Unilateral disarmament: the pros and cons

(A cheap and obvious pun, but it had to be made.)

In a slight departure from strict chronology, The Umbrellahead Review once again turns its attention to films found on some versions of Mill Creek's box sets, but not others. In this case, we're looking at the Nightmare Worlds release -- specifically the version included as part of our 250-pack box set -- which omits two movies we had to seek out from other sources.

One of these films was cut before we got our box set; one seems to have been added afterward. One was removed in favor of The Disappearance of Flight 412, that shaggy-dog story of a TV movie; the other replaced The Return of Dr. Mabuse, that unmemorable slice of early-1960s German murk.

Both films are superior to their respective swapmates -- if that's not a word, it should be -- and one of them is about to get the first grade of its kind on The Umbrellahead Review.

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The War Game (1965)

Grade: A

The simplest way to describe The War Game would be "sobering". We downloaded our copy -- split, it seems, into two individually-digitized reels -- from Archive.org. Normally when we watch movies we don't talk much, but we might chat or complain a little.

But by the time we got halfway through the first reel of The War Game, not a peep was to be heard hereabouts.

Produced, written, and directed by Peter Watkins, The War Game was filmed in preparation for a 1965 showing on the BBC, but after seeing its depiction of the effects of nuclear war on Britain, the bigwigs at the Beeb deemed it too traumatizing for broadcast. Subsequently it was shown at film festivals, ultimately winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967.

But The War Game didn't reach British television until 1985, airing just before the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing in 1945 -- and nearly a year after the premiere of Threads, which did indeed traumatize millions of British people, adults and children alike.

Along with 1983's Testament and The Day After -- both of which did their parts to traumatize American families -- Threads is the most obvious point of comparison for The War Game. All these films were made for TV, and all of them offer a relentlessly downbeat vision of life after atomic war.

One crucial difference is that The War Game is not narrative fiction, but a documentary of sorts. It makes little attempt to tell the stories of specific people, but instead assembles a collage of scripted and unscripted interviews, recitations of quotes by prominent British public figures (most of them hopelessly fatuous, naive, or jingoistic), and enactments of what one might expect to be "typical" scenes in post-apocalyptic England.

You know, looters getting shot, injuries without doctors to treat them, utter and total loss of hope, that sort of thing.

The War Game is far less graphic than Threads, but in some ways is even more effective as a result. Watkins does a masterful job of weaving together individual heartbreak with collective destruction, not by creating characters for us to follow, but through the synecdoche of letting each person's words, facial expressions, and movements inevitably imply the whole.

If you retain any affection for the inhabitants of Great Britain and their ways -- and, please, don't let's conflate the British people with any misdeeds done in their name or the name of Empire -- then it's profoundly disturbing to see the total breakdown of those ways, sometimes referred to as "society". (You know, that thing Maggie said didn't exist.) 

We know that The Day After had a profoundly sobering effect (there's that word again) on Ronald Reagan, who wrote in his diary that it was "very effective and left me greatly depressed...My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent and to see there is never a nuclear war."

Guess it takes Hollywood to reach Hollywood -- but The Day After also reached a massive percentage of the American public. The War Game was denied that opportunity, reaching only a handful of cinematic elites until its time had passed.

Impossible to say now what effect it would have had since -- in this timeline at least -- we miraculously made it through the remainder of the 20th century, and the first two decades of the 21st, without turning ourselves into glass souvenirs for curious aliens.

Anyone who's seen "The City on the Edge of Forever" knows better than to meddle with the past. So, who knows: had The War Game been shown, maybe it would have inspired a huge British anti-war movement that would, in turn, have inspired a countermovement that led to catastrophe. Push a pendulum, get hit in the face.

Better then to forfeit one's moment in the sun -- and an Academy Award sure as hell ain't bad -- than to reap "Two Suns in the Sunset". Nonetheless The War Game is more available than ever and, sadly, just as relevant as ever.

It retains its power to leave an audience in stunned silence -- and if that audience is unlikely to want to watch it again, that would seem to be a measure of its success.

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The Severed Arm (1973)

Grade: C

After The War Game, the gore and goofiness of The Severed Arm come as a relief. True, it has ambitions of being something more than a standard-issue slasher/revenge film; in some details, it does elevate itself above that mean.

But when you come down to it, The Severed Arm is one of those movies whose relationship to the consumer is mainly defined by the one-to-one correspondence between its title and its contents: it does what it says on the can. For those who like freshly amputated upper extremities, it's not going out on a limb (ahem) to say, this is the sort of thing they'll like. It delivers.

Here's a really weird trope that we see a lot in films and TV: the idea that, in the face of a potentially lethal event -- poison gas, radiation, starvation -- you can precisely calculate the amount of time left. If you're able to finish a task or find salvation when you're below that number, you're golden; if not, you're inevitably dead meat.

Now, sometimes this kind of exactitude makes narrative sense, like in a scuba diving movie. But if you're wondering how and why an amputatable gets amputated in The Severed Arm, the main reason is that six bros get together, something goes terribly wrong...

...and before long, "Some of us...maybe all of us...can't make it through tomorrow" if they don't get to sawin'. (Chop chop.)

One might quote Dave Chappelle's sage observation -- "You were in on the heist, you just didn't like your cut" -- but, naturally, that holds little sway with the hack-ee. So when the other five bros begin losing limbs left and right...

...well, really more like left or right...

...the question doesn't really seem like "Whodunit?" so much as "Whatcha gonna do when they [in the 'third-person singular of unspecified gender' sense] come for you?"

Hard to say more without spoilers galore, though the presence of Deborah Wiley as Teddy -- daughter to don't-mind-'im-'e's-'armless -- complicates matters beyond the routine.

Is she a possible love interest with a disarming smile? Just an indignant and/or concerned family member? Something else? Only time will tell.

One of us recalls reading some pretty negative comments about The Severed Arm that implied it was in the same league as Manos or Eegah. Consequently, as we watched (hi, Ray!), the film defied expectations simply by being of ordinary quality.

That doesn't mean it was especially well-acted or well-written, mind you -- the script even invokes the old cliché about how the calls are coming from inside your house! -- but it never got worse than passable.

Of course it helps that, instead of our usual PD fare, we were watching a gorgeous widescreen transfer from Vinegar Syndrome, with intense colors and a beautifully crisp image. Between that, Phillan Bishop's moody analog synth score, and the lavish supply of marvelous 1970s aesthetics, the film is a feast for the senses.

By the way, some people who own DVDs of The Severed Arm have wondered if it ends prematurely. It's possible that sketchy releases truncate the credits to obfuscate copyright, but Vinegar Syndrome's release makes it very clear that the film's rather abrupt ending is intentional, and the final freeze-frame doesn't change during the credit roll.

If you see a still shot with two happy people, and one with a blank expression, you've seen the end.

(But the screenshot below isn't it -- just a chance to show off some cardigans and fancy prints.)

Remembering

In our last entry we made some noises about "unfinished business with a few films" in our mammoth Horror Collection box set from Mill Creek. A careful count of our viewing habits would reveal that, of the Horror Collection's 250 films, we'd only watched 247 from the actual box set (counting the two halves of the The Lost City separately).

Will we be reviewing Night of the Living Dead -- a film we skipped in our first pass through the Nightmare Worlds portion of the box set, since we watched it on public TV on (gulp) Halloween 2009?

No, we won't -- though at least we finally watched the version on the box,. Even in Mill Creek's middling transfer it remains a taut, effective film.

Its only major flaw is a bit too much of the "hysterical/helpless woman" act from Judith O'Dea -- the film's decoy protagonist, so to speak. (Duane Jones is the true protagonist, obvs.)

Or will we be covering Metropolis, the 1927 epic that launched a thousand film studies classes -- and which we also skipped over, since we figured Mill Creek's print was probably crap?

No, we won't, though we realized neither of us had ever actually seen the film (K. thought she had, but hadn't), and so here too we watched the Mill Creek product. And even in a cut-down, grainy version that can't bring itself to fit the film's title on screen --

-- we enjoyed Metropolis and would like to see the restored version sometime. That said, the cuts in the 118-minute version we watched weren't at all obvious to us: it's hardly a hack job like some we've seen. (Looking at you, Planet Outlaws.)

No, the real unfinished business we have is with a third movie -- one that, in at least two different senses, is the thing that started this whole project. Of all the films on the box, it's the first one we ever watched together; of all the films on the box, it's (almost certainly) the first one either of us ever saw.

So, without further ado (and just shy of 2019), here's #250 of 250:

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Warriors of the Wasteland (1983)
[aka The New Barbarians, I nuovi barbari]

Grade: C-

In retrospect, the 1980s seem like the transitional decade -- the period where we went from the way things were to, basically speaking, the way things are now.

For instance, take entertainment: in 1979 you probably had a rooftop antenna, and you watched what was on TV or in the theaters. You read what you owned, or what the library had, or what a buddy would lend you.

Come the early 1990s, we had cable TV, video rentals, and services like Prodigy that weren't so different from the modern Internet, where you could chat with other people interested in all the weird stuff you liked.

OK, it cost money (and charged per minute), and it was your friend's father that had it, not your family. But at least you got to try it once or twice for a few minutes, whereupon you saw the future. (And hopefully your friend's dad didn't flip his shit.)

Nowadays, almost nothing is out of reach. Nearly every childhood memory can be dialed up somewhere on YouTube; nearly every movie, song, video game, book you were ever curious about can be bought online, or even downloaded for free.

Heck, even people can be found, if you're resourceful enough. One classmate's dead from suicide or smack, another has detestable political views, and that little blonde you had a crush on in 5th grade? She's happily married with a couple kids. Good for her.

But back in the late 1980s, such things were still on the horizon (except video rentals, we had those). 

And so, enter a childhood friend of P.'s: let's call him Dog Pound, though that wasn't his real nickname. Dog Pound was at least 5 years older than P., probably more, but only a couple years ahead of him in school.

Picture greasy black hair, wide eyes enlarged by Coke-bottle glasses, thick lips, and a subtle limp. Now add to that shitkicker boots, a Canadian tuxedo, and a trucker hat.

If you're imagining this guy as a redneck with mild special needs, you're exactly right.

Dog Pound was awkward and a bit "off", but willing to be a friend when few others were. It was Dog Pound who stood with P. at the bus stop, and never once made a cutting or nasty remark about him, ever. It was at Dog Pound's house that P. first played Intellivision, and where he ate a dog biscuit on a dare from a mutual friend.

And the first pornographic movie he ever saw? That was Dog Pound's VHS tape, which featured the sordid tale of an android who learns about sex by watching...well, you know the rest.

And speaking of VHS, Dog Pound used to wax lyrical about a movie he called "The Templars". All these decades later it's impossible to recall exactly what he said, but it probably amounted to his version of "This movie is really bad-ass."

So sooner or later, we sat down and watched it together. And not too long after that, Dog Pound and his family decamped for parts unknown (the rumor was Alaska).

Even just a few years later, P.'s impressions of the movie would have been vague: something about a post-apocalyptic landscape akin to The Road Warrior, with a roving band of men determined to kill everyone, everyhere. And that was about it.

Yet it stuck, somehow -- maybe because it felt like some bit of underground knowledge, of a piece with the Intellivision and the porn tape and everything else. Something illicit, hidden, and at risk of being forgotten.

(He was interested in roots and beginnings..."There must be great secrets buried there which have not been discovered since the beginning.")

The impression remained long enough to prompt P. to look it up in the Leonard Maltin book years later, and learn that it was named Warriors of the Wasteland and/or The New Barbarians. Cool.

Then in 2008, in the course of chasing down a DVD of the haunting TV movie I, Desire (aka Desire: The Vampire), we start thinking about B-pictures, and Ed Wood, and Warriors of the Wasteland comes to mind again. (If you're keeping time, that's about 15 years later.)

So we do our research, and find out about the Mill Creek 250-pack. In the weeks before it arrives at our door -- or the months before we order it? -- we download a copy of Warriors of the Wasteland  from Archive.org, and watch it on an iBook sitting on our coffee table, in our little apartment.

For sound, we have the boombox P. salvaged from a dumpster, running off a car stereo adapter in one of the tape bays (which doesn't even spin), and which had the nasty habit of erupting into horrible static now and then.

The audio is about a second ahead of the image, so we route it through a program that adds delay. Later, the sync error gets worse and worse, and we add more and more artificial lag, until we're processing it with about 4 seconds of delay just to keep the dialogue in sync.

Maybe somewhere around that time, P. finds himself thinking about Dog Pound. So he looks him up and, sadly, finds out that someone with Dog Pound's (fairly common) name died about a decade ago. 

Not definitive evidence, to be sure...but on some level he wants to believe things ended there. It makes a better story than a sad existence in some group home, with little to show for the past decades but a history of custodial jobs -- or, all too plausibly, a permanent place on the sex offender registry, thanks to some clumsy and utterly inappropriate attempt at seduction.

(Sorry, Dog Pound, but that kind of thing does happen on the regular: just ask Brian Peppers.)

And now, ten years later, we have a big flat-screen TV and a whole house to ourselves. We're watching Warriors of the Wasteland, the very last film in this box set that we haven't actually cued up yet (Disc 46 notwithstanding, and that'll come in time). With the click of a button, we could watch a hi-res transfer on Amazon Prime, but somehow that would defeat the purpose.

You'll forgive us if we don't bother to opine on whether Warriors of the Wasteland is good, bad, or indifferent (it's all three), or talk about how it's really a Western in homoerotic Road Warrior clothing (which it is). Somehow, those things seem irrelevant right now.

("All the 'great secrets'...had turned out to be just empty night: there was nothing more to find out, nothing worth doing, only nasty furtive eating and resentful remembering.")

Instead, we'll think about where we are: right on the cusp of a new year -- the very year in which Warriors of the Wasteland is set -- and at the end of a decade-long journey. And we'll think about Dog Pound, who turns out to be alive and well as far as we can tell, living just a handful of miles from where he and P. grew up.

(And, we're pleased to note, he's not on the registry.)

So here's to you, Dog Pound. You'll forgive us if we don't seek you out to reconnect, in what would almost certainly be a series of one-sided interactions made awkward by occasional flashes of bitterness -- or, worse, obvious signs of lust for some proximate woman whose kindness confuses you.

But you were there at the beginning of many things that still matter. And you, too, still matter -- especially from a comfortable distance.

No such place

We can muster enough suspension of disbelief to get through most movies, no matter how thoroughly science may have refuted their premises. No one will be walking around on Venus anytime soon; wasps don't make royal jelly; there isn't an island where tigers and lions coexist; you can't freeze a turtle in ice and bring it back to...

...uh, never mind on that one.

Still, these next two films -- which also happen to be the last two black-and-white movies we watched in 50 Sci-Fi Classics -- really pushed our limits by setting their action in places that literally, paradigmatically don't exist. (At least you can land on Venus.)

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Planet Outlaws (1939/1953)

Grade: D+

Planet Outlaws isn't just the last of the B&Ws, it's also the last example on the 250-movie pack of that beloved format, the edited serial. Sigh.

At least it's not coy about its origins:

Someday we'll learn to keep Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon straight -- and it doesn't help that Buster Crabbe played both roles, of course.

At least now we've got the basics down, and know that Buck was the one who got hit with knockout gas in the 20th century and woke up in the 25th: hence Duck Dodgers.

We first encountered Sherman S. Krellberg when he brought us The Lost City via his company "Super-Serials", which now sounds like a line from an episode of South Park but whatever. To freshen up this 14-year-old release, Krellberg decided that a wraparound narration would be just the thing -- isn't it always? -- and that he was just the guy to do it.

(IMDb doesn't make it 100% clear that it was him, but here's a picture of Krellberg with, we kid you not, Budd Rogers. Looks like the same guy to us.)

So there he sits, intoning banalities about UFOs, Jules Verne, da Vinci, and atomic power on the way in, while wrapping things up with a rousing "God bless America!" at feature's end. Heavy duty.

It's not really fair to judge a serial that's been hacked down from nearly 4 hours to 71 minutes -- and "hacked" really is the word: Planet Outlaws moves along at a pace so blistering that transitions are sometimes botched completely, as if the film were skipping forward (but it's not).

End of a music cue from the previous scene left in? Dialogue chopped out mid-sentence? No problem!

Even in this chopped-down form, though, it's evident that the original Buck Rogers serial had one hell of a lot of repetition. Some of that is inherent in the format (since people need to catch up), while some was no doubt done to save money.

The most amusing sign of the film's economizing ways: we don't just get scenes where actors watch previously filmed material on a screen, as recently seen in The Lucifer Complex. We get scenes where actors watch screens that show actors watching other actors on screens.

Yes, it's literally a case of "As I watched 'as I watched'..." -- which we don't envy Google Translate in its attempt to render for our non-English-speaking visitors.

In Planet Outlaws, Buck's main task is to broker an alliance with the Saturnians, in hopes that they'll help the beleaguered forces of the Hidden City to defeat evil dictator and "super-racketeer" Killer Kane (Anthony Warde).

Among Kane's many crimes, perhaps his most heinous is placing his enemies under permanent mind control, using specially designed helmets to turn them into "living robots, men robbed of all willpower". He pronounces it ro-bits, natch.

So Buck flies to Saturn, dodging blockades and security forces along the way...

...and then, later, he flies back to Earth...

...and that's pretty much how this thing goes. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, with every trip bringing a new stratagem to evade Kane's goons -- except the stratagem is usually just "steal a ship and hope they let you through the perimeter".

If we were ten years old in 1938, and seeing Buck Rogers in its original format, this might be exciting. Compressed down to a little over an hour and seen in one sitting, the formula becomes painfully repetitive, like one of those video games where you spend 75% of your time backtracking through landscapes you already know well.

Speaking of landscapes, apparently Saturn has a surface that looks a lot like a California state park, and you can live and breathe there without protection. Who knew?

In fairness, we're not sure when it became clear that Saturn was a gas giant, or that there was no solid surface to stand upon. Were these things known in 1938? We don't know. (This book, though interesting, doesn't help much.)

On the other hand, the Saturnian Prince Tallen doesn't carry any ethnic stereotype baggage, even though he's portrayed by Korean-American actor Philson Ahn. He's just a good guy from another planet. So in that way, Planet Outlaws is refreshingly not of its time, whether you define that time as 1939 or 1953.

Even knowing this version is hopelessly compromised, we can't say we're too excited by what the Buck Rogers serial appears to have offered. We probably shoulda just played it on the Co-lee-co, but we were too busy with a certain boy and his pancake. $500 and it's yours.

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Unknown World (1951)

Grade: D

Look, we know Unknown World means well. We're sure it does. But before committing this particular journey to the center of the earth (ahem) to the screen, couldn't you people have talked to a geologist -- or a coal miner?

Even if the screenshot above were referring to 2500 meters below sea level (and it ain't), we'd be talking about one hell of a temperature increase. The TauTona mine goes to about that depth (from a starting point of 1500 meters above sea level), and it's over 130°F down there without air conditioning.

So, Dr. Morley (Victor Kilian), if your mission is to find a place where people can live and thrive while a nuclear holocaust goes on somewhere over their heads --

-- then 2500 meters underground isn't the place to do it. And 2500 miles underground certainly isn't the place to do it, not even if you're a Horta.

Funding denied! There'll be no saving civilization for you!

The end!

...well, except it's not, since Unknown World uses the Citizen Kane trick of starting out with a lengthy newsreel item about its own characters.

So when the cash runs out, who do you turn to?

Why, everyone's favorite, of course: the good-looking, dissipated heir with a heart of gold (Bruce Kellogg). Always up for a lark, millionaire playboy Wright Thompson Jr. sponsors Morley's expedition -- as long as he gets to come with. He's got a buck or two to spare, and after all, having adventures is exactly what the buck is for, right?

So it's off to the fictional Mt. Neleh, which is apparently near Mt. Lefat...and the cryptic crossword solver in us immediately wonders: did screenwriter Millard Kaufman have a crush on a woman named Helen Tafel?

There seem to have been a number of Helen Tafels out there, and we found at least one obituary with an age-appropriate birth year attached. So maybe she was the one: ah, lost love!

Even though we're sympathetic to tales of subterranean exploration, we don't feel especially inclined to recap the slow, dull journey that Morley's team makes as they progress from the chilly surface -- see, it's windy --

-- into the bowels of the earth. Spoilers would be inevitable, you see, and we'd prefer to evit them.

At least their vehicle is a wacky combination of tunnel-boring machine (bet you wish you had that Horta now, huh?) and submarine -- though it looks more like someone hybridized a kitchen implement with a particularly baroque sex toy.

The tedium is alleviated here and there by a few decent scenes -- like when the contamination of the team's water supply makes them exceedingly grateful for some drippy stalactites.

By the way, the actor playing Dr. Morley is uncredited thanks to the blacklist, making it NO KILIAN I for him.

Nuclear wars that have no victor, and blacklists that assuredly did have a Victor: these were some of the threats facing the American 1950s, when everything so often seemed to be hanging by a thread.

Isn't it nice that we've moved past those days of political persecution and pointless saber-rattling?

Haven't we?

...oh, James Seay, did you do it again?