Flashback 1978 (part one) - STAR WARS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, SORCERER...

A look through the British movie magazines published in 1978. Again this will be spread over two posts because it's so picture-heavy...

Although this magazine is dated January, it would have been available in the month before. The adverts inside reflect that - Star Wars had actually been released in London on December 27th.

Photoplay, January

The Deep sneaked into London two weeks before Star Wars, the follow-up to Jaws (based on Peter Benchley's next bestseller ) made considerably fewer ripples, while being a great standalone underwater thriller. Besides the same author, The Deep hinted at connections to Jaws with Robert Shaw again starring and the poster design.

More about The Deep here.

Photoplay, January

Opening against Star Wars in London, hoping to be an event movie for Christmas, was a fairly grim thriller about the hunt for an extortionist who blows up rollercoasters. A sort-of disaster movie, all the rollercoaster scenes were amped up with the cinema-shaking Sensurround bass-bins. The fact that this is presented in Sensurround is pretty subtle in this advert, not nearly as prominent as it was in the Earthquake adverts, for instance.

If only Star Wars had been in Sensurround. At least it was in stereo in some cinemas, if their sound systems had been modernised. There weren't many at the time.

Film Review, February

These tight colour photos represent how we first glimpsed Star Wars - relatively spoiler-free character shots. There were even these cheap-looking publicity photos of the characters standing against neutral backgrounds...

Because it had been a huge hit in the US (since July 1977), Star Wars was all over most magazines for a few months. Several new magazines launched in the UK, to meet the complete lack of sci-fi coverage at the time.

Film Review, February

Some very good films that came out around the time of the first Star Wars are almost forgotten because they were eclipsed. The Deep for one, Clint Eastwood's The Gauntlet is another. Better than most of the Dirty Harry sequels, this is a violent action-thriller with a touch of wry humour and self-parody.

More about The Gauntlet here.

Film Review, February

David Cronenberg's second horror film essentially unleashed fast-moving zombie mayhem. Giving Romero's Night of the Living Dead a plot-driven biological origin.

A little more about Rabid here.

Photoplay, April

Abba - The Movie is basically a concert movie, with a threadbare, thin comedy plot linking the numbers as the band tour Australia. Nice poster though.

The visual effects and emotional involvement of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a close match for Star Wars, both films representing a quantum leap in how the impossible could be shown convincingly. 

Much more about Close Encounters of the Third Kind here.

Film Review, April

This scene from Close Encounters happens at twilight. But it was filmed day-for-night and this publicity shot wasn't. Devil's Tower in the background.

Photoplay, April

Films Illustrated, April

I saw this at the Odeon Leicester Square and the surround sound stereo took us by surprise. The audience were looking around behind them to see where some of the sounds were coming from!

Photoplay, April

Interesting news bites - did Kubrick want Close Encounters' Cary Guffey to star in The Shining?

At the height of disco fever in the charts, Saturday Night Fever went down a storm, despite being a sweary, wrong-side-of-the-tracks romantic drama.

Film Review, April

Film Review, April

Films Illustrated, April

Film Review, April

The muscle cars and stunt-driving of the original Gone In 60 Seconds looked great but the sound 'system' of our local fleapit couldn't cope with the muddy dialogue mix - I didn't understand a word of what was said!

Film Review, April

Audiences weren't quite ready for Derek Jarman's previous feature film, Sebastiane, with its latin dialogue and story of a gay Roman centurion in love with a saint. But tell them there's a punk rock film, and you've got their attention. But again Jubilee is a long way from mainstream. A post-revolutionary Britain where punk attitude had taken over the country. Adam Ant, Jenny Runacre and Ian Charleson (before he starred in Chariots of Fire) add to its continuing allure.

Film Review, April

The 1970s Spiderman films were made up out of American TV episodes that we hadn't seen yet. A man in tights who walks up walls was proof that Spiderman should have continued as cartoon for a few more decades.

Film Review, April

After being buried at the box office in the US, unfortunately opening just after Star Wars, Sorcerer should have been director William Friedkin's biggest hit yet. With an expensive shoot in South America, I'd compare it to Coppola's Apocalypse Now in terms of the epic scale and runaway budget far from Hollywood's meddling. After it flopped in the U.S., the studio either panicked or just didn't care - in Europe Sorcerer reverted to the name of the source material, Wages of Fear (after the novel and classic French film). The studio also removed nearly half an hour of scenes establishing the backgrounds of the central characters and (I think) altered the ending for the European release. Hence this news item...

Photoplay, May

Because of the disastrous, original box-office, Sorcerer had been atrociously treated on home video. A pan-and-scan version limped onto DVD and never made it into widescreen. Until now! In April Sorcerer will be available, as the remastered original cut on blu-ray and maybe even in a few cinemas. Been a long time coming.

Film Review, May

Tangerine Dream's soundtrack album continued to be sold in the U.K. with the original U.S. title.

More about seeing Sorcerer/Wages of Fear then and now - here.

Photoplay, May

Al Pacino? In Born on the Fourth of July? in 1978?

Film Review, May

I fondly remember double-bills of this decade. If one film was rubbish, the other one was often better. But not on this occasion. The Savage Bees was a low-budget The Swarm that started out as a TV movie, but not a good TV movie. I keep expecting The Incredible Melting Man to get better with age (it's now on blu-ray), but it really does deserve its Mystery Science Theatre 3000 drubbing. Rick Baker's icky, slimy special make-up effects are the best things about this, including a startling slow-motion decapitated head going over a waterfall and cracking open on rocks.

Photoplay, March

Besides creating sophisticated gorilla suits (and performing inside them), Rick Baker's horror film work started in low-budget independents like It's Alive and this The Incredible Melting Man. Articles like this demonstrate how his startling work was getting attention long before American Werewolf In London or even Fangoria. He'd also contributed some of his Halloween masks to flesh out the numbers of aliens in the Cantina scene in Star Wars.



More movie magazines from 1978 in part two - Convoy, Hooper, Grease...

SLEEP TIGHT (2011) - Jaume Balagueró and his apartment horrors

(Updated May 2014, to include Fragile review)

Sleep Tight is the latest in a series of impressive and original thrillers directed by Jaume Balagueró, most of which take place in an apartment building. I'm guessing that is the kind of place where he grew up...

The story of Sleep Tight starts as a man wakes up, kisses the woman asleep in bed with him, and gets ready for work. He's the desk supervisor in that apartment building and he needs to be at the desk early. When the woman leaves for work, she barely looks at him. We realise that they're not a couple...

With the pass-key and some daring tactics, he's sleeping with her without her knowing it. The situation gets more horrifying as it deteriorates, while remaining logical and plausible. A premise that means you might never sleep soundly again...

This is one of the director's best stories yet, presents his most carefully etched-out characters and features his best cast so far. I'd call Sleep Tight a 'creeper' - the story goes at its own pace, gradually getting more creepy. 

Balagueró's stories are strict with logic and continuity, both lacking in many modern horrors. He has equal compassion for male and female characters, young and old. But what's with all these apartment stories?

He's the writer/director behind the successful Rec series. Rec spawned Rec 2, Rec 3: Genesis and the upcoming Rec 4: Apocalypse. Most of his films have been made in Spanish, so Rec was remade in the US as Quarantine, which now has its own sequel.

Rec could be filed under the 'found footage' genre, but it's one of the most intelligent uses of video cameras as part of a story. A young reporter making a TV show about firefighters follows a crew as they answer an emergency call in an old apartment building in the heart of the city. Once inside, they find themselves trapped with the residents, who are being killed by something upstairs. They can't escape because the authorities have sealed the building...

If David Cronenberg's Rabid was a video game, it would look like Rec. The ferocity of 'the infected' lurking in the shadows stayed with me - an effectively realised nightmare.

  

But Rec 2 is one of the best horror sequels I've seen, taking place in the same time frame as the first, the story carefully intertwined around the original and extending them with an even faster pace. I love that he's fleshed out a fictional place so carefully. 

Rec 2 (2009) tackles the mysteries from the first film, but hits the ground running much faster. Knowing of the danger inside, I was already tense from the very start, and the suspense impressively never lets up. Something nasty can happen at any moment. 

While we're on this series, I'll say that Rec 3: Genesis (2012), the only one which Balagueró didn't direct, also takes place in the same time frame as the first two, despite the title suggesting it's a prequel. Rec 3 has been criticised for introducing humour. I thought it succeeded, and fairly sparse among the usual 'no holds barred' thrills. The setting also spreads the Rec concept on a grander scale. And what better occasion for a story to rely on video cameras, than a wedding...

Keeping a lookout for his name, I caught another of his horror films set in an apartment block, on Film4. To Let (2006) is part of a collection called Films To Keep You Awake, each from a different director. Not as consistent as his later work, but again demonstrating his obsession with apartment claustrophobia.

While writing this, I realised that his 2002 film, Darkness, was the very, very first film I ever reviewed in this blog, back in 2005. Relying mostly on in-camera effects and bursts of disorientating editing, rather than CGI monsters (an approach that the director has since stuck with), it then had trouble getting distribution. The wider international release was delayed for two years after it first appeared in Spain, despite being filmed in English (starring Anna Paquin, Lena Olin and Iain Glen).

I found it on DVD in Thailand in a 104 minute (original length) cut, before the US release (in 2004) and UK (in 2005) saw it with a shorter duration of 88 minutes. (The current UK DVD is the short version, the USA have the longer, slightly bloodier version on DVD and blu-ray).

Darkness is beautifully shot (in 2.35 widescreen) and often creepy, but short on satisfying pay-offs both in storylines or suspense. That's despite having something in it that wouldn't look out of place in Rec. While not set in an apartment block, Darkness relies heavily on the oppressive interior of a building.

Fragile (2005) was partly shot in England (including on the Isle of Wight) again with a named cast, headed by Calista Flockhart, Elena Anaya (The Skin I Live In), Richard Roxburgh (Sanctum, Van Helsing) and Gemma Jones (Ken Russell's The Devils).

Again the scares are confined to a single building, in this case, an old hospital being closed down. The children's ward is among the last to be evacuated and just as a new nurse (Flockhart) joins the staff, a child mysteriously breaks his leg, while simply lying in bed...

Like his other non-Rec horror films, this is a character-led story that slowly increases the tension at its own pace. The fun is in the building atmosphere and the unfolding mystery. It packs its punches when its good and ready! 

Really enjoyable, with a cast who rarely appear in horror films keeping the approach fresh.

Balagueró is a director who has stuck with thrillers and knows how to thrill. I'm looking forward to catching all his earlier films.

A concise career overview of the director, in the Electric Sheep online magazine, also catalogues the delays with his earliest films...

ANTIVIRAL (2012) - body horror and celebrity culture

ANTIVIRAL

(2012, Canada)

All hail to the new Cronenberg!

The near future, a young man enters an expensive-looking salon. By appointment only, he meets a strange young salesperson who gives him a long careful pitch. They talk about media celebrities and what it means to get closer to them. The punter makes his choice, receives an injection and leaves.

Dedicated fans of intensely famous people have found a new mania - the chance to feel like their idols... when they're ill. Anyone can now experience exactly the same viruses they've suffered, but without the actual harmful effects. A bizarre, wonderful idea at the core of this intriguing sci-fi thriller.

In this world, the obsession with celebrity has reached the point where TV cameras go inside them during operations, and news constantly reports their state of health. There are big announcements of new mass-produced viruses, as if they were brands of perfume. But fanatics always want what others don't have, and not everyone can afford the exclusive prices. Hence, the murky world of virus bootlegging...

Admittedly, I started watched this out of curiosity, with no great hopes. How often is talent genetically passed down from a famous parent? But I soon found Antiviral, Brandon Cronenberg's first feature film, to be greatly rewarding and very different. While his father's 'body horror' stories were set in the near future, just far enough for science to have made a new breakthrough, they inevitably looked like 'now'. Antiviral looks sufficiently like the future.

David Cronenberg has also stopped making genre films. While Shivers, Rabid, Scanners, Videodrome and The Fly are monuments in sci-fi horror, for over ten years he's stuck with drama. Quality films, but not the genre that originally set him apart. Brandon Cronenberg has begun with a body horror all of his own, and it's a treat to have a similar approach to satirical prediction as, say, Videodrome. But its completely in his own style, and a very different target.

I guess the other trait Antiviral shares with the films of Cronenberg Senior is that the story keeps a steady pace, without needing to resort to action scenes. I guess Gattaca would be a reasonable comparison for its tone, but without anywhere near the flashy budget. This is a great example of how good low-budget can now look, with sparingly-used digital effects, an antiseptic production design and precise 'future-look' cinematography.

The story is anchored by the creepy, extreme, but not exaggerated performance of Caleb Landry Jones, as the salesman who takes his work far too seriously. His pale skin is perfect for making him look really ill. I was recently struck by his resemblance to another intense young actor...

Udo Kier in Blood For Dracula

Malcolm McDowell is one of the familiar faces, but Nicholas Campbell is a welcome link to David Cronenberg's films, having appeared in The Dead Zone, The Brood and even Fast Company.

Antiviral demonstrates that sci-fi can still be original, inventive, predictive, weird and intelligent. And not need spaceships.

(I watched Antiviral on DVD, hired from LoveFilm. As a result, I've bought the region A blu-ray, which includes a commentary track and a 'making of' documentary.)

"THE SCARIEST FILM IMAGINABLE" - radio ads from the 1970s

My YouTube playlist of how the movies were sold with sound...

This year's long term project has turned out to be listening through all my old audio cassette recordings. Besides reviving huge dollops of nostalgia, reminding me of music I'd forgotten, I've found that I used to keep rather a lot of radio adverts for movies, marking their initial release in the UK.

TV ads were often too expensive for the distributors to pay for every week, so many films would have radio ads instead. Against considerable odds, like having no images to work with, these can still be very effective at conveying action, excitement and horror. Though for some reason, trying to make funny ads for funny movies rarely succeeds.

Jaws 2 is a good example of these as short bursts of excitement - a great combination of dramatic narration, dialogue, sound effects and music. 

There's completely ridiculous hyperbole in the voiceovers, often reading out the classic taglines off the posters, "The lucky ones died first". Plus dialogue, music and sound effects (not always taken from the movie). These radio 'spots', together with just a poster, could be all that was needed to send me scurrying to the cinema that week. I've usually used the UK release poster to illustrate each clip.

In the 1970s, the UK often debuted films around six months after the US. The wide release was further delayed by being shown exclusively in London for a few weeks before opening around suburban London cinemas. The ads sometimes pinpoint the year they were first seen in the UK (I've included the month and year if I noted it back then). Interestingly Zombies: Dawn of the Dead only hit the UK in June 1980 (two years after its widely-quoted official release date on IMDB). 

The fun ad for Friday The 13th is an example of the publicity gained from opening the film on an actual Friday the 13th. I love the way they drop in the "X" rating at the end - certainly carries more punch than "18" would do a couple of years later.

Nostalgically, many adverts even mention the London cinemas that they first played in (many of which are no longer there), and give an idea of how wide the initial release was.

Double-bills were still very common with shorter movies, at the end of the 1970s, but were often made up differently for each cinema. Sometimes they were presented as a 'package' and the same two films played across the country. But note the disastrous change in tone as the music changes between Tentacles and Mr Billion, or from Damnation Alley to Thunder and Lightning.

The later ads, starting in 1980, sound like a lack of care is going into them - or maybe it's the movies! This one for North Sea Hijack uses a poor choice of dialogue clips, slackly leaving in some unexciting pauses, Roger Moore apparently stumbling over his lines. 

The one for J. Lee Thompson's WWII adventure The Passage still makes me laugh. Christopher Timothy trying to stir up excitement with a ghastly little script, the overacting in the movie leaping out of the radio "Where is the Bergson family?". Admittedly, listening to this through the years, I succumbed to its hard-sell charms and eventually saw it.

There are also ads that you could only get away with at the time. The superdeep voice for Death Wish paraphrases the story as, "He got himself a gun and went hunting for muggers". The atrocious 'kung fu' noises overused for the Bruce Lee double-bill. And I doubt the script for the softcore Bilitis would get daytime play nowadays.

Patrick Allen (Alien), Ed Bishop (Twilight's Last Gleaming), Michael Jayston (Apocalypse Now) are among the recognisable voices pimping the adverts that were made in the UK. But often big-budget American films provided their own trailers, leaving a British announcer to tack on local details at the end. 

You'll hear Mel Brooks (High Anxiety) and Michael Winner (The Sentinel) as rare examples of directors who personally recorded their own adverts. I'd also love to know who the very, very deep voice was in this classic one for Rabid...

It was unusual that London's Capital Radio ran adverts, but they were also the first to broadcast in stereo. Many films weren't even screened in cinemas with stereo audio at the time! To catch these off the radio, I'd leap at a tape deck and 'pause punch', usually missing the first couple of seconds. As you'll hear. Sorry, I was as fast as I could.

Also included are a couple of mono trailers, like The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. These have been culled from old complete radio shows that surfaced online as examples of how jingles, ads and DJs used to sound.

I've not finished sweeping out my archives and still have much 70s radio to listen to. So I hope to add more to this playlist - it contains all my movie-related adverts in one continuous playback. Enjoy...

Or click here for the playlist on YouTube.

SOYLENT GREEN (1973) - film vs book

SOYLENT GREEN(1973, USA)

You can't say they didn't warn us...

Soylent Green is set in near-future Manhattan, when the population explosion is outrunning supplies of water, food, materials and even living space. In the middle of the overcrowded city a wealthy businessman is murdered, but as Detective Thorn (Charlton Heston) tries to solve the case, he starts making deadly enemies...

The script was based on Harry Harrison's book Make Room! Make Room! which imagined the effects of extrapolated population growth. Set in 1999 Manhattan (while the film is pushed up to 2022), he simply plotted a graph as if no other factors will come into play - like for instance property prices that would force people out of the city. The premise is that Manhattan simply fills up to bursting point. With natural gas depleted, cars are left in the road to rot. With a lack of manufactured goods, society slows down.

While the film reverts to an unfolding murder-mystery conspiracy, the book is more of a slice of life showing the city through the different seasons. The murder connects the characters, but the author teases us that it could all just have been an accident. Instead Harrison shows us what conditions are among all walks of life. A scenario where Americans are forced to resort to a soya and plankton diet to survive, could be the author's joke at the expense of a meat-loving country.

Besides changing the emphasis of the novel from birth control to food shortage, the film uses the same overcrowded ground rules. While the only sci-fi 'gadget' in the book is a self-untangling barbed wire fence dropped from helicopters to cordon off rioters, the film replaces it by the people 'scoops'. The script also adds a chilling name for the women provided as part of a luxury apartment itinerary, they're called 'furniture'. The detective's ageing flatmate, Sol (Edward G. Robinson), gets upgraded in the film from an ex-cop to a human search engine, working for the police by using his lifetime of knowledge and research. Sol's demise in the film is also far more frightening and central to the story.

Harrison wrote an essay about the screen incarnation of his story for Omni magazine, reprinted in Omni's Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies (1984). Harrison was only half-happy with the resulting movie. After the script had been written without him, he put on a brave face and was present during filming to consult with the actors and designers. Annoyed that the plot had been switched to a more cliched, Hollywood thriller, he still gave the director, actors and production design credit for presenting a convincing premise. He also mentions there was studio pressure to cut Sol's death from the film, for fear it would cause offence as Edward G. Robinson passed away just after filming ended.

I'd agree that some of Harrison's propagandising on birth control should have stayed in the film. But the novel's murder plotline ends more by accident rather than detection. The film's famous reveal of the source of Soylent Green satisfyingly indicates that there's been wide damage to the ecosystem far beyond New York. While I can understand that Harrison is upset with the changes (maybe exaggerated by his raw deal while selling the rights to the book) I now feel that the film improves on the book as a story.

I was drawn back to the film after learning that Harry Harrison is still writing. He's just published a new story about his long-running character The Stainless Steel Rat. I loved these books in the seventies, and started reading the comic 2000AD when it started adapting his stories (artwork was by Strontium Dog's Carlos Ezquerra, with The Rat drawn to resemble James Coburn). Indeed Soylent Green also helped shape Mega-City One in 2000AD's Judge Dredd stories, like the horrors of Resyk...


Back in the mid-seventies when I first saw Soylent Green, it was part of a sci-fi wave of disaster warnings from the near future (three of which starred Charlton Heston). Planet of the Apes threatened nuclear annihilation. The Omega Man and The Andromeda Strain described planet-killing viruses. Westworld warned of malfunctioning entertainment androids. Silent Running predicted an Earth without forests... (Five years packed with futuristic catastrophe films then gave way to five years of modern-day disaster movies.)

At the time, I assumed these future worlds would always be fictional and never achieve science fact. After all, if the dangers of overpopulation had been publicly pointed out in something as major as a feature film, then everyone would be scared enough to steer us all away from disaster. In the nick of time? Wouldn't they?

The film shortens the timeframe and ignores Harrison's changing seasons. It even mentions the term 'greenhouse effect', adding green smog and permanently high temperatures. The last massive food source left in the world is plankton, but after decades of pollution the oceans are also in trouble. One scene casually depicts New York's Tree Sanctuary as literally containing one tree.

I can excuse the 1973 film failing to also predict cordless telephones or even computers (you could argue that it's because of the lack of manufactured resources or the unpredictable power supply), but it gets it right about global warming. Seeing it again, it's saddens me to have learnt about a growing ecological problem nearly forty years ago, when it's still not being taken seriously now. The world of Soylent Green is coming true. I expect that the director's commentary track is 97 minutes of Richard Fleischer yelling "I told you so".

Anyone who knows the last line in the film, may think they know what the film is all about. But jumping to the punchline is cheating yourself of many disturbing and well-constructed ideas. Two flatmates studying meat and vegetables as if they were blocks of gold. The food riot being controlled by dumper trucks that randomly scoop trouble-makers away. Families sleeping on staircases, the only way to get a roof over their heads. And of course, the unforgettable scene of Edward G. Robinson's character 'going home', cleverly, gradually unveiled.

Charlton Heston initially plays Thorn as a rational cop keen to tow the line and keep his job. But when his life is repeatedly threatened, his interrogation tactics get distinctly nasty. An interesting contrast to the scene where the apartment manager beats up his 'furniture', Thorn shows restraint by not decking the guy. I can't imagine a scene like that in a modern film, without the bully getting instant knuckle-justice. Instead it keeps the tension brimming and underlines that Thorn doesn't care (or being seen to care) about those women either.

This viewing, I was surprised to see a vintage arcade video game Computer Space appearing in the film, gameplay looking like a forerunner of Space Wars and my beloved Asteroids. The Computer Space arcade game was first available in 1971 - that's ten years before Tron! It was a shock to learn just how long video games have been around.

The fast-cutting, photographic, split-screen, title sequence describes American progress from country life to a car-clogged industrial nation. It strongly reminded me of the pace and imagery of Koyaanisqatsi, though it predates it. (It can be viewed in a blog devoted to movie title sequences, The Art of the Title.)

Other imagery from the film echoed in David Cronenberg's Rabid (1977), where bodies were also carried away in garbage vans, and in Blade Runner (1982), which also staged a gunfight in an overcrowded street.

I think Soylent Green still stands up as serious sci-fi and a gritty vision of a harsh future.


The current DVD release is 2.35 widescreen anamorphic, with a director's commentary track, an original trailer (that very nearly spills the Soylent beans) and two vintage featurettes that include behind-the-scenes footage of the food riots.

The CD soundtrack was recently released as a limited edition.


Here's the spoilery trailer on YouTube...