Queen of Blood (1966) / Mechte Navstrechu (1963)

Two views of Florence Marly’s eerie performance

as the green alien vampire woman.

Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller;

copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

Soon after the releases of three films in their native Soviet Union, legendary B-movie maestro Roger Corman, along with American International Pictures, gained access to these amazingly well-crafted high-budget science fiction epics—Nebo Zovyot, Planeta Bur, and Mechte Navstrechu. The first two were refashioned into three sci-fi films for American teenagers by some of Corman’s young apprentice filmmakers, including a couple named Coppola and Bogdanovich.

Mechte Navstrechu, however, Corman handed over to apprentice avant garde filmmaker Curtis Harrington along with $35,000 production cash and an eight-day shooting schedule. In fact, Harrington was able to create something of a minor masterpiece, the science fiction horror picture Queen of Blood. He salvaged much of the extremely colorful, almost psychedelically rich, footage from the original, lensed some new shots with American actors, changed the ending of the story, borrowed a few rifts from Forbidden Planet’s tonality score, and assembled Queen of Blood. The color shots from Mechte Navstrechu are exotically gorgeous. Incredible matte paintings and elaborate models and sets were all lit with new concepts in colored lighting.

Queen of Blood is historically important because it partly inspired the creation of the film Alien, along with Planet of Vampires and It! The Terror from Beyond Space.


Queen of Blood (1966)

In Queen of Blood the Earth is at peace and science has advanced. Earth is virtually a utopia. A message is received from another galaxy. Some aliens wish to get to know us better and are sending a ship with their emissaries, but the embassy ship crash lands on Mars. A rescue mission is sent from earth. There is no exposition about the months required to travel from earth and Mars.

Of course, the ship encounters solar flares (it never fails; it’s always either meteors of solar flares that cause havoc), which uses precious fuel that would otherwise be used for Mars landing and take-off maneuvers. The earth crew of three, including Laura James, lands on Mars. They locate the alien spacecraft with one crewmember dead at his post. There had to be others. Where are they? The problem is that they used so much fuel avoiding the solar flares that they don’t have enough to cruise around the planet looking for more alien astronauts.

Queen of Blood opens with a lovingly conceived,

colorful abstract title sequence that may be the

best thing in a generally commendable movie—

as did many of Corman's films whether he made

them himself, as in many of his Edgar Allan 
Poes, or produced them as in this case.

Two earth astronauts, including Allan Brenner, who were not selected for this initial trip, provide chief scientist Basil Rathbone with a plan. They will take a smaller ship to Mars, distribute several reconnaissance satellites in orbit around the planet, land on Phobos, then use their two-passenger rescue craft to go down to the planet to join their fellow astronauts (which Brenner and James are happy about, as they are in love). However, following their landing on Phobos, they must launch the tiny two-man rescue craft in 29 minutes or they will have to wait a week until Phobos and Mars are lined up properly.

When they look out their porthole they see an alien vessel—their alien visitors’ escape pod that had ejected, crashing into Phobos. They search the pod, find an unconscious green female survivor, and get back to their own ship, all within the 29 allotted minutes. Since the small rescue ship is small, one of the astronauts must stay behind. They flip a coin to decide who stays behind to be picked up when the next earth ship arrives in a week. The rescue craft enters the Martian atmosphere and gets lost in a sandstorm, crashing far from the earth ship. Our brave astronaut, Brenner, carries the alien woman for miles through the horrible sand storm. When everyone is together, they take off for Earth.

This German poster for the Soviet Union’s Mechte Navstrechu (1963) focuses on the strength, 
courage and selflessness of a future Soviet astronaut who is risking his life
saving the life of an alien woman (an episode freely adapted for Queen of Blood).
Creative license places the planet Mars behind him when in fact, he is steadfastly
struggling through a whirling red sandstorm on the surface of Mars.

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Where the original film (see below) focused on a friendly first contact between beings from different worlds, Harrington integrates the Russian footage into an outer-space sci-fi horror movie that may well be one of the inspirations for Ridley Scott’s Alien (along with It! The Terror from Beyond Space and Planet of Vampires; Alien seems to channel each of these three movies more or less equally).

The Queen of Blood trailer (YouTube)

When the alien awakens she displays great dislike for needles and for Laura James, the woman in the earth crew. In short order, one of the men winds up dead with his blood drained from his body. Now they understand what the creature is. She’s a vampire with hypnotic powers. She drains another victim dry and is starting on a third when Laura James spots her and they engage in a cat fight, wherein the alien is scratched, all her blood drains out, and she promptly dies. She was a hemophiliac. As they reach home, they discover that the alien has laid her pulsating eggs by the dozens hidden all over the ship, which the scientists are uncommonly excited about and carefully remove from the ship to be studied.

The alien has laid her pulsating

eggs all over the ship.

The new movie holds up well enough as an interesting invasion from Mars movie. I agree with DVD Savant, who says in his review, “The new footage is cleverly designed to match expensive special effects scenes from the Soviet original.... Harrington’s matching is remarkable.” I was again and again impressed with how carefully Harrington’s costumes and settings matched their Soviet equivalents, especially with the spacesuits and helmets so that cutting from the American planet-surface scenes to the Soviet scenes and vice versa were practically seamless, especially since Corman had provided him with only $35,000 and an 8-day shooting schedule.

Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller;

copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

Florence Marly’s eerie performance as the green alien woman is truly creepy, with the assistance of William Condos’ inventive makeup and the green and white beehive hairdo designed by George Spicer, a look that Tim Burton paid loving homage to in his Mars Attacks!, which was noted by DVD Savant.

Mechte Navstrechu (1963)

Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller;

copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

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In the 1963 Soviet film Mechte Navstrechu the world is a paradise dotted with enormous statues and immense stages. Cosmonaut Andrei and his cosmonaut girl Tanya are lounging on a pier, and Andrei plays a recording of a song to Tanya, who is enchanted by it. The song emanates into space and is heard by the inhabitants of the planet Centuria, who are themselves so enchanted that they send a spacecraft with a crew of two males and one female to earth to investigate the source of such a nice melody. 

Mechte Navstrechu is gorgeous. Its special visual effects, model work, and production design are all top notch for its era. The scenes of the alien Centurian craft—exteriors, interiors, and shots of it wrecked on the Martian surface are as well-rendered and colorful and amazing to watch as anything put on film at the time. The Luna base looks so real, one wishes one could hop on a shuttle and go there. Scenes with people indoors and talking are a bit slow, but the outdoor shots are propped up by amazing matte paintings and other effects shots that convey the Utopian nature of that whole world. This is a rewarding movie to watch.

The Centaurian spacecraft.

The Centurian crew announces their approach to earth, and all the world becomes excited with anticipation. When contact ceases, there is concern, and then one day a space capsule crashes into the sea. The capsule’s message shows that the Centurian spacecraft had crashed onto Mars; then Earth’s nations devise plans to rescue their woebegone visitors. All the plans involve staging the rescue from the Luna spaceport.

Finally, a ship with Tanya aboard takes off, but encounters a solar storm that causes them to use fuel. Unharmed, they land on Mars mere walking distance to the Centurian craft. They find one dead crewman on board, but the remaining two crew that they expect to find are missing. Responding to the crew’s need of assistance, earth send a second crafts with Andrei on board as one of a crew of two to Mars, however it can only land on Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, and then they would take a tiny two-man shuttle to the planet’s surface to help with the search.

The crashed Centurian escape pod.

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Arriving at Phobos, they unexpectedly find the Centurian craft’s escape pod with the two missing crew. The male is dead, but the female is barely alive. Naturally the woman needs to be taken to the surface to rendezvous with the earth craft ... but that means one of the two men on the Phobos ship must stay behind and die. Andrei volunteers. His crewmate takes the woman but his shuttle crashes in the middle of a terrible Martian sandstsorm, and he must carry the woman a long distance to the waiting earth ship. He succeeds valiantly, and they all take off to bring the alien woman to earth. Tanya weeps for her lover who has bravely sacrificed himself and is dying on Phobos. Some versions end there, while others end with the entire movie being but a daydream Tanya had while watching the sea from the pier.

The version I watched was dubbed in German, which I don’t speak, and included no English subtitles. The summary just conveyed is a compilation of plot information from various book chapters and articles, most especially the four consecutive data-packed articles by Robert Skotak in Outré magazine, issues 19 through 22, published in 2000. 

Queen of Blood (1966) 
USSR/USA. American International Pictures. C. 1.85:1. 81m. 
CREW: Director Curtis Harrington. Script Curtis Harrington. Producer George Edwards. Associate Producer Stephanie Rothman. Director of Photography Vilis Lapenieks. Editor Leo Shreve. Art Director Al Locatelli. Score Leonard Morand. Set Decorator Leon Smith. Title Sequence Background Paintings John Cline. Makeup William Condos. Hair Stylist George Spicer. Production Manager Gary Kurtz.
CAST: Allan Brenner John Saxon. Dr. Farraday Basil Rathbone. Laura James Judi Meredith. Paul Grant Dennis Hopper. Alien Queen Florence Marly. Anders Brockman Robert Boon. Tony Barrata Don Eitner. 

Mechte Navstrechu (1963) 
U.S.S.R. Odessa Studios. C. 1.85:1. 63m. (alternate titles A Dream Comes True, Begegnung im All, Encounter in Space, Toward Meeting a Dream) 
CREW: Directors Mikhail Koryukov, Otar Koberidge. Script Mikhail Karzhukov, Otar Koberidge. Story A. Berdnik, Ivan Bondin. 
CAST: Andrei Sayenko Boris Borisenko. Tanya Krilova Larisa Gordeichik. 

Formal notice: All images and quotations used in this blog and its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in US copyright law. If any true copyright holder (whether person(s) or organization) wishes an image or quotation to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be complied with as quickly as practical.

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http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-9914-4

Five Million Years to Earth / Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

The title cards of the US (left) and UK versions of the title sequence.

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“[Five Million Years to Earth] is powerful, exciting, and intelligent ... one of the high-water marks of science fiction.... Its formidably taut script is a masterpiece. There are no slow parts, no dragging scenes. Everything crackles with energy ... one of the purest science fiction films ever made.”

—C.J. Henderson in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Films: From 1897 to the Present

"Adapted from his popular BBC-TV serial, Five Million Years to Earth represents author Nigel Kneale’s approach to science fiction in its purest form....  Never before was such an all-encompassing parallel view of the human condition presented in a movie. Hammer and director Roy Ward Baker managed to whip up a satisfying epic on a relative shoestring, the sheer imaginative power of Kneale’s ideas transcending budgetary limitations."

—Gary Gerani in Top 100 Sci-Fi Movies 

My overview book that was published in 2016, Mars in the Movies: A History (see photo right), describes many Mars movies, but only a handful are perfect; 1967's Five Million Years to Earth (known in the UK as Quatermass and the Pit) is one of them. 
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The title sequence of Five Million Years to Earth/Quatermass and the Pit is well done, it being instantly clear that someone thought through how best to condense the film’s themes into the opening few seconds. Kim Newman, in his BFI monograph about the movie, spends a few lines describing the titles. As it is the very rare commentator who ever mentions the titles of any movie in any review or description, I’ll repeat Newman’s words here:

"The words 'Hammer Film Production' appear on a black background. Successive jigsaw-piece cutaways reveal a slightly psychedelic skull. Swirling, infernal images are superimposed on bone—perhaps maps or landscapes—evoking both the red planet Mars and the fires of Hell. Beside this, the title appears in jagged red letters: Quatermass and the Pit (Five Million Years to Earth in the American version)." See top image comparison.

As mentioned by Gary Gerani above, the Hammer Film production Five Million Years to Earth/Quatermass and the Pit was adapted by Nigel Kneale’s from his own popular BBC-TV serial. In England it was known as Quatermass and the Pit. This is because this Hammer Studios film and its two prequels were based on the highly successful, highly popular BBC TV plays broadcast live during the 1950s. These were the Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass II (1955), and Quatermass and the Pit (in six chapters from December 22, 1958, to January 26, 1959). Today we would call this format of programming a miniseries.

So successful were these three miniseries, that Quatermass became an icon in the UK. It is said that businesses closed shop during all three series broadcasts, as the proprietors knew they wouldn’t have any customers because everyone would be home watching television. To this day, the name Quatermass conjures up memories and feelings in the British public that are poignant and thrilling. In fact, it would seem that that would be putting it mildly. Andy Murray in his introduction to his Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale (2006) explains that in 1979 when the fourth installment of the Quatermass saga was first being broadcast in England, his "parents, who'd grown up in the fifties, associated Quatermass with nerve-fraying fear and it was decided it would be too much for my young mind." Not to mention that for the mother of a friend of his, "even today...the mention of the name Quatermass turns her white as a sheet. It's a familiar tale in Britain..."

That said, these Quatermass TV adventures never crossed the Atlantic, neither were they ever spoken of, nor did the name "Quatermass" ever enter American consciousness. In America, Quatermass meant nothing at all. Thus, when the film versions opened in America, they bore totally unrelated titles, The Creeping Unknown, Enemy from Space, and Five Million Years to Earth, respectively.

Unlike the previous two Hammer film adaptions of Kneale's Quatermass teleplays (which he hated), he was quite content with the third film—because he'd written the screenplay himself. As a consequence the two versions are similar despite the TV presentation running two hours longer than the film version.

In short: In Quatermass and the Pit/Five Million Years to Earth we learn that Martians who resemble giant grasshoppers, though long dead, have been influencing the development of humankind through genetic mutation for millions of years and concludes with epic scenes of London being destroyed by vast, nearly occult powers in the form of rampaging lightning-like bursts of paranormal energy focused on a huge glowing alien manifestation made of pure energy  (the giant head of a grasshopper-like Martian, see figure), which is effectively short-circuited by an overhead crane made of steel crashing into its heart. [For A Longer Summary see the end of this post.]

During the climax of both the BBC series and the movie Five Million Years to Earth, a 5-million-year- old Martian spaceship comes to life and emits vast amounts of pure evil energy that form a figure in the sky of “the horned demon,” an image of the grasshopper/insect-like beings who long ago embedded their race memories into the remote ape ancestors of humans, giving rise to the human predisposition for genocide and war, among other inhospitable activities such as telekinesis.

Suggested Further Reading:

Hammer Films: The Elstree Studios Years by Wayne Kinsey (as well as in any number of other volumes about Hammer Films)

BFI’s Quatermass and the Pit by Kim Newman

Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale by Andy Murray.

The 2005 Region 2 DVD 3-disc set The Quatermass Collection: A Seminal BBC Sci-Fi Trilogy includes a 48- page booklet that is one of the most comprehensive I’ve encountered (see photo of DVD set above).

Quatermass and the Pit by Nigel Kneale, the 1960 Penquin Books first edition paperback publication of the 1958 teleplay in script format. A second edition of this teleplay was published by Arrow Books in 1979 (cover shown below).

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PRODUCTION CREDITS

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Quatermass and the Pit

UK. BBC. BW. Six chapters from December 22, 1958, to January 26, 1959. 3.5 hr. 

CREW: Director Rudolph Cartier. Teleplay Nigel Kneale. Producer Rudolph Cartier. Score Trevor Duncan. Editor Ian Callaway. Production Designer Clifford Hatts. Special Effects Jack Kine, Bernard Wilkie, Peter Day

CAST: Professor Bernard Quatermass André Morell. Dr. Matthew Roney Cec Linder. Colonel James Breen Anthony Bushell. Captain Potter John Stratton. Barbara Judd Christine Finn. Sergeant Michael Ripper

Five Million Years to Earth (aka Quatermass and the Pit)

UK. Associated British-Pathé Limited, A Seven Arts-Hammer Film Production. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. C. 1.66:1. 1967. 97m.

CREW: Director Roy Ward Baker, Script and Story Nigel Kneale. Producer Anthony Nelson Keys. Score Tristram Cary. Musical Supervisor Philip Martell. Director of Photography Arthur Grant. Supervising Art Director Bernard Robinson. Editor Spencer Reeve. Supervising Editor James Needs. Art Director Ken Ryan. Casting Irene Lamb. Special Effects Bowie Films Ltd.

CAST: Dr. Mathew Roney James Donald. Prof. Bernard Quatermass Andrew Keir. Barbara Judd Barbara Shelley. Colonel Breen Julian Glover. Sladden Duncan Lamont. Captain Potter Bryan Marshall. Minister Edwin Richfield. Police Sergeant Ellis Grant Taylor. Journalist Sheila Steafe 

A longer summary:  In London, at the Hobb’s Lane construction site (building demolition in the BBC version, an Underground extension in the film), news is being made. The digging crew finds, first, a human-like skull with an oversized cranium, then a full skeleton. Anthropologist Dr. Mathew Roney is called in to investigate. His assistant is Barbara Judd. Roney’s excitement is off the charts. One of the volunteers is busy scraping some mud from the same spot where the fossils had been found, and she uncovers something black, smooth, and solid, perhaps a buried pipe. As clay is removed from the object, it becomes less and less likely a pipe. Someone theorizes it may be an unexploded bomb left over from World War II.

We meet Professor Bernard Quatermass in the minister’s office, where he is being told that the funding for his rocket project will be drastically reduced. Gazing out the window is the smug unruffled Colonel Breen, who it turns out is now Quatermass’s boss. At this point a message arrives for Breen asking that he use his ordinance background to help decide what the object in the pit might be. Breen and Quatermass make their way to the pit, and Breen is disturbed by all the archeology folderol and non-military people milling around. When he gets short with Roney, Quatermass reminds him that Roney is the “man of the hour” because of the skull and skeleton making headlines. A bit later, the volunteer calls Roney’s attention to a new skull she’s found buried in the mud. Roney leaps to the skull, marveling how perfectly it’s been preserved. Quatermass asks how old Roney estimates the skull is. “About five million years.” Quatermass continues by asking how could the skull be preserved if it had been in the ground long before the missile struck. Roney answers because it was in ... in ... and then he realizes that the skull was preserved because it was inside the missile. 

Within days, as the reporters start pressing, Roney unveils his educated reconstruction in clay of the ape creatures from the underground, showing enlarged crania. In due course, we learn in rapid succession that Hobb’s Lane was originally named Hob’s Lane, and that Hob was once a nickname for the devil; that homes and buildings in the area had long been abandoned and left to rot because of rumors of strange occurrences; that the spot had long been known for its devilish happenings as Quatermass and Barbara dig deeper through the written records of centuries, always to learn that the spot was “long” associated with evil events. 

A UK half-sheet poster.

Breen has ordered that the possible missile be uncovered. A strange object about the size of a bus comes to light. Also, a large cavity has been discovered in the object; but the cavity represents only half of the interior, the other half being walled up with some smooth material. Drills, even diamond drills, cannot scratch the material. With each passing hour, Breen believes that it is all nothing more than a Nazi hoax, while Quatermass instinctively knows that it is far more. Breen orders a special drill, hoping to pierce the material that divides the object in two. 

The barrier is shattered, revealing several giant green grasshopper carcasses—that are fast dissolving into green pea-soup goo. Roney is able to spray a preservative on the grasshoppers and takes them to his laboratory. Each time we see Roney’s lab, we learn something new. For example, we have learned that Roney is experimenting with a gadget with headsets that is supposed to reveal the past unconscious minds of sensitive humans. Now, we see Quatermass examining one of the grasshoppers with a magnifying glass and tweezers, and he wonders if the creature is a Martian. Roney finds a picture in a journal showing a cave painting similar to the grasshopper beings—a figure of a horned demon.

Roney and Quatermass realize that, yes, the grasshoppers are indeed Martians, that they were struggling to survive on a dying planet, that they decided to do the best they could to survive by proxy, altering primitive apes on earth to mimic their own culture and beliefs; that the plan was carried out; and that the object (a spaceship), creatures, and anthropoid bones discovered in the pit were the remains of a crashed landing five million years before. Breen still believes his hoax idea. Meanwhile a high-voltage electric cable accidentally touches the spaceship, and it comes to life, the entire craft glowing white with pulsing veins, and thumping heart sounds, and all hell breaks out.

It seems that while the Martians had altered a number of anthropoids, there still remained the unaltered variety, meaning that the current human population of earth consists of people who are the product of normal evolution and those that are descendants of the Martian alterations. Due to the energy emanating from the revived spacecraft, the surrogate Martians are gravitating into merciless crowds that are killing the normal humans by telekinesis—a form of the heartless race purging Martians had practiced on their home world. Death and destruction rains over London. Right above the spacecraft, a giant horned being made of pulsing electricity has formed and is the focal point of the energies driving the surrogates to horrifically kill off their neighbors. 

Roney's view as he careens toward the horned demon, riding a huge construction crane to his doom.

Col. Breen has been cooked alive by the powerful energies coming from the buried spacecraft. Exhausted and dirty, Quatermass and Roney feel overwhelmed: It turns out that Roney is all human while Quatermass and Barbara Judd are part Martian. Roney remembers that cold iron is the traditional enemy of the devil. He spots a huge construction crane that is part of the underground project. He climbs to the top and causes it to fall into the giant horned Martian, short circuiting it—while sacrificing himself. Battered and bruised, Quatermass and Barbara catch their breath alone on a deserted but destroyed and flaming street, dimly aware that the horror is over. 

The scenes in the film showing Professor Bernard Quatermass and anthropology asssistant Barbara Judd delving through historical documents further and further back in time made the greatest impression on me. I was stunned by the film. Immediately, I saw eerie similarities to my favorite Arthur C. Clarke novel Childhood's End. In the Kneale film, mankind’s collective unconscious image of the devil is shown to be a remnant memory from the distant past. In Clarke’s novel, contrary-wise, the image of the horned demon has rippled down from the future when the destruction of Earth and the human race is forever associated with an alien race with horns and wings.

Formal notice: All images and quotations used in this blog and its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in US copyright law. If any true copyright holder (whether person(s) or organization) wishes an image or quotation to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be complied with as quickly as practical.

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http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-9914-4

Last Sunrise (2014 Straight-to-Video)

Though only 39 minutes in length, this extremely well-designed and well-produced film deserves to be listed with all the important Mars feature films that are central to this book. John Johnson and Rusty Royden have given birth to a fabulously beautiful child named Last Sunrise. Crammed into its 39 minutes is a stylistic masterpiece that is at once a parody of reality TV, soulless TV news, and our adrenalin-rush-based culture, while at the same time providing stunningly realistic Martian terrain and a real sense of what it must feel like to be alone on Mars.

Beyond that, it is a real-time drama, which is a sub-genre that is always fascinating (High Noon falls into this category). We meet astronaut Steven Drake just after recovering from his rough and tumble parachute landing on a patch of Mars. He radios that he has only 40 minutes of air left, and then the camera remains on him for the next 39 minutes, with the occasional cut-away to a newscast. This is a wonderful concept and works surprisingly well.

The back-story of the picture is that a colony of 12 souls has been established within the Hellas planitia basin—a venture that is the basis for a reality TV show named RedThesis. Millions of earthbound viewers have been watching the joys, woes, antics, and sacrifices that the Mars crew has experienced every day since take-off seven months earlier. On day number 37 following the landing and establishment of the colony on the surface of Mars, a shuttle carrying the pilot Phil Miller and Steven Drake loses control, with Drake ejecting with a parachute. He lands roughly and rips his spacesuit, but he is able to quickly patch it. Once he calms down, he tries desperately to contact the shuttle pilot Phil Miller and the RedThesis base, but gets no response. In frustration he periodically exclaims this reality TV’s version of cussing: “son of a monkey!” “bull spit!” “corn nuts!” “son of a motherless goat!” “mother trucker!” and more. It all seems realistic as Drake introspects throughout the movie's 39 minutes, judging his major successes and failures.

Shooting in the Mohave Desert.

The filmmakers have utilized California’s Mohave Desert to the absolute best advantage. 

With a little help from digital magic, the sands, the rocks, the coloring all seem spotlessly appropriate. The only note that is off-key are a few shots of the Martian skies, which while mostly appearing appropriately pinkish throughout very occasionally can be seen as bluish, sometimes even with white clouds. The reality show feed is often interrupted by Global News Network (GNN) news reports featuring Vicki Chang, who tells us that the whole mission is financed by the Micronesia Unilateral Space Fund (MUSF). Vicki Chang is played by Nanrisa Lee, who perfectly embodies the faux newscaster.
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Nanrisa Lee plays newscaster.

Quickly, Drake learns from the orbiting Phobos Base Control Center that the shuttle crashed into the colony, killing everybody, including Phil. Drake only has a few minutes of oxygen remaining and is understandably upset. Happily, Phobos Center tells him that they’re sending Shuttle 2 down to get him in time before his oxygen is depleted. In a startling shot, Shuttle 2 violently crashes. Drake knows he will die in just a few minutes.

One of this film’s clever innovations is that Drake is accompanied by a little rover named Lassie. Lassie is about the size of a cigar box and is constantly mobile, whirring and racing around, surveying its rocky surroundings. We often see through Lassie’s digital eyes, seeing its many digital readouts, and the effect is charming. Very quickly one bonds with the tiny robot.

Drake with Lassie.

A Lassie status screen.

"Lassie"

At the end of Last Sunset, Lassie discovers an anomaly, which Drake, during his last few moments of life concludes is artificial, proving the existence of past life on Mars or at least that the red planet had been visited by aliens, in either case proving that life exists elsewhere than only on earth—a matter that is certainly inconclusive from our point of view.

The last thing we see is a POV shot from Lassie as it continues its surveying mission—all alone.

Throughout the movie to the last frame, Chris Maine's music is the perfect complement: beautiful gentle melodies that appropriately but subtly remind viewers of a chiming ticking clock.

 Last Sunrise trailer

From the moment I saw that Last Sunrise was available via Amazon video around mid–2014, I assumed it was a knockoff of Ridley Scott’s The Martian, which was getting a lot of press. The posters are similar, a lone astronaut with helmet facing the camera, and the premises are very similar, a lone astronaut facing death on the Red Planet. Usually any knockoff’s raison d’être is to steer unwitting consumers to mistakenly rent or buy the knockoff, thinking it’s the anticipated major movie. A perfect example of this The Asylum’s Martian Land, which is intentionally crafted and marketed to resemble Ridley Scott’s The Martian.

Yet, I wasn’t able to believe that Last Sunrise fell into this category. I believed the concurrent availability of Last Sunrise and The Martian was likely coincidental. Why? Because Last Sunrise was simply too good and too well crafted to exist to merely bilk the unwary. Or, perhaps the timely appearance of The Last Sunrise was simply, I thought, as benign as John Johnson and Rusty Royden wanting to make the movie for some time without ever getting funding, but then the fortuitous announcement of Scott’s big-budget movie opened some coffers. While reality wasn’t exactly this scenario, it turned out to  be something of this sort as I’ve learned since the filmmakers got in touch with me.

Last Sunrise is filled with
clever graphics and sound effects.

Producer Rusty Royden of Sidewall Puncture Productions, offers some details, “The entire cast and crew was less than 10 people. It took well less than a year from first concept to final print.  The "budget" was less than $10,000.   Shooting totaled about 6 days.  We were able to use about 90% of the footage. This was done for fun and art for arts sake. We were just starting production when we heard Twentieth Century Fox was going to produce The Martian.  We completed our film before 20th finished shooting.  We read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars as research material when we were fine-tuning the script. The Mars One and other grass roots Mars colonization ventures were an inspiration for some of the story elements but the inspiration for the main story came from somewhere else.”

As to that “somewhere else,” filmmaker John Johnson says, “Everyone involved with the production knew that Last Sunrise (the script) was a dream that I had two nights in a row… On the Morning after the second dream, I called Rusty and told him the details of the dream... Way before Matt Damon and The Martian.

Effects

Johnson explains some of the secrets that went into perfecting Last Sunrise:

“Lassie came to life when Freddie Vaziri showed up at the Mojave Location and offered to run the remote control. Without Freddie, half of the shots captured from the camera on Lassie would have never happened.” 

It turns out that the perfect Martian desert we see in the film needed a lot of help to come alive. Johnson says: “I used stills from Death Valley and rotoscoped. For example, when Drake walks back down the small rise toward camera just before he passes out and when he wakes up and stands up, the upper half of the horizon (above the ridge line) is a still image from Death Valley. There were so many bushes off in the distance. So, I had to cut a matte line along the ridge (behind Drake) to allow the Death Valley still to be the distant horizon and the sky. Plus, I had to cut out Drake (frame by frame) so he would overlay cleanly over the foreground and the background still image. Another big visual challenge was rotoscoping out the grasshoppers that were flying through the shots. The hard part is the time it takes to do it. I was working all day at my day job and then came home and rotoscoped for 4 to 5 hours a night for 8 months. No complaints though because no one has even questioned the imagery. It was meticulously executed and the overlays really are seamless. I also used hand-painted backdrops.”

Shuttle 2 crashes.

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Last Sunrise (2014 Straight-to-Video)

USA. Sidewall Puncture Productions, Tug 33 Thirty and Three Films, Hoo Ha Grande Productions. lastsunrisethemovie.com. C. 1.85:1. 39m.

CREW: Director John Johnson. News Segments Director Phil Ramuno. Script John Johnson, Rusty Royden, Freddie Vaziri, Phil Ramuno. Producers John Johnson, Rusty Royden. Score Chris Maines. Director of Photography Brian Q. Kelley. Editor William Thompson. Visual Effects Designer Joseph Potter. Lassie Rover Pilot Freddie Vaziri.

CAST: Steven Drake Rusty Royden/Gus Novack. Vicki Chang Nanrisa Lee.

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.

The Great Martian War: 1913–1917 (2013)

What an audacious, perfectly clever, and perfectly realized project.

Waves and waves of Martians!

The beast King Kong in RKO’s 1933 blockbuster film titled King Kong was termed “The Eighth Wonder of the World!” Well, move over King Kong, here comes The Great Martian War: 1913–1917. Frankly, this mock-umentary is like nothing I’ve ever seen. The utmost skill and craftsmanship have delivered this merging of faux archival-style (scratched, battered) footage (appearing as though from The Great War) with an endless CGI army of ruthless Titan alien machines. (Its sometimes needs mentioning that before World War II, the conflict we now call World War I was called The Great War, since in those early days, the thought that there would soon be a second war of global proportions, was not uppermost in most people’s minds.)

June 11, 2022. I am amending this blog site to include the Internet Archive site where, I only just discovered, the entire 2-hour movie can be watched.   https://archive.org/download/TheGreatMartianWar19131917.Mister.X 

😂

This impressive 2-hour TV movie produced by the BBC and the Canadian branch of The History Channel comprises three types of material flawlessly blended together: (1) actual archival footage from the period but not from battles, per se, (2) brand new footage of interviews, war scenes, and connecting and framing material, and (3) CGI of the invading machines. All the new footage that purports to be actually historical in nature is then aged appropriately ... but not all the same. Since the images of battle would have been shot at different times on different film stock in different cameras by different photographers and then likely stored in different places, the quality of these separate elements would necessarily be different.

 A three-minute YouTube collage.

The interviews of elderly survivors were supposed to have been filmed years apart, again implying that the film stock for each of the separate interviews would have aged differently. Plus all the numerous modern interviews with historians, museum curators, and the like needed to appear modern. Thus, after the CGI had been created and integrated with the live action material, all but the most modern sections of the film had to be aged, but each separate element needed to be aged differently—different degrees of blurriness, different dust particles, different scratches, different tears, different color balance, different hand-cranking styles, on and on, so that in the end what you have is absolutely ironic: super-scientific cutting-edge war machines appearing in century-old scratched news footage.

The Great Martian War 1913–1917 is a consummate TV mock-umentary created with unparalleled skill showing how the Martians were the real enemies during the era we think of as World War One. These photos were aged and blurred intentionally. 
Special photo juxtaposition by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

L. Ross Raszewski (blog.trenchcoatsoft.comblog.trenchcoatsoft.com) describes this clever counterfeit footage well:
 

“The interview footage is really convincing.... What sells it is the audiovisual texture.... Remember, this is purporting to be a documentary made a century after the fact ... so this is all archive footage dated from the ’60s to the ’90s. The sound is flat. The video is grainy—and it’s grainy in different ways. Interviews dated to the early ’80s have film grain, and those from the ’90s have VHS artifacts. Some of it is in 4:3. Other parts are widescreen but have that slightly-wrong look of having been cropped and enlarged. The colors are either oversaturated or faded depending on the vintage.”
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The filmmakers made a point of never using actual battle footage from World War I out of respect for the all-too-real sacrifices made by so many during that terrible time. When necessary, they shot new war footage with actors. Also, they respected the real events and histories of historical personalities by having fiction and real life intersect when appropriate. For example, in both reality and in the film immense numbers of young men died in battle in vain due to the ineptitude or ignorance of their commanding officers; no-man’s land was all too real—in fact, on the first day of the Battle of Sommes, for example, more than 12,000 French and English soldiers perished, but nothing could be done to help the wounded who lay in the mud, shattered and moaning; by the end of the Battle of Sommes more than 1.2 million men on both sides had been killed; the film raises the death toll in the equivalent battle to three million. 

This is another YouTube mashup using music from Jeff Wayne's Musical 
Version of The War of the Worlds (see a previous posting).

And I haven’t even mentioned the story or plot or the quality of acting. As for the plot, there is no point paraphrasing the description that appears on The History Channel’s own website (www.history.co.uk/shows/the-great-martian-warwww.history.co.uk/shows/the-great-martian-war):

 

"Europe was on tenterhooks in the 2nd decade of the 20th century, everyone was expecting a Great War between the major European powers. But then, in 1913, something crashed into the forests of SW Germany. Troops were sent to investigate but were wiped out. Martian fighting machines began making their way across Western Europe and the countries of Europe combined forces to resist them. With aspects taken from 'The War of the Worlds' by H.G. Wells and from WWI itself, this dramatization presents a documentary style look at events as they unfolded and the effect they had of our world today."

The acting never seems like acting. The aged survivors and all those who were supposedly interviewed never seem to be anything but what they appear to be. The CGI Martian war machine designs (there are four distinct types) are all incredibly clever (staying true to Wells but with a steam-punk flavor), and their behavior and movements always look 100 percent authentic. Indeed, the entire film seems authentic, and to have pulled it off so satisfactorily reflects uncommonly well on The Great Martian War’s creative team.

 

An FYI:  Timothy Hines, of Pendragon Picture, in 2005 released a very-long-in-production straight-to-video War of the Worlds that was truer to the original novel in terms of time and location than anything to come before or since. For various reasons, Hines released four versions, cut mainly due to length issues. However, his last version was majorly different and was called

War of the Worlds: The True Story. It is a clever mock-umentary. Today is August 9, 2022. In a conversation a few weeks ago he said that he had taken his finished The True Story mock-umentary to The History Channel to raise interest. Nothing came of that, but later the History Channel released 1913-1917, which does have similarities.

 The Great Martian War 1913–1917 (2013 TV movie)

Canada/UK. Entertainment One Television, Impossible Pictures, The History Channel, BBC. C & B&W. 1.33:1 & 1.77:1. 120m.

CREW: Director Mike Slee. Script Steve Maher. Original Concept Steve Sarossy. Producer Mike Slee. Score Mark Korven. Director of Photography Christopher Romeike. Production Designer Andrew Berry. Casting Larissa Mair. Special Visual Effects Intelligent Creatures.

CAST: Narrator Mark Strong. Jock Donnelly Jock McLeod. Nerys Vaughan Joan Gregson. Hughie Logan Ian Downie. Duncan Mitchell-Myers Thomas Gough. Kim Lafonde Ashley Bomberry. Lawrence Hart Daniel Matmor. Alice Hale Hazel Douglas. Howard Klee Howard Jerome.

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.