70's Sci-Fi Appreciation Thread (pre-Star Wars)

I remember seeing The Terminal Man on TV and couldn't figure out quite what to make of it. It's an interesting premise that actually showed up again in a number of forms but most recently as an example of why Doc Ock turns "evil" in Spidey-2

 

http://imdb.com/title/tt0074475/posters

"Embryo"

Another 70's sci-fi flick that had an interesting idea. I wanted to see this as a kid just for Barbara Carrera.

 

Jiminy Jillickers! How did I miss that one?
*hangs head in shame*

Now I gotta see it, if just for that scene.

 

Not sure if this is just a plain old thriller, and not Sci Fi, but Coma sure was a great movie!

Heck, it's Michael Crichton, so I guess it qualifies!

 

I always dug "Phase IV" but never see it around anymore. It was the first (only?) film directed by Saul Bass, the man responsible for several of Hitchcock's inventive title sequences and, not surprisingly, is very visually interesting. The story about ants gaining the ecological upper hand is a little silly but the whole endeavor is treated with impressive solemnity. Definitely worth seeking out, with some nice work by Nigel Davenport and Michael Murphy. It's a pretty cool flick if you can find it.

Aaron

 

Journey To The Far Side of The Sun (1969), starred Roy Thinnes
Westworld

 

Funny you say that, I just watched it last week.
It's ok. Definitely tries to be 2001-ish at times, not very successfully.
But it's pretty fun.

Oh yeah, they use the same groovy futuristic chairs in one scene that were on the space Hilton in 2001.

These:

Far out.

 

We were discussing this earlier. This movie is also known as Doppelganger

 

That is one odd flick. And yes, it is Saul Bass' one feature-length directorial effort. He made a buncha shorts, though.

I like that movie because it crosses over into my other favorite genre, "When Animals/Insects Attack!!", also of the '70s.

Such classics as Night of the Lepus, Food of the Gods, Bug, Kingdom of the Spiders, etc etc etc

But that's for another thread.

 

Here's a list of 70's Sci Fi from www.filmsandtv.com, with a bunch I've never heard of! See any notables on here?

Adventures of Stella Star (1979)
Alien (1979)
Andromeda Strain (1971)
Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)
Battlestar: Galactica (1979)
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)
Beware! The Blob (1972)
Bionic Woman (1975)
Black Hole (1979)
Boy and His Dog (1975)
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979)
Clockwork Orange (1971)
Clonus Horror (1979)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
Cremators (1972)
Damnation Alley (1977)
Dark (1979)
Deadly Harvest (1972)
Death Race 2000 (1975)
Demon Seed (1977)
Embryo (1976)
Empire of the Ants (1977)
End of the World (1977)
Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)
Fantastic Planet (1973)
Futureworld (1976)
Gamera vs. Monster X (1970)
Gas-s-s-s...or, It May Become Necessary to Destroy... (1970)
Godzilla on Monster Island (1972)
Godzilla vs. Bionic Monster (1974)
Godzilla vs. Hedora (1971)
Godzilla vs. Megalon (1976)
Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970)
Institute for Revenge (1979)
Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
King Kong (1976)
Laserblast (1978)
Logan's Run (1976)
Mad Max (1979)
Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Mansion of the Doomed (1976)
Message from Space (1978)
Meteor (1979)
Neptune Factor (1973)
Night of the Lepus (1972)
Night Slaves (1970)
Omega Man (1971)
Piranha (1978)
Prophecy (1979)
Quatermass (1979)
Quintet (1979)
Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (1971)
Rollerball (1975)
Shape of Things to Come (1979)
Silent Running (1971)
Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)
Solaris (1972)
Soylent Green (1973)
Stalker (1979)
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977)
Starship Invasions (1977)
Superman: The Movie (1978)
Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)
THX 1138 (1971)
Time After Time (1979)
Unidentified Flying Oddball (1979)
Warlords of Atlantis (1978)
Westworld (1973)
Yog: Monster from Space (1970)
Zardoz (1974)

 

Night of the Lepus!

Giant rabbits attack in slow motion! With DeForest Kelly in it I kept waiting for him to say "He's dead Jim"!

 

Night Slaves was a terrific TV movie with James Franciscus. He had a steel plate in his head which prevented some stranded aliens (much like "It Came from Outer Space") from using the humans of the community to return home (if memory serves). He falls in love with one of the aliens. It has a nice twist ending, performances and is yet another example of some of the quality TV movies ABC produced during the 70's.

A Boy and His Dog--Based on Harlan Ellison's short story "Blood's a Rover" and it's pretty darn close to the source material (or as close as anything produced from one of Ellison's stories could be). Great movie with Don Johnson, Jason Robards, it was shot on a shoe string budget but made the most of its budget.

In the post-war future telepathic dogs (developed for the military if I recall) helps the kid (played by Johnson)find food, shelter, protection and...willing girls. It seems though that this runaway girl from an underground society is there for a much more neferious reason...to lure him underground to this 50's society that has been build there.

I really like George Roy Hill's film of "Slaughterhouse Five". RIP Kurt Vonnegut! He does a nice job of making a difficult novel into a comprehensible film plus it had Valerie Perrine virtually naked!

Sadly "Colossus: The Forbin Project" is available only in a pan and scan version on DVD. Some great preformances in the film though which is really a late 60's film--it sat on the shelf (I believe it was shot in 1968) but the success of "Planet of the Apes" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" encouraged Universal to release it.

 

This one is slightly out of bounds, but hey ...
—it's a co-production with Second City.

The Monitors (1969)

"Unusual sci-fi invasion film, with a black-comedy twist: The Earth is taken over by The Monitors, aliens who run it like hall monitors in a 1950's high school, with overtones of Big Brother. The film follows the progress of the human underground rebellion. The twist is that as the film goes on, the audience's sympathies shift to the aliens, who are basically benevolent."



...some good reviews over at the imdb on this...

 

This is true. It's inexplicable that Universal put this out in pan'n'scan. They could have at least ported over the widescreen LaserDisc transfer and most folks would have been reasonably content. It was issued on LaserDisc as a double feature with SILENT RUNNING, both with letterbox transfers.

Harry

 

That's a shame, as that's really quite a great film.

 

I just watched the Beta Cloud episode of Space: 1999 last night. Silly. I can't believe that scareed the dickens out of me when it originally aired. then again, I was 5 at the time.

Man, season 1 Space: 1999 and season 2 are like two completely different shows! I can't think of any other example where a show changed so much from one season to the next--Black Adder doesn't count!

 

Black Adder changed in good ways! Space: 1999; well the change was just disturbing. They just made it look cheap in season 2 (I know they slashed the budget, but really). I mean, season 3 of Star Trek had a big budget cut but it least it looked pretty much the same.

And that Maya character was just ... weird.

 

Well, I think from a sense of set design and style, and music, the look and sound of the seasons is totally different, regardless of budget cuts. The vibe of season 1 is early 70's--dark, utilitarian, weird 70's computer fonts--whereas season 2 looks like the later 70's--brighter, clear Euro-style lettering, more colors, more light, a harbinger of things to come in the early 80's. I guess the fact that season 1 was shot 1973-1974 (and aired 1975-76) and season 2 was shot 1976-1977 (and aired 1976-78) made the difference.

The biggest change for me--that I liked the least--was replacing the somewhat thought provoking quotes at the end of each season 1 episode (with dreary finale music) with season 2's not-very-humorous comedy bits and sexual innuendo, propelled by a 70's pseudo-sitcom soundtrack.

 

I *hated* the way they freeze framed so many episodes at the end with Barbara Bain and Martin Landau grinning at each other over some silly remark. It was great for "Eight is Enough" but pretty tacky for a sci fi show.

 

That was Fred Freiberger for you. I remember when I was reading scripts for Dino DeLaurentiis and I came across one of Freiberger's scripts. It was pretty darn bad full of cliches. Then again cliches sold back then (and still today). I remember the big deal that ATV made about Freiberger coming on board and his association with "Star Trek" neglecting to mention that he produced some of the worst batch of episodes the series had. To be fair, though, if Roddenberry hadn't given up day-to-day involvement it probably wouldn't have gotten that bad but they faced the same issues as "1999"--shrinking budgets, a shrinking pool of talented writers working for the show and some downright silly episodes ("Spock's Brain" springs to mind--which ironically was written by Gene L. Coon one of the best producer/writers on the show under a pseudonym--who knows how many hands it went through or how good the original script was? Perhaps that's why coon put his Lee Cronin nome de plume on the script).

Speaking of the 70's---1979 finally saw "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" released. Reading about all the drama behind that film, I'm amazed it turned out as good as it did. Director Robert Wise had no idea what he was getting into. Considering that this is the guy that edited "Citizen Kane", directed "The Sand Pebbles", "The Day the Earth Stood Still", "Run Silent Run Deep" and "The Andromea Strain", I'm not amazed he made a decent film but disappointed it didn't live up to its potential.

 

Now, I'm a Trek fan. I've seen all the films and most of the TV shows (all of TOS, TNG, and VOY, and most of DS9 and ENT), but I always felt that the basic plot for ST: TMP didn't really suit a movie length treatment.

To be honest, the whole foundation of the movie - the origin of V'Ger (I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen) sounds more like something from an episode of Space: 1999. Of course, ST: TMP is an adaption of the unused pilot episode for "Star Trek: Phase 2" - the second TV incarnation of TOS that very nearly got made in the late 70s. As a plot for a massively expensive movie (it cost $40 million - in today's $ you'd be talking over $250 million) it is; how can I put it? A bit lame.

 

I agree. I thought it was an OK movie. The director's cut was an improvement and Wise had them finish some of the visuals that they couldn't do because they ran out of time.

The story came from Alan Dean Foster's treatment for "In Thy Image" which was intended as the pilot. Basically the writers (Howard Livingston and to some extent Roddenberry) "blew up" the story for the big screen. I always felt it wasn't all that original to begin with--it shared story elements for John Meredith Lucas' episode about Nomad.

Although the story was inert the visuals were quite stunning but ultimately the film missed the boat by not focusing on the characters as much as it could have (you could have substituted any characters from any other sci-fi film set in space and done the story with them) and, quite honestly, the writing was often weak in the screenplay.

 

There is the Space: 1999 episode entitled "Return of Voyager," ya know!

ST: TMP also recycles concepts and plot points and even dialog ("Kirk unit," etc.) from the TOS episode "The Changeling."

I gotta admit, the climactic scene in ST:TMP with Decker and Ilia always brings tears to my eyes--and I'm no Trekkie!

 

Doctor Who??