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dsisterson
Reviews
The Long Chase (1972)
Does this still exist?
It's been 32 years since I saw this and I was seven at the time but let's see what I can remember. 17-year-old Simon is on holiday in Scotland with his father. They are fishing by the sea when his father unaccountably disappears. At a loss, Simon resorts to knocking on the doors of the local village, asking 'have you seen my father?' The police, oddly, are also of little help and Simon resorts to turning detective himself. At some point he teams up with Susan, and the two of them carry on the hunt for the rest of the series, hindered by a sinister man on a motorcycle, carrying a machine gun. Liz and Simon almost meet a sticky end at the end of several episodes - either trapped in a network of caves with only a cigarette lighter to help them find a way out, or going over some treacherous rapids in canoes, or at the offending end of the marksman's gun. The wider plot involves an assassination attempt on a major political figure, and over the course of the series Simon finds, to his disbelief, that his father is involved with the gang planning it... And that's about all I can remember. Apparently it turned up on a satellite channel around 1990 so perhaps the tapes are still out there.
Son of Dracula (1943)
A revelation!
I saw this film as one of the batch on the 'Dracula Legacy Collection' DVD and didn't have high expectations - I last saw it when I was 11 and thought it was rather dull then... I've revised my opinion completely! Despite the overall reputation of the later Universal horrors, this is no trashy scraping-the-barrel sequel... it has a genuinely fresh and involving story that kept me glued, and is one of the few films in the series to credit the audience with a little more sophistication than they had in 1930. In addition, the special effects in the transformation scenes still stand up even today, despite the odd cheesy bat-on-strings. Lon Chaney, as has been noted, is not the perfect vampire, his defining facial expression being what my dad calls 'Lon's tortured look', but he's offscreen most of the time and does cut an imposing figure when he appears, even if he lacks Lugosi's European mystique, and he comes into his own admirably in the climactic scenes. Dim the lights for this one.
NBC Special Treat: Into Infinity (1975)
..seems to be where it's gone.
I haven't heard a word about this film since I saw it when I was ten; I remember that it seemed rather uneventful - nothing much happened until the end - but I enjoyed it anyway because it seemed to present a plausible future. I suppose it came right at the end of that optimistic period that began with 'Destination Moon' in about 1950, that told us that the future held great adventures in space that we could look forward to when we grew up. All I remember about the story is this: A family is chosen to be the first pioneers to go into interstellar space on a newly developed starship. They potter around in Earth orbit for a while on a space station, being prepared for their adventure, then off they go in their ship. One of the few shots I clearly remember shows the Doppler light shift on the planet Pluto as they pass it at near-light speed - red as they approach, blue as they leave it behind. Towards the end, the ship falls into the gravity well of a black hole and the family suffer from various uncomfortable photographic effects for a while, but they emerge out the other side safe and sound, where they find they have a whole new universe to explore, where the stars all appear to be seen through special filters to make them look prettier and more pointy, and the sky of space is a deep bright blue instead of black. They all look out of their spaceship window in awe, and there the film ends, just when it looked like getting interesting. It at least had the virtue of presenting a realistic view of what space exploration might be like in the future (except perhaps for the black hole bit) and was worth the effort just for that, but of course Star Wars came along soon afterwards and redefined science fiction in the popular consciousness as 'action movies with spaceships and monsters', and suddenly the medium regressed to the days of Flash Gordon, which is where we seem to have been stuck ever since.
Zítra vstanu a oparím se cajem (1977)
Would love to see this again.
Like the user below, I saw this late one night on the BBC about 20 years ago - probably the only place it's been seen in the English-speaking world-! The plot as I remember it goes something like this: There are two twin brothers sharing an apartment. One is an untidy layabout, the other is a time machine pilot for a company that does tourist trips into the past. The smart brother is engaged to a nice girl whom the slob brother is also in love with. One of the time machines is hijacked by a group of Neo-Nazis who want to give Hitler the atom bomb (there is a scene of Hitler watching a movie of the fall of the Reich, brought to him by these people to prove who they are). Something goes wrong, of course, which somehow results, in the present day, of the smart brother, his girlfriend and all her family falling off a balcony to their deaths. The slob brother is left to sort things out and somehow manages to return to the present before he left and take the place of the dead brother, and marry the nice girl, who now isn't dead. So there are now two of him, one pretending to be the dead smart brother. If anyone else can add their fuzzy memories to this page please do - eventually we might be able to reconstruct the whole story; it seems unlikely we'll ever get to see the film again-! Maybe it only exists in another time continuum.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
pure cartoon
Yes, there are one or two effective shock moments, and it's done in a nice cinema-verite style which gives it an edge, but the best way to enjoy this film is to imagine that it is in fact the final episode of Scooby Doo, only in live-action and without the dog.