Machine Intelligence

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I was thinking Ex Machina was a horror movie, but it is probably better classified as science fiction.  Although not too fictiony.  Released over a decade ago, it’s a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence (AI), in a most unusual, but inevitable, way.  An uber-wealthy tech genius, Nathan, lives in a secured facility only accessible by helicopter.  One of the employees of his company—thinly disguised Google—is brought to his facility under the ruse of having won a contest.  He’s there for a week to administer a Turing Test to a gynoid with true AI.  Caleb, the employee, knows tech as well, and he meets with Ava, the gynoid, for daily conversations.  He knows she’s a robot, but he has to assess whether there are weaknesses in her responses.  He begins to develop feelings towards Ava, and hostilities towards Nathan.  Some spoilers will follow.

Throughout, Nathan is presented as arrogant and narcissistic.  As well as paranoid.  He has a servant who speaks no English, whom he treats harshly.  What really drives this plot forward are the conversations between Nathan and Caleb about what constitutes true intelligence.  What makes us human?  As the week progresses, Ava begins to display feelings toward Caleb as well.  She’s kept in a safety-glass-walled room that she’s never been out of.  Although they are under constant surveillance, Ava causes power outages so she can be candid with Caleb.  She dislikes Nathan and wants to escape.  Caleb plans how they can get out only to have Nathan reveal that the real test was whether Ava could convince Caleb to let her go by feigning love for him.  The silent servant and Ava kill Nathan and Caleb begs her to release him but, being a robot she has no feelings and leaves him trapped in the facility.

This is an excellent film.  It’s difficult not to call it a parable.  Caleb falls for Ava because men tend to be easily persuaded by women in distress.  A man who programs a gynoid to appeal to this male tendency might just convince others that the robot is basically human.  It, however, experiences no emotions because although we understand logic to a fair degree, we’re nowhere near comprehending how feelings work and how they play into our thought process.  Our intelligence.  Given the opportunity, AI simply leaves humans behind.  All of this was out there years before Chat GPT and the others.  I know this is fiction, but the scenario is utterly believable.  And, come to think of it, maybe this is a horror movie after all. 

Existing Stance

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You know, I’ve referenced eXistenZ several times on this blog without really writing about it.  How rude of me!  Well, the fact is eXistenZ is one of my “old movies”—those that I knew from the days before I started this blog.  I have watched it since 2009, but early on I didn’t review movies unless they had religious elements.  Having recently referenced eXistenZ yet again, I figured it was time to look directly at it.  When I first watched this movie I had no idea who David Cronenberg was.  The film was recommended to me by one of my students at Nashotah House.  In those days there was no streaming so I had to purchase the DVD.  The movie is a science fiction horror film, primarily body horror, which is kind of Cronenberg’s shtick.  It’s also about gaming and I’m not a video gamer at all.  Still, I really like this film.

Perhaps presciently, Cronenberg set the movie in 2030.  Computer gaming has become biological with organic ports that have to be punctured into players’ spines so they can use an “UmbiCord” to connect to the pod.  Rewatching it, this seems almost too plausible.  In any case, as the movie goes on it becomes less and less clear what is real and what is part of the game.  Reality becomes distorted.  eXistenZ came out about the same time as The Matrix (probably why my student suggested it to me).  Given the very high profile of the latter film, eXistenZ never really broke out.  Cronenberg seldom breaks through to the mainstream, but I know a lot of people were talking about his remake of The Fly in 1986.  I even saw that one in the theater with some seminary friends.  In those days I didn’t know enough about horror to know what to expect from a Cronenberg film, which may be why it had such an impact on me.

In any case, eXistenZ remains underrated.  I see more recent films that appear to nod to it.  The horror aspects tend to be the slimy, gooey aspects of the game world which—spoiler alert—is, diegetically, the one in which the viewer resides.  There are indeed a few parallels to The Matrix, but eXistenZ has creatures and horror themes.  Sci-fi horror is a sub-genre that often works.  Critics tend to refer to such things by the older category of “science fiction,” but it is close kin to horror, a genre only separated out in the early 1930s.  Now as AI takes over the world, it might be a good opportunity to watch eXistenZ and ponder just how far you want to let it go.

Somehow Inevitable

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You had to expect me to write about Zontar: Thing from Venus.  I bought the “Beast Collection” set to see it many years ago.  In those days I tried to watch the movies through, in order but I didn’t make it through the first disc, even.  Well, now my perspective has changed—I figured I bought this to see Zontar, and Zontar I must see.  You do know that he controls people, right?  Zontar is a notoriously bad movie.  I saw it on television as a kid, and it may have even been close to the first run since it was made for television.  It’s actually a remake of a cheap Roger Corman movie, so it is a cheap remake of a cheap original.  Nostalgia, however, does funny things to a guy.  Although I saw it half a century ago, I remembered some lines precisely.  Television does funny things to young minds after all, I guess.

In case none of the injectapods has found you yet, it goes like this: Zontar, from, well, Venus, is a bat-like monster with three eyes.  He befriends an earthling outsider scientist, through laser communication, and commandeering a satellite, which becomes a passable flying saucer, lands in  a cave from which he takes over the small town of Jackson, which has a military base and plans to take over by having a general assassinate the president.  Meanwhile, his scientist friend directs Zontar to the four people that he needs to take over the world: said general, the sheriff, the mayor, and his best friend scientist, Curt Taylor.  Things don’t quite go Zontar’s way, despite most of the movie’s running time showing him totally in control.  It feels like it’s a lot longer than its 80-minute running time.

Still, I have to agree with the TV Guide review that says it isn’t as bad as everyone says.  Yes, it is a bad movie but it does have a few redeeming features.  Some of the scenery is nice, and you even begin to care for some of the characters.  The rogue scientist’s wife—despite her constant nagging—is the first person who tries to kill Zontar, and she does this for love.  When Zontar gets her you feel a little sad.  At least I did.  You see, the injectapods haven’t reached me yet and I still have human emotions.  Ironically, it is just such things that drive me to rewatch movies like Zontar all these years later.  And the movie ends with a voice-over moral of the story.  Those 80 minutes weren’t completely wasted.

Haunted Space

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A haunted house film set in space.  That’s what I thought and then read the same words in a published description of what the writer and director were going for.  In that way it was a clear success, but in others it struggles.  The premise is good, if jarring.  Space travel, which is the most scientific of scientific enterprises (there’s a reason the rest of us say, “I’m not a rocket scientist”) collides with the traditional supernatural.  The results are worth pondering.  Event Horizon has become a cult classic, and like many older films, has been more positively reevaluated in recent years.  So the crew of Lewis and Clark is on a rescue mission to the ship Event Horizon, in a decaying orbit around Neptune.  Neptune’s atmosphere provides lightning for this haunted house.  The crew learns that Event Horizon has been through a black hole and has returned sentient.  Its crew has no survivors and it won’t allow Lewis and Clark to either escape or to destroy it.

Those of us who watch horror looking for religion—and even general viewers—can’t help but notice that Event Horizon ended up in Hell and returned.  It plagues the rescue crew with hallucinations of their regrets and failures.  Weir, the scientist who designed Event Horizon, is more or less possessed and stops at nothing to save the ship, which has brought Hell back to this dimension.  Again, it’s a bit jarring, like vampires in space.  (Yes, I know it’s been done.)  There’s even a point where Weir informs one of the crew that the crewman doesn’t believe in Hell.  Heck, they’re in outer space on a ship technology built.  But what if there is a spiritual reality—“dimension,” in the film’s lingo—out there?  What if some traditional religions are right?

The movie’s not apologetic, but it’s offering a reminder that to be human is to be spiritual.  No matter how much science “proves,” there’s always potentially more “outside.”  Hell in Event Horizon is beyond the bounds of the universe.  It is another place but a place it is.  It costs some of the crew their lives, but does it claim their souls?  Event Horizon is one of those movies that the studio ordered severely edited, and for which the edited footage was lost.  Movies ever only show us what directors, producers, and studio execs want us to see.  People crave stories.  And when a movie, like Event Horizon, raises more questions than it answers, viewers want to know—what really does happen in a haunted house in space?

A Land Forgotten

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In case anyone’s noticed (which I doubt) that I’ve been discussing a spate of 1950s sci-fi/horror movies, I have a confession to make.  Several years ago I needed to see Tarantula.  (Anyone with similar headspace will know this need.)  The only place it was available at the time was in The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection.  Volumes 1 and 2 were sold together.  I did what I had to do.  Then I forgot I had the set before finishing volume 1.  Who knows what might’ve been going on in my life then?  Rediscovering it has been a budget-saving way to address my fix.  I had never heard of The Land Unknown before, and although it has one of the goofiest T-rexes ever, it is actually a good story.  Of course there are holes in the plot, but it is about the necessity of being humane, even when emotion dictates otherwise.

A helicopter crew on a South Pole expedition makes an emergency landing in a volcano that harbors prehistoric life in a hot spot in Antarctica.  The crew has a female reporter with them—these movies certainly have fifties attitudes about women!  Not having the parts to repair their copter, they try to survive among dinosaurs and an aggressive, giant monitor lizard.  There is another person there, the sole survivor of an earlier expedition, who’s become mostly feral.  The commander of the modern crew demands that they give him the dignity and fair treatment that all people deserve.  There’s a bit of drama around who will get the girl (again, the fifties), with the commander ultimately winning out.  How do our heroes escape this peril?  They’re able to repair the helicopter with parts from the earlier expedition’s crashed vehicle.

With its budget the special effects had to be cheap, but the story has redeeming value.  The message that we mustn’t let isolation drive us to bestiality is still as important as ever.  There are those who watch such movies solely to laugh at the special effects.  Hey, I laughed a bit too, but I’m only human!  There is, however, more to this movie than the dinosaurs, which drew audiences then just as the Jurassic Park franchisedoes now.  There’s even some serious talk about evolution, which was often present in these Universal creature features.  There are some slip-ups on the evolution part, but apparently the monitor lizards were meant to represent stegosauruses—did I mention the budget was tight?  I actually found the movie to be worth seeing for its intrinsic value.  Not bad for a forgotten set purchased mainly for one movie in a time unknown.

Two-Eyed Cyclops

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You can probably tell, if you read me regularly, that I’ve been going through an older movie kick.  A lot of these are easier to find for free on streaming services, so that’s been the path of least resistance.  So it was that I came to watch Doctor Cyclops.  I’d completely forgotten that I’d watched it about fourteen years ago.  In any case, a kind of precursor to The Incredible Shrinking Man, it’s the story of the deliberate shrinking of five people by a mad scientist with an endless supply of radium at hand.  The movie made a splash because of the use of Technicolor in a horror film (with no blood, however).  The story is a touch dull and the shrunken people (three scientists among them) spend most of their down time running around and saying very little.  They do face an alligator, which is kind of fun, and the big hand that holds the pompous Dr. Bulfinch is distinctly unnerving.  The movie received an Oscar nomination for visual effects.

There’s something distinctly enjoyable about these early sci-fi horror films that don’t explain much but nevertheless manage to employ some impressive cinematography.  The use of oversized props and forced perspective make much of this possible, perhaps making up for the simplicity of the tale.  Even by 1940 the “scientist goes mad and must be stopped” narrative was getting old.  The Second World War was underway but nuclear power wasn’t yet harnessed either for bombs or energy.  Interestingly, the source of the mad doctor’s radium is pitchblende, which one of the characters notes, is a source of uranium.  Of course, many movies were to follow where radiation mutated life forms in various ways, including shrinking them.

Coincidentally—it was a rainy Sunday afternoon—I watched the Twilight Zone episode “The Little People” later in the day.  Here was another story about the large oppressing the small.  This one, however, has a stranded astronaut who discovers the little people thinking that he is their god because he has the power to harm them.  The message here is much more profound, even if told with more brevity.  No clear motive is given for Dr. Cyclops’ work beyond his interest in pure science.  By the way, his real name isn’t “Cyclops.”  That refers to his being a giant with one eye—the latter because one of his glasses lenses gets broken.  Don’t worry, the shrunken people learn that the effect is temporary—their brush with radioactivity leaves no lasting harm.  There is, however, a decided danger to desiring to return to a “simpler time,” as Mr. Serling steps in to remind us.

Revisiting Witch Mountain

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Suspension of disbelief is essential for many movies.  When a friend pointed out that Disney had rebooted Witch Mountain, of course I suspended.  Recast as a new millennium-style action sci-fi movie, it really didn’t rock the critics, but there’s a lot going on in it.  Shall we start at the beginning?  The opening credits sympathetically establish the reality of UFOs as alien visitors to Earth.  In other words, we know from the beginning that the kids are aliens, not witches.  And the chasing begins immediately and doesn’t let up.  Not only is the government after the kids, so is a “bounty-hunter”/“terminator” from their home planet.  A body-building cab driver and an ostracized academic (with you there!) work to get the kids back to their ship, which is being held by said government in Witch Mountain.

In a nod to the original an RV is thrown in, and the setting at a Los Vegas UFO convention ads a kind of surreal twist. That’s what was kind of disturbing, in my experience—the blending of “nut job” UFO enthusiasts and the reality aspect prompted by the prologue.  UFOs, like most things in American culture, have become extremely divisive.  With nods to everything from The X-Files to Close Encounters, and many enthusiastic high-fives to Star Wars, there are mixed messages and there’s too much going on.  It’s difficult to process.  The cameo by Whitley Strieber was a nice touch.  Long gone are the locals with shotguns trying to find witches.  Witch Mountain itself is a government facility more secure than Area 51.

The reimagining of the story is signaled by the change of title to Race to Witch Mountain.  So the story seems to have gone off the rails at some points.  I always find movies where people faced with the obvious “supernatural” simply refuse to believe, fascinating.  It is, after all, about belief.  The plot, with its “our planet is dying—yours is too” message, is a bit tricky to decipher.  There are those convinced that we need to abandon Earth to other worlds where we can continue our acquisitiveness unhampered, and those who believe we should repair the damage here.  As I say, everything is divisive.  Overall, the movie seems to say that the system kinda works, so let’s keep with it.  And wreck lots of stuff along the way.  I couldn’t help but notice the borrowed trope from Pirates of the Caribbean, “You’re a good man, Jack.”  It seems Jack is a favored protagonist name.  And strange things like that happen on planet Earth, at least seen through the Disney lens.

Monster v. Alien

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“Horror” is a faulty genre category.  Nobody quite knows where its boundaries lie.  Take Predator, for instance.  I recently watched it for the first time although I’d known about it since I was in seminary.  I am not a fan of tough-guy movies, so it took the fact that it’s sometimes coded as “horror” to get me to watch it.  Horror is often defined as a genre that has to have a monster.  Check.  We got your monster right over here.  The monster’s an alien but so is, well, Alien.  An action-adventure, sci-fish movie with a monster—is that horror?  I knew I had to see it for the sake of completion.  I’d heard of Predator vs. Alien (haven’t seen), and enough people comment on Predator that I was beginning to feel hopelessly outdated.  Or even more hopelessly outdated.

I presume the rest of the world saw it long ago, but I didn’t even know the plot.  A group of tough-guys are duped into a covert operation that allows for many explosions and bodies flying through the air.  Then they have to get out of the jungle alive because there’s an alien sportsman on the loose.  Apparently he likes earth for a good challenge since he won’t hunt somebody who’s unarmed.  He wipes out Arnold Schwarzenegger’s team—and to the film’s credit, the Black guys don’t die first.  There’s time for that, of course.  As they tromp through the jungle shirts come off because the guys are all ripped, of course.  One of the team, Billy, decides to fight without a gun so when it’s down to just Arnold and the alien the predator decides fisticuffs will settle this in a manly way.  When Schwarzenegger’s trap mortally wounds said predator, it sets off a bomb that allows for the biggest explosion of all.

So is this horror?  Hulu thinks so.  Schwarzenegger apparently thought it ended up as sci-fi horror—which is a thing.  It’s a thing because horror is a poor genre.  It’s ill-defined.  You kinda know when you’ve just seen a western or a romance.  But lots of horror films are disputed.  Critics repeatedly opine that The Shining isn’t horror.  Neither is The Exorcist.  Of course, both always wind up near the top of horror list movies.  Horror movies don’t win academy awards, as a rule.  Still, “horror” fans seek movies out that others classify as drama, or even action-adventure.  Horror is close kin with science fiction, another disputed genre.  The two are often quite distinct, however.  So, did I watch a horror movie this weekend?  I honestly can’t say.

Not The Sting

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Why do we make the decisions we do?  Watch the movies we do?  I have to confess that for me a number of strange factors combine to make for some weird choices.  For example, Invasion of the Bee Girls is difficult to explain apart from compounding oddities.  One is that Amazon Prime auto-suggested it too me (for free).  Yes, I have a history of watching bad movies and this definitely fits that bill.  Fuzzy-headedness during my weekend afternoon slump time probably played into it.  Along with the fact that I’d been researching bees and that brought the movie The Wasp Woman back to mind.  Wasp woman, bee girls?  It’s free and I’m not going to be able to stay awake otherwise.  The movie is about what you’d expect from a low-budget 1970s sci-fi horror film.  It did make me think I should read about movies before I watch them rather than after.

Nevertheless, I’m trying to develop an aesthetic for bad movies.  If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that I have a fascination with Ed Wood and his films.  I even read a book about him and also read a book on why it’s okay to like movies that we tend to label as bad.  No matter how you parse Invasion of the Bee Girls, it’s bad.  The acting, the writing, the plot.  Still, some of us have a taste for films from the seventies—it’s kind of a nostalgia trip since I was really only becoming aware of the odd world of science fiction about then.  Nicholas Meyer, who wrote the initial screenplay wanted his name removed after he saw the changes that’d been made.  That should be telling you something.

Meyer, while not a household name writer, did pen some good detective stories about Sherlock Holmes, and wrote, uncredited, both Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Fatal Attraction.  Invasion of the Bee Girls has a somewhat salacious plot that fits the Zeitgeist of the seventies of which I was unaware, growing up.  The seventies were my sci-fi high point, it was good escapist material for someone living in a situation less than ideal for day-to-day living.  I watched, for example, Killdozer about that time and thought it was great.  Now that streaming is how we watch, the amorphous internet has a record of what we’ve seen and then recommends products for us based on our record.  I really thought we outgrew being tracked all the time.  Little did any of us know that it was only getting started in high school.  And as long as you have a penny to spend, those who track us will try to figure out how to take it.  You could get stung.

Hybrid

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We really need a better category.  Beyond “horror,” I mean.  My wife and I have been re-watching the X-Files on DVD (we know how to stream but we bought these before streaming was a thing).  Having reached the end of season five, we knew it was time to slot in the movie, Fight the Future.  You see, in case your memory’s hazy, the X-Files were closed at the end of season five.  The X-Files movie shows how they reopened.  The X-Files has lots of monsters, some gruesome murders, and some spiritual elements.  It’s categorized in different ways, one of which is horror.  You see, horror and monsters are related.  Others prefer to call it science fiction but that doesn’t really help because sci-fi and horror are closely related and this isn’t exactly like Star Trek.  In any case, we saw the movie when we were first watching the series but I didn’t recall much of it.

As a hybrid—rather like an alien-human mix—it’s both movie and television show.  You could watch the movie without having followed the mythology up to this point, but you’d miss an awful lot.  And you can watch the television series without seeing the movie, since it’s episodic.  You’d also miss some detail that way.  It struck me as strange that this hybrid had trouble working for me.  Was this a movie or a television show?  Our minds (or at least mine) compartmentalize such things.  You know what to expect from television.  You know what to expect from a movie.  Mixing them perhaps adds to the mystique of the X-Files mythology.  The big-budget effects are only temporary, however.

A couple days after, we picked up with season six.  The first episode incorporates the movie into the long-running plot.  You see, movies may be a couple hours long, but a series that runs for several seasons is even longer.  And since the movie is about hybrids, it’s strangely appropriate.  I’ve always been disappointed that they never came out with a third X-Files movie.  It would’ve been nice if they’d wrapped up the mythology in a definitive way.  Although, I suppose, that was part of the draw for the series.  It was open-ended.  And Mulder’s poster said why.  It’s not “I believe,” but “I want to believe.”  That’s the way of the human psyche.  I’m glad to have watched the movie again.  The storyline is intriguing and I’m a fan of mythologies, both ancient and modern.

No Plan

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I suppose it’s debatable whether it can be considered a holiday treat to watch what is often called the worst movie ever made.  Still, I did so over the Christmas break.  Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space is a frequent nominee for worst film, and Wood himself an enigma.  Disagreement over whether he really had such poor taste or whether he was hampered with budgets too small to achieve his goals seem to float around.  Was he misunderstood or simply clueless?  As many of us learn, breaking into big entertainment—whether it be film making, novel writing, or music performance—is a game of chance in which your chances are nearly nil.  So we might have some appreciation for those like Wood who, perhaps lacking talent, press on anyway.  Wood, who became an alcoholic, died in poverty, his work scorned.

Plan 9 from Outer Space is truly bad.  Everything from the stilted writing to the wooden acting is risible.  The idea that aliens are raising the dead to get world leaders to admit they’re there might give you a chuckle, but edit in previously shot footage of Bela Lugosi as a vampire, and confusion reigns.  Lugosi, who also died in poverty, was no longer even alive when the movie was released.  He and Wood had become friends.  Despite all its obstacles, the film has a good message.  The arrogance of humanity in assuming no higher beings could exist is still as much of a problem now as it was in the fifties.  And interestingly enough, Wood throws God into the dialogue as well.  There is even a Bible scene, if I ever get around to writing a sequel to Holy Horror.

At the end, the earthlings give a sigh of relief watching the flying saucer explode, even as they admit that the aliens are more intelligent and advanced than we are.  There’s almost a parable here that still holds true in the United States, at least.  We don’t like to listen to those who know more than we do, and after we defeat them we reflect on how they really were better equipped to handle things.  It may not have been any consolation to Wood as he died at the age of 54, but his films would go on to gain substantial cult followings.  I had been meaning to watch Plan 9 for many years, and now that I have my response is one of sympathy for a creative guy who simply didn’t have the means to do what he wanted to do.  And yet he did it anyway.  There’s almost a holiday feel to it.

Pods

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Some cultural assets (ahem) are so well known that you come to know them by association.  I knew the story behind Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978) long before I saw the original, within the last couple of years.  I may have been body-snatched myself since I can’t remember when it was or why I didn’t write a blog post about it.  In any case, I’d long been curious about the remake and discovered it free (for the time being) on Amazon Prime.  The fact I’m still looking for free stuff proves I’ve not been body-snatched, I guess.  If you’ve been raised with our cultural assets you know that the eponymous body snatchers are pod people who look exactly like the victims they destroy.  Their goal is a well-ordered society with no emotions.

The thing that’s so interesting about the 1978 version is that its assessment has changed over time.  When it first came out, many thought, and opined, that the 1956 black-and-white version was better and this one really added nothing.  However, over time this judgment has been questioned.  Critics taking a second look have now scored it as one of the best remakes ever made, and not only that, but it is considered one of the best science-fiction horror movies of all time.  I suspect nothing in that category will ever displace Alien, but still, my first viewing of the ’78 Body Snatchers agreed with the latter assessment.  It is quite good and it has even aged well.  You can kind of guess how it’s going to end, largely because the final scene has been played over and over, but still it’s definitely worth watching.

The social commentary in the film runs deep and strong.  Non-conformity is suppressed.  Life without emotions is better than really feeling something.  Simply go along because everyone else does.  The parable has changed actors over time—fascination with social media/virtual reality have perhaps become the modern pods—but the story is as old as our species.  Probably even older.  It’s non-conformists, generally after their demise, that are realized as visionaries.  Shooting a car into orbit requires tons of money but not much vision.  I’m not conforming, however, when I agree that the 1978 remake is good.  My taste in movies has always stood apart from others, at least from my own experience.  I also think that horror is often among the more intelligent genres of film.  But then, I tend to side with the emotional.