The 1970's Science Fiction Movie Poll

I am so scared to watch Slaughterhouse Five, for fear it will suck, or that they will really mess up the Tralfamidorians.

I just watched beneath the planet of the apes the other night. the scene where the ape city army marching through the desert encounters a field of squirming apes crucified upside-down in flames while in the background an enormous statue of the lawgiver begins bleeding from his eyes is like a halfstep from jodorowsky-level wtf.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/beneath-the-planet-of-the-apes.jpg

and the ending is so hardcore! how the fuck did that movie get made?

and as much as this poll rocks there is no cronenberg here so I must call foul

no surprise which i voted for!

I think everything Cronenberg made in the '70s wld be 'horror,' but 'Shivers' really gets discussed considerably in parasiology books and (sometimes) journal articles!

# Shivers (1975)
# Rabid (1977)
# Fast Company (1979)
# The Brood (1979)

Fast Company is a car racing movie!

parasitology that is; I misspelled one of my truest fancies

I dunno, cronenberg's clinical fascination with biohorror... always struck me as sci-fi.

Naw, I can dig. When it comes to categorizing things by genre, I just go with where you'd find them in a video rental store. (This gets me a lot of hate-ons in Scattegories).

it's a crime that phase iv is still not on dvd

Fantastic list! Only other movies I'd add to the list would be No Blade Of Grass and The Final Programme, but both of those only marginally fit (NBOG is superseded by Mad Max, and TFP doesn't get the ridiculousness of Moorcock down)

Demon Seed gave a serious case of the bonkers. Utterly user-unfriendly movie. I would vote that for my #1 if I hadn't committed to Mad Max.

I have added like 15 things to my netflx thanks to this thread.

In terms of design and execution Alien has to be up at the top. Some of the earth-bound near-future dystopias here might be thoroughly convincing, but Alien is so much more ambitious, and pulls it off in spades.

But aside from that... Phase IV and The Man Who Fell to Earth are both firm faves. Only seen THX once, would like to give that another go.

I voted for Stalker, which is a great film, but I guess the real reason it got my vote is because I'm currently reading the Strugatsky brothers book it's loosely based on - Roadside Picnic.

I think I have to say Logan's Run why bcause Jenny Agutter look intersting AND VERY HOTTT.

-- Rock Hardy, Friday, 25 January 2008 02:37

OTM.

Great list, nearly impossible to choose only one film (I feel sad not voting for so many great films in an ilx-poll, how sad is that?), but I'm going with Stalker as well.

Seen embarrasingly few of these, so I was lame and voted for Alien (which is really more an 80s movie in terms of style).

Logan's Run is so fucking hilarious.

Yeah, that robot towards the end is so goofy.

What's the name of that film where they fake the Mars landing and try to kill the astronauts? I think OJ Simpson's in it.

Capricorn One

aside from the two Tarkovskys, I would go with the good interstellar guest / bad interstellar guest polarity of Close Encounters and
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Slaughterhouse-5 is fine but I don't really think of its SF elements as anything but window dressing. (ian, I like the film of Breakfast of Champions with Willis, Nolte and Finney.)

Wait, where the fuck is Dark Star? Love that film.

Not sure if I understand the rationale for leaving out Star Wars. Looking at this list, I realize that I've seen a lot more '80s sci-fi than '70s.

Star Wars is space opera, ie really an Arthurian / Western / samurai film. Just like Alien is a (boring) haunted-house film set in space.

^ controversial

But isn't "Mad Max" just a Jacobean revenge play then?

xpost

Han Solo doesn't even know a parsec is a unit of space, lol

I thought Alien was pretty boring, too.

Alien is awesome, U R all mad. But it's perhaps not so awesome as hard science-fiction, if that's Morbius's point.

Most storytelling theory doesn't count sci-fi as a genre. It's a setting or framework occupied by a variety of different genres.

I think the test should be whether any major plot point hangs on a scientific concept. That determines whether the sci-fi elements are merely stage dressing or a determining factor of the tale.

like, where's Young Frankenstein?

I think the test should be whether any major plot point hangs on a scientific concept

In SF movies, though, the scientific concept is generally a McGuffin which a thriller/war movie/detective movie or whatever revolves around, structurally speaking.

Impossible to pick one, but a top 11 would read something like :

The Andromeda Strain
Solaris
THX-1138
Slaughterhouse-Five
A Boy and His Dog
Zardoz
God Told Me To
Phase IV
Demon Seed
Stalker
Invasion of the Body Snatchers

I really need to see the Planet Of The Apes sequels.

There are many exceptions to that. The question of what constitutes human identity is central to the themes of "Solaris" for instance - which is a scientific question with philosophical implications.

xpost

That's thematic rather than structural, though. I do freelance script editing, so I tend to look at issues of genre as being to do with structure (which isn't neccessarily correct, but it's how I've been trained).

In SF movies, though, the scientific concept is generally a McGuffin which a thriller/war movie/detective movie or whatever revolves around, structurally speaking.

Yeah but in a lot of these films it's the other way round I think. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers seems like a thriller but it's really about "the question of what constitutes human identity" too. I guess you could say this about a lot of films...

'Dark Star' -- horrible omission, such a great film
'Capricorn One' -- this is sort of more of a political thriller, though part of me definitely wanted to throw things like 'The Parallax View' in there which definitely belongs with these films in mood
'Young Frankenstein' -- I love this, but it doesn't completely belong, I was tracing a line with this poll

Though I decided against made-for-TV films like 'The Martian Chronicles', 'The Quatermass Conclusion' definitely belongs on the list.

I also forgot 'Laserblast'! The only one on my list I haven't seen is 'Parts: The Clonus Horror', and I'm definitely going to have to hunt down 'No Blade of Grass' & 'The Final Programme', I knew Elvis would throw in something I'd never heard of

I just watched Invasion of the Bodysnatchers this morning. I had sort of forgotten how unironically creepy it is. Solid A movie.

Voted for The Andromeda Strain, although who knows what I'd think if I watched it now.

My Top 5 (though this is impossible and I had to remove the two Tarkovsky films)

Phase IV
God Told Me To
Rollerball
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
THX-1138

5 for over the top Camp:

The Omega Man
Silent Running
Zardoz
The Stepford Wives
Demon Seed

I guess I need to see God Told Me To, it's the only one up here I'm not familiar with. I voted STALKER because it feels like a staring contest with God.

haha to go along with the debate above between Morbs and o.nate, I've begun thinking of JAWS as a sci-fi flick

Demon Seed is really a screwball comedy

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/Demonseed11.jpg

Proteus IV: I can't touch you, Susan. I can't touch you as a man could. But I can show you things that I alone have seen. I can't touch, but I can see. They've constructed eyes for me, to watch the show. And ears, so that I can listen in to the galactic dialogue.

(cut to: computer graphic freakout sequence representing the galactic dialogue)

http://www.scifimoviepage.com/images/beneath.jpg

Traumatic hypnosis is a weapon of peace

Maybe it's finally time for me to post this link and see how many familiar faces you guys recognize.

Colossus: The Forbin Project is pretty excellent, a movie I haven't seen in over 20 years but still remember parts of pretty vividly. All of these movies are pretty great and i saw most of them on TV at some point in the mid 80's so they're kind of cemented in my head along with the time I began getting into interesting speculative fiction.

ST:TMP deserves some props for being the outright weirdest Star Trek film; it has a grand vision, something they never again attempted, I don't think.

In its agglomerated way, it's the only one of the Trek films to embrace the whole breathless wonder idea that the original series aimed for, however inadvertantly. The fact that there were long stretches where nobody said anything got understandably slammed on a dramatic standpoint but in terms of trying to portray what a bunch of professionals at work being confronted by something indescribable would react like, seems spot on!

awesome

i think i'm going to watch barbarella again

is CQ any good?

not really

I kind of liked it, but I know I was in the minority

it's not a patch on Barbarella that's for sure

CQ is charming but not a must see. Soundtrack is alright.

That's a good description

haha, this is my 2nd google search result for "ken middleham ants"

Perhaps of interest as a compare/contrast

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/lists/50-best-sci-fi-movies-of-the-1970s-20150114

I can think of a whole lot of films that didn't make the list better than most of their bottom 20 -- first third of this list makes the decade look a lot more wretched than it has to (though I hadn't even heard of 'welcome to blood city')

putting phase iv in the top 10 though, all is forgiven

Saul Bass' Long-Lost Original Ending for Phase IV Unearthed in Los Angeles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beLpsWaUDNk

Whoa @ lost ending. I guess there were probably a bunch of other majorly cut parts throughout... still manages to be awesome, though.

Re-watched this today - love the sci fi update of 'Leiningen Versus the Ants.' Thanks for posting lost ending - it's great!

http://www.amc.com/video-extras/dark-star

^^ "dark star" available to watch free on line

was really disappointed when I finally got around to watching that

why?

because it's terrible? It isn't particularly funny, mostly it feels like a bad episode of Dr. Who

that 70s Tom Baker era jankiness and ambling pace

love that movie. its a perfect movie to just hang out with.

Watched The Final Programme a few days ago, I'm kind of surprised this hasn't gotten a rerelease from Drafthouse or something. Hard for me to remember a film that reached an equally high level of entertainment and incomprehensibility.

The sight gag with the freezer crammed full of McVities was amazing.

The sight gag with the freezer crammed full of McVities was amazing.

http://static.rogerebert.com/uploads/review/primary_image/reviews/dark-star-1980/hero_EB19800311REVIEWS3110301AR.jpg

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/dark-star-1980

Emerged. Haven't watched yet. Will soon if this proto-reality TV trope is in the leagues of 'Death Watch' or 'Year of the Sex Olympics' or just a slightly artier 'Das Millionenspiel' revamp.

Hu-Man, 1975, Terence Stamp, Jeanne Moreau

An actor is placed in dangerous situations and his fear will be broadcast to the television audience. The audience’s emotions will determine whether he is sent into the future or the past.

https://letterboxd.com/film/hu-man/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdvXZAPJkm0

well gosh. odd even for 1970's SF. one wonders what the shooting script could have looked like after the first third. definitely not for the impatient. definitely for people who like to wonder how films like this end up getting made. almost hilariously interminable, but ultimately that is by design. this youtube is a VHS transfer of the 87 minute TV edit, there's a version out there with another 20 minutes, can't even imagine

music credited to Eric Burdon, Tim Blake (of Gong / Hawkwind), David Horowitz, and, somehow, Patrick Vian -- not clear if they're collaborating or swapping off, the ballad at the beginning is clearly Eric Burdon but is that also him doing all the acapella screaming at the end? almost sounds like it could be but whatever it is, it's a riot. sounds like friends in Paris with a lot of gear deciding to record an all night jam session instead of going home after checking out the 1972 Taj Mahal Travellers concert

Capricorn One gets a rec as First Man "counterprogramming"

https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/17/17985708/streaming-movie-recommendation-capricorn-one-first-man