Planet of the Apes and 70s Sci-Fi

I watched The Fantastic Voyage streaming on Netflix a few days ago. It had probably been 30 years since I had seen it. What a trip!

The premise is so completely ludicrous, and yet everyone and everything in the movie takes itself very seriously. It's quite odd. This is totally a B-movie, but a big budget and name actors make it seem like something better. I love the disclaimer at the beginning about how you're about to see something no human has ever witnessed before.

And man does it take its time at the beginning! They never even bother to explain how they shrink everything, but then the process takes like 20 minutes! What's cool is that they only have an hour to stay that size, and the movie is in real time from that point on.

Highlights:

• Casual sexism
• High school textbook drawings coiled up and used like nautical maps
• Two-way video!
• Giant wall map of the body with a guy whose job is to move the marker

This movie is not good. And yet, it is enjoyable.

The white blood cell that begins to absorb the villain as he is screaming, "LET ME OUT! GET ME OUT! GET ME OUT!" completely freaked me out as a kid. I was super scared.

Isaac Asimov wrote a piece about when he did the novelization of Fantastic Voyage. I read it way back when, and it killed that movie for me; too many loose ends.

Coincidentally, over on the film website The Dissolve they've been running a series of articles about 70s sci-fi. I didn't discover it until last week. Yesterday I was excited to see them post about the movie Phase IV. Have any of you ever seen it?

It's basically about how some outer space thing (signal? aliens?) turns ants intelligent and they start attacking this research center. It fascinated/terrified me as a kid. I caught up with it a couple of years ago, and it holds up surprisingly well. It's not a classic, but it has a lot of neat things in it. Definitely some creepy imagery. It was directed by Saul Bass, the guy famous for many opening credits sequences.

I remember thinking that movie was pretty freaky back then, too. That, and wanting to be locked up in a building with that girl in the movie*.

*was 14, may have actually been more scared of girls than intelligent ants.

I still think about Phase IV now and then, and I haven't seen it since it came out on "Channel 100".

S.