bigger-2 Reviews

Cicciabomba (1982)

This is a hilarious comedy, and I don't speak Italian!

[10/10 · 11 June 2007]

Back in June of 1986 I was doing archaeology in Sardinia -- our team was staying in the central town of Marcomer, which is also an Italian Navy base (for training) and we students decided to see an Italian porn film.

Now, we had all see the Italian porn comics on sale at the train station (gross outs) and expected to spend the time going "Eeeuu!" Mostly we expected to watch the Italian boys leer at the screen. We were going 'cultural anthropology.' Our concierge said the film was dirty.

The movie is about an overweight Italian girl who runs an anti-clerical radio station in an Italian hill town who pines for a young man who ignores her. She wins a trip to Anita Ekberg's New York fat farm, where in many grunting scenes the fat suit is removed. Ekberg's male aid clearly has his eye on her.

Fat Girl returns home as a stacked American blond and discovers that her younger sister has been seduced and abandoned and left pregnant at the altar by the idiot boy she had originally had a liking for.

The rest of the tale is her revenge. And no, it isn't something from Elizabethan theater. The movie is funny and sweet and I would show it to a nine-year-old.

And no, we didn't feel like we had been gypped either.

The High Crusade (1994)

Read the book

[11 February 2004]

Years ago the very first SF magazine I ever saw had a knight battling an alien -- it was Astounding SF with "The High Crusade." For a kid it was a great adventure, reading as an adult it is truly hilarious. Poul Anderson handled comedy and tragedy equally well. Had they filmed the book they would have had a hit. Rick Overton would have been a perfect Sir Roger, John Rhys-Davies is worth watching even if he isn't very 'parvus (ie. 'measly.')They clearly did not have the budget for the cast that would have been required The best lines are the ones taken from Anderson's book, such as the 'negotiation' scene. My recommendation, if you have time to kill Rhys-Davies is always worth watching as is Overton. The novel was recently brought out again by i-Books in a cover evidently modeled on the movie. Add the book to your collection and enjoy. Really, it's a very good book and someone should make a movie out of it.

Doorways (1993 TV Movie)

Pilot lost out to Sliders in the TV wars

[14 August 2003]

George R. R. Martin, writer of "Beauty And The Beast," and a well known professional SF writer ("Tuff Voyaging" is heartily recommended) came up with this pilot for an alternate universe adventure show some time before Sliders, but Tracey Torme's version was the one that became a series. Ignore the disparaging remarks and watch it -- George Newbern goes well beyond the bounds of 'male ingenue (sp?)' and Kurtwood Smith delivers two good performances (conceivably he could have been the Kenny of live action TV, a comment you will need to watch it to understand, if the series had made it.

Riverworld (2003 TV Movie)

If you want to know more, read the books.

[13 April 2003]

Evidently Atlantis in Canada was trying to do Riverworld, by Philip Jose Farmer, as a TV series. A good choice -- everyone who has ever lived on earth has been revived on another planet along the banks of a river that winds around it. Scope for adventure, character development, and good use of New Zealand (and maybe Tasmanian) locations. It had to have been finished before untimely Kevin Smith's death in Beijing in, I believe, late 2001, and given TV pilot cycles evidently was not picked up, which is a shame. The riverboat _was_ fabulous. And Brad Johnson and Cameron Daddo, as well as the others in the cast, are competent actors who would have entertained us for at least five seasons. Six, if they decided to do a "Beyond Riverworld" continuation series.

Do you want to know where they go? Can't wait for the rest of the story? Well, look up Farmer, P. J. in Amazon.com, and look for books called Riverworld, The Fabulous Riverboat, as well as anything else he's written. All worth reading. And in the end, well, they do reach the beginning.

Flight to Mars (1951)

co-author uncredited: story based on Tolstoy book.

[26 June 2002]

Flight to Mars was made in the hey-day of the Cold War, so perhaps it is not unreasonable that Monogram films chose not to advertise that the original story was "Aelita," by the Russian novelist Alexei Tolstoy.

Of course, the main character's name, Alita, does sort of give that away. The basic story line and character line up were retained, with the exception of the professional revolutionary who got dropped. In the book the reporter appears at the beginning and end of the narrative, and does not accompany the characters to Mars. In the book the engineer was married, not afianced. Of course, the Russians also filmed Aelita as a silent. What is interesting is that the American version is more faithful to the original plot.

Crusade (1999)

Murdered during birth by TNT!

[16 April 2001]

To those of you who only saw it when broadcast on TNT, the broadcast "opener" was not in fact the true opening episode. The series is now being rebroadcast in the order in which it was intended by Sci-Fi Channel, and after only a week it remains far more satisfying than it was two years ago. The story detailed on all the chatrooms at the time. Basically, B5 was bought for TNT by the people who bought re-broadcast rights, but supervision for Crusade was taken over by people who supervised original series and evidently didn't like it -- they were into westerns. They wanted a new character added, a female who 'explored' other species sexually. They were responsible for the change in uniforms, and they demanded a new opener, one which gave away too much. JMS went as far as he could, then told them to stuff it. They took 13 episodes, no more, and at the time the Sci Fi channel had committed its financial future to Farscape. I liked Farscape -- now I love it -- but I LOVE Crusade. Watch the series as it is broadcast here, and write Sci-Fi asking if they can't get new episodes. Marjean Holden may be trapped in Beastmaster, but I suspect the other actors would jump at the chance to play such complex characters.

Lilac Ball (1988)

From book to movie.

[6 March 2001]

I acquired the tape to this Russian children's adventure a few months ago in part became I am translating the author's stories. Alice is the Harry Potter of Russian literature, with about a dozen books out since 1967. Three of them, this, 'Gost'ya is budushchego,' and 'Taina tret'ej planety' have been filmed or animated. There are some differences. Characters have been condensed to compact the story. The character of Gromozeka, the space archaeologist, has, in the books, tentacles, seven eyes arranged on his head in a fan, and an insatiable thirst for valerian drops. In this film he was portrayed by a human actor (who also appeared in 'Gost'ta...') and resembles the cowardly lion. Pavel Arsonov, who died some years ago, also filmed "Volshchebnik izimrudnogo goroda," or the "Wizard of the Emerald City," from the famous Russian children's tale.

Guest from the Future (1984)

Some details on the series, the novel, and the author.

[6 March 2001]

I recently acquired the three tapes to this five part TV series from Souvenir, a company in New York. It's based on Kir Bulychev's [note that for his books the name is transcribed with an 'e,' which you will understand if you know Russian and which doesn't matter if you don't. My reasons are that I have translated his novel 'Poselek [The Settlement]' into English and published it under the title 'Those Who Survive,' as an on-demand book from Xlibris, and 'Sto let tomy nazad' will be the 4th or 5th book in the series to come out in about two years. And yes, I have a contract with the author.

The series original title means something like 'Back to the Future,' and it is deservedly a cult classic. Natasha Gromova became a star (with tons of fan mail, much of it addresed 'To Alice, Moscow', and stalkers!), appeared in three other films (two not listed in the data base) and left acting when they wanted her for nude roles. She is now married and a research biologist, and recently appeared at RusCon, a Russian SF con in Moscow, to award the prize for best children's work, called the 'Alice.' She is, as an adult, stunning.

A second Alice film was made from 'The Lilac Ball,' another of Bulychev's novels, but was not as successful. I will have comments on that film in that topic. Also, the novel 'Alice's Travels' was turned into 'Secret of the Third Planet,' a very good animated cartoon. The English translation of that should be out by May.

Mysterious Island (1961)

Nigel Green is credited as "Tom" but does not appear.

[6 February 2000]

One of my favorite films. An excellent re-telling of the Jules Verne novel, with changes made necessary by the change to the medium of film. The women do not appear in the book. A love interest was necessary. In the book, the characters sail to another island and rescue a marooned sailor, Thomas Ayerton, who had been marooned there by Lord Glenarvan in "In Search of the Castaways" for piracy. So, Nigel Green is credited with the role of 'Tom.' It is not too much of a spoiler if I make no bones about him not appearing in the film. I do not know the details, but the plot changes indicate he as unnecessary and would have added a divergent story line, so his role was much, much reduced. However, he was credited in most sources, including Willis's "Screen World."

The People (1972 TV Movie)

A guiltless pleasure

[3 February 2000]

I saw this when it first came out (I was at an SF Con at the time) and then later in a re-run. Considering the budget constraints of 1970s TV Sci-Fi movies, they did an impressive amount of story telling, mixing two of the first 'People' stories to re-cast the tale for non-fans. The cast gives good performances (Shatner is not the ham he usually is), the 'special effects' are limited to wires and a series of crayon drawn pictures which tell the background very effectively. This is actually the second 'People' filming -- Science Fiction Theater ripped off the same story for one of its episodes. Zenna Henderson's People stories were collected by NESFA Press and can be found at Amazon.com and elsewhere.

Flight to Mars (1951)

A subversive movie

[3 February 2000]

I saw this film years ago, Before Starwars, and may I rise to defend it? This film is the American version of Aelita, from the novel by Count Alexei Tolstoy (the less famous of the writing counts Tolstoy) and the first version of the novel is worth reading (he later did many more versions to try to please Stalin, but that's another story.) A Russian Engineer and a Revolutionary fly to Mars, which was colonized by humans from Earth's Atlantis in the past (who inter-married with the natives -- they have blue skin)-- the planet is dying of lack of resources and a revolution is brewing. Aelita is the local princess. In the end, the Earthmen precipitate a doomed uprising and flee. The Russian movie tells much the same tale, but in the end it turns out to have been a dream. The American version is in many ways a faithful retelling of the novel done under a low budget. There is the engineer with the unhappy love-life, the revolutionary has been replaced by the reporter (who was in the book too), and Aelita becomes Alita, a Martian engineer with a slip stick as long as her arm. The movie came out from Monogram and was written and directed by people who specialized in westerns, produced by someone who specialzied in Westerns (of the B variety) and by Water Mirisch, who was the only one to break from the mold (with, oddly enough, a western, 'The Magnificient Seven,' which was also cannibalized from someone else's work. And it isn't that bad. For Monogram it was a high budget production; the special effects (the meteors hitting the rocket, the rocket crashing in snow covered mountains) were re-used again and again and have been seen in many other movies and TV shows. Of course they had to hide the origins. This was 1951 and Tail Gunner Joe was looking for commies under every bed, and while Tolstoy may have been a nobleman, he went out writing propaganda for Uncle Joe.