Sci-Fi Films of the 1980s

Lathe of Heaven

1980 Taurus Film, WNET

++ reality drifting

color: made for TV

Place/Date: Portland, Oregon / the near future

Post-apocalypse.

Now, this is a proper science fiction story, albeit a far-fetched one, about dreams and reality.

As a made-for-TV video, it’s pretty limited in many ways, representing future architecture by now-familiar architecture, for instance.

Gadget: “augmenter” a dream-recording machine.

Aliens: are modeled after a certain animal — it’s explained in the video.

Vehicle: aliens arrive in glowing saucers that don’t appear solid. A car appears to be electric.

Weapons: an SR-71 and Nike Ajax missiles represent the human fight against aliens, the latter having already been decommissioned long before the video appeared. Ah well, they looked cool.

Check out the fancy future fashions. They have a lot to do with the plot.

The overall style is pretty solidly ’70s, as it would be in 1980. It’s a little hard to look at in places.

A re-make in 2002 is in many ways superior… at least it brings the style into the new millennium. It loses the aliens altogether — they weren’t necessary for the plot, but the fashions, which do have to do with the plot, are much more lush. It doesn’t bother to explain stuff so much, which is also an improvement. On the other hand, the director had the dialog reduced to whispers, which needlessly detracts.

La Guerre du feu
[Quest for Fire]

1981 20th Century Fox

++ cave-man action-adventure

color

It relates a story of a time on Earth that we can only guess about, and the guesses come from scientific observation.

The setting is some time in the past, when there are multiple strains of humanoids occupying the planet. They are very different one from another, but maybe they can share something.

It is remarkable that long since the film appeared, it has been established that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal were meeting and even breeding. Some stuff that they just imagined in this film, really happened.

The film features invented languages (there is a somewhat embarrassing story about certain words). Nobody speaks English or anything like that. Also, it has mammoths.

This was my favorite movie of the year. It’s the best cave man movie ever, for its attempt at realism, for the drama, for the filming, and for the acting.

Outland

1981 The Ladd Company

OK western on Jupiter’s moon Io

color

Place: mining outpost CON-AM 27 on Jupiter’s moon Io. 2144 personnel. Mostly mining titanium.

The effect of the planet Jupiter very good — its clouds really churn, and it does manage to look big.

The mine’s sets are pretty extensive — greenhouse, bar, multiple rooms and corridors. The sets are made to look like they’re inside metal dwellings — all metal beams and air locks.

Vehicle: space transport, mostly seen when landing (reminiscent of the Moon landing in 2001: A Space Odyssey).

The miniatures are very elaborate, but even here, a sense of scale is lacking.

Nice space suits: lights conveniently light up the workers’ faces.

Favorite means of suicide and killing: person exposed to vacuum, and they blow up. I lost count of how many times….

The technology is all decidedly 1980s, and looks pretty dated. (Let this be a warning of sci-fi cinematographers: do not use cutting-edge contemporary gadgets to represent future technology. The gadgets don’t have to really work, they just need to seem to work. You’re not fooling any tech people now — which are at best going to be your most vocal fans, if you have any.)

Nobody messes with any sissy beam weapons here. It’s good old firearms all around.

The film makes no attempt to represent the 1/6 Earth’s gravity (although it is mentioned) except outdoors. (Do they think gravity only applies out-of-doors? Or does their ’80s technology include artificial gravity generators? Sure, it would have been hard to have all the actors bounce-walk — besides being undignified for a cops-n-bad-guys movie.)

(I feel obliged to mention some astronomical facts that had not yet been uncovered, at the time the film appeared. First, Io is constantly being resurfaced, with numerous active volcanoes spitting stuff hundreds of kilometers into the sky all the time. That would quickly wipe out anything you tried to build here. Second, Io is deep within Jupiter’s radiation belts, which fries electronics on spacecraft, even when encased in a thick metal box. It would give a human a lethal dose inside of a day. Io won’t be anyplace for people to be, any time soon, anyway. Mining titanium? Well, you gotta have some reason to be there… but titanium is a pretty common metal — our own Moon has plenty of titanium. What would one really go to Io for? Sulfur, maybe — it’s all over the surface.)

This is just a story of a good tough cop in a bad tough town — the town just happens to be on Io.

The acting is very strong overall. Connery is very much at his best, and all the other principal actors are engaging and believable.

Taken as a straight cop film, it’s not bad. As sci-fi, the main thing is the space scenes and miniatures. As a cliffhanger, the cliffs are at least otherworldly.

Why is it in my list? What’s new about it, as a science fiction movie? The subgenre “western-in-space” was nothing new at the time, but this might be the best western-in-space up to that time. Also, it’s supposed to be on Io, which, although that has nothing to do with anything but the scenery, was something new in film.

Blade Runner

1982 The Ladd Company, Shaw Brothers

++ dystopian future, cloned humans

color

Vehicles: flying cars

Robots: not exactly machines, rather, biological “replicants”, factory-cloned specialized humans and animals.

The famous cartoonist, Moebius, gets credit for the look and set design. The story line is that of a 1940s film noir, complete with cliffhangers and layers of deception.

Science fiction is throughout this film, beneath the social backdrop of dripping polluted squalor and towering bastions of ultrarich, there’s the idea of black-market alleyway genetic engineering, and the big what-if of manufactured people.

To the best of my knowledge, this was the first film adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story. He died just months before its release. The next decades would see a flurry of major films based on his work.

Everything about this movie is great — except the end, which gets hollywoody — but everything besides that is great. If you haven’t seen it, see it — preferably on a big screen. It is a very big production, and a work of art.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

1982 Amblin Entertainment

+ cute alien

color

Alien: E.T. whose glowing finger does all sorts of magic tricks.

Vehicles: The E.T. spaceship, shaped like a barrel with bright lights all around. A flying bicycle.

Premise: A space alien (with huge blue eyes, so everybody knows he’s friendly) gets stuck on Earth, has a lot of adventures, befriends a little kid, and learns some rudimentary English.

It’s another Spielberg spectacle! I am conflicted on this film, as often happens with his films. He’s brilliant, and has a very strong vision of how a picture should look. On the other hand, it’s not great sci-fi, and it’s a shameless tear-jerker, which I really hate.

It is what it is: great family viewing about a cute alien. Also, great marketing for all manner of placed products. That’s the way you do it!

The Thing

1982 The Turman-Foster Company

++ shape-shifter horror from space

color

Alien: a body-incorporating shape-shifter.

Vehicle: a flying saucer appears coming into Earth’s atmosphere, evidently not well under control. We get to see the saucer again — they say it’s buried in ice at least 100,000 years old.

They’re in Antarctica this time.

It starts with a helicopter chasing a dog running in snow. They’re shooting it! Bastards!

Computer: Kurt Russell is drinking J&B Whiskey, playing chess on a computer — he prefers to short the computer out.

As science fiction and as horror, this is a big improvement over the 1951 adaptation. The nature of the monster has everything to do with the plot and the action. The gore is only part of it — the suspense never lets up, and the script plays the sense of mutual mistrust for all it’s worth. Then, the monster itself is something we hadn’t seen before… it just keeps surprising us with horrors — a horror that just keeps horrifying.

It has those standard horror moments: the monster has already killed most of the guys, and they don’t know where it’s gone, so naturally they split up and all walk into dark rooms. It’s hard to break old habits.

I was warned against this movie when it first came out. Too gruesome. Yea, it’s pretty gruesome. To be fair to the older film, scenes like these wouldn’t have been allowed on the screen twenty years before. This adaptation is closer to the story than the 1951 film, in that the monster is a shape-shifter, and the people can’t tell who’s who.

A “prequel” to the film came out in 2011, with more gore and suspense; more ideas were not to be expected.

Liquid Sky

1983 indie

+ aliens-n-drugs-n-artistes

color

Vehicle: small silver saucer

Alien: one must be in there, but we never see it.

Weapon: A crystal that appears in the brains of people who have sex with Sylvia… or most of them anyway. Sylvia thinks she’s doing it with her own body… but it’s really not very clear. Very little is very clear.

However it is that people are dying, it is clear that heroin and sex are involved.

Despite the apparently central role of the alien in the film, it’s not essentially a science fiction film. It’s much more about the hip, nihilistic, drug-n-sex lifestyle of models and actors.

As a movie overall, it holds together well stylistically, and although it leaves a lot to be desired by way of production values, acting and direction, it’s not so bad as to detract terribly from the story line.

It’s just so damned weird. The fact that an alien had such a lethal voyeuristic focus on this one lady was only icing on the cake. At the very least, the alien here is different from other sci-fi films.

Repo Man

1984 Edge City

++ alien-assisted black comedy

color

It starts out blazing hot and sweaty and horribly weird, and only gets weirder. Some guy is driving through the desert with something in the trunk of his car. As he keeps telling people, “you really don’t want to look in there.”

The young protagonist is the up-and-coming of down-and-out L.A. He aspires to be a “repo man”: a guy who, by whatever means, repossesses property from debtors. (The film is worth watching for the lessons in how to effect repossessions alone.)

The protagonist and his friends and some of his enemies are all part of the late punk culture. Some are psychopath druggies. Nothing good was going to come of this, anyway. Add to the mix a secret government agency who are after… something or other… but will stop at nothing whatever.

The sci-fi that we get to see only serves as a clarifying thread to the mad desolation of all the characters. The society is obviously insane, could the aliens be any worse?

The Terminator

1984 Helmdale Film Corporation, Pacific Western Productions, Euro Film funding, Cinema ’84

++ monster future android

color

Date (future): 2029;

Date/Place: (present 1984) / Los Angeles

Weapons: in the future, very excellent stop-action giant killer robots with death rays.

Robots: the Terminator is a cyborg weapon. At first he resembles nothing so much as a naked bodybuilder, but he gradually exposes his inner metallic glory.

Computers: the Terminator itself is a limited artificial intelligence. A future artificial intelligence called Skylink sends it back in time.

Gadgets: We don’t get to see it, but in the future they have a time machine with the limitation that it can only transport living flesh back in time.

The film lays the premise out at the start: in the future, evil robots, led by Skylink, are at war with the remainders of humanity. Humanity has a strong leader who’s putting up a good defense, so the robots send back in time one of their own, a “terminator” cyborg, to exterminate the leader’s mother, before he can be born. But then, the humans send one of their own back in time to stop it.

Much pool-cue-play, gun-play, car-play, motorcycle-play, truck-play, and hydraulic-press-play ensues. Also, obligatory romance with limited foreplay.

This is easily the best robot movie of the ’80s, and among the best sci-fi movies of the decade. Several scenes are rightly described as “iconic”.

Most memorable quote:

And indeed, he was: the Terminator franchise consists, at the time of this writing, of five direct sequels (some of which aren’t bad themselves), and four or so spin-offs, besides video games and novels.

Dune

1984 Dino De Laurentiis Corporation

− big-budget space opera editing disaster

color

Date: 10191, so distant that people have lost all memory of Earth.

Places: primarily the desert planet Arrakis (aka Dune), a water world Caladan (home of the House Atreides), Giedi Prime (home of the House Harkonnen, Kaitain (capital of the Imperium, home of the House Corrino).

The novel is a story of Byzantine intrigue on a galactic scale between powerful houses and some technological-religious orders, and the poor inhabitants of the planet Dune, and the spice that the sandworms of Dune produce, which is the basis for the galactic economy. It’s very complicated, and engrossing.

Aliens: Sandworms, native to planet Arrakis, grow to enormous size, and are quite dangerous. They are also responsible for “spice”. A desert mouse, “muad’dib”.

There are many kinds of humans, the product of selective breeding, mutation, cloning, and exposure to the spice: Spacing Guild Navigators, Bene Gesserit nuns (aka. “witches”), Mentats (human computers and psychics), Fremen, who dwell in the high desert.

Robots and computers: one thing all groups in the story agree with is the prohibition of thinking machines, due to an ancient war between humans and machines — human mentats took their place. (Thus considerably simplifying the sci-fi.)

Vehicles: faster-than-light space transports called “heighliners”; aircraft are “ornithopter” or “’thopter”, have beating insectoidal wings.

Technologies special to the story: bioengineering of humans for a prophesied goal; travel in space faster than light by means of prescience brought about by the spice.

Gadgets: Crysknife: a knife made of the tooth of a sandworm. Hunter-seeker: assassin’s weapon — a floating poisonous syringe. Holtzman shield, a personal force-field that slows any object or particle. Lasgun: dangerous to use, because if they touch a Holtzman shield, a nuclear explosion occurs. Stilsuit: a full-body fluid-regeneration suit for survival on the surface of Dune.

Could a movie really get around all that? In this case: no.

They made a valiant whack at it.

Many of the special effects were pretty good: the personal shields, the huge heighliners, the desert world, and the sandworms were quite believable. The overall look of the film is rich and deeply textured.

The acting is mostly superb, given what the actors had to work with.

But no. It’s a confused, dismal failure at the end. I have read that the original cut was some three hours long, and, at the order of the producers, many important scenes were left on the cutting room floor. What is left was just too fragmented. Way too often, it resorts to narration to explain what the hell is going on, and way too often we hear the thoughts of the actors — sometimes expressing the bloody obvious.

The result is a story that is incomprehensible for those who haven’t read the book, and frustrating for those who have. It’s awful.

David Lynch has been reluctant to even discuss the film in interviews.

Note: in 2000 a TV miniseries appeared, Frank Herbert’s Dune, done much better. In 2021, another adaptation appeared, again, much better.

Seksmisja
[Sexmission]

1984 Zespół Filmowy KADR

− post-apocalypse sex farce

color

Polish

Dates 1991, 2044

Premise: A couple of guys get frozen, to be woken up 53 years later. They expect to be heroes, but life has gone all complicated. Instead, pretty young women imprison them. Somehow in the interim, the scientists have killed off all the men, and the women now reproduce by parthenogenesis.

It’s a comedy, with one guy being a clown, the other being the straight man, and the women serving basically to reiterate and emphasize conventional sexual conceptions.

It doesn’t make sense that the women have a belief system stating that men never existed, and that all historical figures were really women, and that they would let the men live, and even put them on public trial.

But a lot of this doesn’t make sense. Maybe it didn’t need to.

I read that this film remains beloved in its home country. Audiences of its time would not have missed parallels between the regimented women’s society and the contemporary communist regime in power in Poland. For example, the man objecting to surveillance.

Science-fiction-wise, it’s pretty thin. Besides the original premise, there are a lot of gadgets, nothing new. They spent some money on fancy sets, but again, nothing is really new.

The Dixieland jazz… come on. Do they think that is the only music for science-fiction comedy? (Think Sleeper.)

The film was generally badly in need of editing. It’s nearly two hours long. They had maybe one hour of material. It draws some scenes out pointlessly, and repeats some situations.

Any linguistic or cultural jokes might be lost in translation, but I think most of the jokes are pretty obvious, and easily recognized. So many not-very-comically-thwarted escapes happened, I lost count. While I’m very happy to view perfectly-formed breasts by the dozen, by the end of this film, the undressing had become a drag.

Brazil

1985 Embassy International Pictures; Brazil Productions

++ ducted dystopian future satire

color

It’s rich, confusing, gorgeous, horrifying, and funny as hell. The vision is very peculiar and still familiar. There’s not much to compare this film to, save other Gilliam films.

Is it sci-fi? It has no sci-fi staples. But technology gone mad is a large part of the problem faced by the characters. The technology though is bits and pieces from the industrial revolution, the ’20s, the ’40s, the ’50s and ’60s, all bloated, overcharged, usually recalcitrant and often menacing. And ducts — ducts everywhere.

The food in the French restaurant alone would be worth a sci-fi movie.

Lowry: Give my regards to Alice and the twins! Lint: … Triplets! Lowry: Oh, god! How time flies!

Tuttle: Bloody paperwork. Huh!

Confess! Quickly! If you hold out too long, you could jeopardize your credit rating!

The Quiet Earth

1985 Pillsbury studios

+ where-is-everybody

color

A guy wakes up in a motel, like maybe with a hangover — but it’s worse than that. There is nothing on the radio. The clock isn’t working. Etc. And there’s nobody around, anywhere.

It’s a familiar paranoid nightmare situation. But this film takes it way farther than most do.

The acting is good, the production is good despite the low budget, and the idea is weird enough.

It’s an unexpectedly satisfying, odd little movie.

Cocoon

1985 Zanuck/Brown Company

++ aging, death, happiness, and space aliens

color

This is famous as a feel-good movie, and it certainly is that, but it has deeper emotional explorations.

It’s a genuine sci-fi story, a really different one.

Aliens: “Antareans”. They have some alien gadgets that make flashing lights and noises. We never find out quite what the gadgets do.

Vehicle: a spaceship, a very pretty flying saucer.

Atlantis gets passing mention… well, things are getting fantastical, why not mix fantasies up a little? Dolphins are also somehow involved, but this isn’t emphasized.

We get some inter-alien sex action, kind of. But that’s the silly part of it.

The main story is about the realities of aging and death, separation and love. It manages to look at these in various ways, all the while doing some serious imagining about how different from us space aliens might be.

Beyond being entertaining and massaging some emotions, this movie is thoughtful, and very inventive.

Back to the Future

1985 Amblin Entertainment, Universal Pictures

++ time travel alla DeLorean

color

Date: 1985
Future date: Sat. Nov. 5, 1955

The main ingredient of the time machine is a “flux capacitor”. We learn that a DeLorean can take a lot of punishment. Maybe due to the stainless-steel construction, which also “improves the flux dispersal”. It needs plutonium as fuel, or else any other source of “1.21 gigawatts of power”, pronounced with a soft initial ‘g’.

It’s a nice little excursion into a fading past, as well as a study in the usual paradoxes.

Michael J. Fox is the small-alpha male, loved by all the women of the town. In the past, the high school girls think he’s a “dream boat”.

There are lots of great performances, mostly washed out by Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. McFly’s dad watches Science Fiction Theater and writes sci-fi! He’s one of the best characters — he works through some real severe personal problems.

Enemy Mine

1985 Kings Road Entertainment, SLM Production Group

++ space aliens social commentary

color

Aliens: “drak”, anthropomorphic reptilian hermaphrodites. On the planet, various types of scary bugs.

Place: in space, nice views of planets. On the planet where they crash, there are lots of very lovely painted landscapes, with lots of planets and moons in the sky.

Vehicles: Several types of pretty spaceships, both human and alien, action is basic WWII dogfight stuff.

The alien’s language is pretty elaborate and imaginative.

It’s a little silly. Why should I expect more of science fiction? The message is a good one, though: basically, against slavery and bigotry.

The script develops some secondary characters and scenes poorly. I read there were very bad production problems making the movie. (There was a change of director.)

But the primary story holds together well, and the acting of the principals is strong, so that altogether it works.

This film is very much a moral and social commentary. It was maybe a bit beyond what could have been done in the 1950s, dominant social prejudices being what they were, and the powers that be, being what they were.

Stylistically, it is much nearer to the classic space films of the ’60s, than to the derivatives of the few big films of the ’70s. There is no fancy CGI in this — it could have been made in the ’60s. But it wasn’t. Why not? It is about what the studios wanted to sell, or maybe about what the Western public would pay for.

Hombre mirando al sudeste
[Man Facing Southeast]

1986 Cinequanon

++ mental patient — space alien or not?

color

Spanish

Date/Place: present (1980s) / Buenos Aires

The insane asylum has an extra patient. Nobody knows where he came from. He claims to be a hologram… something like that, from another planet. We can see he’s a musical genius, and maybe other kinds of genius.

Vehicle: we never see one, but he speaks of a space ship.

So is he crazy? Is he an alien as he says? A saint? We see some evidence that he is more than human. There are no special effects, although he seems to have some minor powers.

There are other film stories like this one.

The script mentions Morel’s Invention.

There is a controversy about the 2001 movie K-Pax, whose plot is suspiciously similar. Another film, Mr. Jones (1993), was expressly based on this movie.

I only experienced one lapse in believability: toward the end, there is a romantic scene that didn’t work for me. But it sort of works in the story.

The execution of the movie is excellent — it is beautifully shot, and well directed and acted. Of the films like this that I have seen, it is the best.

Письма мёртвого человека
[Dead Man’s Letters]

1986 Lenfilm

+ post nuclear apocalypse

color

Is it science fiction? I do not consider post-nuclear-apocalypse as being a strongly science fiction form. It’s science fiction of the engineering variety, where we engineer our own destruction. But… it’s not clear that such a thing isn’t about to come to pass.

This is purely a post-apocalypse film. As these things go, it is one of the better ones. It’s beautifully shot, and it’s all surprises — mostly not nice surprises, and the characters are richly portrayed. It manages to carry a message anyway.

The message is about tragedy. It does offer a glimmer of hope, but it is left to your imagination.

It ends with an excerpt from the Einstein-Russell Manifesto:

“There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”

Кин-дза-дза!
[Kin-dza-dza!]

1986 Mosfilm, Artistic Association of Comedy and Musical Films

++ space travel comedy

color

Russian

Uncle Vova and Gedevan become unwilling visitors to various planets in the galaxy when they attempt to aid an apparently crazy guy in the street.

To describe how weird this is… the setting is mostly junk in the desert.

Much of the plot concerns the difficulties of people of different cultures getting along and doing business, and finding one another rude, stupid, dishonest and absurd. The Earthlings just want to get home. The aliens are just trying to scrape by, doing their best to be polite.

The aliens find that Vova has a box of matches, which they refer to as “kts”, and (for no reason that is ever explained) they regard as extremely valuable.

Seen through the Earthling’s eyes, the aliens look very, very silly. Yet they manage to get some things done.

Places: Moscow, planets Plyuk, Khanud, and Alpha in (or near) the Kin-dza-dza galaxy.

Aliens: people play the aliens from the different planets. What is important to them is social class. On Plyuk, the higher class are “Chatlan”, and the lower class are “Patsak”. This influences how they greet one another, and where they sit in public transportation. They find the Earthlings to be Patsak. The Alphans don’t care which class the aliens from Kin-dza-dza are, they reckon they would all be better off turned into cacti.

Vehicles: various flying vehicles called “pepelats”, roughly egg shaped, some apparently made of metal scrap, which in motion sound like rusty metal scraping. With a “gravitsappa”, they may be capable of intergalactic flight. Large, rapid-moving open carts with six wheels and no apparent engine.

Gadgets: instantaneous teleporters, telepathy device (“tsak”, a little bell worn under the nose), ray guns (called “tranklucators”), devices to determine one’s social status.

It’s wonderfully done. The acting and camera work are excellent. The scenery, albeit composed mostly of junk, is still weird enough that when it does something, that serves as good enough an explanation as any. The result is that the improbable is logically acceptable.

At the end, I was believing it. The absurdity had become natural. That is the biggest joke.

My DVD includes a glossary. It’s helpful, for talking about things in the movie.

Cherry 2000

1987 ERP Productions

OK post-apocalyptic robots-n-society

color

Premise: A guy shorts out his sex-bot in a fit of sudsy kitchen passion, and realizes he was in love. He has to get her back, and he has her chip, and he has some bucks. But in this post-apocalyptic world, the robots are hard to come by. So out into the Zone 7 wasteland he goes!

It looks like cheese, and it has many cheese-like qualities. But there’s a lot going on here, and some really fun performances. Fortunately, the film never attempts to be something more than it is, or even real cheese, for that matter.

Griffith especially plays her role with gusto, but in a voice that belongs to a server at a motorway diner. She’s also likable, as are other characters they meet on the way. The non-likables, too, are notable, especially Thomerson, as the insanely perverted utopian survivalist commander. (Compare with A Boy and His Dog.)

“Yeah, Zone 7’s a tough place. You should see the way they carry on out there! People staying up all night, playing Twister, revertin’ to their animal natures.”

Predator

1987 Lawrence Gordon Productions, Silver Pictures, Davis Entertainment

+ alien monster vs military horror/action

color

Alien: the Predator, an intelligent, brutal creature that stalks and kills for points or for kicks (not clarified in the movie).

Vehicle: an alien spacecraft appears entering Earth’s atmosphere.

Weapons: The predator has a ray gun, but uses it sparingly. The humans have profuse supplies of badass weaponry that proves ineffective.

Gadgets: primarily, the Predator has a screen that renders it nearly invisible. It also has a med-kit, and a self-destruction gizmo.

This is basically a space monster movie, but a superior one. It doesn’t fit into the usual space vampire or monster-here-to-eat-us, because the monster is intelligent, and while it isn’t above snacking on peoples, its object is different from those of the usual evil alien.

The wee bits of real science fiction here are not exactly novel: the idea that an alien might kill for sport or something, and the way the protagonist avoids getting eaten.

The filming being done in real jungle, and the big, bad, sweaty actors play to a terrific sense of apprehension. And the monster, once we get a look at it, is one horrid surprise after another.

The human characters aren’t exactly sympathetic, either. It’s basically monster vs. monster. Either way, science will prevail!

This is the seminal film of a franchise including several sequels, some spin-offs, video games, etc.

RoboCop

1987 Orion Pictures

+ bionic cop action in dystopian future

color: stop-motion scenes, matte effects

Robot: ED-209 “Enforcement Droid Series 209”, one of the scariest battle-robots ever to appear on screen, directed by the brain of a cat! Immediately homicidal while growling evil legalese.

Who, exactly, wants to become a bionic super-hero, with all the scary bionic superpowers, but bereft of all the important bits of being human? Of course, nobody, except — subconsciously — a portion of the expected audience. It’s not a surprise that our hero is conflicted, or that a lot of frustrated guys flocked to the theaters. (I did.)

It’s a familiar theme. What’s new here is some really nice animation, a relatively good script, and some really bad bad guys. Some nice jokes on modern consumerism appear in the form of TV commercials.

The violence is constant and graphic, so much so, that the filmmakers cut some scenes to avoid an MPAA X-rating.

The first of a franchise of sequels, TV series and miniseries, a re-make, and video games.

Конец Вечности
[The End of Eternity]

1987 Kinostudiya Mosfil’m

OK action/mystery/suspense time travel

color

Russian

Premise: “Eternity” is the name of an organization of people who employ time travel for the betterment of humanity (as they judge it). That already sounds pretty dodgy, of course, and we quickly find out that not everything is congenial in Eternity.

“Computers” here refer to high placed persons within Eternity. (Remember, at the time the novel appeared, the word “computer” still denoted a profession, not a kind of machine.)

Vehicles: we see a lot of “time capsule” devices, that travel like elevators within time “corridors”. Also, people transport themselves in time by means of a device they just step into… I’m not sure what the distinction is, or if, somehow, they’re the same thing.

Weapons: an “annihilator”, a sort of ray gun.

They spent some money and effort on sets and special effects for this film. It partially succeeds in imparting ponderousness, a sense of levels-within-levels. (But it’s a bit heavy on red LED alphanumeric displays.)

Unfortunately, the pace of the film is pretty choppy. The story involves multiple threads, but they often interact in a clumsy way. For instance, the principal activity of Eternity is changing the time-line. The dialog mentions it a lot, but… little happens with it. Well, there is the one thread where a guy, sent into the past, placed a newspaper ad, which is found and interpreted by Eternity as a message centuries later.

For all the traveling in time, besides the Eternity headquarters and the present time, we see only one other time period, and we meet only one new character there.

Near the end of a film, there is a long contemporary scene of dirty water pouring under a deteriorating concrete bridge. Several scenes come directly from the 1979 film Stalker. They have nothing to do with this story. If you hadn’t seen the other film, you would have to wonder why you are looking at a lot of dirty water and post-industrial ruins. It’s as though a Tarkovski-esque insertion would improve their film, as though they were desperate to save a film they knew wasn’t working out.

Spoiler: The ending is a let-down, just opening more loose ends. I have not read the book, but I read that the ending is a big departure from the book, which the film otherwise followed.

Some of the acting is good, but this is inconsistent too. Enough went wrong here in the script and the editing and the direction to render it not thrilling, as a science fiction story or as a movie. This was after all produced for TV, where we don’t expect the greatest production values.

Altogether, it is a fair stab at an Asimov story, which itself is inventive and gripping — some main elements are pretty well represented. It’s not bad to look at, if your expectations aren’t too high.

They Live

1988 Alive Films, Larry Franco Productions

OK social aliens-already-here shoot-em-up

color

You gotta like the lead-in to the story. It’s cool and it’s down.

Premise: the aliens have been here a long time, and they are running everything, the ultimate capitalists, lulling the human populace into compliant consumerism and slavery by means of mind control.

Aliens: look like human corpses with the skin burned off, but with bulgy silver eyes — when you look at them the right way.

Gadgets: The main gadget is sunglasses, which allow people to see not only the aliens in their true form, but subliminal messages that aliens have posted on every sign, in every magazine.

The aliens have wristwatches with which they can communicate with all their own kind, and with which they can open portals to other places.

The aliens also teleport themselves in space.

Weapons: he-man guns, and more guns. If you like the idea of bursting into a crowded area and blasting away all the (unarmed, unprepared) bad people in the crowd, this is your movie.

The direction of this movie is awfully sloppy. The dialog, particularly, is almost never natural.

The protagonist and his buddy are very straight macho he-man types; the main female character is a standard Jezebel.

The aliens, taken as space aliens, are only remarkable in that they’re just like us except scary ugly — certainly nothing new in bad sci-fi. Taken as a tongue-in-cheek parody on modern economic life, they’re not bad.

Nonetheless, the story has moments of real inventiveness. Also, gotta like: the good guys don’t always win, and waiting to the end for a partial nude scene.

Посетитель музея
[Visitor to a Museum]

1989 Lenfil’m, третье творческое объединение, госкино СССР, CSM Filmproduktion Ag. (Switzerland), Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (Bundesrepublik Deutschland)

+ post-environmental apocalypse social fiction

color

Russian

Synopsis: a guy walks across a huge garbage heap desert, in search of a “museum”, an abandoned city over a polluted sea. There has been a global environmental catastrophe. Some apparently nice people put him up; they are in an uneasy relationship with human “degenerates”, who have their own desperate culture and religion — maybe they’re onto something. The guy has a curiosity in the degenerates that he can barely conceal.

Why were the Soviet filmmakers so good at this sort of thing? Maybe something to do with Russian history. Whatever it is, the filming is great, the acting is great, the soundscape is ominous, the mood is crushing and relentless.

The only way in which this is science fiction is that a global environmental catastrophe could be viewed as a scientific possibility.

Don’t expect the whole thing to make a lot of sense in the end — it’s not about logic, and it’s certainly not about happiness.

鉄男
[Tetsuo]
aka. Tetsuo: the Iron Man

1989 Japan Home Video

+ wild scrap metal flesh horror

color: stop-action

Warning. Many scenes may be very disturbing on multiple levels.

People start inserting junk metal objects into their flesh, and apparently, incorporating it. Before long, the metal starts incorporating more metal. Or something like that. Hard to tell.

Is it science fiction or horror? It’s horrible, for sure. Does it propose naturalistic explanations for unfamiliar things? It may depend on your interpretation of the nightmarish imagery.

The stop-action style is reminiscent sometimes of the Gumby show, except that the objects are real people, or human flesh anyway, and it’s real scary, and you’re allowed fewer breathers in between weird stuff.