The Killings at Outpost Zeta (1980)

THE KILLINGS AT OUTPOST ZETA (1980)
Article 5100 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-6-2016
Directed by Robert Emenegger and Allan Sandler
Featuring Gordon De Vol, Jacqueline Ray, Jackson Bostwick
Country: USA
What it is: Monster movie

When three expeditions to an isolated planetary outpost lose contact with Starfleet, a fourth expedition is set out to find the reason. It is discovered that the earlier expeditions gave rise to a dangerous rock-like life form.

For me, most of the Sandler/Emenegger movies have gotten by because the stories were unusual enough to stave off the problems created by the plodding direction and extreme low budgets. The problem here is that the story isn’t all that unusual; it’s your typical “monster on the loose” story, and it requires the ability to generate suspense, and this requires the ability to change gears in the mood and the flow of the story. That is what doesn’t happen here; once the monsters manifest themselves, the scenes still retain the same low-key, understated mood of the expositional scenes. One of the biggest problems here is the score Robert Emenegger; it’s evocative and moody at first, but it underscores practically every scene in the movie and the lack of variety makes it nearly impossible to change the mood. This, combined with the fact that the special effects are just barely passable to begin with, gives the movie a dreary, tired quality; it’s hard to get involved in the story. I’d have to say this is the least successful of this team’s movies.

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The Force Beyond (1978)

THE FORCE BEYOND (1978)
Article 5099 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-5-2016
Directed by William Sachs
Featuring Orson Welles, Donn Davison, Rosko
Country: USA
What it is: UFO documentary

Evidence is presented for the existence of UFOs.

Here’s another documentary about UFOs, and for good measure, it has some segments on Bigfoot, the attempts to use psychics to find out about the lost continent of Atlantis, and the Bermuda Triangle; only the latter really connects in any real way to the main thrust of the movie. Movies like this were a dime a dozen in the seventies, and most of them were shot in the same dreary way. I’ve seen more of them than I care to mention, but I have to credit director William Sachs for his handling of this one; he actually seems to be going out of his way to make the presentation interesting. This includes such clever touches as incorporating newsreel footage into the movie (Orson Welles appears in this movie only in footage making a quote concerning the “War of the Worlds” scare), arty presentation tricks (such as showing a car driving to a UFO conference while overlapping talks from the conference play over the soundtrack), and keeping the interviews quick and to the point; once one is finished he quickly switches to the next sequence. Is it convincing? Not particularly; in fact, in some of the vaunted footage I can’t see any of the UFOs that are supposed to be in them. Nor does its tendency to jump back and forth between scenes help with the movie’s coherence. It is, however, one of the more creatively mounted UFO documentaries I’ve encountered, and to my mind, that makes it one of the better ones.

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Starship (1984)

STARSHIP (1984)
Article 5098 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-4-2016
Directed by Roger Christian
Featuring Adam Cockburn, Tyler Coppin, Ralph Cotterill
Country: Australia / UK
What it is: Science fiction action

A resistance movement tries to prevent an evil robot empire from killing off six hundred people on a mining planet and replacing them with worker robots.

Every once in a while I run into movies where it seems to me that the director’s intention is to kill all interest I could possibly have in following the story. Granted, when a movie opens with an endless scene of a spaceship landing on a planet while a voice on a monitor spews out an endless stream of science-fictiony jargon, it’s off to a bad start anyway. The characters are a bunch of bland ciphers; granted, in a simple “good guys vs. bad guys” story such as this one, you don’t really need heavy character development, but it should have enough so that you at least get a sense of what you’re supposed to feel about the characters, and it fails to do that. The plot does not seem inclined to keep the viewer tuned in to what’s going on and there’s an annoying addiction to extreme close-up shots (which seems to be less from the desire for you to know the character’s faces and more to keep you from getting a good look at the sets). In the end, the movie inspired only apathy in me; for much of the time I did not know what was going on, and I cared even less. The only sequence that might catch your attention is an action sequence on a huge desert-roving truck, and that isn’t particularly well done. This one was just plain dull.

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Zombie Island Massacre (1984)

ZOMBIE ISLAND MASSACRE (1984)
Article 5097 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-3-2016
Directed by John N. Carter
Featuring David Broadnax, Rita Jenrette, Tom Cantrell
Country: USA
What it is: Not what you think it is and nothing you’d want to see

After witnessing a voodoo ceremony, several vacationers in the Caribbean find themselves stranded in the middle of nowhere, and something is picking them off one by one…

When I saw CANNIBALS, I made the note that most of the alternate titles had the word “zombie” in the title, and I pondered on the fact that though there were indeed zombies in the movie, they largely served as minions and racked up no body count. But…at least it HAD zombies. Which is not to say that a body count is not racked up here – in fact, the murders come so thick and fast at a certain point, you’ll wonder if the movie will be longer than forty-five minutes. But when you find out what’s racking up the body count, it will be the final nail in the coffin of this one. And I do mean “final nail”; the lifeless direction, the characterless characters, the bland dialogue, and the listless pace will most likely have drained your will to pay attention by that point. I always wondered why the only comments I ever found on this movie highlighted Rita Jenrette’s nude scene near the beginning of the movie; it’s about the only thing worth remembering. And you know a movie is shoddy when it can’t even be bothered to find enough background music to cover the closing credits.

By the way, IMDB lists the length of this movie as 95 minutes. My print ran 84 minutes. I consider this a blessing in disguise; about the only thing that other eleven minutes could add to this movie is running time.

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Hospital Massacre (1981)

HOSPITAL MASSACRE (1981)
aka X-Ray
Article 5096 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-2-2016
Directed by Boaz Davidson
Featuring Barbi Benton, Charles Lucia, Jon Van Ness
Country: USA
What it is: Slasher film

On Valentine’s Day, I woman goes to the hospital to get the results of some tests, but when a sinister killer switches her test results, she finds herself held captive there to await further tests. What does the killer have in mind for her?

Like MY BLOODY VALENTINE, this one takes place on Valentine’s Day. Like HALLOWEEN II, almost all of the action takes place in a hospital. About half of the movie is made up of the usual slasher cliches; you’ll know them when you see them. It’s the other half of the movie that perks my interest up. It’s one of the rare slashers where the murders don’t seem indiscriminate; the killer has a specific reason he targets every one he does. The movie also has some unexpected quirky touches, such as the way that practically every character you encounter is at least a little bit creepy, or the way that a sense of humor permeates the proceedings; one of my favorite moments has our heroine looking for help in a room populated only with three men in complete body traction. It’s also one of those movies where the fake scares are actually a bit fun.
All in all, this is a mixed bag, but I have to admit I liked this one a bit better than I do most slasher films.

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Wombling Free (1977)

WOMBLING FREE (1977)
Article 5095 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-1-2016
Directed by Lionel Jeffries
Featuring David Tomlinson, Frances de la Tour, Bonnie Langford
Country: UK
What it is: Fantasy environmentalism

The Wombles of Wimbledon Commons seek to make their presence known to a family known as the Frogmortons so they can spread their anti-littering message.

The Wombles are a group of short, fat, furry creatures largely invisible to humans who clean up the litter the others leave behind. They started out as characters in an English children’s book series from the late sixties. They gained fame in England when they were featured in a TV series that brought them to life via stop-motion animation in five-minute segments. I’d heard about them some time ago, but my only encounter with them up to this point was in a song called “Wombling Summer Party” from a collection of summer songs that I’d picked up at one point. This movie marks my first visual encounter with them.

I have to admit that the stop-motion animated series does intrigue me a bit; it sounds like the presentation would add quite a bit of charm to didactic nature of the series. Unfortunately, this movie does not feature stop-motion animation. Here, the Wombles are people in costumes, sort of like the Sid and Marty Krofft productions of the sixties and seventies. Also, what might be charming in five-minute segments might become less so in a full-length movie, and, quite frankly, the whimsical nature of the proceedings starts to wear thin very quickly here, especially since the story is disjointed and episodic. At times things get pretty weird and even a bit unpleasant; a dinner party scene with a drunk hostess seems rather out of place in particular. There is a charming little sequence where the Wombles fantasize they’re appearing in famous movie musical sequences; for me, this was the high point of the movie. The rest of the movie strikes me as being mostly memorable as a curio. Apparently, Jon Pertwee voices one of the Wombles.

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Space Firebird (1980)

SPACE FIREBIRD (1980)
aka Space Firebird 2772, Hi no tori 2772: Ai no kosumozon
Article 5094 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-28-2016
Directed by Taku Sugiyama
Featuring the voices of Chris Hilton and Ted Thomas
Country: Japan
What it is: Cosmic anime

In a Dystopian future of the planet earth, a space pilot is the only hope for the dying planet when he embarks on a quest to find a monstrous firebird that is the only thing that can save the planet.

I don’t know if it’s because most of my sources tend to neglect anime or if it’s because the form didn’t really take off until a later period of time, but I do know that it’s still a pretty rare occasion when I cover it. This one has a bit more in the way of Western cultural influences according to IMDB; it was apparently inspired by the work of Igor Stravinsky (I’m guessing the Firebird Suite was a big part of it), some Disney animated works (PINOCCHIO is perhaps the most obvious), and it uses certain Western styles of animation (this is one of the rare examples of anime that uses rotoscoping). Still, it is very much a work of anime, and I have to confess that I’m still not quite used to the form; I find myself more apt to enjoy them on an intellectual level but I never quite get lost in them, and the emotional elements remain distant. The version I saw was dubbed into English, and that always makes things seem a little cheesier than they would otherwise be. Still, I generally like this one, and some of the scenes are positively surreal; in particular, a scene on a strange planet with bizarre wildlife is memorable. And it’s always amusing to see movies in which creatures are modeled off of such unlikely items as dice and bagpipes.

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Wolfen (1981)

WOLFEN (1981)
Article 5093 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-28-2016
Directed by Michael Wadleigh
Featuring Albert Finney, Diane Venora, Edward James Olmos
Country: USA
What it is: Creature feature

A series of murders seem to be the result of a creature with wolf-like features. What are they, and do they have a connection with a group of native American terrorists?

This is one of those movies that is based on a novel. It’s also one of those movies that feels like it’s based on a novel. Finally, it’s one of those movies that feels as if the novel is better; I’ve not read Whitley Strieber novel, but I feel that the various characters in the story have a more complex involvement in the story than I see in the movie, especially Albert Finney’s detective character. In its present form, the movie feels like the scenes would work a little better if I were reading them than watching them. The main exception are the various tracking POV shots of the title creatures, which are very effective; in fact, they’re so effective that it’s more than a little anticlimactic when you actually see them for the first time. There are things I like about the movie, but my overall impression is that the movie falls short of what it could have been.

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Sledge Hammer (1983)

SLEDGE HAMMER (1983)
aka Sledgehammer
Article 5092 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-27-2016
Directed by David A. Prior
Featuring Ted Prior, Linda McGill, John Eastman
Country: USA
What it is: Low-budget slasher film

Ten years ago, two lovers were beaten to death by a sledgehammer-wielding psychopath in a remote cabin. Today, partying teens are staying in the cabin. Will the psycho return?

The special effects in this tiny-budgeted shot-on-video horror movie are credited to “Blood & Guts”, which is about as blunt a title as you can get, but then, what do you expect from a movie called SLEDGE HAMMER? I will give the movie credit for having a claustrophobic and surreal vibe to it, much of it probably due to the fact that it was made with an extreme low budget. Beyond that though, it’s the usual compendium of slasher cliches, badly acted and with a truly annoying slowness to the proceedings. The latter condition seems to be the result of the fact that though the copy of the movie I saw ran about 84 minutes, it looks like only about 65 minutes of footage was shot. The movie pads itself out by repeating scenes (the opening scene is almost repeated in its entirety during the middle of the movie), throwing in static shots of the house at random, and the truly excessive use of slow motion; every chase and murder just seems to drag on forever. There’s only one thing this movie does quickly, and that is it makes you hate the partying teens so quickly that you’re eager to see them offed as soon as possible. And all the cliches aren’t from slasher films, either; it’s willing to borrow from the seventies as well with a “lovers romping through the field to romantic music” sequence (in slow-motion, of course) that features such romantic acts as the boy balancing his can of beer on his girl’s head. I wish I could say that scene was intentional parody, but given that would be the only such moment in the film, I’m rather doubtful. A five-minute ending credits sequence also stretches the movie out, but if you reach that point, you may want to keep your eyes open; some of those names look highly suspicious.

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Sketches of a Strangler (1978)

SKETCHES OF A STRANGLER (1978)
Article 5091 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-26-2019
Directed by Paul Leder
Featuring Allen Garfield, Meredith MacRea, Frank Whiteman
Country: USA
What it is: Psycho killer

An artist living with his sister is a serial killer who strangles prostitutes. When the sister of one of his victims arrives in town, she decides to catch the killer on her own by… oh, no, not again!

It seems only a short time ago that I complained about this tiresome and stupid plot contrivance, but here it is again – the sister of a murder victim tries to catch the killer by putting herself in the exact same position as her sister did, and in this case, that means she takes up prostitution in an attempt to catch him. I’ve reached the point where I almost stop taking the movie seriously at this point alone. Granted, even without this plot contrivance, there’s not a lot that could save this movie; even the fact that the acting is quite good doesn’t compensate for the fact that there’s not a plot element here that I haven’t seen before, and the turgid pacing of the movie is another minus. This is one of the dreariest stretches of celluloid I’ve encountered in quite a while.

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