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Weirder sci-fi films

Started by Famous Mortimer, August 03, 2013, 11:43:19 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

mothman

Oh, dear - I hope you're not disappointed. Quintet is nowhere near as mental as the other two. It has its quirky moments but in the final analysis there's a very good reason why it's not that generally well known that Robert Altman made a post-apocalyptic SF movie starring Paul Newman...

Pepotamo1985

Footprints On The Moon is vaguely sci-fiey and incredibly weird. And incredibly good.

the psyche intangible

Escape From Tomorrow. Looking forward to getting hold of this if it's at all possible:

http://io9.com/escape-from-tomorrow-a-movie-shot-at-disneyland-witho-1301521967

billtheburger

Goodbye 20th Century (Zbogum na Dvaesetiot Vek): My first venture into Macedonian cinema was a eye popping, mind blowing piece of the fantastic.
It reminds me of Brunel, Jodorowsky, Lynch & Mad Max with elements of Balkan war hangover and a need to move on from the 20th centuries trappings of imaginary figures. Every shot & frame is very deliberate.
Part of my love for it, is because I had no fucking idea what it was about.
My wife asked afterwards, "how many hours I have wasted on making her watch rabbit, rabbit, rabbit?" So I know it won't please everyone.
It also has my new favorite film poster:


Mark Steels Stockbroker

Quote from: the psyche intangible on September 13, 2013, 01:08:53 AM
Escape From Tomorrow. Looking forward to getting hold of this if it's at all possible:

http://io9.com/escape-from-tomorrow-a-movie-shot-at-disneyland-witho-1301521967

Sounds like they made the film-within-the-film in Bowfinger but for real.

Mark Steels Stockbroker

Quote from: billtheburger on August 22, 2013, 10:05:31 AM
As I love Zardoz & The Man Who Fell to Earth, I will now check out Quintet.

I suppose you know that the thing with Zardoz is that John Boorman wanted to film LOTR but either couldn't get rights or couldn't get funds, so had to invent his own mythology instead?

The scenes with Sean Connery being tested for erectile performance have to be the most dreadful bit of his career, and the amongst the most dreadful in cinema history.

Lyfjaberg

Quote from: Mark Steels Stockbroker on September 14, 2013, 11:04:35 AM
Sounds like they made the film-within-the-film in Bowfinger but for real.

Chubby Rain.

Famous Mortimer

The Last Days On Mars

Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Olivia Williams and a bunch of no-marks are a scientific team who have got 19 hours left of their 6-month stay on Mars. One of them finds some bacteria, space zombies then are a thing that happens, and I can't say much more.

It's like the first third is a weird indie drama that just happens to be in space, then it goes bonkers before almost sticking the landing with about ten minutes to go. I'm not sure it's worth a watch or not, but it's certainly unlike most other sci-fi films before it, even if it is a bit silly in places.

DukeDeMondo

I don't think The Visitor has been mentioned yet, but I'm going to for it's utterly wonderful. Absolutely no excuse for folk to be gawking at anything else. It's got the likes of Glenn Ford, Shelley Winters, John Huston and Sam bloody Peckinpah in, not to mention Franco Nero in the kind of role that comes around but once in ninety-nine lifetimes.

Here's a non-spoilery account of the plot from off of Wikipedia:

"A young girl with telekinetic powers is the focus of a battle between good and evil. Katy Collins (Paige Conner) is no ordinary 8 year-old girl. Indeed, she is unique, carrying within her the power of Sateen, an inter-spacial force of immense magnitude. Katy's primary mission on earth is to carry these genes forward, a task accomplished by convincing her mother, Barbara (Joanne Nail) to bear a similarly endowed male child with whom Katy would eventually mate. Raymond Armstead, who is secretly part of a global conspiracy trying to gain control of the world using these powers attempts to seduce Barbara into marriage so he can father a child who can harness them. Opposing him is the mysterious Jerzy Colsowicz, also known as the Visitor, and his legion of child followers. He possesses the same powers and knows that they are meant to be used for the good of mankind."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visitor_(1979_film)

Brilliant and beautiful stuff.

phantom_power

I read about The Visitor recently as some cinema in america (the Drafthouse?) has restored it and will be giving it a big screen run

thraxx

I liked THX 1138, which is George Lucas' film debut.  I think Charlie Brooker did too, as he seems to have pinched most of the ideas for one of his Black Mirror episodes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138

My favorite bit is where the softly spoken leather androids beat people up.

NoSleep

I think my favourite bit was the soft words spoken to Donald Pleasence as he pukes his guts up on the floor of the unichapel booth.

thraxx

And let's not forget the little heard of but visceral Power Rangers The Movie.

Especially poignant is the climactic battle scene (which surely rivals the helm's deep battle scene in LOTR for sheer thills), when they are in the big morphed power ranger ship-fing fighting a monster and that, and where the monster causes a total power loss in the ship:  "We've lost all power! We're going to go out of control and crash" says one ranger, possibly the blue one, or the white one, or the brown one if there was a brown one. "Then let's blast out of here!  Set engines to full power" says another one, definitely not the white one.  Then they fly away.

checkoutgirl

Quote from: Funcrusher on August 03, 2013, 09:54:26 PM
Have you ever looked at the diagram some guy did that apparently explains how the  timelines work in 'Primer'? Someone on another forum linked to it back when it first came out. I though i had a handle on what was going on, but after looking at that, fuck, it's insanely complicated.

Got around to watching Primer the other day and can say that it's easily the most confusing film I've ever seen. I don't think the guys who made it even understand what it's about. I really enjoyed the fact that they tried to treat science fiction with complete sobriety, no flashing lights, no effects to speak of and the plot was deliberately confusing. I'm not even really sure why I enjoyed it but I did. Maybe they were saying that if time travel was actually possible then the people who discovered it probably wouldn't understand the implications and shit would get really confusing really quickly. This confusion translates into watching a film that is so complicated that you can't make sense of it. Or something.

small_world

Yeah... Primer. Fucking amazing.
We may need a bigger thread.


How do I resize that?

checkoutgirl

I think the less you know about it, the easier it is to understand. Like the success of Gillian McKeith.

zomgmouse

I think I got it. Basically, the first guy who comes out of the box and the second guy don't come out of the box until three days earlier, at which point the first guy comes out three days later and the second guy doesn't come out at all. The first guy is the second guy three days earlier but the second guy dies because he couldn't stand it. The mysterious stranger is one of the boxes in human form.

small_world

AND... If you think that's weird, you should fucking try (sic) Upstream Color

mothman

Quote from: DukeDeMondo on November 07, 2013, 01:44:17 AM
The Visitor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visitor_(1979_film)

Oh, God, yes. Definitely. It is MENTAL. Must be twenty years ago I saw it on TV, spent ages after wondering "What the fuck was THAT about?"

phantom_power

Quote from: small_world on November 07, 2013, 09:32:26 PM
AND... If you think that's weird, you should fucking try (sic) Upstream Color

You really should, it is a wonderful film. In the truest sense of the word. It filled me with wonder

Benjaminos

Colossus: The Forbin Project: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177

A cautionary tale about what happens when you create a super-intelligent computer, put it in charge of a load of nuclear missiles, then seal it up inside a mountain behind an impassable barrier of radiation. Spoiler:
Spoiler alert
Colossus is a dick
[close]

Ignore the Esso garage bargain-bin DVD cover on that link, it's way better than it would have you believe. Chilling stuff.

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: Benjaminos on November 16, 2013, 12:09:18 AM
Colossus: The Forbin Project: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177

A cautionary tale about what happens when you create a super-intelligent computer, put it in charge of a load of nuclear missiles, then seal it up inside a mountain behind an impassable barrier of radiation. Spoiler:
Spoiler alert
Colossus is a dick
[close]

Ignore the Esso garage bargain-bin DVD cover on that link, it's way better than it would have you believe. Chilling stuff.
Not-especially-fun fact: during an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Joel and Dr. Forrester ask each other what their favourite film is, and both reply "Colossus: The Forbin Project" without any hesitation. Which inspired me to watch it, and I'm glad I did because it's brilliant.

zomgmouse

Half of the other posters on the IMDb page for that have the quote "A shocker! Fascinating!" on them. I think I'm going to have to add this to my list.

mothman

It's one of those films I've always wanted to watch but it never seems to be on (terrestrial) TV.

Paaaaul

Quote from: mothman on November 16, 2013, 02:47:33 PM
It's one of those films I've always wanted to watch but it never seems to be on (terrestrial) TV.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZE6ltxqEmA

Santa's Boyfriend

Quote from: babyshambler on August 03, 2013, 02:00:32 PM
I came to recommend Beyond the black rainbow, but I see that's been thoroughly taken care of.

I saw Beyond the Black Rainbow on Netflix US, and although it's visually extraordinary, that doesn't make up for the fact that the story is paper-thin and doesn't really make any sense.  You'll be blown away by the visuals, but will be left feeling strangely empty by the end of the film.

mothman

I watched Colossus: The Forbin Project last night, and enjoyed it. The plot - well, while I wouldn't call it predictable, let's say there weren't many real surprises, but then I'm watching it with the benefit of four decades exposure to Machine Singularities, Robot Uprisings - yer Terminators, stuff like Ellison's I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream and so forth - so I can't hold that against it.

One thing I couldn't remember going in was when it was made. I had a vague idea it was 1976, but that was dispelled as soon as I started watching. It was very sixties in look, so I settled for 1966 in the end. Turns out it was 1970 - obviously made by the part of Hollywood that did its best to ignore the seismic shifts in culture, society and fashion that happened over the previous 5 years. The soundtrack combined Raymond Scott-esque electronic bleeping with episode-of-Columbo-standard incidental music.

One thing that struck me was the ambiguousness of the ending - I'll Spoiler this.
Spoiler alert
You ended with Dr. Forbin essentially playing Captain Kirk, reasoning with the alien-supercomputer-of-the-week that Man needs to be free, and Colossus/Guardian countering with the very countercultural idea that the freedoms it is taking away from humanity were only ever an illusion. That's suggest a very post-Nixon mistrust of authority - this was before Watergate, but after Tricky Dicky had been elected on a platform of ending the Vietnam War, and then escalated it. It would be interesting to see what World Control actually did for humanity, whether the changes would truly be benevolent, that human nature could be improved by removing the negative elements without dimming the positive. Colossus did display quite an understanding of human nature, especially in knowing that not only could it inflict mass destruction on millions, but it could also easily order the murder of individuals and there would be someone willing to carry it out - after all, you weren't shown the US President or the Soviet Premier agreeing to the executions of Forbin's staff or his Russian coubnterpart, the local goons just did it. It's ironic that Forbin suggested Colossus wouldn't need security guards - Colossus obviously knew better... The idea of governments agreeing to commit indivdual criminsal acts in fear of greater reprisal, it reminded me of Jack Bauer being forced to execute one of his colleagues in 24, or even the pig-fucking PM in Black Mirror.
[close]

Mark Steels Stockbroker

I saw The Forbin Project as part of a BBC2 SF film season back in 1983.

The film was taken from a book, which had 2 sequels. According to wikipedia,
Spoiler alert
what happens is that the Earth is invaded by aliens who promise to liberate us from computer control, but it turns out Colossus was really protecting us from them all along, or something.
[close]

Gulftastic

Quote from: Mark Steels Stockbroker on December 15, 2013, 07:30:38 PM
I saw The Forbin Project as part of a BBC2 SF film season back in 1983.



Ah, you and me both, MSS. That was a great season. Silent Running, This Island Earth, When World's Collide were other ones I remember from it.

mothman

Actually, I think I remember this series too. Was there an accompanying/included documentary film on the history of classic SF films, wackily presented by Robin Williams in his Mork & Mindy days?