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My Top Thirty Films, Part 2
Silent Running (Universal Pictures, March 10, 1972)
I’ve had a little think about my favorite films, and what makes them my favorites. As you will see, my choices are on the whole rather fluffy, but these are the films that I return to time and time again for comfort, or as a way to reset my brain. I’d be very interested to find out if any of my favorites align with any of your own – please let me know in the comments below!
Read Part 1 here. Without further ado, in no particular order, and no ratings (because they are all 10s), let’s get cracking!
Taxi Driver (Columbia Pictures, February 8, 1976)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Who’s in it?
Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd
What’s it about?Travis Bickle (De Niro) is a Vietnam Vet, suffering from PTSD, driving a cab for a living, and growing increasingly detached from reality day by day. He lives alone, on a diet of cornflakes and scotch, and writes in his diary the thoughts that trouble him nightly; the state of the New York City streets, the perceived inhumanity of its residents, and brief phrases and idioms to live his life by.
When he meets Betsy (Shepherd), a campaign assistant for a presidential candidate, he is fascinated by her, and attempts to take her on a date. The failure of their unformed relationship is due to his social awkwardness and choice of venue (an adult film theatre). Rejected by Betsy, he falls further into delirium as he becomes obsessed with ‘saving’ a child prostitute (Foster) from her pimp (Keitel). His mental breakdown concludes in the botched assassination of the candidate, and the successful liberation of the young girl in a bloody shootout.
Why do I love it?Everyone remembers their first Scorsese, and this was mine. It is still my favourite Scorsese film, and the fella has made quite a few good ones (sarcasm)!
Taxi Driver is an utterly dreamy film for me, not in the gossamer nightgown and watercolour pastures sense, nor in the David Lynch stream of consciousness sense, but more of an intangible mosaic of sound and light and shadow. Just thinking about it now, having not actually watched in over a decade, I can see the neon-drenched streets and hear the melancholy wail of Herrmann’s brass (my favourite score of his, completed mere weeks before his death).
I fell in love instantly with Cybill Shepherd and wanted to take her out for a coffee and apple pie with a slice of cheese (which still seems utterly alien to me), although I had a hard time separating Jodie Foster from Bugsy Malone. De Niro’s raw performance, years before he became a facsimile of himself, is hypnotic, and although I couldn’t possibly identify with him, I could certainly empathise.
There are so many quirky elements in this film that add to the dreamstate; the afore-mentioned cheese slice, corn flakes and scotch, custom wrist holsters, and Bickle’s own reaction to pornography, and these have all lingered with me like half-forgotten personal memories.
Silent Running (Universal Pictures, March 10, 1972)
Silent Running (1972)
Who’s in it?
Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin, Jesse Vint
What’s it about?In the future, all of nature on Earth has been eradicated by the advancement of humanity, and the last remaining forests, along with a clutch of animals, have been sent into space in vast geodesic domes attached to giant star freighters. The custodians of these last biomes are a motley bunch of blue-collar workers, including an obsessive biologist who seemingly prefers nature over humans, Freeman Lowell (Dern), and a trio of robotic gardener drones, Huey, Dewey, and Louis. When the order comes through to destroy the habitats (for ‘business’ reasons), Lowell flips and turns on his crewmates, determined to keep the forests alive.
Why do I love it?There have not been many films that made me blub uncontrollably at the end (Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983) is one of them), but when Joan Baez’s ‘Rejoice in the Sun’ kicks in as we watch Dewey, the last surviving drone, caring for a little garden with Lowell’s old watering can, the waterworks inevitably begin. It’s an ending both depressing and profoundly optimistic, and caps off a truly groundbreaking hard sci-fi flick that paved the way for many cultural touchstones, not least R2-D2, the stoned bomb operators of Dark Star (1974), and the crew of the Nostromo.
Following Star Wars, little me devoured any and all science-fiction I could find, and Silent Running felt like one of the few ‘realistic’ settings; less catsuits and rayguns, more industrial grime and hardware. It certainly helped that director Douglas Trumball shot many of the interiors in a real-life decommissioned aircraft carrier, the USS Valley Forge, blending the claustrophobic corridors and cabins with stunning, large-scale, greeblie-heavy spaceship models, and the talented performers, all bilateral amputees, imbued the little drones with so much character that they became more than machines, they were the characters that we empathized with the most. A stunning film.
Re-Animator (Empire International Pictures, October 18, 1985)
Re-Animator (1985)
Who’s in it?
Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Bruce Abbott, David Gale
What’s it about?VERY loosely based on H.P. Lovecraft’s 1922 novelette “Herbert West – Reanimator,” this version features West (Combs) as a brilliant, obsessive, young scientist who has developed a glowing green serum that can reanimate dead things.
Having secured a spot as a medical student at the famed Miskatonic University, West ropes his fellow student, Dan Cain (Abbott) into a series of experiments that soon grow wildly out of control. When one of the professors, Dr. Hill (Gale) learns of West’s discovery, he covets it for himself, but soon falls foul of West’s vengeance. However, death doesn’t stop him from continuing his quest to steal not only the formula, but Dan’s girlfriend, Megan (Crampton), and he literally unleashes bloody hell upon the university in his efforts.
Why do I love it?The first of Brian Gordon’s utterly bonkers reinventions of Lovecraft classics (see also From Beyond (1986), Castle Freak (1995), and Dagon (2001)), Re-Animator popped onto the scene when I had just hit 18, and was one of the first legitimate ‘adult’ certificate films I went to see. I was already frothing at the mouth having had the film’s insane effects teased by Fangoria magazine, but I really wasn’t prepared for the sheer sticky madness of the whole affair. Not only was it gory as all heck, but the gore itself was used in such an imaginative and hilarious way, that it altered my brain chemistry forever. Remember, this is a kid who grew up with the horny grue of Hammer films, so I was used to a little more restraint in the bloodletting (barring the occasional The Thing (1982) highlight).
Re-Animator however decided to not just disembowel someone, but then had their reanimated entrails loop out and grab someone, it had a headless corpse steady its own head by slamming it onto a desk paper spike, the undead are dispatched with bone saws. Of course, much of this visceral lunacy would be turned up to 11 in the better of the two sequels, Bride of Re-Animator (1990), but this film was the O.G. — the one that kicked off my passion for over-the-top gore, and my enduring infatuation with Barbara Crampton.
Jaws (Universal Pictures, June 20, 1975)
Jaws (1975)
Who’s in it?
Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary
What’s it about?When the sleepy seaside town of Amity Island in New England is rocked by a shark attack, the local sheriff, Martin Brody (Scheider), must contend with the town mayor who wants to keep the beaches open for the 4th of July, while trying to convince the townsfolk of the very real danger of stepping into the ocean. A failed shark hunt leads him to recruit a student oceanographer, Matt Hooper (Dreyfuss), and a grizzled seadog, Quint (Shaw), in a last desperate attempt to destroy the toothsome terror before it can do more snacking.
Why do I love it?In this complete list of favourite movies, I would argue that all of them are fantastic, but only a handful of them are perfect. Jaws is undoubtedly one of the perfect ones.
My dad (in one of his rare moments of doing something cool with me) took me when I was 9 to see Jaws in the cinema. This was in the first week of release, when the hysteria hadn’t quite kicked in yet, and it had an ‘A’ certificate (the UK equivalent of a PG film), shortly before it was recertified to ‘AA’ (no one under 14 allowed). Naturally it scared seven colours out of me, especially old Ben Gardner’s noggin popping out of the boat hull.
Later that year we holidayed in Cornwall, and I recall the sheer panic when someone yelled “Shark!” at the beach and the sunburned throng erupted from the surf, mimicking a scene from Spielberg’s masterpiece. We did indeed see a dorsal fin, but it was probably a basking shark, harmless. We don’t get great whites off the English coast. Still, it was a lovely snapshot of the ongoing shark obsession that had gripped the world, and a perversely happy memory for me.
Jaws is a regular watch for me, it’s one of those comfort films that I can put on and just wallow in the mastery of all concerned; the stellar cast, the music, the cinematography, and Spielberg’s supernatural blocking skills. The film means so much to me, and has been present in key moments in my life — my early introduction to horror, as a learning tool in film school, as a teaching tool for my own son. I think I’d like it to be one the last things I watch before finally shuffling off. Guess I should be making plans.
Starship Troopers (TriStar Pictures, November 7, 1997)
Starship Troopers (1997)
Who’s in it?
Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris, Dina Meyer
What’s it about?The future expansion of the human race has brought us into contact with a highly-evolved alien insect species, which is now hellbent on destroying our planet. The war with the ‘Arachnids’ is ongoing, and the world government, run by a fascist corporation born from the ashes of a failed democracy, puts military service above all else. Only through fighting for your planet can you truly be perceived to be a citizen, and thus embrace the benefits that come with that status.
Into the fray is thrown Johnny Rico (Van Dien), a blond-haired, blue-eyed jock who doesn’t quite have the smarts for officer material, but is a good fit for the fodder known as the General Infantry. Rico enlists partly to impress his crush, Carmen (Richards), but is fully onboard after his parents and home town are destroyed in a bug attack. Once thrust into the brutality of close combat with the Arachnids, all that remains is for Rico to try to survive each encounter, save his friends, and eradicate the bug menace once and for all (spoiler alert — two out of three ain’t bad).
Why do I love it?The third in the holy Verhoeven trilogy, following Robocop (1987) and Total Recall (1990), and although I love the others equally, Starship Troopers is the one I’ve returned to the most times (and that’s saying something).
For all of my inherent anti-war feelings, I am always completely swept away on a jingoist wave of blood lust when this film gets going — much like rooting for the Colonial Marines when a swarm of xenomorphs is advancing. Nothing beats this film for sheer, bombastic military mayhem, and yet at its core are some sneaky anti-fascist themes, sandwiched between the violent layers like warm syrup in a stroopwaffle. Verhoeven’s great at this, he did something similar with Robocop, and here he manipulates (let’s face it) a Beverly Hills soap cast in a savage deconstruction of the military machine and Robert A. Heinlein’s alleged right-wing fantasies in his original 1957 novel on which this film is based.
But enough of my pseudo-analysis of themes, what really probes my brain bug are the effects, stunning for the time and further proof that for the best CG effects you need to place them in the hands of a traditional artist. Phil Tippett’s bugs still hold up today — it’s hard not to marvel at the swarms of Arachnids thundering across the rocky plateaus on their way to slice and dice the hopelessly outnumbered soldiers. Add to this spectacle some of the best military vehicles ever put on screen, gnarly animatronic gore, and Michael Ironside shoving his metal fingers into a hollowed out bonce and growling, “they sucked out his brains,” and you have the recipe for a damned good time. POPCORN, STAT!
Previous Murky Movie surveys from Neil Baker include:
My Top Thirty Films, Part 1
The Star Warses
Just When You Thought It Was Safe
Tech Tok
The Weyland-Yutaniverse
Foreign Bodies
Mummy Issues
Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Monster Mayhem
It’s All Rather Hit-or-Mythos
You Can’t Handle the Tooth
Tubi Dive
What Possessed You?
See all of Neil Baker’s Black Gate film reviews here. Neil spends his days watching dodgy movies, most of them terrible, in the hope that you might be inspired to watch them too. He is often asked why he doesn’t watch ‘proper’ films, and he honestly doesn’t have a good answer. He is an author, illustrator, teacher, and sculptor of turtle exhibits.
Categories: Fantasy Books
The Problem of the Invincible Warrior: Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer by James Silke
Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer, Volumes 1-4, by James Silke (Tor Books, 1988-1990). Covers by Frank Frazetta
James Silke (1931 – ) is something of a renaissance man in the arts. He’s a visual artist and prose writer, a set and costume designer, photographer, and comic book guy. Most people who I meet recognize him as a comic artist/writer, although I’ve never read any of his graphic stuff.
I’ve seen a few of the movies he’s worked on, including King Solomon’s Mines and The Barbarians. My only experience with Silke’s writing is the four Sword & Sorcery books in the Frank Frazetta Death Dealer series.
These are:
1 Prisoner of the Horned Helmet (February 1988)
2 Lords of Destruction (January 1989)
3 Tooth and Claw (November 1989)
4 Plague of Knives (June 1990)
There’s also a book called Rise of the Death Dealer, with a Frazetta Cover (shown below), but I’ve never seen a physical copy, and from what I understand it’s not a 5th book in the series. According to Fantastic Fiction, it’s an omnibus volume that collects the first two books. Fantastic Fiction has been pretty accurate in my experience.
Frank Frazetta’s Rise of the Death Dealer, omnibus edition (Tor Books, March 2005). Cover by Frank Frazetta
As far as I understand, Frazetta provided the Death Dealer character and the covers and Silke wrote stories about the warrior, including an origin story in Prisoner of the Horned Helmet. I don’t know whether Frazetta offered any story ideas but the prose is Silke.
The series features a character named Gath of Baal, a young but powerful warrior at the beginning of the series, who acquires a horned helmet imbued with great sorcery. He doesn’t realize that once he puts it on he’ll become its prisoner and will become the Death Dealer.
I enjoyed the series quite a lot. There are some strong visuals and some bloody, gory fights. The prose is serviceable but not outstanding. There are some very modern phrasings that occasionally threw me out of the story. I was hoping for more Robert E. Howard style poetic prose but didn’t get it.
The pacing is not as fast as it could have been either, mainly because the books are too long. Cutting fifty pages out of each of these volumes would have really helped. At some point I’ll also talk about the “problem” of the invincible warrior and how it diminishes tension in a tale.
Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for us was Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? and the Pseudoscience Bestsellers of the 1970s. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.
Categories: Fantasy Books
Forgotten Authors: Raymond F. Jones
Raymond F. Jones was born in Salt Lake City on November 15, 1915. He studied engineer and English at the University of Utah before working as a radio engineer. He later suggested that getting an English degree is one of the worst things a writer could do. He had a reasonable amount of success as an author, with his novel This Island Earth being the work he is best known for. It was adapted into a film in 1955, starring Jeff Morrow and featuring Russell Johnson, who would go on to portray the Professor on Gilligan’s Island, and Richard Deacon, who played Mel Cooley on The Dick van Dyke Show.
According to Jones, he was introduced to science fiction in 1927 when he read H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. He decided he never wanted to read it again because he was afraid it couldn’t live up to the “thrill of that first contact with the realm of imagined science.”
After graduating college, he served on a mission in Galveston, Texas and worked installing telephone exchange equipment for Western Electric in Texas, but after marrying Elaine Kimball on June 27, 1940, he took a job with the Weather Bureau to cut down on travel. During World War II, he used his radio engineering degree at Bendix Radio in Baltimore before settling in Arizona after the war.
Jones’ first short story, “Test of the Gods,” was published in the September 1941 issue of Astounding, in which it was overshadowed by the cover story, Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall.” This is a pattern that would be repeated, leading Gerald W. Page to note that while Jones was a “writer of surprising versatility. But the price of this seems to be that too often he came on the scene with a perfectly good story that was still second best to the similar works of someone else.”
Jones wrote 15 novels in addition to This Island Earth, beginning in 1951 with the novel Renaissance (which was reprinted as Man of Two Worlds).
In addition to This Island Earth, two other stories by Jones were adapted by Hollywood. “The Children’s Room,” originally published in 1947, was an episode of the anthology series Tales of Tomorrow in 1952, and 1950’s “Divided We Fall” was adapted for the anthology series Out of This World in 1962.
His 1950 story “Tools of the Trade” is believed to be the first description of 3D printing.
Jones not only wrote science fiction, he also wrote non-fiction, with four juvenile science books ranging from The World of Weather to Animals of Long Ago. He also wrote the study Ice Formation on Aircraft.
Jones was a Hugo finalist in 1967 for his short story “Rat Race,” which lost to Larry Niven’s “Neutron Star.” In 1996, his story “Correspondence Course,” was remembered by enough people to earn him a Retro-Hugo nomination, where he lost to Hal Clement’s “Common Sense.”
Elaine died on July 23, 1970 and on May 2, 1973, Jones married Lillian Wats. Jones and Elaine had five children and eighteen grandchildren. When he married Lillian, he gained five step-children.
Jones died in Sandy, Utah on January 24, 1994 after suffering from pancreatic cancer. For no reason other than the same first name, I tend to think of Jones along with author Raymond Z. Gallun (1911-1994). Coincidentally, both of their obituaries appeared in the same issue of Locus, with Jones coming in second to Gallun’s.
I reviewed Jones’ short story “Death Eternal” in 2018 as part of my Birthday Reviews series on Blackgate.
Steven H Silver is a twenty-one-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference numerous times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.
Categories: Fantasy Books
A Game of Classic Science Fiction: Terraforming Mars by Jacob Fryxelius
Terraforming Mars by Jacob Fryxelius (FryxGames/Stronghold Games, 2016)
About a year ago, I added Terraforming Mars to my collection of board games, fascinated by the premise. At the very end of the year, a local friend proposed to get together and try playing it. On 2 January, three of us sat down to a first game, using the beginner option of everyone playing a standard corporation and keeping all ten of their initial cards without having to pay for them. Four and a half hours later, we started counting up scores.
Terraforming Mars is a game about economic investment and its returns, like Race for the Galaxy, one of my long-time favorites. The premise is fairly hard science fiction: Several corporations have been granted charters by Earth’s world government to begin — as the title says — terraforming the planet Mars: raising its temperature and oxygen and giving it bodies of water. When these reach specific designated values, the game ends and score is taken. There are no violations of fundamental laws of physics such as faster-than-light travel; the departure, so far as there is one is not qualitative but quantitative, in the rapid progress of terraforming, though in some compensation, play is divided into “generations,” which implies a time scale on the order of centuries.
[Click the images to terraform them.]
Back cover of Terraforming Mars
The rule book for the game is 16 pages, but that includes introductory material, illustrations, and several game variants, including a solitaire version. The actual rules are in easily readable type and can be read through in a few minutes. Most of the complexities are strategic and are expressed in the text and graphics of game cards. Along with these cards, each player has a personal game board that keeps track of resources, and players share a larger board that’s a map of one hemisphere of Mars, where tiles can be placed to represent cities, oceans, vegetation, and other special achievements.
The map is also used to keep track of various scores and accomplishments. Reading the map is a little complicated, like watching the screen for character status in a computer game; on this first session we took a while to figure out some of its sections. But I think it can become familiar quickly.
In a way comparable to Race for the Galaxy, each generation in Terraforming Mars is divided into phases. A generation begins with each corporation receiving four cards from a deck, which represent newly acquired capabilities if the player wants to pay for them (“‘Take what you like,’ said God; ‘take it, and pay for it.'”) After that, players perform various actions, many but not all enabled by the cards, and some of which add tiles to the large board. Spatial arrangement of tiles is important and is partly restricted by the game rules.
Race For the Galaxy by Tom Lehmann (Rio Grande Games, 2007)
Some cards are used up by one action; some are kept and displayed in front of the player, and some of these can be used for a new action in each generation. All of this costs credits, and sometimes other resources! At the end of the generation, players engage in “production,” which provides more credits (based partly on their terraforming scores) and sometimes other resources that can be used to advance terraforming, directly or indirectly.
One thing that’s largely omitted from the game is violent conflict; most of the time, the various corporations are competing in an enterprise that theoretically benefits all of them (moving them toward a fully terraformed planet). There are a few moves that advance one player while imposing costs on another. An economist would call these “externalities”; a historian might call them “acts of war.” But as with, for example, Settlers of Catan (another European game), players have the option either of cutthroat competition or of deciding that that makes playing the game less fun, and avoiding it.
One of the three of us found the game rules a bit too complicated and hard to follow, so this may not be a game for everybody. It’s certainly not a casual game! But the other two of us enjoyed it a lot. In The Psychology of Everyday Things (published 1988), Donald O. Norman set out principles for ease of use, and pointed out that well designed games are deliberately a little difficult to “use” successfully (that is, to win); otherwise they become boring when the player solves them. I don’t see Terraforming Mars as likely to become boring.
Many games have an implied story. Sometimes this is very abstract, as with chess (a game about feudal warfare) or bridge (a game about capitalistic competition and cooperation); sometimes a kind of story emerges from the play of the game. (And sometimes, as with Dungeons and Dragons, telling bits of story is an actual move in the game.) Terraforming Mars has a fairly strong story aspect: It tells about how humanity moves out into the solar system and makes other planets humanly livable, in the style of classic science fiction writers (a clever joke in the rule book is to give examples of play with three players named Kim, Stanley, and Robinson!), of recent video series such as For All Mankind, or of the proposals of billionaires.
If you like that premise, or are willing to accept it, you’ll find Terraforming Mars a well thought out representation of a lot of its scientific details. I expect that as we play more games, and move on to using more than the standard starting corporations, we’ll find interesting bits of added flavor in the profiles of other corporations. And I may try playing the solo version when I have a few hours free; it seems likely to be entertaining.
William H. Stoddard is a professional copy editor specializing in scholarly and scientific publications. As a secondary career, he has written more than two dozen books for Steve Jackson Games, starting in 2000 with GURPS Steampunk. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife, their cat (a ginger tabby), and a hundred shelf feet of books, including large amounts of science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels. His last piece for Black Gate was a review of Whose Body? by Dorothy Sayers
Categories: Fantasy Books
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