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The Weirdest Sci-Fi Kids Movies

Pretty much the only bad thing I can say about Wall-E is that I’m not 10 years old so I can’t enjoy it as much as I would were that the case. It even asks the question I find most fascinating in SF: how much of the natural world is an innate human need?

But the film is just another example of great science fiction aimed at young people. Generally kids have an appetite for the non-real and are willing to suspend belief rather than leave a theater arguing whether something is fantasy, regular sci-fi, hard sci-fi, or not genre at all. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if City of Ember is just as great. The Jeanne Duprau young adult novel was adapted for the screen by the very talented Caroline Thompson (who wrote Edward Scissorhands.)

Here some other great children’s sci-fi movies (and if this list seems 80s-centric, that is likely because of my age):

Jacob Two-two Meets the Hooded Fang, 1978

It is the darkest children’s story I can think of, outside of Daniel Handler and the Brothers Grimm, and this is its darkest adaptation. Jacob is sent to the “child prison” Slimer’s Island for insulting a candy store clerk. He says “Thank you very much, thank you very much!” The shopkeeeper thinks he’s insincere, but really Jacob has a bizarre stutter where he repeats himself. So for the crime of insincerity, Jacob is sentenced to “Two Years, Two months, two weeks, two minutes and two seconds”

Hooded Fang, a former wrestler, is the prison warden, and with a job like that is it redundant to say he hates kids? Hooded Flang’s two flunkies are Mr.Fish, a fish/human hybrid and Ms. Fowl, a bird-lady — all metallic makeup and theater whisper overacting. But never fear, child superheros Intrepid Shapiro and Fearless O’Toole are on the case.

I spent sometime in 2003 hunting the film down on VHS. Thankfully it’s now all on YouTube. Start from the beginning.

The Peanut Butter Solution, 1985

This is sci-fi mad science at its finest. Michael is spooked by something he finds exploring a haunted house. Soon afterward his hair falls out due to a condition the doctor calls, “Hairrem Scarrem.” No ten year old can wear a wig for long, so relief comes in the form of a ghost offering him peanut butter to rub on his head. Michael mistakenly uses too much and soon the hair growth is out of control. (A lot of you right now are laughing in anticipation of me mentioning that one mildly raunchy scene. Well, I’m not going to talk about it. This is a family website okay? Oh…alright.) Later, Michael’s art teacher gets the wacky idea to use his hair to build paint brushes. Soon they realize using these brushes allows an artist to instantly paint whatever he or she imagines.

The Peanut Butter Solution is the best known in a series of supernatural children’s movies, “Tales for All.”

Konrad, 1985

The most obscure film on the list. I’m tempted to purchase one of the VHS cassettes on Amazon as there is so little information out there on this one. This film is about a boy robot that arrives at their door totally naked inside a metal vat. From the All Movie Guide:

Directed by Nell Cox, Konrad centers around a strange, technology dominated method of placing children in appropriate foster homes. When a computer error sends Konrad (Huckleberry Fox), a seemingly ideal child, to an eccentric woman whose many quirks qualify her as a definite reject by the mysterious “birth factory’s” standards, no one is prepared for the resulting chaos. The film also features Ned Beatty, Polly Holliday, and Max Wright.

The Amazon reviews are all enthusiastic and not in the somewhat apologetic nostalgic way you typically find with someone remarking on a film once loved in childhood.

Small Wonder, 1985 and Out of This World, 1987 (TV)

Two is a trend! OK, this is TV and I already posted about it, but in cased you missed it, here are my two favorite TV shows from childhood.

The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, 1964

This innocuous seeming Disney film starring gay icon and “Scrabbled Egghead” Tommy Kirk (and Annette Funichello) is actually a subversive argument against the covert CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, MKULTRA. After investigating hypnosis, Merlin discovers the secret to mind reading. The resulting internal dialogue he intercepts is just barely as scandalous as what Mel Gibson hears in What Women Want. In my favorite scene he tells everyone in the college library to “SHUT UP!”

The Flight of the Navigator, 1986

A film about aliens and time travel with one of the coolest looking spacecrafts I’ve ever seen. David is abducted by an alien ship. Because of time dilation he thinks he’s only been gone a few hours, but he actually returns to earth eight years later. Wikipedia has a long plot summary. This is a science fiction classic that’s yet to get its due.

Others I missed:

A lot of great science fiction children’s movies came out of the 80s like The Explorers, Baby, and The Electric Grandmother, (unfortunately I don’t remember these ones very well.) There’s ET of course, and Pinocchio probably counts as sci-fi too. I remember The Boy Who Could Fly, but not too fondly. I also remember being a kid and thinking Honey, I Shrunk the Kids seemed pretty dumb. And don’t forget, two of the best fantasy films of all time — Neverending Story and Return to Oz — also came out of that era. Earlier Fred MacMurray made a career out of weird kids sci-fi, with Flubber and the Absent Minded Professor.

Update: Somehow when I wrote this I blanked out about one of my childhood favorites The Brave Little Toaster, written by the same person responsible for most of my favorite books 20 years later: Thomas M Disch. (Although, I guess it just bridges the fantasy/sci-fi line.)

Posted by Joanne on Jul 2, 2008 | Link

Possession

Poor Sam Neill, Always the cuckhold, isn’t he? (In The Horse Whisperer, Yes,The Piano, Sleeping Dogs, Restoration, Dead Calm, etc, etc… He’s been in at least 400 films, so there’s going to be some repetition, but still, what is it about this poor man?)

Well, I like you, Sam Neill. Especially in Possession.

The 1980 film by Polish director Andrzej Zulawski begins like a traditional art film, with Fassbinder-like bright colors and hysterics. Sam Neill’s character discovers his wife, played Isabelle Adjani, is having an affair. He starts seeing a ballet instructor who is also played by Adjani, and the story continues using borrowed plot furniture from science fiction and horror — clones, serpents, slashings. Zulawski uses pulp elements as substitutes for emotions, like Cronenberg’s The Brood. It isn’t science fiction and it isn’t a horror film: it’s about the dissolve of a marriage, and the exaggerations — the overacting, the violence, the blood, the chaos — externalize emotions running high. One reviewer calls it “Grand Guignol.”

Adjani won the Best Actress award at Cannes, and it’s no surprise. Her freakouts are total adolescent in decadence. Just watch:

Just as memorable is her sex scene with a octopus-like creature, (it was banned in the UK as a “video nasty.”) The serpent was made by Carlo Rambaldi, (who did the special effects for Spielberg’s E.T.).

There are a couple of reasons this film hasn’t got the Cronenberg-sized audience it deserves. First, Zulawski hasn’t made a film in nearly ten years, and this is his only English language film. Secondly, it was badly butchered when it was first released here. Existing VHS copies are missing about 40 minutes of footage. The cut was to market it as part of the 80s junk drawer Italian horror craze — barf bags were distributed at American screenings. Horror fanatics who hate art films won’t like it, and those with strictly pretentious taste are sure to despise it. Thankfully, these binary distinctions are no longer as relevant — the art world includes some of the most voracious consumers of horror film.

I first found a copy of it at Borders about five years ago. It came as a set with a Mario Bava film. It’s no longer in print. Right now, the DVD is $50.00 through Amazon’s sellers. But there is good news: La Femme Publique (”The Public Woman”) will be released by Mondo Vision this year. If they continue releasing Zulawski’s other films, he may finally get the recognition he deserves for this incredible film.

Posted by Joanne on Jun 12, 2008 | Link

Dario Argento and the Paradoxical Feminism of Horror Films

Horror film is the greek mythology of our time — unavoidably moralizing. Especially when it comes to cartoonish fare like Nightmare on Elm Street or the Saw series, you root for the villain, dispensing gruesome O. Henry-ending comeuppance — slash the face of the vain beauty queen, paralyze the bully star athlete. Without unlikable victims, the film can’t go on. The viewer’s conscience is brustled. He feels remorse as spectator of evil, even if it is all staged.

Sometimes the most dramatic moments in a horror film are violence towards animals, as they represent the ultimate innocent victims. What did the puppy do to you? I haven’t yet see The Strangers, but Liv Tyler seems perfectly cast. She’s strong and beautiful, in a humble way. Impossible to dislike. You wouldn’t want her in danger, any more than you could stand a chainsaw weilding monster attacking a panda.

Nearly every film has an Athena, an Artemis, a Cassandra, or some figure combining the myths of all three. Either her boyfriend dies early, or he is maimed, paralyzed, zombified, etc. She must defend him, but first herself, relying on wits and strength she never realized she had. Here is a good essay reviewing several of my favorite films, and explaining how horror films subvert traditional gender roles by making a feminine character the hero.

Notably, there are also a number of films with the girl as the killer, the prototype being I Spit on Your Grave (set for a remake,) in which a woman savagely beaten and raped, kills her attackers off one by one. Hard Candy, with Ellen Page playing a young woman who literally castrates would-be pedophiles, is another one. I didn’t particularly like it, but its faults lie not with the premise, so much as the too-cute script.

At least since HP Lovecraft, horror has been indentified as the genre of repressed sexual fantasy. And I’ve heard more than several people compare slashing to penetration, but for now let’s stick to the theory of the final girl, as named by Carol Clover in “Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.” Her book was groundbreaking in that it pointed out the audience — male or female — does not identify with the serial killer, but the lone woman on the run.

Nobody does the “final girl” quite like Dario Argento, then again most of his main characters are women to begin with. His latest film, the third in the trilogy starting with Suspiria and Inferno — Mother of Tears — opened this weekend. But with surprisingly little fanfare considering he got a big shout out in Juno, and nearly every art school girl I know is obsessed with him. If you’re a fan it’s a must-see, and even if your not, it’s a good place to start. It’s missing the hallucinatory neon music box architecture and prog rock orgy that is Goblin, the band who scored his best known films. But absent of these campy stylistic details, one finally able to appreciate Dario Argento’s gift for suspense.

Sarah, an art historian, played by Argento’s extremely attractive daughter Asia, receives a recently unearthed tomb. Opening it and examining its contents becomes a literal play on Pandora’s Box. All the witches in the world — played by hot goth chicks of all ages and ethnicities — come to Rome to celebrate the new darkness. They are lead by the Mother of Tears (her sisters the Mothers of Pain and the Mother of Sighs, were killed in the previous films. This trio is loosely based on Thomas de Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis.)

Sarah discovers she’s a “white witch,” and therefore must confront the Mother of Tears herself for a magic-off. So there is no sense of WTF are you doing walking down those steps? She has to come face to face with the danger.

Argento’s films have always seemed very feminine, perhaps because the mother of Asia, Daria Nicolodi, often cowrote his scripts. There’s a very small list of women writing and directing horror, so her contribution is notable.

Incidentally, I saw two and a half films over this unpleasantly temperatured weekend. First Prince Caspian, (which is delightful) and afterward, I walked into the last hour of Sex and the City, playing down the hall. The script is dumb and Sarah Jessica Parker is annoying (but actually kinda pretty in it, in a Joan Crawford kind of way.) But everyone is there to see the clothes, and it delivers for that. Just as horror film scripts tend to be threadbare, just circumstances that might deliver a zombie sneaking out from under the bed every twenty minutes, SATC was written to show off shoes, and there’s really nothing wrong with it if that’s your thing

The New Wave of Neural-Advertising in Michael Crichton’s “Looker”

Michael Crichton was a promising young director until his books started receiving Hollywood check-sized advances. His 1981 movie “Looker,” starring Albert Finney as a Los Angeles plastic surgeon and Breck-girl Susan Dey, (his love interest, disturbingly enough); sways like a sailor aboard a sinking ship, from misogynistic to feminist and then back again. Take some pre-Tron computer graphics, a time and space-defying raygun, and throw in, as the IMDB plot keywords states, a “Body Landing On Car” and you’ve got a middling techno-fetishing new wave thriller. (The trailer is here, if you are willing to sit through the IMDB ads.)

The L.O.O.K.E.R gun isn’t just a raygun but time-paralysis stunner than magically stops a person in time, giving the shooter invisibility. In retrospect I wonder if that might have influenced my favorite TV show in elementary school, Out of this World. Maybe it’s DARPA’s inspiration for “LED Incapacitator.” Some bad guys are using the Light Ocular-Oriented Kinetic Emotive Responses gun on the models at a Los Angeles agency, as they undress in their highrise apartments. The “Body Landing On Car” is actually a pretty amazing stunt with a lanky model in her undies falling out the window five flights on top of a tan Camero, post-stun. Is it suicide or…????

These same models once used Albert Finney’s services, although he told them, with no ulterior motives, that they were beautiful just they way they were. Still the numbers don’t lie. The modeling agency has the scientific tools to quantify a woman’s looks. For some reason models can’t plateau at near perfection– a 99.4 will eventually be a 99.2 again — and that is precisely why the models need to be die.

The music is great with a theme by a Kim Carnes-soundalike and a Muzak-version of Goblin instrumentals when the pretty girls are under watch. Lots of close-ups on doors with card swipes and plenty of digital animation — that neon-on-black 80s 3D-modeling. It was the first film to create a realistic computer generated human. It was also the first movie to create 3-D shading with a computer (via.)

In my favorite scene, the modeling agency madam shows Finney a commercial with a dot representing his visual fixation (this is of course the least plausible science, as everyone knows now men look at crotches.)

“I have this feeling like I live in the future. I think things have happened when they haven’t yet. It’s just so self-evident they will happen that I begin to act like they’ve already happened,” Crichton says in the commentary. I have to agree with Dan Swensen’s take on Cyberpunk Review, “Looker seems both surprisingly relevant and woefully dated at the same time.”

You have to give Crichton credit for the paranoia and early critique of neural-advertising. The idea of a focus group deciding the shape of a woman’s nose, just likely they would the font or color of an advertisement, is a scary one.

Plus, his film was one of the first to discuss plastic surgery, which was widely understood but a very private, potentially embarrassing matter. Ironically, none of the models in the movie could make it in LA today, where the advent of airbrushing has created demand for the most airbrushed-looking women. There is no such think as a perfect looking woman, which is why “99.4s” often worry about their looks a heck of a lot more than us civilians.

Crichton says he directed movies between writing books, because writers were advised against writing “more than one book every three years” (those were the days!) When you consider Looker, Coma, and the really fantastic Westworld, it’s not out of bounds to think he could have been, if not Ridley Scott, than maybe the sci-fi Brian De Palma.

Film Review: “Confessions of a Superhero”

People call Washington, DC, “Hollywood for ugly people” but the two cities are alike not just because they are one-industry locales. Both places are made up of outsiders. The difference is in how people arrive. You U-haul into DC with a full suitcase, fresh out of college, find a high rise apartment, and have a research assistant job or internship lined up already. The mythic Hollywood welcome — by Greyhound, of course — well, he most likely left a broken home, maybe straight out of high school. He’s got a vague idea of how auditions work and probably still lives in his car.

If you’re on Netflix, you’ve probably seen a recommendation for “Confessions of a Superhero.” Go watch it. It’s not what you think. It exposes the melancholy underbelly of its quirky subject matter, and might be the best documentary yet about the “Boulevard of (Broken) Dreams,” (I have yet to see “Los Angeles Plays Itself.”)

“Yeah, I’m SAG,” the say, as they rationalize their gigs as acting practice, but working as a superhero can be as demoralizing and time-consuming as a temp job. The four would-be actors are unfortunately stereotyped (the obsessive geek, the formerly homeless guy, the small town ex-cheerleader, and the bitter older guy.) but something special comes out in these contrasts.

The major difference between Washington and the LA is that the city of quartz is in love with its myths. As David Denby wrote in his review of the Black Dahlia, “Los Angeles, spreading out, broods over its history until it rots. Events from decades ago—a famous murder, a Hollywood scandal, a corrupt real-estate deal—serve as the basis of L.A. novels and screenplays, and the movies made from these fictions become part of the city’s sense of itself, and that, in turn, gets fed into new novels, screenplays, and journalism.”

And outsiders love the myth too. We want to believe that in five years everyone in the film (well, everyone except the abusive bitter husband) will “make it,” even if just in a perpetually running ad for Claritin-D, and imagine they’ve moved out of their cramped apartments into Pierre Koenig case study houses (because everyone outside of LA pictures the upper middle class in houses like that.)

Archives for the 'Film' Category

The Weirdest Sci-Fi Kids Movies

Possession

Dario Argento and the Paradoxical Feminism of Horror Films

The New Wave of Neural-Advertising in Michael Crichton’s “Looker”

Film Review: “Confessions of a Superhero”

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