Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: The Humanoid

This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed human. No gloss, no filter. Just stories, spoken without fear. A person who is not generous cannot be an artist. The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhachon on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. Rices may rise during contract. Check availability at gigaclear.com. Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema Rewind. This is Rob Lamb, and hey, we have a theme week here at Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's going to be Star Wars week. It is Star Wars week. And so we are going to re-air an older, a much older episode. This one originally published 5.7.2021. It is rather famous as being a Star Wars rip-off. Again, very much a knockoff or however you want to phrase it. A knockoff at least of the 1977 classic. This is 1979's The Humanoid, an Italian space opera that is itself a whole lot of fun. So let's fire it up and see what it has to offer. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick, and it's Star Wars Clone Week here on Weird House Cinema. We just did a week of regular episodes concerning Star Wars on Tuesday and Thursday. And so we figured we would look into yet another rip-off of the George Lucas classic Star Wars. This will actually not even be the first Star Wars clone we're doing on Weird House Cinema, because a few months back we watched Message from Space, which I absolutely adored. It was, you know, like many movies of the late 70s, a blatant rip-off of Star Wars. But it brought a lot of its own weirdness and texture. I remember it had some really beautiful, highly colorful costumes and great sets and stuff. Today we're looking at a dirtier, dustier, more drab attempt to rip off some of the stuff. A dirtier, more drab attempt to rip off Star Wars of a more Italian persuasion. But this one's got a lot of pleasures of its own. Yeah. Now, before we get into it, I do want to speak just a little bit more about the idea of the Star Wars rip-off. Because there's kind of this, I mean, it's almost kind of like a wave effect through cinema after Star Wars comes out. Because the 1977 original film that is often known today is Star Wars, A New Hope. You know, it really set the world on fire. It created this global phenomenon. But then it also, it opened the door for various filmmakers to come in and, in some cases, you know, just blatantly try and get in on the cash grab to get some of that Star Wars energy and some of that Star Wars money. Other times, it just allowed projects that would not have come to light to actually take form. You know, like because the people with the money realized, hey, look at this, people are lining up to see stuff that's fantastic, stuff that's got space in it. Hey, what do we have lined up that has space in it? And so I think sometimes, and you see this with other hits as well, like you'll see projects that maybe at some point in their development, they weren't as Star Wars-y, but maybe they got Star Wars-ed up. Or you'll see a Star Wars-y project that, you know, has a lot of knockoff elements in it. But then also some original ideas or maybe ideas at least inspired by other properties in there. So they're often really fun to look at because you never know exactly what you're going to find once you really immerse yourself in it. Once you sort of wager way through the initial seaweed of just, you know, utter Star Wars-ness and get out into the, perhaps, the more original aspects of the picture. Yeah, there are a few different things you can look at here. I mean, one is, as you say, I think Star Wars helped sort of push the door wider open for big budget mainstream science fiction and fantasy. The, you know, the idea is, OK, plenty of people in the public are hungry for this sort of thing. People went and saw Star Wars 20 times in the theater. You know, we can make big budget sci-fi and fantasy movies and they can be a huge hit. The other thing is, as you say, movies that are not really Star Wars-y in any sense, except it's... you get the feeling somebody was like, hey, what if we Star Wars-ed up this thing just a little bit? So one example that I think of that will have several connections to today's movie is the James Bond film Moonraker from 1979, starring Roger Moore, the driest and goober-iest of James Bonds, and starring several cast members of the movie we're looking at today, which is, in many respects, just a bad James Bond movie. Like, it's very goofy. It's the James Bond movie where a pigeon does a double take. But also it has a space battle in the end of it. There are... and you just really get the feeling that somebody was like, hey, could we, you know, could we like Han Solo this up just a bit? So you've got Michael Lonsdale playing the villain Hugo Drax in Moonraker and his soldiers go out on a spacewalk where they're shooting lasers at these, I think, I don't know, US or British soldiers who are space soldiers shooting lasers. I mean, obviously no forces of the kind existed at this time, but I think they just wanted to get in on some of that Lucas magic, and this is what we ended up with. Moonraker is a Bond film that there was a time in my life where I thought I would have said it was the worst Bond film. I'm now at the point in my life where I can, without a shadow of a doubt, say it is the best Bond film. And it will never be surpassed. It is one of the most rewatchable of Bond films because it is absolutely ludicrous and tonally all over the place in a way that most James Bond movies aren't. I mean, the earlier James Bond movies, you know, they had a more kind of realistic, sardonic, cynical edge, a kind of mean sense of humor and all that. Moonraker, it's like, got this ridiculous, hilarious subplot where Jaws, the assassin who kills people by biting their necks, falls in love with a woman with braces. But then on the other hand, it's got like really dark stuff in it, like the villain kills people by sicken dogs on them. It's brutal. Yeah, yeah, brutal dog scenes. Michael Lonsdale, who I love in that and everything, he would he would fit into this movie that we're going to discuss today because Michael Lonsdale, has that wonderful, like low energy performance style. Like he's in he's been in many films over the years, but he was in the original film adaptation of The Name of the Rose, playing the Abbott. And he's great in that, but he's so low energy. There are times where I can't quite understand what he's even saying. He's practically mumbling, but what if I should learn it of his own accord? I don't know what you said, Michael Lonsdale, but but I love it. I still love your your energy. I think you will find Mr. Bond that is it's so. Yeah, and it's like what? I can't I can't hear your your villainous monologue because it's just so you're hitting such a low energy level there. Yeah. Oh, but to come back to what you were saying earlier, speaking of low energy, we should get to this Star Wars ripoff that we're looking at today, because of course, the other class of films is just movies that blatantly rip off Star Wars. They're not like taking a preexisting movie concept and trying to Star Wars it up a bit. They're instead taking elements from Star Wars and saying, OK, if we were to directly rip off the Darth Vader suit, how could we write a movie around a character who wears that suit? Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's the that's the caliber of film we're dealing with today. It is 1979's The Humanoid. The Humanoid. Yes. The basic elevator pitch here is in an attempt to overthrow the planet Metropolis, which is our planet, but in the future, the evil warlord Gral turns to a doctor with a recipe for the perfect super soldier, which you probably think that doesn't sound like Star Wars at all. Well, the basic plot is not very Star Warsy and we'll get into what that means here in a bit. What's it some of that trailer audio? All right. Now, I'm not sure how much we really got out of this. All right. Now, I'm not sure how much we really got out of that trailer audio because I think given our choices, that was either mostly all music or that was in Italian. We'll see what we were able to pull together. I think I found a trailer that had some English narration, but maybe it's not original. I don't know. We'll work that out in post. It'll depend. You've already heard it, whatever it is. This is one of those films where I was having trouble finding the trailer, but what I would find on YouTube is just uploads of the entire film, uploads that have been on YouTube for half a decade or approaching 10 years in some cases. Yeah, they do not have their lawyers on the case of the humanoid. Yeah. Now, as we get into the connections on this movie, there's something that you should know from the get-go, which is that this movie has extensive Roger Moore era bond overlap. It has no less than three major cast members who were in back-to-back Roger Moore James Bond movies. Yeah. Yeah. So it's kind of a fun exercise in looking at the moon raker casting especially. Okay. So who directed this thing? All right. So this was directed by Aldo Lado, accredited, I believe, as George B. Lewis, which sometimes it's argued that that was because it kind of sounds like George Lucas. I don't know. But anyway. It's like they were trying to do the trans-morphers thing. What does that call? Yeah. The asylum studios. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. But anyway, Aldo Lado was born in 1934. I will say this. We look at a lot of films and certainly some older films too, where like everybody's dead or most of the people were dead. I was kind of surprised at how many folks are still kicking from this one. I don't know if they were getting some of that iron maiden fountain of youth's sci-fi juice from the plot of this film, but a lot of folks are hanging in there that were involved in this. Anyway, Lado was an Italian writer and director, perhaps best known, at least in some circles, for writing and directing Short Night of Glass Dolls from 1971. A horror movie that also featured Barbara Bach, who we'll get to in a bit, who is in this. And he also did an assortment of thrillers for TV and cinema. I'm not really super familiar with this guy. But there's a guy we're coming up on that fans of Weird House Cinema will recognize. Yeah. So apparently Enzo G Castellari did some uncredited directing on this. Now, he was born in 1938, still alive as of this recording. And he apparently did the opening assault sequence in this film. We've mentioned him on the show before because he directed 1983's Warriors of the Wasteland, 82's, 1990 the Bronx Warriors, and 1983's Escape from the Bronx. All wonderful Italian post-apocalyptic films. He also did 1981's The Last Shark starring Vic Moro. Who was in Message from Space. Yeah. The Last Shark is a jaws ripoff essentially in which Vic Moro plays... What's the character from Jaws? The old Quint. Quint. Yeah, he'd be essentially plays Quint. And then Castellari also directed The Inglourious Bastards from 1978. So Castellari has been mentioned on this show before because we talked about him in the episode Hands of Steel, where I think there was extensive overlap with his work there. Did he actually work on Hands of Steel or did it just have a lot of his regular actors in it? I think it was just the connection to George Eastman and also the connection to the music of Goblin. Okay. Yeah. I think that was the main thing. I don't know that we've actually covered an Enzo G. Castellari picture on Weird House, or at least not yet, but hopefully we'll get to one. The Ultimo Squall, though. All right. There were various writers involved in this one, but I'm just going to mention in passing that Adriano Bolzani was on here, who lived 1919 through 2005. He was also one of the writers on 1964's A Fist Full of Dollars. What? A Spaghetti Western classic. Now, there's a term I'd never come across before, but it makes sense because I think there were a number of Italian Star Wars clones in the late 70s, and that term was... It was actually on a website that we were both looking at. The term is Spaghetti Star Wars. Ha! I missed that. I was looking at that website, but I missed that term. I think that would be accurate Spaghetti Star Wars. I like it. Now, getting into the actual cast, we should introduce the real star of this film. You want somebody with just like unbeatable charisma, a screen presence that sucks you in and you're hanging on their every word. Who'd they get? They got Richard Keele, who played Jaws in the James Bond movies. Yeah, and this isn't just a case where we're most familiar with him, and so we're saying he's the star. No, they said he's the star. He had top billing. He's the star of this picture. I mean, he'd gotten top billing in something before. I think he got top billing in EGAR. Yeah, that was years earlier. That was 1962. So yeah, Richard Keele, who lived 1939 through 2014, so he's a giant of a man. He had the medical condition Acromegaly, and thus attained a height of 7'2". In his life, which in show business, that's like being 9' tall. I mean, you see people who are like 6'8", and if you don't put their coworkers on Apple boxes, then they come off like giants. But Keele was an extremely tall man, and he also had a very signature look, in part due to his condition, that certainly played well with monster makeup. Though I think it's also fair to say that he was still a very handsome guy by most standards. Yeah, I'd say he especially looks good with the beard, which they gave him in part of this film, but not the whole thing. The beard is like an on-off switch that indicates in this movie whether he's in regular human mode or in humanoid mode. Yeah, so he gets to play both in this, which is kind of fun, because a lot of times he was playing monsters and heavies. And in this, he does get to play the snarling monster, but he also plays this likable, big, kind of goofy bearded guy. I'm not saying that that's where Keele's acting strength was, but it's kind of neat to watch him. Oh, yeah, I'd never seen him playing just like a regular guy before, but in the parts of this movie where he's just some space trucker, he's just a regular dude out there in a spaceship, he's quite likable actually. Again, as I was joking, he's not somebody who has natural screen charisma, but he comes off as sweet, likable. You'd be friends with this dude. Yeah, and we do have to stress his importance in the Bond movie series, because he played Jaws in two films, not only Moonraker, but also The Spy Who Loved Me from 1977. So they brought him back. You see that, of course, with Bond himself and some of Bond's auxiliary characters, and occasionally with a main villain like Blowfield comes back over in a movie. Blowfield? Is it Blowfield? Blowfield? I don't know, the bald guy. It's been a while since I've watched him. The guy with the cat. The guy who is sometimes Donald Pleasance, but also many times, sadly, not Donald Pleasance. Sometimes he's Charles Gray. Oh, okay. Well, when he was Charles Gray, I like that. Charles Gray was pretty good. I mean, I guess they tend to have good actors play him, but still, Pleasance was the best. The weird thing is, I feel like how much I enjoy the actor playing Blowfield is directly correlated to how silly the actor playing Blowfield is. So I really like the silly ones. I like Donald Pleasance. I like Charles Gray. I think I like Telly Sovalas when he played him. Oh, yeah. Telly was a different type of villain, but I liked him. Who plays him in the newer ones? Oh, well, they got Kristoff Waltz to play in Inspector, which would have been great casting if the role had been written well, but that movie was just a snooze-fest. Specter, I don't know if you saw it. I have not seen it, no. I found it incredibly boring, not very good at all, but Kristoff Waltz, great casting choice if you give him something interesting to do. Yeah, I haven't seen a new Bond film since Casino Royale. Oh, I like that one. Yeah, like Mads was great in that. Yeah. My advice is stick with the odd numbers. Skip Quantum of Solace, Sea Skyfall, that one's good. Skip Specter. Okay, good to know. Of course, all of these movies, I think, I can just safely say they needed more Jaws. But at any rate, Jaws hasn't been around in a Bond film for a while. I don't think they've quite decided to bring him back, though. They've kind of echoed that sort of second-in-command heavy, I think, in some of the more recent ones as well. Who would be the new Jaws? I mean, it's hard to do. Certainly, there are other big guys you could hire to be a new version of Jaws, but I don't know. The thing is, Keele had that magic. I mean, you could get various super-big wrestlers to step in and play the role, but I don't know. Keele was likable, and I think that's one of the things that shines through in Moonraker. Like, they clearly realized, let's bring this guy back, and people like him, and he looks... He's kind of a gentle... He has this gentle, giant vibe. Let's lean into that. Let's have him fall in love with a girl in braces on a spaceship. Oh, I mean, it's a classic evolution of a villain character across a multiple-film arc, because when he comes in in Spy Who Loved Me, he's actually rather menacing. I mean, he murders people in a way that's kind of creepy. They're not playing him for laughs yet, but as with the arc of, say, Freddy Krueger, he becomes more a source of comedy as the films go on. Yeah. Why didn't he get a spin-off? That's the thing that gets me. Oh, my God. Agent Jaws. He goes... He goes to work for MI6. He becomes like 002 or whatever, and yeah, they send him on missions where he always ends up biting the bad guy's neck. Yeah, maybe he could be 0014, since he's twice as tall. I don't know. Oh, very good. So, anyway, Keel was in many other things as well. We already mentioned Ega from 62. He was the alien, I believe it was, canimate from the classic Twilight Zone episode to Serve Man, which I know is one of your favorites, Joe. Oh, yeah. But he also did a ton of TV work, like he was just popping up on everything, like he'll pop up on Gilligan's Island. So, anytime you needed a giant or a likable big guy, there's a chance that Richard Keel would wander into the shot. I know he was cast in this movie so they could have him turning into the humanoid and hulking out, but I would have enjoyed having more of the movie with him in regular mode with his cute little robot friend, because in this movie he's got a robot dog that is adorable. Yeah. Yeah, I love that robot dog. We'll talk about it a bit in a second here. But let's move on to some of the other actors in this film. The next one is also a bond connection. It's the actor Corrine Clary, who was born in 1950, still alive as of this recording, plays the space character, the sci-fi character Barbara Gibson. It's great. I love how this movie has the same character. This movie has a scene where a character named Lord Grawl sends his forces to kill Barbara Gibson. It reminds me of when Darth Vader took out his lightsaber to go assassinate the Jedi master Fred Nelson. Yeah, I mean, this is not the Lucas approach to naming characters. This is not even David Cronenberg approach to naming characters. I was thinking Barbara Gibson sounds like the name that a child would give their imaginary friend. That imaginary friend were like a stereotypical adult. But anyway, Clary was in Moon Raker, as well as the story of O from 1975, and you're the hunter from the future from 1983. Your hunter from the future is an all-time great Leather Diper Barbarian movie. Yes, and it will come up again. It is connected in several ways to this picture. It's one of the best ludicrous Barbarian movies because it is simultaneously a Conan ripoff and a Star Wars ripoff. So it stars the guy from Space Mutiny, Reb Brown, you know, blast hard cheese, and he's wearing the Leather Diper and running around like killing dinosaurs with a hammer. But then at the end of the movie, he has to fight Darth Vader. All right, the next character, Leonard Mann, plays Nick, born 1947. American actor who was also in 87's Flowers in the Attic and 1981's Night School, in addition to a number of Italian productions. He's going to be our Han Solo for this movie, but a really sort of faded washed out solo. Yeah, absolutely. All right, our Darth Vader in this picture is Lord Grawl, played by Ivan Razimov, who lived 1938 through 2003. An Italian actor who played a lot of heavies. He was in Mario Bava's 1965 sci-fi classic Planet of the Vampires. I love that movie. Yeah, wonderful style. That's one we might have to come back to on the show. He was also in Sergio Martino's 1972 movie All the Colors of the Dark. We've mentioned that one before. That's a Jell-O movie that I've seen. I recall thinking that one was kind of interesting, though like pretty much all Jell-O. It's vile trash, I think, but it's a... I recall it being about like a woman who thinks she's being pursued by a coven of Satanists somewhere in England, but then there's a twist. Yeah, I love the title. It's slightly nonsensical, but I like it. And then he was also in Mario Bava's 1977 film Shock and just various other Italian productions. Now, that character has a brother in this picture, played by Massimo Serato, and the character's name is just Great Brother. And this actor, Serato, lived 1916 through 1989. Italian actor, he was in Nicholas Rogues Don't Look Now, starring Julie Christie in Donald Sutherland. That was the main picture that jumped out at me. Oh, man, have you seen that one? I haven't, but I know it's very well regarded. Yeah, that one's a classic horror movie, very opposite end of the spectrum from the goofiness we're talking about here. That one's like very weird, but also like deep, emotionally powerful, dark. Yeah, that one's... Don't screw around with that one. Like put yourself in the right state of mind if you're going to watch it. Okay. Now, the next actor and the next character here, this is pretty exciting because it's a very esteemed actor, kind of slumming it up, I guess. Or, you know, collecting a paycheck in this Italian Star Wars film. The actor is Arthur Kennedy, and he plays our second tier villain, our mad scientist villain, Dr. Craspin. Arthur Kennedy is fantastic in this. You can tell he... Like all of the roles in this film, it's underwritten, but you can tell he is doing his best to chew the scenery, even though there's not a whole lot to chew on. Yeah, in a film that is just packed with low energy performances, you know, and, you know, poor writing, and just stuff that just falls flat. Yeah, Kennedy brings the most energy to his performance. At times, he's snarling like a mad dog, and it really stands out in a picture, again, where everybody else is really almost coelotic in their performance. Yeah, I would say one of the main characteristics of the acting in this film is that it's almost as if the director, you know, you've heard the story that what George Lucas would say to people on the set of Star Wars was like faster, louder, more intense in their line deliveries. In this case, the director was just always telling people, I don't want you to emphasize any particular word in this sentence. They should all sound exactly the same. Yeah, yeah, like bring it down a notch. So Arthur Kennedy, American actor of stage and screen, who won a 1949 Tony Award for his role in the original stage production of Arthur Miller's death of a salesman. Wow. He was a five-time Oscar nominee. He was in such major films of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s as Lawrence of Arabia, Bright Victory, Peyton Place, and Champion. This was only this is just one of the last four films he did at the very end of his career. But he had a pretty long history. Now, I don't know how how well he is remembered by today's moviegoing audience. Like, especially if you look at the Oscars he was nominated for, he lost in all the all those cases to actors who I think had more star power and more staying power, at least in the public memory. But he was a real talent. And again, he is just clearly light years ahead of any other actor in this film. Agreed. A good casting decision. I did read that they initially wanted Donald Pleasance for this role. Oh, perfect. Which, yeah, Pleasance would have been perfect for this role. He was in a lot of other, you know, international pictures, though, where he played this sort of thing, like the evil guy in a funny costume. Oh, but he would have been absolutely on tone for the rest of the acting in this film because Donald Pleasance, one of the weird things about him is that he has striking monotone delivery so often. Yeah, almost always. It's rare. There are some films you'll find where he plays a more high energy character. But generally, yeah, he was very much in that Michael Lonsdale school of low-key performance. But in a different, with the kind of more nasal version, I remember the main line of his that illustrates this is in Escape from New York when he plays the president of the United States. And he gets into that escape pod egg to get out of his airplane. And he says something like, may God have mercy on you all. Yeah, he always good in that one. So yeah, he would have been right on the same page with all the other actors in this. But no, I think it's good that they got Arthur Kennedy. He mixes it up. You get the sense that Arthur Kennedy can tell the different parts of speech in a sentence when he says them. It's nice. Yes. Now, his character has sort of a companion villain. We'll get into the details in a bit. Lady Agatha played by Barbara Bach. Okay. Born in 1947. This was the Bond girl from The Spy Who Loved Me from 77. Right. She plays a Soviet spy who comes up against Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me. The Spy Who Loved Me is a little bit, I mean, all the Roger Moore movies are goofy. The Spy Who Loved Me is a little bit less goofy than Moonraker. And so there's some spy versus spy action in The Spy Who Loved Me where she's the, she sort of starts off as a villain. Then of course they end up falling in love as always happens. But I recall her being actually pretty good in that Bond movie. In this, I mean, she's great in the role because she like wears these unbelievable wigs well and stuff. But I got to say, the flattest delivery I have ever heard of any line delivery at all in this film. Right. So it basically fits the tapestry of this movie well. Yeah. But she was in a lot of things back in the day. She was in Sergio Martino Screamers from 1979 that I've mentioned several times here. Force 10 from Navarone from 78. And also a film that I think you have told me about, Joe, Black Belly of the Tarantula from 1971. Oh yeah. That's another Jallow movie. It's one of these slashery, trashy Italian murder mysteries. But this one has a really good cast. I think a smaller part in it. The main character in that one is actually played by Giancarlo Giannini and he's wonderful. Now, a bit character in this that I'm just going to mention quickly is Hal Yamanuchi, who was born in 1946, a Japanese born actor who plays just humanoid soldier in this. So it's a very big part. But this is an actor that shows up in a ton of Italian and international pictures. He's also been in such films as the Wolverine, the Life Aquatic, Zoolander 2. He's been in over 100 films and was in several films from the likes of Sergio Martino and Enzo G. Castellari. He began his career as a mime. He translated and dubbed Japanese language films into Italian. And he was even in Stuart Gordon's Robot Jocks from 1990, which to remind everybody, our favorite battling robots film here was, I believe it was at least an Italian co-production. Oh, OK. I had forgotten that fact about it. Now, I was not on the lookout for Hal in this. So where do you remember what part of the movie he shows up? I never saw him or if he showed up, I missed him. He might have been in one of those fabulous sort of stormtrooper costumes that we see. I'm not entirely sure about that. OK. But he has a very distinctive face. You can look him up on IMDB and you might well recognize him and go, oh, that guy. Yeah. I've seen him and thanks for sure. I'll have to look him up after this. Now, we mentioned you're the hunter from the future earlier and the director of that, Antonio Margarete, was the special effects supervisor in this film. Now, that would make sense of something that I caught here because I was watching this movie and I noticed a reused costume. The humanoid has costume overlap with your hunter from the future. Now, as I mentioned, your is a very strange movie because it's, you know, it's put genres in a particle collider where it's part Conan the Barbarian with a red-brown from Space Mutiny playing Conan, but like less smart. And then the villain is just straight up Darth Vader and he has stormtroopers who work for him. And so the stormtroopers who work for the Darth Vader in your where the exact same costumes as some of the stormtroopers in this movie. And I've attached some pictures for you to look at Rob so you can see that I'm telling the truth. Yep, I looked at these earlier and it is the same costume. It was at least the same mask, mostly the same costume, I think. I don't know if I'd actually recommend people try to watch your, but I would recommend everyone listen to the theme song of your hunter from the future. Seth, can we get a little clip of that? Those are the sounds of yours world. Well, since we're talking about music, let's talk about the music in this film because this may come as a shock given everything that we said, but the score for the humanoid is by none other than Ineo Morricone. Ineo Morricone? How is it? Okay, Rob, I feel like you're somebody, I respect your like all encompassing enthusiasm for electronically based music because it seems to me usually if a movie score is electronic, you're going to give it a lot of latitude and you're giving yourself space to love it. And I appreciate that about you. I wanted to love this because I do love Ineo Morricone, but I thought the music in this movie was terrible. It had that theme that kept playing over and over that sounded like, I don't know, it sounded like the trophy ceremony music at the Olympics or something, but synthed up. I readily admit that the music in this is kind of all over the place, but the synthier parts of it, which I think we're going to play a sample of here in a minute, the synthier parts of it really struck a chord with me in part because they remind me a lot. Of some elements that pop up in the early work of the electronic duo Boards of Canada. Oh, okay. Particularly some stuff on Music Has a Right to Children, their classic album. And I actually went down a rabbit hole of like listening back to Boards of Canada tracks because I was curious, because I also was like, well, maybe it was a mix or some of their very early stuff. Like maybe they actually utilized a sample from this score. I know that I know they were inspired by a lot of different elements and I imagine Morricone was in the mix for them. As far as I can tell, though, they're just some things that kind of sound similar in some Boards of Canada films. I don't know if there's a direct connection there or just they were kind of breathing the same synthetic ambiance. But it does remind me a lot of some moments in Boards of Canada's work. There's even some visual tie-in because toward the end of the movie, there's a part where I was enjoying the cheesy synth score and they were like flying off into the sunset with a color scheme that looked very much like Boards of Canada art. Yeah, yeah. So now that we're talking about it, let's go ahead and have just a sample from this set. This would be the track. I believe this is Infanzia, Evolutione e Rittoron, Rittorno. Yes, this is off the soundtrack for the humanoid by Morricone. See, I really like that. I think that, like I say, it strikes a chord with me. Okay, okay. That little ditty that we heard there is probably responsible for 75% of my enjoyment of this film. Well, I want to meet you halfway on this because while I do still think the music was surprisingly terrible, I mean, any of Morricone is an amazing film composer. I mean, he did the film, he did the music for The Thing, which like several Carpenter movies, I mean, John Carpenter is a great director, but he has a number of movies that in a way are just made by the score. You know, like his own score for Halloween, I think makes the movie. You take that music out of the movie, the movie isn't half as good. I mean, it's still good, but you know, that's what pushes it over the edge. Similar thing for Morricone's music in The Thing, like that dun-dun thing that drives the feeling of the movie. It defines the whole tone. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Another couple of Morricone, and again, there's so many Morricone scores. I think he, I mean, it was, I think it's hundreds of things that he did. There's like 400 scores on the big and small screen, I believe, is the number I saw. But a couple that really stand out, you have The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly from 1966, just really iconic work. And then 1986, the 1986 film The Mission, which is a beautiful and tragic, just a wonderful film. Probably, it's got to be one of my top, like, serious motion pictures. Oh, I don't think I've ever seen that one. Oh, it has Jeremy Irons, it has Robert De Niro, and it's about missionaries in South America. And it's, yeah, it's a beautiful, tragic story, and it has this beautiful score. I mean, The Mission, the score by Morricone, is just absolutely breathtaking. You've probably heard something from it, and yeah, I can't do it just, I can't properly explain it. But The Mission is a wonderful movie, and the soundtrack is amazing. Okay, well, I owed you watching that one, but I also said I was going to meet you halfway about the Morricone score, which is that while I don't think the movie is well served by the melodies composed as full music pieces, for this movie, I do like the individual sounds, and I can see how the sounds from the score of this movie could be well used as samples in electronic music. Yeah, yeah, and apparently it has resonated there. I was reading that in 2003, the German electronic group, Computer Jockeys, one word, not a group I was familiar with, but they apparently did a reworking of the track A Man in Space from the score for this movie. You know, we were also looking at a very odd website that is, I don't know how exactly to describe it, it's like a fan website for the humanoid and for Richard Keele that looks like it was made in 1998. Yeah, and it doesn't seem to have changed, which I love, so I do recommend checking that out. What's the web address for that? Okay, so we just had to look it up. It's Golob the humanoid, G-O-L-O-B, Golob the humanoid.com, and it has a page on it that's all about music that has been made as pop fan music about the humanoid. So they've got one song on there that you can download by a band called Ganymede that I was not otherwise familiar with, but it's about the humanoid and I think there's other music too. So the humanoid, you know, it really gets under people's skin. It inspires, it gets those creative juices flowing. You're right, it's just an inspiring motion picture. No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. Addiction is a disease and it should be looked upon as any other disease. How did you cope with a reckless father like me? Join me, Pooja Bhatt, as I sit down every week with directors, actors, musicians, technicians and beyond. You don't need to work with the biggest people and the biggest sound to have great music. I have gone through the sub-credits, Chakka. Reach the pinnacle, stung by the sneaker, I've fallen down again. Yeah, I am not writing actively anymore and when I see my old work it kind of saddens me. I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave. Mom's gone but don't shut the theater. The show must go on. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhatt show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. Trends come and go, your skin barrier doesn't. E45 lotion is effective, science-backed hydration for everyday use. Lightweight, fast absorbing and trusted to do what your skin needs. No fuss, no compromise, just soft, smooth, healthy-looking skin every day. Grab your E45 lotion now. Can you guess, listener, can you guess how this movie begins, what we see on the screen at the beginning of the film? Could it be that there is a star field with some nebulae in the background and then a text crawl that rolls from the bottom of the screen to the top? It's true, that is how it starts. So what we get is a text crawl with, I can't remember, is it narrated as, I think it is because I think the text is actually in Italian and gets narrated in English. So we get it read to us and we hear Metropolis, known ages ago as planet Earth, now faces its gravest hour. Lord Grawl has just escaped from the prison satellite where his brother, ruler of the peaceful galactic democracy, had exiled him. Malevolent and power-hungry, Grawl has plans of vengeance that might forever alter the destiny of mankind. Very good because I love how it starts with the prison satellite as if you already know what that is. It's also telling that because from the very beginning in Star Wars when the text moves across the screen, we already have a sense of a large universe. And not all the details are filled in, there's a lot of stuff that is developed later, but we get the idea that this is an expansive, fantastic world. And in this picture, we already get an idea of a small world, like everything feels small, despite its Star Wars-iness. That's a very good point. I mean, yeah, just the text in Star Wars makes you feel like the galaxy is big, a lot of stuff is happening and we're coming in right in the middle of things. This text suggests this world is boring, not much is happening, and we're starting here at the beginning before things even really ramp up. Yeah, and our fantastic location in space is Earth in the future. Yeah, like the way things start in this movie is not with crisis, but with peaceful galactic democracy. And the opening text tells you, there's a guy who's maybe about to mess that up. But of course, right at the beginning, we get spaceships zooming because again, this is a Star Wars ripoff. And I will say more so than message from space or even Star Crash, those are both Star Wars clones that we've talked about before and have their own charms. This movie does way more direct ripping off of set pieces from Star Wars, just blatant ripoffs of shots and sets and costumes from the movie. Yeah, like in message from space, the Starships, they all look different and they had kind of a cool look and the models were very well done. But man, this is just like a straight up Star Destroyer in this thing. Yes, this one just starts with the Star Destroyer sliding in right over the camera like the opening shot of Star Wars. I know that shot gets copied in a lot of movies, but this one is the most blatant that I've ever seen. Yeah, it's about as spot on as you could get without just actually using a model of a Star Destroyer or just ripping the footage. Yeah, and the model they use is close enough. Like, you know, if you were squinting, you might mistake it. Yeah. And so, you know, we get the Star Destroyer coming in. I think we're to assume already that Lord Grawl is on this ship. I don't know why we know that, but that's just implied. And okay, yeah, Darth Vader was on the Star Destroyer, Lord Grawl's on this thing. And we see a smaller ship approach the Star Destroyer. It looks like it's some space cops or something and they radio and they're like, hey, who are you? What's up? And then the Star Destroyer just annihilates it, blasts it. And then we get the monologue of Lord Grawl. Before we see him, we hear him, I guess he's like talking in his head. He goes, those pilots were sheep, not soldiers. My brother has made his army bloated with peace. You know, and this reminds me, there are actually people who have had mentalities like this in history that like, you know, war is what makes people strong and peace makes people soft. It's even infected American thinking at times. I think, unfortunately, Teddy Roosevelt at some points in his life was somewhat susceptible to this kind of thinking like, oh, you need a good war to make your culture strong. And this is Grawl's philosophy as well. Yes, yes, it is. But then we see him. And oh my God, this Darth Vader dude, Lord Grawl. I don't even know where to start. He's got belts over his face. And so it's not a full Darth Vader mask. It is a Darth Vader helmet and like Darth Vader kind of black leathery looking shoulder pads and the rest of the suit is very Vader-esque. But instead of the robot face of Vader, we get a crucifix of black belts over the face. Yeah, this discount Darth Vader costume, I think in many ways helps illustrate just how well the actual Darth Vader costume was designed and brought to life. For instance, Darth Vader's helmet contains elements of the skull of a samurai helm of an insect of a robot. But it hits all of these notes in ways that don't overwhelm you. You know, like there's a perfect alchemy to the way these elements come together in Darth Vader's helmet and that's why it's become this just iconic symbol. But this design, Grawl's outfit, it leans way too heavily on, first of all, the samurai motifs. Like it's clearly just a shiny samurai helmet that they painted black. And then he has that weird face shackle across his face that kind of looks like it's, it kind of looks like he's a punishment, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like they've put his face in a gibbet or that he's a... Lord Grawl, he got into the cookie jar and they're like put on the punishment helmet. Yeah, like it has that man in the iron mask kind of a feel to it. It just comes off as weird. Lord Grawl is sorry, can I take the belts off? So they're approaching Metropolis, which as we've already been told is planet Earth. I guess it's just Earth in the future. And Barth Quater here sends out an attack ship that is piloted by a guy in a Yor helmet, you know, the ones that are also in Yor. And he says, he says, make sure there are no survivors, especially that Barbara Gibson. So yeah, I just love it. Lord Grawl has put a hit on Barbara Gibson. Yeah, Barbara Gibson. And then we meet Barbara Gibson and this is Karine Clary. She's working at a place called the Institute. The Institute is one of those places from, you know, 70s and 80s sci-fi movies where everybody wears kind of billowy clothes. I don't know what you call the texture of that fabric, but you know, it's like Princess Leia's dress. Everybody's just dressed like that. And it's on a planet that I think is supposed to look like Tatooine from Star Wars. This is another one of the things that... We should get into this in more depth as we go on, but like... I was interested in, okay, when movies are trying to rip off Star Wars, what are the elements they rip off? Because they don't usually copy the overall story structure or anything like that. Instead, they copy specific aesthetic elements like Darth Vader's suit and the Desert Planet Tatooine. All of these Star Wars ripoffs have a desert planet like this with white earthen buildings. Yeah, and I think... So, if memory serves, I don't have the figures in front of me here, but I believe they filmed this in Italy, but also a little bit in Israel. So, I'm not sure in any of these desert scenes if we're looking at Italian landscape or we're looking at Middle Eastern landscape. I would guess this is Israel. Okay. But I will say, these are neat locations. They look interesting and they feel... They kind of feel suitably alien, even if we're not actually on an alien world, if this is just Earth. But I liked it enough. I was wondering though, so it's an institute. What do they study at this institute? Everything. Yeah, everything. Okay. It's the place of knowledge. And so, Barbara Gibson is hanging out at work and then she gets a video call from a child who pops up on the video screen. We learned that the child's name is Tom Tom, and Tom Tom tells her that she must leave the institute and come home at once. And so, you think, okay, how is he going to convince her to leave? But he doesn't need to do any convincing. It's almost like the video call... The child hypnotizes her with like secret magic words, and then she just robotically in a trance state walks out of work and goes home. So immediately we know that Tom Tom, there's something up with him. Like he's got powers. Yeah, this is... Yeah, Tom Tom is a magical child. And I like Tom Tom. Tom Tom has a cool energy about him. Whenever he's on, he seems in control the whole time. He's never really in peril in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. So yeah, I'm a big fan. Oh, were you kind of of the Jean Siskel school that you don't like it when a movie puts a child in danger? I... Not necessarily, but I do find in some films that a child is put in danger in a way that the acting is a little too real. Oh, yeah, yeah. I don't know, not in a way that I'm like completely taken out of the viewing experience per se, but I have seen particularly some Italian horror films where I'm like, oh man, I think that child was really terrified. Oh, yeah. And I don't know, I just really like Tom Tom here, and I didn't want anything bad to happen to him. But luckily, he's super chill. He's not worried about it, so I'm not going to be worried about it either. Yeah, he never seems upset a single bit in this movie. He is like amazingly calm. He has clearly mastered some techniques of emotional control, I believe. So immediately after Barbara Gibson leaves the Institute, there's just a stormtrooper attack. They wander through blasting everything that moves. They kill everybody. And they steal some MacGuffin from inside the vault at the Institute that is called the Capitron. And I was just thinking like, why does this sound so familiar? Because I thought in a previous episode of Weird House Cinema, we have discussed a MacGuffin from a movie that sounded like the dental device called a cavitron. Hmm. It's not ringing a bell. I mean, Capitron sounds like it should be some sort of synthesizer from the late 1970s. But it's not. And in Iomaricone on the Capitron. But the lead stormtrooper has to go back and report to Barth Quater that Barbara Gibson was not at the Institute when they arrived. And then Barth Quater punishes him. He's like, you are stripped of your privileges for 100 days. And then I was like, ooh, what are these privileges? We're going to learn something about stormtrooper society. What special privileges do they get and what is the punishment when they're stripped of them, but then nothing? We never learned what that means. Like is it toilet privileges? Or is it something like really nice? Like you don't get to play the Xbox or something that is there for the stormtroopers, you know? I'm not sure how much this hurt him. Clearly it was not the stormtroopers fault that Barbara Gibson was not at the Institute. Tom Tom got ahead of them and he had no way of controlling that. But I think this is to show us that Lord Grawl is unfair. Like he doesn't care if the reason you failed was actually your fault. He'll take away your privileges for 100 days anyway. Yeah, he's a terrible boss. So let me go back to the Barbara Gibson and Tom Tom house. And Tom Tom is just wiping the floor with her at some kind of strategy game. It looks like it's battleship or something or chess on a computer in some way. And they talk about how even the computer can't beat him. And then she's like, where do you come from? And he says, I come from a place far, far away where I've learned very much. And my real name means great ocean of wisdom. And so it is, so he's not like her child. He is her pupil. I think she's a teacher and she's teaching him. But what is she teaching him? He already appears to know everything. Yeah, he is an all-powerful space child. Yeah. And that's basically all you need to know about it. And honestly, the movie gives us very little else in the way of answers. But then we meet some more characters. We're going to get into the politics of this world. So we meet a guy named Great Brother, which is pretty close to Big Brother, but they say he's the leader of the utopian order of Earth. And an alternate way of reading this film is that actually Earth is not a utopia. It is an Orwellian nightmare state under the control of Great Brother. And the movie is just like it happens to be written by interparty members that are loyal to Great Brother. And in fact, Lord Grawl is the good guy. He's like the, he's being held up as the Emmanuel Goldstein of this world so that all of our heroes can have a, have a two minutes hate against him. But no, instead we meet Great Brother and he's like, he's chatting with this young guy named Nick, who is some kind of soldier and metropolis. I think he's the young hunk of the movie. He's supposed to be Han Solo basically, but far less interesting, dopey or and mopey or with longer curly hair. And they talk about the theft of the Capitron device. Great Brother says, if word gets out, there will be a panic. Why would that be? Well, he explains. He says it was the discovery of the most ingenious scientist that metropolis has had in this century, Dr. Craspin. It has the power to modify a man's cell structure and transmute him into some sort of monstrosity with superhuman powers. And so Nick asks, well, why was the Institute creating a monstrosity beam? And Great Brother says, I don't remember exactly what he said. I mean, basically it seems like, well, Craspin had tenure, you know, he could do what he wanted, but somebody sniffed him out. The person who learned what he was doing was Barbara Gibson. Once Barbara Gibson got on his trail, everybody found out his evil plans and he was arrested because she tattled to Big Brother and the Capitron was confiscated. But now it's been stolen and nobody knows where where Dr. Craspin is. So there's definitely trouble afoot. And so Nick, Nick has given a mission. Big Brother tells him, you need to go find Barbara Gibson. So you I think he calls her Miss Gibson. So you can find Craspin and save the planet. And this part really made I laughed out loud here because there's no refusing the call. There's no Luke saying, you know, it's so far away from here. What can I do? No Han Solo saying, you know, that's not bravery kid. It's more like suicide. Nick just says like, all right, boss. Yeah. And this brings us back to some of the points we're making about about Star Wars copies and Star Wars ripoffs. They certainly go for the aesthetics. They go for these elements like desert planets and stormtroopers and laser guns. Maybe if they have the budget for it, they'll throw in some droids and some aliens. But the thing that they never copy is they never copy the hero's journey. They never get into the mythological underpinnings that were that are so central to Lucas's creations. So there's there's never the hero with a thousand faces. There's never any connection to the earth myth. You know, that's always what is missing. Yeah. The ripping off is of the most superficial elements. Yeah. And ultimately, I mean, that's if you if you just get those superficial elements, yeah, you don't have Star Wars because one of the things that always worked in the Star Wars films is that you had that that mythological skeleton to the thing that was propelling things along. Oh yeah, totally. But hey, I know a way to fix the hollowness of the story, which is introduce Richard Keel and acute robot. Finally. That's immediately what happens next. And thank God we got here because up to this point, the movie is rather dull. Yeah. I was having a very hard time paying attention to anything in this film until finally Richard Keel and the robot dog show up. And then suddenly it's kind of interesting. And I'm like, OK, I can I'm beginning to see where we're going here. Yeah. Yeah. So Richard Keel is cruising in space in his spaceship and he encounters some kind of problem. He's trying to contact Metropolis. They're not getting back to him. His ship's breaking down. Oh, his character's name is Golob, G-O-L-O-B. And he's just generally having a hard time. And then we see him take out his frustrations on his adorable robot dog, Kip. He's like, Kip, I'm mad at you. But then he immediately feels bad about it. And Kip is just the cutest thing. This movie succeeds. I mean, Kip is not as effectively emotional as the droids in Star Wars are. It doesn't have as much personality as R2-D2. But because they went with with robot dog instead of just general robot, it gets automatic mileage out of dog similarities. Yeah. And it is it is very cute in a kind of kind of analog way. You know, it's like this is a dog made out of keyboard parts and stuff. Yeah. So I enjoyed all the scenes involving Richard Keel's character and the robot dog. Me too. I laughed out loud when the robot dog extended its telescoping antenna tail and wagged it. But I feel like this is sort of where the movie really picks up when we meet Richard Keel. And when we start meeting more of the bad guys. So, so yeah, Richard Keel is fun. The robot dog is great. And so they're flying around in space. But then we cut to the evil enemy base on a planet called Planet Noxun, which outside looks exactly the same as the other planet. It's just a desert. Yeah. I when I watched it, I thought they said Nixon. So I was like the planet Nixon. That's great. That's a perfect evil planet for the late 1970s. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty close. But here we meet another villain. It's Barbara Bach. And the first thing you will notice about her is that she's wearing an absolutely astounding wig. It's kind of hair metal. But it's it's also something else that you've just never seen on a human. The wig she's wearing is at the same time hair and a hood and a helmet. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's interesting looking. But you know, she's she's a very stylish lady. She's you know, she's able to pull it off somehow. Yeah. Somehow this doesn't look completely goofy on her. So like the front of this hair looks like the McDonald's arches like it goes up on each side and then comes down and it's kind of fluffy in the front, which makes it look like a, you know, fur lined hood on a jacket. But then behind that hair suddenly turns rigid and flat. And it's like a Darth Vader helmet on the back of but it's hair. Yeah. And she's wearing a really funny dress with like a riveted metal neckline. All the bad guys in this wear stuff with riveted metal hymns on it. And it's pretty much immediately clear that what we're dealing with with Barbara Bach here is a space bathory because we get her and she's meeting with Dr. Craspin who's remember the the scientists who made the Capitron who escaped. And what they're doing when we first meet them is they put some poor woman into a plastic iron maiden that jabs her with a million hypodermic needles and it sucks out her life force. And Barbara Bach is just like, yes, yes. Yeah. It's kind of a horrific scene. It's also the only scene like the scene that has any nudity in it because the woman they put into the iron maiden is nude. Yeah. It's very strange because otherwise this could be a kids movie. But then there's just one scene like 10 seconds long that has nudity and brutal violence. And then if you were to just remove those 10 seconds, it's a kids movie. Yeah, absolutely. So it's totally weird that we suddenly go to this place and then we then we're back into everything that's that's come before. Totally. But so I think we figure out what's going on here is that they are extracting the fluids like it's like Elizabeth Bathory. You know, they're draining the liquids out of the local peasant girls so that Lady Agatha here played by Barbara Bach can can use the this life force of these other women to stay young forever. But Dr. Craspin. Oh, and this is a system that has been designed by Dr. Craspin much to Barbara Bach's liking. But he has to warn her. He says, science may have conquered age, but it will never succeed in conquering death. And for some reason she's mad at him. I don't remember why she starts kind of sniping at him. But then Craspin is very smooth at deflecting her her frustrations. He says, don't you trust me, Lady Agatha? Don't I give you daily doses? You haven't aged one minute since you've been here. And I thought, would you normally notice having aged one minute? During the early parts of this film, I would say yes. You definitely feel those minutes go by. But yeah, they're talking about it like like people can normally look at Barbara Bach and say like, oh, you've really aged one minute since I saw you one minute ago. But she she says to Dr. Craspin, I trust no one and you know it. So this is clearly just a fully transactional relationship. And then, oh, the next thing is Lord Grawl. And remember, Barthquater arrives and we realize that Lord Grawl and Lady Agatha are an item. They are together. And when he arrives and meets Lady Agatha and Craspin, he's like, wow, you are so beautiful. You have not aged one minute. And of course, it's especially hilarious because he's still wearing the face belts. Yeah, yeah, this never comes off. He never takes off this helmet. So the face belts are always fully on, even in scenes where it looks like he and he and Barbara Bach are about to like have some romance. The face belts are just right right in the way. And I think I was thinking about this and I was like, Star Wars made a smart decision by keeping Darth Vader at least post his vatering basically asexual. Because if Darth Vader was trying to like have a dating life while he was building the Death Star, I think that would not have added the right kind of depth to the film. But here we get to see their Darth Vader's love life. He and Lady Agatha, it seems like they're going to be very happy together though. In a way, like, you know, she she's worried about aging one minute and and absorbs the liquids of of slaughtered peasants so that she can live longer. He is a cold, emotionless man inside of a face shackle that so yeah, they seem perfect for each other. No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. Addiction is a disease and it should be looked upon as any other disease. How did you cope with a reckless father like me? Join me, Pooja Bhatt, as I sit down every week with directors, actors, musicians, technicians and beyond. You don't need to work with the biggest people and the biggest sound to have great music. I have gone through the sub-city of Chakka. Reached the pinnacle, stung by the sneaker, I've fallen down again. Yeah, I am not writing actively anymore and when I see my old work it kind of saddens me. I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave. Mom's gone but don't shut the theater. The show must go on. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhatt show on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. Oh, but here we learn about the plan that's driving the plot of the movie. So we learn that Dr. Craspin is going to create for Lord Groll and Lady Agatha an army of human oids that will be indestructible human robots. Again, this is another one of those movies where they pronounce it robot. And then pretty much right after this, Dr. Craspin notices, he looks on a telescreen and he sees Richard Keele zooming around in space nearby. He's flying a spaceship outside the Star Destroyer. I guess they're at the base on Noxin at this point. And Craspin sees him on this TV and he's like, oh, that guy, that guy. I want to turn him into an indestructible human robot. That's the guy I'm going to humanoid. So he uses he like messes with some switches on a panel to make Richard Keele crash land his ship on this planet. And then they like he has some another cute scene interacting with the dog. And then he's just basically hit with a missile that just blows his ship up, right? Yeah, and transforms him into a humanoid. Right. So he gets humanoid by a missile from space. It's very beast of Yucca flats because he pops up and suddenly his beard is gone. Like the moment he's humanoid, he is now clean shaven. And let's see other transformation elements. He can no longer talk. He grunts. Yeah, he grunts and groans a lot. Just rages around waving his arms. Immediately some soldiers show up to shoot at him and it does nothing. And he tosses them around like sacks of flour. And Craspin's dudes capture the rage go lob by knocking him out with what Craspin calls a very special narcotic gas. And then they take him back to the base and say, OK, we can control him now because we put an implant on his head. Yeah, this is kind of third eye jewelry thing that they put on him and that controls him. Right. And Craspin says to Grawl in seven days, metropolis will be populated by an army of humano at your command. Oh, and we skipped over one thing that I thought was really funny because there's like a there's like an interrupted romance scene between Barbara Brock and Lord Grawl here. They're like in a room together and Lady Agatha says to him, it is a great honor for me to be loved by the future ruler of Metropolis and the entire galaxy. And it is the most absolutely flat line delivery I've ever heard. Yeah. But then Lord Grawl is like, so you just want my power. And she's like, only if I can share it with you. And I think they're about to kiss, but I don't know how they would kiss because his face belts are in the way. Yeah. And then immediately, Dr. Craspin like interrupts them by coming on the telescreen on the wall. And he's like, hey, what's up? I've got you a humanoid. He's so tall. Let's turn him in. Yeah, it is stupid too, because it's like, OK, he's can only he's directly he's like a mindless killing machine is directly controlled by the the the implant on his head. And yet he's going to command an army. Right. What how's this work? Yeah, I'm not quite sure. But so they give a mission to the now humanoid at Golob, they send him on a hit job to kill great brother. Remember big brother from earlier in Metropolis and Lord Grawl says to him, you will not stop until my brother is crushed to a pulp at your feet. So they send him into this place, the city that looks like in the establishing shots, it looks like when people make those aluminum casts of ant colony tunnels. Yeah, it looks pretty interesting. And it reminds me of another thing that you see in in Star Wars ripoff movies is that you certainly if you can create an alien city, you know, like this, that's great. But also if you can shoot as many like late 70s futuristic bits of architecture, you know, that kind of future shot kind of architecture. Yeah, that also is a great idea. And they do that in this film. There's some really interesting architectural choices that they use as backdrops at times. I think there are a lot of public library buildings that end up in the sci fi movies because I don't know, you know, they've got some weird looking staircase. Yeah, any Oh, yeah, if you can get a weird looking staircase and interesting hotel atrium, then yeah, you've got to put it in your movie. So they send Richard Keele into the city of Metropolis. Again, I think the planet is Metropolis and the city is Metropolis. And the guards tried to stop him. But of course, nothing's going to stop him. He's a humanoid. So they shoot him with lasers. It doesn't do anything. He throws him on the ground. The palace guards are being commanded by again, Nick, Nick, the guy from earlier. And the lasers have no effect and Golob is very angry. Yeah, he's basically a rampaging Frankenstein and all of this. Yeah, and throwing people on the ground. Laser bad. Laser bad. Yeah. And so Nick goes to talk to great brother and he says, great brother, you must leave the building at once. There's some sort of mutant outside. And so they evacuate great brother and Golob. Oh, then Golob hijacks a land speeder just like Luke has in the first Star Wars movie to go to the Institute from earlier because somehow Craspin knows that's where great brother has been evacuated to. And then he busts in there and they try to set a trap for him where they're going to crush Golob in a hydraulic press. But that doesn't work because he's too strong for it. He just pushes it right back up. And then there's an interesting moment where Golob has a chance to smash great brother. Like he's got him right there. He breaks through the traps and all that. But Craspin for some reason gets greedy with his personal grudge and he's like, no, don't kill great brother yet. Go kill Barbara Gibson first. Yeah, Craspin cares more about killing Barbara Gibson than anyone else in this movie cares about anything. Yes, and it's all for revenge because Barbara Gibson uncovered his illicit activities at the Institute. So he's like, you can't you can't do great brother until you do my revenge mission first. So Golob then goes to Barbara Gibson's house and there's a big chase scene where he's running around smashing through walls and you think he's going to kill Kerry and Clary, but instead it's Tom Tom to the rescue. Tom Tom is there and he uses some kind of psychic powers on Golob to calm him, stop the raging, stop the hulking out. And they sort of kneel down together and Tom Tom says to him, may your essence return to your body? Let me reach into your heart and into your soul and it works. Yeah, and it's kind of sweet. I don't know. I kind of like the energy of this, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then, Kerry and Clary, she, this is Barbara Gibson, she runs out into the desert because I think she doesn't realize that Tom Tom has successfully tamed the beast and she is ambushed by stormtroopers. But then we get this really weird sequence where the stormtroopers that are about to kill her are instead shot with like plastic neon arrows by these two mimes in Obi Wan Kenobi robes that are Tom Tom's friends from another dimension. He says they're foreign travelers. Yeah, they're kind of like space elves. Like not at any like kind of like Warhammer since but like in like they're just sort of like fantasy elves. Yeah, very strange. They come and go a lot in the movie. They appear at random times to aid Tom Tom by shooting people with bow and arrow. The movie has a lot of psychic powers and clairvoyance. And so Tom Tom and Golob then use psychic powers to reveal the location of Lord Grawl and Craspen. They find out they're on Noxon. And then when Barbara goes to reveal this to the authorities, she gets kidnapped, kidnapped by a spaceship and taken to the evil planet Noxon, leaving Golob along with Tom Tom. And of course, Barbara is taken to Lord Grawl and she says with again, absolutely flat delivery. It's like, great brother will crush you like a worm. And she's now Princess Leia from the original Star Wars. She's held prisoner on the Death Star. And now we're we're toward the end of the movie, but we finally kick into very familiar original Star Wars territory, right? It's a rescue mission to Lord Grawl's Star Base. And Nick has to go, I guess, because I don't know, he's the he's the young hunky guy. And he says, well, I'm going to go on a single commando raid because that has the best chance of success. I don't know why that would have the best chance of success. Why don't they send an entire army? Don't they have one? They're bloated by peace, right? Yeah, that's right. They're bloated by peace. Lord Grawl was right. So he's going to go on a mission to rescue Barbara Gibson and recover the Capitron. And then this part made me laugh out loud. Golob goes up to great brother and he's like, go, go, go, Barbara, my friend. And so he's sort of regained some ability to speak, but not the full ability to speak. He can only talk in the caveman monosyllable thing. Oh, and then, of course, Tom Tom comes along. He sneaks onto the ship. So like Nick and Golob are flying to the base and Tom Tom just shows up. And what does Nick say to him? He's like, are you out of your space dimensions or something? Something like that. It gets very Star Wars-y for a little bit here and just Star Wars stuff happens. But it's still worth sticking with because there's a lot of cool stuff at the end. Yes, yes, yes. So there's a space dog fight on the way there where they get attacked by ships. And this is again, one of those like blatant ripoff scenes. It's just a direct copy of the scene in Star Wars where Luke and Han go into the Balter at guns on the Millennium Falcon and fight off the TIE fighters. It's a direct ripoff of that. Except here instead of Luke and Han, it is Nick, the lovable Nick. I did like in the scene though how Golob nods approvingly every time Nick destroys an enemy fighter. He looks at Tom Tom and he's like, yep. But then Nick gets knocked out and they crash land on Planet Noxon, which again looks exactly like Metropolis. It's the same desert. And they get a reunion with Kip the Robo Dog, which is again truly very cute. Yeah, this relationship is the heart and soul of this motion picture. Right. So they have to infiltrate the base. So you got Richard Keele and Nick and Tom Tom and now Kip the Robot Dog. They're all working together. They infiltrate the bad guy base by having Kip the robot distract the guards and then they all just run in the door. And their method for finding Barbara Gibson in the secret Grawl Lair is that Golob says to the robot dog, Barbara, and then somehow the dog leads them to her. I don't know how that works. Yeah, it's a dog, I guess. It just it can lead people to places. That's how it works in TV shows. I have several questions about the fighting that starts here. So they have to fight some Stormtroopers along the way. And a lot of this is hand to hand fighting with like Nick doing wrestling moves on Stormtroopers. Why are they having Nick do the fighting? Isn't Golob indestructible at this point? Shouldn't they let him do the fighting? They should because he certainly does a lot of the melee combat before and afterwards. Doing all sorts of fun giant moves, you know, throwing guys around. At one point he does this wonderful number where he grabs the guy and like just pounds his head into the ceiling several times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yet he never does a move that I was anticipating. The one where you come up behind two Stormtroopers and you grab their heads and you knock them together. Like coconuts, yeah. Yeah, that's like that would be just a that's just a go to giant move and it doesn't happen. That's that's money left on the table. That's my number one complaint about this huge missed opportunity. But then meanwhile, of course, we got to have some some impending peril. So we find out the Dr. Craspin is going to drain Barbara Gibson with the iron maiden of needles to create the most potent dose of serum yet for Barbara Bach. And so she's in the setup and they got the needles going in for her. But then the heroes bust in to rescue her. And Dr. Craspin looks so betrayed in this scene when when Golob shows back up and now he's working for the good guys. He says the humanoids fighting for them. It's not possible. And he seems really hurt again. Best actor in the movie. Yeah. And it's in the in the bar is very low. You know, so when when author Kennedy is busting out those those emotions like you feel them extra hard, you're like, what is this? What am I watching here? So the bad guys have to run out of the room and escape while they were the good guys rescue Barbara Gibson. But Lady Agatha is distraught about this because she needs her serum. She's repeatedly saying like, I need my serum immediately. If I don't get it, I might age one minute. And then there is a hallway blaster fight that again is ripped straight out of Star Wars. It's just the scene from Cell Block A 23. And then this evolves into a big blaster fight and a spaceship hanger. There's a great moment in this fight where Kip the robot dog defeats some stormtroopers by peeing on the floor and then they slip on it and fall over. That's good. At first, Golob is defeating stormtroopers by like knocking them on the ground, but then he gets a laser gun and he really tears up the place. And this big action scene is cheap, but it's pretty fun. Yeah, it is. I enjoyed this one a lot. And again, this is where you have Golob like smashing people's heads into the ceiling and so forth. Yeah. And so when this fight is going on, the bad guys are not doing so hot. Like I said with Dr. Crassman a minute ago, he sounds so hurt. Like the bad guys really seem you start kind of feeling bad for them because Lady Agatha is just clawing at the walls. She's like, I need my serum. And then Lord Groll issues the most forlorn and defeated order to kill them that I've ever heard. Do you remember this part where he says like, kill them? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you kill them or shoot them is as a frequent order given by by villains. But generally there's a certain amount of whimsy or evil to it. I mean, I always come back to the excellent Ronald Lacey and Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know, where it goes, shoot them, shoot them both. Like that's such great delivery. And yeah, Groll is just, I don't think he believes what he's saying. He sounds like he knows he's lost. He's just begging. He's like, kill them. And then we get maybe my favorite special effect in this movie. That's right, because time has run out for Lady Agatha. She aged one minute. Oh no. She aged that one minute. That was the last minute, I guess. Yeah. So she ages that one minute and then she just completely, it's kind of a rapid aging effect, kind of a melting effect, but not done, you know, nearly anywhere near as well as what you would see in say Raiders of the Lost Ark or the third one, the last crusade where we had a rapid aging sequence that was pretty great. This is neither of those. It's more of a frame by frame effect similar to some early werewolf transformation sequences you see in pictures, but it's still a lot of fun. Yeah, she turns into a rotten skeleton. Yeah. So that was fun. That's worth hanging in there for. Now, there's a bunch of other fighting stuff that happens at one point in the fight. Tom Tom and his archer mimes show up again to save the day. They shoot the neon arrows at the bad guys while Tom Tom does psychic stuff. And then there's a part that I thought was very funny. There was a brief hand to hand fight between Nick and Lord Groll. So can you imagine if Star Wars had a scene where Han Solo and Darth Vader were just punching and kicking each other? But eventually in the scene, Lord Groll whips out his secret weapon, which is laser fingers. This is not a power that we knew he had. It just appears out of nowhere and he starts blasting his laser fingers at Nick, but eventually even Lord Groll is no match for Golob the humanoid. Golob bear hugs him and then he disintegrates inside his suit. Yeah, this is kind of weird, kind of like a green screen effect. And then the suit is empty, Groll is defeated. And of course the heroes escape the base as it is exploding. And then you got the problem of the Capitron, this thing that's supposed to detonate and create a bunch of other humanoids like Golob. And Golob decides he's going to sacrifice himself by detonating the Capitron under a lake. So he grabs it, he sort of falls on a grenade, but underwater. And they think he's dead, but then Richard Keele pops back up out of the water and somehow he has his beard back. It has unhumanoidated him to fall on the grenade of the Capitron. Yes, it's pretty great. And he's like, he doesn't really have any memory of what happened. She's like, you look great in a beard. He's like, I've always had a beard. It's beautiful, beautiful moment. Yeah, and then we get an absolutely bizarre twist ending that I have no idea how to explain. We find out that Tom Tom has got a sail off into the sunset because he explains that he is from another place called Tibet. I assume that is supposed to refer to Tibet, the place on Earth. And so you think that this is, oh, maybe this is like a, I don't know, like one of those sci-fi endings where, oh, actually Earth is here and he's from Earth and this is somewhere else. But that doesn't make sense because they tell us that Metropolis is Earth. So it would not make sense to say that, oh, Tom Tom was from Earth all along this far away place. Is it implied? So I don't know, is he supposed to be at in the past? Or did I put that up in my head? Yeah, that's what I was wondering. Yeah, I was like, is he a time traveler from the past? That is the only thing that really seems to make sense to me. Yeah, I'm not sure. I have no answers. But I did really like this ending because again, it feels very boards of Canada. Yes. It feels like we're just straight up teleporting into the hexagon sun here because we have that analog. It's like this analog dreamy summer day psychedelic vibe. The sense of everything's going to be okay because you have the boy Tom Tom saying all these positive things while the morocone dream twinkle music goes on in the background and the glowing cosmic barge floats into the movie from the grey haven. The grey havens or to bad or wherever. And yeah, it's a good landing for the film. I agree. The end is just a slow cruise into the orange. Feels good. Feels warm. Yeah, you do feel warm at the end. Oh, and we get some ending narration too. That was really funny. It said, once again, planet Earth had narrowly escaped disaster. Was there another time? Once again, it had found in itself the intelligence, the insight and the strength to repel a mortal enemy. Once again, man was to live at peace in the galaxy. Awesome. They wrapped it up. Yeah, I guess. Oh, okay. Star Wars wasn't able to do that. Like Star Wars, they had to come back in subsequent films to flesh everything out. This film did it in one picture. That's a good point. Yeah. No additional storytelling required. Everybody lived happily ever after. Yes. So, what to say? I guess in the end, I found this to be an enjoyable viewing experience, though I did have to force myself to keep watching through like the first 10 minutes or so. Yeah, same here. And then there was certainly just kind of a potential dropout period later on. So I would say that if you're tempted to watch this film, you know, stick with it or feel free to skip ahead a little bit because, you know, honestly, you're not going to miss much. I would say this one is very different from Message from Space in that they're both Star Wars ripoffs, but Message from Space, I think I already said this earlier, but it has a lot more aesthetic uniqueness and interest to it, like a lot more different colors and sets and costumes and alien designs and things. And it goes a lot more different places with the plot. Like in many ways, Message from Space was kind of hard to follow because a lot of strange things happen in it. This movie is, I would say the opposite into the spectrum is, it is very simple plot, very straightforward. You might even want to fast forward some parts, but enjoyable in a similar way ultimately. Yeah, and worth it definitely for Richard Keele and for Arthur Kennedy, both of whom are very entertaining in this film. Yeah. Now you're probably wondering, well, where can I watch it? It's been on DVD before. I'm sure you can probably land it on DVDs. If you look around in the right place, but I could not find a legit streaming source for it right now. I don't know. It might be on 2B, but it's definitely been on YouTube. Like one of the places where it's hosted on YouTube, it's been up since 2015 and nobody's bothered to take it down. It's not pristine quality. I feel like you could probably get a better quality version of this if you had a like a legit DVD or something, but it's still watchable. Somebody get us that 4K humanoid. Yeah, yeah, the 4K restoration. I want to see it. I do too. There's several things I need more detail on, one of which is Barber Box wig. I need to see the defined grains and details of the hair that's going on there and where the seams are. That's very important. Yeah, it was impressive costume. Oh yeah, I will say overall, like the costumes and sets and miniatures, like everything looks pretty good. Some of the effects are a little iffy, I guess, but for the most part, everything looks pretty good. It's not Star Wars, a new hope quality, but it's still pretty good. So it is the kind of film that would benefit from like a clear restoration, I think. Maybe not 4K. Don't bring it up too. Don't bring it up into too high a detail, but you know, it's an interesting film to look at. No, put it in 4K, put it in 8K. I want to see every molecule of this movie. Of course, that is a real concern with some of these restorations we've seen though, is that you restore it a bit too much and you're going to see too many of the cracks. You see too many of the wires and so forth. And in some cases, that has to then be digitally removed. Yeah, effects that used to look good don't look good anymore. Or sometimes not even effects, just the colors and I don't know what you'd always call it, maybe the color grading and certain things about the film quality of the movie. A classic example that I recall is that the movie Predator, you know, the sci-fi action movie Schwarzenegger, looks good on VHS tape. I think it even looked good on the first DVD that came out, but I recall at some point there was a blu-ray of it and it was just like, oh, this is not right. It looked like waxy. Interesting. I think sometimes it happens. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we're going to go and close this episode out here, but we'd love to hear your thoughts on this movie, Star Wars in general, but certainly other Star Wars ripoffs. What are your favorite Star Wars ripoffs? What do you think about the aesthetic qualities of Star Wars that tend to be reflected in these films? All of that's fair game. Let us know. And next week, I believe the plan is that we will continue and we'll finish our trilogy of 70s Florida movies. So we'll still be in the 1970s next time in Weird Out Cinema, but we'll be looking at the film Shock Waves, which interestingly enough has a Star Wars actor in it. It has Peter Cushion. Oh, wow. Yeah. So if you want to watch ahead, here's a rare in-episode advance on the next episode. I haven't seen this one, but I'm looking forward to it. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Weird Out Cinema, you will find this every Friday in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. We're primarily a science podcast, so our core episodes on Tuesday and Thursday are going to be science and culture based. On Mondays, we do a little bit of listener mail about any and everything that we're talking about. And on Wednesdays, unless we're preempted, we do an artifact episode with reruns on the weekends. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you'd like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. A person who is not generous cannot be an artist. The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. Listen to my weekly podcast, the puja bhajjo on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.