Sci-Fi From My Wonder Years

In an effort to get caught up with the massive backlog of DVDs and DVD-Rs stacking up in a silently mocking fashion in the office and on the shelves downstairs, I am attempting to start watching these things at a more accelerated pace (say, more than one every few weeks) for as long as is feasible and writing about the ones I feel are worth passing along. Perhaps this way I'll keep myself writing and hopefully lose this nagging feeling that I am unwittingly turning this condominium into a museum full of pretty silver discs. I'll also try to keep the spoilers to a minimum. Promise.

As is likely the case with many people who saw Star Wars during hyper-impressionable childhood, I was immediately cursed with an insatiable appetite for cinematic sci-fi. Of course, those years before the arrival of the videocassette recorder and cable TV were a cruel, thin time to jones for space borne flights of fancy, as I was only taken by my dad to see the odd feature like Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Flash Gordon, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, and The Black Hole while I could only pine to see such utter dogshit as Outland, and Battle Beyond The Stars (hey, come on, at least the latter had some space battles going for it).

The arrival of cable television in Southfield in 1982 was a godsend for catching up on these movies, as I was still too young to be able to afford seeing most of them on my own (not to mention that the nearest movie theater at the time, the Americana, was out of easy bicycling range). Many of these features discussed below were seen on TV few times and then either forgotten about (or my taped copies were dubbed over with my sister's favorite soap operas). Thus, as part of my ongoing series of writing about movies (no, I really hadn't forgotten about this idea, I've just been very preoccupied with things like work, dentist appointments, and the Cleveland Indians), this post will examine a few old HBO/Cinemax genre standbys I've had the opportunity to take in again recently either via DVD or the magic of bit torrent.

I've always been a sucker for a decent time-travel flick and The Final Countdown has long been a genre favorite of mine since it takes on that burning, long-debated philosophical question of "what might happen if a modern nuclear-powered aircraft carrier sailed through a time warp that looks suspiciously like a laser beam from a Frankie Goes To Hollywood video and wound up in the waters off Pearl Harbor on December 6, 1941"? Being that World War II was one of my childhood interest streaks around the time I first saw this film (an ABC Sunday Night Movie, if my recall is correct), this premise had me hooked immediately ... well, that and visions of the U.S.S. Chester W. Nimitz singlehandedly kicking the Japanese fleet clear across the Pacific Ocean.

In the end, however, The Final Countdown is more of a mental exercise than the war-time action film I'd hoped to see as a kid, and even though I still feel a tad shortchanged by the ending all these years later, I still find it at the very least a thought-provoking diversion. The same can also be said for The Philadelphia Experiment, which takes time travel the other way around, as two sailors from 1942 find themselves trapped in modern day America ("modern day" being 1984) after an early experiment in radar-cloaking technology goes horribly awry.

Unlike The Final Countdown, which plays a lot like a Navy recruitment film for most of its running time (featuring lots of extended sequences of carrier flight operations and admittedly cool footage of recently-shit canned F-14s swooping majestically about the sky), The Philadelphia Experiment is based largely in human terms as the two displaced sailors quickly run afoul of the law while trying to determine exactly what happened to them from the doctor who sent them on their impromptu adventure 42 years before. A couple of interesting plot twists come along to keep things moving, and there is some of the usual (though no less amusing) culture shock/situational humor as the two men deal with such foreign concepts as television, manual transmissions and Ronald Reagan residing in the White House.

The Final Countdown, by contrast, entirely avoids laughs (and why shouldn't it? Aircraft carriers traveling through time is Very Serious Business) and manages to be fun despite all of the intellectual sparring going on between Martin Sheen, James Farentino and Kirk Douglas. Most of this talk, of course, centers on paradoxes and what a military ship from from the future is supposed to do when a grave threat to the United States is closing in fast. What can be done about the attack on the United States everyone knows is coming and how will the answer affect forty years of recorded history? Heady stuff.

Another fave sci-fi sub genre of mine is the "last man on Earth" film, where we follow a person (or small group of people) around a post-apocalypse world and follow their attempts to survive or re-start civilization from scratch. One of the best examples of these films is The Quiet Earth, a low-budget left-field success from New Zealand that not only follows around a man who awakens one morning to find everyone else on the Earth has just up and vanished in the wink of an eye, but also makes it clear that this man had lent a reluctant hand in the sudden total annihilation of the human race. Exactly what happened to everyone is only hinted at, but never fully explained, though part of the answer may have to do with our discovery of how this man (and a couple of others he meets) managed to stay behind in the first place. Despite the increasingly-weighty nature of the script, The Quiet Earth is always watchable and peppers the increasingly puzzling revelations concerning the Sun and "The Effect" with interesting characters interacting in unexpected ways and sports a couple of pretty cool visual set pieces (like a crashed passenger jet in the middle of a city and the film's 2001-like denouement).

A near-diametrically opposed approach to surviving the apocalypse is Night Of The Comet, which is quite possibly one of the most inane genre films of the decade as it bravely posits an empty Los Angeles populated solely by teen aged versions of Fred Schneider and Moon Unit Zappa. Like, omigod, what is a bratty California girl to do when the world just, like, ends? Like, totally hit the mall, ya knew?!

Seriously, the most charming aspect to Night Of The Comet is that it knows how silly it is, and it plays like one of those countless B-movies screened on the Satellite Of Love scored with one of the most hilariously canned-sounding 80's soundtracks ever: seriously, this music is so bad it makes even the lamer pop hits of that plastic era sound positively timeless in comparison. While this utterly forgettable twaddle bops away on the automated Top 40 station blaring in the background throughout, the film has a positively cheese-tastic time with the idea of a world depopulated overnight by the same comet that wiped out the dinosaurs 65,000,000 years ago (you see, said didn't hit the Earth but instead passed right on by, bathing the planet in its tail and instantly reduced every exposed living being to Kool Aid mix).

Of course, not every living being can be annihilated in Night Of The Comet or we'd be watching a Warhol movie for an hour and a half. Apparently, anyone stuck inside of a metal container or room would have been immune to the effects of the comet's radiation, despite the fact that the atmosphere remains tinted scarlet for days afterward (which makes this movie look even more like an early MTV video that it already did beforehand). Unfortunately, partial exposure to the radiation turns everyone else into a reject from Dawn Of The Dead, so by the time this movie enters its third act (which at times takes on a surprisingly dark tone), we are watching some increasingly out-of-kilter (and badly acted) blend of 80s teen romp, action movie, and zombie flick.

In the years following Close Encounters and E.T., movies about contact with alien races were a dime a dozen, though a few managed to make an impression on me based on their approach to the subject. One film I remember watching a few times on cable during slow afternoons was Wavelength, which had apparently never made the transition to DVD. Just when I was getting ready to plunk down a few bucks for a ratty old used VHS copy from Amazon, however, I came across a way to land a nicely-transferred DVD-R copy from a private seller and was delighted when it arrived in the mail as I hadn't seen any part of this movie in probably 23 years.

Of course, watching Wavelength again after all such a span made me once again question my own memory on what constitutes "good" versus "bad" movies from that time. This was an a pretty low-budget "Area 51" type of story based on the idea that a trio of telepathic, photosynthetic aliens were being held captive by the U.S. Army in an underground military base nestled right smack in the middle of the Hollywood Hills. Luckily for the makeup department, these extraterrestrials resemble nothing more than hairless ten-year old boys of varying ethnicities rather than something from an H.R. Giger painting.

My guess is that the makers of Wavelength must have used most of their allotted dosh on about 1-minute of average-quality matte work during the penultimate scene and hiring Tangerine Dream to compose a typically atmospheric score. It's a shame they had to go so cheap on everything else (like coming up with two less-irritating central characters) since there are some pretty interesting ideas lurking about what is an otherwise a hopelessly cliched script. Hell, even hiring some better camera operators might have made this easier going (the boom mic keeps wandering into exterior shots to the point where it becomes comical).

It isn't until we finally meet the aliens themselves (about 45 minutes into the film) that Wavelength finally starts to get interesting (or at least the pace picks up enough so that you can overlook the terrible acting being phoned in by Keenan Wynn and Robert Carradine). The real high point of the film is a night time escape sequence through the streets of Los Angeles (stopping by a church and a men's restroom) and into the Mojave Desert with Tangerine Dream's score burbling busily along in the background as it is generally wont to do. The rest of this amateurish mess falls as flat as a pool table. Pity.

A far better "Dickhead U.S. Military vs. Noble Extraterrestrial Vistors" movie is Starman, which looked absolutely stupid on paper but wound up (unlike the rest of these films we've been discussing) turning a sizable profit at the box office by pulling off the impossible: creating a viable hybrid of sci-fi and chick flicks.

As cringeworthy as the above sounds, Starman works on nearly every possible level. The idea is that the Voyager satellites reach a far off planet where their gold-plated greetings from the Earth arrives on an uncharted alien world, who apparently listen to it and decide to respond by sending an emissary over to say hello in person (oh, and nevermind that this would have to happen thousands of years in our future given the speed the Voyager craft are traveling and the incomprehensible distance to our nearest galactic neighbor star ... let alone a system that actually has planets). Of course, before this goodwill ambassador can so much as pick out a place to park, his spacecraft is shot down by a couple of fighter jets over the woods of Wisconsin. Luckily for him, our visitor seems to have no physical form, appearing to us a brilliant point of light that eventually visits Karen Allen's house while she sleeps and takes the form of her dead husband Jeff Bridges (generating his form from DNA sampled in strands of his hair kept in a photo album).

Allen, naturally a tad freaked out at seeing her departed beloved staggering about her house like a toddler (and speaking to her in halting, toneless sentence fragments) initially tries to get the hell away, but finds herself drawn to the vistor's innocent, gentle nature. With only a limited time on Earth before his host body expires, Bridges needs to return to his point of destination to await a ride home (a scene which, by the way, is strikingly similar to the end of Wavelength, which came out a year and change before), though their cross-country drive will be marked with humorous misunderstandings and unpleasant confrontations. Meanwhile, the Big Bad Military (led by the always menacing Richard Jaeckel) is closing in: they know they have an alien visitor running around in human form and they want to meet it, preferably after tying it down to a gurney and poking at it with needles.

I'll quickly address the "chick flick" angle: I'm certainly no connosseur of this kind of film, but for my money, Allen and Bridges sell the relationship that eventually blossoms between these characters, and you'll have little problem empathizing with Allen's behavior around Bridges as she grows from being horrified and frightened out of her wits to understanding and developing a strong emotional bond with the visitor as the movie progresses. Better yet, while Starman's dialog may occasionally dance around the edge of the treacly tar pit (particularly following a pivotal scene in a train car), the movie, to its credit, never collapses into mawkishness.

Looking for additional alien-orientated "date movie" ideas? Well, there is also a romance angle in Strange Invaders, which shares Nancy Allen as a female/romantic lead with The Philadelphia Experiment. While Allen's role in both movies is arguably the same (the skeptical outsider dragged into the center of the plot by events beyond her comprehension), the overall tone of Strange Invaders is far more along the lines of a sensationalist, McCarthy-era comic book than anything remotely horrifying or thought-provoking: think of a more straight-laced Mars Attacks! and you'll be in the ballpark. Self-aware and witty in its use of references, Strange Invaders plays it totally deadpan, but has no fear of winking at the audience once in a while, and you can't help but smile as the "shocking truth" about a sleepy midwestern town that never escaped the 1950s becomes apparent to the protagonist Paul Le Mat at last.

While Strange Invaders is an entertaining attempt to recreate the feel of an old B-movie or comic book, Critters is the real low-budget deal and perhaps the only example out of the handful of low-budget Gremlins knockoffs that didn't suck (unlike, say, Troll or Ghoulies). With Critters, however, the little monsters creatures aren't even remotely cute: instead, these voracious space furballs called Krites (imagine Tribbles with rows of teeth) are being pursued on Earth following their escape from a containment ship by a couple of bumbling, polymorphing bounty hunters. Of course, in the midst of this hunt, the Brown family (led by E.T.'s Dee Wallace) becomes involved as the Krites surround their house and attempt to add the terrified humans inside to their menu. The trigger-happy bounty hunters, on the other hand, seem to spend most of their time destroying a small town nearby in their search for their ravenous, bad-tempered prey which leaves the embattled Browns to take matters into their own hands.

As with Strange Invaders, Critters sports a sense of humor about itself, and is a lot more willing to break into outright comedy. While it looks and sounds like a lame waste of a video rental, Critters is a deceptively smart film that deserved the cult following it attained, with a couple of laugh-out-loud bits involving the creatures themselves (especially a subtitled exchange between two of them on the Brown family's front porch) and some amusing sci-fi references cropping up in the dialog throughout.

Lastly, we come to one of my very favorite movies of any type from the mid-1980s: The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai: Across The Eighth Dimension. If this ridiculous title alone sounds promising, wait until you get a load of the plot: racing against time, Buckaroo Banzai (the world's pre-eminent rock star/scientist/brain surgeon/martial arts expert/Presidential advsior) and The Hong Kong Cavaliers (his team of fellow specialists/backing musicians) battle the creepy, potato-bug like minons of Lord John Whorfin, a crazed alien despot whose ultimate goal is to return to his homeworld of Planet 10 via the use of trans-dimensional travel, made possible by the recently completed Oscillation Overthruster, which Banzai had a hand in completing. Problem is, the citizens of Planet 10 don't want their ex-dictator back, ever, and they're so angry that Banzai has inadvertantly paved the way for his return that they threaten the total destruction of the Earth in the event Whorfin and his minions succeed in their plans.

If you're the kind of person who not only followed all of that but were also intrigued, then this is the movie for you. That said, a lot of people can be pretty put off by a movie that throws you into the plot with hardly any exposition at all: watching Buckaroo Banzai is a lot like picking up issue #5 of a superhero comic book and trying to play catch-up as you read along. Simply figuring out what the hell is going on from time to time can be a real challenge as the entire script plays out as if it was written by a clutch of genre geeks who stuffed every scene with in-jokes, red herrings and obscure references (the dialogue, sometimes incidental in nature and dealing with completely unrelated or "previous" storylines we are not privy to, is often a total riot). It may take a viewing or so to really grok the whole thing (this was the case with me as a teenager), but Buckaroo Banzai rewards attention and seems to unveil something previously-unseen every time you watch. A true "cult classic" in every sense and highly recommended.



The Final Countdown rating: 4/5

The Philadelphia Experiment rating: 4/5

The Quiet Earth rating: 4/5

Night Of The Comet rating: 2/5

Wavelength rating: 2/5

Starman rating: 4/5

Strange Invaders rating: 3/5

Critters rating: 3/5

The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai: Across The Eighth Dimension rating: 5/5