Fire your lasers

First posted 7-7-04

"Fire your lasers!"
- The War of the Planets

I have just discovered a genre of movies that I didn't know existed before. Se here's the story.

Turner Classics is showing some old sci fi movies one morning, From the Earth to the Moon, Village of the Damned and the such. The show something called the War of the Planets. As if I have a choice, I must watch this film. So I tape it and finally get around to watching it tonight. I go to look up the film on the iMDB to add it to My Movies list, but I have some trouble finding it. So I watch the opening credits to get the lead actors name, Tony Russell. Look him up and check what films he did in 1965, the year of the movie. Well, there's a bunch and the names are all in Italian with at least 5 english titles underneath. I find one suitably sci fi sounding and look it up. It's got Tony Russell and some of the other actors as well, but the plot sound different from what it is supposed to be. Then I get an inkling. I look up one of the other actors and there it is The War of the Planets. With virtually the same cast as the other movie I looked up, Tony Russell included.

Yep, I found the Spaghetti Sci Fi genre. Mid 60's Italian sci fi movies made with the same people on the same budget.

I proceed to watch this movie and it is one of the cheesist things I have ever seen in my life. It has space stations and futuristic cities that are obviously 1/12 scale models made of milk juggs and balsa wood. Almost the first scene is this "dance" kind of thing in space. It starts on New Years Eve in the future and there is a choreographed number of people in spacesuits (meaning silver jumpsuits and cut-up gallon buckets) jumping around in space doing tumbling routines and cheerleading moves on wires in reverse motion all to this horrible version of Auld Lang Syne. I could not stop laughing. These people were clearly on cables. And I'm not talking clearly in that the movement was clearly like they were on cables, swinging back and forth (like a pendulum) in "space", but I mean clearly like YOU COULD SEE THE FREAKIN CABLE. I mean, the original Star Trek had better production values than this. At one point, the hero yells "fire your lasers". Well, the lasers were severely underpowered butane torches that sent a jet of flame approximately 6 inches. Not even decent flamethrowers. The evil aliens were actually green lights, and occasionally green light shown on some mist (read: rented smoke machine and damn well was going to get every penny out of it). Cabinets were lowered ponderously to the floor from above and doors whispered upward, all with the very clear indication that we were supposed to ooh and aah at the "futuristic technology". People would use phrases like "he's gone galaxy" and "stars only know". Seriously, if other movies are cheesy, this is processed Velveeta that's gone through a blender, a homogenizer and a nuclear reactor. Oh yeah, they would toss around the terms "radiation" and "Geiger counter" without any clue as to what they really mean. Pulp beyond pulp here.

And then about halfway through the story turns into awesome, creepy old school sci fi with alien symbiosis and collective consciousness and actual filmmaking. It sort of reminds me of Forbidden Planet in that low-production-values-but-surprisingly-awesome-complex-storyline kind of way. Now, it's nowhere near as good as Forbidden Planet, but it has that same feel.

It ends cheaply, but really, is that a surprise?

In the end, it's the type of movie that is so incredibly cheesy that you love it because it is that cheesy. I'm just excited about this previously undiscovered (by me) genre. It's definitely the type of movie you need to watch on a rainy Saturday afternoon about 2 PM, preferably introduced by some UHF gimmicky person, like Elvira or..hell...what was the name of that guy in Chicago. Svengouli. That or completely stoned on Mary Jane at 1 AM with friends so you can laugh at it.

Oh, I forgot to mention...it was dubbed. Oh yeah. Now it was dubbed pretty well, you can tell they tried to match lip movements, but it gives you that creepy vibe when the words and mouth shape don't quite match. I love it.

Rarely do you find a movie this awful-good. I must investigate this genre more. And get a pint of tea...