Well, this TV sci-fi’er really is the whole enchilada when discussing the career of Lee Majors, isn’t it?
Colon’d and suffixed as “The Moon and the Desert” when it aired as a two-part episode during its syndication run (and served as its overseas title in some quarters), we meet Steve Austin, an astronaut that’s made three moon landings. During a test flight crash in a space plane prototype, he looses his right arm, left eye and both legs. His friend and personal physician, Dr. Rudy Wells (played by Marin Balsam, who did not return for the subsequent films or series), recruits Austin for an O.S.O project (O.S.I in the series) overseen by Oliver Spencer (played by Darren McGavin; the character and actor did not return for the subsequent films or series): creating a cyborg through the installation of bionic parts onto a human body. As the reluctant astronaut deals with his new body and recruitment as a government agent (he returned to space in few series episodes), he accepts his first mission to rescue a valuable hostage asset in Saudi Arabia.
The TV movie’s high ratings and overseas success quickly justified the production of two more prefixed U.S. telefilms (again, theatrical features overseas): Wine, Women and War and The Solid Gold Kidnapping. The concept then went to series and ran for five seasons from 1974 to 1978. All three telefilms would be reedited into two-part series episodes for its syndication (with scenes being re-filmed with Martin E. Brooks, who portrayed Rudy Wells in the series, and Richard Anderson, who portrayed O.S.I head Oscar Goldman).
Upon the 1978 dual-demise of The Six Million Dollar Man and its spinoff, The Bionic Woman, Majors returned for three more U.S. telefilms/foreign theatricals: The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman (1987), Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman (1989; starring wheelchair-and-bionic Sandra Bullock!), and Bionic Ever After (1994).
Multiple Sites.
It all began back in 1972 when Cyborg, Martin Caidin’s best-seller, was optioned for a film adaptation by Harve Bennett for Universal Pictures — and, at first, the film retained the book’s title. Elements of Caiden’s subsequent sequels of the continuing adventures of Steve Austin — Operation Nuke, High Crystal, and Cyborg IV — while not directly adapted, had various elements worked into the subsequent series. (You can read an in-depth review of the book-to-film translation at ManaPop and get the lowdown on all of the wonderful toys inspired by the series at Toys You Had.)
Bennett’s first choice for the title roll was Monte Markham, who worked on Bennett’s previous sci-fi telefilm, 1972’s The Astronaut. To ease the sting of losing the part due to studio executive interference — in preferring Majors’s more experienced pedigree courtesy of his work in the well-received and highly-rated series The Big Valley and Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law — Markham appeared in two episodes as race-car-driver-turned-into-new-and-improved-cyborg Barney Miller/Hiller: “The Seven Million Dollar Man” and “The Bionic Criminal.”
After the 1978 series cancellation, and prior to their production of the three 1987 to 1994 U.S TV movies, Universal cut another another foreign-only theatrical in 1980 from the two-part 1976 episodes, “The Secret of Bigfoot” and “The Return of Bigfoot.” As with Battlestar Galactica before it, which was also cut into three foreign theatrical sequels, Universal licensed several paperback tie-ins based on the series’ episodes. (You can watch the series version of “Secret” at NBC.com with Part 1 and Part 2, as well as “Return” Part 1 and Part 2.)
During our “Lee Majors Week” review of Starlight One, we named dropped the 1969 Gregory Peck sci-fi’er Marooned. So we should mention that film was also based on Caiden’s 1964 novel of the same name. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century fans may have picked up Caiden’s 1995 Rogers sidequel/adaptation, A Life in the Future, in which Buck was refitted with bionic parts.
A big-budgeted theatrical — not only for Steve Austin, but Colt Seavers’s adventures in The Fall Guy — have been ballyhooed for years, with Mark Wahlberg as Austin. This Screen Rant article from May 2020 wraps up the film’s production history. Lee has stated that, if he’s given a significant part with substance, and not just a cameo walk on, he’s willing to be involved in both productions. So, it’s fingers crossed for Lee!
You can watch the 1973 theatrical cut of The Six Million Dollar Man on the FShareTV platform. In 2010, upon the release of the 40-disc, 100-hour DVD box set of the series (hey, it’s only $239.95!), Lee sat down with Vanity Fair for an extensive interview about the series and its lasting pop culture status.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Lionel E. Seigel (who wrote many-a-episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman) provided Lee with his third TV movie leading-man role (after 1970’s The Liberation of L.B Jones). Produced by Paramount Pictures for ABC-TV, this is Lee in one of his rare appearances as a heavy, despicable character (that, in my mind as I review his work this week, it seems he didn’t repeat until 1990’s The Cover Girl Murders for the USA Network). Behind the lens is Jud Taylor, which perks up a Trekkies ears (sorry), for his direction of several episodes of Star Trek: TOS; he also gave us many-a-great TV movie, The Disappearance of Flight 412, in particular.
Robert Conrad (he of our Mill Creek fave, Assassin) and Lee Majors star as Eddie and Larry (Eddie’s the nutjob; Larry’s the misguided ne’er do well) who botch a kidnapping by accidentally killing their victim. So, as a consolation, they kidnap three nuns (Jane Wyatt, Carol Lynley, and Lois Nettleton) stranded on a California desert highway. Lee gets second thoughts when he makes an emotional connection with the Nuns and decides to help them escape the crazed clutches of Eddie.
Yes, that’s the same Carol Lynley from the disaster box office bonanza that was The Poseidon Adventure (and The Shape of Things to Come) and Jane Wyatt was, in fact, Spock’s mom. Also look out for an early role from Gregory Sierra (TV’s Sanford and Son and Barney Miller, but always loved around here as Verger from Beneath the Planet of the Apes!) as the cop on the case.
You can watch the full movie on You Tube. It made it to DVD and overseas TV via a deal between CBS-TV and Paramount Studio in the early 2000s.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally shared this review on January 19, 2021. Now, you can watch Clapboard Jungle on the ARROW streaming app.
This movie follows Justin McConnell (Lifechanger) over five years in his life and career as an independent filmmaker, as he continually asks himself, “How does an indie filmmaker survive in the current film business?”
Beyond the story of McConnell, this has plenty of quotes and advice from an army of filmmakers, actors and others behind the scenes, including Guillermo del Toro, Mick Garris, Paul Schrader, Lloyd Kaufman, George Romero, Brian Yuzna, Larry Cohen, Tom Holland, John McNaughton, Uwe Boll, Sid Haig, Jenn Wexler, Don Mancini, Frank Henenlotter, Charles Band, Tom Savini, Richard Stanley, Dean Cundey and so many more.
This is more than just a documentary. It feels like an essential watch for anyone thinking about making a film. With so many of the films that we watch, we only see the end results on screen. There is so much more that we will never know and work we can’t imagine, which makes me think more about how I write when I discuss these films. No matter how down and dirty some movies are, they are someone’s labor of love.
You can learn more at the official site. This is available on demand from Gravitas in the U.S. and Indiecan Entertainment in Canada, and will be released on blu ray from Arrow Video for the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, where they will release it on blu ray.
Based on the Cartoon Network series and directed by Alex Winter — yes, that Alex Winter — Ben 10 Race Against Time is a great live-action version of a kid-friendly series that you may have slept on.
Ben Tennyson has the power of the Omnitrix, which allows him to transform into a multitude of super-powered different characters (for ten minutes at a time) to protect the galaxy, a job his grandfather (Lee Majors!) has done for decades. But now, Eon wants to destroy our her and use the Hands of Armageddon to open a gateway to his home dimension and unleash war upon our planet.
It turns out that Eon is an alternate reality version of Ben gone wrong, one that has learned how to get past the time limit of the Omnitrix. Only four of the powered forms — Diamondhead, Grey Matter, Heatblast and Wildmutt — show up here, but I really enjoyed getting to see a live-action version of a cartoon that I really dig.
Winter would also direct a sequel, Ben 10: Alien Swarm. And hey — Lee Majors is the perfect actor for Max.
You know, it takes some balls to make a sequel to High Noon.
But hey — Elmore Leonard is a heck of a writer and Jerry Jameson made The Bat People and Airport ’77, so he’s OK in my book. And if you’re going to replace Gary Cooper, I guess Lee Majors will do for a TV movie.
Will Kane is now a private citizen and goes back to Hadleyville a year after he threw away at the end of High Noon. Now, the law is J.D. Ward (Pernell Roberts), who allows his deputies to outright terrorize everyone in town and even shoots the horses that Kane came to town to purchase. And now, Ward is hunting down Ben Irons (David Carradine), despite him being an innocent man.
Kane tries to help the wrongly accused man, but can’t save him. Ward attempts to have our hero arrested for aiding a fugitive, but the townspeople turn on him and the local authorities. They reinstate Kane as marshal and he ends up gunning down Ward for resisting arrest.
This film also has some great character actors going for it, like Michael Pataki, M. Emmet Walsh and Tracey Walter AKA Bob the Goon. It was shot at Old Tucson Studio, which was also where The Bells of St. Mary’s, Winchester ’73, Rio Bravo, C.C. & Company, Death Wish, Three Amigos, Tombstone and many more movies were made.
After his 112-episode, 4-year run as Heath Barkley on ABC-TV’s The Big Valley, it was time to see if Lee Majors could carry a feature film. And he did, with this, the screenwriting debut by familiar ’60s and ’70s TV actor Stuart Margolin (we know him best from his support role as Angel Martin, James Garner’s former cell mate, in The Rockford Files). And who’s the director on this? Well, hey, it’s George McCowan — the guy who brought us the nature-run-amuck classic, Frogs and the Canadian Star Wars dropping that is The Shape of Things to Come, as well as a few episodes of the pre-Star Wars venture The Starlost, and too many ’60s and ’70s U.S. TV series to mention.
One of the earliest films — long before the 1979 Oscar Winner, Coming Home — that dealt with the emotional trauma of returning Vietnam veterans, Lee stars as Andy Crocker. He’s a disaffected vet who returns to his Texas hometown to discover his girlfriend was forced into marrying another man, his once successful motorcycle shop is left in ruins, and those he once through were his friends, now turn their backs on him. The campaign against him is led by the town’s queen bee: the mother of his ex-girlfriend.
In addition to this serving as Majors’s film debut, be on the lookout for R&B musician Marvin Gaye (he finished his acting career with Chrome and Hot Leather starring William Smith), country musician and breakfast sausage king Jimmy Dean (who followed up with a role in Diamonds Are Forever), and Righteous Brother Bobby Hatfield, each in their acting debuts. Keen TV eyes and lovers off things character-actor will notice Joe Higgins (from TV’s The Big Valley and The Rifleman, but also Record City and Sixpack Annie!), ’60s six kitten Joey Heatherton (Cry-Baby), longtime Clint Eastwood sidekick and future Commission Gordon Pat Hingle (Rachel, Sweet Rachel), and Agnes Moorehead (TV’s Bewitched, but also of What’s the Matter with Helen? and The Bat!) rounding out the cast.
You can watch The Ballad of Andy Crocker — Stuart Margolin’s screenwriting debut — on You Tube, and watch his latest screenplay, What the Night Can Do, for free on IMDbTV (via your IMDb, Amazon, or Google accounts). We found the original, 1969 trailer to enjoy, as well.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Editor’s Note: This review originally ran on January 21, 2019. We are rerunning it for our “Lee Majors Week” of film reviews.
After the success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hollywood suddenly had roles for older actresses, as part of psycho-biddy films. And no one was more in demand than Joan Crawford, who agreed to be in this William Castle film with the following demands: script and cast approval, a $50,000 salary and 15 percent of the profits.
Lucy Harbin (Joan!) has spent two decades in a mental hospital after the axe murders of her philandering husband (Lee Majors!) and his mistress. After she gets out, she moves in with his brother Bill (Leif Ericson, who is also in I Saw What You Did with Crawford, along with his wife Emily and her daughter, Carol (Diane Baker, who Crawford hired to replace Anne Helm).
Ironically, Crawford herself was a replacement for Joan Blondell, who was injured before filming and couldn’t make the movie.
Carol seems happy and unharmed by the fact that she watched her mother sliced up her father and his lover with an axe. In fact, she does everything she can to keep her mother from being depressed, changing her look back to how she appeared when she was young.
Soon enough, Joan is acting the hell out of this movie, a new series of axe murders are happening and George Kennedy shows up looking young and perverted. Oh yeah — you can also totally play a drinking game by looking for every appearance of Pepsi in this movie. Even crazier, the character of Dr. Anderson was played by Mitchell Cox, who was not an actor, but rather the Vice President of the Pepsi-Cola Company. Joan did this one all on her own, without even asking Castle. Oh Joan!
Even though William Castle had the best gimmick of all — an A-list star in a B-movie horror flick — he still gave audience members little cardboard axes for coming to see the movie. And at several theaters, he brought Joan along, coming out to greet her public.
My favorite thing in this entire movie is that the Columbia logo’s torch-bearing woman is decapitated at the end of the movie!
Look — I’m not going to be unbiased when it comes to Joan Crawford movies. This one is ridiculous — a near giallo with Joan acting decades younger than she should — but that makes it so much greater than it should be.
And as for Mr. Majors: He booked this first role as Joan’s philandering husband — although uncredited — at the age 25. Soon after, he booked a 1965 episode of Gunsmoke and an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, “The Monkey’s Paw.” Then he beat out 400 other actors — including a young Burt Reynolds on the shortlist — as Heath Barkley in a new ABC western series known as the The Big Valley.
Mircoworld is the perfect film to wrap up our “Ancient Future Week” that you’ve enjoyed from April 11 to April 17.
Do you want to know how microprocessors were developed? Do you want to know why those curious # and * buttons were designed for the telephone? Courtesy of this AT&T short film production — and a little narration from Captain Kirk — we learned about our now “Ancient Future” during our middle and high school science classes about the computers that came to amaze us in the ’80s and steal our quarters, then wholly encompass our lives in the ’90s . . . and turned us into social media morons in the 21st century.
Thank you, microprocessor, for ye unleashed the Kardashians and their ilk upon the world and allowed for the coordination of destructive social protests raging across the U.S. in 2020 and 2021.
And it all began 1904, when British engineer John Ambrose Fleming invented the thermionic valve, the first vacuum tube, which made wireless radio technology a reality. Then, in 1971 — a mere 67 years later — Busicom logic architects and silicon engineers Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, Stanley Mazor, and Masatoshi Shima developed a 4-bit micro-programmable CPU. By 1976, microprocessors developed by Bell Laboratories expanded to a maximum of 8.5K transistors and 64-bits of memory. The Tandy Corporation sold the TRS-80 Model 1 through Radio Shack in 1977. The first emails were sent. Steve Wozniak designed the Apple I. Bill Gates’s Microsoft Corporation introduced an MS-DOS GUI personal computer to the mass market (pirated from Xerox, but that’s another story).
Image courtesy of wallpapersafari.com/text by PicFont.
Thanks to “The Gates” and “The Jobs,” we have a little A.I. in our life.
But before Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and fired up the first Web server and browser at CERN in 1991. Before Benoit Mandelbrot discovered fractal geometry and unleashed the M-Set on the world and made your selfie-self a reality. Before Robert Cailliau. Before Larry Page. Before Vint Cerf. Before then Senator Al Gore first proposed the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Before there was HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey . . . there was The Interocitor in This Island Earth (1955), the built-inside-the-planet-thought-manifesting The Great Machine in Forbidden Planet (1956), the computer-with-its-human-private-army The Brain in Billion Dollar Brain (1967), the subterranean OMM 0910 from THX 1138 (1971), the The Tabernacle from Zardoz (1974), Zero from Rollerball (1975), The MCP from Tron (1982), SkyNet from The Terminator, and WOPR (aka Joshua) in WarGames (1983).
Those are the A.I.’s most sci-fi cinephiles know.
For this latest installment of our “Exploring” featurettes at B&S About Movies, as we discuss the “Ancient Future” of computers and information technology on film, we’ll discuss the lesser known “brains” that are NOVAC, Alpha 60, Proteus IV, and Colossus, as well as the early humanoid A.I.s the Clickers and the Roboti.
Gog is the third and final feature in a loose film trilogy chronicling the exploits of the OSI, the “Office of Scientific Investigation.” While The Magnetic Monster (1953) dealt with a radioactive-magnetism experiment gone wrong and Riders to the Stars (1954) dealt with a meteor-retrieval gone wrong, Gog dealt with a rogue A.I. gone bad in an underground military bunker.
The A.I. in this case is NOVAC (Nuclear Operative Variable Automatic Computer) with a “physical extension” of its self: two multi-armed half-tracked, biblical-dubbed robots Gog and Magog. And when a series of unaccountable malfunctions begin to plague the facility, the OSI dispatches Dr. David Sheppard and Joanna Merritt to get to the bottom of the A.I. tomfoolery.
Shot in 15 days at the cost of $250,000 ($2.4 million in today’s money) and released in 3D color, Gog is the best of the three “OSI” films produced by United Artists. Sadly Ivan Tovar’s scientifically accurate screenplay and decent direction by Herbert L. Strock (1957’s Blood of Dracula and 1963’s The Crawling Hand) is undermined by its utter failure of the Bechdel Test.
As with Ib Melchoir’s later and better known Angry Red Planet (1960), we have one red-rinsed female among all the men (Ivan Tovar’s soon-to-be-wife Constance Dowling) who must faint and be fireman-carried through the complex to safety. Of course, while all the men wear standard military issue, baggy flight suits and clunky G.I boots, the women’s flight suits are tailor cut to accentuate their breast lines and pegged to show off some ankle. And, instead of Naura Hayden’s smart n’ sassy ballet flats in Angry Red Planet, Dowling runs around the complex in a sensible pair of open-toe wedge mules. And you thought the women in Project Moonbase has it rough.
So much for the “Ancient Future” of the 1950s.
You can catch Gog on Amazon Prime, but we found two freebies on You Tube HERE and HERE. The trailer comes and goes; we hope this one works.
Jean-Luc Godard’s neo-noir Alphaville, like Elio Petri’s pop-art romp The 10th Victim (1965), and Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1967), are each the prefect combinations of film noir and dystopian fiction. (Toss the later made Docteur M and Kamikaze ’89 on that list.)
The lead character in the film, Lemmy Caution (American actor Eddie Constantine), is a private detective-government operative that came from the mind of British writer Peter Cheney and served as the source of 15 Euro films released between 1952 to 1991. While all of those films were straight noir-detective films, Godard penned his own Cheney-script that placed the Caution character in a dystopian set, technocratic dictatorship.
Caution, aka Agent 003, is dispatched from “the Outlands” to the futuristic city of Alphaville overlorded by a sentient computer, Alpha 60 — which has outlawed the human concepts of emotion, free thought, and individuality. Caution’s mission: find a missing agent, kill Professor von Braun, and free the citizens of Alphaville by destroying Alpha 60.
As with Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie and Alex Cox’s Walker, Godard’s world is rife with anachronisms: for example, Caution arrives in town driving a then “futuristic” ’65 Ford Galaxie. As a result of budgetary limits, Godard uses no special props or any “futuristic” builds; everything is shot in real locations — with the newly built and elegant, Frank Lloyd Wright-modernist glass and concrete structures popping up around ’60s Paris doubling for the city of “Alphaville.”
Then there’s Godard creation of Alpha 60: Just one watch of this clip of an “interview scene” and you can see the brilliance of Godard. With a simple use of an electrolarynx (on his own voice) and the finger-like movement of overhead recording studio microphones and a spinning cooling fan as the “physical extention” of Alpha 60 . . . just wow. Low budget filmmaking at its finest that’s effectively chilling and creepy.
There’s no online freebies for Alphaville, but you can easily stream it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, and You Tube Movies. As of September 2020, the fine folks at Kino Lorber now offer Alphaville on Blu-ray and DVD, the new 4K restoration features both the Original French (with optional subtitles) and English Versions of the Film.
Take a soupçon of the multi-armed robots from Gog and a dash of the narcissistic A.I. from Alphaville and you get a horny supercomputer (voiced to creepy perfection by Robert Vaughn) that kidnap and rapes, oh, excuse me, “imprisons and forcibly impregnants” a woman (movie semantics) with the help of its “physical extension” known as Joshua — a robot consisting of a mechanical arm attached to a motorized wheelchair (an admittedly lame effect; where’s Gog when you need ’em?).
When Dr. Alex Harris (Fritz Weaver of Jaws of Satan, Creepshow), the computer-obsessed developer of Proteus IV, the world’s most advanced form of organic-artificial intelligence, demands “new terminals” and to be “let out of this box,” he realizes Proteus is more powerful than he imagined — too late.
Of course, any computer-obsessed scientist, complete with a fully equipped “mad scientist” basement laboratory, would have his home conveniently wired — via his home security system ALFRED — into his “Frankenstein,” making it easy to kidnap his wife (Julie Christie), construct itself a new modular polyedron body (an awesome, in-camera special effect; listen for the repurposed Star Trek “door swoosh” sfx), and an incubator to create a clone of the Harris’s late daughter — with the “mind” of Proteus itself.
Critics across the board hated this debut book-to-screen adaptation of Dean Koontz’s 1973 novel (Watchers, Servants of the Twilight) of the same name, which was written off as a sci-fi version of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby — only with a “satanic” computer (the book was a best seller; when the movie came out in ’77, the book was reissued; Waldenbooks promoted the book/film via an advertisement on its carryout paper bags). Released during the same year as Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Demon Seed, sadly, wilted at the box office. The director, Donald Cammell, was a protégé of Nicolas Roeg (the big budget American Giallo Don’t Look Now, also starring Julie Christie); the duo worked together on the Mick Jagger-starring Performance (completed in 1968, released in 1970). Cammell faired better with the pre-Basic Instinct psycho-thriller White of the Eye (1987) starring David Keith.
A film “classic” is always in the eye of the beholder: so you may think I’m a bit celluloid blind on this one. But there’s worst things to blow an hour and a half on, which you can do for free over on TubiTV. But if you prefer an ad-free experience, you can stream it on Amazon Prime and iTunes. I rank Demon Seed as essential sci-fi viewing alongside 2001: A Space Odyssey, Soylent Green, Silent Running, and the next film on this evening’s program.
Opinions are mixed on this granddaddy of sentient computer thrillers, which served as the second writing project by James Bridges (wrote and directed the back-to-back hits The China Syndrome and Urban Cowboy) after 1966’s The Appaloosa. And as with that Marlon Brando-starring film, this tale about a 1990s-era American Defense System computer becoming aware was also adapted from a novel, in this case, the 1966 science fiction novel Colossus by Dennis Feltham Jones — which was followed with two novel sequels: The Fall of Colossus (1974) and Colossus and the Crab (1977). And would you believe this was helmed by the director from the 1955 Frank Sinatra-starring wartime romance flick From Here to Eternity? True story. And while James Sargent also directed Burt Reynolds in the influential hicksploitation classic White Lightning, he also racked up a Razzie nod for Jaws: The Revenge.
As with Dr. Alex Harris and Proteus IV in our previous entry, Dr. Charles Forbin (Eric Braeden, aka Dr. Otto Hasslein in 1971’s Escape from the Planet of the Apes), underestimates the intelligence of his own “Frankenstein” and Colossus starts to refuse orders and making its own demands. Of course, double agents leaked “The Forbin Project” and Colossus discovers the Russians have constructed their own sentient defense system, known as Guardian. The now two merged supercomputers, which now identify as Colossus, come to realize that man is a wasteful, warring creature and subjugate the world to do their bidding.
A remake has been in development hell since 2007 at Universal Studios (who released the original) through Imagine Entertainment to be directed by Ron Howard — and Will Smith attached to star as Dr. Charles Forbin. The last word on the remake dates back to 2013, with Will Smith bringing on Ed Solomon, who wrote Smith’s Men in Black, to do rewrites. The poor critical and box office showings of Smith’s sci-fi forays I Am Legend (2007) and After Earth (2013) once again stalled the production. And the since poor showings of Smith’s Bright (2017) and Gemini Man (2019) only piled more dirt on the development grave. (You can read up on the last word of the remake in detail with this 2013 Screen Rant article.)
Courtesy of the fine folks at Shout Factory, a remastered high-definition widescreen Blu-ray was released in 2018 — and that remaster is not currently offered as an online stream? Anywhere? How is that possible? Ah, we found a freebee over on Vimeo.
Prior to Phillip K. Dick’s dreams of androids dreaming of electric sheep, dreams that later birthed Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Roger Corman associate Wesley Barry and his Genie Studios gave U.S. audiences their first vision of “fleshed-out” humanoid androids not aware that they’re androids. In addition: Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published six years afterCreation hit drive-in screens. And Barry’s vision, while not an adaptation of, brazenly pinches elements from Jack Williamson’s 1948 novel, The Humanoids.
Barry’s post-apocalypse tale concerns itself with the themes of racism and man’s loss of humanity against the scornfully-referred “Clickers,” a man-made race of bald, blue-gray, synthetic-skinned, silver-eyed humans (read: blacks) whose population is increasing, while humanity—who’ve developed a technological codependency on their robot slaves—sees their own birth rate decreasing. This triggers the creation of the human-terrorist paranoia-organization (read: the ‘50s “Red Scare”) “The Order of Flesh and Blood” (read: the Klu Klux Klan).
Amid the sociopolitical upheaval, a scientist faces resistance in expanding the “labor force” Clickers’ programming for emotions—going as far as to transform them into human replicas (read: Ash from Alien). Dr. Raven, with mad-scientist tenacity, intends to “thalamic transplant” the personality and memories of recently deceased humans into a robot-replica of that person. However, the human-humanoids have one flaw: like their “Clicker” brethren, they must go to “temple” (recharging stations), which also serves as information exchange terminals with the “father-mother” central computer (read: cyber-theology/church).
Courtesy of its financial shortcomings, instead of a sci-fi classic in the vein of the groundbreaking black-and-white post-apocs Metropolis (1927) and Things to Come (1936), which it seems Wesley was attempting to achieve, we’re instead left with the ambitious, cardboard incompetence of a stale, Aldous Huxley-vision of a not-so-Brave New World of humanoids wearing latex bald-wigs and matching-color rubber gloves, along with a military topped-off with Confederate Army caps left over from Gone with the Wind.
You can watch Creation of the Humanoids for free on You Tube. The trailer comes and goes; hopefully, this one still works.
R.U.R. (1938/1948/1976)
All of this robot, genetic-biological engineering exposition of the “Ancient Future” films we’ve enjoyed this week can be credited to one man—who really did “create” the humanoids: Nobel Prize-nominated and award-winning Czech writer Karel Čapek. His 1920 stage play/book R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) introduced the word “robot” and many of the concepts used in today’s science fiction. You can read the free eBook online at Gutenberg.org or buy a copy at Amazon. A new version of the film—in the wake of two English-language television versions (1938/30 minutes; 1948/60 minutes) and a feature-length Hungarian telefilm (1976)—a new English-language version is currently languishing in development hell.
. . . And we wait with binary-coded breath for that remake.
Update: June 20, 2021: Courtesy of one of our readers, Tereza Sklenářová, we’ve come to know that Karel Čapek was born in 1890, when the Czech Republic was not independent, yet (in 1918), and was a part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire; Čapek was born to Czech parents, and spent his entire life working in the Czech Republic (called Czechoslovakia then) and writing in the Czech language. Čapek was Nobel Prize-nominated seven (!) times. When he was to finally receive the prize (nominated in the autumn of 1938), it came too late: Čapek died in the winter of 1938 caused by complicated pneumonia. On the other hand, it was his luck: the Nazis wanted to send Čapek to a concentration camp, but the order came soon after his death. Who died, then, in the camp, was his brother: painter and poet-writer Josef Čapek.
Our many thanks to Tereza for her continued readership and her positive contribution to make B&S About Movies even better, with her assistance in helping the B&S staff honor the writers and filmmakers behind our favorite books and films.
As you can see, Karel Čapek is a (well-deserved) national treasure in his homeland. Let’s hope the newest film planned on R.U.R. serves in his honor.
Here’s the complete list of our reviews for our “Ancient Future Week.” Enjoy!
* Reviewed by R.D Francis; all others by Sam Panico.
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 About Movies.
Ah, there’s nothing like an “Ancient Future Week” inspiring us to review the future-tech tomfoolery of Brainstorm (1980) and Brainscan (1994) — which also uploads a little bit o’ Ulli Lommel into the frontal lobes.
Yes. Ulli “I’ve Never Seen a Film I Can’t Copy Cheaper” Lommell has hijacked your grey matter and chopped it up into different shapes and sizes at the Ulli Lommel Cookie Factory Company, Ltd., a subsidiary of the Lommel-Love Boilerplate Consortium, Inc.
Yes, Ulli “That’s a Good Idea for a Movie, I’ll Make Another One” Lommell. He of the rock flicks Blank Generation (1978) and Cocaine Cowboys (1979), as well as the opinions-vary Halloween and The Amityville Horror knockoffsThe Boogeyman (1980) and The Devonsville Terror (1983), and TheRaiders of the Lost Ark hornswoggle that is the Klaus Kinski-starrer Revenge of the Stolen Stars (1985).
Hey, the one-sheet got me into the quad-plex!
After that .. . well, you can pick any hit film, or genre, or serial killer, or newsworthy senseless crime story and, chances are, as with the proverbial fish-in-a-barrel, you will hit a low-budget clone-of-a-clone sloppin’ on Ulli Lommell’s resume.
Oh, the VHS joys of the Ulli-herrings we scooped into our 5-5-5 rental nets: When not clipping John Carpenter during the slasher ’80s or George Lucas during the adventure ’80s, Ulli “borrowed” from John Badham to give us a ne’er-do-well ’80s computer nerd with I.F.O.: Identified Flying Object, aka Defense Play (1987). When the market was crazy for Top Gun, Ulli gave us WarBirds (1989), which he stylizes to evoke a little WarGames in the mix.
Such a film is BrainWaves: a film that blatantly tech-jacks Douglas Trumbull’s journey into the human brain, aka Brainstorm — and Ulli, again, stylized the title to toss a little WarGames tech in the mix. Yeah, Michael Crichton’s Coma (1978), which kicked off the evil medical drama craze of the ’80s, and John Carpenter’s Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), which kicked off the inherited memory-cum-clairvoyance craze of the ’80s, are another pair of celluloid Pisces sloshin’ in the five-gallon paint bucket under the scope upon Ulli’s eye.
That’s the joy of Ulli Lommel: a reviewer can just rattle off a bunch of popular movies . . . and you’ve got the plot of the film in a skullcap. But since we’d be remiss in our journalist duties: After receiving a brain injury in a car accident, Ulli Lommel’s always-starring real-life wife Suzanne Love descends into a deep coma. Learning nothing from his own work in The Manitou (1978) or heeding Rock Hudson’s warnings after Embryo (1976), along comes the good neurosurgeon Tony Curtis tech-bamboozling a lovesick Keir Dullea — who learned nothing from the dead fish in the bottom of his career barrel that is Welcome to Blood City (1977) — with his electro-trinket that can jump start comatose brains via the “neural patterns” from dead brains.
Uh, oh. Futuristic pseudo-science is going to fuck you up, again.
As with all of those hand and eye transplant and inherited clairvoyance movies before it, Ms. Love begins to have the ol’ distributing visions trope haunt her, as her brain-impulse donor was drowned in a bathtub by a guy with a wrist tattoo. And Love and Dullea’s investigation inspires the murderer to silence the love birds . . . or is that LoveBirds, Ulli?
Yep, that’s the VHS box I remember.
While this futuristic medical drama isn’t great, it’s still not that bad and above par for a Ulli Lommel clone-joint; if Ulli upped the Argento-body fluids, we’d have an even better, junk science-driven Giallo. The par comes courtesy of a solid cast headed by Keir Dullea (The Starlost) (he’s a little heavy on the histrionics, but it’s not a total thespin’ tragedy), along with the classy Vera Miles (Hitchcock’s Psycho), distinguished character actor Percy Rodriquez (Planet of the Apes) (Rodriquez, James Earl Jones, and Roscoe Lee Brown, the best voiceover pipes in the business), and everyman character actor Paul Wilson (Office Space, 976-EVIL, the also-reviewed this week Circuity Man, and the one Jennifer Annistion movie I can stomach, courtesy of Mike Judge’s Office Space), and perpetually-beautiful character actress Eve Brent (from TV’s Dragnet in the ’50s to trading chops with Barbara Stanwyck in Forty Guns to Fade to Black to The Green Mile with Tom Hanks). And, why yes, that is the Penthouse “Pet of the Month” Corrine Alphen Wahl as our brainwave doner, she of Sean S. Cunningham’s Spring Break (1983) and the great Cirio Santiago’s Equalizer 2000 (1987).
You can watch BrainWaves on You Tube and various without-ads VOD and PPV platforms, as well as easily purchased DVDs and Blu-rays. We found two trailers on You Tube/You Tube.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
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