck juice that's memorable. You never really forget seeing that.

Midnight Movie of the Week #189 - Seconds

Long before Davids Cronenberg and Lynch made the bizarre their normal, Hollywood heavyweight John Frankenheimer made one of the most fascinatingly surreal genre-bending movies of all-time. The film is Seconds, released in 1966 to little fanfare and much confusion, in which an old man (John Randolph) decides to escape from his old life and use a radical medical procedure to become a young man (Rock Hudson) with a fresh young life.

The plot sounds relatively simple, like something that would be used for a 30 minute TV show like The Twilight Zone or Tales from the Crypt (both of which did offer  episodes with similar ideas), bur Frankenheimer finds more than enough content to fill this full-length film with bizarre imagery and thought-provoking plot turns.  The film teeters on the edge a few times, and it's easy to see why some viewers lose interest in the fluid narrative of the film, but each time I see it I feel more in tune with Frankenheimer's loopy sci-fi odyssey.

The film opens with the life of Arthur Hamilton, played by Randolph, and quickly makes the viewer feel unease about this man's life without really telling us much. The camera follows him through mundane daily activities and uninteresting conversations with his aging wife, but also dangles a carrot of intrigue in front of him. Hamilton has been receiving late night phone calls from an old friend named Charlie, urging him to visit a secret medical organization which will help him start his life over. It sounds too good to be true, but Hamilton has reason to believe something is going on there, because he has known for sometime that Charlie is dead.

Hamilton makes up his mind rather quickly, which leads him to this company and leads the film into some haunting sequences which challenge the morality of his decision. Some of these are done visually, like a creepy sequence where a seemingly drugged Hamilton enters a room with a young woman in a bed, but others draw their power from the script. One of the best sequences in the film sits Hamilton in the middle of a room and lets a series of employees talk to him about the decision he's making, starting with an insurance man (who manages to say "The question of death selection may be the most important decision in your life." with a straight face) and leading to a devilish old man who seems to literally talk Hamilton into killing himself. Of course, this kind of suicide promises a second chance, but the words of this old man come off as a rather ominous sign of trouble ahead.

Hamilton goes forth with the procedure, assisted further by a bit of blackmail that makes it impossible for him to turn back, and is reborn as Tony Wilson, who is played by Hollywood star Rock Hudson. Hudson was far from being Frankenheimer's top choice for the film, and I too have often thought of him as an actor with less range than some of his contemporaries, but Hudson certainly brings his best to this role. From day one of his new life we can tell that there are some second thoughts, and even a relationship with a young woman doesn't seem to satisfy all of his expectations about being young again. Wilson also ends up finding himself in some strange social situations that become chaotic on screen, which I've often read as a statement about dropping the seemingly introverted Hamilton into an extroverted world as Wilson. Hudson does an excellent job of showing us the unease that occurs in this character as he comes to recognize regrets about his choice, which leads the film back to the company for an unforgettably chilling final act.

From the opening titles - a montage of extreme close-up images put together by the legendary Saul Bass that reminds me of his opening titles for Vertigo - it is obvious that Frankenheimer does not want to viewer to be comfortable watching this character (or is it these characters?) and one of my favorite things about the film is that the camera always seems to be doing something I call "fishbowling" to the characters. You know how when you look at a goldfish in a bowl it either looks really far away or really close to you and huge, depending on the angle you look through the glass? Well, that's how Frankenheimer and cinematographer James Wong Howe - who would receive an Oscar nomination for the film - make Seconds look. There are a lot of shots that are far too close to the character's face, but they're offset with moments where the camera just seems to be lingering at an angle in the opposite corner of a room or hallway. The altered perspective that comes from the camera's eye adds a lot to the mysterious intrigue of the film.

Seconds tries to succeed on a lot of levels - it's a sci-fi film, it's a horror film, it's a parable about life and death - and it is at least interesting in each of these domains. When the solid lead performances (which are buoyed by supporting turns by actors like Jaws' Murray Hamilton and Will Geer as the previously mentioned Old Man) mix with the haunting visual style, the result is a film that will certainly get viewers thinking. Considering its age, Seconds seems like one of the first great cult cinema mindbenders, and it's still worth revisiting as one of the finest nightmares on film I've ever seen.

The Mike's Top 10 Made for SyFy/Sci-Fi Channel Monster Movies

SO MANY OF YOU PEOPLE FREAKED OUT ABOUT SHARKNADO LAST WEEK!

Seriously, it blows my mind.  People who only watch Oscar nominated films or big budget blockbusters were coming to me and saying things like "WHOA! There's a movie called Sharknado! About a Sharknado!" And I was like "Yes...these things happen." And I was all calm and stuff.  I've been down this road a few times. It's kind of a busy street where I live in the nerdy genre fan kingdom. It's crowded with all kinds of ridiculous and wonderful and cheesy and poorly made stuff - and it's glorious.

I did watch Sharknado, and will say it had a few moments of brilliance - especially in the final act. But honestly, it kind of left me wanting something more fun. It was a one trick pony with a drab color pallette, an often misplaced sense of humor, and a repetitive nature. I felt cheated, because for such an inspired idea it was actually kind of dull - while also being bad. And I feel a little like some of the people who think Sharknado is the end-all-be-all of ridiculousness might want to watch a few more movies.

Which movies? Well I'm glad you asked!  Below are ten movies that (as far as I can tell) premiered on the SyFy network or its previous incarnation as the (grammatically correct) Sci-Fi Channel. Do I mean to tell you these are fine pieces of cinema? Well...not really. But they stick out in my mind as more inventive, more fun, and more ridiculous than most pieces of trash I've ever seen. And if you're gonna watch something bad, you should at least watch something that does bad right. The ten following movies just might fit that bill.

Bonus Honorable Mention: Atomic Twister

Original Air Date - June 9, 2002

Atomic Twister would have been one of the highest ranked films on this list - until I realized it premiered on TNT, not Sci-Fi. Alas, I will warn you that this one is about a Tornado hitting a town with a nuclear plant and stars Zack Morris and a cougar scientist who never buttons her shirt. Sadly, it's almost impossible to find now - so you're just going to imagine Zack Morris as a sheriff trying to stop a nuclear tornado.

10. Mega Piranha

Original Air Date - April 10, 2010

 You're not going to see a lot of movies by The Asylum - the company responsible for most movies like Sharknado or Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus or Battle OF Los Angeles - on this list. Their cheap knock-offs of big budget thrillers have occasional charms but can end up a little vapid.  But a) there aren't a ton of great movies to chose from here, and b) This one sticks out in my mind as more clever than most of their recent "battle between giant things" movies have been. (And I just love Tiffany. There, I said it.)

9. Mammoth

Original Air Date - April 2, 2006

A frozen wooly mammoth is revived and causes havoc in a small town while Firefly's Summer Glau and the excellent Tom Skerritt try to stop it. Why's it here? Because it's a freakin' mammoth! Those things are/were awesome!

8. Never Cry Werewolf

Original Air Date - May 11, 2008

This is basically a remake of Fright Night with werewolves replacing vampires, future Vampire Diaries star Nina Dobrev being attractive and replacing William Ragsdale, and Kevin Sorbo replacing Roddy McDowell. Before you run away to vomit, you should know that I'm a sucker for the Rear Window-with-monsters film, which is a big reason why I love Fright Night and why I can laugh at this thing.

7. Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys

Original Air Date - December 18, 2004

Not only do the title toys go to battle in this one, but they're joined by Corey Feldman and Vanessa Angel feuding over control of the miniature forces. This thing also partially comes from the writer of Dark City, The Dark Knight, and Man of Steel (David S. Goyer) and gets bonus points for ticking off the notoriously shady Charles Band, who doesn't recognize this as "canon."

6. Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep

Original Air Date - September 23, 2006

This one gets crazy bonus points for taking itself too seriously, even while it has an O'Connell in the cast. The real star of the show is one of my favorite underloved actresses, Victoria Pratt, who manages to play a very serious marine archaeologist while only wearing bikini tops. It also features recently deceased Glee star Cory Monteith as one of Pratt's assistants.

5. Wyvern

Original Air Date - January 31, 2009

The Academy Award for Best Lead Performance in a SyFy Original Film of All-Time simply has to belong to Nick Chinlund for his work on Wyvern. The co-star of films like Eraser and Con Air stars as a trucker who has to help a small Alaska town battle a snake dragon, and manages to get in a heavy personal monologue on his way to becoming a hero. Like the last flick, major bonus points for taking itself so seriously.

4. Sasquatch Mountain

Original Air Date - September 9, 2006

Lance Henriksen's wife gets killed by a 'squatch and then a bunch of crooks start pretending their life is Reservoir Dogs in the woods and then there's a bunch of Sasquatch going down and Henriksen is angry and out for blood. There are some obvious flaws, but it still is one of the better Sasquatch movies out there. Then again, there are about zero good Sasquatch movies out there - so I'm not saying much there.

3. Beyond Loch Ness (aka Loch Ness Terror)

Original Air Date - January 5, 2008

If there's one thing I love more than Sasquatch - it's Nessie. I couldn't stop freaking out when that stupid Nessie movie for little kids came out in theaters around the end of 2007. Thankfully, SyFy was there for me. They picked me up and said "Don't worry, The Mike. You want a killer Nessie movie? WE'VE GOT THAT!" And I think that was the moment I knew I was in love.

2. Terminal Invasion

Original Air Date - September 14, 2002

YOU GUYS! You guys! It's Bruce Campbell, you guys!

Campbell stars in what is essentially a feature length (and low-low-budget) adaptation of the classic Twilight Zone episode "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" that is directed by Friday the 13th's Sean S. Cunningham. I KNOW THAT SOUNDS AWESOME. Some bad special effects set the film back a bit, but it's one of the more well-plotted films made for the network and - OH YEAH - it has freaking Bruce Campbell!

1. Mega Python vs. Gatoroid

Original Air Date - January 25, 2011

OK, I know I said I'm not a big fan of The Asylum - but this is their The Dark Knight. Directed by Pet Sematary's Mary Lambert and reuniting '80s pop stars Debbie Gibson and Tiffany - the former reprising her role from Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus and the latter returning from Mega Piranha - this is the one time when the stars just seemed to magically align and everything ridiculous about these movies came together to make one perfectly entertaining work of art.  Plus, we finally get to see a catfight between Debbie and Tiffany that is bookended by quotes from their once popular songs. This is the new American treasure that Sharknado wishes it was.

YEAH I SAID IT.

The Mike's Guide to SyFy's Fourth of July Twilight Zone Marathon

If you're like me - read as: uncomfortable with crowds and human interaction and comfortable with awesome genre entertainment - there's about nothing you'll like more than when the SyFy Network offers up one of their Twilight Zone marathons on the New Years or Independence Day holidays.  It's got its flaws - the fact that they can only show 44 episodes in 22 hours is a big one, not to mention a few cuts to make room for modern commercial requirements - but there's simply no better escape from holiday madness for someone who loves twisted, dark entertainment.

But we can't all be full hermits, and most of us can't sit in front of a TV screen from 8 AM EST through 6 AM EST the next day, which means there's some picking and choosing that you might have to do when it comes to. (I suppose you could avoid picking and choosing if you have one of those fancy future DVR machines that holds a lot of stuff, but I'm a VCR boy and I don't understand that kind of talk.) My point is that you might have to pick out the best of what this marathon has to offer so you can keep your family/friends/waist line happy. And I'm here to help with that.

Below is a quick rundown of the episodes that stand out to me from tomorrow's marathon. I'm still working through the whole series to catch episodes I've missed/forgotten over the years, so this is by no means the definitive answer to this marathon - I encourage you to check out the full lineup, which I'll post at the bottom of this post, and check out the descriptions of the episodes you might like on your cable guide or somewhere like TVGuide.com.  Additionally, I've linked each title to the episode's IMDB page for your convenience.

Here's what I'm recommending/watching out for:

• The daytime lineup features a lot of episodes that I'm not familiar with yet or don't remember well. I'm looking forward to catching a few new (to me) episodes, but there's a couple I dig

9:30 AM EST - People Are Alike All Over - Roddy McDowell of Planet of the Apes and Fright Night fame stars as one of the first Earthlings on Mars, who is given a warm welcome by the planet's humanoid inhabitants. Underrated episode that's worth it for the actor's performance and a stinging ending.

12:30 PM EST - Stopover in a Quiet Town - The ending of this one might not work for everyone, but it's one of The Zone's best "where is everybody?" episodes. A married couple finds themselves in a seemingly deserted town and things are - as always when Serling's the host - not what they seem.

1:30 PM EST - I Sing The Body Electric - This tale of a robot grandmother and the children she takes care of is most notable for being the only Twilight Zone episode written by the late, great Ray Bradbury.

2:00 PM EST - Five Characters in Search of an Exit - A clown, a ballerina, a soldier, a hobo, and a bagpiper wake up in an inescapable room with no memories and only the sky above as a clue that might explain their predicament. One of my favorite episodes, but another with an ending that's a little farther outside the box than some might like.

2:30 PM EST - Nick of Time - I actually haven't seen this one, about another couple stopping in a small town and finding trouble, but I'll be checking it out for two reasons: it's written by Richard Matheson, and it stars William Shatner. If you think that sounds like an awesome combination, check back in at 9:30.

3:00 PM EST - Kick the Can - Also haven't seen this one, but I'm so excited that it's getting shown here. This is the episode that was updated by Steven Spielberg for 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie, in which an optimistic old man tries to convince other seniors that age can be conquered. Really curious to see how this one originally played out.

4:00 PM EST - It's a Good Life - Also updated for Twilight Zone: The Movie, this tale of a boy who holds his family captive with his overactive imagination is a one of a kind winner.

5:30 PM EST - The Invaders - Another classic via Matheson, in which an old woman goes to war with tiny aliens that land on her roof. If it sounds too good to be true - trust me, it's not. It's great.

• (By The Way - From 5:30 to 11:30 you might as well cancel all your plans, because this is when SyFy is bringing out some heavy hitters. Crack the window so you can see the fireworks, but keep your eyes glued to the following episodes if you haven't seen them.)

6:00 PM EST - The Masks - One of the only episodes to be directed by a woman - the great Ida Lupino - and one of the more serious and macabre episodes of the series. This is one you might want to check out on Hulu or Netflix, however, as the cuts for timing hurt a couple of the reveals here.

• (By The Way II: The Sequel - All of these episodes are available on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and even Hulu (for free via IMDB).  If you miss out - you can still see them and win! It's like Christmas and Independenc Day and The Twilight Zone Marathon mixed into one package!)

6:30 PM EST - Living Doll - Telly Savalas goes one on one with the infamous Talky Tina, an angry and murderous doll that won't shut up. It's creepy even if you know that Tina is voiced by June Foray, who is most famous for being Rocky the Flying Squirrel alongside Bullwinkle.

7:30 PM EST - Time Enough At Last - The second straight episode starring Burgess Meredith (The Obsolete Man runs at 7:00 PM) has what might be the whole series' single best gut-punching ending.

8:30 PM EST - Eye of the Beholder - One of the most infamous episodes, and it needs no introduction to TZ fans. The thing about this show is that it can so easily trick us by making us buy in to our own preconceptions of reality - and few episodes do that better than this one does.

9:00 PM EST - To Serve Man - The best alien episode of the series? Possibly. And, like most of these prime time episodes, one that packs a fantastic and iconic twist. Plus it features Richard "Jaws" Kiel as a Kanamit invader - and that's always welcome.

9:30 PM EST - Nightmare at 20,000 Feet - Shatner and Matheson return in another of the series' most popular tales. There's something on the wing of the plane!

10:00 PM EST - Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? - I love love love love love that this episode is getting a prime spot in the marathon next to some of the greats. The story, in which the trail of an alien invader leads to a snowbound diner full of seemingly normal people, is one of the Zone's best combinations of paranoia and mystery.

10:30 PM EST - The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street - It's a paranoia double feature in the the 10 PM hour, as Rod Serling unleashes one of the more socially relevant episodes from the show's run. This chaotic episode is still relevant today, making it one of the show's biggest "must see" episodes.

11:00 PM EST - The Howling Man - This one is probably my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone. I've written about it before, but it still never seems to get old. One of the few Zone episodes that is directly about the battle between good and evil, and the results are perfectly over-the-top and nightmarish.

The early Friday lineup doesn't pack the same punch as that set of episodes does, but there are still some good episodes to be found and a few I'm hoping to catch up with. Here's what jumps out to me.

2:30 AM EST - Night Call - Directed by the legendary Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past, Cat People, Night of the Demon) and written by Matheson, this is certainly one of the most horror-based episodes of the series. An old woman (Gladys Cooper of Rebecca and other Hollywood classics) deals with a series of ominous phone calls late at night and becomes increasingly afraid for her life.

4:00 AM EST - Little Girl Lost - More Richard Matheson! This is the episode that should give any parent nightmares, in which a little girl vanishes from her room while her parents can still hear her scream.

4:30 AM EST - The After Hours - OK, I know it's the title - but I HATE how this one always seems to be buried in the late/early hours of the marathon. I actually just saw it for the first time during one of the marathons a couple of years ago, and instantly loved it. Forbidden Planet's Anne Francis stars...and there's also a bunch of mannequins. Prepare for creepy.

A few of my favorites didn't make the cut for this short marathon - try out Nothing in the Dark (Robert Redford!), Spur of the Moment, and Mirror Image if you need more - but it's not possible to show all the great episodes without showing almost all of the episodes. Check out the full rundown below and make your own viewing (or streaming) plans. In the meantime, hit up the comments and tell me which episodes you dig - I need to make sure I catch 'em all!

----------------------------------------------

(All times EST)
Thursday, July 4                                                             Friday, July 5
8am: “Walking Distance”                                                    12am: “The Midnight Sun”
8:30am: “The Shelter”                                                         12:30am: “The Bewitchin’ Pool”
9am: “The Old Man in the Cave”                                        1am: “The Dummy”
9:30am: “People Are Alike All Over”                                  1:30am: “Dead Man’s Shoes”
10am: “Probe 7, Over and Out”                                          2am: “Night of the Meek”
10:30am: “A Kind of a Stopwatch”                                     2:30am: “Night Call”
11am: “A Hundred Yards Over the Rim”                            3am: “A Penny For Your Thoughts”
11:30am: “A Game of Pool”                                               3:30am: “Long Distance Call”
12pm: “A Most Unusual Camera”                                      4am: “Little Girl Lost”
12:30pm: “Stopover in a Quiet Town”                                4:30am: “The After Hours”
1pm: “Number 12 Looks Just Like You”                           5am: “The Little People”
1:30pm: “I Sing the Body Electric”                                     5:30am: “Caesar and Me”
2pm: “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”
2:30pm: “Nick of Time”
3pm: “Kick the Can”
3:30pm: “Where Is Everybody?”
4pm: “It’s a Good Life”
4:30pm: “The Hitch-Hiker”
5pm: “Third From the Sun”
5:30pm: “The Invaders”
6pm: “The Masks”
6:30pm: “Living Doll”
7pm: “The Obsolete Man”
7:30pm: “Time Enough at Last”
8pm: “A Stop at Willoughby”
8:30pm: “The Eye of the Beholder”
9pm: “To Serve Man”
9:30pm: “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”
10pm: “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”
10:30pm: “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”
11pm: “The Howling Man”
11:30pm: “The Odyssey of Flight 33″

Midnight Movie of the Week #181 - Lifeforce

Lifeforce is a movie falls into one of one of my favorite little-discussed categories of genre films. If I was classifying the movie into more widely accepted categories I might call it a sci-fi/horror space vampire apocalypse film - which is ridiculously long and kind of silly, if not awesome - but that's the second most interesting category in my book. What excites me the most about Lifeforce is that it falls into what I call the "And Then..." genre.

The And Then Film, as defined by me, has its roots in the over-excited ramblings of a child. In my case, it usually meant that I loved to explain things in one unending sentence that was consistently kept alive by the phrase "and then." For example, there was that time when my sister disappeared and then we went looking all over town and then we got the neighbors to help and then we all split up and covered the whole area shouting her name and then called the police and then got home and found out that she had fallen asleep in my parents' closet for no apparent reason. It's like that, except that this movie has less little girls falling asleep and more carnage and destruction and face melting.

The roughest estimate of the plot I can give is as follows. A crew of astronauts, led by the incredibly intense Steve Railsback (star of The Stunt Man, which is one of my very favorite films of all-time), discovers an alien spacecraft inside of Halley's Comet - which was relevant in the real world at the time, as it made its once per 75 years return to Earth's orbit in 1986 - and then (there it is!) accidentally sends the three humanoid beings on board back toward Earth. AND THEN (yep, I did it again) things get really crazy.

So then ("so then" works really well when "and then" has been played out, by the way) the film takes the next illogical step, introducing a beautiful naked female space creature played by Mathilda May who happens to suck the "lifeforce" out of people's faces. But there's good news for humanity - Railsback's super intense astronaut survived the journey back to Earth, and has a mental connection with the space vampire hottie. Which means a a game of sexual/extraterrestrial/creepy cat-and-mouse is about to begin.

Those two paragraphs sum up about 25% of the "and then..." that Lifeforce has to offer, if that. There are not many horror films - or many films in general - that provide this many dramatic shifts from one event to the next. And as the film escalates to a completely apocalyptic finale - which, by the way, should look familiar to anyone who completed the final mission of the brilliant Mass Effect video game series - it should keep most viewers on their toes. It might not make sense all of the time, and viewers who like their films to be more grounded in reason might lose interest in the film - but I'm OK with that. And when the final act is as crazy as the ravaging of London that occurs in Lifeforce, I'm more than OK with a few jumps in logic.

Lifeforce is directed by the much maligned Tobe Hooper, who helmed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and then became something of a punchline over the next 40ish years due to the awkward production of Poltergeist and a string of random and bizarre financial failures like this one. But for all their flaws, films like his remakes of Invaders from Mars and The Toolbox Murders, never skip a beat visually and are always moving to something different. Lifeforce is the director's most inventive piece of work during his post-Poltergeist career, and actually stands out as one of the more fun and bizarre pieces of '80s horror. Hooper may not always have everything together, but Lifeforce is the perfect reminder of how inventive he could be as a filmmaker.

The pieces of Lifeforce fit closely enough together to make it work well enough, just because Hooper, Railsback, May and company (including Patrick Stewart in a bizarre side performance) never blink while pursuing each twist that's coming up. And then, the movie ends...and you realize Lifeforce is truly a sight to behold.

Midnight Movie of the Week #176 - The Quiet Earth

The "last man On Earth" storyline has been played out a few times in sci-fi history, but rarely with the conviction that lies within The Quiet Earth. Produced in New Zealand in 1985, The Quiet Earth is a powerful sci-fi film that overcomes several faults thanks to an ambitious script and a fantastic performance by co-writer/star Bruno Lawrence. Modern film fans will immediately see some similarities to 28 Days Later (right down to the "guy wakes up totally naked to the camera when we meet him" aspect of each film), but The Quiet Earth is pretty much the tonal opposite of Danny Boyle's horror epic.

Lawrence is Zac Hobson, a scientist working on something called "Project Flashlight" in an underground lab - that is until he wakes up at 6:12 one morning and realizes everyone else has vanished from the world around him. What follows in the film's first act is a collection of Zac's reactions to his newfound status as "the President of the Quiet Earth" - which primarily consist of representations of his changing emotional state and a ton of interesting shots that show how small he is compared to the empty city that surrounds him.

Zac is an interesting character primarily because we can tell that there had to be plenty wrong with his mental state before "the event" that left him to fend for himself in the world. I've no doubt that most of us would go a little mad if we woke up alone in the world, but Zac seems to slip into previously untapped desires and urges very quickly. Part of his journey seems innocent - one of my favorite bits shows Zac admiring a model train set, followed immediately by a grinning Zac taking a full size locomotive for a spin - but it does not take the film long to show Zac slipping away from reality. It takes less than a half hour of screentime for us to find Zac wearing women's clothing and addressing a crowd of cardboard cutouts that includes Adolf Hitler and Richard Nixon, and that's gotta be some kind of record.

The character is obviously unhinged, and that's interesting in it's own right. But Lawrence's powerhouse presence really takes the film to a new level during the first act, in which he works to come to terms with his predicament. The commanding presence should remind genre fans of actors like Klaus Kinski who dive into a role and never look back, because Lawrence never seems to waver in his portrayal of a man who is on the edge of extinction. The first 35 or so minutes of the film are gripping and bizarre, and almost all of that is thanks to the man in the lead.  It wouldn't be wise for the film to put this much of a bizarre burden on Lawrence for the entire film, however, which leads us to the film's second and third major life-changing events.

As you might ahve guessed, Zac isn't alone entirely. The film's most touching moment is possibly the one where a female survivor named Joanne (Alison Routledge) finds Zac's location. After a brief standoff, the two instinctively move into a comforting embrace, and the relief that each has to feel the presence of another seems to pour off of the screen. The film follows with a brief reprieve from insanity for Zac and Joanne, but this too is a short lived feeling of peace.

Everything changes for a third time when Api (Peter Smith), an imposing Maori man finds the duo and becomes the third member of what's left of humanity. Two guys and one girl is always a crowd - one that's been exploited by movies of all genres - and tension quickly develops. Zac is also increasingly concerned that another major change is coming thanks to his old project, which leads to a few awkward sequences where the film struggles to balance the sci-fi threat and the desires of these three characters. It seems like the easy way out for the film to go ahead and create a love triangle, but when you think of what's at stake here (the fate of humanity, for example) it makes sense that these people would get caught up in a few petty games. I don't mind the story adding this tension - it's essential in Zac's journey - but it throws a few cogs in the machine as we try to follow what's going on with the experiment that may have ended humanity.

It doesn't seem like I should say that the film goes through another major change - I think I've said enough about the plot thus far - but if there's one thing that becomes completely obvious throughout The Quiet Earth, it's that that Zac Hobson is something of a catalyst for mayhem. There are some pretty fantastic theories out there about what The Quiet Earth actually means (this is one of the rare times when I've actually found intelligent and interesting discussion on an IMDB message board, if that means anything) and the film works as a fantastic "AND THEN...." movie. (Meaning, of course, that every time the movie seems to be slowing down the screenwriters said "and then this happens!" and started the film down a new path.) At the middle of every development is Zac Hobson, and Bruno Lawrence always seems to give him the perfect response to whatever is going on now in the film's twisty universe.

 

It's abstract and it's bizarre, but The Quiet Earth sure knows how to keep a viewer's brain moving in the best way. It's not always profound - that love triangle and the tension that comes from it seems to fill too much of the final 40 minutes - but it always seems to have one more trick up its sleeve. If nothing else, the ambiguous ending is a jaw-dropping addition to the film, and the discussions that can be had after the credits roll are well worth the 91 minutes that precede them. The film's unpredictable nature, beautiful cinematography and fantastic lead performance are all great reasons to seek out The Quiet Earth, which still stands as one of the most unique science-fiction classics of the 1980s.

(If you're up for it, here's the full movie on YouTube. Do not, I repeat DO NOT, go watch the trailer. It spoils everything. This is a movie you must see blind.)