Iceberg Arena: The Worst Sci-Fi Musicals

Today’s Iceberg Arena will be something of a reversal of the usual system. Instead of trying to decide which of two or more films is the best, the winner will be the one I deem worst. This inversion should not be taken to imply that I don’t like science-fiction musicals – quite the opposite – but merely that the hybrid has produced some bizarre and dreadful messes. Even as I enjoy laughing at these failures, I sympathize with their eccentricity and ambition.

“Rocky Horror Picture Show” (1975) is perhaps the only SF musical that the general movie-going public remembers, and it has certainly become the archetype of cult success that later films try to emulate. Its fame is pretty deserving in my mind, as much of the music is actually pretty catchy and the set pieces keep up with the psychotic, but inspired, narrative. “Little Shop of Horrors” (1986) also enjoys a major cult following and at least some popular awareness, though I find the humor a bit strained. Time has been less kind to "Willie McBean and His Magic Machine" (1965), a time-travelling stop-motion children's musical adventure by Rankin/Bass (creators of perennial TV Christmas specials) that has never seen an official release, perhaps due to its constant racial insensitivity.

Other than these, my favorites would have to be “American Astronaut” (2001), an idiosyncratic SF western musical that I’ve talked about before, and “Privilege” (1967), a darkly satiric rock opera about the music industry, celebrity stardom and the marketing of rebellion. If you're looking for films that are actually worth seeing, there you go. But if you are just dying to get to the driveliest drivel, skip ahead to the first contestant.

SF musicals have seen a recent spike in activity during the last decade. Daft Punk has created two, the animated “Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem” (2003) and the less well-received “Electroma” (2006). 2006 also saw the release of Richard Kelly’s (“Donnie Darko”) sophomore film, the semi-musical SF comedy epic “Southland Tales.” Despite being inducted into the pantheon of notorious rejections during its Cannes festival premier, I’m almost fond of the overcast, schizophrenic behemoth.

2008 brought us three movies that at least partially qualify. Joss Whedon’s delightfully lightweight break from the writer’s strike, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” manages to be quick, clever and amusing. The Flaming Lips put together “Christmas on Mars,” which isn’t quite a musical but features the band and includes their instrumental tracks. The biggest budget entry of the year was “Repo! The Genetic Opera,” which was a rousing piece of hypergothic indulgence and gallows humor despite being overhyped and too unabashedly manufactured.

Most of the films above have their share of detractors (and often that share is a controlling interest), but all save one were cut in the preliminary tryouts for worst SF musical. The finalists are “Toomorrow” (1970), “Space Is the Place” (1974), “The Apple” (1980) and “Electroma” (2006).

Toomorrow

8 years before “Grease” (1978), Australian pop star Olivia Newton-John starred in “Toomorrow” (1970), a film easily worse than even “Xanadu” (1980), albeit one that was more successfully covered up (its only release was in Japan and on Laserdisc). Toomorrow features a dying race of aliens who secretly come to Earth seeking a source of life-saving vibrations. They ultimately determine that the upbeat groove of hippy band Toomorrow, led by Newton-John, can save their species, and so they hatch a largely benevolent kidnapping scheme. Their needlessly elaborate interferes with the band include fashioning an alien bimbo and abducting an entire concert venue, with supposedly funny high jinks ensuing.

“Toomorrow’s” attempt to build a youth culture phenomenon around a prefab pop group is hilariously unhip, but thankfully devoid of the smug insincerity and ubiquitous product placement of our Hannah Montana generation. The characters are all bubbling fountains of unrestrained optimism plagued only by difficulty balancing their time between girlfriends and band practice and dealing with an anti-fun school principal. There are times when they’re almost endearing, but their dialogue is just too flat and stereotyped. The clunky overuse of slang dates not only the film, but the true age of the producers.

The plot sputters along slowly, with far too much time spent repeating the same alien “special effects” and tame sexual comedy (think beach movies). The music is so naïve and inconsequential that one could never accept the assertion that it’s either life-giving or unique in all the universe, but it’s not without its peppy charm. More variety of tracks could have helped, but the story is awkwardly structured (the band’s inability to find a time or place to play is a key plot element) for a films that supposed to be about music.

Perhaps the kitschiest moment occurs aboard the alien spacecraft, where the band members briefly transform into toddler versions of themselves during a “time and space” musical number.

Space Is the Place

In the near-future 1970’s Afro-psychedelic musician-messiah Sun Ra lands his spaceship, The Intergalactic Solar Arkestra, on a vibrant jungle world. He claims the planet as the new home for the African-American people and returns to Earth to spread his invitation through music. While building a media empire to recruit passengers, he must do battle with The Overseer, a pimp in league with the white oligarchy and the evil embodiment of African-American social ills. The struggle is reflected in a real world crime feud and a metaphorical game of space-age tarot cards. After the inevitable concert finale, Sun Ra takes the souls he has saved and abandons the Earth, which promptly explodes.

Sun Ra’s enormous ornamental headpieces and symbolic space-age imagery create a distinctively alternative vision that was as much about philosophy as music, but it’s largely hampered by the rock bottom production values and uninspired blaxploitation hokiness. The plot starts out high in guts and inspiration, but only drags under the weight of its many digressions and oversimplifications, petering out quickly and turning the final chapters into a death march.

Sun Ra’s music is a free-ranging variety of jazz futurism and traditional African instrumentation. For many it will be a highlight of the film, but the recording is so poor and tracks so crudely integrated into the plot that it’s hard to appreciate.

The fact that Sun Ra takes his distorted African-separatist mythmaking so seriously is at once the downfall of his film and the essence of its reincarnation as camp. Though it may have been intended to develop a real cult, it has at least succeeded in gaining a bemused following.

The Apple

Alphie and Bibi, a folk music duo from Moose Jaw, Canada almost win a glam rock megaconcert contest with their earnest, heartfelt tunes, but for the manipulation of Mr. Boogalow and his fascist corporation, Boogalow International Music (BIM). Determined to keep his brand of pulsating hypnotic disco at the top of the charts, Mr. Boogalow signs a contract with the country bumpkins and attempts to convert their image into that of his other mindless celebrity puppets. Bibi is duped, but Alphie manages to stage an uprising of homeless peaceniks (bad choice for an army as it turns out). The autocratic BIM brutally suppresses them and appears to reign supreme until the kids are saved at the last minute by God, who drives in and parades them up to heaven.

“The Apple” is a hopeless mess of overdone religious allegory, B-movie SF kitsch, self-conscious trippiness and laughable lyrics and choreography. The musical confuses shiny fabric for futuristic costuming, airport escalators for set design, pop culture silliness for social commentary and ostentatious strutting for a moral message. Still, the films seems largely self-aware of its ridiculousness and occasionally gets laughs that it was probably going for. Perennial Russian villain Vladek Sheybal (as Mr. Boogalow), seems clearly in on the joke, chewing the scenery with mad-eyed grinning gusto and ignoring the screenplay as it combusts around him.

The music manages to be bad in two genres, giving us reason to gag at the sappy folk music of our dumbly unsympathetic heroes and the mind-numbing beat-based loops of the equally brain-dead villains. The choreography never shies away from acting out any idiot idea expressed in the lyrics, leading to delightfully tacky music numbers in garish outfits. The coup de grace is the little silver diamonds that everyone has stuck to their foreheads, apparently just one more way to cram additional sparkles into the cinematography.

Electroma

The usually reliable Daft Punk takes to the screen for the second time in this ambiguous dialogue-free tale of two robots on a quest to achieve humanity. Their initial attempt, immersing their heads in grotesque masks of synthetic sludge, culminates in a disastrous chase through the robot suburbs as the beating sun melts off their faces. Later they set off into the desert where emptiness and desperation lead them to perform excruciating slow-motion suicides.

Band members Peter Hurteau and Michael Reich exercise their talent for visual panache, but prove that music video sensibilities don’t always translate to the big screen. The creators have about 12 minutes worth of rather abstract ideas (not coincidentally, the length of about 3 music videos), none of which can sustain a story. Stretched out to 74 minutes these ideas don’t deserve our attention even wrapped in Daft Punk’s stirringly dream-like beauty. Almost every sequence begins by proffering a signature set of stylized images, but then immediately settles back and lazily cuts between them through endless stagnant refrains of music.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the music were actually by Daft Punk, but the assortment of sweeping tone poems by various musicians is lacking in direction, cohesion and interest. Some judicious cutting could have saved us from the opening highway montage and one particularly “yeah, we get it” sequence comparing sand dunes to a nude body. In truth, initiating a solid round of editing would have quickly whittled the film down to a handful of cool photos to use on a CD insert, but nothing even quite at the level of their music videos for “Around the World” and “Da Funk.”


Conclusion:

Honorable Mention: The Apple.
The so-bad-its-good quality of “The Apple” strikes just the right balance of incidental and intentional humor, with enough highlights and surprises that making it to the end isn’t a masochistic chore. Critics rightly hated on it, but I was still joking about the film in high spirits and mockingly singing the songs days after seeing it.

3rd Place: Toomorrow.
Failure has nearly scratched the memory of Toomorrow from the face of the Earth, but its badness is really more quaint than monumental. It has moments where it’s actually rather cute, helped by Olivia Newton-John’s good-natured persona, when it’s not being sexist and obsequious. It gets last place for poster art.

2nd Place: Space Is the Place
A consummate misfire, “Space Is the Place” only manages to survive its many mistakes by being fascinatingly crazy. The deranged SF intrusions are like little sparks of life in a cemetery of dead scenes uncomfortably exhumed from our cultural past.

1st Place: Electroma
Perhaps because it is the most finely-crafted of the contest entries, Electroma fails to find redemption in its own tragic hubris. One day enough time may pass for Electroma to join the other films as amusing retro camp, but it will still have too much boring pretentiousness (which doesn’t age well) holding back the blindly ambitious pretentiousness (which I admire).

Iceberg Arena: The Cat Countdown Part II

This is the second part of a three part series counting down the best animated cat movies I’ve seen. The final part will feature canine and rodent cinema.


5. Night on the Galactic Railroad (1985)

“Night on the Galactic Railroad” adapts freely from the novel by the pre-war Buddhist writer Kenji Miyazawa about the poor son of sick mother, Giovanni, and his mysterious train voyage across the stars with his best friend Campanella. The galactic railroad takes them through themed constellation stations full of surreal landmarks and eccentric passengers, including a man who harvests herons for candy and the ghostly souls of the sunken Titanic. Giovanni begins to suspect that the train is taking Campanella to afterlife (the Southern Cross), a fear that is confirmed when he wakes up on Earth alone and learns that Campanella drowned during the night’s moon festival while saving the school bully.

Director Sugii’s lugubrious religious allegory unsettled fans of the original work who weren’t expecting the characters to be cats (an artistic choice never explained) and confused those unfamiliar with the novella (amongst them, me) even more. It doesn’t help that the chapter titles are given in Esperanto and the thick symbolism is at once heavy-handed (prepare yourself for a bevy of crosses) and inscrutable (what the hell is with the bird candy guy?). Yet what emerges from the gentle dreamlike flow of the adventure is a mature and emotionally resonant tale about a brave child’s imagination, curiosity, friendship and loss. The low-on-action pacing and atmospheric spiritualism hasn’t been welcomed by fans of conventional American or Japanese anime, but I find it, along with “Angel Egg,” to be a worthwhile experiment.

4. The Cat Returns (2002)

Ghibli’s semi-sequel to “Whisper of the Hearts” (of which “The Cat Returns” is something of a story-within-a-story) is a light-hearted fantasy about a schoolgirl named Haru who can understand cats. One day she instinctively saves the life of a cat in danger and learns that he’s the prince of Cat Kingdom. Amongst the many rewards she’d prefer to reject are dead mice and a marriage proposal that leaves both parties unhappy. A mysterious voice advises Haru to seek out the Baron, a cat statue come to life, and Muta, an obese feline rogue, to save her from transforming into a cat and losing her stake in the human world.

Like with other Ghibli films, especially the kid-friendly “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” this film is warm-hearted, sincere and appropriate for pretty much all ages. The plot can be a little too cute for its own good, but the characters are well-realized enough to add a necessary grounding in realism. It also helps that the visuals are so strong, with Ghibli’s trademark eye for detail, color and light bringing to life Japanese suburbs, Victorian alleys and magical kingdoms.

3. Cats Don’t Dance (1997)

Danny, a song-and-dance tomcat hoping to make it big in Golden Era Hollywood, steps on the shoes of Darla Dimple, “Hollywood’s Sweetheart,” when he improvise on his single line (“Meow”) while an extra in her star vehicle. He’s immediately blacklisted, framed in a studio disaster and rejected even by the other would-be sensations whose dreams have also been crushed by humanity’s lack of interest in animal stars. Though initially depressed, Danny contrives to stage a massive musical comeback that wallows gleefully in garish “final number” excess.

Warner Brother’s underappreciated gem was strangled in the cradle by executives who doubted its potential (much like in the plot), cutting off marketing funds and limiting the release. They managed to lock in a box office failure for themselves, which is sad given the film’s success as a self-aware throwback to classical feel-good backstage musicals and its polished “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” type wit. It walks the line drawn by Pixar, whereby the film appeals to kids with its bright colors, catchy tunes and non-stop action while amusing adults with razor-sharp studio-era references (Darla Dimple, a sadistically villainous Shirley Temple, is especially memorable). At least director Mark Dindal was able to go on and make Disney’s equally delightful anomaly “The Emperor’s New Groove.”

2. The Cat Who Walked By Herself (1988)

This obscure Russian film caught me by surprise. It’s an adaptation of a Rudyard Kipling pourquoi story (short origin tales that take the format “how the leopard got his spots” or the like). It’s narrated in silky whisper by a house cat to a toddler who’s pulled her tail. Apparently the child forgot that thousands of years ago, humans and cats came to an agreement not to do so. Mixing stop motion, cutouts and paintings, a primal fable about cavepeople’s evolution and dependence on animals unfolds, with the cat providing wry commentary.

Intricate constructions and an eclectic art design make this one of the most visually arresting cat films ever made, though few have even heard of it. It also manages to capture the personality of cats and the sense that they see themselves not as pets, but as masters of their domain (unlike dogs or horse, food and scratches behind the ears only buy temporary loyalty). Like in many of Kipling’s other writings, the atmosphere of unfathomable magic and exotic creatures foregrounds nature as an exciting power to be reckoned with and humanity as gruff interlopers in over their heads. The occasionally drab character designs and use of ritual repetition are notable flaws, but the craft, originality and wisdom behind the production won my admiration.

1. Felidae (1994)

Soon after arriving in a new apartment building with his owner, Francis begins to investigate a series of brutal sex murders in the neighborhood. His amateur sleuthing turns up a viscous gang, a deadly cult, a blind beauty, a brilliant technophile, a secret catacomb, feral femme fatales and evidence of an unethical research program carried out years ago that may hold the key behind it all. The closer he gets to the truth, the more bodies pile up around him, but the crafty killer is clearly playing a larger high-stakes game destined to force Francis into choosing between his mind and his morals. Felidae, by the way, is the scientific name for the family of cats.

The sinuous noir plot is the best on the list by far, with metaphoric implications that stretch from Nazi war crimes to modern scientific debates. Its dark tone, unsparing imagery and mature subject matter was a major risk for an animated film (Germany’s most expensive), but Akif Pirinçci source novel ensured an artistic pedigree high enough to pay off in its niche market. The animation is also stellar, aiming for realism (nailing cat mannerisms and their social hierarchy) to create real tension and intrigue. I’m not too sure about the title track by Boy George, but overall this is THE cat film to see.

Next week, top ten countdowns for animated dog and mice movies.

Iceberg Arena: The Ten Lives of Cartoon Cats Part I

This is the first part of a three part series counting down the best animated cat movies I’ve seen. The final part will feature canine and rodent cinema.

I grew up in a relatively large family and there were always pets around in case human companionship wasn’t enough. At one time or another we had fish, toads, lizards, crabs, hamsters, guinea pigs, cats (always more than one), dogs and even horses. Having experienced some breadth of the animal kingdom, I can say definitely that cats are superior to dogs. While I’d love to go into a great deal of discussion to prove this case, the internet has already done that for me.

Cinema has been rather kind to kittens over the years, featuring them frequently as minor characters, especially in horror movies where their noisome mischief often tricks the audience into thinking the killer is nearby (yes, a list of cat scares is pending). In real life, I find that it usually just means that my cat, Claws Kinski, has knocked something over in the kitchen and I have to go clean it up.

Kinski has, by and large, been less kind to cinema. She tends to ignore whatever I’m watching in favor of falling asleep or glaring across the room at me. Her reviews are only slightly less harsh Vincent Canby’s.

Less often are cats are given their due in starring roles. When they are, it tends to be in animated films where schedules and performances don’t have to rely on their admitted fussiness and fickleness. These cartoon cats are the topic of today’s Iceberg Arena Battle Royale, pitting ten animated feline flicks against each other.

I could have done a straight up top ten list, but that would imply that I actually liked all the films on the list (I’d give two of them a remorseless thumbs down) and that I’d seen more than ten (which is technically true if you include “The Lion King,” but I’m sticking to domestic cats). So instead I broke up my list and reviews into a three part Iceberg Arena, where one animated cat movie is eliminated at a time until a single winner remains.

Let the Cat Movie Countdown begin:



10. Fritz the Cat (1972)

Fritz the Cat shocked audiences in 1972 as the first X-rated animated theatrical feature. It tells of the ramblingly adventures of Fritz, a smug chauvinistic thug on the prowl for pussies across a crime-strewn USA. Fritz is cynical, exploitive and selfish, but hardly the worst element in this pessimistic satire of the turbulent 1960’s that’s filled with explicit sex, violence, bigotry and depravity. As is often the case with shock cinema, the message is confused by the inability to tell whether the film is reveling in or reviling its subject matter. The drama never manages the energy of the Angry Young Man movement from which it tears a page, while the comedy can’t get far enough past juvenile locker-room humor to effectively skewer American culture. Even Robert Crumb, writer of the source comic, disavowed the picture.

Director Ralph Bakshi may be the most important name in American independent animation, but he’s probably one of my all-time least-favorite directors. His animation is bottom of the barrel, but his intentionally grimy coloring and skill at exaggeration and grotesquerie does make for a unique and original style. His later films would repeat the formula ad nauseam and mix in ugly live-action footage to patch over the holes, never with much success. With Fritz, at least, he blazed a trail for other indie animators to follow.


9. The Aristocats (1970)

The threadbare plot of The Aristocats involves a wealthy old lady who plans to will her estate and fortune to her beloved cats, much to the dismay of her long-suffering butler Edgar. The scheming manservant slips the cats a milk mickey, scoops them into a sack and sets off to chuck them off a bridge. It really pretty grim for a Disney film, but the actually fate Edgar has planned is never clear, as he’s interrupted and the prisoners escape. The pampered cats are taken in by O’Malley the alley cat and are introduced to Paris’s bohemian scene through Scat Cat and his band of feline swingers before they return home for a predictable showdown.

It’s uncommon for even Disney to just “go through the motions” as overtly as they did with Aristocats, slapping together a boring, mechanical family feature whose premise (a musical comedy about cats in Paris) and best ideas were stolen from “Gay Purr-ee” (see #7). Nearly every aspect is bungled, especially the hokey voice-acting and the forgettable music, headlined by the anti-climactic “Everybody Wants to Be a Cat”. The sigh-inducing comic relief, which features two elderly dogs and a pair of old-maid geese (for a kid’s movie, a major portion of the supporting cast is geriatric), consumes half the film in place of plot and character development. The only really standout element is the animation, especially the beautiful background images of Paris.

8. Cat City (1986)

I mentioned “Cat City” when I rambled about Hungarian animation, and although I don’t consider it a great example, it’s still quite a bit of fun. A secret agent mouse (alright, so this maybe should’ve been counted as a mouse movie) must visit a cell of his organization in Japan to obtain a secret weapon to fight off the growing influence of the cat mafia. Along the way he outwits a whole litter of whiskered assassins who’ve rented a futuristic car for the chase. The maze of surprises and plot developments that ensue would exhaust even a lab rat.

Despite being a smash hit in Hungary and the USSR, “Cat City” never got significant play in the states, largely because of its language-based puns and references to Hungarian culture. Still, much of the humor is broad enough to be understood internationally, drawing from easily recognizable tropes like parody (James Bond in particular), cartoon violence and bumbling villains, but with a streak of more adult humor that parents might want to watch out for. The animation is probably the biggest weak point, with the style feeling dated and rushed.

7. Gay Purr-ee (1962)

Eight years before the Disney clone, UPA made this charming musical featuring the voice of Judy Garland as Mewsette, a housecat from the French province of Provence who is seduced by the luxuries of the Parisian leisure class. Her countrified mouse-nabbing suitor, Jaune Tom, and his boyish pal Robespierre head out in hot pursuit. They’re reunion is repeatedly foiled by Meowrice, a con artist who trains Mewsette My-Fair-Lady-style as a mail-order bride while shanghaiing the men on a ship bound for the Klondike gold rush.

UPA’s signature limited animation isn’t going to appeal to everyone, especially since it can dip a little close to Saturday morning cartoon quality. Chuck Jones’s influence is clear in the exultant bold colors and comic lack of realism, as well as the many references to high-culture literature and art (including a fabulous montage of famous paintings reimagined to star felines), not to mention cinema. Ultimately the plot remains pretty uninspired, but the music and design work still stand up.

6. Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Outer Space (2003)

This ambitious project by a two-man Japanese team follows the adventures of Tamala, an immature, foul-mouthed female cat searching the Orion constellation for her real mother in a cyberpunk future. She is stranded on a planet where the friction between cats and dogs is exploding into riots and killing sprees. Through dream sequences and museum visits she gradually awakens to her origins as an immortal corporate mascot and vengeful reincarnation of the goddess Minerva. While still unaware of her destiny, she strikes up a brief relationship with Michelangelo, who is traumatized by her apparent death and rebirth.

Gutsy, original and unconstrained by tradition, co-creators “the trees of life” construct one of the most odd and ambiguous cat cartoon yet made. The jerry-built plot bites off more than it can chew with an outline modeled after Pynchon’s postmodern tome “The Crying of Lot 49,” a tense corporate setting not far from Gibson’s “Neuromancer” and inflections from Roman mythology and modern feminism, yet I can’t help applaud the effort. The isometric black-and-white animation has a retro videogame look that feels comfortably synchronized with the bizarre mishmash of ancient, modern and futuristic iconography.

To be continued...

Iceberg Arena: Unofficial Pinocchio Sequels

[Image: I just had to lead with this picture.]

When it comes to adapting classic fairy tales, folk tales and children’s literature there’s a certain burden in knowing you’re not likely the first or the last interpretation that will hit the screen. One has to weigh how true to the original to stick, whether to modernize the setting, if it’s wise to borrow from other adaptations and so on. And then there’s always that nagging half-hope, half-doubt: will this be the definitive version? The one everyone remembers?

Disney has certainly had no end of success winning that debate in the popular conscious. They’ve made highly-praised animated adaptations that have often stood the test of time even when working from source material that had seen plenty of previous versions like “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Jungle Book,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “Aladdin.” I’m considering all of these films for potential Iceberg Arena comparisons, since I think some of the rarer alternatives are just as good or outright better, but that’s not quite what I’m up to in this post.

No, today’s focus is on a film that Disney did first, and I think best: “Pinocchio” (1940). Comparing it to any other version (Roberto Benigni’s unbearable live-action adaptation anyone?) would just not be fair without issuing handicaps. I considered featuring only sci-fi adaptations of the 1883 novel including the disastrous CG “P3K: Pinocchio the Robot” (Malcolm McDowell, if you're ever that hard up for money again, please come to me) and the love-it-or-hate-it epic “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.” Finally I decided to stick to refreshingly shameless animated unofficial sequels to the 1940 Disney classic.

Now to count as unofficial sequels these films had to be clearly set after the original story and make references to uniquely Disney elements that do not appear in the original novel. Thus the vaguely-deranged Russian animation “Pinocchio and the Golden Key” (1959) doesn’t count, because it is an original adaptation based on The Adventures of Buratino Buratino. That quasi-spinoff novel was the invention of Aleksey Tolstoy, who tried to tell his children the story of Pinocchio, but couldn’t remember how it went.

So today’s duelers are the Belgian artifact “Pinocchio in Outer Space” (1965) and Filmation’s surprisingly creepy “Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night” (1987), two films that will probably not top very many most-beloved family entertainment lists (one list they did make it onto, purportedly, was Disney’s black one). I was certainly expecting these films to be ill-conceived and bizarre (in fact, I was counting on it), but I was shocked by something else about them: I actually liked them. Seriously! Maybe it’s my love of animation, kitsch, obscurity and strangeness, but I found them to be a lot of fun.

Both films include the device of Pinocchio returning to his wooden puppet form for irresponsible misbehavior (Pinocchio in Outer Space) and taking his freedom for granted (Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night) respectively, only to go on a series of adventures to earn his humanity once again.


Pinocchio in Outer Space:

The film begins with a overdramatic ostentatious documentary-style intro about the possibilities of space, propelled by the type of unqualified optimism towards science that marked the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, complete with a bold declaration that the following story is a reconstruction of what would actually happen if a puppet boy traveled into space. This transitions into an animated sequence where the Blue Fairy and her crotchety mother – who is knitting on a pastoral plot of the Milky Way – are disturbed by the rockets and satellites that are whizzing by.

We eventually get around to the actual story, wherein Geppetto’s workshop is suffering hard times due to its low-tech toy-line (kids want rocket ships). Pinocchio, wooden once again, sees a news report about Monstro (oops, I meant Astro), a space-faring whale that is terrorizing interplanetary traffic. With only a quarter to his name, he decides to pursue the bounty on Astro in the hopes of saving Geppetto’s shop and becoming a hero worthy of being a real boy.

Not far from his home he runs into the wily fox and his feline sidekick, just as in the original. They convince him to buy a pamphlet on hypnosis written by Professor B. A. Fraud, reasoning that he can use this power to ensnare Astro. Soon after leaving his dubious pals, Pinocchio is almost crushed by a spaceship piloted by Nurtle, an alien Twurtle (not to be confused with their terrestrial cousins, turtles) who looks a lot like Jose Carioca and serves as the Jiminy Cricket surrogate.

Pinocchio and Nurtle set off for Mars where they are attacked by gigantic sand crabs and take shelter near the nuclear reactors of a derelict alien metropolis. They find laboratory setups for giantizing a whole host of desert creatures and an underground aquifer where they speculate Astro was raised before mutating and turning on his masters. However, before they can find any real answers a sandstorm nearly buries them alive and they escape mere moments before the city goes nuclear. They have little time to celebrate their escape before Astro appears, leading to a climax where Pinocchio learns that there’s more to hypnosis than shouting “You are a statue. You are a statue” over and over again.

What’s great about the plot of “Pinocchio in Outer Space” is that it seems entirely unselfconscious. There’s no hint of irony or intentional outlandishness while Pinocchio dabbles in hypnosis, traipses about on Mars, flees from alien crabs or battles a space whale. The film virtually bursts with the innocent enthusiasm of an eleven-year-old fascinated by astronomy and smitten with pulp sci-fi adventures, and this whole-hearted zest really cancels out the sickly feeling of watching a cheap rip-off.

The result is fun, kitschy and zany. I even enjoyed the dated edutainment factoids about space that are often, much to my amusement, totally incorrect. There’re also little details that make me think the writers actually enjoyed themselves. Pinocchio tries his “You are a statue” hypnotism on a trio of ducks and is pleased with his 33% success, not realizing that the bird that remained frozen is the wooden decoy of a hunter (a nice parallel to Pinocchio himself). Or take a little exchange where Nurtle expresses some skepticism about the existence of Astro, and Pinocchio argues that you’d know if he were lying because his nose would grow.

The script isn’t exactly brilliant, but it is occasionally rather ballsy and that can be a fair exchange in cult B-movies. I found it especially galling (but maybe in good way) when Nurtle, outpacing the Martian mushroom cloud behind him as they escape the abandoned city, mentions offhand that now they’ll never know who the Martians were or why they bred giant monsters. And he means it. No explanations. I’m not sure if I’m baffled by the haphazard loose-ends or impressed with the beguiling ambiguity. I’m probably happier not knowing how much of this is just poor writing.

Another pleasant surprise was the animation, which is not half-bad. Though it doesn’t really distinguish itself from or live up to the 1940 film, one can actually tell that this is a four-year labor of love. The characters are fleshed out (even Nurtle, who doesn’t have the benefit of a well-established precursor), animated with vigor and verb, and voiced with personality and affection. The backgrounds are often fairly detailed, with some standouts like the Martian metropolis and Geppetto’s workshop.

Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night:

Norm Prescott, co-director on “Pinocchio in Outer Space,” eventually helped found Filmation, a television studio most famous for its low-budget animated series based on Star Trek, He-Man, the Ghostbusters and the like. The studio would eventually venture into feature films that road on the coattails of previous classics (“Journey Back to Oz” and “Happily Ever After” being the other two), including their most ambitious: “Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night.”

The plot, seen from a distance, is really just a convoluted clone of the original set one year later and with some throwaway subplots, a love interest and an evil supervillain. Actually, that does make it pretty different...

Pinocchio and Geppetto are revisited by the Blue Fairy, who lectures about the importance of free will and brings to life Pinocchio’s toy glow worm Gee Willikers to be his conscience. No mention is made of Jiminy Cricket, more likely because of rights issues (Filmation was beleaguered by Disney lawyers throughout the production) than an acknowledgement of crickets’ three-month life spans. Pinocchio then sets out to deliver a valuable jewel box, only to be waylaid and conned by a sly raccoon and his monkey stooge (Honest John and Gideon in the original), getting him grounded that night when Geppetto finds out.

The film really gets going after Pinocchio violates his probation to go set things right, heading off to recover the jewel box. He is drawn to a carnival that enticed him the previous day and falls in love with a marionette named Twinkle who puts on a salacious performance while singing about running away from your parents doing whatever you want (upping the double-layers of the 1940’s “I’ve Got No Strings” with a clever triple-meaning refrain line “No one to hold me”). Afterwards, Pinocchio sneaks backstage and is kidnapped by the organ-grinding puppet-master Puppetino (who acts so much like a rapist that the scene never aired on TV) in what surely ranks amongst the most disturbing scenes in an animated children’s film.

With the help of Gee Willikers and the Blue Fairy, Pinocchio escapes, but learns from the still-scheming con artists that the jewel box is now in the dexterous hands of Puppetino. He riverboats down to find the carnival’s next stop, but is swallowed by a whale and entered the empire of the night, a ghostly world of fantasies and nightmares. There he visits the Land Where Dreams Come True and engages in a showdown with the four-armed demon lord The Emperor of the Night.

Perhaps the film’s most notorious scene is at the Land Where Dreams Come True, which actually exceeds the equivalent Pleasure Island in the original (where Pinocchio is transformed into a Donkey during a night of revelry). “Empire of the Night” goes even further, trippier and more terrifying. After entering a night club called the Neon Cabaret full of unlimited toys, Pinocchio indulges in mugs of absinthe, hallucinates that the leering faces around him are melting and then engages in a psychotropic self-indulgent disco dancing duet with Twinkle that involves spinning around on rainbows discs across abstract lightshow patterns while Playboy silhouettes composed of stars frolic around him.

This surreal euphoric high is followed immediately by the confrontation with the satanic demon villain, in a one-two mood-swing punch that probably spawned a lot of nightmares in young viewers. In the end he must escape the sinking ship (who knew we were on a ship?) through a series of implausible doors. One is so tall he has to tell lies so that his nose grows long enough to pull the handle and soon after he must confess truths to shrink it down enough to pass through a revolving door. Weird, but inspired.

However, counterbalancing the exquisitely overwhelming climax are heavy chunks of wasted time spent following Gee Williker’s subplot. He’s as much of a wet blanket as Jiminy Cricket, but without the charm or tunefulness. He spends most of the film vainly trying to argue with Pinocchio, who rightly ignores him, and then gets lost and has a bunch of lame time-killing adventures with Lt. Grumblebee and a large frog that rampages on an insect village. These scenes ruin the pacing of the film and don’t really belong.

Then there’s the Blue Fairy who keeps telling Pinocchio that free choice is the most powerful thing in the universe, but then admonishing him every time he doesn’t make the choice she wants. I guess that’s like real life.

The character design is more distinctive than “Pinocchio in Outer Space,” but much less appealing and hampered by 80’s-bad voice-acting. The good guys are especially weak: Geppetto looks like a jangly skeleton, Pinocchio’s cheekbones poke out distractingly and Gee Williker’s comes off as a carryover from a bad Fleischer cartoon. The villains, however, are a welcome upgrade. The raccoon/monkey con artist duo actually works and their dialog/performance is a far more convincing version of shifty shysters than other adaptations, even if the accents are rather offensive. Puppetino is almost too creepy and stands far above most henchmen (I hate the slow-witted buffoon variations) while The Empire of the Night makes most Disney nemeses seem like Heidi.

The background art is a notch or so above “Pinocchio in Outer Space” in terms of consistency. It also has better atmosphere, especially the carnival (even when it is seen from a distance) and the Empire of the Night. Yet at the same time it doesn’t have quite the same charm and sincerity.

Conclusion:

Relative to my expectations, both of these films were real winners. If you’re already a disciple of the 1940 version and you’re tolerant towards a little artistic theft, I’d actually say it’s worth indulging any curiosity you might have. I probably wouldn’t show “Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night” to little children and “Pinocchio in Outer Space” might be a little quaint and naïve for adolescents, but I’m sure some kids could latch on to either. Besides, good parenting or not, I’m of the belief that a little outrageous surrealism is a healthy childhood vaccine against conformity indoctrination.

Anyway, I’m giving the gold to “Pinocchio in Outer Space,” but objectively it’s probably the other film that most people would prefer.

Winner: Pinocchio in Outer Space

Iceberg Arena: Ridiculous Japanese Monster Mayhem

A part of my youth will always be tied to Godzilla. I inherited my father’s love for the king of monsters and shared his excitement about obtaining Godzilla paraphernalia. I remember Christmases and Father’s Days when we gave him bulky Godzilla VHS box sets, a Godzilla T-shirt (a semi-abstract image of his shadow against a skyscraper which he still regularly wears) and action figures that are proudly displayed in his office.

But most of all I remember the films, in bits and pieces that make about as much sense as the wholes. I remember how much fun is was to watch giant monsters crush tanks, trample Tokyo and beat and the crap out of each other.

Now much older and living on my own, I revisit Godzilla less frequently, but was recently reminded of the reptilian ringleader when looking at an action figure display at the St. Louis Delmar Tivoli Theater. Thinking myself somewhat of a Godzilla completist, I was shocked to discover he’d had a full 29 features leading all the way up to 2004 (ending with “Godzilla: Final Wars,” which I watched with my dad). Most of my experience had been with the Showa era (the classics from 1954 – 1975), which many consider to be the height of cheesiness.

Godzilla originated in 1954 as the brainchild of director Ishiro Honda. The story was a parable about the dangers of the atom age embodied in the form of a giant dinosaur-like monster that terrorized Tokyo. In later sequels Godzilla would reverse roles and become a sort of guardian for Japan, defending it from all sorts of strange monsters that ranged from Mothra (a giant moth) to MechaGodzilla (a robot version of himself). Godzilla’s design was tweaked over the years, but his powerful screeching roar and the atomic beam he fires from his mouth have remained staples.

Feeling a bit nostalgic, I decided it was time to fill in some of my gaps in the Kaiju (giant monster) genre and stage a showdown of the most ridiculous Japanese monster movies. Ishiro Honda was an obvious place to start since he’d been my favorite director from the genre and I knew he had several unusual non-Godzilla films (“Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People,” for instance, which I once screened at Splice). I also acquired “Godzilla vs. Biollante” (not by Honda), known as the “lost” Godzilla films due to its brief theatrical release and unavailability on R1/R2 DVD.

So here are the competitors:

Dogora the Space Monster (1964)
Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965)
Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989)

Now much like my Rutger Hauer B-movie Double Feature the rules are somewhat different from the usual Iceberg Arena format. Instead of competing to be the best movie in the traditional sense, the winner will be decided by which film is the worst in a good way.

I will award Astro-Points for things like ridiculous premises, outrageously bad dialog, inexplicable occurrences, weird plot points, totally awesome monster abilities, induced head-scratching and general silliness. Ordinary badness like poor lighting or boring stretches do not earn Astro-Points.

The points awarded for each item will appear in brackets.


Dogora the Space Monster:

[8] Premise: A team of double-crossing jewel thieves is interrupted mid-heist by a giant squid from outer space who summons cyclones to suck up concentrated carbon. This is bad for the crooks, who are seeking a large shipment of diamonds, and bad for the hero cop, whose girlfriend lives near a massive coal mine. This was Honda last single-monster outing.

[3] Eventually the military concludes that Dogora was created when swarms of wasps (apparently flying around in the ionosphere) interacted with radioactive space cells. They therefore divine that wasp toxin should destroy Dogora, distributed by parachuting barrels of it into the air and pointing robotic hoses towards space (which fire about 30 feet up).

[3] When the toxin does take effect, it transforms Dogora, now a cloud of jellyfish-like bubbles, into rainbow-colored meteorites that rain down like skittles and crush the jewel thieves.

[2] For extensive use of a musical saw on the soundtrack to create an eerie alien warble.

[1] We are treated to a floating hobo in the opening scene. Other than this, the film never really exploits the fact that humans are carbon-based and Dogora largely ignores the cast, contrary to the poster art and DVD cover (seen above) which claim, “It devours buildings and people.”

[1] Dr. Munakata, who we’re told is one of the world’s leading crystallographers, asks “Coal and diamonds are both made of carbon, right?”

[1] Dogora only appears in its widely publicized squid form for a handful of seconds through an effect where mist is superimposed on a squid superimposed on an image of the sky. Dogora is actually seen in this form for longer in many of the trailers, which repeat the shot several times throughout.

[1] The requisite American character, “Mark Jackson,” karate chops three times as many people as the nearest Japanese character. As in the real world, a single mild blow on the back of the neck knocks the victim out instantly.

[1] The jewel thieves wear the world’s most conspicuous white gloves even when engaging in nighttime stealth operations.

[1] For several stock footage scenes of satellites spinning around or just sitting there.

Total: 22

Frankenstein Conquers the World:

[12] Premise: Near the end of WWII, Nazis smuggle the immortal heart of Frankenstein from Frankfurt in the hopes that Japanese scientists can harness its cellular regeneration to create bullet-proof super-soldiers. A german destroyer transports the organ to a Japanese submarine, who then delivers it to Hiroshima just before the dropping of the atom bomb. 15 years later, a waif child is spotted killing small animals in the area. Dr. James Bowen, an American doctor living locally, manages to capture the creature, later discovered to be Frankenstein’s monster. The artificial man grows into an enormous giant, escapes from captivity and is suspected in the destruction of several mountain villages. The truth turns out to be that Baragon, a tunneling dinosaur with a glowing horn (and no backstory), is at large and mega-Frankenstein may be on the only one who can stop it.

[4] After successfully defeating Baragon during a raging forest fire, there’s still the question of what will happen to the 20-story Frankenstein. No problem. With less than 4 minutes left in the film a gigantic octopus comes out of nowhere, grapples with Frankenstein and pulls him into the ocean. I wish Hollywood films had that much unfathomable panache when dealing with loose ends.

[2] Frankenstein escapes from his chains when he grows so big that his shackles cut through his arm and the limb falls off. It’s later found crawling around with a life of its own.

[1] Dr. Bowen teaches his Japanese assistant (later to be his wife) “American humor.” She catches on quickly. When admiring his ability to cook beef (the sole element of American cuisine), he explains that the first step is to buy a good cut of meat. She quips back that really the first step is to “lasso a cow.” Both burst into laughter and fall in love.

[1] For Mrs. Bowen’s inexplicably giddy excitement when her husband suggests they visit the grave of a patient he couldn’t save.

[1] For the dialog exchange:
“If only we didn’t have to kill Frankenstein.”
“Well unless you can think of some other way to kill him, we’ll have to.”

[1] For at least three irrelevant scenes involving go-go dancing.

[1] For the actress who responds to a nearby avalanche as Baragon busts through the side of a mountain with “Did you hear something?” and for the fact that nobody else does. We never see this character again.

[1] The film stars American C-actor extraordinaire Nick Adams, former hanger-on pal of James Dean and Elvis Presley, who’d promised three years earlier “I will never make a picture abroad.”

[1] Alternate titles include “Frankenstein Versus Subterranean Monster Baragon” and “Frankenstein Meets the Giant Devil Fish.”

Total: 25

Godzilla vs. Biollante:

[9] Premise: Dr. Shiragami, a once ambitious scientist now quietly wiling away his time experimenting with plant telepathy, crosses secret government Godzilla DNA with rose petals and the remains of his dead child Erika, inadvertently (well, actually it seems like it would have to be pretty advertent) creating Biollante, a towering rose-monster with thorny vine tentacles (arguably one of the lamest monster premises ever). As something of a sibling to the gargantuan lizard king, it calls out to Godzilla, who is busy decimating Japan, and several titanic battles ensue.

[4] The Japanese Self-Defense force tries to kill Godzilla with a mirror-lined hovercraft that reflects back his atomic ray “1000 times stronger” and by firing bazookas at him containing syringes of bacteria that eats his vital nuclearness. Not only is the poor understanding of science hilarious, but the visualization of these silly ideas is appropriately over-the-top.

[2] Dr. Shiragami communicates with Biollante through his young female telepathic assistant. At one point he abandons her on an empty ocean platform to try (unsuccessfully) to reason with the approaching Godzilla.

[2] After Godzilla defeats Biollante for the final time, its spores ascend into outer space and Dr. Shiragami sees the image of his daughter’s now-smiling face superimposed in the glowing particles like some sort of trippy mirage.

[2] For perhaps the worst soundtrack in any Godzilla movie I’ve seen. Whether triumphant, comical, ominous or upbeat, the music never fits the action. One suspects that the composer was not given even a rough cut of the film to work with and that a deaf studio stooge ironed the musical tracks onto the celluloid at random.

[1] The various factions duking it out on the ground are a little difficult to follow, but one appears to be a silent assassin hired by an Arab company whose nefarious (?) plot involves ending world hunger with a Godzilla-spliced strain of super-wheat.

[1] There’s also a couple of American agents working for a company called Bio-Major trying to steal the anti-nuclear bacteria for some unclear reason. You can tell they are American because one is African-American and their dialog consists of English expletives.

[1] Once Biollante blooms, it is able to spew radioactive acid vomit.

[1] Godzilla emerges from the inside of a volcano, after a terrorist bomb disturbs his sleep.

[1] The bazooka battle with Godzilla takes place along the riverbeds that wind through a Japanese commercial district, a huge set that is actually pretty cool.

Total: 24


Conclusion:

Honda’s “Dogora” was a major disappointment that really failed to do much cool with its crazy ideas and skimped on the special effects needed to be considered a kaiju classic. However, the director made up for it with “Frankenstein Conquers the World,” a film so consistently silly and yet strangely inspired that I was never bored. Meanwhile, “Godzilla vs. Biollante” won’t be regarded by any as the best in its series, but it is far from being the worst and had enough bizarre concepts to remain more memorable than most.

Winner: Frankenstein Conquers the World

Iceberg Arena: Time-Traveling Czech Entertainment

Czech SF was featured in an Iceberg Arena comparison previously (“Ikarie XB-1” vs. “The End of August at the Hotel Ozone” vs. “Dinner for Adele”), but I can’t resist a rematch of sorts, this time with a specifically time-travel theme. Two of the directors return, Jindritch Polack (“Ikarie XB-1”) and Oldrich Lipsky (“Lemonade Joe,” “Dinner for Adele”) from the previous competition, and even the third auteur, Karl Zeman (“Baron Prasil”), is a Film Walrus alumni. Here are the contenders for this round:

Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)
I Killed Einstein, Gentleman (1970)
Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (1977)

The three films all involved travel back in time, though each focuses on very different destinations. They’re all pretty light-hearted affairs, if not outright comedies, quite different from the solemn, scientific, action-driven films that often mark the subgenre. I guess you could think of these as Czech precursors to “Back to the Future” or even “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventures.”


Journey to the Beginning of Time

“Journey to the Beginning of Time” is an edutainment adventure about four boys who find themselves on a river flowing backwards through time towards creation. The scale is in the millions of years and the starting point is the second ice age, so most of the film deals with prehistoric life such as dinosaurs. Doc, the oldest and most scientifically rigorous of the crew, takes notes and gives lengthy speeches describing each epoch’s flora and fauna.

The setup would seem ripe for rousing action, but the general format stays pretty stiff: one of the boys, usually the youngest, will get separated from the group and the others will look for him, often ending with a quick dash to the boat with a carnivorous animal in pursuit. The chipper lads aren’t confused or even frightened by their journey (they frequently mention that “they can always find their way back”), demonstrating a gung-ho uniformity that makes them seem a bit like Boy Scout caricatures.

These faults with the plot and characters certainly won’t bother youngsters, clearly the intended audience of the film. And they’ll be absolutely fascinated by the stop-motion work and set design, the real heroes of “Journey.” As usual, Zeman pulls out every trick in his hat, using stop motion models, clay, puppets, monster suits, full-size props, forced perspective, mattes and painted backdrops to make immaculate replicas of bygone eras on a relatively small budget. His creatures look impressively real for 1955, a product of the crew’s diligent research and attention to detail, but what makes them really come to life is the way they move and sound.

Karl Zeman had been working in the industry for more then a decade, producing innovative shorts like the delicate glassmation “Inspiration” (1949), before making his debut feature film. “Journey to the Beginning of Time” established Zeman as a major stop-motion and effects giant, although it didn’t land on American shores until nine years later when William Cayton recut it. He added a framing device that makes the adventure a dream experienced by four American boys visiting the Museum of Natural History in New York City. This version makes very little sense (the boys apparently have no parents or guardians and inexplicably bring canned food and axes on the museum visit), but it seems to be the predominate edition available. I’d love to see the original (with subtitles rather than the goofy dub) and reassess it.

I Killed Einstein, Gentleman!

Oldrich Lipsky, up to his usual wacky antics, weaves one of his most ambitious and silly projects in this time-traveling farce. In the distant future terrorists have invented an advanced bomb that causes women to grow facial hair, precipitating a global crisis. The government rejects a high-tech shaving robot in favor of a more radical plan: going back in time to assassinate Albert Einstein during his 1911 visit to Prague and thus preventing modern physics from ever developing advanced bombs in the first place.

Giacometti (Svatopluk Benes), Robert and Gwen are assigned to the mission, along with an accidental fourth companion: a mischievous kitten. Robert meets his father, Gwen falls in love with the hapless target and Giacometti utterly botches the job during a madcap party where a chandelier is suppose to fall on Einstein’s head. They go back for a second try, but this time they are foiled by the future terrorists who use the cat as a spy and soon recruit the love-struck Gwen. It doesn’t take long before history has been altered, but the results aren’t quite what anyone expected.

Lipsky throws science and gender politics out the window and aims straight for the funnybone, ultimately creating a high-speed anarchic comedy that’s bizarre even by his own standards. While he’s not too highbrow to indulge in slapstick and striptease, the sheer creativity of his narrative gives a unique specificity to the broad laughs. The escalating chaos throughout the film eventually hits a critical point at which the rhythm and humor really clicks, and the resulting confusion helps mask the liberal dosage of nonsense on display. Still, Lipsky obeys enough of the time-travel precepts to pull out an amusing and rather extended ending that’s half predictable and half insane.

The performances are pretty good, especially Petr Cepek (“Valley of the Bees”) as the humble Einstein and Jana Brejchova as Gwen, who do an admirable job establishing chemistry (and ending physics) in their brief, frenzied romantic entanglement. Of particular interest is the 60’s-kitsch futuristic design (architecture, costumes and even the hairstyles don’t escape unscathed) and even the Edwardian scenes, with their ornate wood furniture and ostentatious dresses, are a pleasure to behold. None of this will change the fact that Lipsky’s work is a love-it-or-hate-it affair, but there’s certainly nothing else quite like it.

Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea

Though I like all three titles in today’s arena, there’s no question that the verbosely declarative “Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea” is my favorite. The titular event serves as the origin point in a series of complicated loops back and forth through time that can be hard to keep up with but pretty easy to follow. The delightfully contrived plot introduces Jan Bures, whose identical twin brother Karel works as a pilot for a time-traveling tourism company.

Karel is something of a bad apple, negotiating with a group of aging-resistant neo-Nazis to deliver a modern atomic bomb to Hitler just as his defeat draws nigh. But the morning before his plot goes into action, Karel chokes to death on his breakfast (and Jan scalds himself with tea). The tongue-tied Jan semi-intentionally impersonates his roguish brother to save Karel’s fiancé, who Jan also loves, from a broken heart. The masquerade serves his own interests, too, but obliges him to pilot the nefarious villains along Karel’s scheduled WWII cruise. Once they hijack the history-hopper, Hitler hijinks ensue (say that three times fast).

Ironically, the Nazi bad guys include Film Walrus favorite Vladimir Mensik (“Cassandra Cat,” “Who Wants to Kill Jesse?” etc.) and Svatopluk Benes who had momentarily pondered killing a pre-political Hitler in “I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen,” made seven years earlier.

Jindrich Polack’s “Ikarie XB-1” (1963) proved he could handle hard SF with a professional aplomb that was still relatively rare in the genre, but “Tomorrow… Tea” is evidence that Polack was equally adept at creating imaginative comedies. Petr Kostka is wonderful in the dual role of Jan and Karel Bures, capturing the opposite personalities of the bumbling underdog and scheming scoundrel with equal relish. We rely on Kostka to provide a reference point in the shifting versions of past and future while also anchoring the love story, the screwball comedy, the hectic action and social satire (note that Karel, the opportunistic capitalist, is aligned with Nazism); not an easy role.

Writers Josef Nesvadbas and Milos Macourek also deserve a round of applause for tying such a convoluted narrative knot and then unraveling it into a conclusion that has the superb symmetry of a cat’s cradle. There are certainly more than a couple of plot holes left lingering about, but Polack makes it clear that the focus is on the character’s growth and not the story’s soundness.


Conclusion

Today’s batch has to be one of the funnest sets I’ve done, and I’m certain the three films would make an unbeatable triple feature for Czech and/or time-travel loving cinephiles. However, I suspect that even seeing an uncut and fully restored edition of “Journey to the Beginning of Time” wouldn’t give it the necessary push to beat the other two films. “I Killed Einstein” has some really golden moments, but it isn’t quite first-rate Lipsky and will probably leave some viewers scratching their heads at the Euro-humor. My pick for the winner, therefore, has to be returning-champion Jindrich Polack and his underrated SF diamond.

Winner: “Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea”

Iceberg Arena: Ants!

While a lot of sci-fi is based around mind-boggling concepts like alternative worlds, time-travel, intergalactic politics, technology singularities and post-human evolution, it’s occasionally nice to revisit SF’s most simple and familiar premise: an attack by something very large. It might be a giant ape evolved in isolation or an alien invader from space, but ever since 1954’s “Godzilla,” atomic mutation has become the culprit of choice.

In mediocre films for the past sixty years humanity has been assailed by enormous lizards, 50 foot women, praying mantises, venus flytraps, killer tomatoes, spiders, wasps, slugs, shrews, crabs, cacti and much more. Collectively, I’ll refer to these as “Attack of the X” or “Giant X” films. Today we’ll be looking at one particular foe: ants.

Perhaps because of their steadfast industrial workaholic nature, ants are quite capable of inspiring resentment, if not particularly fear. Their vast numbers, hierarchical society and constructed cities make them popular metaphors for, or rivals of, human civilization. Their collective-before-individual behavior made them suitable cinematic stand-ins for the presumed inhumanity of communism during the Cold War.

Today’s Iceberg Arena will force three ant armies to square off, hailing from the films “Them!” “Phase IV” and “Empire of the Ants.”



Them! (1954)

After finding a little girl wandering the desert in a state of shock, the New Mexico police begin an investigation, quickly discovering a shredded trailer and a general store ransacked for sugar. A wise entomologist and his partner/daughter suspect giant ants, a hypothesis soon proven correct when they are attacked by a patrol. The government manages to locate the nest in the desert and flamethrower troopers are sent in to wipe it out, Unfortunately, two queens fly out in time to start new hives, one that must be scuttled in a cargo ship transporting sugar while the other gets dramatically purged from the underground maze of the L.A. sewer system.

“Them!” was one of the earliest Giant X films, and its effective combination of SF and horror was highly influential on the countless waves of knockoffs. The original story by George Worthing Yates is the primary asset, hurrying the action through several stages and maintaining the suspense even as the “shocking” revelations are dispensed with and the stakes escalated. Lesser monster films delay the action for too long (as if the posters and trailers hadn’t already spoiled the anticipated creatures) and wade through viscous filler before going all-out in the last ten minutes.

The cheap-but-distinctive sets help sell the situation whether they're exploiting the exposure of the open desert or the claustrophobia of the hive tunnels and sewer nests. The giant ants themselves are mean and plentiful, gnashing their jaws, waving their antennae and emitting high pitched whines and clicks. Action scenes are frequent, with ants biting people in half or getting fried to a crisp.

None of this should be taken to mean that the film is realistic or scary. The serious tone, oversized ant puppets and scientific babble makes for vintage cheese. “Them!” endures as solid entertainment today because it provides retro silliness without the poor pacing and embarrassing incompetence of duds like "The Wasp Woman" or "The Giant Gila Monster."

Phase IV (1974)

“Phase IV” is something of exception amongst ant films and Giant X cinema more generally, because, well, the ants aren’t giant. A secluded research dome is set up to with a two man skeleton crew to monitor unusually aggressive ant colonies that have been terrorizing a small town and even making geometric crop circles. The film wastes no time having the local population either evacuate or die, leaving the two scientists and an orphaned girl to match their wits against a diabolic ant siege.

Saul Bass is better known for his graphic design work (he created the logos for AT&T and several major airlines) and innovative title sequences (like the paper cut-outs in “Anatomy of a Murder” and the moving text in “Vertigo”) than this singular feature film effort. Yet despite setting out with a pedestrian premise and miniscule budget, Bass’s work is closer to an existential art film than a B-movie monster flick. After a rambling, garbled kickoff, the film gradually begins to convert snickers to shivers with its eerie sun-scorched cinematography and unrelenting conviction.

It’s clear from the dogmatic dialog and clunky performances that Bass wasn’t an “actor’s director,” but his extensive deployment of ant macro photography, far beyond the usual stock-footage inserts, manages to put the hive and humanity on equal footing. This unusual amount of insect screen time actually goes a long way towards making the story work, especially in vignettes showing the self-sacrificing ants adapting to a yellow chemical spray or attempting to single-handedly destroy some electronic equipment while being hunted by a mantis.

The tenacity and resourcefulness of the ants is ultimately a convincing depiction of how armies of tiny creatures could conquer the planet. Combined with Dick Bush’s coldly observant cinematography and the weird, pessimistic finale, this certainly makes for one of the most chilling and underappreciated monster movies of its era. I also find it interesting to note, especially given Bass’s background as a title designer, that the title does not appear until the arresting final image.

Empire of the Ants (1977)

If the exposition in “Phase IV” is a limping misfire, then the grueling snoozefest at the start of “Empire of the Ants” is something far worse. Why we must listen to the petulant yammering of crudely-developed caricatures destined to be indiscriminately dished out as ant bait is beyond me. These are the type of characters that you hope will die; men who pointlessly suggest that the group split up and woman who would rather spend their last ten minutes screaming than outpacing the glacial monster-dolls being waved about by some poor schmuck just offscreen. Sadly, that passes for an FX-packed money shot in a film where the insects are made to look giant by – and I wish I were making this up – filming ants crawling on still photos of the sets.

I should talk about the plot, but I got sidetracked with frustration. Anyway, the story is about a group of prospective real estate buyers who are stranded on a tropical island where radiation has caused giant ants to take over. The queen ant uses pheromones to turn nearby townspeople into zombie slaves and forces them to harvest a king’s ransom in sugar cane.

The film stars a pre-“Dynasty” Joan Collins, who would later leave this title off her resume. The acting is atrocious, the pacing unbearable and the cinematography flat. Yet somehow I found this film nightmare inducing as a youngster, though to provide some context I was also frightened of brontosauruses and Ronald McDonald.

We happened to own this film on VHS because a cardiac medicine vendor mailed my father a series of “video classics” that had promotional infomercials for experimental medications in the place of trailers. I always wondered if some physician out there was really so grateful to own a copy of “The Graduate” or "Midnight Cowboys" that they actually prescribed their patients FDA-unapproved drugs. I don’t think my dad has ever gotten around to watching the film (or the infomercial), but for some reason I’ve seen it three times now.

Conclusion

This is actually kind of a hard choice. “Empire of the Ants” is so impossibly bad that it almost might be the most fun to watch if you have a group of MST3K-type friends, but then again, all three of these films work well for humorous camp and the others are much more entertaining.

“Phase IV” is really the film I’d like to declare the winner, for its wildly disproportionate ambition if nothing else. It’s worth checking out if you're even slightly curious and definitely deserves a cult following. Still, I think the answer has to be “Them!,” which is just so classically fun and alarmist. It remains a staple of retro-SF cinema and stands a head above most of its brethren.

Winner: Them!

Iceberg Arena: Czech Yourself Before You Wreck Your Spaceship

Continuing my series of 3-way Iceberg Arenas focusing on the science-fiction films of various countries (see Britain and the Soviet Union), I now come to the Czech Republic. As both a genre and a country that I have a special connection with, I feel a deep affection for Czech SF despite only recent acquaintance. Notwithstanding their obscurity and datedness, I think they are well-worth watching today.


Ikarie XB-1 (1963)

Ikarie XB-1 is a 22nd century spaceship sent on a multi-month journey to our nearest neighbors, Alpha Centauri, in the hopes of finding intelligent life. On the way, the crew, including a robot named Patrick, must deal with a variety of problems and adventures. Boredom, claustrophobia and homesickness wear down the initial euphoria of the mission. The discovery of a derelict space station provokes their curiosity and, after the discovery of human corpses inside, their fear. Most dangerous of all, their unwitting proximity to a radioactive dark star is draining their energy and turning one crew member into a potentially homicidal psychopath. Note that the English version of Ikarie is Icarus, the character in Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun.

“Forbidden Planet” (1956) is often cited as the primary influence on the 1966 Star Trek TV show and as the prototype for the successful brand of space opera that would make the genre popular. Yet “Ikarie XB-1” (1963) deserves recognition, too, as a more mature, sophisticated and consistent work that really dug into the world-building mechanics of what life in space would be like. Their culture is detailed through food, recreation, dance, romance and history as much as by technology.

“Ikarie XB-1” is also an early example of sci-fi horror with powerful scenes frequently copied by later films. For instance, the roving flashlights of a crew exploring a ghost ship in space or the “villain loose aboard a spaceship” premise seen in films like “Alien” and “Sunshine.” Yet for all that the film is unusually optimistic, featuring a triple dénouement that includes a tense shootout, a shocking revelation about extraterrestrial life and the first pregnancy in space (a metaphor brilliantly developed by “2001: A Space Odyssey” several years later).

But is “Ikarie XB-1” more than just a collection of ahead-of-its-time ideas and “missing-link” influences of chief interest only to SF buffs and historians? I think so. The Zdenek Liska score is fantastic, particularly the proto-electronic opening. The set design is dazzling, clearly pumping up the production values and really giving the film quite a bit of space-age 60’s atmosphere. Especially impressive is the number of shipboard sets (most contemporaneous SF used one or two) that span the cathedral-esque bridge, exercise facility, lounge (with mezzanine), mess hall, private living quarters and mainframe core (called the robotics facility in my translation).

The characters are a little dry and I found them slightly difficult to keep track of, but the sense of a multifaceted futuristic society aboard a self-sufficient spacecraft is well realized through their relationships and recreations. The pacing is pretty uneven, but the action never hinges upon a single issue or threat allowing several highlights to punctuate the mission. Critics, censors and distributors during its limited American release (by AIP, who characteristically brutalized the ending) didn’t like the hints of propaganda, but I think that it’s handled tastefully and smartly: the writing on the dead spaceship is clearly English and the explanation for its demise is related to gambling, greed and the hoarding of WMDs.

The End of August at the Hotel Ozone (1967)

Aside from sporting one of the coolest titles in all of cinema, “The End of August at the Hotel Ozone” also presents one of the most depressing visions of the apocalypse in a subgenre (post-apocalyptic SF) literally defined by depressing visions of the apocalypse. I’m especially drawn to the subgenre (see another Iceberg Arena), and this low-budget entry provides a particularly pessimistic, savage and yet low-key example.

A band of eight female scavengers roam the uncivilized wasteland of Earth looking for food and ammunition. Their behavior is instinctual and animalistic, driven by the crude fundamentals of survival and yet hampered by an ignorance and amorality that borders on self-destruction. Only one woman, the elderly emaciated leader, is old enough to remember the world before an unspecified nuclear disaster wiped it out. The other women, some of them not more than girls, are almost an unrecognizable species in their primitiveness. The director does not shy away from the boredom or the brutality of their meager existence, including such acts as the apparently real-life shooting of a dog and the still-living slaughter of a cow for food.

Having gone many years since their last encounter with any other member of humanity, the gang stumbles upon an old man struggling vainly to preserve the fragments of culture and civilization that he still possesses. His eccentric yet charmingly domestic revival of music, ranching and even chivalry awakens long-buried nostalgia in the gang’s leader and a timid love begins to bloom. Yet the ravages of age and radiation, the friction between the nomadic and settled life and the paranoid regression in the young feral generation leaves little opportunity for hope.

The black and white cinematography emphasizes the crumbled decay and shrinking signs of civilization with bleak, unflinching detachment. The torn-down, shriveled visuals, minimal dialogue and “there’s no rush now that everyone’s dead” pacing remind me of later films like “The Last Combat” (1983), though “Hotel Ozone” is unusual in that it doesn’t even try to give its lone survivors a sense of existential hipness or post-apocalyptic renaissance-man resourcefulness. Set several decades after the crisis, the film is not concerned with modernist commentary on the mistakes of the past. Nor is the future fate of man still open for debate: human life is doomed.

If this doesn’t sound like a good time, you’re right, it’s not. This is not a post-apocalyptic movie that has any room for Will Smith, animal sidekicks, comic relief, special effects or action scenes involving legions of vampires. However, it’s probably not too unrealistic and it deserves to be seen by anyone as fascinated by end of the world scenarios as myself.

Dinner for Adele (1977)

If you’re in the mood for something lighter, than “Dinner for Adele” might be for you. I’ve reviewed maverick madcap director Oldritch Lipsky before (see the classic Eastern western “Lemonade Joe”) and this films levels similar satire but directs it at the mystery genre, specifically lampooning the Nick Carter detective series that still today continues its 100+ year publishing history after dabbling in popular comic book and radio show formats.

In “Dinner for Adele” Nick Carter is charged with solving the murder of a canine in the family of a wealthy and beautiful Prague maiden. The clues point towards a carnivorous plant, leading Carter to suspect his longtime nemesis Baron von Kratzmar, a criminal mastermind known as “The Gardener,” whom Carter thought he killed years earlier in a swamp confrontation (an event we will witness, humorously, from both points of view). Kratzmar was incenses as a young botanist student by his poor grades and vowed to prove his talent and score his revenge by musically hypnotizing Adele, his bloodthirsty flower, into eating a former professor and his beautiful daughter. Olga Schoberova co-stars.

If “Ikarie XB-1” is about an optimistic future and “Hotel Ozone” is about a pessimistic one, “Dinner for Adele” is about a fun-loving return to the past. Yet despite the whimsical tone and vintage setting, “Dinner for Adele” freely makes use of SF inventiveness in a Jules Verne sort of way. Kratzmar, for instance, babbles his mad scientist jargon with the best of them and even Carter can, with little foreshadowing, whip out a solar powered laser if need be. The stop-motion and animated special effects for Adele were done by Jan Svankmajer himself and won the Czech’s their only Saturn award.

The real cornerstone of “Dinner for Adele” is its humor, which might be a little broad and wacky for the art film crowd, but which never fails to amuse me with its creative absurdity. Some favorite examples: Our damsel in distress tells Carter that she sealed off the room where her dog disappeared to preserve any clues and, expecting to see the usual band of yellow tape across the door, we find the Victorian entrance has been bricked off. Nick Carter, of course, karate chops his way through. Or another: during a climactic air balloon chase, Carter’s gun explodes in his hand at a crucial moment causing him to cry out “Material fatigue!” as the villain escapes. Despite the setback he’s content (he gets paid either way), until a change of wind blows in his favor.

Lipsky’s witty dialogue survives translation in the two versions I’ve seen, while the inflections and melodramatic direction need little help to understand. It’s kind of a toss up as to whether the visuals are better in this or “Lemonade Joe.” Given that Svankmajer’s effects are more for laughs than for horror or realism, I’d say “Lemonade Joe” is the more refined and innovative presentation, but the Facet’s aspect-ratio cropping of the latter seriously compromises it. I can’t wait to watch more of Lipsky’s films, especially “Happy End,” “The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians” and “I Killed Einstein, Gentleman.”

Conclusion:

While I adore all three films, there’s no question in my mind that “Ikarie XB-1” is the champion. It’s high-style, well-thought-out foundations for space opera surpasses retro-kitsch to become a convincing vision of the future. Now that it is available in a clean, uncut transfer with passable subtitles, it deserves to be widely seen and finally acknowledged as one of the great, groundbreaking works in SF history. Even casual fans of the genre should place this on their must-see list. As a side note, I now have a 1963 film that handily defeats “Tom Jones” for my SF-themed Oscar revisionism.

Winner: Ikarie XB-1

But where can I get these films?

“The End of August at the Hotel Ozone” is available through Facets on a manageable transfer with an insert booklet. You can get it on Netflix. The other films are a bit harder, but both can be found through dvdr.cz. Click on the British flag for the English version. The current currency exchange is about $1 (USD) to 18 Czech koruny (CZK) and expect to pay a lot for shipping. I had to apply the subtitles for “Dinner for Adele” through some frustrating computer piddling, but they are easy enough to find free online. If you want a subtitled version and don’t mind not having the case you can purchase them from one of my new favorite rare film dealers, AllCluesNoSolutions or legally torrent either film.