Beating death -- or at least the effects of old age -- is a longtime scifi flick theme. In real life, Viagra or a plastic surgeon's knife serves as the Fountain of Youth; on film, it comes in many different forms. The title character in The Picture of Dorian Gray has a magical painting that ages in his place. In Steven Spielberg's Twilight Zone: The Movie segment, codger Scatman Crothers turns the elderly denizens of a retirement home into their youthful selves. Terminally-ill billionaire Anthony Hopkins attempts to buy Emilio Estevez's body in Freejack. But perhaps the most memorable movie about the prospect of eternal youth is Cocoon.

Continue reading "Cocoon Offers a Youthful Look at Aging That Baby Boomers Can't Resist" »

The actors beneath the makeup were not immune to the physical and political trials that time-traveling apes Cornelius, Zira, and Milo face among mankind in Escape From the Planet of the Apes. Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowall and Sal Mineo all suffered needless persecution that marred their Hollywood careers.

Hunter (who had already snared an Oscar for A Streetcar Named Desire back in '51) found herself blacklisted and unable to work during the McCarthy era because of her civil rights activism. In 1962, she testified before the New York Supreme Court with the hope of clearing the names of others similarly trampled on by the era's hysterical hunt for Communists, an experience which surely informed her work in three Apes films as the complex Dr. Zira.

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Jack Horner, professor and paleontologist, knows the lasting power of science in science fiction. It's been 15 years since Jurassic Park first brought dinosaurs back to life and "Most of the graduate students I have right now got interested in dinosaurs as a result, he says. Dr. Horner took time to reminisce with amctv.com about his work on the film and he explained why the world would be a better place if we were as smart as the film's target demographic -- kids.

Q: What exactly did you do on Jurassic Park?

A: As a technical adviser, my job was to make sure the dinosaurs looked as real as possible. Basically, [Steven Spielberg] wanted to make sure that sixth graders didn't send him nasty letters saying "this wasn't right." So my job really was to make sure we didn't have things that dinosaurs couldn't do. They were going to create a scene where the Velociraptors would come in and stick forked tongues out to sniff the air, and only lizards do that. So, I told him, "You can't do that." But if it was my hypothesis that T-Rex was a scavenger rather than a predator, then he'd just assume since other people thought they were predators, he could make it a predator.

Q: Were you on the set?

A: The dinosaurs come in two forms: Computer graphics and animatronics. When the animatronics were on, I would be there. And I talked a lot with Sam Neil and the actors so they would know what a paleontologist actually looked like -- they could see we're normal people, even though we're kinda geeks.

Q: What was it like to attend the premiere?

Continue reading "Jurassic Park Paleontologist Jack Horner Still Gets Angry Letters From Kids" »

Before the Governor of California was a Terminator, and long before Keanu slipped out of the Matrix, David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) showed us how easily innocent computer play could turn into the apocalypse. WarGames wasn't the first movie to explore the new and widely unknown world of computers, passwords, and modems, but it was the first to consider the potential danger when combining computer controlled weapons systems with international warfare.

Looking back WarGames is very charming in its simplicity. Lightman, armed only with his 1970s microcomputer, "cracks" systems connected to public phone lines -- just a teen and his computer adjusting bad grades and playing little chess. All of this play turns into Cold War panic when the chess games become "Global Thermonuclear War."

Continue reading "With WarGames, the Stage Was Set for Our Fear of Hackers" »

When Linda Hamilton originated the role of Sarah Connor in 1984's The Terminator, she looked like the typical girl next door, with a particularly unfortunate feathered hairdo. But during the seven years between Terminator and T2, the character of Sarah -- and cinema's take on scifi chicks in general -- changed a lot.

Gone were Sarah's skinny frame, Farrah Fawcett locks and naive attitude and in their place was an intimidating, ass-kicking mama, hell-bent on protecting her child and the rest of humanity. Hamilton's incredible physical transformation was noted by many (including her director, James Cameron, who went on to marry her), but even more striking was how much scifi's leading ladies had changed in less than a decade.

Continue reading "The Transformation of T2's Sarah Connor" »

With Don Knotts' classic comedy The Reluctant Astronaut airing on AMC this Monday at 10PM, we thought it would be a good idea to compare Knotts' intrepid space explorer Roy Fleming to some of Hollywood's other astronauts... specifically, by determining (scientifically, of course), how reluctant they were, on a scale of zero to five "Knotts." Five is the most reluctant; one Knott is pretty brave. Let's get to it, shall we?

1. Bruce Willis as Harry Stamper (Armageddon, 1998): Since Harry Stamper is a professional oil driller drafted by NASA to destroy a deadly, evil asteroid, you'd think he'd be pretty reluctant... But you'd be wrong. Though it takes about half the movie to get Harry into space, it takes him and his crew of maverick cohorts a very short time to agree to risk their lives to save the Earth. Harry, in particular, takes little convincing, and has to spend the majority of the time convincing everybody else in the film that heading out to certain death is a super idea.

Reluctance Level:

Continue reading "Who Is the Most Reluctant Astronaut in Movie History" »

The war between good aliens and bad aliens boiled over in the summer of 1982 when Steven Spielberg's E.T. and John Carpenter's The Thing both touched down within two weeks of each other. Cuddly E.T. won the battle (in the box office) but not the war: 25 years later, The Thing is considered a taut special F/X masterpiece, while E.T. staggers under the weight of its treacly sentimentality. And which film's philosophy holds sway? E.T. is exactly the sort of pro-alien propaganda that those nasty monsters like the titular Thing would want humans to swallow prior to a full-scale invasion. Look at the films side by side and you'll see what I mean.

Continue reading "The Thing Reminds Us to Trust No One; Not Even E.T." »

Compared to the lithe mechanical bodies of the bad bots in The Matrix and other modern movies, silvery Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still looks sluggish and almost huggable. It's not by chance that this movie became a classic: In form and function, Gort infected 1951 audiences with a new technological vision of robotics that most people could barely wrap their heads around.

Robots had peopled plenty of films since the turn of the 20th century, but mainly in the form of clockworks or "living dolls." The word "robot" itself comes from the Czech word "robota," which means "drudgery" or "servitude," and fell into use after the debut of Karel Capek's ironic play Rossum's Universal Robots, which featured crude humanoids as an endless labor source. In film, robots persisted as objects of fantasy, like Fritz Lang's legendary gynoid in Metropolis, or the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. Back then, the idea of robot strength or intelligence surpassing that of man was barely conceivable.

Enter Gort.

Continue reading "The Day the Earth Stood Still: Robots Get a Promotion " »

Monstrous spiders. They've had supporting roles in Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. They've been the star attraction of overlooked gems like Horrors of Spider Island and 1975's Giant Spider Invasion. Like some of the best B-movies of the '50s, Earth Vs. the Spider offers a simple premise, in this case: A giant spider is awakened by teenagers' rock music. At this point you are either on-board or you stopped reading already.

Released in 1958, the film was an early knockbuster -- the "giant spider" plot was inspired by 1955's Tarantula. It was produced under the title The Spider; but shortly before its release, the big box-office movie was Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers. So producer Samuel Z. Arkoff changed the title to Earth vs. the Spider, which isn't entirely accurate, but likely sold more tickets.

Earth Vs. The Spider airs on Saturday, March 29 at 3AM | 2C. For more on eight-legged freaks at the movies, watch The Sci Fi Department's Celebration of Spider Cinema.

In the face of modern and oftentimes frightening technological advances, mankind is wont to look to the past for reassurance and allegory -- to take comfort in the fact that we have triumphed in the face of such adversity before. Take the case of serial director Spencer Gordon Bennett's 1959 film, The Atomic Submarine.

Ostensibly a camp classic about an undersea alien invasion, the film is actually an exploration of the then newly-unveiled nuclear submarine. Made at the apex of the Atomic Age, when the idea of harnessing the power of the atom was both exciting and terrifying, The Atomic Submarine was crafted to look like a military action film -- early previews and promotions for the movie played down its sci-fi aspects and referred only to a dire threat the crew must conquer. The lurking danger is an octopedal one-eyed alien intent on mankind's destruction -- pure science fiction. Or is it ancient mythology?

Watching the film, it becomes difficult not to draw allusions to Homer's ancient epic The Odyssey, in which the warrior Odysseus, returning home from the successful siege of Troy, finds himself and his crew ensnared by Polyphemos the Cyclops -- guess what Commander Vandover and the crew of the atomic Tigershark name their alien threat?

Continue reading "The Atomic Submarine: Ancient Mythology Goes Nuclear" »