Invasion of the Mindbenders (1987)

Mindbenders (1987)

Starring Roy Thinnes of the 1960s series “Invaders” and “The X-Files.” This is another Canadian production. 

Finally, I was able to find this movie, and after the first 30 seconds, I thought perhaps I may be wasting my time…  This is an extremely low budget… cheap… and ridiculous movie…  it has really bad over-acting, bad sound, bad editing, cheap production values, and is attempting to be some sort of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” silly teen comedy… and essentially fails at this, but…

I had fun watching this shitty movie.  Anyone who has seen “Interface” (1985) perhaps might be interested in this. This high school (like any high school) is having problems with a few students, and the principal (Roy Thinnes) has this guy from the “Behavior Modification Research Institute” try out a new system which uses sound to control behavior of students. This is not so far fetched, one can go to youtube and punch up videos which have certain frequencies on them which are designed to do exactly what is being presented in this movie.   The movie’s not that smart though, but this technology does in fact exist, and there’s a whole bunch of things people have used it for, and I’ll leave it to you to listen to them and decide or imagine what could likely be out there in real life… They are going to shut down the student radio station (because they don’t like rock n’ roll anyways) and broadcast these subliminal sounds over the speaker system to make students docile and suggestible. The main characters are the student D.J.s at the radio station and of course rebel goofballs who wear headphones all the time so they are immune to the mind control and decide the faculty have to be stopped. 

As soon as I saw the Max Headroom poster on the wall in the high school radio station, I had to see where all this

was going.  This movie is trying to do more than what they really have the resources for (decent actors, decent sound recording equipment, a good camera, money to buy props, etc) and it’s dumb, but the script isn’t entirely idiotic, and while the ‘actors’ are over-acting so much it’s ridiculous,  it moves along and the story itself is actually fun but I cannot make any kind of 'universal recommendation' for this, many people will be absolutely annoyed with the astoundingly bad over-acting which is really the worst part of this shit film.  There’s some insane things that happen that in the context of such a low budget film that are quite amusing.  It IS idiotic, but it can be fun to watch as often even the worst of the worst produced 'satire' can still be for some reason. 

There’s little things that happen here and there, and lines here and there which are actually commendable, and since this is not a Hollywood production, you get something that strays a little from something you might see from Paramount, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox or whatever. You get terrible acting, but better over-acting than weak acting. In this case it works a little better, though I can see this being annoying to some people out there. It’s rebellious at heart and subversive at heart, and even though this isn’t even on the level of Class of 1984, or Class of 1999 for that matter, it’s silly concept of brainwashing students, where rock and roll is the antidote, and turning them into mind-controlled robots carries this movie exactly where you’d want it to go.  This is terribly made, and that could be enough all by itself. They set someone's head on fire... for real, and that could be worth seeing... 

There’s some good ideas (at least fun ones) in this, and like Interface (1985), if you can handle the ridiculous performances and bad production value, there’s some fun to be had here. Clearly this film is lacking in professional quality, it’s like watching somebody’s first attempt at filmmaking, where they borrowed money from their uncles and used their credit card, but the difference here as it so often is from independent movies from the 80s is… it’s still on film!  Film somehow makes this all the more viewable than something people make today with an HD video camera. This is what you’d call a ‘crap movie’ but one still worth watching if you’re interested in old 80s obscure movies, and still want to be entertained. I was surely entertained, and actually had fun, I didn’t even fast forward anything. Personally I wanted to see what they were going to do with the ‘mind control’ plot with the computer programs, the subliminal tones, and how the kids rebel. Like Interface (1985), it’s all pretty pretentious, but there’s still something there trying to say something or do something subversive, funny or crazy with the premise. Sometimes even Troma Films don’t even have that, that silly edge which one might describe as ‘punk’ or rebellious, we’ll call it ‘80s satire.’  It’s not anything profound exactly, it’s simply trying to be outrageous and if it’s not only crazy but has something like allegory, or any kind of social commentary, no matter how pretentious, it can still all be worth it. This is a stupid movie most definitely, and it does try a little too hard to be funny, and attempts to be other movies out there that it isn’t, that it couldn’t be if it tried, but in spite of this, it’s still interesting to watch what they do with it. 

This isn’t exactly “so bad it’s good” but there’s enough “bad” that either I kept watching because I wanted to see just how hard they would try, or just what was it they were trying to do. In some sense what is here is in Class of 1999, only instead of cyborg teachers, it’s simply this mind-control plot. This isn’t the only movie of it’s kind, and I’m guessing it is trying to be one of these other kinds of movies, but it is still satire, so in a world where it seems nobody even gets what satire is, perhaps I’ll take what I can get.  Any movie which attempts to make statements like this, like what you might see in movies like “They Live” is still worth watching in my opinion, because there are so few of them, no matter how ‘bad’ they really are. 

There’s a lot of trash out there pretending to be ‘satire,’ and there’s satires that are so trashy they get sidetracked from their central purpose.  This might be considered a 'must see film' if you've decided to go out and film your very own movie, look at what's working and what isn't, a perfect teaching tool for those attempting this sort of comedy.  The production value can end up being so bad, it's hard to believe, and yet, I've seen worse from LIONSGATE. There are even big budget films that can't manage a story as coherent as this one, which is even more depressing.  You have been warned, but if you're into weirdness, this is worth a look. 

I'm going to have to make a solid list of movies like this, they seem to be of their own category, like Interface (1985), The Tower (1985) and a few others which have absolutely terrible production value--the worst, bad acting, and ridiculous plots, but there's something so weird about them, they're actually worth watching.

The Young Ones (2014)

Starring Zod (Michael Shannon) and Nicholas Hoult from the Xmen. 

This movie is not what I expected at all. For some reason I expected some sort of “post-apocalyptic” futuristic tale about how these young people deal with life or some sort of situations illustrating how difficult their lives are, or what strange conflicts they face in the future…or something like that. This movie did not really go into territory like that, but this is no “SyFy” movie of the week either. 

I was reminded of “There Will Be Blood” or some peculiar Steinbeck novel or a play or some kind of “western” dealing with family life on the open range like “Shane” or something—only taking place in the future. It begins in what first comes to mind as some sort possible ‘post-apocalyptic’ scenario, with people from what could be “Mad Max” marauders trying to break into some guys “bunker-water well” shed. Like characters from “The Book of Eli” trying to steal some survivalist’s water. They get caught, there’s a shootout, and are introduced to our main characters who are not necessarily “Mad Max” survivalists or characters from “The Road” but more like characters from a western drama about an old farm and people trying to make it during the Dust Bowl era. The ‘future’ seems potentially “post-apocalyptic” but rather, vast areas have turned to desert, a corporation like that seen in “Sleep Dealer” is in control of the water.  This is something still quite possible and imaginable. 

The circumstances are introduced, and it is future America, and while there still seems to be some civilization left, it looks more like something of a western with technology just a little beyond ours, and yet it would seem, something of a collapse must have occurred. This could be only a decade from now, where corporations own the water, water is more expensive than anything, and people live like they did over a hundred years ago, only they have robots. 

Like a scene from Star Wars A New Hope, the farm boy and his father travel to a major town to buy a robot ‘mule’ so they can continue to cart supplies up to the ‘company water station’ out in the middle of nowhere. It’s their only livelihood unless and until the father can get water to his farm. “Luke and Uncle Owen” have been depending on their water pumps which have run dry. This does not however turn into an action film at any time, it turns into something more like “There Will Be Blood” and the politics and life circumstances of something akin to frontier ranchers in the old west. It is interesting to say the least, as the drama unfolds, a future life of a family is met with all manner of misfortune due to the water corporation, and neighboring rural characters and their schemes. It becomes a Steinbeck novel or something and though there are all sorts of circumstances which involve futuristic technology, this could have been a story made to take place during the time of the first oil companies, or mining companies in America.

This is nowhere near as harrowing as “The Road” or as deeply conceptual as “Book of Eli” but it could perhaps take place in a world similar but a few years out from those time periods, or perhaps something which takes place in the same world as “Sleep Dealer.”  It could be a few years after “The Postman” and if you were to compare it to where we are actually at today, this looks like it could be what our world will be possibly around 2025, likely after more environmental decay and perhaps an economic collapse or two. The ‘reality’ of the setting is not so much central as more of a backdrop to a tale which likely occurred a hundred years ago as well. The more things change, the more they stay the same, and we revisit the same degradation and misfortunes people did a hundred years ago.

The “Young Ones” are only a few characters responding to this situation, but it isn’t a horror story about cannibalism and post-apocalyptic anarchy, it is likely everything these people go through has happened in American history a long time ago, and I believe this film is essentially alluding to this through it’s ‘ranchers’ having a hard life and being screwed by both greedy companies and unscrupulous young men with no futures in desolate lands. This is not as epic in scope to “The Postman” nor as visceral as “The Road” but it could be a kind of “post modern” companion piece to stories like those. After the events of “The Postman” civilization starts to come back, and the fascist cult of the Holnists are wiped out, but no utopia is born, and old time western living returns complete with greedy mining companies or other capitalist ventures bent on stripping what’s left of resources. As sad to say as this may be, but this is likely a story which will be carried out not too long from now by those who survive whatever ecological or economic collapses we now face.  

Now all someone needs to do is remake “Little House on the Prairie 2029,” and we’ll have a new genre of post-modern Americana where “Postman” and “Book of Eli” will fit in and won’t be considered “post-apocalyptic” any more as people who live through catastrophic collapses will endure and begin living through situations like this in real life. As the west coast becomes radioactive, the deserts of the southwest grow, the prairies die from genetic engineering interference, the bees die, and the weather and climates change, and fascist super-corporations take more and more, the life of people in America will appear more and more as it once did in the 1800s. Lawless lands, futuristic pioneers, anarchic gunslingers, corrupt resource-stripping small town governments, along with the rest of the expected futuristic scenarios will all actually take place. People will be living out these stories and it won’t be much different than it was in the 1840s, only there might be a few robots or drones out there, perhaps here and there some fascist corporation will be stealing human beings to experiment on or steal body parts or something, and maybe a cyborg or two, and the people who are left to rot in bigger cities will be still living in Blade Runner Land, but outside, in places like those in Automata or many other dystopian films, there will be altered but still wild landscapes where people destroy each other in a variety of ways to survive. 

What we need to understand today is that this is the actual future we face, and not all our lives will be the same as Rick Dekkard’s or Mad Max, or Kevin Costner in “Postman.”  People will be caught up in quite a variety of situations, and all dystopias will be taking place all at once, as they have already begun now. People watch films like “The Road” and they might fantasize about trying to be on top of the situation by loading up on guns and canned food or whatever they decide, but they might try responding to the apocalyptic or dystopian situation they are actually currently in the middle of rather than all attempt to react to the same fantastic one. The reality here is, you might end up choosing to be Burke (Paul Reiser) in ALIENS to ‘survive,’ or you might choose to be Mad Max, or worse, but right now is when you will be deciding on who you are going to have to be because in fact this is it—right now, this is where it all begins. 

Currently I would suggest that most people in America are trying to get Carter Burke’s job as fast as they can so they can ‘survive’ no matter who they are or where they come from, but I would highly recommend that this delusional response is only going to make things worse. Some people are going to be forced into positions they never dreamed would happen to them, and people better wake up to the fact that there no longer is a ‘common morality’ that can be expected from society any more, whether you come from the right or the left. People will now do all kinds of weird things to ‘survive’ and come up against all sorts of peculiar circumstance in this emerging dystopia one simply cannot really be prepared for. You might end up as Harry Buttle, and get ‘Swatted’ just because of some bureaucratic error. Whatever the case may be, reality is science fiction now, and “The Young Ones” in a few short years will be nothing but an ordinary “modern drama.”

Terminating the Franchise: Terminator Genisys

Everything I’ve seen regarding this new remakequel/preboot/whatever the hell it’s supposed to be is utterly atrocious. First it was the casting. Arnold is back… old, but still some remote potential and yes I can see a Terminator getting old...maybe, but when they said he’s playing ‘father figure’ to Sarah Connor in yet another terrible timeline alteration, I think I was ready to say enough right there. Emilia Clarke isn’t necessarily a bad choice, but doing a prequel about Sarah Connor makes no sense. We don’t need to see 16 year old Sarah before she gets a job as a waitress, but, oh, you say you’re sending more Terminators back in time before that?  We’ve seen that already, in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I’ve seen enough Terminator Father Figures and Connors growing up. Enough of that shit already. The guy they cast to play Kyle Reese is the worst thing about this movie for me with all of its foolishness. They have two actors still young, and still capable of playing Reese who already played him… nope, we’re not going to see Christian Bale play John Connor either. I’d have rather seen Thomas Dekker reprise his role than the actor they picked because I just don’t see it at all, it’s absurd. I don’t even want to know why Doctor Who is in this movie.

Then we see the promotional photos, and it looks like this is some sort of parody movie. Arnold just looks ridiculous, and I don’t even want to know why they’re carrying Super-Soakers and shooting at the ground and screaming. The title is dumb, then they changed it to simply spell it differently? Nothing about this Terminator movie is good, it’s worse, it’s fucking insulting.

Remember that Terminator Salvation trailer when it came out? Wow, it didn’t live up to that entirely, but it wasn’t the worst movie ever made. This Genisys looks like the worst movie ever made. There are several stories they could have and should have told other than this garbage. The most obvious story which I believe everybody has been waiting to see since the first movie is what happens in 2029? What about the big future war? A giant epic futuristic robot war with all the imagery and all the big flying machines and the desperate attempt to save the past and the future? Nope. We get this shit.

I’ve been told that “everybody” hated Terminator Salvation. I didn’t. I didn’t think it was terrible, and while it wasn’t ‘great’ and could have been a lot better, it didn’t sink it for me. I liked the casting, I didn’t care for the Marcus storyline, but the rest was pretty decent in my opinion and I thought the effects and action were all pretty good. There was supposed to be three of those with Christian Bale, or at least three in a series that McG wanted to do. He could have improved… we’ll never know now, and now we’re getting something that looks so much like shit, it makes Terminator 3 seem like the quality of ALIENS. 

There’s so many better things they could have done with this, they could have made a sequel to Terminator Salvation and showed us the big future war. They could have given us the answer to the Sarah Connor Chronicles and tied the series, Salvation and the other films all together. They should have gotten the actors who played the people previously (any of them, there’s a lot to choose from for Christ sakes, every film is a whole new set of actors).  I would have even accepted a story about the creation of the T-1000, (this could easily have been the tie-in to the TV Series).  What was needed was for somebody to look at all these stories and attempt to tie them all in somehow, because everybody knows it’s off the rails now as far as continuity goes, and a few things could have been done to make things right. Nope. They decided to fucking change everything all over again. In the TV Series, they basically gave us “Terminator 3 has been superseded… Sarah Connor flew right through the timeline and it never happened.” Thanks for that, I’m good with that, but here we are again another fucking story about a teenager and a robot? Fuck this nonsense. 

The ending of Terminator Sarah Connor Chronicles left a few questions as well as a few good ideas, but also changed the whole Timeline again. There’s a good place to start if you’re going to do yet another fucking sequel/prequel. The fact is, as soon as you start to think about any of this none of it makes any fucking sense, and I’d be happy to treat it like the Old Planet of the Apes Franchise, which is about the same level of continuity and sense, but this shit is just getting so ridiculous it’s not even worth thinking about.  For me though, the constant cast changes just piss me off. I seriously doubt they even considered casting ANYONE that previously played Connor, Reese, or Sarah. This is clearly just an Arnold-is-back cashgrab gimmick. It’s that simple. The people who hated The Sarah Connor Chronicles can suck it now. The writers of that show gave the Terminator Franchise a lot of thought and tried to write some good stories, and the people who hated Terminator Salvation can also suck it now, because looking back at it, it really wasn’t as bad as Terminator 3, and though it focused too much on a character nobody cares about, it wasn’t Phantom Menace. Now we’re getting Phantom Menace, only no Ewan MacGregor to give us an acceptable Obiwan. No Christian Bale, just an old Arnold and likely a lot of stupid jokes about his age. This is going to suck miserably, think Terminator 3 only on a scale you previously didn’t think possible.

Personally I would think people would be pissed that Christian Bale isn’t back, and this has nothing to do with Terminator Salvation, because at least we saw a John Connor who kicked ass for once and didn’t sit there and pout. To be honest, I would have rather seen a movie starring Linda Hamilton as an old Sarah Connor (now that Terminator 3 has been excised—thanks Sarah Connor Chronicles) in the future with Christian Bale, and the other cast of SALVATION.  If you really want Arnold, do the Tron Legacy CGI. (They did it in SALVATION didn’t they, and they’re doing it again in this piece of crap). There’s no reason to have an old Terminator except for jokes. They could have had Linda Hamilton getting old, watching the world die, and having some sort of relationship with her 30 year old son before she dies. This could have started it all out, with the death of old Sarah. Or perhaps she doesn’t die, if Terminator 3 was non-existent, no cancer, no death.  

I would have even gone for a movie-sequel to the Sarah Connor Chronicles which would have been the storyline of how the T-1000/liquid terminators deviated from Skynet, evolved beyond Skynet and played a third party to the post-apocalyptic conflict, and nobody knew who John Connor was when Thomas Dekker jumped into the future to find his fembot. Sarah clearly could also make a jump after all the events we’ve seen up to that point, thus making her alive in the future to fight the war. Enough of this shit about sending Terminators back in time. Skynet must be stupid, all it needed to do was go back in time and either kill off the early descendants of the Connors before guns were even invented, or just kill off the human race by exterminating all prehistoric hominids or primates with Ebola or something. This is just getting ridiculous. Give us ‘the future,’ this is why we all had high hopes for Terminator Salvation. It was the future, no time-travel for once. Now we’re back to that stupid shit again. 

Once this movie comes out, I’m pretty sure I can’t watch this shit any more. Terminator was one of my favorite franchises. I even loved the TV Series, but this is beyond the pale. This shit they’re releasing looks so bad, it’s like a SyFy movie of the week piece of garbage written by hacks worse than Damon Lindelof. The End did Begin as Terminator Salvation said. The End Began of the franchise, and now the End Ends here. No other reboots could possibly be taken seriously after this shit. This is Batman Forever, this is Batman and Robin here. This is the worst possible avenue these idiots could have taken with this series. Time-travel doesn’t fix everything (sorry Lindelof), and they never should have gone down that road again. Ultimately, they might as well have made a Terminator film where Arnold gives birth to Sarah Connor, and then sends her back in time to kill himself.

        Perhaps they should have stopped after T2, perhaps they never should have gone forward with anything, and at this point, unless they're going to give us a really good story not inspired by Damon Lindelof, I think they really need to quit. People are still holding out for James Cameron, and a lot of people still want to see Arnold do the Terminator schtick again, but Arnold wasn't the center of it all.  If we're not getting Bale as Connor, or a continuation of anything we've seen before, nothing but 'reboot' after 'reboot' what is the damn point? Franchise: Terminated.