Tracer Reviews

Zero Hour! (1957)

The *differences* between this and _Airplane!_

[18 July 2004]

_Airplane!_ was so closely based on this movie that the list of DIFFERENCES between this movie and _Airplane!_ is shorter than the list of similarities.

Some of the differences between _Zero Hour!_ and _Airplane!_ are:

*) The only two characters with the same names are Ted Striker and Joey.

*) In ZH, Ted Striker's ill-fated air raid during the War was dramatized in its entirety at the beginning of the movie, not reconstructed piecemeal in flashbacks over the course of the film -- although Ted did have a couple of flashbacks in ZH at crucial moments.

*) The flight in ZH is a DC-4 carrying 38 passengers from Calgary to Vancouver, BC. The airspeed indicator for the DC-4 only went up to 250 miles per hour.

*) In ZH, Ellen (the character that became Elaine in _Airplane!_) was Ted Striker's wife, and Joey was his son. Joey was among the unlucky passengers who ate fish (halibut) instead of meat (lamb chops), and he gets so sick that he symbolically breaks the toy airplane the pilot had given him.

*) The pilot in ZH succumbs to food poisoning slowly, and manages to keep the plane under control for an hour or so, thanks to a morphine injection administered by the Doctor, until he finally collapses. The automatic pilot (not inflatable, of course) was already engaged by then.

*) Nothing like the Knute-Rockne-based inspirational speech that the Doctor gave to Ted Striker in _Airplane!_ is anywhere to be found in ZH.

*) In ZH, the unmarried stewardess had a boyfriend on board who tried to cheer up Joey with a glove-puppet.

*) A tense moment happens in ZH where the plane's radio accidentally gets knocked off the proper frequency and Ted Striker is on his own, cut off from communication with the ground, until Ted and Mrs. Striker can find the frequency again. This sequence does not appear in _Airplane!_.

*) In ZH, when the air traffic controllers went looking for Ted Striker's old commanding Captain, they first had to call his babysitter at home (who had Elvis Presley turned up way too loud on the TV to hear them), and then had to call a nightclub where said Captain and his wife were dancing to an equally-loud jazz band.

The Glass Jungle (1988)

Both boring and ridiculous

[1/10 · 11 February 2003]

This movie is BAD.

The premise is bad. The villains kidnap the hero's girlfriend so that he'll drive around New York City carrying 5 million dollars in his trunk. Why not just hide the money?

The pacing is bad. A huge amount of this movie is taken up by scenes of the hero driving around in his cab. JUST driving.

The flashbacks are bad. The flashbacks make up the majority of the movie. The hero flashes back to his girlfriend, then flashes back to a DREAM he had about his girlfriend, then flashes back to his girlfriend some more -- given the lengths of all these flashbacks, their relationship must have lasted since the late Renaissance -- then flashes back to earlier scenes in the movie.

The ending is bad. The hero faces down the bad guy, who puts a gun up to his girlfriend's head threatening to kill her, and the hero reaches behind his back and pulls out a *miniature crossbow* which earlier shots less than a minute before had established was NOT there. The hero shoots the villain through his wide-open mouth, which was probably wide open in astonishment at such a ridiculous Deus-Ex-Machina.

One video store owner said he would give 10 free rentals to anyone who rented The Glass Jungle from him and could say, with a straight face, that he/she liked the movie. No one ever got the free rentals. That's how bad this movie is. You can't even LIE about it being good.

Beyond and Back (1978)

pseudoscientific sensationalism about near-death experiences

[2/10 · 18 May 2001]

I remember seeing this film when I was a young pre-teen lad, wide-eyed with wonder and gullible to anything that sounded good. And, at the time, the idea of real "proof" that there was life after death sounded really, really good.

This film is nothing more than a dramatization of 5 or 6 different people's reported Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), narrated by an impressive-sounding guy with a beard. Except for the attempted-suicide's NDE at the end, all the NDEs had a common theme of floating in the room they were near-death in, then travelling through a dark tunnel with a bright light at the end. Of course, we never got to hear the stories told by people who had NDEs that differed from this, because those stories wouldn't make a good movie. One of the guys said he saw lasers and other high-tech devices "20 years before they were invented" in his NDE, but conveniently didn't report this story until AFTER such things were invented.

The attempted-suicide story at the end was tacked on, I'm sure, as a way to discourage people in the audience from intentionally putting themselves through near-death experiences of their own. The suicidee described a horrific NDE with skeletons and snakes and hot subway tunnels, implying that you go to "hell" if you attempt suicide, even though all the other NDEs they describe sound more like going to "heaven."

Near-Death Experiences are assuredly nothing more than hallucinations brought on by oxygen-starvation in the brain.

Island City (1994 TV Movie)

Who writes this junk?

[15 December 2000]

The turning point in my "enjoyment" of this obvious TV-series pilot came when the heroine announced that no one in this future post-apocalyptic world is allowed to have sexual relations with anyone not of a "compatible" genome type, for fear that they will have killer mutant babies. It's the 21st century, and no one's heard of contraceptives?

I turned off the TV at that point.

The Fantastic Four (1978)

The series that gave us "Herbie the robot" (ugh)

[3 August 2000]

This Saturday-morning adaptation of the Marvel Comics title was done at a time when parental fears of violence on TV were at their worst. As such, the Human Torch does not appear in it. Parents were afraid their kids would like the Human Torch so much, they might try to light themselves on fire. Or something. Of course, without the Human Torch, they would only be the "Fantastic Three," so the writers had to invent a new character to fill in for him. And whom did they invent to replace the Human Torch? Why none other than H.E.R.B.I.E. the Robot, a robot so annoyingly cute that you want to throw your bowl of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs cereal at the TV every time he appears. The animation was on par with that of the animated Star Trek TV series -- in other words, it stank. And worst of all, I can't recall a single episode in which Doctor Doom made an appearance. What good are the Fantastic Four without Doctor Doom? That's like having an entire Silver Surfer TV series without Galactus, or a John Travolta movie without Scientology.

Battlefield Earth (2000)

The Benihana School of Editing!

[1/10 · 21 May 2000]

Oh, God, who edited this thing?! A bunch of people who were fired from MTV because they chopped the shots down TOO short even for the MTV crew, no doubt. And the plot is totally ridiculous. You'd think that a science fiction writer who invented his own religion out of whole cloth could do a better job of -- hey! Who are you?! What are you doung breaking into my house?!! Get away from my keybWE ARE THE CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. YOU WILL WATCH BATTLEFIELD EARTH.

Nightfall (1988)

Allegedly Asimov's "Nightfall", this is really new-age junk.

[1/10 · 3 February 1999]

If you go to this film hoping to see a well-crafted cinematic adaptation of Isaac Asimov's short story "Nightfall", you're in for a BIG disappointment. The lowest-common denominator of the short story's plot are present (the suns that give the people's planet perpetual daylight are going out, and everyone's afraid of the impending darkness), but everything else seems to have been concocted in the mind of a New Age True Believer taking hallucinogens.

For instance, the people track the paths of the suns beyond the local horizon with "sonar", using a hand-held device that looks like a deerskin victrola. The doom-and-darkness cult that Asimov made only passing references to in his story is the central player in this movie, going to the point of getting their eyeballs chewed out of their sockets by ravens. In the story, the civilization was almost identical to 1930s Chicago without the light bulbs; in the movie, everybody lives in tents and grass huts. The book's scientific explanation of the impending darkness is notoriously absent in the film, perhaps because they weren't expecting their audience to have more functioning brain cells than the filmmakers did.

Asimov's short story would have made an excellent one-hour episode of _The Outer Limits_ if said episode had been made true to the original. The movie is neither true to the original nor well-done in its own right.