BARBARELLA soundtrack CD - new release!

Transport yourself over to Barbarella's Shagpile Cockpit to see how the new CD soundtrack compares to the original 2002 release...

BAREFOOT GEN (1983) - he saw the bombing of Hiroshima

BAREFOOT GEN

(1983, Japan, Hadashi no Gen)

A terrifying account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, for children...

Disaster movies are currently all about meteor collisions and climate change. But for decades, the most likely apocalypse was nuclear war. In the 1980s, I was seriously worried it might become a reality, with Ronald Reagan constantly talking tough with the Russians. For all I knew, they all had their fingers on big shiny red buttons ready to launch hundreds of missiles at each other. It was hard to imagine what might happen.

Post-apocalyptic movies portrayed nuclear-ravaged worlds (usually as desert, as in Damnation Alley and Mad Max 2) and sidestepped showing the disaster itself, except for increasingly familiar stock footage of nuclear test explosions. But what was it like to be in a city at ground zero? This wasn't shown - the effects of radiation had only been hinted at with deformed humanoid monsters and giant animal mutations. (The original Godzilla (1954) had carefully portrayed the many effects of a nuclear blast in a work of fiction, but I didn't get to see that until the mid-1990s).

Despite being decried as anti-government propaganda, realistic depictions of what a nuclear war could look like crept onto TV in the 1980s. The first that I saw was a short, shocking clip from Peter Watkins' The War Game (1965) made by the BBC but too realistic to be transmitted for several decades. The BBC however produced and transmitted the dramatic imagining of a nuclear strike on England in Threads (1984), just after America saw The Day After (1983), also made for TV. Both made sobering viewing - any country launching nuclear weapons would also automatically become a target. The fates of the USA and the UK would have been the same. Raymond Briggs' (The Snowman, Fungus The Bogeyman) graphic novel When The Wind Blows was then adapted as an animated film in 1986, describing how a suburban couple might cope with a nearby nuclear explosion if they follow the official government information booklet.

But I still had little idea of what the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had actually experienced during and after the nuclear blasts in 1945. The only depiction in a movie I saw in the 90s was a brief scene in Black Rain (Japan, 1989), shown on TV.

Eventually there was Barefoot Gen. I first saw a clip from the anime movie on Japanorama, a 2002 Jonathan Ross TV show about Japanese pop culture. The moment the bomb detonates over Hiroshima was incredibly shocking. It was simply-drawn animation, but depicted horrendous and graphic events. A nightmare on Earth. It's even more horrifying because the author had personally witnessed it all. To see the film I bought a secondhand VHS from the US, where it had been originally released.

Keiji Nakazawa was six years old when the bomb dropped, as he was on his way to school in the centre of Hiroshima. A split-second quirk of fate saved his life. In an instant, everything around him changed. The city was levelled, there were very few buildings with foundations of steel and stone. Anyone who wasn't instantly vaporised had been hit by the explosive blast and then a firestorm. The survivors could then die from the effects of radiation in the next few minutes, months or years... Keiji stayed on the outskirts of Hiroshima as it started to rebuild itself.

He became a manga writer, but wasn't able to publish the first volume of his most famous work until 1973 when Japan started to talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki again. The stories of Barefoot Gen are dramatised versions of reality, but were "70 percent" (his words) based on Keiji's actual childhood experiences. Immediately popular, they soon inspired three live-action films at the end of the decade. But the manga proved a better way to spread the story overseas, being translated into many languages. An anime adaption was a logical extension.

However the animated film (produced by Madhouse) is strangely aimed at children, the title music is fiercely corny and upbeat. It even starts like a Ghibli movie following boisterous six-year old Gen (pronounced with a hard 'g', as in 'begin') and his younger brother trying to scrape fun and food out of the rural war-torn Japanese countryside. Gen's father struggles to feed his family and decries the rulers of Japan for not surrendering. But the boys still have fun together and little mischievous adventures - the children even look like typical Ghibli creations, the youngest child has a huge mouth and a big grin. The animation is fairly simple but well-observed. Occasionally, there's a brief voiceover about the state of the war and the bomb being prepared.

The first half of the movie takes time to set up what life was like around the city in 1945, and then the bomb drops.

In an instant, 80,000 civilians die instantly. Gen accidentally survives, finding himself in the middle of a nightmare. Some of the walking wounded are partially melted, many of them are better off dead. It looks like hell on Earth. Corpses are everywhere and the rubble is still on fire.

The next scene is just as upsetting as the explosion, as Gen discovers what has happened to his family.

In the days that follow, as Gen is struggling to find food and shelter, people are still slowly and painfully dying of the effects of radiation. (Decades later, that exposure to radiation is still killing the survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Keiji Nakazawa himself is currently battling cancer).

The story continues to follow Gen through the initial dark days after the bomb, until he starts a new life, staying in Hiroshima, making his way anyway he can, with nothing. Against all odds, Keiji wants the story to be an optimistic one. This is where the perspective of a six-year old actually helps, when nothing is impossible and humour can be found in the simplest things in life.

It's an extraordinary film, with a deceptively comic start. I've not seen such an explicit, realistic vision of what it was like on that day. It's horrific, even depicted with simple drawings. I still don't think it's possible for a live-action equivalent of the same sequence. A recent Japanese TV adaption expanded the story to three hours, spending more time with Gen's family, but the scene of the bombing is quite short, treated in a similar way to The Day After.

Gen's story continued in another animated movie set three years later. Barefoot Gen 2 (1986) shows Hiroshima slowly recovering, but with orphans roaming the streets and the black market thriving. It's similar to other post-war stories, but with the characters dealing with the continuing effects of radiation. The doctors are trying to deal with radiation sickness, when no research or treatment yet exists. Understandably, with all the dead still not buried, there's resentment of the occupying American forces.

Again, the story strives for optimism and the chirpy opening title song seems inappropriate, but the story is gritty and memorable, still refusing to pull punches. The sequel is included as a double-bill on the DVDs.

The atomic dome in modern Hiroshima
(photo by Hirotsugu Mori, 2006)

Barefoot Gen prepared me for my own visit to Hiroshima in 2004. A day trip included a visit to the iconic 'atomic dome', one of the only recognisable landmarks left standing close to the centre of the blast. Rubble lies around the skeletal building as if it had been destroyed the day before. A short walk through the memorial park took us to the huge museum which traces the events of how the bomb came to be dropped on Hiroshima and the devastation it caused. There are two huge scale models of the city as it looked before and after the explosion. An exhibit of photographs of the effect of radiation burns was simply too much to look at.

In the anime, as Gen runs to school just before the blast, there's a series of seemingly inconsequential images that resonate with some of the artifacts in the museum. He passes a pile of bottles and a woman sitting on a doorstep. You can see these bottles all fused together from the heat of the blast, as well as the shadow of the woman vaporised into the stonework of the wall she was sitting in front of. The grim events are of course in complete contrast to the vibrant modern city that Hiroshima is again today. My most vivid memory of the day was the tribute of hundreds of fresh flowers still being laid out at the memorial arch.

In 2005, Barefoot Gen and the sequel were released in the UK on DVD from Optimum Asia (at top), in Japanese with English subtitles. The 4:3 aspect ratio looks accurate. They're now on DVD in the USA as well, from Geneon (above). Through the efforts of Project Gen, the manga has also been widely translated and published. More about the original manga, and some pages from it, here, with spoilers.

I've not seen the three live-action Japanese films made in the 1970s (directed by Tengo Yamada), but here are some screengrabs from the first film, made in 1976 .

The 2007 two-part TV series expands on the events portrayed in the anime, including more about Gen's older brother joining the army. Only available with English subtitles on this Hong Kong DVD (from Amazon USA here).

Of course now the Japanese nightmare of deadly invisible radiation is no longer confined to World War 2. The recent earthquake damage to the nuclear power station at Fukushima has again spread radioactivity into the ground, the sea and the air, with little information as to where it is and what the effects can be, short term or long term. It's like a slow-motion replay of the aftermath of Hiroshima.

Keiji Nakazawa is finding a new audience as he attempts to dispel the myths about the effects of radiation. After a lifetime of campaigning against the use of nuclear power and weapons, he's also currently participating in a new documentary. News article and a recent photo of Keiji.

DAMNATION ALLEY (1977) - now on DVD and Blu-ray

DAMNATION ALLEY

(1977, USA)

Daft but very watchable post-nuclear road movie...

Finally this apocalyptic sci-fi adventure gets a proper home video release. It's new to DVD and Blu-ray. I last reviewed this in 2008 after watching a pan-and-scan VHS to refresh my memory of the original cinema experience... This updated review now reflects the 2.35 widescreen Blu-ray from Shout! Factory.

 

The story opens with a frankly upsetting vision of how easy and brief a nuclear apocalypse could be. A rather realistic depiction from the viewpoint of a nuclear missile bunker, the major cities of America are wiped off a huge viewscreen one by one. America is blitzed into a desert wasteland - using footage of actual test launchings and explosions. In amongst the military is a speechless Murray Hamilton (the mayor in Jaws), strangely uncredited. The entire Earth atmosphere is sabotaged and the survivors eventually emerge into a desert-ravaged landscape where the skies are cosmically confused.

After another rather unnecessary disaster (reliant on even more stock footage), four men are left to try and reach other survivors. The only radio signal they can find is in Albany, New York (what made them so bomb-proof?). The only obstacles are giant insects, mutant hillbillies and a touch of bad weather...

These hazards are no more convincing than you'd find in 1950s' B-movies, especially the giant scorpions. This was released after Star Wars, so the special effects already looked inferior in the cinema. But watching it now, with a world of beserk weather, it somehow rings true today, depicting violent electrical storms, massive twisters and a sky that’s all wrong.

They travel in specially-fitted trucks which have impressive all-terrain triple-wheel assemblies and plenty of firepower. (But the stretchy bit in the middle looks less than radiation proof). They cross the continent via a radiation-free corridor through Las Vegas, Detroit and Salt Lake City.

I really enjoyed seeing this again, it was certainly memorable (as the DVD cover promises) while I'd completely forgotten the supporting feature I saw with it in the UK, Thunder and Lightning, a car crash comedy starring David Carradine and Kate Jackson.

It's good to see Jan-Michael Vincent when his movie career was peaking. He looks even hotter than token female co-star Dominique Sanda (1900, Steppenwolf). Top-billed and about to appear in Hooper and Big Wednesday the following year, he of course returned to TV with the hit series Airwolf.

George Peppard’s career was halfway between two hit TV series Banacek and The A-Team and yes, he has his trademark big fat cigar, as well as an ungainly southern state accent and a Nazi moustache.

Vincent’s drop-out sidekick (above) is the late Paul Winfield, who scored many major sci-fi movies in his long acting career – Star Trek II, The Terminator, and Mars Attacks! Not to mention the Haiti zombie movie, The Serpent and the Rainbow.

While watching the excellent Little Children (2006), I realised that I hadn't seen Jackie Earle Haley in a film since Damnation Alley, thirty years earlier. After he’d given up on acting for a spell, he landed and nailed an award-winning performance, opposite Kate Winslet, as a sex offender trying to return to suburban society. His career is now completely back on track. In 1978, I didn’t know who he was, having deliberately missed the three Bad News Bears films that had briefly made him a child star. 

The novel was drastically revamped for the screen - the producer himself admits to being over-ambitious for the budget. In Roger Zelazny’s original story, the mission was to get radiation medication to Boston, like a futuristic Wages of Fear. Only law-breaker, ex-biker Hell Tanner knows the passable, less-radiated routes. He sets off in a radiation-proof truck and encounters giant bats, snakes, gila monsters, butterflies and biker warriors of the wasteland. So when I first saw the film in a UK cinema in 1978, my hopes of seeing some giant monsters were high. Instead, I got rather unconvincing scorpions and hungry cockroaches (dialogue, “the town has been infested with killer cockroaches”).

The scorpion and cockroach scenes were handled by micro-photography expert Ken Middleham, on whose work the 'insect-attack' movies Bug (1975) and Phase IV depended. The poorest effects are the use of floating models, which looked poor at the time, in 1978.

More successful are the extensive and complex optical effects used to replace every view of the sky in the many exterior scenes. Tracking the laser-lit fluorescent FX to the long, loose camera moves is very impressive for the time, and unsurprisingly not perfect.

Best of all is the full-size Landmaster truck built by Dean Jeffries, who’s not had enough credit for his work. It's really good to see him interviewed in new Shout! Factory DVD extras (also on their Death Race 2000). Besides behind-the-wheel stuntwork, he built movie vehicles like the James Bond’s moon buggy in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) and helped design the Monkeemobile and the iconic Adam West TV Batmobile. His name is spelt two ways on IMDB (also as Dean Jefferies) halving and seperating his list of credits.

The bombastic, synthesizer-heavy soundtrack was composed by Jerry Goldsmith, a plus to any film, but was never released as an album. This is teased around the menus and featurettes on the Blu-ray so it must still exist somewhere in very good condition.

With huge holes in logic, this isn’t a movie to take too seriously after the intial catastrophe. But it’s enjoyable for many reasons and an early post-apocalypse road movie, just before Mad Max inspired so many others. 

Damnation Alley looked lousy and confusing on VHS. Only 2.35 widescreen will do any viewing justice. The desert photography of the Landmaster trucking across the desert (including a glimpse of Meteor Crater) are standout visuals.

It was originally released in so-called ‘Sound 360’, which equated to a 6-channel stereo surround system for selected movie theatres. I'm guessing these tracks were still available to create Blu-ray's optional 5.1 and 7.1 remixes.

As always, DVD Beaver have the best Blu-Ray review and (ahem) screengrabs of what high quality to expect.

The star of the show, the amazing Landmaster vehicle, has its own webpage...



(This is the updated version of my 2008 review).


 

THE BLACK HOLE (1979) expanded soundtrack debuts on CD

Intrada are about to release a special edition of the late John Barry's soundtrack to the outer space adventure The Black Hole (1979). Remastered from the original master tapes, this also promises to be the entire score, adding an extra twenty minutes of unreleased music. This is also the score's official debut on CD, see Soundtrack Collector for details.

Music samples, more details and CD ordering information on Intrada's website here.

I only wrote about John Barry's music for outer space a few weeks ago, a recurring and favourite theme of mine in all his work. The score for The Black Hole is some of John Barry's best work, regardless of what you think of the movie. Personally, the music has helped transport me into the dark, futuristic adventure. It's fun to see Disney taking some risks, killing off characters (that aren't parents) and even getting metaphysical...

My full review of The Black Hole is here.

Hopefully someone will remaster the movie soon. It looks very poor on "Disney DVD"...

(The above Japanese poster was teleported from the supreme sci-fi nostalgists' blog... Space: 1970.)

ONE MILLION B.C. (1940) - the original Tumak and Luana

ONE MILLION B.C.

(1940, USA, MAN AND HIS MATE)

Trend-setting rarity not on DVD, later remade by Hammer Films

I've always enjoyed dinosaur movies, but ones with good dinosaur effects are hard to find. This mixes great special effects with rubbish ones. It also set a blueprint for caveman movies for decades to come. The script was closely remade by Hammer Films in 1966, the format repeated by When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.

 King Kong (1933) and The Lost World (1925) mixed humans and dinosaurs by having the animals survive for millions of years. This story reverses the format by pushing humans back into the same timeframe as dinosaurs, a huge historical inaccuracy that the film makers ignored, mixing in mammoths and other large mammals as well.

Until Jurassic Park, the most convincing dinosaurs had always been realised with stop-motion animation. But One Million BC ignores this approach, making it a weak link between King Kong (1933) and the remake One Million Years BC (1966) which had special effects by animation giants Willis O'Brien and his protegee Ray Harryhausen respectively. The special effects are still strong enough to make it worth seeing. The modelwork for the earthquakes and erupting volcano are exceptional. Some ingenious composite work also provides some shocks.

'Paste-up' composite publicity photo of 

a giant iguana somehow walking on two legs

The 'dinosaurs' are depicted with every visual effect that has never ever realistically worked. One Million BC has a crocodile with a dimetrodon sail fin stuck on its back, and a pig dressed up as a triceratops! Oh, and a pangolin with some rubber horns on its head - little more than a visit to a pets' fancy dress store. This looks silly, but the technique endured into the 1960s. Irwin Allen used dress-up animals extensively for his 1960 remake of The Lost World. Harryhausen even used one at the start of One Million Years BC. Visual effects like these made the basic animatronics in The Land That Time Forgot (1975) look like an improvement. 

But it gets worse - the animals are filmed fighting each other. There are some very nasty scenes of a crocodile and a gila monster chomping on each other and trying to twist off limbs. Exotic lizards are tipped through crumbling sets, buried in rubble, and surrounded by fire. There's a bear killing a snake and an almost dead gila monster pumping blood. Plus an astonishing shot of a cave/stuntman braining a charging bull with a staff. It's not quite Cannibal Holocaust but it's halfway there. This animal cruelty is apparently the main reason that this film has disappeared from home video. It used to play occasionally on British TV, sometimes under the alternate title Man and his Mate.

Least convincing is a disastrous 'man in a T Rex suit' which again looks like fancy dress. They knew it wasn't going to work and the suit is only seen in distant long-shots or hidden by really thick foliage. It's the scene in the remake where Tumak saves the girl up a tree in the village of the shell people. I've seen worse 'man in a T Rex suit' movies, but the best is easily The Land Unknown (1957).

The story, characters and dialogue were closely copied for the Hammer remake, though there's more soppiness here as the cave people all learn how to get along. A major difference is that the volcano eruption isn't the climax in the original. Victor Mature and Carole Landis seem to playing to a pre-teen audience, while Lon Chaney Jr milks pathos out of the deposed chief of the rock tribe, in a rare, disfigured make-up.

Without Harryhausen's dinosaurs and Raquel Welch's everything, this is a dry-run for a great remake with better dinosaurs.

DOWNFALL (2004) - the horror of Hitler

DOWNFALL

(2004, Germany, DER UNTERGANG)

Who knew Hitler could be a YouTube hit? The stream of variations of 'Hitler is angry' and 'Hitler is informed...' recycles movie clips, but rewrites the English subtitles so that the Dictator appears to vent about lightweight grievances of modern life, ranging from iPads to football transfers. These are actually scenes from the 2004 film Downfall, usually when Hitler blames his staff for not informing him how much his troops have lost ground to the Allied forces.

I was prompted to see Downfall when I realised that producer/writer Bernd Eichinger and actor Bruno Ganz had worked together on this before The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008). I also wanted to see if the YouTube phenomenon might affect newcomers to the movie. I found it engrossing, but also a doom-laden, claustrophobic experience. While I've always sought out horror movies, recently I'm finding well-made reality-based dramas far more horrifying than fiction.

It's not the first portrayal of Hitler's final days. There's been Hitler: The Last Ten Days starring Alec Guinness, and The Bunker starring Anthony Hopkins. It's a temptingly dramatic story. The dictator's death signalled the end of the Third Reich, Nazi Germany and World War II in Europe (Japan held out a little longer). Downfall is the latest version, and the first to be made by Germany, with the added benefit of a new and thorough eyewitness account from Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge.

The story uses her as a central thread to the narrative, from when she first joins Hitler's staff in his reinforced concrete bunker. Crucially, Junge worked with him as the Russian forces finally approached the hideout, and were simultaneously closing in on Berlin. As commander of Germany's forces, Hitler refuses to surrender even though it means the continuing deaths of his outnumbered troops, as well as the civilians left in the city. Despite the desperate situation, his loyalty to his own extreme ideals threaten to drag everyone down with him.

Hitler is undeniably a complex role to portray in any depth, with the added challenge of having to distance the portrayal from every comedian's manic impression. Previous adaptions usually had actors speaking English with a German accent. But Downfall benefits from everyone speaking German. Bruno Ganz (Harker in Herzog's Nosferatu, lead angel in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire) even had access to a rare recording of Hitler in conversation, in order to accurately mimic his ordinary speaking voice.

Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, had remained silent about the events she witnessed for much of her life. In her last years she helped write an account and appear in a documentary about her time with Hitler, when she was living and working in close quarters with him and transcribing his thoughts, right until his final testimonies.

The publicity emphasised this new account, though Downfall uses several other accounts, adding perspectives on what was happening elsewhere, particularly in Berlin. The production was controversial because the German people were still very afraid that any realistic portrayal of Hitler would show him as a human being, and therefore sympathetically.

But of course he was human, and Downfall dares to show the Hitler we don't usually see. Not grainy footage of of him shouting and gesticulating his speeches to the troops. Here he can be quiet, considerate, good with children and animals... But it's carefully presented as a paradox, showing that he was capable of compassion, even though he abhorred it as a weakness in anyone else. Under increasing pressure, his beliefs look like insanity to even his most trusted believers.

Downfall isn't just about historical events, but also an insight into the mentality of the Nazi leadership, and the strength of loyalty that enabled them to commit their crimes. Their lack of compassion extended to German civilians and their own families. The last nightmarish events in the bunker, on Chancellor and Frau Goebbels' final day, are even more as horrifying than the carnage on the streets of Berlin.

I started watching with a sense of dread, that reminded me of Titanic. I knew roughly what was going to happen eventually, and dreaded when and what I was going to see. The two and a half hours running time was a fascinating education and a haunting experience. The grim siege atmosphere where people coldly contemplate suicide over dinner. The horrible tension that the killing will continue as long as he's alive.

It's useful to know a little about the end of World War II beforehand, as there's little historical context included for newcomers. Knowing a little from a few documentaries didn't ready me for how powerful it was as a drama, rather than simply summarised in a voiceover.

The YouTube spoofs didn't spoil the film as I feared. I was already completely drawn into the story by the time that scene appeared. Don't get me wrong, I find them very funny. But I'm conscious that we only see Hitler played for laughs now - like when he pops up in Family Guy. He shouldn't just be a comedy character. Inglorious Basterds was a welcome change, to see a more visceral and emotional response to him.

The narrative is careful to show pivotal events from the perspectives of people we know survived the war to tell their story. In most scenes, it's carefully established which witness was around. I'm in awe of Bernd Eichinger's script having to distilling so much information, while including so much detail. It was a shock back in January when Eichinger passed away at the age of 61. Check out his production credits, you might be surprised at how many of his films you know.

Bruno Ganz's performance as Hitler is easily a career best. But there are many exceptional performances, especially from the women: Juliane Köhler as Eva Braun, and Corinna Harfouch as Magda Goebbels have extremely difficult scenes, but are utterly convincing. Alexandra Maria Lara, as Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge, has the central role, though is maybe a little too wise in some of her reactions.

The UK blu-ray from Momentum shows up a lot of film grain, but the 5.1 soundtrack adds to the feeling of being surrounded by a constant enemy bombardment. There are commentary tracks, making-of featurettes, some very interesting interviews with the main cast and an insightful summary from Traudl Junge's biographer of how her full story came to light.

I then watched the documentary Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary (2002) as a test of Downfall's accuracy. It consists solely of filmed interviews with Junge, shortly before she passed away. It was a surprise to see a couple of contradictions between her accounts and some of the events in Downfall, like how she escapes, which proved that it had exercised some dramatic license. But I was very impressed at how the accurately the film portrayed the atmosphere that Junge describes in the final days in the bunker.

Junge talks about her life after the war, apparently dismayed how she was so close to Hitler for so long, while ignorant of what he'd been implementing. Her testimony is fascinating and not all of her stories are dramatised in Downfall, including an account of how his own men tried to kill Hitler (dramatised in Valkyrie) which actually ends up as funny.

Publicity for Downfall says this was the first dramatisation of Hitler in a German film. But interestingly there was another German-language portrayal, which Traudl Junge also advised on, in 1955. Der Letzte Akt (The Last Ten Days) was directed by the G.W. Pabst (Pandora's Box), but made in Austria. I can't find this available anywhere though.


Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary was shown as part of BBC's Storyville documentary strand, and has been on DVD in the UK and US. Melissa Muller's book, written with Traudl Junge, is still widely available.