Posts Tagged ‘Disaster’


No Blade of Grass

January 4th, 2012 | article by | 2 Comments »
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dir. Cornel Wilde
1970 / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / 97′
written by Sean Forestal and Cornel Wilde
from the novel by John Christopher
director of phogoraphy H.A.R. Thomson
music arranged and conducted by Burnell Whibley
starring Nigel Davenport, Lynne Frederick, Jean Wallace, John Hamill, Patrick Holt and Anthony May
now available on dvd-r through the Warner Archive Collection and Amazon.com

How would so-called civilized men react were the first world to find itself in the midst of devastating famine? This is the question posed by No Blade of Grass, the penultimate directorial effort of eccentric talent Cornel Wilde, here adapting John Christopher’s monumentally successful freshman novel The Death of Grass (which had been re-titled for its Stateside publication). One of the first films of its kind, Wilde’s No Blade of Grass is a tale of social collapse in a time of ecological catastrophe – a virus has crippled worldwide grain production, plunging the developed nations into third-world anarchy.

Caught in the resulting upheaval are well-to-do architect John Custance (Nigel Davenport), his wife (Wilde’s then wife Jean Wallace), his teenaged daughter (Lynne Frederick in her film debut) and younger son. Working with advance information from a lab-tech friend (John Hamill) the family escape a nightmarish London, patrolled by machine gun-toting bobbies and barricaded by trigger-happy military forces, just as chaos descends upon it. The plan from there is simple enough – seek the safety of brother David Custance’s isolated, easily defended farm in Westmoreland – but with every individual in England suddenly fighting to survive the veneer of civility soon wears thin, and the Custances find themselves adopting unexpectedly vicious practices to preserve themselves.

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Crack in the World (1965)

November 15th, 2010 | article by | No Comments »
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A well-meaning scientist on the brink of death leaves a legacy of world-wide calamity in Crack in the World, a Philip Yordan (Day of the Triffids) production released through Security Pictures and Paramount in 1965.  Starring real-life husband and wife acting duo Kieron Moore and Janette Scott as well as a late-career Dana Andrews (Night of the Demon, Where the Sidewalk Ends), this proto-disaster effort benefits from a talented cast and a welcome turn by Eugene Lourie (Gorgo) as director of special effects.  Andrew Marton (King Solomon’s Mines) directs, from a screenplay by Jon Manchip White and Julian Zimet.

I’ve been patiently waiting to get my hands on this audacious bit of studio advertising for a nice long while now, and some recent good luck at the auction block finally sent it my way.  An old-school one sheet in the defunct size of 27″ by 41″, this poster was just too big and too fragile for me to risk scanning it by hand – a real shame, as the shoddy digital camera photos don’t even begin to do it justice.  Aside from some fold separation and a tear on the right hand edge this is in great shape, with crisp, clean imagery and surprisingly little wear.  The usual pinholes aren’t even in evidence.

While the central illustration is awesome, what I like most about this poster are the comic-style action frames that let would-be audiences in on what they can expect from the film.  SEE daring magmanauts, the earth torn asunder and a buxom blonde scientist, too!


Prophecies of Nostradamus: Catastrophe 1999 (1974)

August 23rd, 2010 | article by | 1 Comment »
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Toho’s epic 1974 disaster-a-minute masterpiece needs no introduction to anyone familiar with this site, where our review of it remains one of our top-read month after month.  Directed by Toshio Masuda (Tokyo Blackout) and starring Tetsuro Tanba (Bohachi Boshido: Code of the Forgotten Eight), Toshio Kurosawa (Evil of Dracula), Kaoru Yumi (ESPY) and Yoko Tsukasa (Yojimbo), the film was pushed into production after the box office superstardom of 1973′s Submersion of Japan and took top honors in its release year of 1974.  Prophecies of Nostradamus: Catastrophe 1999 (original title, Nosutoradamusu no Daiyogen) remains a picture well ahead of its time in terms of concept, predating the nonsense mega-disaster hits of Roland Emmerich by several decades.

Though sold to me as a lobby card, this Mexican poster measures in at a considerably larger 16.5 x 21 inches.  Prophecies of Nostradamus: Catastrophe 1999 is another Toho effort produced with international distribution in mind, and included a lengthy English language sequence set in New Guinea, in which an investigative team goes out to hunt for one earlier lost only to discover that they have been reduced to a state of putrid living-death by a lingering radioactive fog.  This sequence would cause Toho considerable trouble shortly after release, when the shocking nature of both it and a late-film look into a post-apocalyptic future enraged advocates for survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The offending footage was subsequently cut from Japanese release prints, with Toho banning the picture from screenings entirely after its initial theatrical run.

Nevertheless, the film made a pretty penny in international markets and left an indelible impression on my young mind when it finally made its way to domestic television in the early ’80s in its truncated The Last Days of Planet Earth form.  This poster showcases one of the film’s most memorable moments, featuring two stills from the controversial New Guinea sequence.  The rest of the artwork, including a ship on a frozen sea, a Concorde SST, a desolate war-ravaged Earth and a chillingly reflected cityscape, are culled from the original Japanese one-sheet design.  The title translates to The End of the World: The Prophecies of Nostradamus Fulfilled! (El Fin del Mundo: ¡Las Profecias de Nostradamus se Cumplen!).


The Second Atlantis

June 24th, 2010 | article by | No Comments »
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company: Ace Books, Inc.
number: F-335
year: 1965
length: 123 p.
writer: Robert Moore Williams
cover art: Gray Morrow
Order this book from Amazon.com

It shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with my taste in film to learn that I have something of a soft spot for the garbage literature peddled by publishers like Monarch and Ace Books in the early half of the ’60s, particularly the science fiction potboilers that earned them so much of their keep.  With its stilted prose, paper-thin plot and utter lack of literary aspiration, Robert Moore Williams’ (The Day They H-Bombed Los Angeles) The Second Atlantis comfortably dwells in bona fide guilty pleasure territory, fighting the good fight for cultural degradation and brain damage right with the best (worst?) of them.

Offering up very, very little in the way of plot (basically it’s ‘a bad thing happens and people walk away from it’ for 120 pages), The Second Atlantis presents readers with a singular horrific event and then bombards them with unnecessary characters until the feeble, New Age-y conclusion is within sight.  At least the event in this case is a good one, a massive chart-topping earthquake that just keeps rolling, turning the greater Los Angeles area into a crumbling, fiery ruin before unceremoniously burying it under the Pacific.  The improbable catastrophe is of Emmerich-ian magnitude, baring no small resemblance to that director’s destruction of L.A. in the recent mega-budget mega-disaster flick 2012.  It’s not particularly well conveyed, with Williams’ awkward nested metaphors proving more distracting than illustrative (see the example below), but it offers up enough in the way of trashy thrills to keep the page turning.

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When Time Ran Out . . .

April 15th, 2010 | article by | 2 Comments »
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rating:
company: Warner Bros. and
International Cinema Corp.
year: 1980
runtime: 109′
country: United States
director: James Goldstone
cast: Paul Newman, Jacqueline Bisset,
William Holden, Edward Albert,
Red Buttons, Ernest Borgnine,
James Franciscus, Burgess Meredith,
Pat Morita, John Consodine
writers: Carl Foreman and
Stirling Siliphant (from a novel by
Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts)
cinematographer: Fred J. Koenekamp
music: Lalo Schifrin
order this film from Amazon.com

Warner Bros. must have felt plenty gipped after successful film and television producer Irwin Allen jumped ship at 20th Century Fox and began making films under their banner.  Allen’s seminal disaster efforts The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno had grossed $200 million collectively just a few years prior, giving Warner plenty of reason to sink million after million into new Allen productions.  Allen was first put to work in the television market, where he conceived a host of derivative suspense pictures like Flood! and Cave In!, most of whose titles ended in exclamation points.  By the time Allen entered the big-budget world of theatrical pictures again things had changed.  The disaster craze had run its course, more or less, and the American public was weary of seeing the same old tropes paraded before their eyes.

1978′s The Swarm would prove Allen’s first epic failure, earning back less than half of its estimated budget of $21 million.  His big comeback feature Beyond the Poseidon Adventure is said to have done worse still, though this reviewer had no luck hunting down its box office returns.  Beyond was universally derided by critics and rejected by audiences, lasting a mere two weeks in general release.  1980′s When Time Ran Out . . . would prove to be Allen’s final chance at luring audiences back to his increasingly outdated brand, his last big swing at melding stars, spectacle, and soap opera dramatics into box office gold.  Even after The Swarm and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, I doubt anyone could have imagined just how terrible an idea this one was.

Held together by little more than contractual obligations, When Time Ran Out . . . stars The Towering inferno alumni Paul Newman and William Holden (Sabrina) in ostensibly the same roles (inversely, the rich property owner and the doom-sayer), and Jacqueline Bisset (Under the Volcano), who helped usher in the American disaster craze with 1970′s Airport.  The list of unfortunately involved name talent goes on and on, with the likes of Burgess Meredith (Of Mice and Men), Ernest Borgnine (Emperor of the North), Red Buttons (The Poseidon Adventure), James Franciscus, Edward Albert, Pat Morita, and on . . . and on . . . and on . . .  Everyone looks uncomfortable to be in the picture at all, though they trudge on professionally all the same.  Meredith seems particularly perturbed, having been granted a cheap plot contrivance (he’s a high wire artist – that won’t figure into things later . . . ) instead of a role.

Narratively, When Time Ran Out . . . is pretty sorry stuff.  The script, by otherwise exceptional writers Stirling Silliphant (Village of the Damned, In the Heat of the Night) and Carl Foreman (The Bridge on the River Kwai, High Noon), follows the usual Allen tropes.  A huge cast of everyday people is accumulated in a luxury accommodation, in this case a newly opened resort hotel on an island, threatened with ongoing disaster, in this case a volcanic eruption, and forced on a dangerous trek to safety, in this case the other side of the island.  The disaster builds in the usual way, with the obvious ominous portents of danger being ignored by those in charge.  Par for the course, most of the good guys reach salvation while the baddies (and most of the supporting players) meet their untimely ends.

The traditional Irwin Allen walk of doom, a staple of his brand since 1960′s The Lost World and possibly before, feels particularly tired here, with two unnecessarily lengthy man-on-ledge set pieces tasked with the bulk of the suspense-ratcheting.  The second of these, in which the intrepid survivors contend with a slowly crumbling foot bridge suspended over a river of bubbling lava (cue Meredith and his high-wire act), drags on for the better part of twenty minutes!  Lalo Schifrin (Enter the Dragon, Dirty Harry) is particularly deserving of audience sympathies here, forced to compose some 17 minutes of endless suspense cues to keep the illusion of action going.

Warner, undoubtedly disappointed by then with Allen’s output under their name, seems to have had the decency not to spend more than was absolutely necessary to bring When Time Ran Out . . . to its unfortunate fruition.  It’s clear that after the performers’ salaries and basics of production were covered, the special effects crew was left with peanuts to work with.  The realization of the volcano is, frankly, horrid, amounting to a single matte for daytime shots and uninspired stock footage and process work otherwise.  There is a huge disconnect between the purported threat of the volcano and the reality on screen, the fine Hawaiian locations dispensed with in favor of stuffy and unconvincing studio rigs for the suspense setups.  Poor Newman (“The lava is headed this way . . .”) is gifted the dubious honor of convincing audiences of the danger (“The lava is still headed this way . . .”) as visuals of the slowly approaching molten death fail again and again to materialize.

Then there is the writing for the volcano, which is so pointed in its actions that it should be credited as a character all its own.  Particularly noteworthy are the lava bombs erupting out of it, all of which are aimed (occasionally in multiples of three) squarely at James Franciscus (the requisite baddie, who is greedy and cheats on his girlfriend and, thusly, deserves to die) and the resort hotel under his command.  The lava bombs themselves are pretty inconsistent, causing only minor damage while the heroes are around and sending the hotel up in a massive fireball once they’re safely away.  The realism of things is highly questionable even before the eruption, however.  So-called scientists operate an observatory on the precipitous rim of the volcano their studying, and go so far as to lower a glass-bottomed volcano-vator directly into it just so Paul Newman can get a peak.  Damn the seismographs, it sure looks like it’s acting up . . .

What all of this amounts to is a horrible film that easily ranks as one of the worst of the entire disaster cycle and the biggest box office no-go of Irwin Allen’s career (regaining only $1.7 million of it $20 million budget in general release).  It’s also my favorite of Allen’s films, ludicrous in the extreme and existing at a level of sublime hilarity that Roland Emmerich can only aspire to.  2012 may have whole continents ripping themselves gloriously apart, but where are the men falling sideways into library footage of lava pits just because a plot contrivance necessitates that they stand on the skids of a helicopter while it flies directly over the eruption?  When Time Ran Out . . . is one of the best inadvertent spoofs of its own genre ever devised, a film that would have been brilliant if intentional and is just too fantastically stupid to be ignored.

Warner Brothers was kind enough to keep When Time Ran Out . . . from DVD circulation until after star Paul Newman (who listed it as the only picture he regretted when interviewed by Larry King in 1998) passed late in 2008, but also greedy enough to use his namesake as a means of moving more product.  When Time Ran Out . . . was released as part of the Paul Newman Film Series in February of last year.  The disc is absolutely bare bones, lacking even a chapter selection menu, and features only the shorter theatrical cut (109′) of the film (a 141′ cut was released to VHS previously, for those who want more time to run out of).  Without its big-name star this would probably have ended up a part of Warner’s Archive Collection, alongside Irwin Allen’s made-for-TV. disaster films.  The transfer is a nice progressive job from elements in great condition.  There’s very light damage throughout, more evident in the cheap process shots, but color, detail, and contrast are all quite nice.  Frankly this looks far better than it probably should – the Fred J. Koenekamp (The Amityville Horror, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) cinematography is one of the only genuinely good things about the film.  Audio is a simple and clear monophonic track. Subtitles are available in English SDH or French.

Just one of the many top-notch effects that await you in 'When Time Ran Out . . ."

order this film from Amazon.com


The Night the World Exploded

March 17th, 2010 | article by | 1 Comment »
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rating:
company: Columbia Pictures
and Clover Productions
year: 1957
runtime: 64′
country: United States
director: Fred F. Sears
cast: Kathryn Grant, William Leslie,
Tristram Coffin, Raymond Greenleaf,
Charles Evans, Frank J. Scannell,
Marshall Reed, Fred Coby
writers: Jack Nutteford
and Luci Ward
cinematography: Benjamin H. Kline
music: Ross DiMaggio (musical director)
not on home video in the USA

Plot: A newly discovered mineral element that expands and explodes when it is exposed to nitrogen in the Earth’s atmosphere threatenes to destroy the world.

Prolific producer Sam Katzman’s excursion into the science fiction genre was limited, encompassing only a handful of the nearly 250 pictures he financed between 1933 and 1973.  His assembly-line approach to film production produced a few genre gems – the early Ray Harryhausen / Charles H. Schneer collaborations It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and the underrated sci-fi horror The Werewolf.  Most, however, were little more than lean programmers that relied more on memorable titles and fanciful ad art than content to draw in the necessary business.

1957′s The Night the World Exploded, half of a Columbia double bill featuring the Wtf-Film creature favorite The Giant Claw (another product of Katzman’s Clover Productions directed by Night‘s own Fred F. Sears), will never be remembered as a classic.  But with no video release and only the rarest of representation on modern television, Night is probably lucky to be remembered at all.  Those who grew up on the television late shows of the 60s and 70s (perhaps even more recently, though I never chanced upon it as a kid myself) will recall Night as the picture in which Earth is threatened by exploding rocks pulled from Carlsbad Caverns.

The Night the World Exploded runs along standard contemporary genre lines:  Young scientist David Conway (William Leslie, Hellcats of the Navy) invents a new magical device (a quartz tube “pressurometer” in this case) just in time to predict a major earthquake in Los Angeles.  While the city pieces itself together Conway comes to a startling revelation – immense pressure is building in the Earth’s crust, and the first earthquake is only a warning of more severe disasters to come.  The cause of the pressure reveals itself to be the new Element 112, an explosive mineral that earthquakes worldwide are threatening to expose with cataclysmic results.  From the moment Element 112 is discovered the race is on to find a means of averting a seemingly inevitable apocalypse.

The story may be prototypical sci-fi hokum, but The Night the World Exploded at least manages to toss an interesting idea into its recipe for worldwide carnage.  Like Kronos the same year, Night makes something of an argument for the conservation of natural resources.  The incendiary Element 112 is an entirely natural phenomena, benign in its usual environment.  It’s the pesky meddling of mankind, gung-ho in their coal mining and oil drilling, that have weakened sections of the Earth’s crust enough to allow the Element to expose itself.  The film is careful to point out that it’s not all our fault (natural erosion at the Carlsbad Caverns has exposed the Element as well, for instance), but the message is clear all the same.  ”It’s almost as though the Earth were striking back at us for the way we’ve robbed her of her natural resources,” Laura ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson (Kathryn Grant, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad) says early on.  Erosion be damned, Mother Nature is pissed and all of her stock footage wrath is upon us.  It’s a sentiment that places Night among the very earliest of the ecological disaster films and, in that single sense, well ahead of its time.

Predictably, a solution to the Element 112 crisis is reached before the situation becomes too catastrophic.  Conway discovers that the Element is reverted to a harmless inert state when submerged in water, leading to a poverty row public works project in which library footage from World War II works to flood the areas where the mineral menace has been exposed.  The special effects are of the usual Katzman quality, and new shots are commissioned only when vast libraries of stock shots or earlier bits from old serials were deemed insufficient.  The most impressive moment occurs rather early, when the opening title explodes off the screen – there must have been a few dollars of the budget to spare come time for the titles to be printed.

Dramatically The Night the World Exploded fluctuates between being boringly typical and unintentionally hilarious.  Romantic triangles are normal for pictures of all genres, but I’ve never seen one handled in quite the way it is here.  Scientists Conway and Hutchinson are obviously fond of each other, but Hutchinson intends to marry another man as Conway is too involved in his work.  Night leaves little doubt of which man will get the girl, as Hutch’s intended husband never appears in the film!  We learn his name (Bryant) and of Hutch’s involvement with him, but the character himself never once materializes.  By the time the sun rises over a newly-salvaged world he has been forgotten all together.  Otherwise things are pretty standard issue, with lots of meetings between scientific types and government officials to pad the brief running time.

At just under 64 minutes in length, The Night the World Exploded doesn’t overstay its welcome, and underrated director Fred F. Sears keeps things moving at a reasonable clip while providing narration as well.  Writers Jack Natteford and Luci Ward were seasoned professionals approaching the end of their lengthy careers, just the kind of people Katzman was fond of hiring.  Their work is never as lively as that of the blacklisted Bernard Gordon (who worked for Katzman credited by the name Raymond T. Marcus), but it gets the job done.  Cinematographer Benjamin H. Kline (Before I Hang) keeps everything nicely framed, not that the open matte video masters floating around show it, while music director Ross DiMaggio fills the soundtrack with familiar library cues.

No one will ever mistake The Night the World Exploded for good film making, but there’s a comfort food appeal to it for those of us who grew up on old Columbia programmers.  I certainly enjoyed it.  The studio got more than their money’s worth out of these Katzman productions, re-issuing them in double and triple bill weekend matinees well into the 60s.  It’s a pity more aren’t readily available on DVD, though Sony’s recent collections of deep catalog titles are promising to say the least.  For now Night is a rarity, though it is out there (even without resorting to bootleggers).  I say see it.


A home video release 45 years in the making – ‘Crack in the World’ coming to DVD in 2010

February 24th, 2010 | article by | No Comments »
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Color me surprised, but when a company I’ve never heard of announces that they’ve licensed titles from Paramount’s hefty catalog of previously unreleased productions it can be nothing but good news.

There is no firm street date as yet for this Olive Films DVD, just one of around 20 older Paramount properties the company intends to release by the end of the year.  And while I find it doubtful that there will be much in the way of supplemental content given past experience, this is still exceptional news for fans who have been waiting for a proper video release of the title for the past two decades or more.

You can read Wtf-Film’s review of the film here: Crack in the World (1965) dir. Andrew Marton


2012

December 16th, 2009 | article by | No Comments »
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postercompany: Columbia Pictures
year: 2009
runtime: 158′
country: United States
director: Roland Emmerich
cast: John Cusack, Amanda Peet,
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton,
Oliver Platt, Thomas McCarthy,
Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover
writers: Roland Emmerich
and Harald Kloser
cinematographer: Dean Semler
out in wide release

Warning: This article probably contains some spoilers.


Plot: An increase in solar activity coupled with a rare galactic alignment showers Earth with neutrinos, heating up the core of the planet and causing its crust (and its magnetic poles) to catastrophically shift.  The world’s governments work together to preserve some semblance of humanity.

Roland Emmerich seems to have the dubious title of reigning king of the contemporary disaster genre, in spite of having only directed a few films on the subject.  His penchant for destruction on a global scale reaches dizzyingly absurd new heights in 2012, coupling a near bottomless production budget with a script that wouldn’t pass muster with a When Time Ran Out-era Irwin Allen with consistently hilarious and occasionally awe-inspiring results.

The narrative plays like a lopsided retread of the 1951 classic When Worlds Collide, only with pesky subatomic particles in the place of invading heavenly bodies.  Whereas the focus of that film was on the vast public works project to construct the humanity-saving space ark, 2012 zeros in on the disaster early and often – the ground quakes and oceans rise while familiar edifices of civilization crumble into oblivion.

Throughout Emmerich strives to retain a sense of immediacy, with the action revolving primarily about a broken family (Cusak, Peet, and McCarthy as a father, mother, and stepfather, with two preteen kids along for good measure) and their journey to save themselves.  That the father, a part-time chauffeur for a rich Russian and a full-time writer, has penned and published an under-appreciated apocalyptic science fiction novel with an optimistic conclusion ensures us that all the principle players will make it through just fine.  The catastrophe even offers up an opportunity to put Cusack and Peet’s marriage back on track, offing step-dad as soon as it’s expedient to the plot.

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Providing a secondary view on things is a government scientist (Ejiofor) with a kind heart an eye for the President’s daughter (Thandie Newton).  We also, briefly, glimpse things from the prospective of the President himself (an unlikely Danny Glover), himself lost when the USS John F. Kennedy comes tearing across the lawn of the White House.  Woody Harrelson even pops up in a minor but important supporting role as a crackpot radio host who just happens to know where Cusack and co. can find safety.

Most of 2012‘s drama falls pretty flat, from the forumlaic broken-family fantasy (the wife really still loves her old husband in spite of having remarried) to a half dozen or so people who realize too late that family ties are all that matter.  Characters plainly aren’t, with the accomplished cast struggling to provide them with any dimensionality at all, and most ultimately wind up as fodder for the apocalypse.  Here Emmerich presents with a certain cruelty, allowing numerous individuals to think they’ve reached salvation only to have the tables immediately turn on them.

In fact, there’s a nasty streak running through much of the destruction on display in 2012.  Emmerich takes obvious glee in plunging millions, even billions of people to their assorted dooms, including a pair of old ladies he sends crashing head-first into a wall for the minor sin of being in front of our escaping heroes.  Worse, he seems to want things both ways – tugging at our heartstrings with sad music and teary close-ups between shots of people trying to survive in torrents of debris before widening his scope so that we might revel in the shear spectacle of the thing.  It’s an uneasy combination, and one Emmerich isn’t nearly competent enough to pull off.  He’d have been better off forgetting such obvious attempts at garnering audience sympathy and just presenting his thrill-ride apocalypse for what it is – pure exploitation.

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Emmerich also seems to have a particular bent against the rich and powerful, apparently having realized that public opinion of both is scraping the bottom of the barrel in this time of recession.  The sentiment is no different than in the George Pal classic 2012 so obviously emulates.  The rich are condemned just for being so, even though the literal arks that save whatever is left of mankind are financed in large part by private backers.  That age-old government conspiracy subplot also rears its ugly head, and it takes our kind-hearted scientist to convince world leaders (all of them!) that they should do the right thing and save as many people as they can.

While the drama simmers at a low level throughout the rest of the narrative twists itself into impossible knots of contrivances.  We see not one, but three last-minute edge-of-your-seat plane takeoffs of the Independence Day variety, the outrunning of a pyroclastic flow by an RV, and even the shifting of an entire continent some thousands of miles just so our family can make it there reasonably unscathed.  The crowining absurd moment comes at the end, when an ark is threatened by a collision with a mountain.  What mountain, you ask?  Why Everest, of course!  In a film like this, no lesser peak will do.

I could gripe about this picture all day, but I won’t, because I was so damned entertained in spite of it all.  The expansive CGI work has been credited as “photo-realistic” by some, which is utter baloney, but that doesn’t keep it from being a world of fun just the same – it’s certainly one hell of a cartoon.  2012 explodes Yellowstone, sinks California, and wipes the rest of the world clean with gargantuan tsunamis before it hits the two hour mark.  It may struggle for momentum in the ark-bound final act out of a shear lack of more destroy, but memory of what came before is more than enough to pull one through to the end of things.

For Emmerich the world is obviously not enough (perhaps we’ll get a cataclysm on a galactic scale next go around).  I may lament its furthering of the popularity of the asinine doom-sayer lunacy surrounding the year in question, but I enjoyed 2012 for what it is – the kind of dumb loud entertainment only a hack like Emmerich can get away with (and he has, again, handily).  Art it isn’t, but recommended matinée viewing?  Absolutely.

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The End of the World

December 5th, 2009 | article by | No Comments »
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postera.k.a. Verdens Undergang
company: Nordisk Film Co.
year: 1916
runtime: 77′
country: Denmark
director: August Blom
cast: Olaf Fonss, Ebba Thomson,
Johanne Fritz-Petersen, Alf Blutecher,
Thorleif Lund, Frederick Jacobson,
K. Zimmerman, Carl Lauritzen
writer: Otto Rung
not on home video in the USA
order this film (double feature with A Trip
to Mars, 1918) from the Edition Filmmuseum Shop

Plot: A newly discovered comet enters the Earth’s atmosphere and destroys Europe.

The Danish Film Institute has restored a wealth of silent treasures over the past few years, including the odd 1918 science fiction adventure A Trip to Mars and the Titanic-inspired 1913 drama Atlantis among others, and released them to DVD with both the original Danish and translated English intertitles.  DFI’s 2006 restoration of August Blom’s The End of the World is a revelation, showing that cinema’s fascination with destruction on a cosmic scale is almost as old as the medium itself.

Comparisons between Blom’s film, inspired by the devestation of World War I (still raging at the time) and the recent panic surrounding the reappearence of Halley’s Comet in 1910, and Abel Gance’s unfinished La Fin du Monde, which went into production some 12 years later, are too tempting to resist.  The basic narratives of both films are quite similar, and involve a young woman stolen from her impoverished lover by a wealthy man who takes advantage of an Earth-threatening crisis to strike it rich in the stock market (which crashes in both as well).  Each also ends with a spectacular display of destruction, in both cases caused by the near passage of a comet.  Missing here are the hefty dollops of socio-political and religious subtext present in the Gance picture which, though never completed, saw release in France and American in 1931 and 1934 respectively.

Gance credited the 1893 Camille Flammarion science fiction novel La Fin du Monde with inspiring his work, though one can’t help but wonder if he ever saw Blom’s earlier film.  On that note, it’s also entirely possible that Blom and writer Otto Rung could have been inspired in part by the Flammarion novel or even some of his odd scientific predictions.  In 1910 he was one of the proponents of the idea that poisonous gas from the tail of Halley’s Comet would “impregnate [the Earth's] atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet” (from an article here).  Yikes.

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Whoever or whatever inspired which film, The End of the World is a great time regardless.  The story concerns a family, a father and two sisters, living in a mining town.  Dina (Ebba Thomson) is betrothed to miner Flint (Thorleif Lund), but is whisked from her hometown and into the lap of luxury by the exorbinantly wealthy and devoted Stoll (Olaf Fonss) before they can be married.  Her aging father curses her betrayal of the family name, refusing to forgive her transgression even on his death bed.  Sister Edith (Johanne Fritz-Peterson) is happier with small town life, and falls for seaman Reymers (Alf Blutecher).  Years go by, with Dina living in the city with Stoll, who has become even more successful, and Edith patiently watching as Reymers moves up the chain of command to become First Mate.

Things get complicated when Professor Wisemann, a cousin of Stoll, discovers a new comet and calculates its Earth-bound trajectory.  The discovery and its potentially disastrous ramifications cause panic, and the stock market collapses.  Stoll, sensing an incredible opporutnity, buys up as many shares as he can, then bribes the editor of The Times into reporting that the comet poses no danger – even as it becomes visible to the naked eye.  The stock market rises, Stoll collects, and the couple returns to the mining town for a ritzy party (not nearly so risque as Gance’s upper-class orgy, though there is a floor show) before doomsday.  Flint, frustrated with his lower-class lifestyle and still angry with Stoll for stealing his bride-to-be, organizes a mob and attacks the party, tragically killing his beloved Dina in the process.  The comet arrives shortly thereafter, unleashing all manner of havoc and killing both Stoll and Flint in dramatic fashion.

The End of the World shifts gears towards the uplifting immediately after the comet’s rampage is concluded.  Only Edith and a priest survive from the mining town, though Edith’s lover Reymers has survived at sea.  The heartwarming conclusion sees Edith and Reymers reunited, drawn to each other by church bells.  Just what future they have in amidst all the devestation is unclear, though the ending image of the couple knealing and looking heavenwards assures us that the humble will be rewarded for their suffering now that all the wicked have perished (okay, so maybe there’s a little religious subtext, but it is the end of the world).

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August Blom’s direction is typical of the time period, meaning every scene is captured from a single camera with a bit of horizontal shifting if necessary.  The most interesting moments come when Blom is forced off set and on location, as when Stoll is surveying a mine or Reymers is out to sea.  It is at these times, under less controlled circumstances, that he and his crew were forced to be more creative with generally excellent results.  Credit is certainly due for Blom’s apt handling of the lengthy destruction sequences here.  The production’s budget was obviously of the higher order, and most of the effects on display are of the full-scale variety.  Buildings burn, fire rains from the sky, and the sea rises to engulf the low ground, with people scurrying in all directions in an attempt to survive.  It’s all rather impressive, even in this age of no-holds-barred computer wizardry.

The Danish Film Institute’s restoration of The End of the World is excellent, far better than I would have anticipated for an obscure film of this vintage.  Presented on a double-feature DVD with the strange but loveable A Trip to Mars, The End of the World is transferred in the original full frame ratio with dual-language Danish and English intertitles and fine piano accompaniment by Ronen Thalmay.  The disc’s PAL encoding may prove troublesome for some, but all of you readers under the NTSC standard should have a region and code-free DVD setup by now anyway (trust me, if I can afford it you can afford it).  There are no extras, but this package is well worth picking up for the two films alone.

The End of the World was a wonderful surprise for this reviewer, who hasn’t seen nearly as many silent films as he rightfully should have at this point.  It may be melodramatic and antiquated and even a little bit silly, but its apocalyptic end reel still makes for compelling viewing over 90 years later.  Highly recommended.

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Night of the Comet

July 23rd, 2009 | article by | No Comments »
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Atlantic Releasing [1984] 96′
country: United States
director: Thom Eberhardt
cast: Robert Beltran, Catherine Mary
Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Sharon
Ferrell, Mary Waranov, Geoffrey
Lewis, Peter Fox, John Achorn
Order this film from Amazon.com
This review is part of the CHRISTMAS
IN JULY ’09 B-movie roundtable,
hosted by yours truly.

It’s Christmas time in Los Angeles, but precious few people are around to celebrate after a mysterious comet [whose last approach was at the time of the great dinosaur extinction] does a close fly-by and turns most of the animal life on the planet – us included – into calcium dust.  Those who received only partial exposure to the comet’s rays are rotting to dust as well, in a process that turns them, for however short a time, into dangerous flesh-hungry zombies.

Surviving the apocalypse are trucker Hector [Beltran] and valley girls Regina [Stewart] and Samantha [Maroney], the latter of whom received basic combat training from their military-minded father.  Such training comes in handy when the group encounters zombie children, zombie homeless men, and mall-bound zombie stock boys with more than promotion to upper management on their minds.  A band of scientists tucked away in the desert soon present themselves and begin helping the survivors, but their intentions prove more menacing than meets the eye.  The burden of society rests on the shoulders of our three young heroes – can they out-live the zombies, out-smart the scientists, and jumpstart a new and groovier civilization?  Like, totally!

I really, really love this, one of the last great hurrahs of the late 70′s / early 80′s surge of films made out of admiration for the B-movie sci-fi and horror programmers of old.  NIGHT OF THE COMET wears its inspirations on its sleeves, with the disaster itself reminding of Wyndham’s DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS and the barren Los Angeles [as well as our heroes' temporary radio station housing] is evocative of THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL.  The dust that the comet leaves behind is reminiscent of THE DAY MARS INVADED EARTH, especially when we see it swept away by rain.  A rare 3-D print of IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE even figures prominently into the early third of the narrative.

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But the screenplay, by director Thom Eberhardt [who had written and directed the spooky and underrated SOLE SURVIVOR the previous year], also pays considerable lip service to George Romero and the two zombie pictures he had made up to that point.  When Hector first appears, he relates a story in much the same vein as Duane Jones’ from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, and the zombie child he later encounters is of a similar ilk as the two Ken Foree fends off in sequel DAWN OF THE DEAD.  Then, of course, there is the lengthy sequence in which Samantha and Regina amuse themselves at the local shopping mall . . .

Eberhardt keeps the tone of his end-of-the-world story remarkably up-beat – the world-wide disaster is nothing short of a dream come true for the valley girl protagonists, and even Hector is swayed once the prospect of a nice and quiet family life presents itself.  Violence is kept off-screen for the most part [only a few obsenities push it into PG-13 territory], with the director focusing on the tongue-in-cheek humor instead of horror.   Unlike many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Eberhardt opts to define his film by the time period in which it exists – no one eyeing the fashions or hearing the multitude of pop songs on the soundtrack will ever be confused as to which decade NIGHT OF THE COMET belongs.  And that’s just fine by me.

Along with loads of popcorn entertainment value NIGHT OF THE COMET presents with considerable style.  The lengthy sequences in the scientists’ underground compound that dominate the final third of the film are composed in a particularly creative fashion and with great Bava-inspired multi-color lighting to boot.  Of all the things I was expecting when I first screened this, that it would be as well made as it turned out to be was never one of them.

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The main cast is a reasonably accomplished lot, though they weren’t all that way at the time of filming.  Robert Beltran is perhaps best remembered for his lengthy stint as Commander Chakotay on the STAR TREK: VOYAGER television series.  Catherine Mary Stewart hit it big in 1984, with leading roles in both this and THE LAST STARFIGHTER, while Kelli Maroney was fresh from playing Kimberly Harris in 174 episodes of the soap opera RYAN’S HOPE.  All three have led successful careers in television in film and continue to perform today.  Writer / director Eberhardt has done reasonably well for himself, though his last major film was the 1992 comedy CAPTAIN RON.

NIGHT OF THE COMET itself has enjoyed something of a rediscovery in recent years, thanks largely to MGM releasing the rental store staple to DVD in March of 2007.  While bare bones to the max, the inexpensive disc does present the film in a reasonable 1.85:1 anamorphically enhanced and progressive transfer.  While the film deserves better treatment, the relatively low price [$7.99 at Amazon as of this writing] makes it a desirable release all the same.  The captures for this review were taken from a DVD-R I recorded from the MGM HD channel in April – here’s hoping the fine HD master makes its way to Blu-ray at some point down the line, though I won’t hold my breath.

A serious rumination on life after the apocalypse this definitely isn’t, but as witty sci-fi and horror lite entertainment it’s tough to beat.  Who knew that the end of the world could be so fun?  NIGHT OF THE COMET comes highly recommended, and the MGM DVD, however sparse, is a must-buy for fans.  So what are you waiting for – Christmas?

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Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds

June 26th, 2009 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. KYORYU – KAICHO NO DENSETSU / THE ‘LEGEND OF DINOSAURS’
Toei Co. Ltd [1977] 92′
country: Japan
director: JUNJI KURATA
cast: TSUNEHIKO WATASE, NOBIKO SAWA,
cast: SHOTARO HAYASHI, TOMOKO KIYOSHIMA

Many many years ago, in a time long since passed when Blockbuster Video had more to offer its humble customers than the multiple copies of the latest Hollywood garbage, I stumbled upon a curious and forbidden film. The offending video had a rather crude drawing of a large Plesiosaurus [with an abnormally proportioned head] toting a woman about by the leg. In the background was an exploding volcano and, high above it, a flying reptile of some kind. The title on the video box read LEGEND OF THE DINOSAURS, and I knew right away that I had to see it.

I was very young at the time, no older than five or six and, as it tended to at the time, parental discretion won out over my naive curiosity. For years I ran the gamut of other available dinosaur classics; THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT [1975], THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT [1977], THE LAST DINOSAUR [1977], THE CRATER LAKE MONSTER [1977... feeling a trend?], DINOSAURUS! [1960], and THE LAND UNKNOWN [1957] along with the entirety of available GAMERA offerings. But my interests kept turning back to the mysterious film with the blue box. That my parents refused to allow me to see it must have meant that there were goodies within well worth seeing – so my childish mind concluded, at least.

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Fukkatsu no Hi – Virus

May 27th, 2009 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. VIRUS / DAY OF RESURRECTION
Haruki Kadokawa Films [1980] 155′
country: Japan
director: KINJI FUKASAKU
cast: MASAO KUSAKARI, BO SVENSON, OLIVIA HUSSEY,
cast: CHUCK CONNERS, GEORGE KENNEDY, GLENN FORD,
cast: ROBERT VAUGHN, EDWARD JAMES OLMOS, HENRY SILVA
Order this film from AMAZON.COM

VIRUS is a big movie – in fact, it’s a very big movie. Perhaps not quite so big as the flamboyant producer behind it [Haruki Kadokawa, heir to the Kadokawa publishing empire, who was rather publicly busted for drug smuggling in 1993], but close. Concocted as an internationally marketable exercise in Hollywood-ian excess, VIRUS carried with it a gigantic multi-national cast and the biggest budget ever to grace a Japanese film up to that point. That it was overseen by one of the hottest Japanese directors of the time [Kinju Fukasaku; BATTLE ROYALE, BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR OR HUMANITY, UNDER THE FLAG OF THE RISING SUN] was just the proverbial icing on the cake. In spite of a massive advertising campaign, VIRUS was a failure both domestically and abroad.

It’s treatment in America has proven particularly poor over the past three decades. The 108′ international version initially made rounds on television and home video via Media Home Entertainment [fittingly, one of the biggest of the early home video companies]. Since then its rights have seemingly come into question, with innumerable gray-market ‘public domain’ VHS and DVD issues [many of which cut the film further].

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Crack in the World

August 28th, 2008 | article by | 1 Comment »
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Paramount [1965] 96′
country: United Kingdom
director: ANDREW MARTON
cast: DANA ANDREWS, JANETTE SCOTT,
cast: KIERON MOORE, ALEXANDER KNOX

There are a multitude of films that I recall seeing as a child, but only a few that have managed to really stick with me over the years. MIRACLE MILE [1988] is one, THE GIANT CLAW [1957] another.

I only saw CRACK IN THE WORLD once as a child – I was at my grandmother’s house watching it on AMC (it had an introduction by Nick Clooney if memory serves). It’s amusing to think that, even though the special effects and score have stuck with me to this day, the most prominent memory I have of that viewing was my grandmother patronizing me about the on-screen kiss between Janette Scott and Dana Andrews. It’s funny how the mind works . . .

It would take ten years and the blossoming of the eBay bootleg VHS revolution for me to find the film again and finally add it to my home video collection (I had missed its only other subsequent local airing when my VCR failed to record it). In spite of the horrid quality of the VHS I managed to procure, CRACK IN THE WORLD the experience of seeing the film again – I watched it at around 3 in the morning, just before heading off to a rather early work shift – was certainly a good one. It had definitely been worth the wait.

Dr. Steven Sorenson (Andrews) is a brilliant geophysicist on the verge of the breakthrough of his career – Project Inner Space, whose goal is to tap the near limitless potential of the magma beneath the Earth’s crust, is his brain child. Unfortunately the project has hit a snag – the drilling that had been so successful up to this point has been stopped in its tracks by an unknown variable. In order to complete the project, Sorenson decides to use a thermonuclear weapon to burn through the remaining crust. It’s up to an international consortium of scientists, politicians, and military men – the representatives of the money backing the project – to decide whether or not to go ahead with the new plan, which Sorenson insists will be a ostensibly benign event.

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Prophecies of Nostradamus: Catastrophe 1999

April 22nd, 2008 | article by | 4 Comments »
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a.k.a. Nosutoradamusu no Daiyogen / The Last Days of Planet Earth
company: Toho Co. Ltd
year: 1974
runtime: 114′
country: Japan
director: Toshio Masuda
cast: Tetsuro Tamba, Toshio Kurosawa,
KaoriuYumi, Yoko Tsukasa
not on home video

I was in sixth grade when I first saw the film reviewed herein, and it scared the hell out of me. For weeks thence my mind was tormented by absurd visages of weeds pummeling their way through concrete subway tunnels and of mammoth bats swooping out of the skies – drug addled teenagers, volcanic disturbances, and nuclear disaster all followed suit. It was a strange time and the first, I’ll admit, that I began taking environmental concerns seriously.

Even at that age I had realized, perhaps better than most adults viewing the same film today would, that THE LAST DAYS OF PLANET EARTH was a “message” picture. That message was scrawled in bold across its 88 minutes, using scenes of disaster on a global scale as ink, and I read it well. “All of this is your fault,” it said, and I believed it.

THE LAST DAYS OF PLANET EARTH had quite a long and troubled journey to my sixth grade eyes. It began as Toho Studios’ answer to the overwhelming popularity of the superior disaster effort, SUBMERSION OF JAPAN, in 1973. Always quick to make a buck on the next big craze, Toho rushed into production a sequel in theme only – this time the world would be their playground. Taking the resurgance in popularity of supposed-seer Nostradamus into account and bankrolling the talent of GODZILLA VS. THE SMOG MONSTER director Yoshimitsu Banno as writer and assistant director ensured that the resulting film would be original at the very least.

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