"I never said it wasn't terrible" - 10 quasi-terrific Sci-Fi curios streaming on Amazon Prime

Good old Ib Melchoir, not exactly the most engaging sci-fi story teller, less pulp than we'd like, but reliable with tons of rocketry, patriarchs in uniform with stern countenances pointing at images of space onscreen and making split second decisions, late inning rat monsters, robots, or mutants, and a certain quantity of Weird Tales twists to put it all over. A man who knew how to stretch a low MGM budget to make it look like a medium MGM budget, which equals a huge budget in a tax shelter country, and TIME TRAVELERS is comic book colorful if naught else. Lapses into egghead longwinded analysis (i.e. DC rather than Marvel) lot of straight edge males refusing to fire on mutants since killing is wrong even with a limited food supply and no room for ugly people in the gene pool blah blah, and robots. But stick with it--it's the early 60s so there are some hotties lolling topless in the artificial sun spa and pleasant miasma of LOST HORIZONS-meets-MOLE PEOPLE disaffect.


By the time you wake up from dozing off (a Melchoir specialty), a nice 'awake to the problem of overpopulation and/or getting wise to the genetic con job that is reproduction and life' kind of epiphany may well have erupted in your absence, addressing what was still considered a serious problem here on Earth bak in the 60s-70s--overpopulation. Somehow, though our population has more than doubled since then, we're not allowed to worry about it anymore.


Whatever your stance, this offers the same kind of mellow mix of awe and sleepiness you might feel during Walter Pidgeon's walking tour of the Krell wonders in FORBIDDEN PLANET.  As for If you're wondering why it looks so damned good, better than brand new, note that the great Czech ex-pat Vilmos Zsigmond did the cinematography (he'd go on to be a key player in the gritty-but-cozy look of 70s movies like Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS) and the Prime image glows better than new.


A very hungover and irascible John Agar leads an international space crew who land on Uranus or wherever, and there's a stop motion animation one-eyed rat monster in a cave, and a bunch of ghostly hot but strangely bland Swedish women (aliens using the astronaut's memories to lure them, ala half the sci fi movies ever made). The giant all seeing alien eye factors in (above), and alas Uranus looks like the thawed Danish tundra, giving their space exploration a kind of dispiriting vibe like we're six and being bored during a birthday party visit to a matinee showing some  No matter how much it puts you to sleep like a longwinded grandpa's hazy memory of seeing Sputnik on TV, keep it on until the end for the astro lounge credits - it's the star-swingin'-est theme song ever baby, set to groovy planet space scenes, like Tracy Morgan as Astronaut Jones tip. If your AA sponsor permits you, mix yourself a martini and let its dreamy lounge vibe provide the coup de gras for a little Melchoir nap (he co-scripted). As the noted Teleport City's Keith puts it:

"Journey to the 7th Planet isn’t very good. It moves at a snail’s pace toward a predictable conclusion. The characters are pretty dull. The special effects are pretty awful, on the rare occasion that they make themselves known. And yet, as you can guess, there is something strangely compelling about the movie. It’s like an album you put on in the background."

As I've written in the past, DEATH LAID AN EGG-maker Elio Petri's career seems to run on its own parallel track to evolution of Italian cinema, predicting major trends and then moving on from them right when the rest of his country catches on. So here he beats Antonioni's inestimably influential BLOW-UP by a full year, bringing us the pop art explosion then just starting to get its groove on, harnessing it to satire of the TV generation that's so broad it makes William Holden's pompous final NETWORK monologue, the "This is real life, Diana. I have real feelings!" speech seem like the height of abstract subtlety, let alone the glum teenage hype of THE HUNGER GAMES. By now you know that the film posits an inevitable future where people are hunted on the streets for TV ratings and population control; those who survive are national media stars. One of them is Marcello Mastroianni, in black turtleneck, cropped (badly dyed) blonde hair, and horrible swollen purple bags under his eyes, he looks like goddamned mid-70s Metal Machine Music-era Lou Reed if Lou was dumb enough to take his shades off, which of course he wasn't. Without Marcello's trademark dark glasses, the full brunt of the previous year's dolce vita-ing is felt like the sucker punch of being stuck with the check after your dinner party is crashed by half of Rome.


Here he's the latest star in an international hit TV show where contestants are drawn at random to stalk and kill one another. He's being stalked by hottie Ursula Andress. Death where is thy sting, so you'd think, but it's never fast enough. Instead, well, if you've ever made movies yourself you've probably done the 'chase thing' - where it's just you and a buddy working on it, so you film them running away, occasionally looking backwards in fear, and then you switch-- and they film you chasing them down the same street or path (or vice versa), well there's a lot of that in here, with breaks for the inevitable falling in love and escaping or so forth, with he wise to her trick of luring him to a kill zone surrounded by camera, etc.

Meanwhile it irks that Marcello's supposedly a big star but so bad with money he's constantly having his furnishings repossessed, including his girlfriend's comic book collection ("the classics" she says), and Ursula's supposed to be a great hunter but always letting him outsmart her; and we get the feeling the writer's doing high-fives with his Marxist-sexist buddies at Cahiers du Cinema in his mind while writing that one - Zap! Pow! For Americans, though, especially in this era with our reality TV president-elect, this grim pop art future is a bit like watching your father drunkenly hitting on your girlfriend at Thanksgiving. Great art though, if you like that post-mo pop style (mannequin arms and blinking eyes).

Edgar G. Ulmer--a seasoned hand at pre-Hitler UFA in the high-end Expressionism business--was all set to be Universal horror's F.W. Murnau, but Laemmle wasn't having him as the alienator of his niece's affections so he got booted out after one great film (THE BLACK CAT). But unlike many ousted ex-pats, however, Ulmer never stopped working, taking the niece with him and decamping to the other side of the railroad tracks, working with budgets so low his work is studied today in film schools as masterpieces of economy. Most of the running time of DETOUR for example doesn't even have a set- just fog, rear projection and a convertible. And here, all of a sudden, in this wild wooly indie, he makes great use of a futuristic Dallas World's Fair exhibit--all geometric geodesic angles and offsets--to conjure a post-apocalyptic world crashed by a jet pilot after he's the first man to break the sound barrier. The exhibit is long forgotten, but it makes a great Expressionist backdrop for an old hand like Edgar G-.--the painted backdrops and exaggerated set dressing, creating a highly stylized dream theater 2-D vibe (so emblematic of German Expressionism ala CALIGARI, FAUST, etc.) where the action seems to occur well outside the boundaries of space and time.


Here for example the art direction is accomplished and creative and the way budget limits are circumscribed with such art is so notable it might well be shown at film schools as exemplary use of found sets. The plot involves a pilot's sound barrier acceleration experiment launching him far into the future in a world gone mutant and/or sterile and either way underground - a dying world run by a few old character actors and housing a few babes dying for a real man's --ahem--virulent fertility. A suspicious security agent buzzkill (with such blatant and hysteric fearmongering one could imagine him working for Fox News) by the gigantic and ever-irritating Red Morgan. The script is by a decorated WW2 photographer Arthur C. Pierce and stars Robert Clarke (HIDEOUS SUN DEMON) as the stranded flier. Put them together and get Arthur C. Clarke who wrote 2001. Not that that was intentional, I'm almost sure-- 2001 was some years away. Daughter Arianne Ulmer is sone of the girls in search of the kind right stuff a time traveling pilot can offer

This Michael Crichton adaptation got a bad rap when it came out for a slew of reasons: it was overbudget, it was racist, it had a terrible ape suit, it was laughably acted, there were no CGI dinosaurs. JURASSIC PARK had just come out a couple years earlier and so Crichton was now associated with this cutting edge technology, so CONGO's old school ape suits and stagey red clay gigantic sets didn't cut it in the new post-T. Rex era. But now the smoke has cleared and we can re-examine the film free of all pre-set disregard. Turns out, I like CONGO for all those same reasons, as it reminds me of all those terrible old H. Rider Haggard-or-Edgar-Rice-Burroughs adaptation safaris into lost civilization adventures from the 60s-70s, the ones slung together with paperclips and terrarium lizard blow-ups by Irwin Allen and Dino Di Laurentiis: blown-up images of iguanas with fins glued to their backs fighting or lashing their tongues out at middle-aged lumpen former A-listers pretending to leap over great precipices and burbling science fair volcanoes or big foam-rubber pteranodons zipping by overhead on steel cables and rubber plesiosaurs erupting out of the water around Nazi submarines (as in 1974's LAND THAT TIME FORGOT), all supplemented by various babes in fur bikinis and/or nimwit sidekicks.


In case you can't tell, I got no problem with the red clay, timely volcanoes, ape suits, the corny translation device watch the good ape wears, or his sappy bromance between 2nd tier-Swayze Dylan Walsh sending his specialist (?) Laura Linney into the Congo to find him giant diamonds for his satellite space laser, running into apes and toppling Congolese juntas en route. Savvy and cool without either relying on bitchy or sexy manipulative tropes to get men jumping through her hoops. Her knowing wry professionalism more than makes up for the hammy accent of Tim Curry in the requisite 'doomed greedhead' role. The mysterious white apes are all uniquely different from one another with complex strategies, and there are moments when they're battling the automated machine gun sentries and laser fences that you think at last FORBIDDEN PLANET, ALIENS, and PLANET OF THE APES are all swirling together like we always knew they would someday. And there are no goddamned kids in the cast, just a doe-eyed 'good ape' with a translation device watch. You heard me!


Bronson Canyon! If one of those Larry Blamire films was made during the era of Martin, Lewis, Joe Besser-era Stooges, YOU BET YOUR LIFE-era Groucho Marx -- it would look and sound and smell just like INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES, a film that's gotten a bad rap over the years but can stand proudly between Corman's CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA and THREE STOOGES GO TO MARS any day, if it wanted to --the former in wry beatnik laissez-faire (and Corman corp. members working behind the scenes: Jonathan Haze (writing) and Bruno VeSota (directing). The framework involves two goldbricking privates (Robert Ball, Frankie Ray)--a kind of hipster, less slapstuck Martin and Lewis, cooler, less sadistic Three Stooges, and more sexually aggressive, less infantile Costello and Abbot. In point of fact, the pair seem to--intentionally or no--evoke Edward G. Robinson and George E. Stone in LITTLE CEASAR, and Peter Lorre and George E. Stone in FACE BEHIND THE MASK, as Ray's acting style seems as if he's constantly listing to port or starboard of Robinson or Lorre impersonations. They plays AWOL privates who spot a landed saucer piloted by two buxom babes and staffed with carrot monsters who run and dance and twirl their fringe tops. They don't know whether to agree to mate with them, report them to their Groucho Marx-ist superior officer, or just keep their big yaps shut. To prove their truthiness, they need evidence, and/or to stop a nefarious plot to take over the world. I'm too busy bulging my eyes out and shouting "Whhhaaaa?" to notice.

But I do like that there's some whooping, dancing hipster Native Americans (you'll want to study and learn their crazy dance), and the idiot guy does a pretty astute Curly; the babes are my favorite kind--gigantic and buxom, dwarfing both men--and they're arc transcribes more than the usual dearth of character (good, bad, etc.); the giant carrot aliens skip and dance around and have a blast and there's all sorts of absurdist self-aware Brechtian movements, the Eddie accidentally picking up a rock and throwing it like it's styrofoam which of course it is, but only supposed to be light to the aliens (the way he tries to pass it off is priceless). So nice to get two schmucks who at the very least no what to do when a giant space broad takes them onto her lapIf like me you've studiously avoided this film due to reliable critical consensus, then you'll want to track down those critics and give them a hearty bitch slap. . You could have seen it so many times by now you'd have it memorized! And then you'd be better off than you are. Until CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA lolls back inland onto Prime-al shore, this is the B-side to BUCKET OFF BLOOD you'll want on your late night LSD recuperation "what the fuck - did he just say that?" roster.