Iron Sky (2012) – We truly live in a magical age, where for $8 million, one can have a fully realized movie about Nazis who’ve lived on a base on the far side of the moon since World War II and are now coming back to finish what they started. Perfectly respectable digital effects, stunning dieselpunk design, wry present-day political comedy, and actors who can switch seamlessly from (to my ears) perfect German to flawless English… the fact that this movie exists at all tickles my soul, and the fact that it’s also great fun to watch is a plus. (And the icing on the cake is the scene that apes the one from The Downfall (2004) that we all know as “Hitler Learns of the Death of Michael Jackson,” etc.)
The Strange Ones (2017) – The quick synopsis on the IMDb makes this sound like a semi-fantastic, surreal movie, which is probably why I had it around to watch. It’s not actually a fantasy… I think. In fact, I think it’s the most dreamlike, subjective movie I’ve ever seen which is NOT an actual fantasy. Deft camerawork and editing, combined with some stunningly subtle acting by adolescent actor James Freedson-Jackson, render this a hypnotically ambiguous artifact of storytelling, which is lessened not a bit as the non-fantastical character of the setting is slowly established.
(Yes, I’m being vague. Deal.)
The Time Tunnel (2002) – This is actually the pilot for a proposed remake of the old ’60s series which wasn’t picked up. I’ve never actually seen the old show, so I don’t know what they kept and what they changed about the feel of it, but the concept is that a “time storm” from a failed fusion experiment is wreaking havoc with time — picking up people from one era, throwing them into another, etc. — with the potential of ruining causality. So from the one stable end of the time storm, a team is tasked with traveling to the other where the computer says there’s an anomaly, to correct an outbreak of the Black Death during World War II or whatever.
A setup that didn’t get explored far in the pilot — but was certainly there as a springboard — is that the “present” in the show was already altered by the time storm before the scientists managed to nail down the stable end. (The meanings of “red” and “green” in stoplights are reversed, for instance, and there are only 49 states because New Jersey incorporates Delaware.) Only the team members who were at the “eye of the storm” when it happened know that the world outside their facility is different, and some of them “lost” family members who, as the continuum stands, never existed.
Anyway. I don’tr know why it wasn’t picked up, and I don’t know that the world is really a lesser place for the ensuing series not existing (at least in our plane of the multiverse), but it had potential.
Abandoned movies: The Resurrected, The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb, Arachnia, Rewind This!
Iron Sky was fun when I saw it (allowing for the rough edges) but they wandered about and lost it all in the sequel, I hear. I guess the sequel is hard to find for a reason.
Not “hard to find” as such — nothing really is, these days — but they want MONEY to watch it on Prime. (Gasp!)
You abandoned THE RESURRECTED? The Dan O’Bannon Lovecraft film?
And Arachnia? But…but…Stop-motion spiders!!!!
Re: THE RESURRECTED: It does not help a Lovecraft tale to add a major female character, and then give the role to someone whose acting raises a rash.
Re: ARACHNIA: Four of the six characters qualified as “Odious Comic Relief,” a lot more than I could stand. I didn’t even make to the stop-motion.
Ah, you should have tried to make it through THE RESURRECTED. It’s a pretty faithful adaptation in its general contours, more so than THE HAUNTED PALACE.