I remember being thrilled with “Prisoners of the Lost Universe” (1983) when I found it flipping channels in the mid-1980’s. Out of curiosity, I hunted down a online copy during one of my recent episodes of insomnia. (You can find the full movie just under the trailer below, courtesy of the good people at Flick Vault.)
The film … didn’t hold up well over time. (I could only endure about the first half hour.) Oh, well. Not everything can be the goofy rediscovered gem that my beloved, rediscovered “Spacehunter” is.
But I’ll always remember being delighted by this ham-handed parallel universe tale when I was a kid.
By the way, the hero here is none other than Richard Hatch of “Battlestar Galactica” (1978) fame.
I was joking around on Facebook just yesterday about “The Six Million Dollar Man” (1973-1978). I would have been a baby when this originally aired, but, like a lot of Gen X’ers, I can remember it pretty well from reruns. (I am linking here to the Potentium Youtube channel.)
I still remember being a little kid and trying to make the show’s (indescribable) signature sound effect when lifting something heavy.
Does anyone else remember “The Odd Couple” (1970-1974) growing up? I was too young to remember its original run, but it played endlessly in reruns in the early 1980’s. For a lot of us, it was a show our parents watched. It was based on an eponymous 1965 Neil Simon play, and Tony Randall was absolutely a household name.
Hearing that theme song — and seeing those priceless shots of early-70’s New York in its opener — absolutely takes me back to my gradeschool years. I can practically smell dinner cooking in the kitchen.
Turns out it didn’t have a lot of cultural staying power — with my generation, at least. When was the last time you heard someone make a pop-culture reference to “The Odd Couple?” Yet people still fondly remember things like “The Partridge Family” (1970-1974), “The Six Million Dollar Man” (1973-1978) and “Voltron” (1983-1985).
Believe it or not, I had Lincoln Logs as a first grader in 1978 or so … they might have even come in a bucket like this one; I can’t quite remember. (I think there was a weird merchandising trend in the 1970’s in which toy sets and puzzles came packaged in tubes.)
The Lincoln Logs were made of wood! (God, the idea that I once owned wooden toys makes me feel as old as … Lincoln, I guess.) Here’s some weird trivia for you, if you remember these — they were invented in 1916 by John Lloyd Wright, who was the son of famed architect Frank Loyd Wright.
I’d moved on to fancier things than Lincoln Logs fairly quickly — my parents had started me on Sears’ Brix Blox by 1980 or so. (They were basically budget Legos, but they suited me just fine.)
Lincoln Logs never really went away during my early childhood, though … they would turn up in bits and pieces for years at the bottom of my toybox, my closet, my box of army men, whatever. If you gave an absent-minded kid like me anything that included dozens of small parts, then they were destined to haunt the house in perpetuity. There was sort of a permanent intermittent presence of Tinker Toys at my house too — you could sort of think of those as Legos’ surreal, cubist, crazy cousin.
Actually. let me qualify my admission above. I might have scattered my small toys a lot as a little boy, but I pretty assiduously kept my G.I. Joes and their guns together. That was a serious matter. And I’d like to think I had a fairly good track record.
“Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell” (1978) was yet another made-for-television movie that rocked my world when I saw it in early grade school. But it didn’t age well — not even by a narrow margin. When I saw it on TV again a few years down the line, like maybe when I was in junior high, I realized it was … truly a third-rate horror movie. (It was every bit s campy as the trailer below suggests.)
It wasn’t all bad, I guess. It stars Richard Crenna. And whatever special effects they used to show the titular monster after its demonic transformation were surprisingly decent for a 70’s TV movie. (I actually wonder if they used the same rotoscope process that Ralph Bakshi used in the same year’s animated “The Lord of the Rings.”)
Below are the trailers for all four major film iterations of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Though these movies enjoy varying degrees of fame, they all remain close to my heart. There is just something about Jack Finney’s original paranoia-inducing story idea that’s timeless and frightening. (Finney’s 1955 novel served as the basis for the first film, directed by Don Siegel, a year later.) And I always thought that the identity-stealing, alien body snatchers were an elegant monster concept too, because they can be rendered effectively on film with little or no special effects.
The first trailer is for the original 1956 classic, which still holds up surprisingly well. (If you haven’t seen it, then you might discover that it’s got more urgency and less camp than you’d expect from a typical 1950’s alien invasion flick.) The second trailer is for the genuinely frightening 1978 remake, which is, quite simply, one of the top science-fiction/horror films of all time.
I was introduced to both of these movies by my “movie uncle,” Uncle John. I remember thinking the original was far better than I’d expected for an “old black-and-white.” (I’d had a an adolescent’s predictable skepticism about old movies.) And the dour 1978 masterpiece got under my skin and stayed there forever.
The 1993 installment, simply titled “Body Snatchers,” is probably the least well known — I’ve never heard it mentioned outside of horror fan circles. I myself had never heard of it until I stumbled across it in a video store more than a decade following its release. It had a very limited theatrical release, and it sometimes feels like the most generic of the “Body Snatchers” movies — like maybe a made-for-television movie or an especially good entry for the first revival of “The Twilight Zone” (1985-1989).
I love it. You could tell it was a labor of love for its screenwriters and its director, Abel Ferrara … it was obvious that they truly “got” Finney’s concept, and that they set out to deliver just what genre fans wanted. This “Body Snatchers” was freaky, fast-paced and unsettling, and I still feel it deserves a broader following.
The fourth trailer is for the most maligned and recent adaptation of Finney’s novel, 2007’s “The Invasion.” (My god, was this really made 13 years ago? Tempus fugit.) People really dislike this movie, despite a cast led by Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. It was generally panned by both critics and audiences, and I sorta understand why. It’s got its share of flaws — most notably a hasty happy ending that feels tacked on by the studio. I don’t quite love it, but I really like it quite a lot — it’s stylish and ambitious and has a lot of creepy moments. And if you think Nicole Kidman is easy on the eyes, as I do, you’ll see that she looks like a million bucks here.
If you really enjoy these films and are hungry for more, there are two other alien invasion movies that seem to channel the same muse as Finney’s. The first is 1994’s “The Puppet Masters” by Stuart Orme. (It should not be confused with its soundalike contemporary, the “Puppet Master” (singular) horror franchise, which depicts demonic dolls.) “The Puppet Masters” is campy, but still very cool, and it adapts the eponymous 1951 novel by Robert A. Heinlein.
The second recommendation I’d offer is 1998’s “The Faculty.” It’s an even campier horror-comedy aimed more at mainstream audiences, but it’s still a lot if fun.
I’m not sure if the below scene from “WKRP in Cincinnati” (1978-1982) is overexposed; it annually pops up a lot before Thanksgiving. (I’ve shared it on Facebook at least once, I’m sure of it.) It is, of course, the famous “turkey drop” scene from the Thanksgiving episode of the show’s first year. (WKRP would have been on the air only two months when this episode first aired.) The title of the episode was “Turkeys Away,” and it’s still quite well remembered by people interested in television pop culture.
The scene is really funny — people went nuts for it back in the day. I still remember my parents and older siblings truly cracking up over over it. And it really is all tied together by Gordon Jump’s perfect delivery of its feckless final line.
Hey … there’s actually another bit of WKRP trivia that’s been making the rounds lately on social media. It turns out that the lyrics for its closing theme, which many people my age remember quite well, are actually nothing but gibberish. Seriously, check it out.
So I’m introducing a dear friend tonight to “28 Days Later” (2002). It is possibly my favorite horror film of all time, maybe even narrowly beating out “Aliens” (1986), “Alien 3” (1992), John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), the Sutherland-tacular 1978 version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and George A. Romero’s first three “Dead” films (1968, 1978, 1985). (Whenever “Star Wars” fans refer to their “Holy Trilogy,” I muse inwardly that those last three are its equivalent for zombie horror fans.)
My friend thinks it’s funny that I refer to “28 Days Later” as “my sacred cow.” I’ll be crestfallen if she does not like it, and I told her as much. And that’s weird for me … I usually don’t feel let down when someone doesn’t enjoy the same books, movies or music that I do. Not everything is for everyone. Art would lose its mystique if it weren’t subjective. If all art appealed to all people, it would lose all its appeal altogether.
Part of me feels, unconsciously perhaps, that “28 Days Later” is the kind of film that “redeems” the horror genre (even though no genre needs such redemption — if art is well made or if it affects people, then it’s just fine).
Most comic book fans of my generation can tell you how people can occasionally roll their eyes at their favorite medium. (Comics have far greater mainstream acceptance today than when I started reading them in the 1990’s.) For horror fans, it’s sometimes worse. Horror is a genre that is easily pathologized — and sometimes with good reason, because a portion of what it produces is indeed cheap or exploitative. I wish I could accurately describe for you the looks I’ve gotten when acquaintances find out that I’m a horror fan. They aren’t charitable.
“28 Days Later” and movies like it are so good that they elevate horror to a level that demands respect from the uninitiated. It is an intrinsically excellent film — it just happens to have a sci-f-/horror plot setup and setting. It’s beautifully directed by Danny Boyle, it’s perfectly scored and it’s masterfully performed by its cast — most notably by Cillian Murphy and Brendan Gleeson.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 