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jwstrand63
Reviews
The Black Hole (1979)
A decent film, SORELY in need of a REMAKE!!
The effects are excellent, and so is the music, the story? Well also pretty good, but could be made MUCH better!
The Disney 'Suits' blew $20 Million on this thing, TWICE the amount for 'Star Wars', and due to their meddling in the production, put in lame dialog, dumb devices (Robots with ESP), and gave it the typical 'Disney' touch of death; adding dopey dialog and cutesy crap!
It begins right from the start, 'Vincent' starts blathering totally non-sensical dialog, and from there on out, the dialog goes into the black hole faster than the Cygnus does! Roddy McDowell probably had a vision from 'beyond' to let his name be left out of the credits!
An example from Vincent's opening dialog: "Unscheduled course correction due at 2200" - Well, if it is "Unscheduled", then HOW can there be a time for it to be DUE???
All he does is orate countless proverbs and sayings, and, if that's not bad enough, 'Old Bob' (Slim Pickens) provides more camp to the soup of poison.
Tony Perkins puts in a decent performance, coming off as the fan of the antagonist, kissing his behind at every available moment.
This film fell WAY short of what it could have been! Don't even get me started on the physics shown in the film! HORRIBLE!!
This film was boiling over with potential, but the Disney Suits, who were, at the time, looking for a way to keep their jobs, picked this up and produced it, and also pushed for a 'PG' rating, realizing that the 'G' rated films weren't drawing as much money then. What is too bad, is the Disney Suits couldn't leave a sure thing alone, NO! They had to stick their fingers into the magic cake batter while it was in the oven, thereby making it fall, and in the end, releasing this half-baked mess. WHAT A SHAME!!!
Glen or Glenda (1953)
Way ahead of it's time, and was also used as a teaching tool!
I am a huge fan of Ed, after seeing "Ed Wood", and I have since bought the book "Nightmare of Ecstacy". Also, I bought all of the films that he had made that I could get my hands on.
Like it or not, "Glen Or Glenda" was a landmark film!
This particular film was made WAY AHEAD of it's time!! While I was first watching Tim Burton's fantastic film, recreating the making of "Glen Or Glenda", I noticed that there were things in it that seemed rather familiar to me, even after 30+ years have passed, and that is what partly interested me in looking into both the book, and Ed Wood's films. What I discovered was, I had seen this film when I was in GRADE SCHOOL!!
After viewing the REAL "Glen OR Glenda" film, I realized that I had had seen this exact same film before, although heavily edited!
It was shown as a part of our sex-ed class!! I can hardly believe it that they showed us this back then, but they did. No
thanks to the school I went to, and the horribly incompetent teachers, but they did show it!
Now, fast forward to today, the reason for all of the extra scenes near the end of the film, such as the 'Devil' sequences, and the rest of the rather abstract looking scenes, were not originally part of the screenplay. Those scenes (baffling and dumbfounding), were NOT part of the film as Ed had written. His script left the running time short of what George Weiss had told him he wanted, a 7 reel, 16MM film, which was what he needed to sell it. A 16MM reel runs about 10 minutes, and George needed a 70 minute film (at least), because he pre-sold it in several states as a "Feature", before he actually found out what it really was. He wasn't too pleased with what Ed had made, but he was able to distribute it to his clients, after all of the extraneous material was added at the end. George did eventually make his money back, and he and Ed worked on a couple of other projects, unlike what is shown in the "Ed Wood" film.
Even today, though, I think that this film was made way before it's time, and Ed Wood should deserve some credit for trying to bring a sense of understanding to what was then a totally misunderstood way of life for a select few.