Wow. I am so amazed at how bad of a film this is, I am NOT EVEN FINISHED with it, and I feel obligated to comment.
I held off for a significant portion of the movie before I finally gave up my attempt to determine whether this was intended to be an extremely deeply-seeded comedy. Despite the actions of a little toy woodpecker (it winks), I felt unconvinced. This brought me to the trusty old IMDb, where I have now learned that it was, indeed, an intended straight SciFi.
Wow.
George Hamilton is robotic. At one point, he literally "reacts" to a colleague's outburst a spit-second before the guy actually makes the outburst.
Suzanne Pleshette; is she even there? Actually, intimate scenes between her and Hamilton are tough to ignore, for their awkward lack of rapport, and the conspicuous decision to mic martini glasses and pump heels, to name a few items.
Poor Richard Carlson (I really like him normally). His entire performance is delivered in one of (or a combination of?) two ways: as if the actor himself is drunk, or as if he is narrating a promotional short for the world's fair.
A few scenes are stolen by a bizarrely appropriate, and extremely loud (hammer dulcimer? harpsichord? I don't know my instruments), musical score, a la "Hercules In New York." The heavy-handed direction is quite distracting, with its wannabe Hitchcock jump cuts, third wall removals, and arbitrary angles.
The real star of the film, though, is the script. Half of the male-delivered lines are (or could've been) interchangeable between a handful of characters. There's a tiredly trite scene between a Brooklyn-transplant waitress and Hamilton; you can probably can enact the scene on your own, right now. Think lines like "I keeant buhleev I left New Yohk fuh dis joeub." There, you've got the idea.
Watch for the piano driving scene with George Hamilton and a menacing mechanic. Also, check out the film's unintentional microcosm, in which a fighter plane sends arbitrary missiles into a grove of trees in the desert, where the improbable, the ridiculous, the random, and the just plain goofy, all converge. Once you hit that scene, stop the film--or just watch the scene repeatedly--you have already seen everything it has to offer.
I held off for a significant portion of the movie before I finally gave up my attempt to determine whether this was intended to be an extremely deeply-seeded comedy. Despite the actions of a little toy woodpecker (it winks), I felt unconvinced. This brought me to the trusty old IMDb, where I have now learned that it was, indeed, an intended straight SciFi.
Wow.
George Hamilton is robotic. At one point, he literally "reacts" to a colleague's outburst a spit-second before the guy actually makes the outburst.
Suzanne Pleshette; is she even there? Actually, intimate scenes between her and Hamilton are tough to ignore, for their awkward lack of rapport, and the conspicuous decision to mic martini glasses and pump heels, to name a few items.
Poor Richard Carlson (I really like him normally). His entire performance is delivered in one of (or a combination of?) two ways: as if the actor himself is drunk, or as if he is narrating a promotional short for the world's fair.
A few scenes are stolen by a bizarrely appropriate, and extremely loud (hammer dulcimer? harpsichord? I don't know my instruments), musical score, a la "Hercules In New York." The heavy-handed direction is quite distracting, with its wannabe Hitchcock jump cuts, third wall removals, and arbitrary angles.
The real star of the film, though, is the script. Half of the male-delivered lines are (or could've been) interchangeable between a handful of characters. There's a tiredly trite scene between a Brooklyn-transplant waitress and Hamilton; you can probably can enact the scene on your own, right now. Think lines like "I keeant buhleev I left New Yohk fuh dis joeub." There, you've got the idea.
Watch for the piano driving scene with George Hamilton and a menacing mechanic. Also, check out the film's unintentional microcosm, in which a fighter plane sends arbitrary missiles into a grove of trees in the desert, where the improbable, the ridiculous, the random, and the just plain goofy, all converge. Once you hit that scene, stop the film--or just watch the scene repeatedly--you have already seen everything it has to offer.