Def-Con 4

I'm trying to find more sci-fi films in the 'so shite it's good' category. Sharktopus and Robinson Crusoe on Mars are good examples of this genre. But all I've found so far are some 'so shite they're unwatchable shite' films.

I saw another one last night. This offering was called "Def-Con 4". And there are already problems. Namely with the title. For one thing it shouldn't be hyphenated, it should be "DEFCON", and secondly DEFCON 4 is only a slightly increased threat of nuclear war. Put it this way, at the moment we're at DEFCON 5, and on 9/11 we were at DEFCON 3. And as this film starts out with all-out nuclear war then the title really should've been "DEFCON 1". But no matter, the inaccurate title is the least of this film's worries.

There is no sense of drama or suspense at all in this film, ever. Even when the whole world is being obliterated by nukes and our protagonists have to observe this from space. The acting is just so bad. I haven't even mentioned the plot yet have I?  Well there's two guys and a woman who are hanging out above the earth in a nuclear missile carrying space ship. Their job supposedly being to manually launch nukes in the event of a nuclear war. So anyway, the nuclear war happens and they faff about with their consciences and stuff while trying to decide whether to nuke the earth too. After much faffing about they don't launch their nukes, but by this time the earth has pretty much gone tits up anyway.

Then we have a bit more faffing about when they're actually considering going back to earth to help or something. I didn't really get this bit. At this point we've already established that they're pretty safe in their spaceship, and that they have enough supplies for four months. And yet they want to immediately return to earth after it has been nuked to shit?

Anyway, they spend so much time faffing about that their space ship decides to make the decision for them and begins falling back to earth. So they launch their nukes safely into space. Except for one of course, which gets stuck. So apparently the nuke thinks it has been launched when really it's stuck in its launcher on the ship (yes, I am absolutely sure this is how nuclear missiles work). So the only thing they can do is set the delay on the missile so that it blows up in a maximum time of 60 hours. (I think you can see where this is going). So if they could delay the detonation then why couldn't they disarm the thing?  Oh well, whatever.

So their ship falls back to earth with an armed nuke on board. When they finally land one of the guys goes outside and immediately becomes dinner for the starved locals. (Hey, good non-radioactive meat is hard to come by these days, especially when it's this fresh). So the other guy and the woman decide to sit things out in the space ship for a while. The guy decides to venture out under the cover of darkness, because of course the locals will have got pissed off and gone home to bed by then. Well luckily for him this is exactly what happens.

What follows is a very Mad Max-esque type of film where society has broken down and new rather unsavoury types are in charge. Except it's nowhere near as good as Mad Max. And that's saying something because Mad Max wasn't that good either. At some point along the way the guy meets a girl called J.J. This was another area that initially caused some confusion. J.J. is wearing a school uniform. I thought that maybe she had been in the middle of some bedroom role-play session when the nukes struck. But no, J.J. is actually supposed to be a schoolgirl. I've looked on IMDb and at the time this film was made the woman playing J.J. was 26. I'm sorry, but at no point did I buy the fact that she was a schoolgirl.

So then more stuff happens, but I zoned out a bit here. But essentially the guy, the woman from the space ship and J.J. get captured by some of the aforementioned unsavoury types. They're about to be hanged and the guy escapes. He returns later to rescue the woman and J.J. but the woman dies. So the guy and J.J. take off on a sail boat to some un-nuked corner of the globe and the armed nuke on the crashed space ship finally blows up, killing all of the unsavoury types. Hooray!  The end.

I can't recommend this film at all. It's cack. The plot holes are massive. The acting is wooden and the actors are unconvincing in the roles they're supposed to be playing. I won't be watching this film again, ever. And I'm kind of sorry I even bothered to watch it once. If you want a good film with the threat of imminent nuclear war, then for God's sake watch War Games instead.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars

Last night I watched a film on Netflix. A film so bad I was compelled to watch it until the bitter, rather abrupt end. The film was called Robinson Crusoe on Mars. And yes, it is every bit as bad as it sounds. The first thing that lured me to watch this evil film, aside from the absurd title that is, was the fact that it stars Adam West. I though "Hey, if Adam West is in it, surely it can't be that bad?" temporarily forgetting of course how dire the original Batman series actually was.

But I can put your minds at rest. Any fears you may have of having to sit through an hour and a half of Mr West's bad acting are unfounded. Adam West dies within the first ten minutes, presumably realising what a steaming turd he had signed up for. So the other bloke turns out to be the main character that we follow. There's another guy in a loin cloth a bit later on and a monkey. No, I'm not making this shit up.

So basically Adam West, the other guy and the monkey are on their way to Mars. Not to land there, but to do some other sciency type stuff. They have to take evasive action to avoid a big fiery ball thing and end up using up their fuel. So they descend to the Martian surface in their individual escape pods. This being the point where Adam West dies in an off-screen crash landing.

The other guy survives and finds a cave to take shelter in. One of the most annoying things was that he kept turning the oxygen supply to his space suit on and off, presumably to conserve it (yeah, that'll work). But then he discovers the rocks that he's been burning to keep warm release oxygen (well of course they do). And later still he realises that he doesn't need his space suit at all, and only needs to take a "boost" from his oxygen tanks every hour or so because of the "thin" Martian air.

So he goes for a wander and finds the remains of Adam West and (annoyingly) a very much still alive monkey. So the guy and the monkey shack up together in the cave. I can't even remember the monkey's name now, but rather disturbingly the guy keeps calling it "baby". Hey, that was Adam West's monkey!  Has this guy no shame?

Rather inevitably the monkey discovers water and food. Water in the form of pools (which the guy goes swimming in of course) and food in the form of plants with pods that contain sausages. I thought at this point it couldn't really get any more absurd. Sadly I was mistaken. Over time the guy makes the cave more and more homely and he seems to have a pretty easy life.

One day the guy sees something flying in the distance and thinks it's someone come to rescue him. It turns out to be several alien ships who are firing on some people in loin cloths who are digging on the surface below. The aliens are using the people in loin cloths (who I guess technically are aliens too) as slave labour to mine Mars for something or other (we're never told what). One of the slaves breaks free and runs towards our friend and his monkey. So our friend and the monkey have a new, if rather mute companion. Our friend decides to call his new companion "Friday" (no, really) and he sets about trying to teach him English. Sadly the alien ships can track Friday because of the non-removable bracelets he is wearing. So the guy, the monkey and the loin cloth man have to leave their nice, cosy cave and go on the run, deeper into the caves of Mars.

They eventually decide to head towards the polar ice cap for more water. At this point the guy manages to saw through Friday's bracelets so that the aliens can no longer track him. Shortly after another ship appears. They are fearful that the aliens have returned again, but no, it's the rescue party from Earth. Hooray!  The End. No, it really does end that abruptly. Sadly it didn't end abruptly enough for my liking.

This film is slow. And I mean REALLY slow. When you consider that what I've described above takes place in a film that's just ten minutes shy of two hours long, I think you'll get the idea. The thing that was most annoying for me is that there seemed to be no thought of making this film even remotely based upon scientific fact. But I guess the title of the film pretty much informs you of that already. When you consider this film was released in 1964, just five years before we landed on the moon, and just four years before 2001: A Space Odyssey, I think they could've done a better job.

Having said all that, I was compelled to watch it until the end. And if I'm honest, I'd probably watch it again at some point. The special effects, while not being all that special were good for the time. Towards the end they did seem to use some stock footage of volcanoes and blizzards, but that's to be expected of a low budget film like this. Clearly this heavily weighed towards the fiction end of the science fiction genre. I guess this film is more Robinson Crusoe in another setting rather than Robinson Crusoe on Mars. It's certainly not like any Mars I've seen. But hey, give it a watch. I don't want to have suffered alone.