Another Stephen King Dollar Baby short film — so-called because low-budget filmmakers could make one of his scripts for a $1 — The Lawnmower Man: A Suburban Nightmare was written by future screenwriter and New Line Cinema production executive Michael De Luca, who also wrote Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, In the Mouth of Madnessand Judge Dredd.
The film was made while Gonis was a junior at New York University and only cost $5,000. It played the first Dollar Baby festival and a screening of King films at the Stanley Hotel that inspired The Shining.
If you’re wondering, “Why is this nothing like the Hollywood version?” Well, that version was so different from King’s — and played Japan under the name Virtual Wars— that King sued and got his name removed.
RoboCop 3 presents an astounding and completely science fiction conceit: a robot police officer built by a corporation decides to stop serving the interests of law, order and the establishment and throws in with a bunch of homeless multicultural people. Read this line and get it: RoboCop gets shot by a bunch of white supremacist cops, realizes ACAB and gets woke. Then he gets a jetpack and fights robot ninjas.
Obviously, this movie is amazing.
Director Fred Dekker has an interesting career, writing House and House 2, as well as writing and directing The Monster Squad and Night of the Creeps. The original script was written by comic book writer and artist Frank Miller*, who also did the previous film in this series. He was so upset by the way his screenplay was treated — comparing it to dogs urinating on a fire hydrant — that he left Hollywood until Sin City.
The biggest change is that Peter Weller decided to make Naked Lunch** and the lead role was played by Robert John Burke, who was the Dust Devil in the movie of the same name, as well as the lead in Thinner. Dan O’Herlihy also didn’t return to lead Omni Consumer Products. And spoiler warning, but Nancy Allen’s Officer Lewis gets killed minutes into the film.
OCP is calling in the bill on Detroit, using Paul McDaggett and his team of Urban Rehabilitators to forcibly move out the residents of Cadillac City, killing anyone who disagrees. The Kanemitsu Corporation also works to move this plan forward, replacing the police with their violent Otomo robots.
When RoboCop and Officer Lewis try to stop the Rehabs from killing civilians, they are gunned down and our hero’s fourth directive forces him to stop defending himself. He’s rescued by the very people he wanted to save, including Nikko, a young robotics genius who has somehow turned ED-209 into a good guy.
As RoboCop is rebuilt, he joins with the underground, led by Dr. Marie Lazarus (Jill Hennessy) and Bertha (CCH Pounder). Seriously, this movie is cast so well, with Rip Torn as the OCP CEO, Mako as the leader of Kanemitsu, Stephen Root and more.
Look, I get it. RoboCop is the best of this series and this one really cuts down on the violence. Dekker admits that the hero’s journey of Officer Murphy/RoboCop was complete by the end of the first movie, but you know, I kind of like the idea that a human in a robot shell who has only been a cop can see the errors of his mindset. He’s no longer acting like Judge Dredd shooting everything in his path. Instead, he has to connect with people beyond his fellow officers.
It also looks pretty good, thanks to director of photography Gary B. Kibbe, who Dekker chose after seeing his work on They Live, which this movie is very similar to, and Prince of Darkness. Dekker called John Carpenter to ask for his blessing to use Kibbe and after telling him the premise, Carpenter joked, “Homeless people taking up arms. That’s real left wing.”
This is way better than it should be and when seen in 2021, it’s an even better film. If Dekker could have gotten to do the things he wanted to do — adding in more Hong Kong style martial arts, an extended jetpack sequence and an ending where Officer Lewis becomes a cyborg, it would have been something people other than me remember.
*Otomo is similar to Miller’s comic Ronin and CCH Pounder’s Bertha Washington is a reference to his character Martha Washington.
**To his credit, Weller met with Dekker and explained why he wasn’t doing the movie in person, which is a pretty stand up way to act.
The Matrix may be the movie that most go to when they think of 90’s cyberpunk , but the truth is that Dark City came out a year before* and has many of the same storybeats. And Grant Morrison’s 1994 comic The Invisibles had plenty of the elements that The Matrix also mined, like the leap of faith from a building and a gang of anarchists being the actual heroes against a world of sameness.
It’s pretty amazing that this movie ever came out, as who would think that New Line Cinema would co-finance a movie that’s based on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave? You can see their studio notes all over this movie, like how the psychic scenes needed effects and the voiceover introduction that attempts to explain everything to the audience.
John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes up not knowing who he is except that he’s in a hotel bathtub. A call from Dr. Daniel Schreber (Keifer Sutherland) tells him to run, as there are a murdered body and a bloody knife in the next room, as well as a group of men called The Strangers after him.
For some reason, no one realizes that the city is constantly covered in the dark of night. Murdoch discovers his name, that he has a wife named Emma (picture-perfect should-be giallo queen Jennifer Connelly) and that he also has powers that allow him to reshape reality.
There’s also William Hurt as a cop who believes that Murdoch is innocent of the murders and the fact that the Strangers are really aliens living inside the skins of dead humans and oh yeah — the city itself is floating in space inside a giant energy field.
Dark City is packed with so many ideas that you could really watch it over and over and still find new ideas that were unseen in past viewings.
Also, cheers to director and co-writer Alex Proyas for casting Richard O’Brien, bringing the Rocky Horror creator into yet another cultural obsession for me (along with Rocky, Flash Gordon, Shock Treatment,Jubilee and Spice World).
Unlike the aforementioned Neo-starring film, Dark City went up against Titanic and faired about as well as you’d expect. Honestly, this is a movie that finds its audience and keeps it, reminding them that there is a secret world somewhere in which alien corpsewearers will learn that the human heart means more than the brain.
As for me, I love movies shot completely inside on soundstages with cars and buildings that seem to come from no set time period. Therefore, if you’re looking for a perfectly unexpected movie to pair this with, I’d suggest Streets of Fire.
*It was also shot on the same sets at Fox Studios in Sydney.
Stuart Gillard directed the third Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film, the remake of The Initiation of Sarah and episodes of the classic and reboot of Charmed. For some reason, MGM wanted a sequel to WarGames a quarter of a century later and he was the man to make it. The more cynical of us would say, “That was just to keep the copyright.”
I don’t know who else has been trying to make WarGames that it would need a copyright.
This film has RIPLEY instead of WOPR, but that old computer also shows up. Where we only had nukes back in 1983, this time there are drones and the fully connected World Wide Web. It also has some brand synergy, as the main character is playing Stargate Worlds, a game that would never be released.
Brand synergy you say? Back in 2008, this was announced as just one in a series of direct-to-DVD sequels, which also included two new Stargate films, a remake of Audrey Rose, Cutting Edge 3 (also directed by Gillard), a sequel to the 2002 movie Dark Blue, a spin-off called Legally Blondes and Species: The Awakening.
After discussing the public television broadcasts of the early “ancient future” computer precursor Hide and Seek (1983), which included a discussion of PBS-TV’s first feature film, A Lathe of Heaven (1980), we had to revisit this hour-long PBS documentary narrated by Arthur C. Clarke. And yes, The Colors of Infinity is, in fact, part of our “ancient future” theme week of reviews in tribute to the burgeoning technology of computers and the Internet committed to film in the ’80 and early ’90s — only we have to go through the Monsters of Rock festival and Pink Floyd to get there. Be patient.
Fans of the progressive rock scene of the 1960s know documentarian Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon for his longtime association with Pink Floyd. Or, if you’re a fan of ’70s British rock and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal of the ’80s, you know Gordon for his committing the very first “Monsters of Rock” at Castle Donnington festival to film in 1980 (You Tube/clip).
I bought this album from the back pages of Circus magazine for $3.99, plus a $1.50 shipping (what happened to my April Wine and Saxon hats)?
In 1966, while a student at the London Film School, Gordon preserved the first images of Pink Floyd on film (8 mm) with the eleven-minute, experimental silent short Syd Barrett’s First Trip, in which Gordon captured his high-on-magic-mushrooms classmate, Syd Barrett, frolicking in the Gog Magog Hills near Cambridge. Then, in 1967, Gordon chronicled Pink Floyd at Abbey Road Studios signing their first recording contract with EMI Records. (Both events have since been combined on one DVD. You can watch Syd Barrett’s First Trip on You Tube.)
Then, in a partnership with noted album design company Hipgnosis, Gordon formed his first production company, Green Back Films. In addition to creating promotional “pop clips” for Joe Cocker, Donovan, and Pink Floyd that aired on variety television shows, Green Back produced hit MTV videos for Big Country and Squeeze (“In a Big Country,” “Tempted”). They also produced Incident at Channel Q (1986), a long-form video/feature film that incorporated several of their rock video productions. Another one of their popular video rentals was the feature-length documentary Rainbow: Live Between the Eyes, which captured Ritchie Blackmore and company touring their sixth album, Straight Between the Eyes (1982) (since released on DVD and uploaded to You Tube).
1991-era tech. How quaint. Yet, it opened an undiscovered world.
Finally, we’re here. And it wasn’t even as deep as a Mandelbrot set.
Many of us were first fascinated by this documentary in 1995, aired as a post-script to PBS-TV’s commercial-free broadcast of the original, 1968 theatrical release — complete with intermission title card — of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The films were paired as result of their common denominator: Arthur C. Clarke, who serves here as narrator. The soundtrack is, of course, courtesy of David Gilmore of Pink Floyd. And Floyd fans take note: band aficionados claim the music from Fractals also appeared, in part, on the band’s The Division Bell (1994) and The Endless River (2014).
So, what’s a Fractal?
Image of VHS available on multiple mathematics, documentary, and online seller sites.
Fractals are an everyday part of our lives. The discovery of Fractals, aka Fractal Geometry, made Data Image Compression Software possible. You know all of those JPEGs you upload to your WordPress pages? All of those selfies you snap and share on Twitter? The ability to store all of that information on a tiny thumb drive? That’s all because of Fractals.
The Colors of Infinity is the story of Belgian mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot discovering what is now know as the M-Set (or Mandelbrot Sets) in the early seventies and coining the term “fractal” to describe the geometry behind it. It wasn’t until 1991, with the advent of personal computers, that man was able to gaze at the wondrous, psychedelic images — “God’s fingerprint” — created by basic fractal equations. Then, British mathematician and computer graphics researcher, Professor Micheal Barnsley, based on Mandelbrot’s discovery, developed the fractal image compression technology that we don’t go through a day in our ubiquitous, digital lives without using.
Think about it: The Linux operating system was first released in 1991. Tim Berners-Lee first turned on the web at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 1991. We were just beyond our old Apple IIs and Atari 800s (packing 8-bits and playing Joust!), our Commodore 64s and DEC Rainbows 100 (Yikes, Rainbow, dudes: two huge operating manuals?), our TRS-80s (packing that Zilog Z-80 microprocessor!) and our first IBM PC clones running software from some guy name Bill Gates.
Then we had our “ancient future” digital life distilled to this:
z⇌z²+c
However, don’t let the fact that this film discusses the theories of Euclidean space deter you from watching, as Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon has a reputation as a documentarian for presenting the complex for easy consumption by mass audiences. Again, if you have a curiosity to know how your smart phone records and stores all of those still images and video into what is the size of a credit card, then this is a great watch.
After its U.S. public television broadcast on PBS-TV, Fractals was issued on VHS and, a few years later, subsequently released on DVD. However, caveat ye denizens of the Amazon and eBay marketplaces, as the DVDs for sale are straight VHS rips with a quality that’s no better than the washed-out uploads found video staring sites, which vary from either TV-to-VHS or direct-from-VHS rips.
In 2004, Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon himself reissued the DVD, included as a supplement to his authored paperback version of the film: The Colours of Infinity: The Beauty and Power of Fractals (copies are easily available on Amazon). You can learn more about Fractals and Mandelbrot sets on Wikipedia. You can also watch three of the many “Fractal Zoom” videos on You Tube HERE, HERE, and HERE; however, the music selections on each are questionable, poor choices. We suggest you play those videos with the sound off and use the audio from one of the many “ambient space music” uploads on You Tube to best enjoy the wonders and mysteries of Fractals.
Trip out as you watch Fractals: The Colors of Infinity in its entirety on 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 and publish music reviews and short stories on Medium.
Based on the 1976 John Varley short story, this was a co-production between New York PBS station WNET and Toronto’s RSL Productions. The budget was high, so they cut costs by shooting it on video and selling it to smaller American cable companies, as well as CDC and PBS’ American Playhouse.
Aram Fingal (Raul Julia, before I could say things like “Raul Julia deserves better”), a programmer who has been caught watching Casablanca at his work and pays for that crime by having his mind placed into the brain of a baboon before his mind is active and becomes lost in the system.
Somehow, Aram ends up becoming Rick Blaine and getting the person in charge of getting rid of him, Apollonia Jones, to fall in love with him.
PBS also made The Lathe of Heaven around this time, which is wild that they were ahead of the cyberpunk trend. Too bad this movie has the production values it does, because the SOV style does not serve a movie that is trying so hard to be of the future.
You can watch the Mystery Science Theater 3000 riff of this on Tubi.
Andrew (Eugene Simon, Game of Thrones) is looking for the truth about his family history, giving a secret government agency his DNA in order to discover his ancestry. He soon discovers that his grandparents participated in a super solider-like program and that he’s inherited powers locked within his DNA.
Then he finds out that he’s not alone.
Now part of a group of other super powered individuals, Andrew is placed in a series of increasingly stranger situations designed to push his emotions and powers while also using him to control the emotions of others.
This movie feels like it wants to be a darker take on The X-Men, but doesn’t hit the target that it’s aiming for. Instead of using the comics and movie — as well as several other films like The Matrix — as inspiration and going its own path, this feels rudderless.
It’s a shame because it looks gorgeous and well beyond its budget.
Martin Grof has only made one other movie, 2019’s Excursion, a thriller about “a 1980’s devoted Czechoslovakian communist party member visiting his future self in London to make sure Socialism still prospers.” That sounds like something I should check out after this. Actually, I’d keep an eye of Grof, because there’s something there. Hopefully, his third effort finds it.
“What kind of thing could possibly so trouble the binary darkness of your computer’s soul?” — Master Operator Andrew to The Beast
Opinions vary on this intelligent Canadian television production that, as result of its budgetary constraints, utilizes minimal “futuristic” builds (that remind of the ’70s Saturday morning kids TV sci-fi’ers Ark II, Jason of Star Command, and Space Academy) and instead, relies on preexisting, modernist glass and concrete structures of the Frank Lloyd Wright-variety (like Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville) to convey its futuristic setting.
In 2017, after the world’s ecological and economic collapse, a new Earth rises courtesy of a bureaucratic technocracy comprised of city-states operated by a network of super-intelligent, biological computers uplinked to a common-mainframe on Atlantis, the Earth’s moon base. Since the computers are biological, to communicate with their human makers, the computers work with a telepathic human interface who’s brainwaves are conditioned for computer interaction. The most powerful of these computers, The Beast, is connected with Melody, its human counterpart.
During Operation Ceres, a space project repositioning asteroids just beyond Mars into Earth’s orbit to redirect the Sun’s energy, The Beast receives an ominous alien communication to halt the project. The alien contact and the new, strange behavior of her computer counterpart, puts Melody in a race against time to convince man to halt the project: we’re disputing the “musica universalis,” the ancient, mathematical harmony of the celestial bodies that will unbalance the universe’s natural order. But the Earth’s new world order, believing their computer-based world is without error, says it’s impossible for any connection from outside the system and they dismiss Melody’s computer-induced dreams and visions of impending doom.
The plot sounds intriguing, doesn’t it?
Sadly, while intelligent and well-meaning — and dripping with nostalgia value courtesy of its multiple Friday and Saturday night airings during the USA Network’s Up All Night ’80s weekend programming blocks (check out our “Drive-In Friday: USA’s Night Flight Night” featurette) — Music of the Sphere is an ambitious, low-budget Canadian tax shelter that suffers from its two-year stop-start production schedule. The acting is woefully amateurish, rife with plodding expositional patches and voiceovers to advance the (intriguing) plot, and the Toho Studios spaceship and moon base modeling makes Gerry Anderson’s UFO and Space: 1999 look absolutely Trumbull-Lucasian.
But even while shot in grainy 16mm color and black and white, this feature film debut by writer-director Philip Jackson (of the popular ’90s renter Replikator) is still more engaging than any episode of Glen Larson’s Buck Rogers in the 25th Century plastic-verse. Thus, we’re willing to deal with the muddy sound (subtitled bilingual English and French punctuated by German and Russian), soundtrack distortion issues, and washed-out cinematography; we’re willing to overlook the fact that the “eye” of The Beast, the sentient computer of the film, communicates via a “Mystify”-styled screensaver (from our old After Dark program for Windows 1.0), and video information is still stored on (then groundbreaking) VHS tapes.
“I’m sorry Dave. I can’t do that. This conversation has become pointless. Goodbye.“
Overall, appreciation of Music of the Spheres is about one’s nostalgic perspective. Call them D-Movies if you want. But as with its fellow, low-budget government-funded Canadian tax shelters Terminal City Ricochet, 984: Prisoner of the Future, and CBC-TV’s public television-produced, sentient computer drama Hide and Seek, I appreciate Jackson’s valiant, deep examination of the search for truth, emotions, and logic by an artificial intelligence, and his incorporation of the Greek philosophies of Pythagoras and the complex concepts of Asteroseismology packaged into an easy-to-digest sci-fi format. I appreciate Music of the Spheres in same vein that led to my continued enjoyment of PBS-TV’s production of Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Lathe of Heaven, which explored the state of the human condition with the same level of attention to intellectual detail.
Truth be told: Music of the Spheres is ready for a major studio, big-budget CGI-driven remake (but please: don’t botch it like that awful 2002 A&E Lathe of Heaven remake or HBO’s 2018 reimaging of Fahrenheit 451).
And you can enjoy this “Ancient Future” treat with a very clean, free-with-ads stream on Tubi.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
In this film Albert Pyun posits a future in which an arcade called Dante’s Inferno has a new virtual reality arcade game called Arcade. It’s being test-marketed by a company man who is handing out free samples of the home edition and hyping the thing up like he’ll die if it doesn’t sell, which is not far off.
The problems start here. The arcade has a cool name and the game has a really boring one. Arcade? Let me see the creatives who sold that one and I imagine their balls have their own independent orbits. Also, what arcade allows someone to hand out home systems that will keep players out of their establishment?
Alex Manning (Megan Ward, Tentacles II, Amityville: It’s About Time, PCU, Encino Man) is a troubled kid whose mom killed herself last year and only finds herself through video games. To make things even better — or worse for the characters — Arcade was once a little boy who — VR Pinocchio kinda sorta — has been used as the brain for this game.
As silly as this gets, the cast is good and game. Peter Billingsley (yes, Ralphie), John de Lancie (yes, the original Q), Seth Green, A.J. Langer (who the rest of the world knows from My So-Called Life and I know as Utopia from Escape from L.A.) and Don Stark (who is in everything from That ’70s Show to Switchblade SIsters, Evilspeak and Santa With Muscles) all do the best with what they’ve got.
This film is filled with CGI and would have had light cycles in it, but Disney caught wind and sued the puppet-sized pants off of Full Moon. Oh Disney, so willing to sue daycare centers and small-budget films, yet so unwilling to go after racist rednecks that at will steal the Punisher logo and tarnish the Marvel brand.
This was written by David S. Goyer, who may have started his career in Charles Band land, but would move on to write movies like Dark City, Blade, 2014’s Godzilla, the Nolan Batman films and even the new Hellraiser, which is in production.
Let me tell you, eleven-year-old me thought WarGames was awesome.
Written by future Sneakers co-writers Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes and directed by John Badham*, who would gift us with the ancient future movies Blue Thunder and Short Circuit, is about a young hacker (Matthew Broderick) who unwittingly logs on to a server that allows him to simulate wargames with a computer called WOPR that really thinks that it’s time to start a nuclear war.
For many, WarGames was their first mainstream exposure** to hacking and formed the idea that one lone kid in his bedroom could take over so many major computer systems. That may be fantasy, but the real dream here is that someone that’s on his computers for weeks at a time without leaving his bedroom could score Ally Sheedy.
Shout out to Dabney Coleman in this, who continually raised the bar when it came to playing, well, Dabney Coleman roles in a variety of 80’s films. He’s one of the first actors I remember consciously thinking, “This is that guy.” Between 9 to 5, Cloak and Dagger and Tootsie, he’s always dependable.
The tunnel to NORAD in this movie may seem familiar. That’s because it shows up at the end of Back to the FuturePart II and is the entrance to Toontown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
The funniest thing to me is that they made a music video for a Crosby, Stills and Nash song made for the movie but edited out. That’s what kids in 1983 wanted to see, right?
*Martin Brest was the original director for all of 12 days. His next three films — Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run and Scent of a Woman — probably erased the pain of this movie. Then he got stuck making Meet Joe Black and Gigli.
**It’s the reason for the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984. Representative Dan Glickman opened the legislation by saying, “We are gonna show about four minutes from the movie WarGames, which outlines the problem fairly clearly.” The ensuing House committee report claimed WarGames showed a realistic representation of the automatic dialing and access capabilities of the personal computer.”
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.