1983: VIDEODROME

What’s it about?

Cable channel executive James Woods goes out looking for the next big thing in television -- something that will break barriers and shock viewers into massive ratings. He thinks he’s found it when he stumbles across a pirate broadcast of a show called “Videodrome”. The program has no content except for depictions of torture, mutilations, and murders which all take place in the same featureless room.

Woods, believing the program to be staged, attempts to find the creators so he can offer them a broadcast deal. The trail leads him first to renowned television prophet and personality Brian O’Blivion, and then deeper into a shadowy underworld. Meanwhile, Woods begins having powerful and disturbing hallucinations, which he eventually learns have been triggered by signals hidden in the Videodrome broadcasts. By the time he realizes he’s caught up in a weird conspiracy, it seems too late for Woods to save himself.

Is it any good?

I’ve been avoiding writing about David Cronenberg movies because -- well, just because. I watched both THE BROOD (1979) and SCANNERS (1981) back when I was covering the years they were released in, but couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to say a whole lot about them. I got pretty close with THE BROOD, since I was interested in how it used a “soft” science like psychology as the springboard for sci-fi speculations instead of a harder science like robotics or physical medicine or computer science. I also mentioned THE BROOD in my entry about ALTERED STATES (1980) when I talked about the mind-over-matter themes of that latter movie.

After watching a couple more David Cronenberg movies, it certainly seems like he keeps obsessively returning to those mind-over-matter themes. SCANNERS is about warring factions of folks with telepathic powers -- including the ability to link in to other peoples’ bodies and affect their bodily functions (sometimes with explosive consequences). Likewise, VIDEODROME is at least partly interested in how hallucinations can change subjective (and possibly objective) reality.

There are really two sci-fi stories running in parallel in VIDEODROME, though they are unavoidably intertwined with each other. The first is Woods’s quest to find ever more shocking content for his cable channel. This leads him to seek out programs that feature sex, violence, gore, perversion, or (ideally) some combination of them all. To be honest, the sci-fi edge here is a distinction in degree rather than in kind -- and only by the slightest degree. The quest for shock value certainly isn’t new of itself, and the programs that Woods reviews don’t even necessarily seem more depraved than some that exist in the real world. In 1983, it wouldn’t have been so easy to distribute such things on a mainstream cable channel, but today the Internet has removed essentially all doubt that there’s an audience out there for even the most envelope-pushing or stomach-turning content.

The other sci-fi twist involves Videodrome’s ability to trigger hallucinations in those who watch it. If you look at that from a metaphorical point of view, it could be saying something about how watching violent or perverted content can warp a person’s view of reality. It also pretty clearly separates “those who watch” from “those who don’t” -- anybody who watches enough of the show will be easily recognizable by their raving insanity. When Woods finally meets the folks responsible for the shows, for instance, they ask him why on earth a person would want to watch a show like Videodrome. They’ve never seen it themselves -- if they had, they would have gone crazy too.

On a more surface level, the hallucinations are part of a plot to do something or other. To be honest, I’m not really clear what the makers of Videodrome were trying to accomplish. They don’t appear to be anarchists who are just intent on driving everyone crazy. Seemingly the hallucinations are controllable -- that is, the shadowy forces in control of Videodrome use Woods’s freak-outs to control his behavior, and at one point even get him to assassinate some people for them. (Though the logic behind the assassination is never clear either.) So potentially Videodrome could be a recruitment tool for insane assassins, but it’s such a blunt tool that it would be difficult to really manage the program. The movie doesn’t really spend much time developing that part of the plot either, which is probably just as well. As far as brainwashing assassins goes, I can’t really imagine that VIDEODROME would be able to top the audacity of similar plots in movies like THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962) and THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974).

David Cronenberg has a reputation as a guy who loves disturbing or gross images. I haven’t seen that many of his movies besides the ones I mentioned already, but I can see where folks might get that impression. THE BROOD isn’t particularly gross, but it does make use of some freaky child-like killers in creepy masks. They’re a bit too similar to the big gotcha from Nicholas Roeg’s DON’T LOOK NOW (1973) to be deeply disturbing, but there are a few frightening moments. These killers are also the physical manifestations of mental anguish, and one late scene where one is shown budding out of a woman’s body is pretty darn grotesque.

SCANNERS ups the gore considerably with its iconic exploding head. It’s an amazing special effect, and it still looks cool even when watching it happen frame by frame in slow motion. The climactic battle between the final two telepaths is a revolting splatterfest as well. When the fight’s over, we’ve seen ruptured blood vessels, burst eyeballs, and burning and melting flesh.

VIDEODROME takes things in a different, but no less unnerving direction. We never see the worst of the torture on the Videodrome program -- it’s still unpleasant, but it’s very brief and never particularly graphic. James Woods’s hallucinations, however, are extremely graphic, and they seem to have a recurring theme of combining organic flesh and technology. In one recurring bit, Woods’s appendix scar splits open, allowing access to his innards so videotapes or guns can be deposited inside his body (or, later in the movie, retrieved for use). There’s not a lot of blood and gore necessarily, but Cronenberg seems to hone in instantly on what makes people say “yuck”. I’ve got at least THE FLY (1986) and NAKED LUNCH (1991) upcoming from him as well, so I expect to be saying “yuck” many more times.

Ultimately, I don’t think that any of the three Cronenberg movies I’ve seen so far are that great. They all start out with very interesting premises, but then end up in pretty standard patterns. THE BROOD turns into a slasher flick in the second half, and both SCANNERS and VIDEODROME end up as conspiracy thrillers. The conspiracy part of VIDEODROME is especially half-baked -- as I said, I’m still not clear on what the objective of the conspiracy is, and I have no clue whatsoever why the bad guys went to all the trouble they did to rope in Woods. (A half-hearted answer is given to that second question, but it doesn’t really make any sense.) VIDEODROME looks better than either of the other two, and the special effects on the hallucinations are worth seeing. It’s kind of unpleasant at times, but it’s also fairly unique (at least in the early going). And James Woods is a great actor for this role. Based on all this, I’m really looking forward to seeing Jeff Goldblum in THE FLY. I could easily see that being the magic combination that makes a really great movie.

1980: ALTERED STATES

What's it about?

Young scientist William Hurt experiences an apparent flashback to a primitive proto-human state while experimenting with sensory deprivation. Believing that he has somehow tapped into a genetic memory of man’s ancestry, Hurt goes to South America to retrieve an untested hallucinogenic fungus that he thinks will intensify his head trips.

The fungus seems to do just that -- but Hurt also comes to believe that it is causing physical changes in his body which could cause him to revert to a primitive state. When his colleagues urge him to stop his experiments, Hurt pushes on alone with predictably disastrous consequences. Only the love of a good woman is able to break his descent into a Jekyll and Hyde tailspin.

Is it any good?

Back in the 1950s (or at least back when I was watching lots of sci-fi movies from the 1950s), I got so very sick of stories about scientists. Practically every movie had either a handsome scientist or astronaut for its hero, and they would always come up with some implausible scientific scheme to save the day at the last minute. Movies like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) and I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958) seemed revolutionary to me at the time because they were about normal people with hardly a scientist anywhere in sight. (I still think they are both excellent movies, by the way, but there was a bracing freshness at the time that was mostly a result of comparing them against all the scientist movies that had come before.)

There’s no period of sci-fi movie history where scientists and astronauts aren’t common fixtures in the lists of heros or villains. But it’s certainly true that in the 1960s and beyond, movies that aren’t about scientists start to outnumber the ones that are. Many of the scientists who do remain are just as one-dimensional as their 1950s counterparts -- but they are increasingly likely to be the ones causing the problems rather than the ones fixing them.

All of this is a long preamble to the admission that I was actually excited by the scientist protagonists in ALTERED STATES. Almost all of the main characters are scientists and (to my untrained ear) they seemed like pretty realistic ones. They are passionate about their work, intellectually curious, more likely to come up with hypotheses than improbably certain answers, and a little too prone to arguing philosophical points. More than anything, I think it’s the enthusiasm in Hurt and his colleagues that make them seem both real and also the kind of people you might want to know. These aren’t the all-knowing, ever-calm hero scientists of the 1950s, but neither are they the dour, self-important meddlers of paranoid 1970s thrillers.

After creating such fine scientist characters, it’s a bit of a shame that ALTERED STATES sticks them in such a cliched dilemma for the genre. I really enjoyed the beginning of the movie, when Hurt and his friends were discovering the ability to flash back to primitive states while undergoing sensory deprivation. But before long, Hurt finds himself almost literally in a Jekyll and Hyde situation. Though at first addicting, his experiments have become terrifying. But he’s powerless to stop their effects, as his body now starts slipping into its primitive state against his will.

Oh yeah, I haven’t really mentioned that part yet. Hurt’s experiments eventually do suggest that the flashback state triggers physical changes in the subject’s body. Latent genes are tripped or some hooey like that, and the result is that Hurt’s body transforms itself into that of a primitive man -- heavy brow, underdeveloped vocal cords, hair all over the body, the works. This is kind of a cool idea, so I don’t really mind that it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Actually, it’s really two cool ideas. The first is the idea of a modern man reverting back to a less evolved form, and the second is the idea that mental exertions can result in physical changes.

ALTERED STATES is not the first movie to suggest a link between the mind and the body. (A link beyond the normal one, I mean.) SOLYARIS (1972) is partly a movie about telekinetic powers -- though the mind in that case is that of a planet-sized organism. A bit more to the point, I almost wrote about a movie called THE BROOD (1979), in which an experimental form of therapy called “psycho-plastics” results in physical manifestations of the patients’ neuroses. Psychology in THE BROOD is presented almost like Edwardian spiritualism, with trance states and mediumistic role-playing and ultimately bodily manifestations that are not unlike ectoplasmic emissions. It’s this last bit that gives pyscho-plastics its name, and also that is most like the “mind over matter” powers of ALTERED STATES.

Having set up the science of the movie in this way, I am perhaps starting to see for the first time what the ending of the movie is really about. Hurt subjects himself to risky experiments despite the warnings of his colleagues, and the result is that he eventually emerges from the sensory deprivation tank in the form of a hairy proto-human with limited impulse control. The situation worsens later when Hurt begins to revert to this ancestral form at times he can’t control.

But the very ending is what I wanted to talk about. There’s one last experiment that Hurt convinces his colleagues to help him with, to prove and document once and for all these unaccountable physical changes. But Hurt either regresses too far or just does it once too often, and he somehow experiences the terrifying nothing that existed before the creation of life. Hurt changes first into a monstrous form, and then into a swirling whirlpool. He also seems to phase in and out of reality, like a picture going in and out of reception on an old television.

Hurt is then saved not once, but twice, by the love of his wife. This is what I mean when I said I was starting perhaps to understand this part of the movie. She first retrieves him from the brink of nothingness during the experiment by daring to wade into the psychic maelstrom in the laboratory and physically pulling Hurt out. Then she saves him agin by convincing him to fight against an unexpected regression back to the nothingness. I get pretty annoyed with movies when they seem to be suggesting that “love is all you need” or that “love conquers all”. Those may be truisms, but they are hardly universally true. ALTERED STATES wasn’t really any different in that respect -- I got pretty annoyed at its lame (and highly controversial) pro-love message.

What I did realize just now though is that the whole movie is about “mind over matter” -- using only the power of the brain to make physical changes in the world outside. Love, in this case, would reside in the mind. So simply by changing one’s mind -- transferring creative passion from scientific pursuits to a loved one, for instance -- one can also change the reality of the world. In this way, the message is not so much “love conquers all” but rather more like “the mind conquers all”.

I’m being pretty generous to ALTERED STATES with this interpretation, and I’m making it sound better than it really is. I still think the beginning of the movie is great, but the end is just a mess. It’s practically impossible to tell what’s happening to Hurt -- both from the dialogue and from the visuals. The initial regression into a proto-human form is pretty straight-forward, but the later transformations just don’t seem to make any logical sense. And the images themselves aren't shocking or terrifying enough to make the exact whys and wherefores superfluous. And even though the “love conquers all” ending arguably fits with the rest of the “mind over matter” themes in the movie, it’s still pretty lame when threatening forces are instantly dissipated when the main character finally admits that he loves his wife.

Through much of ALTERED STATES I was also reminded of Francis Ford Coppola’s YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH (2007). At the end of that movie, there’s a sequence where Tim Roth’s supernaturally intelligent and supernaturally young linguist has hooked up with a woman who babbles in ancient languages while under hypnotic trances. By using past life regression techniques, Roth is able to send her further and further back into history until she is speaking the ur-languages of primitive humans. Such experiments take a spiritual and physical toll on the woman, but she’s eager to keep helping Roth isolate the first moment when human language is created.

I’m not really sure how I feel about YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH in total, but that part of the movie has stuck with me ever since I saw it a couple years ago. For one thing, these experiments are seemingly the only way for Roth to complete the history of language that he’s been writing for a lifetime (or two), so it’s obvious why he’s willing to take these risks. And the fact that he’s gambling with somebody else’s sanity and life only makes the stakes even higher (and makes it a more realistic parallel for actual scientific research). Finally, the ancient babbling of the woman (and its effects on her) is both logical and pretty darn creepy.

The parallels with ALTERED STATES are obvious, but the differences are also instructive. At the beginning of the movie, Hurt doesn’t really have any stake in research into primitive humans. He’s monkeying around with sensory deprivation and drugs to study altered states of consciousness. The caveman hallucinations (and eventually the physical changes) are an unexpected discovery, so it’s not clear why Hurt is willing to risk everything to hurtle headlong down this path. The movie seems to suggest it’s just Hurt impulsively seeking generic “truth”.

Likewise, Hurt putting himself in danger is pretty boring. A lot of science fiction is surprisingly anti-scientific, but even if Hurt ended up turning himself permanently into a monkey man, that’s not really much of a cautionary tale. One scientist goes too far, gets turned into a caveman, and is presumably hunted down. Hardly on par with Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita in regret at the first test of the nuclear bomb. Changing the nature of the threat to Hurt -- from regression to annihilation -- does make things more interesting, but it also makes no sense at all. So despite its promising beginning, I don’t really see myself thinking about any particular scene from ALTERED STATES years from now.

1979: THE BLACK HOLE

What’s it about?

A space expedition (including captain Robert Forster, scientists Yvette Mimieaux and Anthony Perkins, journalist Ernest Borgnine, and robot Roddy MacDowall) comes across an apparently derelict spaceship hovering around the opening of a massive black hole. They identify the ship as the Cygnus -- an exploration vessel that went missing decades ago with its entire crew. While investigating closer they are caught by the gravitational pull of the black hole, but are saved when the Cygnus suddenly lights up and draws them to safety using a tractor beam.

On board the Cygnus, the explorers discover a ship populated by robots -- including a hulking red bruiser called Maximilian, mute shrouded types with reflective faceplates, and a beat-up old model voiced by Slim Pickens. They also find megalomaniacal captain Maximilian Schell (no relation to the robot Maximilian), who is on the eve of a grand experiment to take the Cygnus into the black hole, protected by an anti-gravity field. He tells his visitors that his crew left the ship voluntarily, but strange observations on the ship call the captain’s story into question -- and implies danger for the rest of the humans on board as the start of the experiment moves closer.

Is it any good?

I don’t know how to tell other people about THE BLACK HOLE. If an evil sorcerer wanted to lure me off the safe path through an enchanted forest and draw me to my destruction with a seductive siren call, he would show me something that looked like THE BLACK HOLE. He would show me the amazing miniature of the Cygnus, perched on the edge of a swirling black hole. He would show me the creepy Gothic touches like the shrouded robots and the sinister secrets that lurk deep in Cygnus’s past. He would show me a cast that includes a veritable catalog of B-list and C-list character actors. And only once I had strayed far from the safe path, lost in the underbrush with no hope of returning again, would I find that THE BLACK HOLE is form with no substance -- a cloak wrapped around a shadow -- an illusion and nothing more.

Well, not exactly nothing. But THE BLACK HOLE really is almost all seductive exterior with no guts to back it up. Not since THIS ISLAND EARTH (1955) has a science fiction movie been so baffling to me in its power to disappoint. And I’ve seen this one before. I knew what to expect. I remembered being profoundly disappointed the last time I saw it, more than ten years ago. But even then, it meticulously dismantled my skepticism and built up my expectations all over again, only to dash them down. And then, worst of all, at the last minute, it held out another glimmer of brilliance that simply reminded me all over again how disappointed I was. Let me explain.

THE BLACK HOLE was more or less Disney’s answer to STAR WARS (1977). It’s a swashbuckling space opera with expensive special effects, an exotic setting, and lots of derring-do. It also has the potential to be more morally complicated than STAR WARS, since good and evil aren’t so clearly delineated and the story actually raises questions about science, ambition, discipline, and duty. THE BLACK HOLE was also the first Disney movie to be rated PG, which apparently caused a minor stir at the time for some reason. (To put it in context, a PG rating in 1979 would have put it in the company of movies like ROCKY II, MOONRAKER, ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ, TIME AFTER TIME, and BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE.)

The movie starts out much like an episode of Scooby-Doo. Robert Forster’s Mystery Machine breaks down in a deserted part of space and he decides to use the telephone at the creepy old spaceship down the road. It doesn’t happen exactly like that, of course, but it’s close. What really happens is that the ship’s computer first detects the most massive black hole it has ever seen. That’s fine enough, I suppose, but we have to pretend that nobody else has ever reported it and the computer failed to detect it until they were right on top of it. While scanning the black hole, they discover a ship nearby -- the Cygnus, which has been missing for years. In case that wasn’t interesting enough, one of the crew members on the missing ship was also Yvette Mimeaux’s father. Then while conducting a fly-by of the Cygnus (during which it looks dead and silent), they start hurtling towards the black hole or something. The Cygnus suddenly lights up and draws them in with a tractor beam, but not before their ship is somehow damaged.

Okay, so that scene is a pretty good representation of how THE BLACK HOLE works. You’ve got a crew that has apparently just accidentally stumbled upon the most massive black hole ever seen: lame. You’ve got a derelict old ship which has been missing for years sitting silently at the edge of that black hole: awesome. You’ve got this business with the ship suddenly being sucked into the black hole or something: lame. You’ve got the derelict ship lighting up and locking on to them with a tractor beam they can’t escape: awesome.

There’s a reason why Scooby-Doo episodes (and many other stories) begin with cars breaking down in front of creepy old mansions. It’s because creepy old mansions are awesome. And if the creepy old mansion is awesome enough, I’m usually willing to overlook the lameness of the car breaking down in exactly the right spot. But I definitely prefer it when movies don’t force me to overlook dumb things like that, and just don’t have dumb things in them in the first place. Just give me a believable reason why the characters should be at the creepy old mansion, and I will be perfectly happy. But just having them stumble across it by accident -- that is almost always dumb. THE BLACK HOLE, I am sorry to say, has many dumb things -- but for much of its runtime, it also has many awesome things.

It’s clear almost from the beginning that things aren’t right on the Cygnus. Maximilian Schell is the only human left alive on board, and his only companions now are robots. He claims that the rest of the crew abandoned ship when they received an order to return to Earth. Schell, meanwhile, admits that he disobeyed the order so that he could stay and study the black hole further -- eventually preparing for a descent into and through the black hole itself.

All right, let’s stop here for a minute. You and I -- we know that you can’t go through a black hole. I’m not a physics guy, so I can’t talk with authority about this. But a black hole is just a very dense accretion of matter -- so dense that the escape velocity needed to break the gravitational pull is, at certain distances, greater than the speed of light. Therefore, at a certain distance (i.e., beyond the event horizon), nothing can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole. So if you go into a black hole, you are never coming back out again -- neither where you started from nor anywhere else. You just end up mushed up in the black hole along with everything else it sucked in. So this whole idea of putting an anti-gravity shield around a giant starship and flying into a black hole is nonsense at best, and suicide at worst.

This is yet another example of something that is both kind of awesome, but also pretty dumb. Giving the sole surviving human on the derelict spaceship a monomaniacal obsession with flying into a black hole is kind of awesome. It puts everybody in danger and makes Maximilian Schell seem insane but maybe also sort of brilliant. But claiming that he will fly out the other end through a white hole and having other (supposedly sane) characters believe him is pretty dumb. I’m actually willing to accept that the ultimate culmination of a life obsession with black holes would be a desire to fly directly into one, but it’s annoying that the way it’s presented means that I have to forget all the stuff I actually know about black holes first.

So where were we? Maximilian Schell wants to fly into the black hole, and Anthony Perkins is starting to think he might want to go with him. Schell is okay with that, but he wants the rest of Forster’s crew to monitor his journey from their own (now repaired) spaceship so they can take the data back to Earth. Meanwhile, the rest of Forster’s crew think flying into a black hole is crazy and are more than happy to be watching from their own (now repaired) spaceship when it happens. In other words: AT THIS POINT IN THE MOVIE EVERYBODY WANTS THE SAME THING. The only possible conflict could be convincing Anthony Perkins whether to stay on the Cygnus or go back with Forster and Co., and that’s not really much of a conflict since he would presumably eventually make a decision that everybody else would respect.

Except! Except the robots. There are a lot of robots in this movie. Some of them are very annoying, and were clearly designed to keep kids entertained. (Begrudgingly I will admit that it worked. I loved the dumbest of the robots when I was a kid.) On the other hand, other robots were clearly designed to be creepy and to lend to the atmosphere of mystery and danger. (This also worked -- I was terrified of these robots as a kid, and I still think they are creepy today.) The problem with this is that Disney is trying to serve two masters who want totally different things. The story of THE BLACK HOLE is a pretty grown-up tale with Gothic, almost horror-like elements. Meanwhile, kids love slapstick and funny voices. So depending upon what you want out of the movie, you are going to think that one set of robots is awesome and the other is lame (or traumatic).

But that’s not what I was going to say about the robots. Fair warning -- what comes next is a pretty big spoiler. It turns out that the creepy shrouded robots who take care of the day-to-day activities on the Cygnus are not actually robots at all. They are the remnants of the crew, which Schell turned into cybernetic zombies. They are still alive (and possibly conscious), but are programmed and function like robots. There’s not much explanation about what exactly happened, but clearly the crew now exist in some kind of living death. This, by the way, is awesome. It’s a horrifying revelation, and it turns even Anthony Perkins against Maximilian Schell. But... But so what?

Schell still controls the Cygnus and all the many robots on it. He already overpowered the entire crew of the ship, and there’s no reason he can’t do it again. (Or almost. There are hints of a potential robot rebellion, but this is never explained, barely developed, and there is no reason to expect it will happen.) Forster’s crew debates taking Schell back to face justice, but decide it is too risky. So instead they decide to get back into their spaceship and leave. At the same time, Schell decides to take the Cygnus into the black hole. In other words: AT THIS POINT IN THE MOVIE EVERYBODY WANTS THE SAME THING. There is no reason why everybody can’t just do what they are planning to do without getting in each other’s way.

Except! Except Maximilian Schell has ordered Yvette Mimeaux to be turned into a robot. I don’t know why. If he had just let her go back to her own ship, all of his problems would have taken off and flown away and he could have descended into the black hole unhassled just like he wanted. But instead, Forster has to mount a rescue mission and fight his way through the robots of the Cygnus. For the most part, these are some pretty awful action sequences and consist mostly of stiff robot mannequins falling off catwalks. The princess -- I mean, the scientist -- is saved, and the good guys fight their way back to their ship. Unfortunately, Ernest Borgnine turned out to be a big old chicken and he flew away without the rest of them. This, by the way, is deeply, deeply lame.

Then there’s a meteor storm (lame) and Maximilian Schell is crushed by falling stuff in the bridge (lame) and Maximilian the robot refuses to help him for no adequately explained reason (lame). One of the good robots voiced by Slim Pickens sacrifices himself to save the rest of the good guys (lame) and declines to be helped the last few feet to the waiting spaceship (lame). The surviving members of Forster’s crew get in the Cygnus’s probe ship and try to fly away, but find that it is already preprogrammed to fly into the black hole for absolutely no logical reason (lame) so they cannot escape.

This, by the way, is actually awesome. Having the survivors go through the black hole instead of escaping is a great ending both because it’s unexpected and because it gives us a chance to see what the inside of a black hole looks like. It’s just that most of the action and build-up to that moment is pretty unsatisfying and unbelievable. The biggest problem, as I alluded to earlier in giant capital letters, is that both the good guys and the bad guy want the same thing at the end of the movie. There is no actual conflict, so the movie manufactures a series of unlikely and illogical events to generate the needed climax. The frustrating thing is that it seems like there should be enough raw materials for a great conflict, and with a few more drafts of the script they might have actually figured one out that was both exciting and made sense.

A good conflict at the end of THE BLACK HOLE wouldn’t have erased all the dumb things that came before. But up until the end, the dumb and the awesome are more or less balanced. It’s possible to ignore the dumb parts and just focus on the awesome stuff. That’s still plenty frustrating, and I would be complaining about all those dumb things right now even if the ending of this movie was perfect. But they are small potatoes compared to the story problems at the end. In fact, I haven’t even mentioned half the dumb things from the rest of the movie because they hardly seem important when you remember that this is a movie which has no actual conflict in the final act.

But then the surviving good guys go through the black hole. I’ve seen this movie before, so I knew this was coming. I also had no memory at all of what the inside of the black hole looked like. Stop a minute here and imagine to yourself what you would expect it to be. This is a Disney sci-fi movie from 1979. What does a journey through a black hole look like? The safe money is on some abbreviated version of the 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) journey through the monolith. In other words, a light and color show full of camera tricks and abstract patterns, meant to suggest some experience which cannot really be understood unless you experience it. But that’s not what happens. That is not at all what the inside of the black hole looks like.

Instead, Maximilian Schell and Maximilian the robot float unprotected through space. They merge into a single being. The merged being stands on a rocky outcrop, and the camera slowly pans back from their eyes in a single long shot that reveals an enormous stylized hellscape full of red rocks, tongues of fire, and the shuffling damned spirits of the robotic crew. Then Schell somehow ascends from the shot and flies up through the same landscape into a long glowing white corridor that appears to lead to a place of beautiful white light. As the light approaches, the scene dissolves, and Forster’s crew is through the black hole, in a new sector of space, safe and alive. The end. I don’t know what just happened there, but trust me that it was incredibly awesome.

Part of me wants to see THE BLACK HOLE remade. The story at the heart of the movie is kind of classic in a way. After all, it’s a lot like the story to another Disney sci-fi flick -- 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1954). In both, a group of people find themselves unexpectedly on a vessel that is captained by a very refined borderline psychotic, crewed by mysterious and uncommunicative hands, and home to a horrible secret. A lot of the specific touches in THE BLACK HOLE are pretty great too. But then there are the dumb parts. I’m not sure that I could confidently untangle the good parts of the story from the bad, or that anything coherent would be left if I could. So any attempt to remake the movie would likely be doomed to failure as well -- and doubly doomed if it felt any need (as it no doubt would) to preserve recognizable elements from the original movie and shoehorn them into the story.

BONUS BLOG -- 1974: PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE

What’s it about?

A devilish record producer named Swan (played by hobbit-sized songwriter Paul Williams) steals the music to a rock opera version of the Faust legend for the opening of his new club, the Paradise. After infiltrating Swan’s mansion in an attempt to get his music back, the opera’s geeky composer is beaten up and thrown in prison, where a sadistic warden pulls all of his teeth and replaces them with metal prosthetics. (Not sure why.) After hearing that one of Swan’s no-talent pre-fabricated bands will be performing his rock opera at the Paradise’s opening, the composer escapes from prison and is hideously disfigured by a record press while trying to destroy all the 45s of the singles bastardized from his music.

As the opening of the Paradise draws nearer, the composer (now presumed dead) lurks about the club and starts killing those who sing his music. Sensing an opportunity, Swan strikes a deal with the composer to rewrite the rock opera and then have it performed on his terms. But no sooner is the rewrite finished, then Swan attempts to go back on his word. The composer, meanwhile, sets out on a new round of revenge that only brings more ghoulish publicity to the Paradise.




Is it any good?

After doing THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, I swore to myself that I would stick with straight up science fiction for a while. After all, straight up science fiction still covers a very wide range of stories -- everything from ant invasions to giant robot monsters to expressionistic allegories about shirtless Sean Conneries to Mel Brooks parodies to Afrofuturistic musical manifestos. In fact, I really should be writing about SPACE IS THE PLACE right now, since Afrofuturism is an influential but under-represented branch of science fiction.

The problem is that Afrofuturism is so little regarded by most sci-fi fans that I know practically nothing about it myself. Neither do I know anything about the music of Sun Ra (or even George Clinton, to name another more prominent Afrofuturist). The other problem is that I didn’t enjoy SPACE IS THE PLACE all that much. I’m sure part of it is that I don’t have any of the cultural context needed to appreciate a story about a jazz musician leading an exodus of the black people of Earth to a planet where there are no white people. But it’s also, in a lot of ways, not that good of a movie and not even that good of a document of Sun Ra’s music.

Anyway, since I can’t tell you anything at all about Afrofuturism, I’ll just recommend that everybody go look it up on Wikipedia. (That’s what I did after watching SPACE IS THE PLACE.) It seems interesting, and I’m going to try and learn some more about it. But in the meantime, I am going to talk about PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE instead, since it would be a travesty if we made it all the way through the seventies without mentioning any rock operas. And I am probably going to skip THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), since there is a whole phenomenon around that movie that I have only experienced a little bit.




PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is not, strictly speaking, a rock opera itself. It’s about the production of a rock opera, and there are many songs in the movie -- many from the Faust show, but others not. Paul Williams is credited as the songwriter for all of the movie’s music. I’m not sure if you guys know much about Paul Williams, but he wrote easy-going seventies hits for groups like The Carpenters and Barbra Streisand and Three Dog Night. (“Just an Old Fashioned Love Song” and “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays” are all his work, for example.) He’s also a friend of the Muppets and wrote “The Rainbow Connection”, which is featured in THE MUPPET MOVIE. And, incidentally, he acted in a few movies -- including a role as an orangutang know-it-all in BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973).

The music in PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is not much like any of those things I just listed. The songs are more prog-rock ballads (it is a rock opera, after all), and as Swan makes changes to the show they get heavier and more menacing. By the end of the movie, a mincing Transylvanian rocker named Beef is screaming the lyrics over grinding electric guitars while gyrating on the stage in full-body Frankenstein’s monster make-up as his bandmates pretend to dismember people in the audience. (By the way, one of the few unfortunate things about the movie is the stereotypically “gay” way that Beef acts. It’s too bad, since he’s otherwise a pretty great character.)




The movie’s story is obviously an update of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA with a heavy dose of FAUST, but it also weaves in bits of THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY and FRANKENSTEIN. The plot is pretty complicated, and Swan does a lot of back-stabbing and double-crossing. The music is almost all integrated into the story as performances or rehearsals, and there is usually something else going on to forward the plot while the songs are being sung. (For instance, the composer/phantom puts many of his plans into motion while his intended victims are on stage, singing.) One of my biggest complaints about musicals is that the plot usually stops when people start singing, so I was happy to see that wasn’t much of an issue here. There’s one amazing sequence in particular that features two long simultaneous tracking shots in split screen that plays out like a surf rock version of the opening of Orson Welles’s TOUCH OF EVIL.

Now, what about the science fiction? When Swan and the composer make their deal, part of it is that Swan will restore the composer’s voice, which had been destroyed in the same accident that disfigured him. This involves some shenanigans with a giant synthesizer that probably qualify as science fictional. But, yet again, this movie is probably more fantasy than sci-fi -- especially towards the end when the devil becomes an increasingly literal presence.

On the other hand, the look and sound of the movie is far more sci-fi than fantasy. The Paradise is a high-tech place, fitted for pyrotechnics and neon lights and all sorts of modern showiness. The Faust rock opera seems to have sci-fi elements as well -- I mentioned earlier that one of the characters is assembled in the style of Frankenstein’s monster. The composer’s phantom mask is also more like a space helmet or robot faceplate than any traditional kind of mask. And the movie is full of video cameras and synthesizers and all kinds of electronic doodads. It may be fantasy, but it’s not the old-fashioned unplugged kind.

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: