1978: BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

What’s it about?

Just as the twelve human colonies are about to sign a peace accord with the hostile alien Cylons, patrol pilots Richard Hatch and Rick “Jessie’s Girl” Springfield stumble upon a sneak attack mustering behind a moon. One of them makes it back to warn the fleet of the imminent attack, but unfortunately only super-suspicious battlestar commander Lorne Greene is in a state of readiness. Simultaneous attacks wipe out both the fleet and the colonies, and just a handful of human survivors band together on 220 spaceships led by Greene’s Battlestar Galactica.

Hunted by the Cylons and running low on resources, the remnants of mankind start searching for a legendary thirteenth colony called Earth. (Sound familiar?) But first they need to find food and fuel, so they make for the nearby planet of Carillon. Upon landing, they make an unexpected discovery -- an opulent casino and resort in the middle of a derelict mining outpost. The insect-like managers of the casino are outwardly friendly and generous, but soon it becomes clear that not all is as it appears. As Lorne Greene’s suspicions mount yet once again, he finds himself opposed by political forces that threaten the safety of the fleet.




Is it any good?

The original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA series seems to be mostly regarded as a goofy cash-in to the STAR WARS (1977) craze. That’s a pretty fair assessment of most of the series -- a lot of the episodes are schlocky “planet of the week” adventures where Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict get into all kinds of scrapes as Apollo and Starbuck. I happen to think the show is plenty fun even at that level, but there are also at least a handful of episodes that are really terrific and tense sci-fi stories as well. This two-hour miniseries aired both on television to kick off the series, and was later theatrically released as well. The first half of it (really everything until the fleet lands on Carillon) definitely falls into higher quality category.

It’s fair to say that the music, the Cylons, and many of the spaceship designs are pretty heavily “inspired” by similar elements in STAR WARS. The space battles look very much like the Death Star assault scenes with slightly less skillful special effects. But let’s be honest here -- nobody ever complained that there are too many space battles in STAR WARS. Derivative or not, the ones here are fun and exciting and are some of the best parts of the miniseries. (Unfortunately, much of the effects footage gets recycled even before the end of the miniseries, which dampens the enjoyment considerably before the two hours are up.) The first hour also moves quickly from crisis to crisis as the Battlestar Galactica deals with the overwhelming alien attack. There are a few moments of emotional anguish too. In one scene, for instance, the crew of the Galactica sits stunned as report after report streams in on monitors of devastating attacks that they’re helpless to prevent. There’s another dark stretch where the civilian survivors on a ship start clamoring for food and information -- neither of which they’ve had for two days.




The Carillon bits, on the other hand, are much more like what the series would mostly become in later episodes. The casino that’s not what it appears is like something out of a STAR TREK episode -- sort of a high concept gee-whiz idea that doesn’t really make sense in the larger context of the show. The human race has just supposedly been completely obliterated, but the first planet they land on is teeming with hundreds of humans laughing, drinking, and playing cards. This part of the miniseries is also where the irrepressible scamp Boxey and his alternately horrifying and hilarious robo-dog Muffy clamp on to the show and refuse to let go. I happen to like a lot of the actors and characters in the original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, but Boxey is not one of them. The new series is excellent in its own way, but there was nothing particularly wrong with how the original series handled Captain Adama, Apollo, Starbuck, and some of the others. Boxey, however, was a bad idea that should have never been revived. (Luckily, he didn’t stick around long on the new show.)

In some ways, the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA miniseries is actually an inversion of STAR WARS. I have mixed feelings about the first two-thirds of that movie, but I love the tense assault on the Death Star and have admitted that I can sometimes be found watching it over and over again. With BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, the tense and exciting parts come in the first two-thirds -- and they come thick and fast. I could probably watch that section over and over again, while the ending is just extremely disappointing.




Finally, I’m not going to compare the plot of the miniseries too much to the new version of the show, but the biggest difference I noticed is that although the Cylons are robotic in appearance, there’s no indication that they were created by humans. In fact, it seems pretty clear from hints dropped throughout that they are simply meant to be a hostile alien race that has come into conflict with mankind (and probably everyone else they’ve ever met). From what I understand, the series later explains that the Cylons were created by another alien race which then died out, leaving their robot servants and soldiers to find their own way. Another major difference is that there are no “skin jobs” -- no Cylons that look like humans. But there are the Imperious Leaders -- a Cylon model that is more intelligent and cunning, and which serves as the Darth Vader for the series.

BONUS BLOG -- 1972: THE THING WITH TWO HEADS

What’s it about?

Brilliant but racist surgeon Ray Milland is dying of chest cancer and the way to survive is a complete body transplant. After completing a successful experiment with a gorilla, Milland entrusts a team of his colleagues with finding a suitable donor body and carrying out the procedure to save his life. Finding a donor proves very difficult, however, as the ideal donor must be dying (since they will not survive the procedure) but must also have a healthy body and be able to live long enough for Milland’s transplanted head to establish control of the body.

As time runs out and Milland slips into a coma, the doctors go to their last-ditch source: death row inmates. Convicted murderer Rosey Grier volunteers just before they flip the switch on the electric chair, hoping that the extra thirty days of life will be long enough for his girlfriend to collect evidence that will exonerate him. But when Milland discovers that his head has been transplanted to a black man’s body, wacky hijinks ensue.




Is it any good?

This is a movie where Ray Milland’s elderly head is transplanted onto the body of a professional football player. This is also a movie where the resulting two-headed monstrosity flees on a dirt bike and leads a dozen police cars on a bash ’em, crash ’em chase across a hilly field for twenty minutes. So no, it’s not really “good” in the traditional sense of the word. But it’s not exactly bad either. I don’t have a whole lot to say about THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, but it’s crazy enough to be worth maybe a few paragraphs at least.

I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but I think I’m a little bit surprised that I haven’t seen more sci-fi movies yet that are about race. The only obvious one that doesn’t dance around the issue at all is THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959). A lot of folks read a criticism of race relations into NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), but it’s not clear how much of that was intended. Otherwise, there are a lot of movies that arguably allegories for the racial situation in the U.S. -- probably the closest being CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972).




THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, on the other hand, is unambiguously about race. Yet despite the fact that it introduces a racist character precisely so that it can bind him physically to a black man, I’m not real sure that it has anything to say about the situation except, “Boy wouldn’t that something!” In some ways, I guess that’s enough. What do you really expect a movie like this to say anyway? In THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL, it was clear that Harry Belafonte connected passionately with the story and themes, and that he really wanted to get people to sympathize with a mixed-race couple despite their prejudices.

But THE THING WITH TWO HEADS is more like an authority-tweaking wish fulfillment movie -- more along the lines of WILD IN THE STREETS (1968). Rosey Grier starts out as a victim of the system. Not only is he wrongfully scheduled for execution (or so he claims), but when he volunteers for an experimental transplant operation he finds out that he’s being used to prolong the life of an old white racist. So it’s kind of exciting to see him break out of the clinic and go on the lam -- ultimately convincing a young black doctor to join him in thumbing his nose at the man.




A lot of movies from the 1970s seem to be about thumbing noses at the man, and it’s something I can never exactly relate to. There’s a certain sensibility that runs through whole genres that takes it for granted that disobeying laws, evading the police and destroying government property is unquestionably heroic. The middle of THE THING WITH TWO HEADS falls squarely into this sensibility as Rosey Grier leads the cops on an excessively destructive chase that would have made Burt Reynolds or Kris Kristofferson (or at least Tom Wopat and John Schneider) proud. I didn’t count how many cop cars we actually see destroyed on camera, but a news report in the movie says fourteen and that sounds about right. (Some of them are clearly the same wrecks from different angles though.)

There’s not a whole lot else to talk about -- this movie doesn’t take itself seriously and doesn’t expect anybody else to either. It is far superior to another similar movie I watched called THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT (1971). I had high hopes for that one, since it starred Bruce Dern and Casey Kasem, but it’s nonsensical, inept and offensive. THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, despite being incredibly silly, is none of those things. It’s not really something I’d recommend, but I will think of it fondly for the next week or so until it fades entirely from my memory.



And now here are a bunch of screenshots of police cars crashing, since that is primarily what the movie is about:

BONUS BLOG -- 1962: PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!

What’s it about?

Ray Milland packs his wife and two teenaged children into the family camper and sets off early in the morning for a fishing trip. A few hours into the mountains around Los Angeles, the family suddenly sees a bright flash behind them. When they stop to look, an enormous mushroom cloud is spreading over the city. The family at first turns back towards Los Angeles, but soon Milland begins to have his doubts about this course of action. As more and more panicked people pour out of the city towards the mountains, they first seek out a grocery store and hardware store in a small town for supplies, and then head off into the wilderness.

All does not go smoothly, however. A misunderstanding in the hardware store ends with Milland pulling a gun on the proprietor and making off with a stash of goods without paying for them. Later, another confrontation on the highway escalates until son Frankie Avalon wounds a man with a shotgun blast. Even after arriving at the secluded fishing camp, the family finds they’ve been followed by both the hardware store owner and the hoods they shot at on the road. With no law for miles, the family finds itself harassed with no choice but to fight back with deadly force. But when one of them is wounded as well, they must risk leaving the relative solitude of the wilderness and venture back to the cities again for medical treatment.




Is it any good?

I don’t know an awful lot about Ray Milland, but he was a well respected actor in the 1940s (even winning an Academy Award for THE LOST WEEKEND) who ended up acting in a lot of low budget sci-fi and horror movies in the 1960s and 1970s. Milland once reportedly said that he didn’t particularly enjoy acting, and he considered it simply a way to pay the bills. In light of that, it’s tempting to look at his transition from romantic leading man to B-movie icon as the career move of a cynical or apathetic actor. But in addition to starring in PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!, Milland also directed the picture. And he once said that the movie he was most proud of besides THE LOST WEEKEND was the Roger Corman cheap and quick sci-fi thriller X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963). So regardless of what motives were primarily behind the switch to genre pictures, he clearly had some interest in sci-fi above and beyond collecting a paycheck.

It’s hard to tell exactly where PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! wants the sympathies of the audience to be. As law and order break down around him, Ray Milland’s character pretty quickly crosses the line from law-abiding citizen to single-minded desperado doing whatever he must to protect his family. He holds up a hardware store, causes a multi-car pile-up on the highway, almost runs down a group of men trying to defend their town, and ultimately ends up blowing away two unarmed no-goodniks with a shotgun. Less egregiously, he also refuses to trust anybody outside of his family -- going so far as to turn away an abused girl looking for help before his son points out how heartless he’s being. Presumably we’re meant to think that Milland is doing what he has to do to protect his family, but that his single-minded objective obscures his judgment from time to time.




PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! doesn’t have much interest in the nuclear war other than as a vehicle for creating the lawless situation that Milland and his family must survive. There is no attendant Soviet invasion and no secondary effects from the nuclear blast beyond the destruction of Los Angeles and several other cities -- no fallout, no radiation sickness, no hint that this is anything except a temporary disruption of normalcy. The movie is surprisingly bleak in places, and it’s pretty surprising to see the “good guys” so willing to level shotguns at everybody they meet. Even the idea that Ray Milland would put a gun in Frankie Avalon’s hands and tell him to blow a guy away if he makes a wrong move is kind of crazy.

On the other hand, the dialogue and story are not that deep. The mother particularly gets the bad end of the script -- she spends much of the beginning of the movie as a kind of ineffectual conscience before her big conversion when she gets a few rounds off at the hoodlums trying to rape her daughter. Speaking of hoodlums, kids get a bum rap in PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! too. Even Frankie Avalon is depicted as far too trigger happy -- he enjoys toting around a gun too much and Ray Milland seems to think he is teetering on the verge of running wild like the hoodlums who terrorize them. Add to this the fact that the attempted rape is disturbingly scored with hep jazz music, and it starts to seem like part of this movie’s agenda is a “get off my lawn” message from a cranky old man.