This Island Earth (1955)

Dr. Cal Meacham: Sun lamp?

Dr. Ruth Adams: That's what it looks like. Only instead of a suntan, you get your brain cells rearranged.

The 50’s really gave Sci-fi a boost in popularity with flying saucers, aliens and other weird and wonderful technologies.  The funny thing is these 50’s sci-fi films generally take themselves seriously and oddly enough the imagination had to run wild to overlook some of the limitations of the technology of the day.  They had no CGI, green screens or other tech to fake spaceships or aliens so it was all done with hard work, miniatures and costumes (some worked well, some not so well).  On top of that, prior to the 1956 Forbidden Planet, sci-fi flicks were classed as “B” movies and therefore did not attract the budget for intricate levels of detail so sometimes they had quite simplistic and in some cases laughable effects to keep the costs down.  This Island Earth has a creature used in the latter part of the film that had some issues which caused a lot of embarrassment for the actors in the premiere.  The creature was supposed to have a full body costume but they couldn’t get the bottom half to work properly so due to studio deadlines they had to resort to using trousers which makes it look…umm…well kinda dodgy, real dodgy, but we can overlook that I think ☺

Electronic Engineer Dr. Cal Meacham (Rex Reason) is studying the industrial application of nuclear energy.  When some parts of an unknown source come his way he assembles them and this leads to him coming in contact with a being called Exeter (Jeff Morrow) who invites Cal to a research lab in Georgia.  Cal agrees to go and is met by Dr. Ruth Adams (Faith Domergue) who leads him to the facility.  As time progresses they realise something is wrong with the other scientists so they attempt to flee only to be taken captive by these aliens and flown to the planet Metaluna to help them whilst they are under attack from Zagon starships.

It’s an interesting story that is intelligently laid out and told in its brisk 86 minutes which doesn’t allow much time to develop the mystery behind these “aliens” that are already on earth apart from them seeking a certain mineral.  That aside it’s quite enjoyable though I thought It Came from Outer Space was better, however here we have the opportunity to see another world which adds to the interest of the film.  The effects are not too bad considering when it was made, though the creature looked a bit dodgy with the pants in some ways, however believe it or not that very same creature is what keeps this movie alive and is what people are reminded of when the movie is mentioned.

The DVD reviewed is an Australian release by Bounty Entertainment and can be purchased either through them or via ebay.  It’s a barebones release that has only the movie in about a 1.37:1 aspect ratio and standard Dolby 2 channel stereo sound.  There is a UK release available on DVD as well but is in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio again with no extras and finally there is also a Bluray available from Germany which is also in widescreen 1.85:1 and has a few extras that may be worth looking at if you are a big fan of the movie.  But overall the Aussie release is ideal as the image is quite good though with a few spots, dust and speckles but nothing nasty and on top of that it can be bought for a very reasonable price.

Overall the movie isn’t too bad, perhaps not a stand out movie but certainly not bad.  I didn’t know of the movie until I looked up a list of some of the best sci-fi movies from the 50’s but I’m glad I watched though I wouldn’t put it as one of my favourites.  The creature is kinda cool in a 50’s sorta way but what holds up the movie is also the fact that it’s a bit more intelligent than many others, and that’s a good thing.  If you’re a fan of 50’s sci-fi then grab yourself a copy, sit back and enjoy.  If you just want to watch the best sci-fi the 50’s had to offer, then this would probably be in the top 20 list.  If you’re keen for a Star Trek type movie with great effects… look elsewhere ;)

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Wake in Fright (1971)

Dick: [referring to John Grant] What's the matter with him? He'd rather talk to a woman than drink?

Tim Hynes: Schoolteacher.

Dick: Oh.

Director:  Ted Kotcheff
Producer:  George WIlloughby
Main Cast:  Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond, Chips Rafferty, Jack Thompson, John Meillon
Runtime:  108 minutes

The Australian movie industry was apparently in a bad state after WW2 and certain agreements with Great Britain meant there was even less guarantee that Australian made films would even see a box office in England so the industry continued to decline with few good movies and no doubt great resistance in funding for films.  Then in 1966 the comedy “They’re a weird mob” got surprising interest and gave a hint of what was to come in the Australian “New Wave” of cinema.  

Come 1970 and a Canadian-Bulgarian director/producer Ted Kotcheff (who somewhat later went on to direct Hollywood films like “First Blood” and “Weekend at Bernie’s”) came to Australia to make a film based on a 1961 novel of the same name.  The director stayed in Broken Hill for a few months to get a good handle on Outback life and came out with this movie that shocked audiences around the world, though it was, strangely, popular in France.

The film was thought to be lost “forever” but after 10 years of searching a copy was finally found in Boston USA in a container marked for destruction.  Steps were then taken to arrange a complete restoration of this Australian classic.

The movie starts out doing a 360 degree pan of “Tiboonda” (a fake name for a town outside of Broken Hill NSW) which consists of a school house and a Hotel/Pub.  It’s the last day of school before the 6 week Christmas Holidays and the school teacher, John Grant (Gary Bond), has the intention to go back to Sydney to visit his girl who lives there.  Once school finishes he gets the train to Bundayabba (it was based and filmed in Broken Hill) and whilst killing a bit of time he gets drawn into playing Two-up and losses all of his money and gets stuck in “The Yabba” (short for Bundayabba).  As an outsider he is welcomed by the local police officer Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty’s last film) but then gets mixed up with the wrong group of people (with leads of Jack Thompson and Donald Pleasence) who lead him on a drinking binge along with some Roo hunting and his “normal” life is suddenly turned upside down.

The movie is so raw in its depiction of Outback life that it caused a stir among locals saying that its giving Australians a bad image and I would in some ways agree with that but the book was written with inspiration from Broken Hill so perhaps there is “elements” of truth to it.  Personally as a non-drinker, the amount of drinking in the film is sad but it adds to the feeling of moral degradation that is experienced by the character and the viewer.  In a place like the outback where water may not have been the best I can only assume that beer was the norm and that is not hard to imagine seeing a pub is a common thing in the outback (look at the town in the opening scene of the movie based in Horse Lake).  

In Broken Hill at the time the men outnumbered the female population 3:1 and there was also a hefty suicide rate so it’s safe to say that it was not all peachy in the outback 40-50 years ago.  As the Director states in the extra features, the time he spent in Broken Hill helped him get some understanding of the culture before making the film.  He came to the conclusion that fighting among the men was more about “human contact” than it was about fighting.  Men fought in order to get that human contact that would normally be sought other ways in a community with a more balanced population and geographical location.  So when viewed with this background it helps us to understand the movie a bit more.

I mentioned above that there is a Roo hunt and I make special mention of this because it’s not a fake hunt but rather the footage taken from an actual roo shoot by professional hunters to cull the roo population.  The footage was taken by the film crew with no direction from the Director apart from “just do your daily job”.  If you get squirmish about this then you may want to skip this part of the film because……. well let’s just say that you will not see anything like this in a film either before or after unless it’s a documentary.  It caused people to walk out of its 2012 Cannes Film Festival showing so you have been warned.

There are also no stunt people in the movie so everything is done by the actors which adds incredible realism to the movie.

The disc reviewed was imported from the UK and comes under the Eureka “Masters of Cinema” Dual Format (Bluray and DVD in one package) guise which is usually reserved for special films.  The movie is also available in Australia as a DVD or Bluray but with limited extra features.  The Masters of Cinema edition shows the film in its restored 1.85:1 aspect ratio with DTS HD Master Audio 2.0 sound.  The image quality is nice and the sound is clear and adequate for a movie of this type.  The DVD was not tested.  The Bluray has the following extras:

• Audio Commentary by director Ted Kotchell and editor Anthony Buckley
• A 2009 video interview with Ted Kotchell
• ABS’s 7:30 Report video piece about the discovery and restoration of the film
• A vintage video piece called “Who Needs Art?”
• Outback TV spot (the movie was also called Outback)
• UK theatrical trailer
• 48 page booklet with essays by various people about the movie

I can see how the movie has become a classic as it was instrumental in starting off the Australian movie industry again and it was just so different to the movies at that time.  It has a realistic feel to it (though I would like to think that it is exaggerated) which is made even stronger by the two roo shoot scenes.  Overall it makes me feel that making good choices in life is very important and also to be careful who you hang out with.  What we choose out of sudden compulsion can have disastrous effects that are not really seen at the time but are manifest later in life.  It also points out that we do not always realise just how far we may have slipped down the moral sink until you come in contact with an outsider.  It should be challenging to us all in that regard because we are often blind to our own motives and habitual actions.

Would I recommend the movie?  Yes and no.  It is disturbing in its depiction of outback life and the addiction to alcohol, there is also a scene or two of nudity in the film which makes it harder to recommend and of course there is swearing (older Australian coarse language common to 70’s lingo, not newer course language), but as a movie putting aside the scene or two of nudity, the movie is really interesting and certainly one of those classics alongside “Walkabout” and “Picnic at Hanging Rock” and is one of the few Australian movies that currently has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  

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The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906)

When the world was showing 10-15min narrative movies in the silent era, Australia popped up in 1906 with the world’s first and longest narrative feature film at the time which, they say, ran for about an hour.  It was also, apparently, banned from screening in Benalla and Wangaratta VIC in 1907 and also in Adelaide in 1911 (I wonder why lol).  This is The Story of the Kelly Gang.

Sadly the majority of that footage has been lost forever however over a number of years small fragments have been recovered, restored and released on DVD by the National Film & Sound Archive (NFSA) in Australia.  About 15 minutes of restored footage is available to view with either a silent, piano or “experimental” soundtrack along with a commentary and there is the option to view the “Study” edition which runs for about 30 minutes that has intertitles and still images to give you an idea as to what is happening in the story.  I watched both the 15 and 30 minute versions with the piano soundtrack for the 15-minute part of the film and the commentary by Film Historian Ian Christie and Graham Shirley, the NFSA’s Senior Curator of Moving Image, for the 30-minute version which is really quite informative.

The recovered film we have essentially covers some of the Kelly Gang’s exploits and his last stand which is only about a quarter of the film’s original length however it gives us an idea as to where the film was heading.  It’s not hard to grasp that film was expensive so when they started rolling they kept rolling till that scene was done whether it be right or not so there doesn’t appear to have been various takes, just one and that will have to do.  In one scene a horse wanders off screen and you can tell some of the actors are not sure what they should do next but it wanders back on and they just continue.  Today that would be unacceptable however in those times it was a bit more acceptable no doubt due to expense.

Considering the film is about 110 years old what we have has been restored quite well (my scoring takes into account the age of the film) though there are sections which were just damaged beyond repair and it really shows.  There is a “before and after” sequence which shows how much work was done to restore the film and it is quite interesting.  

The DVD comes with the following special features:

• Reconstructed study version, providing background and curated context to the restored fragments with optional explanatory commentary
• Commentaries by leading film historian Ian Christie and NFSA’s Senior Curator of Moving Image, Graham Shirley
• Piano accompaniment by Mauro Colombis, from the Pordenone Silent Film Festival
• Experimental soundtrack by Endorphin
• ‘Before and After’ reel demonstrating the details of the restoration process
• Image Gallery

So the question I guess is do I recommend this?  To the average person, probably not.  For someone interested in movies and Australis’s involvement in film history, then yes.  You should be able to get the basic edition for about $20 or under on ebay though there is a collector edition available which includes a 208-page book (about A5 size) that speaks a lot about the film etc but that would be somewhat harder to get.  After I bought the DVD I saw a second-hand copy of the book going for $7 so I picked it up but for a general interest the DVD would suffice.  I think it’s really good to have this part of Australian history available on DVD for those interested and a big thanks to those at NFSA for putting all this together cause we were, after all, the first country in the world to have a 60 minute narrative movie.  Good on ya cobber!

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Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956)

Brig. Gen. John Hanley: As you were, Sergeant.
Sgt. Nash: Unidentified Flying Object reported flying due West, sir. Probably a buzzard.

The first flying saucer movie was called The Flying saucer in 1950 and since then it spawned a collection of movies that contained saucers primarily as an alien spacecraft with the exception of Forbidden Planet where it was a man-made craft.  Whilst the name Earth vs the Flying Saucers sounds kinda cheap and cheesy, it would certainly sit in the top 10 flying saucer movies of all time alongside others such as Iron Sky, Forbidden Planet, This Island Earth, Battle in Outer Space, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Independence Day, The Day the Earth Stood Still.  As with many 50’s sci-fi films I have seen, it is quite serious in its approach yet many may find it a bit cheesy compared to today’s offerings.  The visual effects are done via stop animation so those desiring modern day effects would be disappointed and the budget was not there to shoot in colour so they had to make do with black and white, however recently the movie was colourized with quite pleasing results.  

The Bluray looks better than both examples below but this gives an idea of the modern colourisation process that is employed here.

Dr. Russell A. Marvin (Hugh Marlowe) and his wife Carol (Joan Taylor) are driving on a road in the desert toward the military base from where they intend to send their 11th rocket into space to orbit the earth to gather data for future space exploration.  Along the way Dr. Marvin is recording notes via a voice recorder when all of a sudden they get zoomed by a flying saucer the noise of which is captured on the reel to reel recording device.  After getting over their ordeal they get to the military base and send off the rocket but later find out that it crashed and was destroyed, just like the previous 10 before it.  By chance, as Dr Marvin was playing back his voice recording he noticed the sound of the flying saucer that zoomed him was captured on the audio recording and when the tape is slowed it is actually a voice from the aliens asking him to schedule a meeting with the world leaders in 56 days. He eventually finds out that the aliens intend to invade earth so he creates a device to counter the flying saucers ability to fly.

This is yet another 50’s sci-fi film that I really enjoyed and consider it among the essential sci-fi films to watch involving flying saucers and alien invasion.  The story is taken seriously and even shows some Foo Fighters which in real life some pilots claim to have sighted toward the end of WW2.  The aliens look real clumsy and silly initially but don’t be too discouraged at that as there is reason for it.  The flying saucers that invade earth are all done via stop animation by the very skilful Ray Harryhausen and by this stage had really got the art fine-tuned but its naturally still obvious, so don’t expect computer generated graphics quality but it is still very well done as the saucers crash into various government buildings within Washington (all stop animation of course).

The Bluray reviewed was imported from the UK which can be purchased for less than AUD15 + shipping (assuming stock has not depleated) and has the film in both the original black and white and colourised.  You are also able to switch from B&W to Colour on the fly by pressing the “Angle” button on your Bluray player remote (if it has one) which is a really great idea.  A few of Ray Harryhausens movies have had the modern colourisation treatment in recent years being 20 Million Miles from Earth, It Came from Beneath the Sea and this one.  

The image quality is really good in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio and comes with Dolby Digital True HD 5.1 audio that also sounds good though as is usual for these older movie don’t expect modern quality as it was mastered from the original mono soundtrack.  

On top of the two versions of the film, the disc also contains the following extras:

• Commentary by Harryhausen, Jeff Okum, Kan Ralston and Arnold Kunert
• Remembering Earth vs. The Flying Saucers featurette
• The Hollywood Blacklist and Bernard Gordon featurette
• Photo galleries
• Interview with Actress Joan Taylor
• The Colorization Process (10:55)

Overall highly recommended as a solid 50’s sci-fi.  I watched the film in the colourised version and thought it was really good with only a few spots that didn’t look quite right and I did flick between the two editions a few times to compare.  If you’re a fan of older sci-fi give it a go as you can also hire these on the major digital streaming services like Google Play and iTunes.  Like all stop animation, the effects may not be everyone’s cup of tea but as a movie I really enjoyed it and is highly recommended primarily for fans of 50’s sci-fi.

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