The Road to El Dorado (2000) – Review

With two films under their collective belts DreamWorks Animation tried to tackle Disney head-on with their action/adventure buddy comedy The Road to El Dorado, a film that would try to capture the goofy screwball elements of the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby “Road to” comedy series of the 1940s while also updating it with energetic animation and bold visuals that would bring this genre to a whole new generation, sadly, things didn’t quite work out as they’d hoped.

The plot of The Road to El Dorado fits the right in the mould of those old Hope and Crosby movies as we are quickly introduced to a pair of fun and charismatic con-artists, Miguel (Kenneth Branagh) and Tulio (Kevin Kline), whose dreams of becoming as rich as the King of Spain leads them on a danger-filled adventure to the New World, and that is where this film differs from those 1940s pictures as those films were mostly contemporary period pieces while The Road to El Dorado is set way back in 1519 with Spain in full conquest mode. Now, anyone who has even a little knowledge of history knows that Spain’s exploitation of the New World was not all the great for its current inhabitants, slavery and genocide being the go-to modus operandi for most explorers of the time - this is why many people aren’t all that keen about celebrating Columbus Day – and one must admit setting an animated comedy amongst such dark settings was a bit of a risk.

 

“Wait a minute, did someone say slavery, isn’t this a kid’s film?”

The story kicks off when our two con-artists come into possession of a map to the legendary City of Gold, El Dorado, which they had won in a rigged dice gamble, but when their loaded dice are exposed they found themselves on the run from the law and angry locals. Lucky for them, the chase ends with the pair hiding in a couple of water barrels that are being loaded aboard the ship of the notorious conquistador Hernán Cortés (Jim Cummings), who just so happens to be sailing for the New World to get some of that rumoured gold. This kind of happy coincidence is a hallmark of screwball comedies and something you’d expect to happen to the likes of Hope and Crosby but as this is an animated film after our heroes are exposed as stowaways, and sentenced to life as a slave in Cuba, they are aided in their escape by Cortés horse, Altivo (Frank Welker), which is not something you’d find happening in a live-action film. This magnificent warhorse quickly becomes a third member of this comedy troupe and his comedic reactions to the troubles that Miguel and Tulia are constantly getting themselves into makes Altivo a surrogate audience member.

 

Altivo would have been a great help to Dora the Explorer, as well.

The visuals of The Road to El Dorado move into high gear once our heroes manage to make it to South America and with the help of the map they “won” they have a wonderful and musical trek through the jungle until they finally reach the outskirts of the legendary city, and it’s here we encounter the next member of this fun little band in the form of Chel (Rosie Perez), a resident of El Dorado and a con-artist in her own right. When Miguel and Tulia are mistaken for gods, the two of them appearing on horseback matched the image of a stone carving of the local gods, Chel is quick to take advantage of the situation and promises to remain quiet, that is if they promise to take her with them when they leave the city. Needless to say, things don’t remain quiet for long and wackiness ensues.

 

We even get a bit of romance to spice things up.

Not only did DreamWorks capture the zest and fun of the classic Bob Hope and Bing Crosby "Road" pictures of the 40s with this film animated film they also orchestrated a brilliant remake of the Rudyard Kipling story "The Man Who Would Be King” with Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh providing the perfect amount of banter and fun one could expect from such a classic buddy comedy, but that’s not all, The Road to El Dorado also offers scenes of spectacular animation boasting vibrant colours and dynamic songs that simply explode this wonderful adventure tale off the screen and into our hearts. When the film’s key song number "It's Tough to Be a God" is launched with a kaleidoscope of colours and stunning visuals we know we are in the hands of master animators and with the likes of Elton John and Tim Rice bringing their skills to the music department this movie has all it needed to become a classic, so what went wrong?

 

“Have any of you guys seen the main plot anywhere?”

Where the film does drop the ball is in the villains, which for this movie they decided we needed two for some reason, unfortunately, neither of them are all that effective. First, we have the aforementioned Cortés, the Spanish Conquistador who kicked off our story in the first place but then disappears for the bulk of the film’s run time only to show up at the end of the film to do, basically, nothing. Our heroes never even encounter him again after their first abrupt meeting and thus there is no real satisfying payoff for his character, which is a strange way to treat a real-life monster, a man who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire and literally oversaw bloody genocide, yet here he barely has any screen time or much of an impact on the film's narrative as he’s simply an imposing domino that pushes are heroes in the direction the plot needed them to go, unfortunately, The Road to El Dorado’s principal antagonist is even more problematic.

 

“Don’t hate me, I’m just a misunderstood buffoon.”

The film’s primary antagonist, at least if we are going by screen time, would be high priest Tzekel-Kan (Armand Assante) who believes that Miguel and Tulia are gods and that their appearance in El Dorado is a sign that the “Age of the Jaguar” has arrived and that the peaceful days under the kind-hearted Chief Tannabok (Edward James Olmos) are over and to be replaced by ones that will flow with blood and human sacrifice, and sure, that sounds like a great villain but for most of the movie he truly believes Miguel and Tulia are gods and is only disappointed when they don’t seem as keen on human sacrifices and blood as the legends have foretold. When he finally tumbles to the fact that these two goofballs aren’t gods he brings a giant stone Jaguar to life to kill them and it’s a case of too little too late, and though he does get a proper comeuppance his character never really felt threatening and so his fall from grace has very little impact. Like the Hope and Crosby films, The Road to El Dorado is more a buddy film than anything else and so the villains get short-shifted to provide more time for comedic shenanigans.

Overall, this is one beautiful film and though some elements of the script could have used a little tweaking it doesn't stop this animated wonder from being truly spectacular, from its amazing art direction to the great songs by Elton and John and Tim Rice this movie is epic, unfortunately, it also bombed hard at the box office and was unable to recoup its $95 million dollar budget and became another nail in the coffin of hand-drawn animation. Indigenous rights organizations quickly criticized the movie for its sexist and racist themes, and for its lack of historical sensitivity, which to fair the film is quite guilty of on both counts but as a bright and silly adventure film, The Road to El Dorado is well worth tracking down.

Zombies of Mora Tau (1957) – Review

Zombies have been a staple of horror films for quite some time dating back to Bela Lugosi in White Zombie, even Bob Hope encountered one in his 1940 film The Ghost Breakers, but they didn’t really come into their own until George Romero’s seminal classic Night of the Living Dead hit the scene back in 1968, a seminal moment that launched the zombie genre as we know it today.  When Romero tackled the subject matter he ditched the Haitian roots of the zombie genre for his film but he wasn't the first to do so, which brings us to Sam Katzman’s Zombies of Mora Tau, a horror film where a group of fortune hunters face-off against undead guardians and a cursed treasure.

Sam Katzman’s Zombies of Mora Tau takes place on the isolated coastline of Africa where zombie mythology has its roots in the traditions brought to Haiti by enslaved Africans, which gives this film some credible historical merit, that it then quickly abandons once the story unfolds and we see that we are in an Africa that looks pretty damn Caucasian. Let the silliness begin. The movie opens with Jan Peters (Autumn Russell) returning to her childhood home only to discover that her great-grandmother’s (Marjorie Eaton) belief in voodoo is still very much prevalent and not just something she thought was a nightmare from her childhood. Later that night a group of treasure hunters, led by wealthy American tycoon George Harrison (Joel Ashley), arrive to salvage a fortune in diamonds from the wreckage of a ship that had sunk 60 years earlier, needless to say, a curse and a horde of walking dead complicate matters considerably.

 

"They're coming to get you, Barbara"

Upon reaching the shore George Harrison introduces his team to Grandmother Peters; there is his wife Mona Harrison (Allison Hayes) who is the resident bad girl and openly flirts with the group’s deep-sea diver Jeff Clark (Gregg Palmer), an activity that oddly doesn’t seem bother her husband, finally, there is Dr. Jonathan Eggert (Morris Ankrum) whose main job is to spout expository dialogue. What is surprising is how well this group handles the big reveal of several graves belonging to the previous expeditions that were looking for the sunken treasure; a British group who tried to recover the loot back in 1906, a German excursion in 1914, a second British group in 1923, Portuguese treasure hunters in 1928 and the first American group who perished in ten years later in 1938, but more startling is the fact that Grandma Peter already has open graves ready for these new treasure hunters. I guess greed lets a person overlook such things as personal safety and the chances of you being eaten by a zombie.

 

I wonder if Grandma Peters chargers for these tours of the damned.

And what exactly has everyone been hunting for all these years? Well, it seems a fortune in uncut diamonds was the principal cargo of a ship called Susan B. which went down just off the South African coast in 1894, unfortunately, it’s been guarded by the undead crew ever since. Dr. Jonathan Eggert is the one member not interested in monetary gain as he’s here to learn about the history of the area for the book he's writing and when he states that he’s “Not eager to occupy one of those graves” Grandmother Peters is quick to point out that “Only fools are afraid of the grave. There are worse things” as she informs Eggert that anyone who is not buried quickly enough will become the walking dead. One must assume she isn’t the one the government asks to write their tourist brochures.

 

Come for the scenery stay for the undead attacks.

As to what is the cause of this zombie infestation, well, it seems that Grandmother Peters’ husband was the captain of the Susan B. and on their last voyage they made a brief stop and decided to explore the nearby jungle which then led them to the discovery of the overgrown ruins of an ancient temple to which, of course, they proceeded to pilfer. According to legend, a fight broke out among the men and ten of them were killed, including the captain, and the surviving sailors brought the diamonds back to the ship only to have the supposedly dead sailors return from the jungle to slaughter their shipmates and scuttle the Susan B. All these years later Grandmother Peters hopes that someone will find and destroy the diamonds so that her cursed undead husband can finally rest in peace, a belief she still holds despite Jan pointing out that Harrison isn’t the type of man who would destroy a treasure trove cursed or not. What follows consists mainly of the treasure hunters trying to recover the diamonds from the sunken wreck, while fending off underwater zombies, and Jeff and Jan starting some half-assed budding romance. To say neither of these goals is fully achieved goes without saying. What is rather interesting here is that the zombies and their habit of kidnapping women and bringing them back to their mausoleum to be turned into more undead, a fate that sweet Jan escapes but poor Mona does not.

Question: Grandmother Peters makes it clear that fire is the only way to destroy the zombies so why hasn’t anyone simply tried torching the mausoleum? Surrounding a zombie with candles seems like a far less effective strategy.

Stray Observations:

• If your driver reacts to running over a zombie with the same blasé attitude you’d have after hitting a pothole it’s time to think about getting the hell out.
• Sam the chauffeur’s criteria for someone being a zombie is if they have seaweed hanging off them, I just hope he doesn’t run over any random swimmer who had an unfortunate encounter with kelp.
• Jeff still denies the fact he is fighting the undead even after burying an eight-inch blade into the chest of one of them and not getting a drop of blood on the blade. There is denial and then there is stupidity.
• That we have underwater zombies but don’t get a zombie versus shark moment is a definite missed opportunity.
• A cursed zombie treasure makes this film a pre-cursor to Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.
• We have a cursed treasure, wandering zombies and the family has a Great Dane, I think we have a Scooby-Doo mystery on our hands.

 

“And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling zombies!”

The plot may have a distinct Scooby-Doo vibe to it but Sam Katzman's walking dead flick was a landmark event for the zombie genre as no longer were witch doctors involved as this shambling horde clearly has its own agenda and director Edward L. Cahn did an excellent job building up the suspense and chills as our “heroes” were mercilessly stalked by the undead. Unfortunately, the film kind of runs out of steam in the last act when Grandmother Peters, whose repeated insistence that the diamonds must be destroyed to free the dead, finally wins over Jeff’s mercenary ambitions and he simply dumps the diamonds into the water, but only three feet from shore. That’s her idea of destruction? “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Regardless of how it turned out Zombies of Mora Tau still gets major points for expanding the cinematic zombie mythos even if it was greatly harmed by its anticlimactic and utterly nonsensical ending.

 

Or is it?

With a running time of barely over an hour one can at least say there isn’t a huge time commitment involved when sitting down to watch Zombies of Mora Tau but even if one were to let slide the rather dubious ending we still must deal with a cast of characters who don’t offer much in the way of people to root or care for; we have the grandmother who seems totally cool with dozens of people dying as long as someday her undead husband can be released from his walking dead purgatory, then there is her great-granddaughter Jan who is one step up from being an inanimate piece of cardboard but with less personality, and finally, we have Jeff and his treasure hunting comrades who are about as wanted as a case of genital warts. Zombies of Mora Tau is an important entry in the zombie subgenre but one must take its more questionable qualities into account if true enjoyment is to be found here.

The Prince of Egypt (1998) – Review

After kicking off their animated division with Antz, a blatant cash-in of Pixar/Disney’s animated flick A Bug’s Life, DreamWorks decided to boldly venture into territory rarely explored by family-friend animated films, that of the Bible story. Aside from such straight-to-video offerings like the Veggie Tales religion and cartoons seldom mixed and when Jeffrey Katzenberg decided to produce an animated adaptation of the 1956 film The Ten Commandments two big questions had to be answered “Can you tell the story that took Cecil B. DeMille three hours to pull off in just ninety-minutes and how are you going to handle the darker aspects of the Book of Exodus in a film that is aimed mainly at younger viewers?”

Adapting a story from the Bible is certainly tricky business because no matter how good a job you do you’re definitely going to offend somebody – this film was banned in Malaysia, the Maldives and Egypt – and to mitigate this issue as much as possible the film opens with a text disclaimer stating “While artistic and historical license has been taken, we believe that this film is true to the essence, values and integrity of a story that is a cornerstone of faith for millions of people worldwide” which is a good way to say “Hey, cut us some slack this is the best we could do in the time allowed” and as this is more a remake of the Cecil B. DeMille than it is a “true” adaptation of The Book of Exodus I think that was a fair attitude to take. What is to be respected is that Katzenberg and his team of directors didn’t shy away from some of the story’s darker elements and did their best to remain as faithful as possible.

 

Question: The Pharaoh ordering that the newborn Hebrew babies be tossed into the Nile to prevent a possible future rebellion is one thing but would such an act be something you’d want to commemorate in a giant mosaic?

The most interesting aspect of this retelling of the story of Exodus is the relationship between Moses (Val Kilmer) and Rameses (Ralph Fiennes) who in this version are depicted as fun and mischievous brothers who truly care for each other, with Moses being adopted by the Pharaoh’s wife instead of his daughter in this version, but what makes this take on the story great is the dynamic relationship between the two. Unlike the DeMille version, these two are not rivals for the love of a woman, or for the throne of Egypt for that matter, and we are first introduced to them as they carelessly race chariots through the city, destroying a temple in the process and thus making this pair fun and relatable. The tension is formed due to the fear that Rameses has that he will be the “weak link” and that will bring down the dynasty, a fear that is born into him by his stern father, Pharaoh Seti (Patrick Stewart), who does not find these childlike antics amusing.

 

Personally, I think chariot races are a lot more progressive than mass infanticide.

The story kicks into gear when Moses runs into Hebrew slaves Miriam (Sandra Bullock) and Aaron (Jeff Goldblum) who spills the beans that he is their brother and is destined to deliver them from slavery – it should be noted that the prophesized deliverer is really downplayed in this movie and it almost seems like God chose Moses simply because he was convenient – but when he confronts the Pharaoh and the truth is confirmed his world is shattered, which to be fair, finding out your loving father is a monster would certainly skew one's reality. This key element really changes things from previous versions of the story as the emotional resonance of Moses turning his back on his brother to go off and find “his people” is the real center of the story, and sure, plagues and all that “Wrath of God” stuff is cool but it’s Ramesses and his feelings of betrayal that are the heart of this film and though this may be an animated movie Ralph Fiennes is not playing a cartoon villain and you can understand the pain and conflict raging in his heart, and when his brother returns and simply states “Let my people go” his being hurt is completely understandable. What’s even better is that Moses himself is also broken up about how their relationship has now been torn asunder and it’s clear that he finds no joy in unleashing the plagues upon his brother and the people of Egypt.

Stray Observations:

• A big deal is made about Moses accidentally killing the cruel Egyptian overseer, which the priests insist is a death penalty level crime against the gods, but I’m betting a Prince of Egypt could kill a dozen Egyptian overseers without much consequence.
• Without the character of Nefretiri, who loved Moses but ended up with Rameses in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments we are left wondering who is the mother of Rameses’ child because we see neither hide nor hair of his queen in this movie.
• Being that the love triangle between Ramesses, Moses and Nefretiri is missing from this version we get more screen time with the wife of Moses, who he now meets as a slave girl in Egypt instead of in the desert home of Jethro and she is also a more spunky character than in previous incarnations.
• The character of Dathan is also missing so we don’t have Edward G. Robinson questioning “Where’s your messiah now?” instead, the part of the Hebrew doubter falls to Aaron, which is odd considering that in the Bible it was Aaron who was actually the one to use Moses’s staff to perform all the miracles of God.
• In fact, the Hebrews in this movie are a lot less fickle than the ones depicted in both the Bible and the DeMille movie as once the plagues start hitting they are behind Moses one hundred percent and the movie wisely ends without Moses finding his people throwing an orgy and worshipping a golden calf.

 

Seriously, would you ever again doubt a dude who could part the Red Sea?

Sadly, the film does have a couple of missteps that stops this from being a true gem, for instance, we get Steven Martin and Martin Short as two Egyptian priests whose comedy antics would be more at home in Disney’s Aladdin than in a story about the Book of Exodus and the abbreviated running time makes some character beats come right out of the blue. As pointed out, in this movie we don’t have a Nefretiri analog and thus there is no one to spur Ramesses into action against Moses; one minute Ramesses is grieving over the body of his dead son and telling Moses “You and your people have my permission to go” and the very next he’s leading a chariot charge to kill them all. What caused him to change his mind? The movie clearly needed a final scene to illustrate Ramesses’ inner feelings and his boiling rage against what he considers a personal betrayal but the film is too busy racing to the big parting of the Red Sea moment and thus Ramesses gets a little short-changed at the end.

 

“I’d go back to my wife but the movie forgot to give me one.”

Overall, with The Prince of Egypt, the people at DreamWorks Animation proved they could take on the House of Mouse without copying their fairy tale motifs and striking out with their own truly visual masterpiece in an entry that included one of the best voice casts ever to grace an animated film with such other notable actors as Michelle Pfeiffer, Helen Mirren and Danny Glover, all giving amazing performances in a re-telling of a story that had all the scope one could hope for in a Biblical epic. Directors Simon Wells, Brenda Chapman, and Steve Hickner did a spectacular job in not only telling such a tough tale for a younger demographic but the blend of traditional animated and computer animation would change the industry forever, so if you somehow missed this excellent DreamWorks outing do yourself a favour and track it down, it’s certainly a less stuffy and more heartfelt version than the one starring Charlton Heston.

The Invisible Boy (1957) – Review

The dream of most actors is that after their big break they will have a long career that would allow them to explore a variety of interesting roles, whether that be in film or television, but one does not expect such an outcome from what was basically a prop from a motion picture. In 1956 the world was introduced to Robbie the Robot in the science fiction classic Forbidden Planet, a menial labourer created to help out Walter Pidgeon and Anne Francis, but due to Robbie stealing pretty much every scene this “movie prop” became a star in his own right. Robbie the Robot went on to appear in such television shows as The Thin Man, Columbo, The Addams Family and Lost in Space but his first foray after Forbidden Planet was the MGM feature film The Invisible Boy.

As was the case with 1954’s Tobor the Great, this little science fiction focuses on the premise of “A boy and his robot friend” but in the case of The Invisible Boy this relationship is more central to the plot and we get a more developed relationship between the boy and the robot, though this film takes it into a much darker place. The basic plot of this film could best be described as “A scientist allows a Skynet level computer to brainwash his son” in what must be one of the worst cases of parental neglect in cinema history. The genesis of The Invisible Boy is rather interesting as it simply stemmed from the fact that Robby the Robot was a very expensive prop and the studio wanted to get their money’s worth by having him appear in a sequel, unfortunately, a sequel to Forbidden Planet never got off the ground so MGM decided to go with a simpler approach, and by that I mean a film targeted for younger viewers.

 

The age-old tale of a boy and his robot.

The movie opens with the introduction of professor of mathematics Dr. Tom Merrinoe (Philip Abbott), who is the main programmer at the Stoneman Institute of Mathematics, which is conveniently located next to his own home, but more importantly, we also meet this film’s villain an evil supercomputer that is equal parts Brainiac from the Superman comics and the world-destroying Skynet from the Terminator movies. We learn that the military will soon be launching a weapons system into space and they want this wunderkind of a computer to go over the calculations just to be safe side, hoping to get it in orbit before the Commies find out about it, which eventually leads to the supercomputer's own plans for world domination.

 

Hal 9000 has nothing on this computer.

Of course, this movie isn’t only about evil computers and the arms race between America and the Soviet Union as this film is basically a “kid’s fantasy” and thus much of the screen time will be filled with the shenanigans of Merrinoe’s ten-year-old soon Timmie (Richard Eyer) who, much to the consternation of his father is not living up to his potential.  Timmie never combs his hair and slurps his soup during dinner, basically, the kid is a great disappointment and Merrinoe is not afraid to make this fact known to his son – Father of the Year this guy is not – and when his kid’s failure to understand math problems or offer a proper chess match he turns to this multi-million dollar supercomputer for help. Who needs good parenting when you can abuse government property? Unfortunately, the computer does more than just improve the kid’s mental aptitude as it basically hypnotizes Timmie into being his unwitting pawn, made possible by Merrinoe leaving the kid alone with the computer, and before you know it Timmie is hustling his father at chess and getting access to a defunct highly advanced robot which he then easily assembles due to his hypnotically boosted intellect.

Note: The appearance of Robby the Robot in this film is rather bizarre as Merrinoe explains to his son that a vanished scientist had apparently developed a time machine and he had retrieved the robot from the future, a photograph on the wall depicting Robbie disembarking the C57D spacecraft landing at Chicago Spaceport is dated 2309 thus making this film an odd sequel to Forbidden Planet.

Once the robot is assembled the movie goes into full-on kiddie fantasy mode with Timmie trying to figure out what kind of mischief he can get himself into with a fully functional robot as his ally. It's not all as he'd like because when he has Robby build him a large and powered box kite Timmie becomes rather dismayed when the robot won’t let him ride the thing, this is because Robby was programmed with safety protocol that prevents him from allowing humans to do dangerous things – we’re talking Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics – but such pesky notions of self-preservation doesn’t sit well with our Timmie so he brings Robby to his dad’s computer lab and has the supercomputer disable Robbie's safety protocols. Smart move kid, you may have just doomed humanity to a robot apocalypse.

Note: The acrobatics the kid performs while hundreds of feet in the air clearly depicts that he has the survival instincts of a lemming, so that the mental boost he received obviously didn't cover self-preservation.

Timmie gets bummed out when his mom rains on his parade, smashing the control panel to the kite and giving the kid a good hard spanking, but when Robby suggests that invisibility could solve all his problems the film is truly off and running and in some truly interesting directions. As this story unfolds one could make the argument that Timmie is a burgeoning sociopath as his actions once invisible are not too far off from what the mad scientist in The Invisible Man got involved in – not so much in the realm of mass murder but he does get even with a bully and tries to watch his parents make out in their bedroom – and after another much-deserved spanking Timmie decides to run away from home, but Robby comes up with a better idea “How about outer space?” For the next little while Timmie is blissfully missing and the movie shifts gears into a darker tone with the evil supercomputer demanding Merrinoe reveal to him the numerical code that will allow him to leave the building without triggering the self-destruct explosives that were built into the facility.

Science Note: The film does its best to explain how Timmie’s invisibility works, something to do with the refraction of light, but like other “invisible men movies" it doesn’t explain away the fact that without light reflecting within the eye you would be blind.

It’s really quite shocking how immense the tonal shift the movie takes in this second act, what with the supercomputer demanding the code or it will have Timmie tortured to death, stating “You have 58 hours. If at that end of that time you have failed to supply the required information the boy will be destroyed, as slowly as possible.” Damn, that is cold.  Are we sure this is a kid’s movie? As this is a super-smart evil computer it doesn’t simply rely on Merrinoe caving in to his demands as it also uses hypnosis and electronic implants to control other humans – this is achieved by Robby kidnapping people and performing brain surgery – but despite threats to his offspring Merrinoe continues to work against the computer and its mind-controlled minions. This leads to some fun stuff, like Robby the Robot fighting his way through the military might of the U.S. Army to gain access to the rocket ship that was intended to launch the weapon system into orbit, but they are all shocked to find out that the robot is impervious to bazookas and flamethrowers.

 

“I am monitored to chew bubble gum and kick ass and I’m all out of bubble gum.”

With a completely oblivious Timmie, who Robbie at some point had smuggled the clueless kid aboard the rocket, the computer makes one last-ditch effort to convince Merrinoe to hand over the code, “You are of course aware that the robot is a skilled anatomist familiar with every fibre of the human nervous system and capable of inflicting pain for days, if necessary, without bestowing death.” Once again, damn, that is some pretty harsh stuff for what is supposedly a kid’s movie, but Merrinoe is made of sterner stuff and even when the computer states that “The robot is monitored to drop 150 strontium bombs in a single circuit of the planet” he still refuses back down. I was actually quite impressed at this point with Merrinoe, sure he is a complete failure as a parent but he fully understands that if the computer is allowed to become an orbiting menace then mankind would be pretty much fucked. Lucky for Timmie, when the computer orders Robby to proceed with the torture, starting with the kid’s eyes, the robot is able to fight off its altered programming long enough for Timmie to switch on Robby’s original safety protocols.

 

Couldn’t he have tortured him just for a little bit?

Stray Observations:

• The dad is rather blasé about his ten-year-old son being able to assemble a robot that dozens of other scientists had failed to get working.
• Timmie’s mom gets upset when she bumps into Robby while vacuuming and for some reason she assumes he is a door-to-salesman. This begs the question “Are all adults in this world monumentally obtuse?”
• When the supercomputer alters Robby’s programing, basically removing Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, it also makes Robby nigh indestructible. I’m not sure what kind of programming can change the molecular stability of a matter, then again, I’m not Skynet.
• When Timmie shows up for dinner, while invisible, his father’s rather blasé reaction is to say “Stop all this nonsense and start acting sensibly” and he then tells his wife that the kid is just doing this to get attention. Is this guy an absent-minded professor or clinically insane?
• Robby the Robot is somehow able to kidnap and perform mind-controlling brain surgery without anyone seeing him lumbering about, was part of his new programming stealth ninja skills?

 

Now, his tackling the armed forces, that I totally buy.

To say that The Invisible Boy is an odd duck of a film would be a vast understatement as not only do you have some of the worst parenting imaginable on display, even if we let slide his willingness to let his child die for the sake of the human race, one doesn’t expect such things as brainwashing, surgical implants and torture to appear in a film that is intrinsically a kid’s movie, but when the film focuses on the actual science fiction aspects of the film, the parts that don’t involve the annoying kid, we get some really chilling moments. I especially loved the computer’s last-ditch effort to keep from being dismantled, via Merrinoe and an axe, with the computer mesmerizing both father and son and stating “I will lead you out to the planets. I will show you the furthest reaches of the galaxy. I will show you the stars. If only you will serve and obey me” but even that awesome sales pitch doesn’t work so it changes tactics a bit “I will seek out organic life wherever it may exist down to even the littlest virus which in time might evolve mentality. So at last, all the universe will be cleansed. All will be sterile. All will be myself." It should be noted that even though this villain sounds a lot like Superman's computer nemesis Brainiac this movie came out a year before that character's first appearance in Action Comics. MGM’s The Invisible Boy may be goofy as hell but when it comes to evil computers bent on humanity's downfall this is the granddaddy of them all and its influence on the genre is probably greater than you think.

 

 Sadly, the movie ends with Robby intervening in Timmie’s much-deserved spanking.

If we ignore the idiotic antics of Timmie and his criminally negligent parents and focus on the aspects of the film that surround the sentient computer, one that is hellbent on wiping out humanity, there is much to appreciate here, unfortunately, as good as those moments are it is hard to look past the annoying “boy genius and his robot pal” aspect because as cool as Robby the Robot is, and he is one of the coolest robots ever created, every moment they were on screen together I wanted Robby to vaporize the little shit. That all said, if you have I high tolerance for annoying kids and a great love for movies about evil computers then The Invisible Boy is well worth checking.

Tobor the Great (1954) – Review

What young boy wouldn’t want a robot as a best friend? This very idea is the premise for Brad Bird’s amazing animated film The Iron Giant but the concept dates back to 1954 and a low-budget science-fiction flick called Tobor the Great, a film that pits nefarious individuals against an 11-year-old boy and his robot best pal, and if I were a betting man I’d put my money down on the kid with the large metal man.

Robots have been around long before science fiction was even a thing, in Greek mythology there was Talus, a giant automaton made of bronze created to protect Crete from pirates and invaders, then there was the legend of the golem, an artificial creature brought to life by Jewish mysticism, but the more common example of the robot dates back to a Russian play called R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) and though this is where the term “Robot” first appeared the robots in the play were more android than mechanical men, but from L Frank Baum’s Tik-Tok in the Oz books to Fritz Lang’s Maria from the silent classic Metropolis the idea of a constructed servant has never stopped being a key staple in mankind’s view of the future and in 1954 Republic Pictures put their own stamp on this iconic piece of science fiction with Tobor the Great.

 

Tobor, a robot of many talents.

The plot of Tobor the Great is a rather simplistic one, mostly due to the film’s rather low budget, and it dealt with a man named Arnold Nordstrom (Taylor Holmes) a professor who believes that manned space exploration is too dangerous and so an alternative is needed, so with the help of Dr. Ralph Harrison (Charles Drake), they embark on a research project to create a robot that could replace humans for space flight. What makes Tobor unique in the annals of science fiction robotics is he was created with synthetic emotions and was given some human capabilities, including the ability to "feel" emotions and react via a telepathic device built into his robotic brain. What is not made clear is why having emotions in a robot would make him a better candidate to undertake space travel. When Nordstrom and Harrison run a simulation of a meteor storm, with Tobor tasked to pilot around this common space hazard, the robot has a nervous breakdown and smashes the monitor and even bats Nordstrom’s eleven-year-old boy-genius grandson Gadge (Billy Chapin) across the room. Which, surprisingly enough, the two scientists take in stride while I’m still questioning the benefits of a robot that can have a panic attack.

Note: The meteor shower in this simulation comes at him so dense and fast that no matter how talented a pilot was there would be no way for a Rocketship to avoid them, not even if the pilot had robotic reflexes.

Of course, Tobor the Great isn’t just about robotics and space travel we also have some political intrigue added to spice things up, one of the reporters to show up for Nordstrom’s press conference turns out to be a foreign spy (Steven Geray), who immediately puts plans in motion to steal the robot. Lucky for our heroes this particular spy ring is as inept as it is ruthless as their first attempt is thwarted by the defensive devices at the Nordstrom's home, which mostly consists of sensors and loudspeakers playing sound effects from the Battle of Iowa Jima, but even though they scared off by such an obvious ploy the foreign agents are not deterred. This is where the ruthless part comes into play. The chief spy realizes that if they can’t breach Nordstrom’s defences to steal the robot they can get their hands on the technology by stealing Nordstrom himself, which leads to a plan to lure Nordstrom and his grandson to a fake screening “The First Flight to Mars” and after capturing the two they force Nordstrom to write out his formula by threatening to torture his grandson, which entails one of the goons threatening to burn Gadge’s bareback with a blow torch. Unbeknownst to the villains, Nordstrom had finished his long-range telepathic control system and is able to remotely command Tobor to undertake a rescue mission.

 

Needless to say, things don’t go too well for the spies.

Stray Observations:

• Tobor is simply "robot" spelled backwards, I guess we can’t expect too much in the way of creativity from scientists.
• They have a grandfather clock that has no hands, you just ask it the time and it tells you, but how this is better than just glancing at a normal clock still eludes me.
• When Gadge first tries to test out the robot it knocks over lab equipment, overturns tables and lamps and even goes after the household drapes, which posits the question “Is Tobor’s default setting rampage?”
• Why didn’t Nordstrom give Tobor the ability to speak? He’s basically created as a robot with artificial intelligence, one that not only has emotions but can communicate telepathically, so why not give it a voice box as well?
• It’s odd that the foreign spy would have a German accent, and not a Russian one, considering the fact that when this film came the communist Red Scare was very much a big deal.
• The poster for this film shows Tobor with a woman in his clutches, despite such an event never happening in the movie, but this was a common occurrence in science fiction as the posters for The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet both showed their respective robots making off with a woman.

 

Robots in science fiction were unfairly portrayed as notorious womanizers.

As science fiction films go the only thing truly remarkable about Tobor the Great is Tobor himself, designed by Gabriel Scognamillo and built by Mel Arnold this lumbering metal man is a truly frightening creation, but where the film stumbles is in the relationship between Tobor and the little boy. With a meagre 76-minute running time we don’t get much in the way of interactions between these two, aside from the big rescue mission at the end of the film we only see Tobor's initial rampage through the house and him batting Gadge aside while in full-on panic mode, and sure, after knocking the kid to the ground Tobor appears to be upset with his actions, he even kind of pats Gadge on the head as if he trying to console the poor kid, but the film could have done with a few more scenes of the two of them paling around together. The idea of a boy and his robot best friend would be addressed again a few years later in 1957’s The Invisible Boy, which would feature the return of Robby the Robot, though to be fair, that movie had a very complicated relationship between boy and robot.

Note: In the film The Invisible Boy Robby the Robot gets mentally hijacked by a 1950s version of Skynet and captures the kid in a plan to take over the world using a military weapons satellite system, you know, for kids.

As a children's sci-fi adventure Tobor the Great is a decent enough entry but as pointed out, the film could really have used more interaction between the robot and the boy as we never got a chance to see them really bond, that all said, the film is still entertaining enough as a sci-fi comedy-thriller and worth checking out, if only to watch the amazing Tobor on his mini-rampages.

The Angry Red Planet (1959) – Review

Since H.G. Wells penned the classic tale of the War of the Worlds back in 1897 the planet Mars has continually been seen as a threat to the planet Earth, either by launching invasions or attacking astronaut interlopers, and this idea had really come to the fore by the end of the 1950s with a film that perfectly summed up the public’s fear in the aptly titled film, The Angry Red Planet.

The structure of The Angry Red Planet tries to fool the audience into thinking we are stumbling upon some science fiction mystery as the story is being told in flashback, and from a rather unreliable narrator, but why is she unreliable? Well, she’s a woman in a 50s space adventure film and the only thing reliable about them is their ability to provide good coffee service and the likelihood of going into hysterics as if on some sort of schedule. As the film opens we learn that the long-overdue spaceship MR-1 (Mars Rocket 1) has suddenly appeared in orbit over Earth, which causes the military brass to scramble all hands on deck to recover the craft, despite their failure to make any contact with the crew. Fearing everyone on board is dead they remote pilot the rocket to a safe landing only discover that there are two survivors, the ship’s biologist Dr. Iris Ryan (Nora Hayden) and the mission commander Col. Tom O'Bannion (Gerald Mohr), unfortunately, O’Bannion is in a coma and his arm is covered with a strange green alien growth, while Iris is suffering from a sort of trauma-induced amnesia and it’s up to the base’s doctor to help her remember the events of her doomed mission.

 

Needless to say, this will involve some screaming.

The bulk of the film then deals with her debriefing as she reports in detail the crew's experiences while travelling to the Red Planet and exploring its surface. We learn that the trip to Mars was rather uneventful, well, if you call every member of the crew making sexist remarks uneventful, but as this was the 50s this kind of attitude was common and having a "dame" aboard your spaceship makes this kind of conduct pretty much expected. We get Warrant Officer Sam Jacobs (Jack Kruschen) overtly sexist remark, commenting on her attire “You know, I can't say that I recommend spacesuits for beautiful young dolls. What happened to all your lovely curves?” and even pipe smoking Professor Theodore Gettell (Les Tremayne) can barely treat his colleague with a modicum of respect and like everyone else calls her “Irish” instead of Iris, but the worst offender is the commander who is in full-on creeper mode throughout the film, when she asks why he calls "Irish" instead of her name “I never know if you're calling me by name or nationality” and his cringe-inducing response of “When I call you by your name... you'll know it” a comment which would get him flagged and fired by any modern HR department.

 

“You’ve got a nice pair of cans there, honey.”

The rampant sexism is briefly put on hold when they finally arrive on Mars as they are quickly unnerved by the planet’s stillness, even to the point where the Professor posits the idea that the eerie silence must be caused by some superior mental control over the planet’s inhabitants, which has me asking “Are we sure this guy is a scientist?” I’d put my money on the reason Mars is so quiet is more due to the fact that the atmospheric pressure on the Red Planet's surface is small, amounting to less than 1% of Earth's sea level pressure, so even though there would be some sound on Mars I’m not sure what he expected to hear through the hull of their ship and that he immediately leaped to “Alien Mind Control” as the most logical explanation makes me question his academic qualifications. The crew eventually decide to leave the confines of the ship and explore the Martian surface, taking along Sam’s really cool freeze gun, and while wandering around they come across a variety of Martian flora and fauna and a gigantic bat-rat-spider creature, which they mistake for a grove of trees because of course they do.

Note: It’s strange that trained scientist sees a grouping of leg-shaped "trees" that are at least 40 feet high and yet they fail to notice the rat-bat-spider monster standing in the midst, at least in Kong: Skull Island the body of the creature was hidden by the jungle while this creature was just standing out in plain sight.

Unfortunately for the crew, gigantic bat-rat-spider creatures are the least of their problems for while exploring the distant shore of a large Martian lake – yes, there are no bodies of water on Mars but let’s not have facts get in the way of our fun – our heroes discover a Martian city with towers a mile high, but before they can do any further investigations a giant amoeba-like creature with a single spinning eye rises out of the deep and chases them back to their ship. Poor Jacobs is grabbed by the creature and drawn inside its gelatinous body to be digested, right in front of his horrified crewmates. The film wraps up rather quickly after this, with Iris figuring out a cure for O'Bannion infected arm, which he obtained when in contact with the giant amoeba, and listening to the message left by the Martians on the ship’s recorder, a message that basically said “Get fucked” and never come back to Mars on pain of udder destruction.

Question: Would this destruction come in the form of giant amoeba being sent to devour the citizens of Earth? Could 1958’s The Blob be considered an early test run from these nasty Martians?

Stray Observations:

• One of the Airforce generals states a possible reason for the crew being dead is that take-off from Mars at 5 to 6 G’s could have killed them, sure, if they were toddlers as the average person can survive up to 9 G acceleration.
• Col. O'Bannion returns to Earth with his entire right arm covered by a strange green alien growth yet no one thinks to put him in quarantine, instead, he’s simply in a hospital bed behind a privacy curtain. That’s how you get the Earth wiped out by an alien plague, thanks, guys.
• This film keeps up the tradition of having a “Brooklyn Guy” as one of the spaceship’s crew, “Shall we go out and claim the planet in the name of Brooklyn?”
• They grumble about the time lag in communications to Earth "Just wait until it's a couple of hours!" but at their greatest separation, the radio lag between Earth and Mars would only be about 22 minutes. Maybe they were referring to a trip to Pluto.
• For what should look like a desolate landscape this Mars seems rather rife with plant life, I wonder why our telescopes never picked up the jungles of Mars.
• Iris is almost devoured by a giant man-eating plant because when it comes to adventure films being attacked by killer plants is a woman’s job.

 

Where’s Tarzan when you need him.

Ib Melchior’s The Angry Red Planet gets the distinction of being filmed in something called CineMagic a process used by the filmmakers to combine hand-drawn images with live-action by hiding it via a strange red filter that would also create a ghostly red look to the planet Mars, and though I’ll admit this did provide the film with a unique visual style it can best be described as someone with glaucoma looking through rose coloured sunglasses. What’s particularly hilarious is that Melchior would occasionally forget that Mars had a red atmosphere and thus randomly the view outside the ship’s portal would show a blue sky. Who said continuity is important in filmmaking? The film was shot over a mere nine days on a budget of only $200,000 with an end result that at best can be labelled “interesting” and the bizarre-looking bat-rat-spider monster will forever keep this particular entry in the genre memorable, but with such a curtailed budget certain things did suffer and is why we only get a glimpse of this “superior” Martian society.

 

This is all we can afford to show you, I hope you enjoyed it.

The Angry Red Planet is another fine example of 50s space adventuring where men are men and women will occasionally scream hysterically, the use of the CineMagic technique to hide the film’s technological failings didn’t quite work but that goofy-ass bat-rat-spider creature was truly a thing of nightmares and has remained an indelible element of the genre making this particular entry a must-see for fans.

Queen of Outer Space (1958) – Review

By this point in the 50s, the trope of alien planets being ruled by women had been quite established, with the likes of Cat-Women on the Moon and Fire Maidens of Outer Space being two prime examples, hell, even Bud Abbott and Lou Costello got into the act with their film Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, but what none of those films had going for them was a story by the legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht and a screenplay by one of the best authors in speculative fiction, Charles Beaumont, a man who went on to pen some of the greatest episodes of The Twilight Zone.

The 1950s science fiction boom brought many exciting space adventures but it was Queen of Outer Space that took that journey with its tongue firmly planted in cheek in what could best be described as a fun and campy parody of the genre. This film takes place in the distant year of 1985 where a crew of astronauts consisting of Captain Patterson (Eric Fleming), Lt. Mike Cruze (Dave Willock) and Lt. Larry Turner (Patrick Waltz) who are given the task of taking Professor Konrad (Paul Birch) up to an orbiting space station to investigate some threat from outer space, but before you can say “Duck Dodgers in the 24 and a half Century!” the space station is destroyed by an interstellar energy beam – so I guess they were right about that threat – and then that very same beam hits the spacecraft and our heroes are then whisked across the Solar System to where they then crash land on Venus. A rather distraught crew venture forth onto this alien world, that Professor Konrad assures them is the planet Venus, despite both Patterson and Cruze pointing out that Venus is supposed to have an unsurvivable atmosphere, to which the Professors states “Yes, I know. I subscribe to many of those theories myself. I even helped formulate some of them.” And not only is the atmosphere on Venus apparently quite compatible with human life it also sports some rather beautiful flora and fauna.

Science Note: Venus is a hot, hellish and volcanic planet, it has 90 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth so an evening stroll would be instantly fatal, and that’s only if you could somehow survive surface temperatures that could melt lead. Despite what Konrad says, these facts are not based on theories.

Our heroes don’t have much time to explore as come morning they find themselves in the clutches of the residents of Venus who seem to have a deep hatred for men and live under the dictatorship of the cruel Queen Yllana (Laurie Mitchell), a masked woman who has her own more personal reasons for hating men. While in the court of the Queen the men learn that ten years ago Venus fought a devastating war with another planet and though they won the war the planet suffered great losses and their civilization was pretty much wrecked and as men started this war Queen Yllana had all males killed, which is a little bit of an overreaction in my opinion, but she did keep few mathematicians and scientists alive on a prison colony moon, so I guess she was a little pragmatic.

 

This is not to say that women don't do any science here.

It’s also clear that the Queen’s temperament hasn’t changed much as she immediately accuses the Earthmen of being an expeditionary force as a prelude to a full-on invasion and she sentences them to death. Lucky for our heroes, Patterson’s hunky good looks catch the Queen’s eye and their execution is put on hold, which makes Captain Patterson another Proto-Captain Kirk whose supreme male magnetism is the crew’s ultimate weapon, which is wonderfully illustrated by Professor Konrad stating “You know, there's a certain irony in the fact that our lives and perhaps the lives of everyone on earth may depend on Captain Patterson's sex appeal.” Unfortunately, there is a wrinkle when approaches Queen Yllana and goes into seduction mode “You're not only a Queen, you're a woman too. And a woman needs a man's love Let me see your face” but when she removes her mask, to reveal the radiation burns she received during the war, Patterson has a less than diplomatic reaction.

 

Come on Captain, take one for the team.

With Paterson unable to even kiss the disfigured Queen it looked like he and his men were doomed to a quick execution, or would have been if not for a "fifth column" of Venusian women who not only disliked the Queen’s cruel dictatorship but were also very “Pro-Man” and leading this group was a beautiful Venusian scientist named Talleah (Zsa Zsa Gabor) who falls in love with Captain Patterson and aids him and his men in their escape from the palace. This alliance leads to Lt. Turner saying “Hiya, dolls! Glad to have you on our side” and this brings us to one of the most notable elements of Queen of Outer Space, the rampant sexism that the film practically bursts with. Women being treated as inferiors or sex objects was certainly nothing new in the genre, there are some really cringe-inducing moments in Rocketship X-M that will leave your jaw on the floor, but with Queen of Outer Space, it is so blatantly overt that it’s clearly included to lampoon those earlier films. The character of Lt. Turner is practically a walking erection as he tries to make out with every woman within range but unlike other space heroes we aren’t exactly supposed to like him and when he says something like “Twenty-six million miles from Earth and the little dolls are just the same” it’s clear we’re not to take any of this seriously.

 

I kept waiting for one of these women to blast his dick off.

Stray Observations:

• We see the rays that are fired at the space station coming from many directions, in a nearly 360-degree arc, but if they are all originating from Venus shouldn’t they all be coming from one direction?
• Venus has a surprising amount of snow for a planet located that close to the Sun, even Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Carson of Venus books treated the planet as somewhat tropical.
• Professor Konrad states that “The gravity is so close to Earth's the atmosphere should be breathable” but as gravity has little or nothing to do with the composition of a planet's atmosphere it makes me wonder what exactly Konrad is a professor of.
• Later Konrad remarks that Venus has several moons when it, in fact, has none, so seriously, did this guy get his degree out of a Crackerjack Box?
• The men are surprised to find that the women on Venus speak English but are quickly told that this is because they'd been monitoring Earth Signals for years, but it is never explained why all of the women bothered to learn English. Was it an elective course at Venus University? And aside from the rare bark of the word “Bochino!” no one on this planet speaks their native tongue, even amongst themselves.
• Despite easily learning English the Venusian women aren’t all that bright, they fail to notice that when Talleah puts on the mask to impersonate Queen Yllana their ruler suddenly has a thick Hungarian accent.
• While hiding in a cave Turner is attacked by a giant spider, which one must consider as a nod to the giant spider in Cat-Women of the Moon.

 

I was cheering for the giant spider during this scene.

It’s clear that the basic plot of this movie was recycled from Abbott and Costello Go to Mars but where that film had its cheesy sexist moments its Venus section made up only the last act of that film, with Costello being made King of Venus over a bevy of beautiful women, but as to Queen of Outer Space it wears its genre trapping right out in the open from almost frame one, and it also wasn’t a straight-up comedy, as was the case with the Abbott and Costello film, but more of an elaborate parody of the genre in general with many liberal jabs at how poorly women had been portrayed in science fiction films. It was all made even more gloriously funny by having Zsa Zsa Gabor sending up her own persona by flirting with our "hero" in her thick Hungarian accent, spouting out lines of dialogue like ”Zat de qveen vil destroy ze planet Earss unless ve stop her, Capt. Patterson." How could the good Captain fail to fall in love with such a creature? Then there is the fact that pretty much every other frame of this film is filled with gorgeous women in mini-skirts, which certainly would have appealed to a certain demographic, but I’m betting even the women of the time watching this film would have got a kick out of this goofy little flick.

.Production Note: The plot wasn’t the only piece of recycled material as many props and costumes were borrowed from the science fiction classic Forbidden Planet

This entry into science fiction cinema came out during the tail end of the 1950s sci-fi boom but, sadly, the elements it lampooned would remain a staple in the genre for decades to come and it would take Ridley Scott and Sigourney Weaver in Alien for the stigma of sexism in space to be finally put to rest, well, we hope it’s been put to rest. So if you want a fun time strap on your rocket pack and jet on over to the Queen of Outer Space and have a rollicking good time in a place where men were men and women wore mini-skirts.

Drinking Game: Take a drink anytime one of the men calls a Venusian woman “Doll” but be careful, by the end of the film you could have alcohol poisoning.