George Pal's 1953 War of the Worlds

Found this classic movie on DVD at a market stall a couple of days ago, and couldn't resist adding it to my 50s sci fi collection.

Which I'd love to say is "Burgeoning" but really isn't.

I remember as a child I saw it for the first time as part of a wonderful regular weekly slot of sci fi films on BBC2, a halcyon time when I saw "The Day the Earth Stood Still", "It Came from Outer Space", "The Forbidden Planet" and many other classics for the first time. I loved watching every single one of those films, they thrilled me so much.

But somehow the War of the Worlds was a disappointment. It may have had an incorrect American setting, but that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was Jeff Wayne. Having been introduced to that classic album by my stepfather to be in about 1979, when I thought of Martians, I didn't think of Pal's cutesy ET creations with multicoloured eyes flying around in underripe bananas with a streetlamp stuck on.

I thought of terrifying, tentacled blood drainers destroying the best of Victorian England in their Mike Trim designed death machines, the fighting machines of legend. And the creations of Pal's movie just didn't measure up in the childish imagination.

But watching it again, it stands up well to the test of time, and certainly delivers a well placed Heat Ray blast to Spielberg's 2005 very silly effort with its hideous children, and Tim Robbins. Gene Barry with his glasses on makes a rather less obvious action hero than other movies of the time, and although the constant screaming of Ann Robinson is a bit of a cliche, and the religion and churches aspect a bit of a drag, the special effects aren't. The fighting machines, apparently based on manta rays, are a mile away from the usual flying saucers every movie of the time was chucking at the drive-in audiences, and the heat ray and "skeleton beam" weapons effects are far ahead of anything else that was in cinemas in the 50s.

The martians, although strangely cute, are more otherwordly than in other sci fi efforts of the period with exception of the single eyed horrors of "It Came from Outer Space", and I also like it because of the proto-geekery weight given to science, as opposed to military might.

If only the Priest had been played by Phil Lynott...

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 07.06.14

CINEMA - Super 8 Scores a 7. And a Bit

Finally got to watch Super 8, having bought it originally as a present for the folks and having had to wait for a discretely decent interval before spiriting it back to my place alongside some onions.

After about half an hour, it was pretty obvious I was watching Super Close Encounters of the Extra Terrestrial Cloverfield Kind - there were so many Spielberg identifiers in there it was hard to see where JJ Abrams could have put his own imprint on the movie. Cute child - check. Cute child who lost their mother to an unfortunate crushing incident - check. Cute child gets kidnapped by alien - check. Lashings of sentimentality - check check check check.

Finally, Abrams own DNA gets a look in. A monster that looks pretty much the same as the Cloverfield one. But for all the movie's obvious derivations, it has a lot of charm. The framing device, the kids of the cast shooting their own zombie apocalypse movie on the titular Super 8 camera, is a fantastic one and it also bears noting that the finished product you see over the end credits is better than Planet Terror by a mile.

The young cast - Joel Courtney, Riley Griffiths and the tons-better-than-her-sister Elle Fanning - are great too, and the fact that the creature is given more depth than either a building crushing giant prawn, or a finger glowing be-good moralist, adds a dimension to the film other creature flicks lack.

In short, it's not amazing, but it is a highly watchable film, and I whiled away a happy sofa bound couple of hours watching it.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25/08/2013