sci-fi

Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century (1999)

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When we were listening to the Old People Rap Station the other day, the Janet Jackson/Busta Rhymes duet “What’s It Gonna Be” prompted me to joke about the brief time in the early 00s when all R&B videos looked like Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century. That’s when I realized I had never actually seen Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century, despite being aware of it for more than half my life. The only reason I could conjure the made-for-TV movie’s aesthetic in that moment is because it was that heavily advertised before it first aired. It turns out, though, that it’s not a film you actually have to watch from start to finish to get the full picture. Just in knowing that Zenon was originally conceived as a pilot for a Disney Channel television series set on a space ship that vaguely resembles the set of the “No Scrubs” video is enough to clue you in on what the film can deliver. The only question, then, is how you’ll feel inhabiting that world for 97 minutes.

Imagine if the satirical wit was surgically removed from Clueless, the characters were age-regressed to junior high, and the whole thing were set on a space station. The titular Zenon, played by forgotten Disney Channel starlet Kirsten Storms, is essentially a futuristic Cher Horowitz in-training, far too whip-smart to obediently live a quiet life on her near-lifelong space station home. After acting out in a few too many (harmless) outer space pranks (often with the help of a sidekick played by a young Raven-Symoné), Zenon is literally grounded by being sent to live with her aunt on Earth. Besides her adjustments to the allergies, gravity, and Fahrenheit measurements Earth life presents, she also struggles with the pressure to beat the clock in two pressing concerns: 1) Saving her space station home from an evil corporation’s plans to corrupt it with a computer virus and 2) Making it back in time to attend a Microbe concert, which will be the first-ever boy band performance in space. I’ll leave it to you to discover for yourself whether she’s able to save the day and attend the big dance climax, but I’m not sure plot is the most important aspect of this fine work either way.

In the second act stretch where Zenon is stuck on Earth and dodging the flirtatious/contentious attentions of her new classmates, I shared in her painful longing to be back in space. The most fun the movie has is its writers’ room playfulness with futuristic Heathers slang, casually tossing out phrases like “stellar,” “lumerious,” and “zetus lapetus” as if they meant something to the audience. Other turns of future-phrase that tickled me: “Gossip travels at the speed of light,” “I wouldn’t miss it for all the stardust in the galaxy,” and “Terra firma . . . the firma the betta.” I also was amused by off-hand references to President Chelsea Clinton and to how the band Microbe is so old-fashioned because their songs still have melodies. If the Zenon concept had been developed into a television stories, as intended, it’s easy to see how this kind of goofy future-slang could’ve been fun weekly fodder for the nerdier set of late 90s Disney devotees. It’s probably better for its legacy that it wound up being a television event movie (with two “zequels”!), though, since it’s still remembered fondly by the folks who caught it nearly twenty years ago. I imagine it was a great gateway drug into sci-fi nerdery for plenty of burgeoning geeks and its girly version of a pigtails, jellies, and shiny lip gloss futurism still stands as a great encapsulation of a very specific time in pop culture visions of the future my mind will continue to conjure every time I hear the right note of old school R&B.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #36 of The Swampflix Podcast: Disney Ride Movies & Ghoulies II (1988)

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Welcome to Episode #36 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our thirty-sixth episode, we enjoy what’s left of the summer with a trip to cinematic amusement parks. Brandon makes Britnee watch the carnival ride-set Gremlins knockoff Ghoulies II (1988) for the first time. Also, Brandon & Britnee discuss Disney movies that were adapted from their corresponding theme park rides (as opposed to the other way around). Enjoy!

-Brandon Ledet & Britnee Lombas

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

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I was really expecting a lot out of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and while I wasn’t disappointed per se, as a great deal of it lived up to the expectations that I had, there was still enough to detract from its majesty to leave me feeling relatively cold in the end. This may come as a surprise to you, given that I was and am a staunch defender of Jupiter Ascending (going so far as to put it on my Top Ten of 2015 list), but it comes as even more of a surprise to me. Maybe it’s that the charisma score of the two leads in Ascending (Channing Tatum +10, Mila Kunis -4, sum total 6) was still higher than that of Valerian (Dane DeHaan, normally a +8 for me, comes in at a +1.5 here, and Cara DeLevigne at a surprising +4), or maybe it’s that Ascending was a dumb-but-pretty thrill ride that escalated over the course of the film while Valerian is front-loaded with a lot of greatness that peters out into a banal “love” story by the conclusion.

The film opens on a magical and beautifully rendered sequence, set to “Space Oddity,” that shows the progress of the Alpha space station as it grows over time to include a multitude of different national space programs and astronauts, then to include delegates and additions from other space-faring races, to ultimately become so massive that it has to leave earth’s orbit and move into the Magellan Current (there’s no such thing that I know of, although there are dwarf and satellite galaxies near our own that are known as Magellanic Clouds). 400 years after leaving our solar system*, Alpha is home to millions of life forms from over a thousand races. Major Valerian (DeHaan) and his partner Laureline (DeLevigne) are special agents of the Human Federation (it’s unclear why the amalgamation of races is referred to this way, or if the humans merely administrate the station due to the fact that they built the original core) on a mission to retrieve a valuable life form from a Jabba-esque alien (John Goodman) at an interdimensional bazaar. En route, Valerian receives a soul-powered dream/vision from a young alien princess who died following a catastrophic disaster on her home planet of Mül, an event that destroyed her world and drove her people to the brink of extinction.

Following their success, Valerian attempts to research Mül, but all information about it is classified, even to their four-star general superior Okto Bar (Sam Spruell). Their attempts to further discern what happened to the planet are thwarted when General Filitt (Clive Owen) is called upon to give a speech to assembled member species about a radiation zone which has appeared in the center of Alpha, and from which no survey team or tactical party has yet returned. This assembly is attacked and the general kidnapped, forcing Valerian to pursue and Laureline to investigate further, leading her down a rabbit hole adventure of duck-like aliens with trunks and scrotal skin, a psychic jellyfish that feeds on memories, a steampunk submarine pirate named Bob, and nearly getting eaten. Meanwhile, Valerian’s misadventures lead him to enlisting the help of a shapeshifting alien named Bubble (Rihanna), and finding out what really happened on Mül and who’s responsible.

I was so on board for this film, and I was completely in the moment, despite some reservations, until the point when Laureline is kidnapped. I wasn’t a huge fan of Valerian’s creepy possessiveness of and desire for Laureline, but I was willing to forgive this transgression as a kind of blind deconstruction of the Han/Leia relationship (YouTube channel Pop Culture Detective has a pretty good video essay on this subject here) until it became apparent that their relationship was meant to be read as completely sincere. This was the biggest sticking point for me in the first half of the movie, but I was still along for the thrill ride through that nonsense and a belabored info dump. However, the film starts to drift when Laureline is captured by the languageless alien monsters that hate outsiders (a friend compared them to Jar Jar Binks, saying that they weren’t explicitly racist caricatures like he was, but their tribalism, cannibalism, and lack of higher speech functions smacks of “space ignorance”). Meanwhile, Valerian has to recruit Bubble to help him as a disguise to enter their xenophobic culture to save Laureline (after she saved him first, so she’s no damsel in distress). This, too, is pretty dull, give or take a PG-rated shapeshifting Rihanna exotic dance number.

If you’ll recall, when Avatar came out, there were stories about people who were so obsessed with living in the world of Pandora that they were getting cosmetic surgery and considering suicide. That seemed absurd to me then (and now), but while I have no desire to shuffle off my mortal coil, I’ve never before experienced such an intense desire to live inside a film’s aesthetic than I have when watching the delegates of fish people and mechanical men arrive on Alpha. Aside from an expositional infodump as Valerian and Laureline return to the space station, there’s too little exploration of the world that’s been created. Instead, the film gets distracted by plot cul-de-sacs that explore areas of Alpha that are far less interesting than those of which we get only a glimpse. I used to think that we would never again live in a world where the special effects in a movie would be the film’s biggest draw, along the lines of how the word of mouth about Independence Day revolved around the monumental destruction of landmarks, bringing in more audience members than could have been expected. That’s not really true, however; the effects in Valerian are so effective at rendering a beautiful world that you can’t help but get lost in it. It’s so engrossing that, when a supposedly emotional moment is happening between Laureline and Valerian near the end of the film, you forget to pay attention to the plot, such as it is. Combine that with some heavy-handed (and questionable) use of the Noble Savage trope, a dramatic “reveal” of the film’s villain that is anything but, and a notable lack of chemistry every time DeHaan and DeLevigne are on screen together, and you’ve got a beautifully imagined world captured in a fairly lackluster film.

*Except not really. The film states that Alpha has progressed 700 million miles from earth at the time that the majority of the film takes place, which is . . . still in our solar system. To put it in perspective, the earth is an average distance of 93 million miles from the sun (a distance referred to in astronomy as an “astronomical unit,” or AU), so this would put Alpha less than 8 times further from our sun than we are, or, more poetically, further than Jupiter but closer than Saturn. The furthermost planet, Neptune (please refrain from expressing your non-scientific sentimentality for Pluto in the comments), is 2.795 billion miles from the Sun. Of course, it’s absurd that the film (and I in this footnote) are charting anything in miles, since astronomy is a science and science uses the metric system. Even if I misunderstood and the film said that Alpha was 700 billion miles (or 0.119 light years) out, our closest stellar neighbor Proxima Centauri is 24.94 trillion miles (4.243 light years) away, so it really hasn’t gotten far, especially in four centuries. That’s a mere 43.435 light days from earth! If this were set today, August 1, 2018, that means that I could live on Alpha and pick up radio transmissions from June 19. But just because they think Chester Bennington is still alive and have no idea that Anthony Scaramucci has been appointed and deposed, they’ll know soon. It’s hardly a distance befitting the majesty of pulling Rutger Hauer out of his bed of mothballs to give a grand speech about travelling among the stars. But I digress.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Deathrow Gameshow (1987)

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I’m a huge sucker for dystopian gameshow cinema, so my appreciation for Deathrow Gameshow might very well be entirely dependent on genre. There’s nothing particularly special about this mid-80s sci-fi cheapie that you couldn’t find in titles like The Running Man, Death Race 2000, The Hunger Games, or Nerve in terms of dystopian world-building or slick production design. Deathrow Gameshow even sidesteps the genre’s usual adherence to liberal, anti-authoritarian politics to sympathize & laugh along with the abusers in power, which seems like the exact wrong way to go about making one of these things. Still, I couldn’t help but take delight of some of the Killer Gameshow from the Future surface pleasures of the film’s premise because the genre territory it occupies is so instantly appealing to me. As the film went along, I even started to appreciate the way its disgusting Reagan era politics & sadistic black humor helped distinguish the work from its genre peers, even if by being spiritually repugnant.

In the not too-distant future of1991, a game show titled Live or Die executes prisoners for captivated audiences’ afternoon television entertainment. Deathrow inmates sign waivers to appear on the show, where they answer trivia questions or complete simple (but rigged) tasks in the hopes of winning prizes. The cost of an incorrect answer or a job half done is a televised execution – by guillotine, by electrocution, by explosion, by whatever keeps eyes glued to the television. The show is wildly popular, with citizens committing crimes for the opportunity to appear as contestants & family members of the executed cheering on their death for brief fame or small prizes. Live or Die does have its critics, though. Protestors gather in the streets holding signs saying the host “should be aborted.” There’s also, of course, people out to kill the host themselves to avenge lives he’s ended on air for personal profit. What’s weird is that we’re asked to sympathize with the sick, oppressive fuck instead of his portrayed-as-whiny detractors. Instead of watching him suffer under the weight of his own societal sins like, say, James Woods’s similar sleaze bag in Videodrome, we’re supposed to be invested in his spiritual growth as he’s threatened punishment, but ultimately gets out on top. That might be a result of the film’s dedication to comedy instead of horror or dystopian sci-fi, but it is a striking deviation from how these things usually go nonetheless.

Besides aligning audience sympathies with its selfish sleaze bag gameshow host, Deathrow Gameshow also disgusts in the targets of its misanthropic humor. This film takes jabs at “militant” feminism, makes casual references to prison rape & domestic violence for easy “humor,” and is convinced that the mere mention for homosexual desire is the height of hilarity. It’s also worth mentioning that although there’s diversity in its deathrow prisoner population, the only black characters represented onscreen are violent criminals. The film wholly & cruelly commits to a Reagan-era sense of Fuck You, I Got Mine selfishness, but in a way that almost works to its advantage. Even if its goal was to make me laugh with its cruel sense of punching down humor, the way those gleeful stabs at political incorrectness land make me recoil in horror, which in a way heightens the effect of its premise. This is a crass film with a complete absence of a moral center, but that kind of Money > Empathy sentiment fits its killer gameshow premise surprisingly well. I’m not sure the effect was entirely intentional, but the discomfort certainly makes for a memorable, authentically horrific viewing experience.

That’s not to say all of Deathrow Gameshow’s humor amounted to empty cruelty, though. I got a chuckle when one of the Live or Die contestants wins death by hanging as a gameshow prize, only for a The Price is Right-type announcer to declare, “Every man dreams of being well hung.” It’s not a particularly smart or inventive joke, but it’s well told, much like other gags where a secretary is caught masturbating or a rolled-up car window reads the message, “Blow it out your ass.” Everything in Deathrow Gameshow fits in one of two categories: sex or violence. Sometimes that 80s-era lizard brain idiocy can be amusing, like when an assassin, portrayed by an actor known simply as Beano, chows down on a whole mess of spaghetti while casually discussing murder. Sometimes it can be deflating, like when a character calling a woman coded to be a Feminist “a stupid bitch” is supposed to be a knee-slapper of a punchline.

There are some stranger, non-comedic touches to Deathrow Gameshow too: prisoners only being referred to as numbers, television advertisements for sex work, a nightmare sequence being rigidly blocked off like a movie trailer, a character justifying the show’s murder for entertainment ethos by explaining, “Life is a transitional state and Death is God’s way of saying ‘Take a Break.’” The movie’s just a little too compromised in its spiritually corrupt humor & underwhelming in its world-building ambition to award a hearty recommendation. I don’t mean to besmirch the good name of filmmaker Mark Pirro, whose other titles include Nudist Colony of the Dead, A Polish Vampire in Burbank, and Curse of the Queerwolf, but I’m not sure he was the best person to tackle the material. While Pirro’s grimy, off-putting sense of humor did provide the film a memorably sleazy, discomforting vibe, it’s a property that could’ve been an all-time classic in the more ambitious hands of The Canon Group or maybe Roger Corman’s crew. As is, Deathrow Gameshow is entertaining enough in its lighthearted approach to cruel, meat-headed exploitation cinema. It’s just difficult to shake the feeling that it could’ve been something more worthwhile.

-Brandon Ledet

Okja (2017)

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In one of our very first posts as a website we declared Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi epic Snowpiercer the Best Films of 2014. My assumption is that it rose to the top of our list that year mostly because it was so much movie. As with a lot of Asian cinema, Snowpiercer never ties itself down to a single genre or tone. It constantly shifts gears from humor to terror to action spectacle to political satire to whatever whim it feels at the moment as its story progresses from one dystopian end of its train setting to the other. It was near-impossible to know what to expect from the director’s follow-up, then, except that it might similarly spread out its eccentricities over a bizarrely wide range of cinematic modes. Okja is just as deliciously over the top, difficult to pin down, and tonally restless as Snowpiercer, although it does not resemble that film in the slightest. If a movie’s main virtues rest in its ability to surprise & delight, Okja is an undeniable success. It’s not something that can be readily understood or absorbed on even a scene to scene basis, but its overall effect is deliriously overwhelming and expectation-subverting enough that it feels nothing short of magnificent as a whole.

Tilda Swinton & Jake Gyllenhaal star as the public faces of an evil meat industry corporation that’s attempting to improve its image with a new, falsely fun & friendly attitude. As part of this evolution within the corporation, they promise to breed a new form of domesticated animal to help maintain the world’s demand for (supposedly) non-GMO meat supply, a “superpig.” The unveiling of this superpig breed is structured as a kind of reality show contest and the movie follows one of 26 worldwide contestants within that frame. Okja, a superpig who has been raised free-range in the forests of South Korea, is officially declared “the best pig” (recalling titles like Babe & Charlotte’s Web), winning the dubious prize of being torn away from the little girl who raised her as a close friend instead of an eventual source for food. Before their separation, we get to know Okja as a kind, selfless animal with human eyes & a hyper-intelligent aptitude for problem-solving (not unlike the intelligence of a real-life pig). After she’s unceremoniously removed from her home and sent to face her fate as meat, we get to know the little girl who raised her as our de facto protagonist. The movie gradually reveals itself to be a coming of age quest to free Okja from her corporate captors, protect her from the well-meaning but idiotic animal rights activists who want to use her as a political pawn, and return her to her home in Nature. The rest is a blissfully messy blur of action set pieces, wild shifts in comedic tone, and a brutally unforgiving satire of modern meat industry practices.

The cuteness of Okja herself and the film’s occasional dedication to a kids’ movie tone (despite its constant violence & f-bombs) make it tempting to look to Babe as an easy animals-deserve-empathy-too comparison point. The truth is, though, that Okja more closely resembles George Miller’s terrifying action movie nightmare Babe 2: Pig in the City, where the grand adventure staged to bring its very special superpig home is a nonstop assault of bizarre imagery & comedic terror. There’s a constant threat of danger in Okja, ranging from car chases to meat grinders to stampedes through an underground shopping mall. The CGI in service of this spectacle is shoddy, but in a flippant, Steve Chow kind of way that is so irreverently cartoonish it could not matter less. Oddly, the performances work in much the same way. Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, and Shirley Henderson all stand out as intensely bizarre sources of nervous energy that exist far beyond the bounds of human nature, but in such a casually absurd way that it somehow fits the film’s ever-shifting tone. Gyllenhaal likely wins the grand prize in that respect, often resembling more of a rabid duck than an adult man. In any other context he’d be too broad or, frankly, too annoying to function as anything other than a distraction, but it’s somehow just the jarringly over the top touch the movie needs.

Okja is too much of an ever-shifting set of complexly self-contradictory tones & moods for it to be wholly described to the uninitiated. It’s both a scathing satire of modern meat industry & a slapstick farce poking fun at the activists who attempt to dismantle it. It’ll stab you in the heart with onscreen displays of animal cruelty, but will just as often giggle at the production of farts & turds. I can try to describe the film as an action adventure version of Death to Smoochy or a more deliberately adult reimagining of Pig in the City, but neither comparison fully covers every weird impulse that distracts & delights Bong Joon-ho as he chases his narrative across multiple continents. Just like with the similarly divisive Snowpiercer, I can’t promise all audiences will be onboard for the entire ride (Gyllenhaal in particular is sure to be a frequent point of contention), but Okja does offer something that’s increasingly rare in modern action adventures of this blockbuster-sized scale: the wildly unpredictable. You may not appreciate every individual turn in its impossibly twisty road, but oh, the places you’ll go.

-Brandon Ledet

RoboCop (2014)

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One of the stranger trends to emerge from major studios scrambling to remake every past success has been the push to re-imagine Paul Verhoeven films as PG-13 commodities. The recent announcement of an upcoming Starship Troopers re-imagining makes three Verhoeven remakes in the past few years that seemingly are determined to strip the iconic director’s work of all the satirical cruelty that made it successful in the first place. Did the world really need a version of Total Recall with no Schwarzenegger and no trips to Mars? It’s doubtful. I can’t imagine a modern version of Starship Troopers’s war propaganda satire will fare much better and it’s starting to feel like only a matter of time before we get an updated version of Verhoeven’s Showgirls with all of the camp and the nudity surgically removed. The biggest disappointment in this trend so far, though, might just be the 2014 remake of Verhoeven’s privatized police force satire RoboCop, arguably one of the greatest films ever made. The PG-13 RoboCop reboot is especially frustrating in the context of modern, sanitized Verhoeven remakes because it threatens to actually be a decent film with its own interesting ideas for its opening half hour. No other Verhoeven bastardization so far has ever had a chance of being half as interesting as the recent Robo-reboot did, which makes it all the more tragic that the film crashes and burns in such a dull, uninspired manner.

I’d forgive anyone for being fooled that the 2010 RoboCop “gets it” based on its opening sequence. Samuel L. Jackson kicks off the film as the host of a primetime news shoe that’s half CNN, half Dianetics DVD. There are no comedy sketches interrupting this opener as “commercial breaks” like in the Verhoeven film, but the satire in the sequence is still palpable. Jackson’s fake news show profiles a private American company that makes billions of dollars selling weaponry to the military. In demonstration of the power & efficiency of the company’s military-grade robots, which include past RoboCop villain ED-209 working in tandem with Star Wars prequel-type droids, a Middle Eastern terrorist cell is dismantled by American troops. The raid bleakly concludes with the execution of a child, a detail the news program conveniently cuts from its live feed. Jackson’s host then asks his audience why a “robo-phobic” America is so cautious about bringing these private sector androids into urban law enforcement, needling, “What’s more important than the safety of the American people?” This opening efficiently conjures modern concerns of trading freedom for safety, the morality of drone warfare & the surveillance state, and the terrifying business practices of privatized military & police forces, all while maintaining at least some of the sly humor of Verhoeven’s source material. Unfortunately, its minor successes are short-lived. There’s a national debate about the ethics of a roboticized police force that, of course, eventually leads to the titular cyborg solution of a half-man/half-machine (all cop) compromise. The movie remains mildly interesting as RoboCop is built by a futuristic prosthetics company and adjusts to his new Robo-body, but immediately crashes into a wall of modern PG-13 action tedium as soon as he blossoms onto his complete Robo-self. It never recovers.

The hard-R violence of the 1980’s RoboCop feature meant that each bullet, every blow delivered by RoboCop or his supercriminal enemies were significantly brutal. In the remake, the violence is much less impactful, much easier to shake off. The film’s CGI-aided fantasy violence doesn’t help that point much either. RoboCop leaps weightlessly like a superhero in this version, sharply contrasted with the limited mobility in his heavy hydraulic systems of the past. Outside of a couple production details like RoboCop having one human hand and one Robo-hand to accentuate his dual, self-conflicted nature, the film more or less runs out of ideas as soon as its titular hero is actualized. It’s an aggressively conventional work that fully loses track of why it even exists, to the point where callbacks to the Verhoeven classic in lines like “I wouldn’t buy that for a dollar,” feel absurdly out of place. With the violence muted and the satire almost completely drained, this RoboCop rehash feels entirely devoid of a sense of purpose, as if it were a down-the-line sequel of a Jason Statham or JCVD property that surfaced on VOD long after its origins had been forgotten. You can feel it reaching to reclaim its opening spark in its political mockery, which posits old-timey Republicans as the opposition to the RoboCop initiative and forward thinking leftists, including Michael Keaton in full Steve Jobs mode, as the ones pushing for the innovation. By the time Sam Jackson’s news anchor returns to usher in the end credits, though, the game had already been lost and nearly everything in-between feels like a generic 2010s shoot-em-up. Something about that wasted potential feels even more dispiriting than it would if the movie were just bland from the very beginning.

RoboCop is one of those remakes where you could change just the title and a couple minor plot details and avoid purchasing the rights to the intellectual property altogether. That, of course, would have hurt ticket sales, but it would also have lowered expectations of the quality comparisons to the original Verhoeven film, which it seems disinterested in matching in tone or content. The worst part about RoboCop is that the idea it initially presents it is interested in continuing & adopting Verhoeven’s weird vision to a modern context. Ultimately, though, I’m not sure it was interested in saying anything in particular at all, a distressing attribute seemingly shared by all of these unimaginative “re-imaginings” of this great director’s greatest hits.

-Brandon Ledet

The Night the World Exploded (1957)

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There’s been a lot of grumbling this week about the way Trey Edward Shults’s sophomore feature It Comes at Night was marketed as a straightforward horror film, with a lot of people expecting some kind of monster attack based on its title. I want to believe that in two weeks’ time at most, first weekend horror audiences’ expectations will no longer matter and It Comes at Night will still be a fantastic film long after they’re forgotten. Sometimes, the title or the advertising of a film does matter in the long-run, though. Sixty years after its theatrical release, I found myself similarly bummed by the movie promised in the title The Night the World Exploded. I didn’t exactly expect Earth to explode in the picture, but the title does suggest some kind of alien invasion or large scale sci-fi threat, an expectation backed up by its inclusion on a drive-in double bill with The Claw, a creature feature about a giant killer bird. Unfortunately, this world-threatening event is a much more pedestrian kind of sci-fi villainy: earthquakes. It seems that in mocking general audiences for their titular & genre-based expectations, I was setting myself up for a taste of my own medicine. It did not taste sweet; it was, in fact, quite bland.

The Night the World Exploded announces its tedium up front by opening its narration with a weather report. The air was cool, low 50s, in case you’re interested. Three scientists who study the weather are concerned with drastic shifts in air pressure, which is somehow alarming to their unproven invention: a machine that accurately predicts earthquakes before they occur. Government officials don’t believe the validity of this machine’s prediction and refuse to evacuate the area indicated for severe impact. Many die as a result. A machine that can accurately predict earthquakes is still science fiction speculation, but between 70s disaster epics like Earthquake & modern throwbacks like San Andreas it’s an idea that had since become old hat in terms of cinematic depiction. What makes The Night the World Exploded more distinct as a sci-fi film is the source of its disastrous earthquakes. Instead of merely being set off by shifting tectonic plates, the earthquakes in the film are the direct result of a previously undiscovered element found under Earth’s surface that’s harmless when wet, but explodes when dry. Once this source is determined, what follows is an odd version of a 50s sci-fi message movie like Them! or The Space Children where, unlike nuclear war, there’s nothing real life audiences can do to stop its threat, since it’s entirely fictional.

Besides the fear mongering built around a fictional element that could explode the Earth from under us, I admire The Night the World Exploded‘s ambition​ to make its threat a worldwide event despite its budgetary limitations as drive-in schlock. Stock footage of buildings crumbling, newsreels of disaster relief & widespread fires, and even images of war are wrangled by a fast-talking narrator who attempts to tell a worldwide story of scientists & governments in crisis. Its smaller scale story of the three-scientist team that discovers the explosive element in their underground cave explorations is much less interesting. You see, the sole female scientist of the crew is frustrated because she wants to become a wife ASAP, explaining, “I’m a scientist, but I’m a woman too.” She’s frustrated because she’s settling to marry the wrong man, due to her co-worker being too wrapped up in his research to take notice of her romantic desire for him. What a pickle! (Oddly enough, this is more or less the same plot as Doris Wishman’s nudie cutie Nude on the Moon.) I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler say that the world does not explode and the two scientists eventually get their happily-ever-after kiss. What’s questionable is which resolution is more anti-climactic.

It’s likely not fair that I’m judging The Night the World Exploded based on its failings to deliver the sci-fi horror I was expecting based on its title. However, I’d like to think that if the film were an especially well made or deliriously fun version of an earthquake disaster picture I would’ve been able to overcome my expectations. There were moments of stock footage inanity and scientists demonstrating what the explosive element could do to the Earth on a plastic globe that certainly pushed me towards having a good time, only to be routinely deflated by its limp, central romance. Still, the truth is that I was settling in to watch one kind of old fashioned schlock based on the film’s title and was disappointed when I was treated to another. I guess this should teach me some sort of empathy for audiences who settled in for something like Insidious or The Bye Bye Man when they bought a ticket for It Comes at Night and were instead shown a quiet art house reflection on the terrors of familial grief. Those audiences even have the moral upper ground in this situation in that they paid to see their disappointment on the big screen while I, a hypocrite, was just looking for a way to waste a morning on YouTube.

-Brandon Ledet

Rupture (2017)

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I had a difficult time fully understanding what more enthusiastic fans saw in the recent horror cheapie The Void (besides its incredible special effects craft), but I think I found my ideal version of that film’s aesthetic in Rupture. Like with The Void, there’s nothing in Rupture that hasn’t technically been pulled off better, both artistically & financially, in higher profile films that arrived before it. Specifically, Rupture film feels like a mashup of Martyrs & A Cure for Wellness, except boiled down to the production values of a late 90s episode of Outer Limits. Despite its inherent cheapness (or maybe because of it, knowing me) and its The Void level of objectively terrible acting & dialogue, I was wholly won over by Rupture as a low-key VOD horror charmer. It’s an efficient little slice of modern schlock that deliberately bites off more than it can chew thematically, but easily gets by on both visual style and the over-the-top absurdity of its basic premise.

Noomi Rapace (of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, sorta) stars as a tough-skinned, fiercely independent single mom struggling to navigate the frustrated anger of the two men in her life: her teenage son and her ex-husband. After dropping off her son with his dad for the weekend, she is promptly abducted by a mysterious organization that tackles, tases, duct tapes, and handcuffs her into compliance. As she works on escaping and uncovering the identities of her captors, Rupture threatens to devolve into an array of genres that have already been exploited to death: abduction thrillers, Women in Captivity horror, torture porn, etc. Thankfully, it reaches for much more deliriously pulpy territory. Rupture is not traditional torture porn so much as psychological torture porn. As our hero & her fellow abductees are tormented with their greatest fears (heights, snakes, spiders, etc.), the film feels like a dirt cheap mockbuster version of Martyrs, where the next step of human evolution can be unlocked by science & fear. Rupture‘s genre film thrills are fortunately a lot less brutal & less gendered than they are in Martyrs, however, keeping the mood consistently light and enjoyably bizarre.

Director Steven Shainberg, who also helmed the BDSM cult classic Secretary, crafts a slick schlock aesthetic here, framing the film with a ludicrous comic book eye, as if it were a sequel to Sam Raimi’s Darkman. Giant syringes full of florescent liquid & futuristic Science Goggles™ recall 1950s B-pictures and the 1980s horrors that payed homage to them. Not all of Rupture is light, trashy, fun. I cringed through a few of Noomi Rapace’s awkwardly​ delivered interactions with her fellow captives, but the mysterious organization who tortures them for a triggered evolution is bursting with excellent performances from skilled character actors. Michael Chiklis, Peter Stormare, and Lesley Manville (who was a villainous joy on the first season of Harlots) are all effectively creepy as Rapace’s tormentors while still aligning their performances with the film’s overarching cheapness. I got genuine chills and light-hearted giggles when these villains would tenderly stroke Rapace’s cheek and mutter tenderly, “Interesting skin,” between experiments/torture sessions. It took me back to the old tonal victories in horror cheapies like Tobe Hooper’s Invaders from Mars, a deceptively difficult balance to strike between genuine terror & comic book absurdity.

I can’t tell you exactly why I was totally on-board with the horror film nostalgia of Rupture (and, looking further back, Clown) while the similar thrills of The Void left me largely cold. Maybe it’s because the mood was lighter. Maybe I’m that much of a sucker for intense horror movie lighting and was easily won over by Shainberg’s use of colorful reds, blues, and yellows, which gave the film the sheen of a forgotten Creepshow segment. Maybe I’m just a sucker for Shainberg’s eye in general. There’s no accounting for taste, really. The dialogue & acting in Rupture are just as awkwardly weak as they are in The Void, but they did little to sour my enjoyment of the film as a bargain bin mashup of A Cure for Wellness & Martyrs. The film is too much of a trashy delight to be sunk by something as trivial as subpar character work or embarrassing line deliveries. Those faults rarely ruined our appreciation of the 80s & 90s VHS horrors or the 1950s horror comics the film tonally resembles either, so there’s really no reason to let them get in the way now.

-Brandon Ledet

The Space Children (1958)

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There’s nothing more admirable in genre film production than basic efficiency. Cheaply made sci-fi and horror can often transcend its limited means by way of an over the top premise or an inspired knack for production design, but those virtues can be dulled so easily by a labored pace or runtime. At just under 70 minutes, the sci-fi cheapie The Space Children never had time to outlive the novelty of its basic premise. Although director Jack Arnold had previously made a fine example of artful prestige horror with The Creature from the Black Lagoon (which is stunning in its moments of underwater cinematography), The Space Children is nothing but a bare bones sci-fi yarn made to fill out a double bill with the similarly slight, but impressive The Colossus of New York. Those limiting factors of microscopic budget & necessity for a brief runtime only amplify & enhance its charms as a scrappy little horror oddity with a strange plot & an even stranger alien menace. Whenever catching up with these efficient examples of bizarre, but slight genre films from the drive-in era, it’s tempting to wish that our modern PG-13 horrors & superhero epics would stick to that exact kind of length & scale.

The Space Children is a message movie about the horrors of nuclear war, nakedly so. While its heavy-handed lesson about how it’s probably not super cool to get into a worldwide arms race that could very quickly destroy the planet isn’t exactly a revolutionary thought for a 1950s genre picture, it is handled in a way that somewhat subverts its genre expectations. This is an alien invasion picture where neither the Thing From Another World that challenges our military, nor the army of creepy children it hypnotizes are the villain. In a variation from the Children of the Damned standard, it’s the parents, adult humans, who are the enemy. Scientists & military families are contracted by the American military to live in an isolated community while developing The Thunderer, a hydrogen bomb that can be readily launched from an orbiting satellite instead of a fixed physical location. Concerned, a glowing, telepathic brain from outer space lands on a beach nearby the military base and hypnotizes the scientists’ children to do its evil bidding: preventing nuclear holocaust by dismantling The Thunderer. Short story shorter, its galactic mission is a success and the evil space brain (with a little help from its ragtag group if telepathic juvenile slaves) saves Earth from blowing itself apart.

The Space Children never had a chance to be as iconic or as memorable as other nuclear horrors of its time like Them! or The Day The Earth Stood Still, even though it concludes with the exact same kind of moralizing rant about the dangers of nuclear war (this time with a Bible verse printed over an outer space backdrop to drive the point home). It was too cheap & lean of a production to aspire to those genre film heights. The movie does a great job of working within the boundaries of its scale & budget, though, suggesting worldwide implications of its central crisis despite never leaving its artificial studio lot locations. Although not likely a conscious choice, the artificiality of those sets, which are supposed to feel like natural outdoors environments, only adds to the movie’s charming surreality. Seemingly, the entire budget of The Space Children was sunk into the look of its space alien brain, which was a smart choice. When the alien first arrives, it appears to be a glowing jellyfish that washed up on the beach. As it pulsates, expands, and glows brighter while psychically linking to its child mind-slaves that same brain gradually grows to be the size of a small, glowing hippo. The logistics of constructing such a thing seemingly zapped most of the production money, leaving only room for cheap-to-film horror movie touches like telepathy, teleportation, telekinesis, and (scariest of all) Disney Channel levels of goofy child acting. It’s an expense that pays off nicely, though, and the brain is just as memorable for its physical presence as it is for somehow not being the villain.

The Space Children is a cheap, goofy sci-fi horror with nothing especially novel to say about the perils of nuclear war, bit still manages to feel like a fairly rewarding entry in its genre. Its efficiency in delivering the goods of its space alien brain special effects & its anti-war morality play in just over an hour of drive-in era absurdist fun is an impressive feat in itself. Backing up that efficiency is another excellent score from Twilight Zone vet Van Cleave (who also scored The Colossus of New York). As soon as the opening credits, which superimposes children’s heads over telescopic photos of outer space, Van Cleave’s organ & theremin arrangement elevates the material considerably. That Twilight Zone connection feels true to this movie’s overall spirit too, as that show was excellent at delivering the goods in a similarly lean time & budget. Something you won’t see on many Twilight Zone episodes, though, is a hippo-sized brain that glows, pulsates, hypnotizes children, and forces them to rebel against their war hungry parents. The Space Children wasn’t even the best movie on its own double bill at the drive-in (The Colossus of New York is so good), but it knew exactly how to milk its few saving virtues for all they were worth and, in some cases, how to make them glow.

-Brandon Ledet

Gandahar (1988)

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French animator René Laloux is well known & respected for his debut feature, Fantastic Planet, a gorgeous work of political sci-fi psychedelia, but people unfairly treat his career as if he only ever directed that one film. Laloux actually directed three feature films (along with several shorts) in the Fantastic Planet style, each tied to similar themes of anti-fascism political empathy and each visually striking in their traditionalist, but psychedelic hand drawn animation. The last of these films, Gandahar, even came close to breaking through to mainstream success in America. Dubbed by American voice actors like Glenn Close, Bridgette Fonda, and Penn Jillette & slightly edited for sexual content, Gandahar was distributed in North America under the title Light Years by the Weinstein Company. Arriving during the 80s fantasy boom of titles like Legend, Labyrinth, and Ladyhawke & guided in translation by sci-fi heavyweight Isaac Asimov, Gandahar was in the exact right position to make a lasting mark on the public consciousness. Instead, it’s faded into relative obscurity, not having nearly as much of a cultural footprint as Fantastic Planet. It’s a shame too, because the film feels just as worthwhile as that bonafide classic, even in its compromised American form.

The title Gandahar refers to a sort of space alien Eden, a matriarchal hippie paradise in the stars ruled by Nature & peace. The Counsel of Women who govern Gandahar follow a strict boobs-out-for-empowerment philosophy that affords the film a wealth of National Geographic-style desexualized nudity. Their way of life is dedicated to a preference for organic Nature over manmade technology, an ethos that is challenged when their reverie is disrupted by war-hungry robots. Black, personality-free machines invade Gandahar and zap citizens into stone, like God punishing Sodom. This threat is clearly coded as a robotic stand-in for Nazi invaders a hateful force hellbent on destroying the diversifying concept of the individual self. They rebuke a life lived for freedom & pleasure, exemplified by Gandahar, and their mindless loyalty to a single Master gives them great strength in that conviction. To save their people, The Counsel of Women deploys a single male savior, Sylvain, on a journey to find salvation outside his home world Paradise. In his adventures to save Gandahar, Sylvain discovers love, time travel, the true evils of The Master, and a community of mutants who call into question whether Gandahar was ever the utopia it was reported to be before the robots even invaded.

All in all, Gandahar plays like a mashup between an extended He-Man and the Masters of the Universe episode and animated cover art from the prog band Yes. Its central metaphor about robo-Nazi invaders and the value of the individual self never extends too far beyond the robots shooting lasers out of their Hitler salutes and talking up threatening masterplans like “The Final Annihilation.” It’s possible that some of that subtext was stronger in the unadulterated French cut of the film, but it’s not what makes Gandahar special anyway. Laloux’s visual Dungeons & Dragons-flavored fantasy, overrun with odd details like alien bugs suckling off humanoid breasts, flying manta ray dragon beasts, and Godzilla-like kaiju is the main treat in Gandahar, as it was in Laloux’s biggest hit, Fantastic Planet. Clashing the organic, Cronenbergian terrors of his alien landscapes with a then-modern 80s synth score is more than enough to justify giving Gandahar a second look. Laloux’s political metaphors may feel like an outdated hippie fantasy, but his visual style is far too fascinating on its own accord to suffer under that shortcoming. Gandahar may not offer anything terribly new that wasn’t seen before in Fantastic Planet besides a distinctly 80s soundtrack, but a more of the same proposition shouldn’t be a problem for anyone captivated by Laloux’s eternally striking visual art.

-Brandon Ledet