John Donne wrote, “No man is an island.” By myself, at best I’m a peninsula.
Fortunately, I had Roy to bounce ideas off of during our chat last night about “This Island Earth.”
Interesting special effects, proto-1950s production design, pleasing Technicolor, and a memorable Metaluna mutant are all assets to this fondly-remembered pulp classic.
Tastes and mores may have changed – it’s no longer fashionable for female atomic scientists to regress into scream queens – and ultimately the movie doesn’t actually go anywhere, despite the fact that the characters travel light years to a foreign solar system. Still, “This Island Earth” – while no “Forbidden Planet” – remains an agreeable, if a little bit of a WTF, extraterrestrial journey.
We’ll return next Friday to talk about Jan-Michael Vincent, giant cockroaches, and a 12-wheeled armored vehicle bound for Albany, in “Damnation Alley” (1977) – a glimpse at what the future of movie science fiction might have been, if not for the seismic box office upset of “Star Wars.”
Join us for a dirt bike ride through a desert full of mutant scorpions, on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner. The post-apocalyptic livestream will take place next Friday evening at 7:00 EDT!
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