DR BLACK, MR HYDE (1976) - Dr Jekyll gets blaxploited

DR. BLACK, MR. HYDE
(1976, USA)
aka Dr. Black and Mr. White

Now on DVD

In the 1970s, low-budget 'blaxploitation' films took a stab at most movie genres, including horror. One of the more successful is this reworking of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde…

A successful black scientist called Dr Pride, is trying to find a serum to cure liver disease. He has a beautiful, intelligent girlfriend, Billie, who’s also a scientist. Under pressure to get results, he starts cutting ethical corners by testing serums on human rather than animal subjects. Aslo developing a drink problem, he starts hanging out at low-life bars, where he befriends a prostitute, Linda.

Caught between two worlds, and taking the serum himself, his life splits into a black half and a monstrous white half. As 'Hyde', he’s unable to control his impulse to kill…

Many plotlines are introduced that lead to dead-ends, and it’s hard to believe Pride’s motivations, such as cheating on his girlfriend, played by Rosalind Cash, an actress who shone in The Omega Man as a tough cookie who could give Cleopatra Jones a run for her money. Unfortunately her part here is quite small, as Pride gets more interested in Linda.

As the title character(s), ex-footballer Bernie Casey doesn't clue us in much as to what’s going on in his head. He also muffs the crucial transformation scene, which relies almost solely on performance rather than special effects. Incidentally, the make-ups were provided by Stan Winston. But Casey’s physical scenes are very convincing - he excels at throwing people across the room!


Technically, I think this is the best of the blaxploitation horror films - it's better written than most, with the money to provide enough action. Despite William Marshall’s princely performances as Blacula, I’ve found the other 'black' horror films dull and too cheaply mounted. Dr Black, Mr Hyde is faster-paced, with an interesting if scattershot premise.

While various sub-plots are introduced, little is made of them. Dr Pride gets whiter each time he transforms, and he seems to be falling for Linda, but then chooses her as another test subject.

The film has political points to make, but these are unbalanced by the harsh treatment of the female characters (like pimps keeping their girls in line), nudity expected of the female cast, and comedy relief being provided by drug-pusher characters. Dr Pride and his girlfriend Dr Worth would be fine professional role-models if it wasn’t for his greed for success.

This has now been released by VCI Entertainment on region 1 DVD.

A Dr Black, Mr Hyde trailer is here on YouTube...

Thrillers like Shaft and comedy-dramas like Cotton Comes to Harlem were far more successful vehicles for empowerment than horror films could ever hope to be. However, they were part of a wave of films that provided all-black casts (with a couple of token honkys) for every movie genre.

My favourites from that era were the bigger budgeted affairs that crossed over into the mainstream – Car Wash, a slice-of-life comedy with a classic soundtrack, and the all-action Shaft’s Big Score, starring ‘black James Bond’ Richard Roundtree.

Although horror is my bag, man, the blaxploitation horrors are mostly unenjoyable, partly because they are so hard to get to see in any decent state. To enjoy a film where the print is badly damaged and the audio hissy and inaudible, it's also difficult to evaluate them properly. But I don’t think even a sparkling new transfer of Blackenstein, Blacula, Abby (aka Black Exorcist), or The Zombies of Sugar Hill will change my mind.

Do you want to know more?
Here’s a starter list of blaxploitation films from Wikipedia…

And a review of Sugar Hill that made me want to go back and re-watch it.

(This is an updated article from October, 2006)

THE NIGHT CALLER (1965) eerie sci-fi thriller in the Quatermass vein

THE NIGHT CALLER
(UK, 1965)
also called NIGHT CALLER FROM OUTER SPACE
and BLOOD BEAST FROM OUTER SPACE

Now on region 2 DVD in the UK (October 2011)

The Night Caller is a low-budget British ‘B’ movie that I repeatedly revisit. Partly due to the nostalgia factor – I first saw this as a schoolboy in the seventies, only being allowed to stay up late once a fortnight to watch horror films on TV. It reminds me of the excitement and anticipation I felt for horror films back then – they certainly weren’t as easy to see as they are today.


More objectively, I think it's still enjoyable for the mid-sixties London vibe, the tight direction and effortless perfromances. It’s shot in crisp black and white with a creepy use of shadows and ‘dutch’ (slanted) angles when it gets a little crazy! This is before TV’s Batman wore out the technique the following year.

Starting with a UFO landing on wasteland just outside London. The army track it down and bring in three scientists from a nearby Government research facility. Convinced that it was a spacecraft, they're surprised to discover a small sphere, the size of a football, sitting on the ground. There’s no crater, so it must have been guided down. They hold it at their lab for further tests. Surrounded by the army, the scientists discover that, late at night, the object glows intensely and a dark, clawed figure appears.

In the panic, the figure disappears with the sphere, as do dozens of young women a few weeks later. Thinking that they’re going for an exclusive modelling job in the heart of London’s seedy Soho, they don’t realise they’re meeting the monster from the lab. As the kidnappings continue – how can the scientists help the police stop the creature from space?

I forgive the rubber claw that signifies the alien for most of the film. But when it's standing in the shadows completely swathed in rubber, the Soho connection takes dark new meanings. The slightly fractured narrative also logically and faithfully keeps to the original novel ‘The Night Callers’ by Frank Crisp, first published in 1960.

Its many moments of suspense are conjured up by the actors and the intense close-ups, rather than by showing much. Even with so little explicit terror, the film still warranted an X certificate in 1965. (This is a British 'X', only for over-16 year olds, rather than an American 'X' meaning hardcore porn).

Strangely, there’s a scene in the film, ‘blocked' (similar shots, action and set layout) the same way as one in Hammer’s later The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974) – where Drac poses as a millionaire in a swish futuristic room, backlit by anglepoise lamps so that his face can’t be seen. The same ‘long room and back-lighting’ subterfuge is used halfway through The Night Caller. I've been confusing these two very similar scenes for years without connecting the two.

Director John Gilling peaked in the mid-sixties with this and his Hammer horrors Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile, which he shot back-to-back.

Hard to credit who the actual star is, with the story constantly shifting between characters dealing with the alien, though every actor plays this invasion-from-outer-space plot deadly seriously. A youthful John Saxon (far left) heads the cast, years before Enter the Dragon and Battle Beyond the Stars, or as cops in Argento’s Tenebre, Black Christmas (1973) and several Nightmare on Elm Streets. He’s accompanied by frosty blonde Patricia Haines, who I’m surprised didn’t make more movies. She worked steadily in top British TV series, including three episodes of The Avengers.

The third scientist is the stalwart Maurice Denham, whose most famous role was probably as the panicky recipient of ‘the runes’ in the opening sequence of horror classic Night of the Demon (1957).

Heading the police is Alfred Burke who recently passed away. He specialised in hard-boiled detectives on British TV, notably as the star of Public Eye for ten years. You might have seen him in Children of the Damned, in a very similar role. His last role was in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

There's a star cameo by Aubrey Morris as a creepy porn-merchant, flirting with a granite-faced Burke, "magic seeing you again”. Morris later played the abusive probation officer in A Clockwork Orange – talk about typecast. More recently he cropped up in Babylon 5 and Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood!

Another bit part has the always excellent John Carson representing the army. Carson played Dr Marcus in Hammer's Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter, and the squire in Plague of the Zombies.

For fans of John Cleese's Fawlty Towers, there's a rare straight role by Ballard Berkeley – the only time I’ve seen him onscreen where he's not the alcoholic 'Major'.

Warren Mitchell is in a single improvised scene with Marianne Stone, as parents of a missing teenager. Mitchell is famous in Britain as the bigoted Alf Garnett in TV sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, the original template for the character of Archie Bunker in All in the Family. Despite being typecast, he was versatile enough to play wealthy Russians in a couple of The Avengers episodes and Hammer’s space western Moon Zero Two. Marianne Stone holds the record for most movie appearances by a British actress, a familiar face in the Carry On comedies.

Seeing a good copy of The Night Caller is getting easier. The first DVD was the NTSC region 1 Image Entertainment DVD (pictured above). It's a slightly censored version, with an alternate shot that covers up nudie magazines in the Soho 'bookshop'. More damagingly, it has an awful and dated song over the opening credits, replacing the atmospheric ‘northern soul’ instrumental of the version that's been on telly for decades - one of my favourite movie theme tunes ever! The instrumental is coincidentally called "Image" and is credited to Joe Glenn, Larry Greene and Bob Sande.

A new Italian DVD calls it Madra... Il Terrore Di Londra. Boasting great poster artwork, it's PAL region 2, fullframe 1.33, with alternate English or Italian soundtracks. The Italian subtitles are removable. The instrumental title music has replaced the awful song, though the credits for the song remain onscreen. The opening credits also run slightly long, the end of the music track has been extended to fit by repeating the last few bars. The print used is the same as the US disc, with the same BBFC censorship certificate ('X') at the start, and the slightly censored Soho bookshop scene.

Finally, in 2011, the UK had a DVD release, with the option of seeing the film colorised! It's a 'square' 1.33 full-frame release - I'd have preferred a 1.66 - the colour version is only optional. But this is the UK version that I've been hunting for, with the original instrumental theme tune and thematching title credit sequence. This is therefore the best DVD so far of the UK version - the seedy Soho bookshop scene is even the naughty version!

These 1.33 'fullframe' presentations on DVD cramp the composition, often cutting actors in half if they're at the edge of frame. There've been widescreen presentations on British TV and now there's one on YouTube and it's the entire film in one part. The trade-off is that it's also the version with the awful song. The choice is yours.

Of the many presentations I've seen, I've never run into the Blood Beast From Outer Space onscreen title. Never seen a trailer for the film either.

Lastly, here's how the opening instrumental track should sound, with the correct onscreen credits. This is only available in the 2011 UK DVD...

(This article updated November 12th, 2011)

OUTLAND (1981) - almost in the ALIEN universe

OUTLAND
(1981, UK)

After Zardoz and Meteor, Sean Connery made a good sci-fi film...

The year before sci-fi cinema started ripping off either Blade Runner or Mad Max 2, Alien was the strongest influence on outer space action for older audiences. Humanoids From The Deep, Alien Contamination, Galaxy of Terror, Titan Find all tried to cash in before the official Alien sequel in 1986. In the meantime, Outland (1981) duplicated so many elements from Alien that it could easily be mistaken for a spin-off. It was also serious sci-fi from the Alan Ladd company just before they produced Blade Runner.

Outland looks and sounds like Alien. But it's less of a cash-in than a concerted attempt to fit in with the Alien universe of the fairly near future, and matches the high production values. Extensive large-scale modelwork represents the mine and gigantic spacecraft. Functional, claustrophobic interior sets with huge chunky airlock doors add to the realism. Plus an unsettling soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith.


A gigantic titanium mine on Io, a moon of Jupiter. O'Niel (Sean Connery) is the new sheriff in town, each tour of duty lasts a year. Two deaths coincide with his arrival and catch his interest. All witnesses say the miners killed themselves, so the mine supervisor (Peter Boyle) isn't happy when O'Niel decides to investigate further. He's only just arrived and has no friends or allies. If he causes any trouble, he'll have even fewer...

I'd recommend Outland to anyone who's overdosed on Alien sequels but still wants more. Like Alien and Aliens, this was shot in Britain, all filmed on studio soundstages. There's a mostly British and American cast, with a feisty female character to remind us of Ripley. Maybe it is Ripley, or her daughter.

When I first saw this on release, I was hoping that there would be a monster somewhere in the mining complex. The trailer and publicity had teased some mysterious, messy death scenes with exploding heads. So, I was hoping for an alien cause...

Outland is a good thriller with solid characters and a great cast, but not solid sci-fi. The confined sets are convincing, but even a slim knowledge of science could spoil it for you. As always, there's no attempt to portray the (one-sixth) gravity until the characters are in a depressurised zone. And who in their right mind uses shotguns in outer space?


Peter Hyams directed this between Capricorn One and the 2001: A Space Odyssey sequel 2010. It's far and away better than his more recent sci-fi offerings like Timecop and, gulp, A Sound of Thunder...

Sean Connery had missed out on a trip into space as James Bond in You Only Live Twice, and this is the only other time you'll see him in a spacesuit. He's excellent here, and the script, dialogue and supporting cast keeps it all dramatically strong. He shares the best scenes with a wry Frances Sternhagen (Communion, Misery), playing an incurably cynical, overworked doctor. I thought she looked old in this, so I was surprised to see her again in The Mist 26 years later.

Always a treat to see the late Peter Boyle (Taxi Driver, Young Frankenstein). Hard to understand why his film work dwindled after the seventies. James Sikking (Star Trek III) was also underused in movies. Here he plays O'Niel's right-hand man in the police force. The actor's greatest role remains Howard Hunter, trigger-happy commander of the armed response team, in ground-breaking TV cop show Hill Street Blues.

So far, any DVD releases keep on repeating the same faults. Outland desperately needs remastering. There's weaving picture movement and film dirt. The 1997 DVD is anamorphic widescreen but doesn't look much sharper than the laserdisc.

Here's an original trailer, cropped from 2.35 to 16:9, and it's far murkier than the DVD...

IT'S ALIVE! (1974) - Larry Cohen's monstrous baby

IT'S ALIVE
(1974, USA)

Kill, baby, kill, kill!

Hollywood movies usually have an A-list cast, beautiful cinematography, superb production design and state-of-the-art special effects. It's Alive has none of these. But director Larry Cohen still provides a unique horror concept and a script rich in ideas. It still keeps me interested right to the bloody finish where many mainstream movies fail to. Anyway, why bother with production values when you can make it cheap, make a profit and spawn a couple of sequels?

The first of the three is easily the best - don't feel compelled to watch the sequels...

A newly born baby slaughters five doctors and nurses in the delivery room, before escaping into the night. As the parents struggle to cope with why they've given birth to a monster, the police try to track 'it' down. The newborn craves milk, toys, and its parents. If anything gets in its way, it has teeth and huge claws...

Unlike traditional monster movies where our heroes are isolated or trapped (at sea, in space, in a remote mansion), this attempts a realistic portrayal of a menace in a modern city, including nosy media, tired cops, and the politics of putting down killer babies. Cohen, who also wrote this, depicts the media as especially insensitive, intruding on the family during their crisis. The use of gentle irony and satire is similar to his later films The Stuff and Q - The Winged Serpent.

Presumably It's Alive was inspired by Rosemary's Baby and a desire to see what happened next. The poster even repeats the image of the pram (though there isn't one in the films). But rather than link this mutant baby to religion, Cohen switches the probable cause of abnormal size and psychosis to manmade - suggesting food additives, pollution, and radiation.

The opening images are simple but disorientating - a growing multitude of flashlights in the night. But even for the 1970s, the low production values are very basic - stark lighting, sometimes scenes are underlit, with bizarrely wide camera compositions and very shaky tracking shots.


While it looks cheap, most of the acting manages to convince that this is all happening to a real couple of people. The late John P. Ryan (Runaway Train, Death Wish 4), as Frank Davis, holds most of the film together, with a transition from happy prospective parent to a reluctant hunter. Some of the supporting actors are on the clumsy side of naturalistic, but the key roles are solid, with Frank's wife (Sharon Farrell) particularly well played.

The film is also blessed with one of the last soundtracks to be composed by Hitchcock favourite Bernard Herrmann.


While the drama is consistent, it's less successful as a seventies monster movie, and especially lacking now. While Jaws succeeded in gradually revealing the monster, It's Alive barely ever shows us the goods, despite the excellent photos of the creature that were published. While the larger-than-lifesize model may have looked good, it couldn't move convincingly. Some quick cuts look like someone waving a plastic monster baby around. There were stories of the young make-up artist Rick Baker dressing up his (then) girlfriend as the creature and tricking the scale down, but again, these shots are so brief, most of his hard work isn't in the film. It's a classic design, but it's not showcased onscreen.

All the films under-deliver in showing us the title character. It's hard to even get a sense of its size. The horror content relies on the repetitive throat wounds, without showing the actual attacks.

Cohen's cheeky script for Maniac Cop, gave us the ultimate in police brutality and a inarguable reason for the public not to trust the police (any of them could be the maniac killer!). It's Alive also plays devil's advocate with a hard decision to make - surely a baby should be terminated if it's going to kill the moment it's born...

If the baby was seen more, like in all the classic monster movies, this would be better known. As it stands, it's a rewarding cynical horror with real people and some substance.

At the time, with very little competition, this was a sufficiently powerful monster movie and audiences wanted more...


It's Alive 2: It Lives Again (1978) kicks in soon after the first, with another couple about to have a monster baby (an echo of the events of Village of the Damned). The young couple, played by Kathleen Lloyd (hot off The Car) and Frederic Forrest (Coppola's The Conversation) are lucky to get advice of Frank Davis (John P. Ryan again).

Coincidentally Ryan, Lloyd and Forrest had just appeared together with Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando in a western The Missouri Breaks. Demonstrating how good Larry Cohen was assembling his casts.

After an unlikely escape from a heavily-guarded hospital, there's an even nuttier storyline - a group of idealists trying to protect this 'new line of evolution', with unsurprising results. While there are plenty of fresh situations, the carnage is slow to kick in, with very few glimpses of now three monster babies. The camerawork is often so poor as to be mystifying. The drama is uneven and often implausible, but it's closer in tone to the original than...

It's Alive 3: Island of the Alive (1987), Cohen released the monsters again, with a project perfect for the lucrative VHS market. While the world had changed considerably, Cohen's increased special effects budget didn't deliver anything more realistic, and the next generation of child mutations mostly keep to the shadows, even when battling very-eighties post-punk troublemakers. Michael Moriarty bounces between over-acting and going for laughs. Karen Black and Gerrit Graham act their socks off in a project that's gotten silly.

It's Alive is still around on DVD (don't get it confused with Larry Buchanan's 1969 It's Alive!), the two sequels are available together on DVD, and there's also a set of all three (above). It would make more sense to keep the first two films as a pair, and leave the third for fans of the 80s...


OK. Now should I face the 2008 remake?


An original trailer for It's Alive (1974) is here, from YouTube...

They've released THE SATAN BUG (1965) in the US!

THE SATAN BUG
(1965, USA)

A different kind of bug hunt...

(An update of my review from 2007)

Before Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, before Outbreak, The Satan Bug was a gripping 'viral' thriller, based on Alistair Maclean’s best-selling novel. Through the 1960s and 70s, Maclean's books inspired a string of hit movies. The author's name on a poster promised adventure and man-centric thrills.

A list of his novels (with their original publishing dates) which were all turned into movies:

1957 The Guns of Navarone
1961 Fear is the Key
1962 The Golden Rendezvous
1962 The Satan Bug
1963 Ice Station Zebra
1966 When Eight Bells Toll
1967 Where Eagles Dare
1968 Force 10 From Navarone
1969 Puppet on a Chain
1970 Caravan to Vaccarès
1971 Bear Island
1974 Breakheart Pass

As you can see, his stories ranged from World War II heroics, through cold war thrillers, to high-tech terrorism. Which brings us back to The Satan Bug, which Maclean wrote under a pen-name and isn’t actually credited in the film.


This is a well-made, tight detective thriller with a slight sci-fi edge (that is if the science of such a bio-weapon is still fictional). The 'Satan Bug' is a virus engineered by the government to kill all living things, a sword of Damacles in a top secret lab in the Nevada desert. Then the bug goes missing, along with another less deadly virus.

So the story starts with a typical ‘locked room’ murder mystery – a well-guarded bunker with a huge combination locked laboratory. How did the thieves get in, let alone escape?

Top security agent, played by George Maharis (Route 66, The Sword and the Sorcerer) is brought in to find out how the virus was stolen, and where it is now. Then an incident in Miami, hundreds of people die mysteriously and suddenly…

The story depends on the audience paying attention, keeping track of a dozen different suspects, all men in suits. Dialogue drives much of the complex plot with many crucial events, even the opening murders, all happening off-screen. The early detective work has the benefit of the spectacular scenery of the desert mountains, and the action eventually takes off. But with a premise like this, it's suspenseful throughout.

The film is helped enormously by an outstanding early score from Jerry Goldsmith, his first sci-fi soundtrack, using unusual percussion and electronic sounds. The opening title theme is very striking and suitably downbeat.

The director, John Sturges, was the man behind Christmas TV hardy perennials The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, as well as many other well-known thrillers. He does well to keep the tension persistent and the settings familiar.

The cast also make this a pleasurable watch, with the late Anne Francis as intelligent eye candy – good to see her in something besides Forbidden Planet. An elderly Dana Andrews (Night of the Demon, Zero Hour, Crack In The World) coordinates the search for the virus, and Richard Basehart (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) plays the head of the scientific team (below).

Notable bit parts include a young Ed Asner (Lou Grant), with hair, and James ‘Scotty’ Doohan without any dialogue, but stealing one great scene, worthy of his red shirt…

There are also a couple of great-looking helicopters in the film, a regular feature in Alistair Maclean films, just because they were standard issue in thrillers at the time - visual shorthand for ‘high-tech’ and ‘big budget’.

The US VHS release was severely ‘panned & scanned’ down to a tight 1.33 full frame. The first widescreen release was the Fox Laserdisc.

In 2007, I was pleased to find the film on DVD in Denmark and Norway, in 2.35 anamorphic widescreen. However, the picture didn't look much better than an (analogue) laserdisc.

There was visible patterning, with hard diagonals turned into a series of steps (see the edge of the desk, above). It’s only distracting on certain scenes, but there’s also slightly muffled audio - not something I'd expect on a digital release.

So I was looking forward to this new MGM Limited Edition Collection version, even though it was an official DVD-R. I foolishly assumed that MGM (like many of the recent Warner Bros Archive releases) was going to remaster the film, curing the visual and audio faults of the Scandinavian DVD. Many websites selling this new version (it's only available online) failed to warn that this has been 'made from the best source available' - a caption which greets you only once you play the disc. A pre-emptive apology that means it doesn't look as good as it should. The exception is Amazon.com which outlines the problems prominently on the product page. I wish I'd visited them before double-dipping for the same sub-standard transfer. '...best source available'? Please don't tell me that MGM have lost the negative...

My mistake, perhaps, and at least this is a chance for the US to see a great sixties thriller in widescreen, on DVD for the first time.

Jerry Goldsmith’s scary paranoid soundtrack debuted on CD a few years ago, one of my favourite of his works. Several cues only exist today mixed in with sound effects from the film, but there’s also half an hour of just the music. Seems that I'll never get to hear the creepy synthesizers of the robbery sequence without those pneumatic sliding doors...

Lastly, there's an original trailer on YouTube.

ASTRO BOY (2009) - looking good, but...

ASTRO BOY
(2009, Hong Kong/USA/Japan co-production)

If only the script had been as good as the animation...

This beloved Japanese manga character became popular in the US when it was one of the first anime series shown on TV, back in the 1960s. Two further series were made in 1980 and 2003 and released in English language versions, but this high-budget feature film attempted to push the character as franchise material, though no sequel is happening. While it was a hit in China, it wasn't in the US... or even Japan.

The origin story of Astro hasn't been changed too drastically, retaining the tragic death of Professor Tenma's son, and the scientist's attempt to create a robot to replace him. But not just any robot. Tenma packs the it with enough 'defence systems' to remain safe from any foreseeable harm. But when Astro is activated and begins to realise his potential, the government want to use him as a weapon, or destroy him for being a potential threat.

During the power struggle over Astro's future, he escapes and runs away to live down below on the Earth's surface. Not in the beautiful floating city where robots do all the dirty work, but the trash-covered remnants of the Earth's surface...

This is a familiar premise, but clumsily outlined with a wordy, patronising prologue, rather than the elegant introduction of Pixar's recent Wall-E.


The futuristic city where Astro Boy lives was always re-imagined for each new anime series. Here the intricate pastel architecture, the designs of the giant robots and police pursuit vehicles are startling at times. The character animation and motion is dynamic and very high quality, as are the blistering action scenes.

The emotional dilemmas that Astro has to face as he finds a new place in the world are also quite tough for a children's film. The relationship with his father is far from the usual depiction of a single parent, and realistically, touchingly performed by Nicolas Cage. Cora (Kristen Bell), the tough girl he befriends, is rather a stock character, reminding me of Penny Robinson from the Lost In Space remake of 1998, though she's likeable enough.

Bill Nighy doesn't cope with voiceover acting at all well, but thankfully his character isn't in there for long. Donald Sutherland is also put in the shade by Nicolas Cage's vocal performance, as a one-note villain who tells us what he wants near the start and keeps on repeating his dastardly schemes if we'd forgotten.

The main drawback with the film were the secondary 'good' mechanical characters. The robot society in Astro Boy are the crux of the manga - future humanity's relationship with sentient robots. Many of Tezuma's original stories dealt with stories of an integrated automated workforce seriously enough to rival and predate subplots in Spielberg's A.I. (2004). This new Astro Boy includes an arena where robots fight each other to destruction, taken from the stories, echoed in A.I..

Apart from the snazzy-looking 'evil' ones, the robots aren't dealt with seriously at all, but as comedy relief. One dimensional characters with poorly underwritten gags that reduce many scenes to the level of tiny tot TV. Bizarrely, these comedy reliefs are part of a robot liberation front, a non-important subplot trading on jokes about powerless grass roots political groups. It's the wrong era for satire like this and feeble humour. Without them, this would be a much stronger film for all ages.

This new Astro Boy movie is available in the UK and US on DVD and blu-ray.

AFTERSHOCK (2010) - heart-rending disaster movie from China

AFTERSHOCK
(2010, China, Tangshan dadizhen)

The psychological debris from a natural disaster

The city of Tangshan in China suffered a devastating earthquake in 1976 that left 240,000 dead. But Aftershock doesn't exploit the extent of the devastation, but homes in on the lasting effects of the disaster on one family.

Early in the story, the quake is shown from the perspective of a few people in one neighbourhood (rather than an overview of the city), as a mother and father race to protect their children. The amazing scene is a seamless mix of CGI and large-scale sets. But unlike the disaster movies that I'm used to, the accent wasn't on spectacular destruction. The deaths had more emotional impact, helped by the random victims being played by actors rather than 'digital stuntmen'.


The story really begins when the dust settles and it emerges who survived. As rescuers dig through the rubble, the mother is forced to decide between the lives of her son and her daughter. A natural disaster has forced her to make the most difficult decision of her life, and could ruin the rest of it. She reluctantly chooses to save her son. Without her knowing, her daughter has miraculously survived, but heard her mother decide against saving her. Also completely traumatised, she walks away from the city to a new life.


The story then repeatedly leaps forward to see how these survivors lead their lives, still haunted by the day of the quake, right up to the present day, 32 years later. Some of these 'fast-forward' fades-to-black avoid many events that are ripe for melodrama. The director avoids many of the cliches, often leaving the viewer to deduce some of the major changes in the characters' lives.


In the background, there's a summary of the last thirty years of life in China. It's interesting to see the similarities and differences between western life and communist society. I've read that this film didn't get an Oscar nomination because it didn't appeal enough to an international audience, but it's far from inaccessible. There are very few important references to historic events or unfamiliar places.


There also seemed to be a conscious decision to appeal internationally. An orphan being fostered by both parents in Red Army uniform looked like it was aimed at non-Chinese viewers, trying to counter decades of negative depiction of communism.

The opening shot had me a little worried, a swooping helicopter shot of Tangshan, filled with unconvincing CGI dragonflies, (an illustration of the kinds of natural warnings China had before the quake). Understandably, there were also CGI establishing shots of Tangshan as it was before the quake. But soon the film settled down as a very high-quality production, with the exception of one non-Chinese actor who spoiled a later scene.

Xiaogang Feng, director of Assembly (2007) and The Banquet (2006) assembled a fantastic cast who convey some truly heart-rending scenes. Though apart from the quake itself, the many intimate dramatic scenes were hardly an obvious choice for an IMAX presentation, as it was in China.


With so many regular natural disasters around the world, and so many people affected, it's hard to let yourself be affected by each new catastrophe. Hollywood disaster movies also maintain this distance, rarely depicting death tolls, permanent injuries and lasting emotional effects.

For a disaster movie, this unleashed a huge emotional impact on me, emphasising the personal tragedies that last for decades after the funerals are over.


I watched a DVD from Hong Kong, released by Media Star, with good subtitles and widescreen anamorphic aspect. The extras were deleted scenes, cast interviews and a trailer, but these had no English subtitles. The USA has yet to release this, but there was a limited run in the UK and there's now a DVD, with cover art misleadingly showing skyscrapers in the background (above) - compare it to the Chinese DVD art (at top).

An extensive, spoilery review on Asia Pacific Arts.

An original trailer on YouTube...