ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John A. Frazier is absolutely crazy about the movies. In fact, he has been known to go crazy at the movies, too.
It’s New Year’s Eve and on the Gamma 1 space station the party is in full swing. There’s a “Space Spectacular” wherein Commander Michael Halstead’s crew take to the stars in space suits, link their bodies and spell out “Happy New Year.” It is a raucous affair going all night. At one point one officer is found buzzing around outside, drunk as a skunk. The officer who brings him inside says, “He’s drunker than a miner on Mars!”
As the revelers continue celebrating, the Delta 2 space station is attacked by strange lights. When Halstead sends men to investigate, the people they find are frozen stiff.
“Seems like they all died from fright,” reports back one rescue team member. They realize some of the frozen people are still alive.
The attack is the result of the Diaphanoids, malevolent creatures made of light.
“You can’t stop them. They’re lights but they have shape. They’re more than light! They’re things! They’re things!”
Then the Delta 2 space station completely disappears, followed by Alpha 1 and Alpha 2 space stations also disappearing.
Back on Gamma 1, when the Diaphanoids attack, Commander Halstead moves everyone into a room fortified with lead titanium walls. It is a move that saves their lives. “They can’t get through. That was my hunch.” A couple blasts of radiation send the Diaphanoids scurrying away.
Captain Dubois is commandeered by the aliens. His body is used as a vessel to communicate with the humans. He takes Michael Halstead and his crew to their planet. (Connie Gomez has also been taken to the alien’s planet. Connie and Michael constantly bicker like a couple of little kids, but they seem to like one another.)
General Halstead, Michael’s father, gives Michael and his men a small window of time to save as many abducted people from the alien planet before he blows it up.
Halstead and his troops locate Delta 2 personnel tossed away like garbage on the alien’s mining planet. Any living bodies are serving as hosts for the aliens.
Time is ticking away and General Halstead is hot to press the button that will blow the Diaphanoid’s planet out of the cosmos.
Will Michael Halstead save Connie Gomez and the others from the clutches of the Diaphanoids? Will he survive to live another outer space adventure? Will he keep bickering with Connie Gomez if he gets her to safety?
I won’t spoil the fun this science fiction comic adventure delivers. War of the Planets is a fun Italian space opera that is part of a four chapter series. The other movies in the series include Wild, Wild Planet (1966), War Between the Planets(1966) and The Snow Devils (1967). They are all pulp space tales of heroic men of action and women in peril, told just before man actually walked on the moon.
The miniature effects are pretty fun, the space fashions are shiny, and the interior sets are colorful and mod. Not the entire same cast is in all the movies of the series, as the Gamma 1 space station is the main continuity throughout the series. All of the films were directed by Antonio Margheriti, who used the name Anthony Dawson.
I encourage you to give these films a watch, especially if you are a fan of pulpy 60’s space adventures. War of the Planets, Wild, Wild Planet and The Snow Devils are all available on the Warner Brothers Archive Collection DVD-Rs. War Between the Planets is available on a double feature disc with Creation of the Humanoids by Dark Sky Films.
(I don’t know how familiar fans are with these movies. From what I could locate, these movies don’t seem to have had much of a Home Video presence. I could only dig up an old Midnight Madness VHS copy of War Between the Planets, which was released under the TV title Planet on the Prowl, from Montgomery Home Video, from the mid 80’s. Before these DVD/DVD-R releases, I could only find that Wild, Wild Planethad been released on Laserdisc by MGM.)
When her sister is kidnapped by a gang of white slavers, Margaret (Karen Kopins, Troop Beverly Hills, Once Bitten) knows she needs a hero to save the day. That becomes Jake Speed (Wayne Crawford, who wrote the script and also appeared in Barracuda and Valley Girl, another film he produced and fought the studio to keep Martha Coolidge in the director’s chair) to life from the pages of pulp novels.
Along with his trusty sidekick Desmond Floyd (Dennis Christopher Chariots of Fire, Fade to Black), Jake is ready for action. He’s recommended by Margaret’s grandfather, along with Mack Bolan. Everyone thinks that the old man is insane, but it turns out that somehow Jake is a real person.
Everything sounds awesome, right? Well, it turns out that ringleader of the slavers is none other than Jake’s arch-nemesis: Sid (John Hurt, Alien)! It’s obvious that Hurt had a blast making this film.
I love that this movie is a tribute to the pulps. In the world of this film, Remo The Destroyer Williams, Mack The Executioner Bolan and Doc Savage are all real, with the novels about them actually true facts. Jake even talks about these men as his contemporaries. If you’d like to see two movies that came from the pulps, you should check out Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins and Doc Savage. Of course, the best pulp-inspired movie ever made is Raiders of the Lost Ark, a film that this movie owes some debt to.
Me? I’m a sucker for any movie that gets meta.
Director Andrew Lane, in addition to producing several films with star Wayne Crawford, also directed 1989’s Zach Galligan starring thriller Mortal Passions — that box art was a video store favorite — and 1991’s Lonely Hearts, a movie that dares to pair Beverly D’Angelo with Eric Roberts.
Ready to watch this? Grab the new Arrow Video release on blu ray. This release features a brand new 2K restoration of the film from the original 35mm interpositive, as well as a new interview with co-writer/producer/director Andrew Lane as well as one with producer William Fay. As usual, Arrow does an amazing job giving you the absolute best version of a film for your library.
The conjunction of B&S Movies’ recent “Star Wars Week,” our current “Ape Week,” and our upcoming “Shark Week” colliding with the calendar fade in this year of our Lord of 2019 leaves this writer with a morbid disappointment: the Italian-predicted post-apocalypse never happened.
(Yes. Mr. Michael Sopkiw. This is your life. One more time.)
I should be reminiscing about last year’s Rollerball World Championship Game between Houston and New York—you know, the game where the league suspended the rules to force the world’s greatest sports hero, Jonathan E., to retire. I should be running in fear from the marauding motorcycle ‘n dune buggy hoards on a quest to control the last drops of fuel and water. I should be worried about being eaten by radioactive zombies. I should be swingin’ makeshift, nail-spiked bats at cannibal warlords.
New York hasn’t fallen to the Eurac Nation. Manhattan should have been turned into a walled prison by now. There’s no Arthur C. Clark-predicted spinning-wheel space station over the Earth. I still do not have my one-piece jumpsuit and it looks like I’ll die before I catch that flight on a Pan-Am space shuttle to the Moon. We’re not consuming each other by way of soylent wafers and law enforcement doesn’t control starving rioters with human-scooping, dump truck-bulldozer hybrids.
Yes, to the chagrin of the Italian film industry: we are still alive. And to my chagrin: the Italian post-apocalypse—the single greatest sci-fi film sub-genre to dominate the drive-ins and home video stores of my youth—is over.
Sure, Hollywood offered us their big-budgeted versions of our decimated future with Waterworld (1995), Escape from L.A (1996), 28 Days Later (2002), The Road (2006), I Am Legend(2007), The Book of Eli (2010), World War Z (2013), and Mad Max: Fury Road (2016), but it was the low-budgeted indie knock-offs coming out of Europe in the 1980s—spearheaded by the Italian film industry’s insatiable quest to ripoff proven American genre flicks—that revved our post-nuke engines.
Those mainstream Hollywood films were begat from Mad Max and The Road Warrior out of Australia and John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. And how can we forget Richard Connell’s and Robert Sheckley’s writings inspiring the “human death sports” craze with the likes of Rollerball, Death Race 2000, and Deathsport, Endgame, and Rome 2072.
No nostalgic waxing of the post-apocalypse is complete without honoring the influential “Big Three” starring Moses and Ben-Hur himself: Charlton Heston. His turn in Planet of the Apes ignited the post-apocalyptic sci-fi craze within the Hollywood mainstream studio system and led to Heston’s turns in The Omega Man and Soylent Green. And Heston’s “Big Three” beget the likes of Oliver Reed in Z.P.G, Yul Brynner in The Ultimate Warrior and Sean Connery in Zardoz, James Caan in Rollerball, Michael York in Logan’s Run (1976), George Peppard in Damnation Alley, and Richard Harris and Paul Newman in Ravagers and Quintet, respectively.
And while the directors and actors of the post-apocalypse have come and gone—and been forgotten by the many—we, the survivors of the celluloid cataclysm of our teenaged years have never forgotten the genre’s biggest and baddist star. And no: it’s not Kurt Russell or Mel Gibson.
Hey, Mr. Sopkiw. You had to know you weren’t ringing in 2020 without someone bringing up the most cherished of the only four films you shot in an all-too-brief, two year acting career.
The ol’ VHS cover we know and love.
Born in the U.S state of Connecticut in 1954, Michael Sopkiw (pronounced Sop-keev) began his show business career as a successful photo/runway model-turned-actor. As with the equally Euro-revered apocalyptic-action star Mark Gregory, Sopkiw starred in several Italian-produced films that, while not earning critical praises as result of their low-production values, garnered substantial financial returns in the U.S, European, and overseas home video markets.
Before he became a beloved Euro-action star during the ’80s home video boom, Sopkiw’s lifelong love of sailing earned him a job as a merchant sailor, which led to a job laying underwater cable in England’s North Sea in the seventies. Finding other employment opportunities as a yacht broker, and as a sailor on luxury yachts and commercial ships, he returned to his homeland to attended college at the University of Miami (Florida) to study mechanical engineering. For reasons lost to the test of time: Sopkiw’s oceanic navigation activities led him into the underground world of drug smuggling. The end result: he served one year on a two and a half year prison sentence for transporting cargos of marijuana.
As result of parole guidelines that restricted his return to sea, Sopkiw needed to choose a new career. As result of knowing someone active in the New York City theatre scene, he took up acting—seriously and full-time. In an interview with David Everitt in the pages of Fangoria, Sopkiw said that acting was merely a fantasy at the back of his mind that, for many years, he never took it seriously. When he was appearing in [high] school plays, he said, “I never thought you could do this sort of thing seriously. I thought it was chosen people who became stars.” And thanks to Sopkiw’s impressive physique, developed from his years of working at sea, he was “chosen” to work as a model with the world-renowned Ford Modeling Agency—and off Sopkiw went to work on the biggest magazines and runways in Europe.
While in Rome, Sopkiw met noted Italian Giallo director Sergio Martino (All the Colors of the Dark, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tale—just to name a few) who, ready to jump on the Escape from New York and The Road Warrior-inspired, post-apocalypse bandwagon, was on a national talent search for a film regarded as the best of the Italian-made wasteland ripoffs: 2019: After the Fall of New York (1983). Martino, taking note of Sopkiw’s readymade, action-film physique—and his facial similarities to John Carpenter’s Snake Plissken character portrayed by Kurt Russell—cast him as the hero-reluctant, Parsifal (yes, based on Wolfram von Eschenbach 13th century Arthurian hero, Parzival), Sopkiw, like British actor Oliver Reed before him, scored a leading man role in his first-ever casting/acting job—and was signed to a four-picture deal.
In a 1999 interview with filmologist Fred Anderson, Sopkiw gave his thoughts on his film debut in After the Fall of New York:
“[I am glad everyone likes the film, but] I’m not sure it was supposed to be a comedy, but at least it turns out to be a redeeming feature [of the film].”
“[As for the ‘ripoff quality’ of the film, in comparison to its inspiration, John Carpenter’s Escape from New York], I think everyone should do his best work or not bother working [at all]. We call this genre of ‘ripoffs’—exploitation films. Not sexually of course, in this case, but exploiting concepts and ideas that have already been shown to attract interest—and therefore money. Generally speaking, I don’t find this a very attractive or noble motivation. If this is the best work these people can do, then I thank them for their efforts, thank them for allowing me to be a part of it, and hope they are not just into it for the money. I also hope for them that they can do better in the future.”
In a 2009 interview with the online publication Icons of Fright, when asked which film was his favorite of the four he made—he cited . . . After the Fall of New York:
“They were all [four of my films] a blast to work on. I suppose, overall, After the Fall of New York would top the list as a fave film. I think it has the most memorable lines like, ‘Cleaned up & disinfected she might be all right.’ I also think it has the best caliber of actors overall with Gigi, Vince, Romano, Gigetto, Valentine, et al. There were really some good performances there I think and some serious actors.”
In the pages of Fangoria (Issue # 44; reposted alongside a plethora of film stills, posters, video box covers, and articles about After the Fall of New York and Sopkiw’s “boss,” Almi Pictures, by the online publication, The Tell Tale Mind), Sopkiw had this to say about being a leading man in his first acting job—ever:
“[It] was a little overwhelming at first. A kind of instant, minor stardom. I can remember the first day I walked into the studio: You go through the gates set in these big concrete walls, and inside there’s one set after another, each one a different world. And then I went to my dressing room and there it was—with my name on it. It felt really great. While I was getting dressed, I opened up my window and there was eight or ten guys from the movie down below, dressed up like Darth Vader, all on white horses. And I said, ‘Jesus! I think I’m where I Iike to be.’”
After working in Rome and the U.S state of Arizona (for ATFONY’s desert car-chase-duel and his tooling across the desert on a future-cool three-wheeled cycle), Lamberto Bava, the son of famed Giallo director, Mario Bava, recruited Sopkiw for two films shot in the U.S: the Georgia-shot Blastfighter and the Florida-shot Monster Shark—the second utilized his past sea-faring skills.
In working with Lamberto Bava, Sopkiw had this to say in the Icons of Fright interview:
“Almost nothing but praises for Lamberto. He’s a very compassionate guy; pretty much to be expected being Italian. That was my experience with most Italians. But he shows it in his everyday consideration and caring for both actors and crew. And he sure knew how to make a lot with a little. He was always quite accessible and gentle but seems to have had a bit of a penchant for blood. You noticed? I would love to speak with him now to find out a little bit more of what drove him.”
As with the spaghetti-cloning of Kurt Russell’s and Mel Gibson’s apocalyptic romps with his Parsifal character in After the Fall of New York, Blastfighter borrowed from Sylvester Stallone’s vision for Sopkiw’s next film as Jake “Tiger” Sharp: a Rambo-inspired, take-no-prisoners ex-cop with a supersonic sci-fi rifle out for revenge against a gang of backwoods rednecks.
As the title of Sopkiw’s third film implies, Monster Shark (aka Devil Fish, Monster Fish, Monster from the Red Ocean, Apocalypse in the Red Ocean, Devouring Waves, and Shark: Red in the Ocean) was Italy’s (and one of many) reimaging of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 don’t-go-in-the-water classic, Jaws, in which Sopkiw starred as a dashing, sea-faring shark fighter.
And so it goes in Italian cinema: once you ripoff Spielberg, George Lucas is fair game. Thankfully, Sopkiw didn’t appear in one of Italy’s many Star Wars celluloid swindles (. . . that’s an article unto itself!*). Sopkiw did, however, appear as an Indiana Jones-inspired adventurer in Massacre in Dinosaur Valley (Prisoner of the Valley of Dinosaurs), a bizarre, little action movie that borrowed from Italy’s cannibal sub-genre of zombie films, had no dinosaurs—and mixed it with comedy!
It was while filming these four films (which completed his “contract”) and residing in Switzerland that Sopkiw, looking for a greater purpose in life beyond a career making low-budgeted ripoffs of better made films, he took up the study of metaphysics. Those disciplines and philosophies led to him developing natural healing remedies based on sun energy—which required a special glass to maintain the vitality of organic plant molecules. Through his studies in medical plant and herbal sciences, Sopkiw founded the California-based Miron Violettglas to achieve his ultimate goal: encourage people to get back to natural Earth-born remedies in an over-drugged, pharmaceutical-oriented society. The ancient Egyptian-inspired glass craft was also adapted for wine-bottle importing.
Oh, yeah. I remember this TV spot. It’s what got me into the duplex that Saturday.
When the post-apocalypse came-a-callin’, Italian Giallo purveyor Sergio Martino answered the call with a tale about a world war erupting between the African-European-Asian united Eurax (Eurac, whatever!) nation and the U.S-led Pan-American Confederacy. The Darth Vader-cum-samurai clad Eurax won the war and began experimenting on the survivors to find a cure for the post-war, now twenty-year sterility of man that’s resulted in no children being born.
But wait!
The Pan-Americans’ “supercomputer” has discovered there’s one fertile woman left on the Earth. And the (unseen; you know how it goes it non-budget land) sentient being has also determined that only one man—a disgruntled ex-Pan Am soldier by the name of Snake Pliss . . ., I mean, Parsifal—is the only man for the man for the job. Well, Parsifal and an “uncover” cyborg dude named Rachet who dispatches enemies with some Chinese meridian balls on wires he tosses around, and the robotic, claw-hand Bronx whose “mind” is a virtual map of New York.
But wait!
Parisfal is the king of the punk rock-football pad-goth wearing hoards haunting the Arizona wastelands as the champion player of some Mad Max-inspired game with cars who wants no part of what the Pan-Americans are cooking. So they kidnap him. And they offer him a deal: get the last fertile woman out of New York and they’ll give him a seat on the rocket they’re launching to Alpha Centuri to start a new world. Oh, and if he doesn’t along with the plan, he’s gonna get his ass Bob Hauk’d out of the world.
But wait!
Oh, did we forget to mention that, in addition to Escape from New York, Mad Max, and Star Wars, this delicious plate of radiated Italian post-apocalypse pasta also clips Planet of the Apes, courtesy of the always welcomed George Eastman as “Big Ape,” who leads a merry band of hairy men and helps our not-so-magnificent three in their suicide mission? Hey, nothing like the ubiquitous, post-apoc professor’s hot, egg-fresh daughter inspiring a little cooperation.
Yeah, we know, you’re saying, “This sounds like that major studio, single-shot sequence jerkfest that was 2006’s Children of Men.
Yeah, we know. That’s why the crew at B&S Movies watched Children of Men only once . . . and we’ve watched Sergio Martino’s future world with Star Wars-like repeat viewings. Clive Owen vs. Micheal Sopkiw? Really? As if there’s a “choice” in the matter?
If you do not always err to the side of Michael Sopkiw, then you need to surf for your video fringe fixes somewhere else. B&S Movies don’t be associatin’ with folk like ya’ll. Give us Michael Sopkiw or give us death!
Happy New York!, uh, New Year, Michael. We dig ya, brother! Ring in the New Year with Sergio and Mike and watch After the Fall of New York for free on You Tube.
Author’s Note: Sam previously reviewed 2019: After the Fall of New York — our all-time favorite apoc flick — as part of B&S Movies’ 2017 “Fucked Up Futures” week of apoc-films. And be sure to visit us the week of January 5 for “Shark Week” as we dive into Michael’s ’80s shark flick, Monster Shark, for a second look.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes for B&S Movies.
“You know, the Templars’ burnt, eyeless and noseless, sunken-skulled faces sure do look like monkeys,” cigar chomps the cheesy American film distributor. “That gives me an idea. . . .”
“Legend has it, almost 3,000 years ago, a simian civilization of super-intelligent apes struggled with man to gain control of this planet. In the end, man conquered ape after a brutal battle, which saw him destroy the ape, his culture and society. After this battle, man tortured and killed all the ape prisoners by piercing their eyes with a red-hot poker. One of the prisoners, who was also the leader of the apes, vowed they would return from the dead to avenge man’s brutality—at a point in time before man destroyed Earth himself. That time is now.”
Upon the success of Amando de Ossorio’s* first horror film, 1969’s Malenka, The Vampire’s Niece(aka, Fangs of the Living Dead; a success in spite of its intended psychological horror plot recut into a vampire flick against his wishes), de Ossorio decided to continue with the horror genre and eschew his previous, less successful attempts at spaghetti westerns (1964’s Grave of the Gunfighter and 1966/66’s Three from Colorado, aka Hudson River Massacre) and comedy (1967’s A Girl in the Yard).
Inspired, in part, by the writings of Spain’s Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s Gothic horror short story “El monte de las animas” (part of his 1862 short-story collection, Soria) and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), in 1971 de Ossorio concocted a tale about a legion of 13th Century knights, known as the Templars who, in their quest of eternal life, began committing human sacrifices and drinking human blood. In modern day Portugal, a group of tourists poking around the ruins of the Templars’ abandoned monastery revive the rotted, eyeless corpses of the Templars to reign once again.
As with the Gothic, psychological horror of Malenka hacked into a vampire feature to appeal to the American marketplace, American distributors decided to re-edit Tombs of the Blind Dead as a Planet of the Apes rip-off sequel. The opening credit sequence to their edit replaced the film’s original setting with a post-apocalyptic future in which the undead were deceased intelligent apes from the Planet of the Apes story-arc, picking up where the fifth and final apes movie, Battle of the Planet of the Apes, left off. It was all just a matter of excising Tombs’ Templars sacrifice sequence, where they tortured and drank the blood of a female victim, and expunging its sex and gore accoutrements, particularly de Ossorio’s lesbian relationship subplot and the rape-on-a-train sequence. Stir in the English-dub with the cast screaming about “apes” and . . . Poof! We have another ape “sequel” that played on U.S. East Coast Drive-Ins screens in 1978.
And that, boys and girls, is the Tales from the Spanish Planet of the Apes.
It’s a night with de Ossorio’s Templars!
The 2021 unofficial sequel-homage!
Yep! We did ’em all . . . and the ripoffs!
* Be sure to check out all of the films from our December 2022 “Amando de Ossorio Week” of reviews.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes for B&S Movies.
I’m really emotional about the town that I come from, Pittsburgh. When people talk down on it or proclaim how they can’t wait to get out of here, I get upset. There’s nothing like this city to me and nowhere I go in the rest of this world can really measure up.
A Rick Sebak documentary can bring me to tears. And watching the trailer for this movie, I realized that I’d probably be moved for its entire running time.
I mean, how can you not love Pittsburgh, a city that has given you the 1970’s Steelers, probably the roughest gang of brutes that ever took the gridiron; Bruno Sammartino, perhaps the greatest pro wrestler of all time; and also Fred Rodgers, a man who gently helped several generations grow up?
Tom Junod started writing for Esquire in 1997, with some of his notable works including The Abortionist, The Rapist Says He’s Sorry and The Falling Man, which was turned in to a documentary. His Esquire profile of Mister Rogers, “Can You Say… Hero?”, was the basis for this movie, written by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster (who also teamed to write Maleficent: Mistress of Evil).
It’s directed by Marielle Heller, who created the films The Diary of a Teenage Girl and the Lee Israel biopic Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) is the award-winning Esquire journalist in this story who stands in for Junod. Recently in The Atlantic, Junod wrote about the differences between reality and the film. He never got in a fistfight with his father at his sister’s wedding. You should read that article, marvel at how well-written it is, then come back to read my poor by comparison thoughts on this film. You can also see more of what is true and false in this Slatearticle.
Tom Hanks plays Rogers and if there’s anyone else that should imbue this role, I don’t know who it could be. I traveled over an hour to see Mr. Rogers at the age of seven, so excited to be near him. He was just a constant moment of my childhood and there comes a time when we grow past our childhood, in the same way that Lloyd has forgotten his stuffed childhood friend Old Rabbit.
To be honest, I needed to hear from Fred Rogers and consider what his message can still mean today, in a world where anger is the only thing sustaining me most days. I forget all the wonderful things that exist in the world, whether they’re as simpler as an Italian direct to video horror movie or the love you get from your wife. This movie succeeds because it imparts that message without feeling preachy. These things just are. You are special, as Mister Rogers told me nearly forty years ago and like that stuffed rabbit that the writer has forgotten, I’ve forgotten too.
This movie will mean something somewhere else, but it reminds me again of why I love Pittsburgh. Why this city makes me so emotional that my eyes grow wet. Because it’s a place that built things at one point. Maybe it was the steel in skyscrapers. Perhaps it was the birthplace of someone like Warhol. Or maybe it was the home to someone like Mister Rogers, who took his Neighborhood of Make-Believe and sent it into our homes and tried to get us ready for the world that would come once he was gone.
It’s a dark and frightening place, if I can be perfectly honest with you. There are days where I can’t control the shaking in my body because I get so nervous and worried and unable to decide what to do that I have no recourse other than to just shake.
Maybe I should meditate further on this quote from Rogers: “As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has — or ever will have — something inside that is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.”
I don’t have any of the answers. But I’m trying. And that’s the best we can do. You should see this movie, obviously.
B&S Movies’ readers are already up to speed on everything ape, with the franchise’s production minutiae readily available—if you want it.
But here are the basics that led to the post-Star Wars POTA movies: As result of the first four films’ box office returns—it was the Star Wars of its day—Arthur P. Jacobs, the producer of the films through his APJAC Productions for distributor 20th Century Fox, decided to capitalize on the theatrical success with an hour-long live action series. It was to start (and take place after the events in) after Conquest, which was believed to be the fourth and final film. Then Fox decided that, instead of a series, they wanted another movie, which became 1973’s Battle.
Sadly, Jacobs died in June 1973 before his vision of the TV series could be realized. CBS-TV then purchased the broadcast rights to the first three films: each ran as a “Movie of the Week” during the month of September 1973 to, not surprising, high ratings. And result of Jacobs’s death, Fox was in full control of the decisions regarding the franchise.
So while the ape movies were breaking TV ratings records, Gene Roddenberry developed his Star Trek follow-up, Genesis II (1973), through Warner Bros. for CBS-TV—and the movie-series pilot garnered high ratings. Plans were made to go to series, with Roddenberry scripting a 20-episode season arc.
But the ratings for the Apes reruns rivaled Genesis II, which resulted in CBS turning their focus away from other contenders (what those series were, is unknown) for a new weekly science-fiction series—including Roddenberry’s. And with that, the network ran with Apes TV series idea and added it to the schedule for their 1974 autumn programming. Fox ordered 14 episodes.
The series started from scratch, with actors Ron Harper and James Naughton as Alan Virdon and Peter Burke, two astronauts who pass through a time warp while approaching Alpha Centauri on August 19, 1980, which results in a crash on June 14, 3085. They’re rescued by a human (for the sake of adding “drama” to the series, unlike the films, the humans can speak) who takes them to a bomb shelter and opens a book containing historical text and pictures of Earth circa 2500; the space explorers are convinced they are on a future Earth. A later check of their ship’s chronometer confirms their fears: they’re on Earth 1000 years in the future.
They’re soon befriended by a friendly chimpanzee, Galen, portrayed by Roddy McDowall—the only actor to return to the franchise. Booth Coleman (the 1956 post-apoc flick World Without End; pick a ‘60s or ‘70s TV series) took over the role of the orangutan Zaius from his friend, and former Dr. Zaius, Maurice Evans. In another Star Trek connection: Mark Lenard (Spock’s father Sarek in Star Trek: TOS, TAS, TNG) starred as gorilla General Urko.
The series, which ran during the highly-coveted ratings sweet spot from 8 to 9 p.m on Fridays in September 1974, was a ratings disaster. The failure was attributed to the high production costs against the low ratings, ratings that resulted from repetitive stories (boring stories) that relied too much on human philosophical dilemmas and not enough ape action—which is what everyone came for in the first place: the apes. After 14 episodes, which ran from September 13, 1974 to December 20, 1974, the series was cancelled. (Sounds like Battlestar Galactica‘s dilemma to catch some “Star Wars” success.)
In 1981, in the wake of the Star Wars-inspired sci-fi boom on theatre screens and television (check out B&S Movies’ “Ten Star Wars Rip Offs” and “Attack of the Clones” tribute weeks as proof), Fox reedited ten of the fourteen episodes—two episodes stitched together—into five international TV movies (that also played as theatrical features in some overseas markets). To achieve continuity and flow, new prologue and epilog segments were filmed starring McDowall as an aged Galen telling the “past” tale of the Earth astronauts. Those five films were:
Back to the Planet of the Apes
Forgotten City of the Planet of the Apes
Treachery and Greed on the Planet of the Apes
Life, Liberty and Pursuit on the Planet of the Apes
Farewell to the Planet of the Apes
(In addition to the Planet of the Apes series, CBS-TV also recut episodes of The Amazing Spider-Man (Spider-Man Strikes Back and The Dragon’s Challenge) and their two ‘70s pilots for Captain America (Captain America and Death Too Soon) into overseas theatrical features (which became box-office hits) and telefilms. Other TV series recut into theatrical/telefilms in the wake of Star Wars’ success included Sylvia and Gerry Anderson’s syndicated UFO and Space: 1999, the 1973 Keir Dullea Canadian series The Starlost, and Universal’s Buck Rogers in the 25th Century for NBC-TV and Battlestar Galactica for ABC-TV (BSG’s “Commander Cain” story-arc was cut into a successful foreign theatrical: Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack; trailer); even story-arcs of The Six Million Dollar Man (The Secret of Bigfoot) received theatrical cuts. Even the early ‘70s pilot-movies for Earth II, The Questor Tapes, and Genesis II found new life via new edits and new titles. You can learn more about those telefilms with the Medium article, “In Space No One Can Hear the Pasta Over-Boiling: The ’80s Italian Spacesploitation Invasion.”)
However, before Fox edited those ape movies, the studio teamed with NBC-TV and created Return to the Planet of the Apes, a 1975 Saturday morning animated series (as was Star Trek) produced by the team behind the popular Jonny Quest. The series went back to the beginning, once again, as three American astronauts—including Jeff Allen (voiced by Austin Stoker, who played MacDonald in Battle; John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13)—time jump into Earth’s future. The storylines closely mirrored Pierre Boulle’s Monkey Planet source novel and the Vietnam War and Cold War themes of first two ape movies. In addition, the series featured characters that originated in both of the Fox films and the CBS live action series. NBC broadcast 13 episodes between September 6 and November 29, 1975. As with the live action CBS-TV series, the kids stayed away in droves, as the show’s message was too complex and heavy-handed for children. NBC cancelled the series.
In addition to Marvel Comics’ longer-running Adventures of the Planet of the Apes series published from August 1974 to February 1977, Power Records issued a 1974 comic book-audio series, Planet of the Apes (which can be enjoyed on You Tube).
And that was the end of the Apes franchise—until Tim Burton’s 2001 reboot.
Numerous episodes of CBS’s live action and NBC’s animated series are uploaded on You Tube. You can sample the first episode of the hour-long live action series (Part 1 and Part 2) and the half hour animated series. The fan-made clip, seen above, is based on deleted, lost footage shot for the opening of the third Apes theatrical film, Escape. Based on the original shooting script, the segment featured the apenauts inside the space ship, seeing the Earth destroyed, and encountering the time continuum. The scene was ultimately scrapped and the film began with the ship already crash landed on Earth.
Wanna play?
As part of our May 2023 tribute to Roger Avery and Quentin Tarantino’s weekly podcast tribute to their days at Manhattan Beach’s Video Archives, here’s the link to their take on the home video version of The Apes TV series.
The two, above paperbacks are adapted from the series episodes that comprise the third Apes telefilm — learn more with our individual review of Quentin’s favorite of the series, Treachery and Greed on the Planet of the Apes.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes for B&S Movies.
Conrad Vernon started his career as a storyboard artist on Cool World but may be best known as creating and voicing the Gingerbread Man from the Shrek movies. He also co-directed Sausage Party before starting work on this reboot of Addams, who you may remember from the Charles Addams newspaper strips (which started all the way back in 1938), the 1964-1966 TV series or the three films made in the 1990’s, The Addams Family, Addams Family Values and the direct-to-video Addams Family Reunion.
There’s a cute origin story at the beginning of this film, as Gomez (Oscar Issac from the new Star Wars films) and Morticia (Charlize Theron) escape the old country thanks to help from Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll). As they travel to New Jersey, they soon meet Lurch (Vernon). In truth, they move to Westfield, as that’s where creator Charles Addams grew up.
As we move forward a few years, we meet their children, Wednesday (Chloë Grace Moretz) and Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard, who must have the Richard Moll in the 80’s deal to be in nearly every movie that comes out). Pugsley is about to enact the ritual of the Mazurka, which is a sword dancing exhibition that proves that he is man enough to defend his family. It’s kind of like the Addams version of a bar mitzvah.
Meanwhile, reality TV host Margaux Needler (Allison Janney) is creating a town called Assimilation down the hill from the Addams mansion and wants to rid her perfect town of the family.
The message here is that everyone should be unique, which is nice for kids to hear, and that even strange people like the Addams can be a family that loves one another.
There’s plenty of fun voice talent in this, like Snoop Dogg as Cousin Itt, Bette Midler as Grandmama and Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara as Morticia’s parents.
I really enjoyed how the look of this film appears more like the actual comic strip than the TV show, although the end, where the cast appears in the original credits, is a delight.
Paul Dehn wrote every one of the original Apes films, but after providing the story idea, an illness made him leave the project. John William and Joyce Hooper Corrington (The Omega Man) came in to write the movie, despite never seeing any of the previous films.
Dehn was unavailable for the initial rewrites, but was hired to come in and do one more pass. He was only given a story credit, despite an appeal to the Writer’s Guild of America for shared credit on the screenplay, despite rewriting 90% of the dialogue and adding a new ending.
While the original script ended on a playground with ape and human children fighting, now it would close on a statue of Caesar with a tear falling from its eye. Joyce Corrington called ythe new ending stupid and claimed that “It turned our stomachs when we saw it.”
The budget for this one was $1.7 million, a figure that director J. Lee Thompson felt wasn’t enough. He also wasn’t happy with the script, regretting that Dehn wasn’t on board throughout the entire process.
In the future — 2670 A.D. — a Lawgiver (John Huston!) explains that Caesar led the apes after mankind wiped itself out in a nuclear war. The ape leader, along with his wife Lisa (Natalie Trundy, reprising her role) and son Cornelius, are attempting to create a new society where human and ape can live together. Opposing this is the gorilla Aldo (Claude Atkins!) who wants to imprison the humans and make them do slave labor.
After an incident between Aldo and a teacher, Caesar doubts his leadership and wishes that his parents could have taught him more. MacDonald, Caesar’s human assistant and the younger brother of the similarly named character from the last film — played by Austin Stoker — knows that there is archived footage of them in the Forbidden City. So the two are joined by Virgil (Paul Williams, who of course had to end up in this series) on a quest to see this video.
However, there are mutants living within the city, led by Governor Kolp (Severn Darden), the man who once captured Caesar. Soon, Kolp declares war on Ape City despite his assistant Mendez’s trying to calm him down. Later in the film, Mendez is asked to set off an atomic bomb if the humans don’t win their battle against the apes. Mendez refuses, which is the start of the mutant cult that we saw in the Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
Speaking of people named Mendez, this is the film that inspired Tony Mendez to create the operation “Argo” during the Iran hostage crisis. The film Argo dramatizes this tale, as Mendez traveled to Iran in disguise as a film producer and had the hostages disguised as a film crew in order to flee the country. There’s a clip of this movie within that movie, showing the moment when Caesar, MacDonald and Virgil arrive in the Forbidden City.
Aldo plans a coup against Caesar and when Cornelius overhears, Aldo hacks off the tree branch he’s on, critically wounding the young ape. Kolp attacks, but the tide soon turns and he runs, leading Aldo to follow him and ruthlessly slaughter all of the retreating humans.
Aldo returns to try and take Caesar’s power, Virgil reveals that the milittary leader has broken the most sacred law – “Ape shall never kill ape.” Aldo falls to his death and he attempts to treat humans as equals.
In the future, the Lawgiver tells a mixed audience of young humans and apes, that their society still waits for a day when their world will no longer need weapons, as a closeup of a statue of Caesar cries a single tear.
Lew Ayres — who played Dr. Kildare in nine movies — also shows up as the orangutan Mandemus, the keeper of the weapons. The actor was a well-known pacifist, so there’s some resonance in how much the character believe that he must protect the weapons from the warlike gorillas. He believes that the guns are only for defense, not offense.
This would be the last theatrical Apes film for awhile, as producer Arthur P. Jacobs died a few days after the film’s release. As to the future of the Apes, stay tuned as we will soon get to the TV series that followed.
Hustlers is based on the New York magazine’s 2015 article “The Hustlers at Scores: The Ex-Strippers Who Stole From (Mostly) Rich Men and Gave to, Well, Themselves” by Jessica Pressler. It confirms to me what I’ve always known about men’s clubs. The men think they run the world, but they have little to no power at all, despite the small bits of cash and ego they try to sap from the women who are way above them.
Lorene Scafaria, who wrote Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist and wrote and directed Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, wrote and directed this film. It’s told through flashbacks as reporter Elizabeth (Julia Stiles) is working on a story about the girls and how they robbed men to pay for their lives.
Destiny (Constance Wu, Crazy Rich Asians) is dancing at Moves — you know, Scores — to support her grandmother but is barely getting by until she learns the ins and outs of dancing from Ramona (Jennifer Lopez). Seriously, this entire movie should belong to J. Lo. The scene where she mesmerizes Destiny before letting her hide under her fur coat on the roof? That’s why she’s still the biggest star around at fifty.
After the financial crisis of 2007–2008 — and one last night with Usher throwing enough money at the girls to solve all of my money woes for life — things get rough. No one has money and the Russian girls that work the club now are more about selling sexual favors than using their bodies to make money the old fashioned way without really having sex.
That’s when Ramona and Destiny reconnect and start using a mix of Special K and MDMA to knock dudes out and take all of their cash via credit card at the club. Life’s good again, but it can’t last.
The other girls in the film are played by Keke Plamer (who hosts Strahan, Sara and Keke with Sara Haines and Michael Strahan), Lili Reinhart (Betty from Riverdale), transgender actress Trace Lysette (who before she became one of the first trans people to appear as a non-transgender person on prime time television in a speaking role performed as a showgirl in bars around Dayton and Columbus, Ohio), Madeline Brewer (Orange Is the NewBlack, The Handmaid’s Tale) and Lizzo and Cardi B in what are pretty much cameo roles. Plus, Mercedes Ruhl is the mother of all the ladies.
In truth, Cardi B has admitted to illegally drugging and robbing men in the early stages of her career, so she pretty much knows exactly what this movie is all about. Lopez personally brought the actress on board, saying “I know she knew this world better than any of us. I told her she had to do it. And I wasn’t going to take no for an answer.”
Stand up comedian Big Jay Oakerson plays the club’s DJ and one of the customers who gets taken is played by Devin Ratray, who was Buzz in the Home Alone films and the bully in Little Monsters.
This wasn’t bad, to be honest. It could have used more of the dog, Mister Bruce, who is a scene stealer. And there’s one scene I’d like to call out: after the Russian girls start, guys start ignoring Ramona, even paying her to leave one evening. Is this movie science fiction? Jennifer Lopez is setting the screen on fire and this dude is like, “We’re all good, thanks.” Certainly, this man is an android from the Weyland-Yutani company and not a stockbroker from the boiler room.
I’ve been reading a lot about the deaths of beloved stars. Like Elvis, who struggling through his final concerts while raving in a mania about killing the karate instructor who he thought stole Priscilla from him to the point he had to be drugged into incoherence before dying from quite possibly overstraining himself on the toilet because all the prescription drugs had torn up his insides so badly. People who had everything but it felt like nothing, who lived supposedly charmed lives but had given so much of themselves away that there was nothing to do but, well, die.
What can I say? 2019 has kinda been like that.
So here’s another tale of stardom not being as wonderful as it seems, based on the Peter Quilter play End of the Rainbow. This time, we’re following the end of Judy Garland’s career as she relocates to England for a series of sold-out shows at the Talk of the Town in London, only for things to fall apart all over again.
Quilter went on record about the loose adaption of his play by saying that screenwriter Tom Edge wanted the story to be much more true and precise and have less fantasy sequences than his play.
Critics have been all of the map on Renee Zellweger’s performance as the lead. Me, I still can’t come to grips with her new head, but then again, I’m not a woman trying to maintain my relevance in Hollywood. Far be it from me to demand that celebrities not get work done. She acquaints herself well with the musical numbers here to the point that there are moments to cheer about. And it never gets to Lifetime movie mania, so that’s good. Or bad, because you know, I like to wallow in the mud when it comes to biographies.
There’s a scene in the beginning that feels lifting from Crazy RIch Asians as Judy and her two kids can’t afford to stay in a room any longer. But instead of being a lesson in how hotel owners underestimate people, it’s just to illustrate how far Ms. Garland has fallen.
Finn Wittrock, who has been in so many of the American Horror Story shows, plays Garland’s fifth and last husband, Mickey Deans.
Sir Michael Gambon is also here as Bernard Delfont, or by his full title, The Right Honorable Baron Delfont, who was born in Russia as Boruch Winogradsky. He ran the Talk of the Town, bringing in big stars like Sinatra, Shirley Bassey and Eartha Kitt. As EMI’s chief executive from 1979-1980, he also funding for Monty Python’s Life of Brian at the last moment, worried over the religious satire in the film.
Of all the movie, I really enjoyed the flashbacks to Garland’s early life in Hollywood, such as her interactions with Louis B. Mayer, as he explains to her that the gift she has makes her better than other girls, but that it comes with a cost. Or a flashback to a date with Mickey Rooney where a studio executive interrupts so that she can take her amphetamines so she’s not too hungry.
There’s also a nice moment where the two fans who see her every night are surprised that she wants to follow them out for an evening, ending with an all-night singing session at one of their apartments. It’s a pretty emotional moment realizing that Garland has lost so much that these two fans represent nearly all she has left.
Liza Minnelli said on her official Facebook page that she had “never met nor spoken to Renée Zellweger” and made it clear that she didn’t approve of the project. She’s played by Gemma-Leah Devereux from The Tudors in the movie.
Speaking of celebrity, Jessie Buckley, who plays Garland’s assistant in England, broke into showbiz on a reality show called I’d Do Anything. One week, she sang Garland’s “The Man That Got Away.” She’s good in the film, but it seems to set up that there’s going to be a moment of catharsis or learning between their two characters.
That never happens, just a sort of feel good moment where Garland stumbles at singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the audience helps her finish it, before she asks them to not forget her. This is followed by the gut punch of learning she died six months later.
I guess this is the opposite of a feel good movie. A feel bad one? A good cry? A reminder than maybe it’s a good thing you never became a famous star? You can decide that for yourself.
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