Sci-Fi In July: Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone (2009)

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My daughter has gotten into Manga and Anime in a big way, so I try to watch some of that with her. We’d both heard of the Evangelion series, but neither of us really knew anything about it. It is a confusing franchise as there are numerous series and movies, with reboots and rebuilds thrown into the mix.

We more or less randomly decided to start with this film, which is essentially a retelling of the original Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series. That series isn’t available on our streaming services, but this film is on Crunchyroll, and since it basically retells the original story, we figured it was as good a place as any to start with.

Having now seen the film, I’m not so sure that was true. I found much of the story quite confusing, and it very much feels like I’m missing a large part of the lore.

The film drops you right into the middle of it, without explanation. Best I can figure is that sometime in the past, these giant Kaiju creatures known as Angels came to Earth, nearly destroying it. Humans have now built Mech-Warrior-type robots, called Evangelions, to fight back.

For reasons that are never really explained, the head leader dude taps his estranged 14-year-old son to pilot one of the Evangelion robot thingies. Though he is very young and has had zero training, they pop him into it and ask him to fight an incoming Angel.

He fumbles at first, nearly destroying the machine and killing himself, but miraculously, he recovers and destroys the angel. After some unspecified amount of time, another Angel arrives, and basically the same thing happens. Shinji is placed back into the Evangelion; he has no idea what he’s doing, but after taking some losses, he somehow finds a way to destroy the angel. Rinse, repeat.

In between these battles, he talks with his guardian Misato and becomes friends with Rei, another Evangelion pilot who was previously injured. Shinji only pilots his machine reluctantly, being essentially forced to do it, but Rei willingly takes it on with a sense of duty and honor.

It ends with a cliffhanger and some weirdness.

I seriously don’t know what to make of this film. I understood the basic plotlines, but so much of it was left unexplained. It felt very much like I was supposed to have watched the original series, even though this seems like it was designed as a straight retelling of it with updated animation.

There is a lot of mythology built into it that I simply don’t understand. I kind of hated it, but I also want to watch more. There is something about it that is truly interesting and I’d like to dig into that, but I’m not sure whether to watch the next movie or go back to the original series.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Sci-Fi In July Edition: Resident Evil (2002)

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I stopped playing video games after things advanced past the Super Nintendo System. Partially, this was because I’d gone to college and found more interesting things to take up my time. Partially, this was because I was now college-aged and expected to purchase things like gaming systems myself, and I had other things to spend my money on. But also, my friend had a Nintendo 64, and when I’d play games on it like GoldenEye, I found I got nauseated.

My brother had a PlayStation, and I believe he owned the first Resident Evil game. I remember playing it a time or two, but it never hooked me in. So when the movie came out, I was none too interested.

I thought I had watched it sometime previously to tonight, but I’ve not logged it in Letterboxd nor rated it on IMDB. Watching it, I found that I had no real memory of it. The opening scene did seem a little familiar, and I definitely knew about a scene where a laser beam cuts some soldiers into pieces. But maybe I saw that in a trailer, or some other clip. Or maybe I started the movie, got halfway through, and decided it was too stupid to finish. I dunno. As I get older, my memory of what I’ve seen and haven’t seen diminishes, and I’m left scratching my head over certain films.

Obviously, none of this matters to anyone, but this is my blog, and I can ramble if I want to.

But on to the actual film. Alice (Milla Jovovich) wakes up naked and alone in a shower. She seems to have fallen, pulling the shower curtain down with her (to strategically cover up her naked parts, yet reveal enough to get the horny boys most likely to see this movie all excited). She seems to have lost all memory of who she is and what she’s doing there. She sees a picture of herself with a man. They are dressed as if it is their wedding day. She notices a wedding ring on her finger.

Suddenly, a strange man tackles her just as a group of commandos busts into the mansion. The commandos have no time to explain, but take Alice and the man with them to an underground train. There, they find Spence (James Purefoy), the man in that wedding photo, who also says he has amnesia.

Riding the train deeper underground, the commando boss, James Shade (Colin Salmon), explains that they are entering The Hive, a top-secret genetic research facility owned by The Umbrella Corporation. Earlier that day, The Hive’s supercomputer, also known as The Red Queen, mysteriously killed all the people inside The Hive. The Commandos are there to find out why. Alice and Spence are employees of The Umbrella Corporation, tasked to guard the entrance of The Hive, and were only pretending to be married as some sort of cover.

For the first half of the film, our heroes do battle with The Red Queen. It is still on guard and has set deadly traps for anyone trying to get in. That’s where those laser beams come in, plus various other murderous traps.

Once they turn the computer off, they realize the reason it went haywire is that the T-Virus was unleashed, and The Hive had to be shut down lest it contaminate the outside world. The T-Virus turns humans into zombies.

Also, the crazy scientists in The Hive were experimenting with the T-Virus on various creatures, creating super monsters. The rest of our film finds our heroes battling them.

Paul W.S. Anderson directs (I seem to be having an Anderson weekend). Like all of his films that I’ve seen, he does a good enough job directing that I don’t hate what I’m watching, but a poor enough job to make me wonder why I kept with it. He’s competent enough to keep things interesting, but not enough of an artist to ever make me seek him out. Someone should tell him to lay off the CGI, though. It looks bad in all his films, but here especially, since most of the monsters are CGI and they are laughably bad.

He’s helped here by a script that kept the action coming at a steady pace. Jovovich is quite good as the lead; she’s starred in all of the Resident Evil films, and I imagine this is what she will be remembered for. She’s got quite a presence. As does Michelle Rodriguez as one of the commandos. This was just her fourth film, but she completely owns it. The rest of the cast is a mixed bag, ranging from pretty good to fairly terrible.

This is a film where, if I have actually seen it before, I can totally understand how I’d forgotten it. It isn’t all that bad, but neither is it particularly memorable. It is, however, just good enough to make me want to watch the sequel. Or maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment.

Sci-Fi In July: Alien vs Predator: Requiem (2007)

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I suppose every kid at one point or another has created their own crossover event. You got a big box of toys from a variety of different toy lines, so you mix and match. GI Joe Teams up with Thundercats. Superman and Wolverine battle Megatron and Darth Vader. Etc. Sometimes you wonder who would win in a fight: Spider-Man or a Mutant Turtle, Cobra Commander or Skeletor. Etc., again.

It makes sense that actual comic lines would take up this idea, and television and movies. The Avengers made it into a billion-dollar event.

I suppose, then, that an Alien vs Predator mashup was inevitable. I still think you could make a good movie out of that concept. In my mind, you have the Predators on some isolated, desolate planet, or maybe a big ship without much crew. They’ve got a bunch of Alien eggs on board, and then something goes wrong. The Aliens hatch and start picking off the Predators before they know what’s happening. Basically, you make a really good Alien movie but with Predators instead of humans.

There are bits of that idea inside of Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, but they frak it up pretty quickly. The film starts immediately after the event of Alien vs. Predator, so spoilers for that film ahead.

The Predators win, because, of course, they do. The Xenomorphs are much cooler creatures, but they have no personality beyond kill, kill, kill. The last Predator actually dies at the end of the movie, and we see some other Predators fly down in their spaceship and pick his corpse up for a memorial. But just before the credits roll, we see a Chestburster bust out of the dead Predator.

So, the Aliens have a life cycle, part of which has them being hosted by another creature. In the films, that creature is usually a human. Apparently, it partially merges with its host’s DNA, picking up some of its characteristics. When its host is a Predator, what comes out is something called. Predalien (something I just now learned by reading the Wikipedia article).

The Predalien smashes up the Alien ship, causing it to crash back on Earth. It releases a bunch of Facehuggers, and quickly, Earth is being infested with Xenomorphs. Only one Predator survives, and it needs to kill all the Xenomorphs before they kill all the humans. I’m not sure why it cares other than it just really likes killing Aliens.

I’m down with all of that. I can totally get behind a lone Predator facing off against a bunch of Xenomorphs and a Predalien. Unfortunately, this is a Hollywood film, so it has to throw a bunch of dumb humans into the mix.

They are very dumb, completely unmemorable, and an utter waste of time. I watched the film last night and I couldn’t tell you a single human’s name and barely remember what any of them look like. There really isn’t a point in discussing them because, for the most part, they only exist to be killed by the Predalien or a Xenomorph.

Every now and again, the Predator will wipe out a Xenomorph, and once or twice that’s actually kind of cool. But mostly it is dumb humans getting massacred in completely boring ways. If you are waiting for an awesome showdown between the Predator and the Predalien, don’t hold your breath. They do have a fight, but it is not very interesting, and ultimately – spoiler for the ending – the humans drop an Atom bomb on the town, killing everybody but a few of our sort-of heroes.

I’ve now seen every film in both the Alien and Predator franchises. They are both a pretty mixed bag, with both very good and very stupid films existing in both. But I can see myself revisiting all of the films in the franchises except these. I never want to think about these two crossover films ever again.

Sci-Fi In July: Alien Vs. Predator (2004)

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Alien (1979) is one of the greatest science fiction/horror movies ever made. Predator (1987) is, well, it isn’t the greatest anything, but it is a ridiculous bit of 1980s sci-fi action elevated by some fine direction by John McTiernan and some charismatic performances by its stacked cast (including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, and Bill Duke).

Dark Horse Comics obtained the rights to both franchises and began releasing separate stories from them. In 1989, some genius decided to combine them and created the first Alien Versus Predator mashup. There are a lot of comics, and I’ve not read any of them, so I can’t comment intelligently. My understanding is that the Predators, at some point, found some Alien eggs and have been breeding them ever since. With the intent of periodically releasing them so that they can be hunted.

A quick primer if you’ve never seen any of the films. A Predator is a technologically advanced alien species that flies to various planets and hunts the native species for sport. The Aliens are Xenomorphs, incredibly dangerous, but not particularly advanced, creatures with acid for blood.

There are numerous films in both franchises, and two crossover movies. The crossovers got terrible reviews and are generally considered some of the worst films in either franchise, which is why I’ve avoided watching them for so long. I found a cool DVD boxed set at Goodwill the other day that contains the first four Alien films, two Predator movies, and both of the crossovers. And here we are.

For the first thirty minutes, Alien vs Predator creates a promising setup. Wealthy industrialist Charles Weyland (Lance Henriksen) (the Weyland-Yutani corporation features heavily in the Alien franchise) discovers a massive pyramid structure buried some 2,000 feet below the surface of a tiny island off the coast of Antarctica.

Weyland gathers a bunch of smart people, and they investigate. I love a good story where a group of specialists investigates something mysterious and discovers monsters, or ghosts, or aliens. I can completely get behind that in a film.

The difficulty of an Alien/Predator mashup is that they are both aliens. Big, scary monsters. The Xenomorphs are basically killer animals that can’t communicate in any real way. The Predators canonically speak a non-human language that is never translated (at least not in the films). Making an interesting story with just these two creatures would be difficult. One likes to be able to relate to at least one character in a story.

I really wish they’d make that film, though. They always add humans into the mix, and humans just muck up your Alien/Predator mash-up. They don’t get developed well, and for the most part, they just become cannon fodder for the monsters. I think you could make a really good AVP film without any humans at all.

Here’s where things get stupid. Our heroes (such as they are) come to the Antarctic island only to discover someone or something has already drilled a hole down to the pyramid. Naturally, it is the Predators who drilled the hole. Apparently, the pyramid is theirs. They keep a bunch of frozen Xenomorphs down there, and every hundred years, they come to Earth, unfreeze them, let them feed on humans to grow big and strong, then hunt them for fun.

We spend a little time watching the humans muck about in the pyramid. Then they unwittingly unleash some Facehuggers, and quick as you like, they burst out of their chests and become full-fledged Xenomorphs.

A few Predators, who have apparently been hanging out in Earth’s orbit waiting for this to happen, fly down for some (finally) Predator on Alien action. Most of the humans are dispatched pretty quickly, though a couple last a while, and there is at least one survivor (because, of course, there is).

It was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who helmed films like Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, and several of the Resident Evil films. And like those films, his direction isn’t terrible, he’s not incompetent, but neither is it particularly memorable. He’s just good enough to keep you watching, but bad enough you wish you hadn’t.

That pretty much sums up my feelings on this film. It is better than I expected to be, but my expectations were incredibly low. I still think you can make a good Alien Vs. Predator movie, but this is definitely not it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Phase IV (1974)

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Saul Bass was probably the only person to become famous for creating title sequences for movies. He did memorable title sequences for films such as The Man With The Golden Arm (1955), North By Northwest (1959), and Anatomy of a Murder (1959). His titles were innovative and beautiful, and they gave you a sense of the essence of the film you were about to see. The Criterion Channel once had a collection of films based on his title sequences alone. He also designed movie posters and was an award-winning graphic designer for commercial projects.

In 1974 he directed his first and only feature-length film. A science fiction/horror film about mutant ants that try and take over the world.

Phase IV is a meditative, art-house film tackling a subject that wouldn’t feel out of place amongst 1950s sci-fi b-movies such as The Blob, or The Fly, or The Brain Eaters.

It is full of extended, wordless scenes that concentrate on nature, or more often than not, insects – mainly ants. There are extreme close-ups of real-life ants, and beautifully rendered shots of hand-crafted miniatures.

There is some hard science fiction with scientists endlessly staring at computers and working with test tubes, and a lot of nonsense dialogue and character beats. It is incredible to me that Saul Bass chose this rather off-putting, strange little monster movie to be his directorial debut.

The story goes something like this. A strange cosmic event happens over Earth. Humans are all excited about it, but after a week with nothing extraordinary happening they all go about their lives. Except for one scientist, Ernest D. Hubbs (Nigel Davenport). He realizes that something strange is happening to the ants. They seem to be evolving – communicating with each other and working as one, towards some unknown goal.

The ants build these large monoliths in the Arizona desert. Hubbs convinces the government to build a science station next to them and recruits James R. Lesko (Michael Murphy) to help him. All nearby residents flee, leaving the scientists all alone. All residents except one small family.

Soon enough the family is attacked and killed by the ants. The only survivor is Kendra (Lynne Frederick) comes to stay with the scientists at the station.

The humans spray the ants with some kind of goo which deters them for a time, but soon enough the insects learn to cope. The humans destroy the monoliths. The insects build a reflective surface that sends the sun’s heat directly into the science station, drastically raising the temperature inside. The humans decipher some of the ant’s language. The ants infiltrate the station and start tearing up the machinery.

On and on it goes. Humans are against nature. It is an old story told in a beautiful, strange way. I don’t know how to explain this film, except that you should do yourself a favor and go watch it.

Sci-Fi In July: Lady Terminator (1989)

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The history of non-American countries ripping off Hollywood movies is long and weird. I’m not well versed enough in it to really discuss it here other than I am fascinated by it.

As you might guess Lady Terminator is a (sometimes shot by shot) Indonesian remake of the James Cameron classic The Terminator. As is their want it also throws some Asian mythology into the mix.

Sometime in the past, the Queen of the South Sea uses her sexy charms to seduce men. In the throws of passion, a snake that resides in her vagina bites the men’s penises off. One day some dude pulls out just in time and grabs the snake before it bites. It then turns into a dagger. The queen curses his would-be granddaughter and then dives into the sea.

All of this happens in just the first ten minutes!

Fast forward to the present and an anthropologist named Tania (Barbara Anne Constable) is researching the Queen of the South Sea for her university studies. She takes a boat out to where the Queen was supposed to have dived in all those years ago. She discovers the Queen’s resting place and is then tied to a bed while the snake enters her vagina turning her into the new Queen of the South Seas, or as we like to call her – Lady Terminator.

She then proceeds to have sex with a bunch of dudes, letting her vagina snake eat their cocks off. Sometimes she meditates while naked and listening to some jazzy New Wave music. But then she realizes some lady has an ancient piece of jewelry or something that she needs so she goes on a killing rampage (but with guns, not vagina snakes.)

At one point she utters the phrase “I’ll be back” and later she’ll walk into a police station and shoot the place up. There are lots of car chases and scenes where she fires hundreds of rounds into dudes crotches. She’s completely indestructible and we’ll be treated to numerous instances where she’s shot at, torched, and walks right through a dozen explosions.

The scrips is bad. A few choice bits of dialogue:

“I am not a lady, I’m an anthropologist.”

“We’ve seen more dead bodies than you’ve eaten hot dogs, so shut up and eat.”

The acting is wooden. The action scenes aren’t bad as long as you don’t compare it to the actual Terminator movie.

But it is so bizarre I just couldn’t look away. It is the very epitome of trash cinema. I kind of loved it. This is a film with a tag line that reads “She Mates and Then She Terminates.” How can you not have anything but love for something like that?

Sci-Fi In July: The Quiet Earth (1985)

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There is a scene early on in The Quiet Earth – a film about a man who thinks he is the last human left alive on the planet – where he takes a big truck and drives it through a small convenience store, smashing it to bits. My dad, or maybe my uncle, rented the film when I was 12 or 13 years old. I thought that scene was the coolest. Me and my cousins decided that’s exactly what we would do if we were the last people on Earth – destroy a bunch of stuff. We already liked breaking glass bottles and blowing up Coke cans with firecrackers. So how cool would it be to drive a truck through a building?

I don’t think I finished the film back then. I probably thought it was boring after that. But that scene has stuck with me all of these years. I’ve often thought about it and wondered what the film was. Some two decades later and here I am looking at lists of science fiction films and I come across it once again. The film is so much better than that one scene, there is a lot more to it.

That man is named Zac Hobson and he’s played by Bruno Lawrence. We first see him lying in bed naked. The time is 6:12 AM. His alarm goes off and Zac seems confused to be there. He turns the radio on and finds only static. His clock is stuck at 6:12. He gets dressed and drives to work. On the way, he stops at a petrol station. Nobody is there. Nobody is on the road either, though there are some cars just randomly stopped here and there. The city is empty of people.

He works at a scientific station. The building is empty. He uses his computer to send messages to other stations across the globe, but he gets no reply. He finds a man dead in a chair next to a bank of terminals. He looks burned by radiation. He reads a screen that says Project Flashlight took place that night.

His company destroyed the world.

He goes to a radio station and records a message for any survivors to contact him. He drives around using a bullhorn to search for others. He starts to drink. He’s slowly losing his mind.

Then he meets Joanne (Alison Routledge). She somehow also survived. They are thrilled to find each other.

Collectively, they systematically begin looking for survivors. Being a scientist he’s constantly trying to understand exactly what happened, and what other changes this event might have wrought.

It is a slow, meditative film. It spends a lot of time pondering what someone would do if they thought they were the last people on Earth. Before that scene in the truck smashing a convenience store, Zac goes through a whirlwind of feelings. He goes shopping. He moves into a large house. He puts on a woman’s slip. He goes into a church and questions God (then blows a statue of Jesus on the cross to bits with a shotgun). He declares himself the president of the world.

With Joanne, he keeps his sanity. There are questions about what they will do next. Will they try to repopulate the world? Should they travel farther away in case people in other countries survive? The film mostly leaves those unanswered. It doesn’t always even ask them. But it leaves the audience time to ponder them. Eventually, things do get moving at a faster clip and there becomes a need for urgency, but those things are best left unspoiled. It ends with one of the most beautiful closing shots in all of cinema.

Sci-Fi In July: Sphere (1998)

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I’ve previously mentioned how The Silence of the Lambs helped me to become a lifelong reader. Well, Michael Crichton was no small slouch in that regard either. He became the first author that I really followed. I have fond memories of a couple of friends and me discovering his books and fighting over who would get to check one of the books from the school library first and who would have to wait.

The first book of his that I read was The Andromeda Strain – about an alien virus that crashes to Earth aboard a satellite and the scientists that study it. I loved it. I loved its realism and attention to detail. Just now I’m realizing that the Hannibal Lecter books by Thomas Harris and the stories of Michael Crichton appealed to me in the same way. Harris dug into the details of forensic and behavioral science – why serial killers behave the way they do and how the F.B.I. catch them. Crichton also leans heavily into his science background. Both authors lay out science in an organized and detailed manner. That appealed to me in some way.

I don’t remember much about Sphere. I remember reading it on the bus – slouched down, knees on the seat in front of me. But I don’t remember much of the actual story. Except that, I was disappointed in it.

I was even more disappointed by the movie which took quite a few liberties with the book, though again my memories are fuzzy.

But it has been many years since I saw the film, and sometimes movies I was disappointed with as a college kid become better with age. Since this is Sci-Fi in July and that film stars Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson, Sharon Stone, and Liev Schreiber I decided to give it another try.

Friends, it has not gotten better with age.

The basics of the plot are pretty good, especially in the beginning, but then it does a deep dive into stupidity and never recovers.

So, a ship is discovered at the bottom of the ocean. Several inches of coral have grown over it. Coral grows at a specific rate which indicates the ship has been down there for three hundred years. Since humankind didn’t have spaceships 300 years ago it is determined that this ship is extra-terrestrial in origin.

A few years prior psychologist Dr. Norman Goodman (Hoffman) was tasked by the Bush administration to write a paper detailing what should be done if aliens were discovered on Earth. He filled in some procedures and proclaimed you’d need an astrophysicist (Schreiber), a mathematician (Jackson), and a marine biologist (Stone).

That’s a very Michael Crichton setup. He loves putting together a crack team of smart people to solve a crisis. But in this story (or at least this adaptation of this story) Goodman half-assed that paper. He needed the money and didn’t think anyone would read it. All of the scientists he claimed they’d need were just people he knew. Some of these folks are super smart, but they aren’t exactly the elite group of people one might actually ask for.

The military has already established a sea station on the ocean floor next to the spaceship. Our heroes take a sub down and investigate. Inside the ship they discover a few things I won’t spoil but also a large CGI sphere. It reflects everything around it except for the humans suggesting it is an intelligent life form.

One of the characters later goes inside the sphere but when he comes out he can’t remember anything. Soon after strange things start happening like the base station is attacked by a giant squid and strange sea snakes come out of the sink. Meanwhile, up above a huge storm has rolled in causing the Navy ships to have to leave for a few days, stranding our heroes down below.

At some point, the alien starts talking to our heroes through text messages on the computer. It is friendly at first and then it begins acting like a petulant child. Luckily, our psychologist knows how to talk to angry children. For a little while at least

For a little while I enjoyed the film. The basic setup is solid and I like the actors, but the longer it rolled the sillier it becomes. And stupid. As I said one of the things I liked about Crichton is that he took science seriously. He loved to get into the details without letting the story get bogged down. He probably made some stuff up, but he did it well. The film takes a lot of shortcuts with the science and it makes the film worse.

Director Barry Levinson is known for his character-driven dramas and he is clearly out of his depth with this blockbuster-fueled science-fiction horror story.

Sometimes it is best to remember that a movie is bad, and not try and prove those memories as faulty.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)

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Hammer Studios made a name for themselves in the 1960s and 1970s by remaking and updating the classic Universal Horror Monster Movies. They were stylish and full of wonderful sets. They were more violent and sexy than those classic films, though they come out looking fairly tame by today’s standards.

They made numerous Dracula, Frankenstein, and Mummy films (I don’t believe they ever made an Invisible Man or Creature from the Black Lagoon film), most of which starred Christopher Lee and/or Peter Cushing. I’ve talked about a few of them in these pages. I have a great fondness for them all.

Frankenstein Created Woman was the fourth film in Hammer’s Frankenstein series (there would be seven in total.) It is a bit of a strange one in that it doesn’t seem to have much of a connection to the other films other than Peter Cushing playing Victor Frankenstein, and him continuing to be a mad scientist.

Here he isn’t so much reanimating freshly dead corpses, but capturing the souls of the recently deceased and placing them in fresh bodies. It is also strangely, almost accidentally progressive.

It opens with Frankenstein lying dead in a sort of deep-freeze coffin. He’s been dead for exactly one hour and at that precise moment, his assistant Dr. Hertz (Thorley Walters) resuscitates (or resurrects?) him. This proves to Frankenstein that a person’s soul does not immediately leave the body at death. Something he surely must experiment with.

Meanwhile, his other assistant, Hans (Robert Morris) is having a love affair with Christina Kleve (Susan Denberg) a woman who is disfigured and whose body is partially paralyzed.

Soon enough he’ll find himself being guillotined for a crime he didn’t commit and she’ll commit suicide shortly thereafter.

Naturally, Frankenstein takes this as an opportunity to capture the soul of Hans and put it into Christina’s body. This is where the film gets accidentally progressive. It apparently doesn’t occur to our friend Baron Victor Frankenstein that putting a male soul inside a female body might be considered strange (I mean stranger than reuniting a dead person). He doesn’t seem to consider it at all. For a brief moment, Hertz raises the question but it shuts down with a singular word from Frankenstein.

The film doesn’t really do anything with the concept after that either. There aren’t any moments where Hans’ soul is questioned about what it is like inhabiting a woman’s body or anything of the sort. No one ever mentions the fact that he could have simply resurrected Christina without Hans’ soul and his experiment would have still been a success.

Frankenstein also fixes all of Christina’s ailments (well, technically Hertz does the actual surgeries as Frankenstein’s hands no longer work – something I think that happened when he was frozen). She can now walk properly and her face is beautiful. No one questions why he didn’t do this while she was properly alive. That would have actually been something the entire community could get behind.

Anyway…

The two souls seem to exist simultaneously. Christina is more or less in control, but she hears Hans talking to her – he mostly screams at her to kill the people who committed the crime that got him executed.

It is a strange entry into the Frankenstein universe. There isn’t really a monster, just a nice girl who gets her dead lover’s soul implanted inside her body. Even after she (or they) start a murder spree the film is on their side. It seems to justify their crimes since the people getting killed were jerks in the first place.

So she’s not really a monster. There aren’t any townspeople with pitchforks, and Frankenstein isn’t all that involved in his own movie. We spend more time with others, developing relationships than with Frankenstein in his lab.

But it kind of worked for me. I am a great fan of these Hammer Horror films. They are often rather slow and meandering, but there is something I just love about them. This is no exception.

You can stream the film for free on the Internet Archive.

Sci-Fi In July: Barbarella (1968)

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Barbarella is the sort of movie that was infamous in my junior high. It was infamous everywhere, really, but I was a pubescent boy amongst many other pubescent boys and the film got a lot of talk. between us. This would have been the late 1980s. It seems strange to me now that 13-year-old boys would be talking about a movie made more than a decade prior. It must have come out on home video or been playing a lot of HBO or something.

At the time Jane Fonda was known more for her exercise videos than her movies. I didn’t get to see the movie. To be honest I don’t know if any of my friends did. But there was this buzz about it. Jane Fonda had a nude scene in it and was all kinds of sexy. That’s what we talked about.

The film was notorious outside of my junior high for those reasons as well. In 1969 Fonda was a well-established movie star. Barbarella was a sexy, cheesy sci-fi flick directed by her husband Roger Vadim. Critics didn’t know what to make of it (they mostly didn’t like it) and audiences didn’t know what to do with it (they mostly didn’t watch it). But everybody talked about it, even a decade later.

It has remained on my cinematic radar ever since. But until this week I’d stayed away from it. The film has a reputation for being notoriously bad and campy fun. Now that I’ve seen it that’s pretty much how I’d describe it.

It is not by any means good cinema. But it is deliriously entertaining. The set design is magnificent and the costumes are outrageous. It looks like psychedelic cotton candy. The story is ridiculous and everybody but Jane Fonda seems to be phoning it in, but gosh I had fun watching it.

Set in the faraway future Barbarella the film stars Jane Fonda as Barbarella the character, who is tasked by the President of the Earth to find Durand Durand, a scientist who has created a psionic ray. Now in this future violence has been eliminated and sexual hangups have gone bye-bye. Barbarella is a groovy chic who hangs out in her shag-carpeted spaceship digging on cool tunes and having a good time.

But now she has a job to do. She flies to the planet Tau Ceti to save Earth from destruction. There she has lots of crazy adventures including having sex with an angel, being locked in a cage and attacked by birds, and attached to a machine designed to make her orgasm to death.

It never takes itself too seriously, it looks amazing, and mostly it is a lot of fun. It does run a little too long (technically it is only 98 minutes in length but it feels a lot longer) and there is a very little to it. I can’t see myself returning to it often. I’m glad I watched it, but I don’t imagine it will entice me again anytime soon.