Surveying the Gen X landscape and the origins of geek
If this is Escape from New York playing in New York, that’s pretty cool. Even better if it’s Manhattan.
Sign me up for Firecracker, also from 1981: “She’ll mix seduction with destruction in the screen’s first erotic Kung Fu classic.”
(Photo via Daniel Aull/Flickr; video via Shout Factory)
Above: Cameron paints the hero’s village—a beautiful, surreal design—from BBTS.
Below: Cameron painting the skyline for Escape from New York.
And here’s a short magazine blurb on Galaxy of Terror. The man squatting next to the pyramid is Robert Skotak. The two also worked together on Battle Beyond the Stars and Escape from New York, and Cameron later hired Skotak as visual effects supervisor for Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and Titanic.
Cameron remembers his friends, I’ll give him that, and Aliens is the greatest sci-fi action movie ever made.
(Images via CHUD.com, Ain’t it Cool News, and Atomic Donkey)
Chuck Comisky was the special effects supervisor on Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), a fun, clever sci-fi adaptation of The Magnificent Seven. His interview defines what was great about B movies when the people who made them had the integrity and talent to turn serious time and money constraints into lasting artistic triumphs, many of the productions outdoing their big budget counterparts. Here’s Comiski summing it up:
And what we’re doing is we’re substituting ingenuity, hard work, and a little bit of common sense for a big budget. When you don’t have money and you don’t have a big budget, it forces you to think creatively. You have to say, “How the hell are we gonna’ get the shot and make it look good: We don’t have any money to do it with.” So then you find yourself manufacturing some of your models out of greeting card racks and terrariums and developing systems… to avoid matte problems.
Comiski has some curt words for the first art director on the film, who “never took the trouble to look at the [spaceship] models and try to match up the interiors to the ships.” Comiski and his crew had to sort all of that out in addition to doing all the effects. The first art director was fired before shooting started and Comiski hired a replacement: James Cameron*. It was Cameron’s big break, and he went on to do some really brilliant work for other notable B features, including Escape from New York and Galaxy of Terror (both from 1981).
Comiski has great things to say about the visual effects in Star Wars, but he pans The Black Hole and Star Trek: The Motion Picture for being bloated and unimaginative—for substituting money for “creative imagination.” Fantastic Films asks him if he would have done more elaborate effects if the budget had been bigger. “No,” he says. “If I had more money, the one thing I would do is pay my people more money.”
Cameron, after Titanic made all that money and won all those Oscars, would return the favor and hire Comiski as visual effects supervisor for Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) and, later, as 3D specialist on Avatar (2009). The irony is almost painful: Avatar is the most bloated sci-fi production in history, a textbook case of throwing money at effects to gloss over a hackneyed script. I won’t say it doesn’t look like shiny candy, or that it didn’t make a gazillion dollars, but I’d much rather rewatch Battle Beyond the Stars. It’s a superior film with, yes, better special effects.
_________________________________________
*In The Directors: Take One, Volume One (Ed. Robert J. Emery), Cameron says: “I was actually hired by the head of visual effects on a movie called Battle Beyond the Stars… Then they fired the art director because he wasn’t prepared… So I said, `Oh, I’ll do that.’ So I became the art director on the film.”
The Wikipedia entry on Battle Beyond the Stars reads, in part: “after the original art director for the film had been fired, Cameron became responsible for the special effects in Battle Beyond the Stars, or, as Cameron later put it, `production design and art direction.'” This is incorrect. Comiski was in fact responsible for special effects, which are not the same thing as production design or art direction.
Charles Breen appears to be the art director who was fired. Breen was assistant art director on, go figure, Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
(The first installment of Fantastic Films #20 is here.)
Time for a new feature, this one inspired by Lefty Limbo’s find above. He nails all the signs of the times in his post, and between us I think we identified all the visible movies, except for the one at the bottom left corner of notorious Psycho rip-off I Dismember Mama (the title spoofs I Remember Mama, a 1944 Broadway drama adapted for the screen in 1948). We put the year at 1987 based on the Witchboard and Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors counter displays.
I worked in a video store at the time, and I watched every one of these movies multiple times, customers be damned. (Once, for somebody’s birthday, we had a slumber party in the store and watched Videodrome and other “racy” fare after the parental chaperone nodded off.)
For most people interested in non-mainstream films, the VHS box was the only thing to go on when deciding what to rent. Sensational art (a detail of the theatrical poster) and creative blurbs often were the difference between profit and loss. A video wasn’t like a book or a comic—you couldn’t have a peek inside and see if it was worth your time and cash.
So I’m going to post full VHS cover spreads—what you would have seen while perusing the empty boxes on the aisles—of flicks from the era.
“In their brutal world, survival is the only grade that counts.” “Check out the scene at CRUISIN’ HIGH… gang warfare is the passing grade!” A little tear of appreciation just formed in the corner of my eye.
Cruisin’ High was originally released as Cat Murkil and the Silks in 1976. (Find a short and sweet review here.) The term “inner city,” with all its negative connotations, entered the vernacular between ’75 and ’85, when street gangs and violent crime were at their peak. Vigilantes were in (Guardian Angels, Bernhard Goetz, Dirty Harry, Paul Kersey, Mack Bolan, The Punisher), and the very concept of gangs scared the living crap out of all the people in the suburbs who promptly rented the movies designed to exploit their fear. “Warr-ee-urrs, come out to PLAY-EE-AAAY…”
In Street Trash, the owner of a liquor store finds a stash of bad booze in his basement and, humanitarian that he is, sells it to the area winos. Problem: the bad booze literally melts the bums. It’s fantastic, a minor horror classic. The blurb is clunky, but the ingeniously trashy art makes up for it. Dude is melting into the toilet, people!
(First image originally via Pinterest; VHS cover images via VHS Wasteland)
Some of you will remember a controversial film from 1984 called Silent Night, Deadly Night (the working title was “Slayride”), in which a traumatized teenager goes nuts, puts on a Santa suit, and starts killing folks. Well, right before he loses it, Billy (that’s his name) works at Ira’s Toys, and that’s what you see here.
Toys of note include Jabba the Hut and Luke Skywalker, Hot Wheels Wipe-Out, Stomper: Badlands Trail, Matchbox Super Garage, Castle Grayskull, and, best of all, the psychedelic Krull board game. Get in my closet! Also, in the very last shot, you can see a massive, nondescript AT-AT box behind Grayskull.
Thanks goes to Geektarded for spying the goodness and grabbing the screenshots. Special thanks to Transformer World 2005 for the heads up (and the mention).
Really? I must have seen this movie a hundred times when it first came out on video (it’s still one of my all-time faves), but I had no idea there was a game. The cool illustration on the instructions title page is by Bill Willingham. You can see his signature on the plane. The second drawing—the “crazies” coming out of the sewer—might be an Erol Otus. Isn’t that an “EO” in the top right corner?
I would love to play this baby.
(Images via Board Game Geek and eBay)
Yeah, I just transcribed the entire voice-over for you. Please do me the favor of passing it along and sprinkling phrases of it into your everyday conversation. For example, if your coworker Bruce says, “I can’t stand this goddamn job and I think my wife is sleeping with a man who wears a ponytail,” you say: “Bruce, you really need to conquer your fears, face the unknown, and discover the incredible link between man, animal, and all that is phantasmagorical.”
It was foretold by witches. It was conceived through sorcery. And it was to be destroyed by all that is evil. But the courage of one mortal saved it.
And so, into an age of darkness, in a time of mysticism, sacrifice, and plunder, there came the only light… THE BEASTMASTER.
Born with the strength of a black tiger, the courage of an eagle, the power that made him more than any hero… more than any lover.
He was lord and master over all beasts. (AAAAAWWK). He was THE BEASTMASTER.
Behold the wonder, the horror, the fantasy, the challenge of the one warrior they called… THE BEASTMASTER.
Marc Singer is Dar. Tanya Roberts is Kiri. Rip Torn is Maax. John Amos is Seth. Together they take us on a fascinating journey back into unexplored times.
Conquer your fears. Face the unknown. And discover the incredible link between man, animal, and all that is phantasmagorical.
In the world of dungeons, dragons, and Dar: THE BEASTMASTER: The epic adventure of a new kind of hero.
Beware: Spoilers ahead.
It’s 1941, and a Nazi regiment has been sent to defend a mountain pass—anchored by a creepy and ancient keep—in the Carpathian mountains. The creepy keeper of the keep warns the Nazis not to mess with the thousands of gleaming crosses embedded in the walls, and even tries to convince them that said crosses aren’t silver (nickel, I tell you, nickel!). But, as we know, Nazis absolutely must possess all that gleams, and they can sniff out the rich stuff as easily as if it were bratwurst. Schnell, Olaf! To the crowbars!
Problem: Prying out just one of the silver crosses unleashes a demon of some sort, which promptly begins tearing apart Nazis on a nightly basis. You see, the keep was built, way back when, not to keep something out, but to keep something in. To keep something in the keep, I mean. The evil thing, that is. What?
Enter the Jewish historian (Ian McKellan) and his pretty daughter (Alberta Watson), who are spared the concentration camp on the condition that they figure out what the hell is tearing apart Nazis on a nightly basis.
Enter Einsatzkommando Major Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne), who, scoffing at the somewhat sympathetic Nazi Captain (Jürgen Prochnow) for buying the supernatural demon theory, begins executing the “partisan” villagers posthaste.
Enter some guy (Scott Glenn) who woke up in Greece with bright lights in his eyes and hauled ass to the keep to stop the demon and have sex with the Jewish historian’s daughter about 20 minutes after meeting her.
Enter the ultimate battle between good and evil, etc.
The Keep is a pretentious mess, directed and adapted by Michael Mann before he decided to insert some substance into his style. Still, it does look dreamy, and the demon in humanoid form is an overlooked makeup effects masterpiece courtesy of Nick Maley, who worked on Star Wars (the Cantina sequence), The Empire Strikes Back, and Krull, among others. The Tangerine Dream soundtrack (listen here) has achieved cult status in its own right, and rightly so.
According to urban legend, a stupidly long director’s cut exists that, if released, would remedy the theatrical release’s incoherence (referred to as “dream logic” by the film’s admirers). Somewhere in the vaults of Paramount, there’s a door marked by a silver (er, nickel) cross. Dare they unleash the beast?
(Poster image via movieposter.com)
(Video via laserdiscphan)
Oh yeah. Rogue Synapse is working on a “functioning Starfighter cabinet” that will play like the one in the nerdtastic ’80s classic, The Last Starfighter. You can actually download and play the final version of the game here. I’ll be all over this when the kid goes to sleep tonight.
Thanks to Wil Wheaton for the heads up.
Happy Friday.
My wife is always telling me about the major crush she had on Andre Gower, so much so that I now get really irritated and jealous when she talks about the crush she had (has, let’s be honest) on the guy. Gower was in the ’80s classic The Monster Squad (1987), for those of you who don’t know. You might remember the scene in which the longstanding metaphysical debate over whether or not Wolfman has nards is settled once and for all.
Gower was also in Circus of the Stars, a surprisingly long-running show in which the stars of the day dressed up in embarrassing outfits and performed—you guessed it—circus stunts.
Anyway, I sprung the top photo on my wife one night as she was going on about “Andre” and said, triumphantly, “This is the guy you have a crush on?”
She spluttered something about Circus of the Stars not counting, then calmly pulled up the current-ish picture below and said, smugly, “Yeah, this is the guy I have a crush on.”
Andre Gower: one.
2 Warps to Neptune: zero.
(Images via Totally Awesome Teen Pinups and Magazines and IMDb)
2 Warps to Neptune 