Lima

Poster tagline: SEE... TERROR IN THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH! CAVERNS OF FORGOTTEN MEN! MONSTERS! EARTHQUAKES! VOLCANOES! In the 1950s, usually the more exalted and exciting the title and advertising, the more boring and useless the film was, and that’s absolutely true here. Unlike the previous and amazingly stupid Man Beast, here I see a definite forward movement in the work of Jerry Warren (considered a second Ed Wood Jr. by critics and B-movie fans of the 1950s and 60s). It's still amazingly stupid, breaking every rule of logic, every conceivable law of physics, including Archimedes's, but that’s something I kind of expect from Warren. In keeping with the mandatory minimum one-hour runtime, there's an initial ten-minute voiceover about marine life, accompanied by documentary footage cut from other films. Then we dive briefly to the bottom of the sea with a diving bell that crashes and the screenwriting mayhem can kick in full force. Divers at a depth of one kilometre go up and down the bell, as they please, without affecting the climate inside, on the seabed they find a stalactite cave, in which the light is as bright as on a clear day, there is not a drop of sea water in it, on the contrary, what is not missing is a well of clean drinking water (!) and a shipwrecked man who looks like a hobo. According to his words, he’s been there for 14 years, after his boat sunk to the bottom of the sea and sometimes leaves the cave to catch fresh fish. He lusts after a female scientist in the team and wants to woo her saying he’ll kill everyone so they can be alone, and when she rejects him, she threatens to kill her. Yeah, it would be hard to find a more stupid script. On the other hand, everything was filmed on location, so I can't deny Warren a certain effort, and when we are not in the cave and they are wondering how to rescue the divers it’s quite boring, but at least not in a way that would insult your brain. So I'd sum up the final impression with the phrase "harmless, boring crap".

Poster tagline: INVINCIBLE! INDESTRUCTIBLE! SEE: A MIGHTY CITY TRAMPLED TO DESTRUCTION! SEE: MISSILES AND ATOM BOMBS POWERLESS! SEE: CIVILIZATION RIOTING WITH FEAR! The Japanese have their Godzilla monster-horror movies, Hollywood also has them and the British have tried them with success, so why not the Danes? But as they say, two people might do the same thing, but the result it’s not always the same. Everyone failed here, from the FX artists to the screenwriters and the second rate Danish actors, who, with deadpan performances, recite their lines mechanically like robots (with cringeworthy English), the only one at least a little alive is the actor playing the general, who on the other hand, is hysterically overacting. The FX artists failed, and I have to say that the botched model of the monster was the least of the transgressions. During the final demolition of Copenhagen, there is absolutely no interaction with the already crappy paper models of the buildings, so most of the time the rubber snake rubs its head on them, like a dog on its owner's leg, and spits green saliva in post-production, which doesn't go anywhere and looks like a marker line; and pyrotechnic effects? You can only dream about them. The inhabitants of Copenhagen, i.e. the extras, are running around in a "panic", and if you look closely you can see how they are laughing, I guess the shooting was a lot of fun. The first hour stretches out the time as much as possible, so there is a ten-minute tourist trip through the attractions of Copenhagen, spiced up with a live jazz song (nothing against it, it was ironically one of the few bright moments). And so the only thing that snapped me out of my lethargy was the disruption of the necessary genre cliché with typical characters: the professor with his beautiful daughter and the young scientist with whom the young lady falls in love, but in this case the professor has two daughters. Well, the Danes are original after all :o)

Poster tagline: LIFE MAGAZINE SAYS – “THE ULTIMATE IN SCIENTIFIC MONSTERS.” Roger Corman was a talented businessman. In 1957, when the media was flooded with news of the launch of the Sputnik satellite and people were very interested, he sensed a business opportunity and within a month and a half had the script written, all the production done and the film made in just ten days, according to the saying strike while the iron is hot, and while the word is out. He gave it a title as exalted as possible, for what could sound more appealing to the average viewer in this context than War of the Satellites, and presented a not very witty tale of a scientist in charge of a project to launch satellites, which are not wanted by aliens in Earth orbit. The aliens kill the scientist and replace him with his double, a "zombie" who has no human heart and whose sole purpose is to sabotage the project. The hastily spliced-together set with the empty white corridors of the satellite and the space headquarters is not worth much, and the effects of the satellite on a string and its "assembly" in space are downright ridiculous. On the other hand, the view of the launch pads with three rockets is quite nice and there’s one effect, repeated three times, when the alien scientist "hatches" a ghost, walks and materializes into another identical body, that is quite good, they used to give Oscars for these seven or eight years ago. In the end, I would rate it more positively, because the film has a fairly fast pace, but reason gets in the way, because the whole story of infiltration, secret murders, blatant coincidences, gradual suspicions and sudden epiphanies is terrible bullshit, and the highlight is the moment when the evil alien agent falls in love with an Earth woman, even though he despises the human race.

Poster tagline: LIKE NOTHING YOU’VE SEEN BEFORE! And for my part, don't underestimate the wrath of a mother, or you'll be flattened, as Gorgo did with London. A more than solid response by British filmmakers to the success of Japan's Godzilla and similar monsters coming out of Hollywood, with directorial assistance from Hammer legend Terence Fisher. The plot is nothing original: a monster is captured off a distant island and brought to a London circus (see King Kong there, too?), but it avoids clichés in some ways and adds one new element. First of all, there is no love line, typical for Hollywood and most of Toho's works (the tried and tested model of a professor's daughter falling in love with a handsome young scientist). In fact, there are no female roles at all, and the new element is that the mother of the monster comes for her captured cub (which was originally thought to be an adult), and she’s about ten times bigger and incomparably more dangerous (this concept was then successfully repeated by the Japanese in Gappa, the Triphibian Monster). In terms of production design and effects, the Brits can proudly stand next to the Japanese and even surpass them by a head in some respects. In the entire film – with the exception of one underwater scene with a bathyscaphe – I never said to myself "Gee, that looks bad". No blatant mockups of army equipment, no artificial rear or front projections, just proper models and pyrotechnic effects. The last 30 minutes are literally an orgy of demolition, with perfectly filmed crowd scenes that just ooze hysteria and must have been the envy of Hollywood. I already have a lot of experience in this genre and I say for myself "Nice work, British lads!"

Poster tagline: FIFTY YEARS INTO THE FUTURE!!! THE MOST FANTASTIC EXPEDITION CONCEIVED BY MAN!! Filmmakers have been fascinated with space since the beginnings of cinema. The focus of interest was always the moon, but it started to change in the 1950s, and this one is the second film (after Rocketship X-M) that deals with a trip to Mars. Awareness of cosmic laws was not yet high, so the astronauts encounter a swarm of dangerously aggressive small stars (here named "shooting stars"), resembling meteoroids, and land on Mars in an avalanche of snow, so there’s no chance to wonder at the advanced Martian civilization. The fact that the film was shot in color (which was not yet standard at the time) is a testament to the austere production design depicting Martian architecture with slanted corridors, windows of all possible shapes, and two effects shots: a brief macro view of an underground city with flying objects and a hangar with a crashed rocket. While Earthlings walk around in the Martian air in flight suits with oxygen muzzles, Martians wear brightly coloured jumpsuits with helmets that resemble today's astronaut helmets in shape and size. The first dialogue when both civilisations meet is funny. The Martians speak English , they learnt it from radio broadcasts from Earth, and when asked why we never caught their radio broadcasts, they explain that they know how to receive them, but not how to transmit them. The script smacks a bit of chauvinism, with the roles of the women (all of them in miniskirts without exception, and some with dangerously deep cleavages) being reduced to rivals in love, or a traitorous element. The quick ending is a bummer, it looks as if they had run out of budget. All in all, though, a pretty entertaining sci-fi B-movie with quite nice visuals.

Poster tagline: YOU’VE HEARD ABOUT IT! YOU’VE READ ABOUT IT! YOU’VE TALKED ABOUT IT! THE SCREEN’S FIRST STORY OF MAN’S CONQUEST OF SPACE! I was very pleased with this smart sci-fi movie, it lived up to its praiseworthy reputation overseas. Of course, it must be seen in the context of a time when awareness of the technical aspects of space exploration was still in its infancy. So there is no need to be surprised that 1) astronauts walk on Mars in leather jackets, with a cap, with their face covered only with a muzzle from an oxygen bomb 2) the concept of weightlessness does not exist 3) to physically overcome the overload at space velocity, you just need to lie down in bed and fasten a belt around your waist, etc. Those who don't like conversations (in this case, intelligent conversations) won't enjoy the film much, because 80% takes place inside the ship, in an oval room about 5m in diameter. But thanks to the likeable cast, led by Jeff Bridges's then-young dad, Lloyd Bridges, the experience was enjoyable. The scenes from Mars have an interesting orange filter, and there is also an action scene in the form of a fight with a primitive Martian gang that look like prehistoric hunters (a leftover state after the atomic catastrophe that destroyed the advanced Martian civilisation). Intelligent dialogues, good performances and an unexpected tragic ending, which eventually leads to the scientists' determination to build a new ship, leaving a certain element of hope, all of this suited me perfectly and I have no problem giving it a strong 4*.

Poster tagline: TERRIFYING! FANTASTIC! STARTLING! SEE... A PREHISTORIC WORLD OF FANTASTIC ADVENTURE COME TO LIFE!!! There are few certainties in life, like the fact that one day you’ll die, that the smug douchebag Václav Klaus will continue to poison the local political climate, and that Bert I. Gordon does not change! His entire oeuvre, all his films, have a common symptom: overgrown, especially radioactively tuned-up fauna vs. man, hideous rear and front projections, sloppy effects; and this film is no exception. It’s an ultra low-budget piece shot in three days, and one of his worst, in fact. The story of four astronauts exploring the planet Nova (sic!!!), which suddenly appeared in our solar system, looks like this: during 45 minutes of the hour-long runtime, 4 actors sit in a spruce forest, with randomly cut shots of a fawn, a bear cub, an alligator (!), and a sloth (!), they are attacked by a hideous front projection of a giant ant, and one of the actors rolls in the ground fighting with a stuffed crocodile. The highlights are the violently cut shots of an iguana (that's supposed to be the dinosaur) breaking into some kind of opening that represents the cave where the main characters are hiding. All of this is achieved with hideous back projections. During the escape, the actors shoot a giant armadillo, there are brief shots of mammoths and prehistoric goats from the 1940 film One Million B.C., which do not match the visuals of the film at all, and everything ends with a shot of a massive atomic mushroom with one of the actors cheering. Forget the Ed Wood’s films, forget the legendary Robot Monster, this is an absolute cinematic low point that will have you laughing in disbelief.

Poster tagline: GREEN SLIME – INVADERS FROM BEYOND THE STARS – ARE HERE!!! Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima are history, now we are friends. This largely forgotten sci-fi classic is one of the first co-productions between Japan and the United States. It has a slight patina of Ishiro Honda's films – so the outdoor scenes, the barracks and the launching pad are made of papier-mâché, the interior design is very decent (everything was filmed in Japan), the effects are consistent with the time and typical of Toho studio; it all looks nice and the widescreen format suits it. The destruction of an asteroid threatening our planet using drills and an atomic bomb inspired Bay's Armageddon and Deep Impact, and the fight with aliens aboard a space orbital station has similarities with Scott's Alien. The monsters, elongated warty potatoes moving on two legs with one red eye and octopus-like tentacles, are cute today, they don't inspire much fear, but that didn’t affect my experience. Too bad the chase with the aliens around the orbital station stops after about half an hour and there are no twists to freshen things up. But I can't help but comment on the nonsense written by my colleagues and at the same time summarize my impressions. Folks, these films need to be seen through the eyes of the filmmaker and the viewer at the time and judged by the time they were made. There's nothing ridiculous about this solidly produced sci-fi flick, it's just that you're already a bit jaded by the Transformers and similar attractions :o)

There’s no more boring and hackneyed cliché in recent times than the constant emphasis on how much better Ben Affleck is as a director than as an actor.

Poster tagline: WATCH OUT!!! GAMMA RAY CREATURES OUT OF CONTROL!!! Weird film, weird (almost) sci-fi. The theme, a man (two in this case) in a mysterious unknown country with totalitarian elements, reminded me a little bit of Juráček's Case for a Rookie Hangman, only without the strong absurd elements. The plot, set in a small, remote country called Gudavia, clearly brushes against totalitarian systems (one of the main characters, a boy genius, wears a uniform like a small NSDAP member, complete with the requisite slick blonde Nazi patois), and the ruler uses gamma rays to turn people into either gifted geniuses or, conversely, brainwashed obedient puppets willing to follow any order (responding to the sound of a whistle) and terrorize the local population, while the small, gifted children create art not unlike socialist realism, etc. It's not brilliant, but it's not a stupid film either. There's nothing unintentionally ridiculous about it, and it meanders through quite unpredictable plot twists, which is nice. The British approach is also refreshing, the main character protecting the female protagonist is not a sexually attractive man, but a bland and slightly overweight middle-aged geezer (in Hollywood it would have to be an Adonis).