Blinkenlights and dank synths

Next up, two films that take pre-existing footage, and wrap it in new packaging to make a buck.

Hard to resent them for it, though, when we consider what we get in return: delicious analog synth soundtracks, and huge panels full of old-school dials, knobs, and LEDs.

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First Spaceship on Venus (1960)
[aka Der schweigende Stern]

Grade: C-

It's no secret -- it's so well-known as to be proverbial -- that America's troubled race relations (to put it euphemistically) were a focal point of Iron Curtain critiques: how could they not be?

So when Poland and East Germany got together to make a spectacularly expensive film about an expedition to Venus in 1985 (sigh), it wasn't an accident that they cast black (Julius Ongewe) and Asian (Yoko Tani, Hua-Ta Tang) actors in prominent roles.

It wasn't altruism either, of course: no doubt the intent was consciously propagandistic -- an attempt to gain an edge, however slight, in a global struggle.

But because the makers of First Spaceship on Venus took a "show, don't tell" approach, and didn't foreground the blackness or Asianness of these characters, the net result is remarkably modern. The technician Talua, the physician Sumiko, and biologist/linguist Tchen-Yu are members of a team, characterized by what they contribute, not where they happen to come from.

Of course, then they have a white guy (Kurt Rackelmann) play an Indian mathematician, so all bets are off.

There's not much point to recapping the plot of First Spaceship on Venus, though the MacGuffin here is a bit different from Planet of Storms et al. Instead of receiving a message from another planet, or simply going there for its own sake, the Earth forces have discovered a message that was already here: spooky!

Unearthed at an irrigation site in the Gobi desert, this magnetic spool appears to have originated from Venus, and clearly contains significant data -- expressed, of course, as a series of dank analog synth sounds.

So we'd better check it out in person -- and send a cute robot too!

Speaking of the robot, we owe First Spaceship on Venus an apology. In this scene we noticed, to our great irritation, that White couldn't possibly give mate after 1...Kh8 2. Kxe7, as announced by the computer. But that's almost certainly an error in the dubbed soundtrack, as the correct move is clearly made on the board: 2. Kf7, with the inevitable result of 2...e5 (or 2...e6) 3. Bg7#.

If we were more literate chess scholars we'd know the study from which this was taken; maybe something by Rinck? Either way, they clearly did their homework, so everybody gets an A!

"Iron Curtain film about an expedition to Venus" seems like a reasonable basis for comparing jabłka to яблоки. But ultimately First Spaceship on Venus, while fun, doesn't reach the same heights as Planet of Storms -- though some of the sets are kinda groovy.

And no, we're not just lamenting the absence of Masha, whose equivalent here is certainly Sumiko. Yoko Tani shows herself to be perfectly capable of doing the whole "talking on the radio while crying" thing, which is no doubt someone's kink somewhere.

We also get black goo that threatens to engulf the cast members, à la Tasha Yar. No doubt that's someone's kink too.

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The Lucifer Complex (1978)

Objective Grade: F

Holographic Hitler Helpout: D+

More than once, over the course of this project, we've seen the opening minutes of a movie and felt unsure as to whether we were about to see a very good film, or a very bad one. Maybe it's because films at either end of the quality continuum tend to write their own rules, and construct sequences that don't seem bound by the predictable progression of genre norms.

Or maybe it's because we particularly appreciate films that have a lot of space in them? Good films do this because they want to create a world that we, as viewers, can inhabit -- or because they understand how the "hard sell" can actually be a turnoff, inhibiting our emotional response -- or simply because they have dynamic range, incorporating loud and soft, fast and slow.

Bad films do this to pad their running time. And for a while, the net result can be the same.

The real test is whether you can follow up your understated intro with something that rewards, intrigues, and gratifies the patient viewer. If you've ever seen a film or TV show with a compelling premise that turns out to be a shaggy-dog story, you know the feeling of disappointment that hits you around the 85% mark, when you realize they're just going to cobble together some contrived, unsatisfying, bullshit explanation for everything that seemed so tantalizingly, explicably mysterious a few minutes ago.

After this happens enough times, you develop a growing suspicion of mysteries that seem to be building layer upon layer of impenetrability -- because you no longer trust them to pay off.

When it comes to nostalgic intros to 1970s productions, though, we're still trusting souls. Show us someone wandering a natural landscape, alone, as the camera films from overhead. Give us an enigmatic, contemplative voiceover. Follow it up with melancholy music as the credits roll. Put it all right at the edge of loss, of fading away -- a piece of film in a closet somewhere, alongside the Beartooths and Idaho Transfers of the world.

In other words, these are our buttons: push them.

And for the first 10 minutes or so of The Lucifer Complex, we wanted to believe. Oh, how we wanted to believe.

Even when the nameless protagonist (William Lanning) started cueing up assorted footage from the past, each clip playing in a little window as if this were an elegiac Sega CD game from the early 1990s, we still hoped all this might amount to some sort of meditative piece -- call it The Library That Survived Armageddon -- from the National Film Board of Canada.

(Or just Boards of Canada, that would work too.)

Hell, we held out hope even after the film offered up endless, exploitative shots of real-world violence, including scenes of actual starving people...kind of like Commando Mengele/Angel of Death: funny how that film seems to be coming up a lot lately. 

In the midst of that, we get live footage of the Edgar Kelly Band, a regional act meant to represent the big rock concerts of the 1960s. Each shot is carefully curated to make a crowd of about 20 people seem like 20,000.

So is this As I Watched: The Movie? Which would basically be The White Gorilla 2, minus the gorilla. Ergo, White Primate in a Cave, Watching Other People Do Things. Yes?

Maybe we could live with that, I guess. But wait, what about this guy? Where's he?

So, out with it: the first 20 minutes of The Lucifer Complex are nothing more than an elaborate intro for a shitty, unfinished movie about secret Nazis in South America, starring Robert Vaughn and Keenan Wynn.

That's it. That's what all these nostalgic helicopter shots and edutainment clips are building towards: nothing. They're just padding. They just wanted to salvage the footage from a shitty unfinished Nazi movie -- Hitler's Wild Women was the working title, if that gives you an idea -- and make a buck.

Now, to be clear, this particular shitty Nazi movie is hilariously bad (though not nearly as fun as Commando Mengele). OK, it's almost intriguing for about 10 minutes, when it's not clear why a bunch of dignitaries have been gassed to death aboard a bus --

-- or why Vaughn gets clocked when he goes to check the situation out.

But soon enough, Nazis.

And Robert Vaughn, looking pissed off -- does he ever not look pissed off? -- in an elevator, with men with ridiculous sunglasses and mustaches and head wraps.

And a fetus in a vessel.

And more Nazis. Lady Nazis.

And long battle sequences in which Vaughn conveniently isn't visible, since he's allegedly inside a tank. That'll save some $$$.

And Hitler also shows up -- 

-- and he shoots lasers at people.

And then the guy in the cave goes for a walk, because everyone else is dead. The end.

Bleached blondes and space sprays

Easy enough to find a theme for these next two, as they apparently shared a double bill back in 1961. That's not all they share, though, as both films have a bunch of other things weirdly in common:

• spaceships with supply lines that get cut or disconnected;
• astronauts endangered by fast-moving meteoroids while on a space walk;
• mutually-hostile male characters who find themselves on opposite sides of a love triangle, only to later join forces;
• and, above all, major characters with incongruously bleached hair.

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Assignment: Outer Space (1960)
[aka Space Men]

Grade: C+

There are some things we expect in the opening moments of a science-fiction film from 1960. For instance, an assortment of goofy meters, as seen above. Or maybe, if the film gets to the action right away, you'll have people in spacesuits.

One thing we didn't expect, though, was this:

Unless you count some earlier shots of the back of a person's head, the first character onscreen in Assignment: Outer Space is ace pilot Al, played by Archie Savage. Now, between Savage's bizarre platinum dye job, the print's faded colors, and sheer disbelief, it took us a moment to process that a film of this vintage had a black man not just as a prominent character, but in the leadoff spot.

He's not the protagonist, mind you; that role falls to spunky reporter Ray Peterson (Rik Van Nutter), whom Ray wakes from hibernation in the opening sequence. But, still.

And do you know what the other characters say about Al's race? Absolutely nothing. It's literally never once remarked upon, or even alluded to in the vaguest way. He's just a crack pilot and an affable (but heroic) guy, and a key member of their team.

Of course, the folks aboard spaceship BZ-88 (and space station ZX-34) don't mince words, and even genial Al has no hesitation about referring to Peterson as a "parasite". Fair enough since, while Ray does supply the film's narration, he's not of much use otherwise. He even screws up an important refueling operation --

-- much to the displeasure of station commander George (David Montresor), a melancholy and put-upon soul who kinda looks like the drug dealer in Day of the Panther.

Otherwise Peterson has little to offer beyond the repeated, extreme close-ups we get of his star-struck gaze -- which we're guessing is actually the same shot recycled over and over again. Its first appearance is when Al unceremoniously kicks him out into the "terrifying void" of space, spawning this exchange:

Ray: "A chilly sense of...emptiness. D'you understand me, Al?"

Al: "Sure I understand. Every baptism has its mystery, even out here in space."

Ray: "I've never felt so lonely."

If you're familiar with 2001: A Space Odyssey, some bells might already be ringing. Crew members waking from hibernation? Close-ups of awestruck eyes? And what if we were to tell you that there's even a computer gone wrong that has to be deactivated, while the body of a crewman who died in hibernation lies silently nearby?

In fact it seems to be more or less established that Stanley Kubrick was well aware of Assignment: Outer Space, specifically took inspiration from it, and even tried to hire director Antonio Margheriti to handle the visual effects for 2001.

It's not difficult to see why, as Assignment: Outer Space captures the heaviness, isolation, and coldness of space travel, much as in Kubrick's opus. Characters move in a measured, self-conscious way, carefully proceeding through rooms (or the exteriors of spaceships) as though they really were navigating an altered environment, while high-G maneuvers in flight put visible strain on the actors.

And while others have poked fun at the special effects in Assignment, the film's ships and rockets at least have the solidity and weight of real objects, and there's something disarmingly ingenious about them. Someone who can do this kind of work with a budget of essentially nil? That's the kind of guy you want to hire, because he won't go overbudget when you give him more to play with.

There is one moment where any sense of disbelief comes to a bizarre, screeching halt, as a crew of redshirts meet their death in a fiery crash on Phobos. The pilot desperately tries to regain control, his voice echoes in terror, and then we get this:

That's...a street, and power lines, and a car (we're told it's a Chevy). Once we were done laughing, we had to wonder: what gives?

Well, apparently this shot wasn't in the original Italian film, nor is it to be found in the English dub seen here (with much better color quality than the Mill Creek print). In those prints, though we zoom in on the Martian moon's surface, the ship's impact isn't shown.

So we can only assume some American distributor felt the moment wasn't sufficiently "impactful" (ugh) and decided to add an explosion, any explosion that was available. And now poor Margheriti (whom we already knew from Battle of the Worlds and The Long Hair of Death) gets the rap for it! Does that seem fair to you, Ray?

Anyway, none of this is to say that Assignment: Outer Space is a masterful work of cinema, because it certainly isn't. It's talky, the plot is often too opaque for its own good, and the romantic subplot with navigator Lucy (Gaby Farinon) is hardly convincing -- even if it's amusing to watch the camera zoom closer and closer in on the duo, as the sexual tension mounts...

...until Ray suddenly brings up Christmas out of the blue and the score starts playing "Deck the Halls", to utterly bizarre effect. (At least it's not "Jingle Bells".)

Still, Assignment: Outer Space is a work of hard SF that never relies on woo-woo physics or deus ex machina to justify its plot points, and we have a lot of respect for that. The ships go a bit fast at times (though well under the speed of light), but otherwise everything that happens is entirely within the realm of practical human achievement, and is explained in those terms.

And it feels real, in a way that so many slicker productions don't -- but 2001 did. For those reasons, and for its remarkably forward-looking racial politics, Assignment: Outer Space deserves more credit than it's gotten in most quarters.

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The Phantom Planet (1961)

Grade: D

The opening minutes of The Phantom Planet bear more than a slight resemblance to various elements from Assignment: Outer Space. For instance, we've got redshirts who are scarcely introduced before they promptly crash into a celestial object.

We've got valuable, pressurized fluid spurting into the void thanks to a cable issue -- and no, we're not talking about the scrambled Playboy Channel.

And of course, we've got a skilled pilot with weirdly tinted hair:

For his role as Capt. Frank Chapman, Dean Fredericks apparently decided to keep the bleached-blonde look he'd picked up when playing Steve Canyon for NBC, even though that TV series had ended a year or two before The Phantom Planet started filming. Though not nearly as disconcerting as Archie Savage's snow-white mane, it still doesn't look right on Fredericks.

Anyway, Capt. Chapman is sent out by the Air Force brass to check out what happened to those redshirts, and for a while it looks like we're going to get another hard SF tale with a plot heavily shaped by military hierarchy, orders that are followed or not followed, and so on.

Chapman and his philosophical co-pilot Lt. Makonnen (Richard Weber) have a refreshingly honest conversation about the stresses of taking off in a giant exploding space dildo:

"That does it, Captain. We can relax a bit now."

"Takeoff's always the same...my heart pounded like a sledgehammer."

"Yeah, mine too."

It's nice to see a film where space travel isn't treated as something absolutely routine.

Soon, in another echo of 2001, they're called to exit the craft to deal with a technical issue, whereupon things go very wrong.

Given that the film's title and MacGuffin are one and the same, it's no surprise that their rocket soon crash-lands onto the large asteroid seen in the first screenshot above -- a prop picked up on some holiday trip to the Great Barrier Reef, no doubt.

But then things take a turn for the weird:

Like, really weird:

From this point on, the touchstone that comes to mind for The Phantom Planet isn't 2001, but The Twilight Zone, as we leave hard SF behind and are instead handed a premise that'd be more at home in the presto-change-o, ain't-life-strange-o vistas of Rod Serling's brainchild.

At least they mumble some technobabble about the space between electrons being decreased on this asteroid -- known as Rheton -- and, unlike "Rascals" on Star Trek: TNG, Chapman's outfit doesn't change size too. Fortunately, the mysteriously humanoid, English-speaking inhabitants of Rheton have no trouble finding something for him to wear.

Actually, much as there is something Twilight Zone-ish about the direction, it's probably Star Trek -- the original, we mean -- that's the better touchstone. One example: when Chapman is immediately put on trial for roughing up a member of the welcoming committee, the jury for this dashing spaceman is made up entirely of nubile young women, including two real-life Playboy Playmates of the Month (!). 

Speaking of the Shat, one of those women is (blink and you'll miss her) Allyson Ames, aka Kia from Incubus. Bucking the trend she appears here as a brunette, i.e. without the bleach job she had in the Esperanto epic.

Other name actors include Richard Kiel (we'll get to him later) and Francis X. Bushman as Sessom, the kindly elder who runs Rheton. Hard to imagine what was going through his head when he was asked to play an imaginary theremin while delivering lines like "This planet is slowly using up the energy that holds the atomic particles together", but he never seems to think himself above the material.

The rest of The Phantom Planet plays out a bit like a mediocre episode of TOS, and is largely dedicated to Chapman's efforts to answer common Captain Kirk questions like:

"How can I escape this cult-like society, which has me imprisoned in subterranean caverns and unable to communicate with my allies?"

"How shall I use these women's obvious attraction to me to my advantage?"

"How should I handle this ritualized fight to the death against a hotheaded, competing male?"

"How might I best defeat this hilariously goofy-looking alien in physical combat?" (Enter Richard Kiel.)

"How should I handle my own star-crossed attraction for a woman who, now that I think of it, bears an odd resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor?"

"And how should I address the obvious sexual tension between that Japanese-American crew member and their commanding officer -- if at all?"

"Eh, never mind. I think we're done. How about some end credits?"

"...Let's get the hell out of here."