Vintage sci-fi

[Sits]

Vintage sci-fi

Again semi Sci-Fi very Cold War, but I remember as a kid seeing a movie where an agent has had a terrible accident and returned with his head covered by a steel casing which can't be removed. The whole film is around the character's torments, and his bosses (or are they?) trying to work out if it's really him or an imposter.

That's all I remember of the film.

A few years later in the 70s I bought a book purely on the strength of its cover called Who? by Algis Budrys. Only as I began reading it did I realise it was the same story. I read the book many times but it's long since lost, chucked out, who knows.

I've never seen the film since and really should track it down. Unfortunately IMDB chose to show its most inappropriate renaming and video cover:
Who?

[Patrick Thistle]

Vintage sci-fi

via vicaria wrote:

Oh and they used the wrong spelling/word 'insure'. Always annoying. Ensure

But maybe they were accurately conveying the sort of grammatical errors likely to be made by technical staff aboard a tanker..?

It was a company directive, though. From the suits! But I'll take your reasoning as it'll help me get through that scene from here on in. The awful badly-edited cut involving Ash's head is unforgiveable though.

WOM - you can find a lot of TZ episodes on youtube if you need a quick fix. I'd agree with you on most fronts re: how good it is, although the odd 'wacky' episode they'd do was a bit genuinely crap (that Cavendar one, for example)

Surely that makes it more likely to be spelled wrong though. Some of the corporate emails I get sent from the dept director are gibberish...

[via vicaria]

Vintage sci-fi

On a bored-on-the-couch youtube wandering, I found that there are a number of the remastered episodes of Star Trek TOS available, so I had a go on The Doomsday Machine, which I haven't seen for about ten years.

The new graphics are good - appropriate for the series and not trying to be all fancy-dan, retaining their sixties' charm, but the acting was even hammier than I remembered. The biggest surprise, though, came from realising that Commodore Decker was played by Jessica Fletcher's Cabot Cove doctor mate! He was awful.

[Max Payne]

Vintage sci-fi

Stumpy Pepys wrote:

Wow, that's quite high on a scale of science-fuckwittedness, isn't it, versalete? But to be fair to the film-makers and their public of the day, people hadn't had much more than 200 years at the time to get to grips with Newton's system.

Modern film-makers are still regularly ignoring the laws of physics. Even in sci-fi, where the sound of noisy exploding spaceships can propagate in a vacuum.

One of the things I liked about 2001 : A Space Odyssey

[Sits]

Vintage sci-fi

Not sure if anyone has DVDs and can better judge, but at the time we always thought Space: 1999 was superior to its peers in terms of special effects (no Blake's Seven wobbly spaceships or Dr. Who polythene monsters).

But I imagine the acting wasn't as good as my teenage memory recalls. And then there's the flares and stack heels in Series 1.

[M_L_M]

Vintage sci-fi

Space 1999
The tomorrow People
Timeslip
UFO

Ah the memories

[via vicaria]

Vintage sci-fi

I only saw Space: 1999 for the first time in the late '90s/early 2000's (BBC2 got a job lot of old scifi for mid-Saturday pre-football viewing, it seems, as they ran the original BG in that slot for a while), and while the set design often seemed pretty impressive, the special effects out in space were the usual models-on-strings business. Not as egregious as yer Blake's 7 or anything, but nothing fancy.

[Patrick Thistle]

Vintage sci-fi

This by the way, is fab

How Aliens Should have Ended

[Stumpy Pepys]

Vintage sci-fi

via vicaria wrote: … and while the set design often seemed pretty impressive, the special effects out in space were the usual models-on-strings business. Not as egregious as yer Blake's 7 or anything, but nothing fancy.

Space 1999 still holds up pretty well — it, like most Gerry Anderson stuff — had a pretty large budget.

Season 1 probably better than season 2; it's just season 2 had Catherine Schell, who I used to fancy rotten.