I first watched TIME WARPED (1995), which is technically two episodes of a tv show, but whatever, sometime in the 90s, on a VHS tape my uncle had obtained directly from Matt Smith, for some reason. I think? The details are hazy, this was like 30 years ago. Sue me.
Anyway, I am pretty sure my uncle did in fact get it from Matt Smith, which isn’t that weird considering we live in Colorado and my uncle was a sound engineer well-known locally (he even won a regional Emmy once).
Anyway, I like watching this stuff because I recognize all the locations, sometimes just generally, sometimes extremely specifically. I know exactly where this cave is, for example:
I could be there in 30 minutes.
And the whole time in CANNIBAL! THE MUSICAL (1993) when they were trying to get to Breckenridge, I was like, you’re probably in Breckenridge already? Sure looks like it. Breckenridge isn’t worth it, trust me.
Another reason is the hyper-local jokes, like my review above, which is also a fun thing about South Park when they crap on Conifer, there’s snow everywhere all the time, and this joke:
I have previously mentioned my Thing about Lillian Gish and her vacant stare. I think it’s generally interpreted as winsome and pure, but that’s not how it lands with me. She just looks kind of empty and bored most of the time. Kind of like this movie.
I generally enjoyed BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER (1960) but I have to take this opportunity to be pedantic about something other than film—hypersonic aircraft. Assuming the fictional X-80 is a typical hypersonic aircraft along the lines of real ones like the X-15, this dude should not have been able to lift off from 2024, much less make it back to his own time.
Well, ok, the X-80 was obviously not the same as an X-15 (the higher number! come on!). This movie is sci-fi. But the X-15 was the most recent X-plane when the movie was made, so I’m going with that one.
The X-15 was designed to be hauled up to altitude by a B-52 and then drop-launched. So immediately, this isn’t what happened with the X-80. The X-80 took off by itself, which requires a lot of fuel, which is both heavy and requires storage space, both of which slow you down, which is why the X-15 was drop-launched.
More egregious, to me, is that the X-80 appeared to carry not only enough fuel to take off once, but twice. Were this movie made today, the characters would have spent a bunch of time in 2024 running around trying to find jet fuel, because the X-15 only had exactly as much fuel as it needed to go as fast as possible. The plane would burn every bit of fuel it had on board on the going fast part, and then glide in for a landing, with zero fuel.
(This part is actually kind of accurate in the film, because the pilot announces he’s beginning his glide descent in the X-80 when he arrives in 2024, so I’ll give them credit for that.)
In fact, one of the things removed from the X-15 when they were streamlining for weight was the landing gear indicator light, because it weighed five pounds and was essentially useless, because if your landing gear jammed on your way in, you had to land anyway, because you didn’t have any fuel to pull up and circle around and try to lower the landing gear again, like you would in an ordinary plane.
Obviously, if the X-80 needed a B-52 to launch, that would have been an insurmountable obstacle to leaving 2024. Scrounging jet fuel for takeoff is semi-believable, but doing that AND finding a working B-52 that also needs fuel is a few bridges too far.
(I don’t remember exactly where I learned all of this, but I think it was Breaking the Chains of Gravity by Amy Shira Teitel?)
I was trying to come up with movies similar to POINT BREAK, to watch with my partner, and FACE/OFF (1997) kind of fits the bill. The chaos factor, probably.
But also maybe the blasphemy. I’m a sucker for hilarious blasphemy.
Here’s a video of all the bird shots in FACE/OFF (embedding is disabled, sorry).
SPACE PROBE TAURUS (1965) is about some people going out on a rocket, killing some aliens, and accidentally landing on an alien planet, in the ocean, where their ship is attacked by giant crabs.
I’m kind of used to the wild sexism you get in this era of film, and in particular in sci-fi in this era, but this one actually seemed to be trying to make some kind of statement against sexism?
It wasn’t executed very well, because they just took a hard left into benevolent sexism, but it was an improvement on Star Trek: The Original Series, which suffers from the fact that in the 1960s there were apparently a lot of men who could easily imagine alien planets and species and wild technology but not that women could be good at their jobs, and they couldn’t understand why anyone would let them be on spaceships except to be polite, and women on spaceships would obviously need quite a bit of babysitting. In SPACE PROBE TAURUS, the single female scientist is actually good at her job and is allowed to save the day. Wild!
Now I don't have to see any of those movies. Hehe. I have no idea about X or B planes or any other alphabetical letter that's named for an airplane but making any realistic film in 1960 would have been a feat. I won't tell hubby you criticized Star Trek.
Fun piece. :)