Screen: 'Black Hole' By Disney: Ultimate Knowledge. IF you like outer space, . Produced by the Disney studios, it cost half as much as . The special effects are fancy, and the design even more so. The sets are so eye- catching, in fact, that they distract attention from the actors, which in movies of this genre is almost always a good idea. The cast includes Anthony Perkins, Maximilian Schell, Ernest Borgnine, Yvette Mimieux, and a robot named Vincent who is a whole lot livelier than his flesh- and- blood friends. Since 2005, BLACK HOLE REVIEWS recommends movies - horror, sci-fi, cult, Euro, US, Japanese, silent, monster. Fall 2003 ASTR 2030 Black Holes: Black Hole Movies Here is a list of movies and TV episodes that I know, or am told, in some way or other involve a black hole or. Review: Ahead of Its Time - With the advancement of movie technology today. But in the end, you see a movie like 'The Black Hole' for the story itself. Get The Black Hole (1979) movie reviews from critics and fellow moviegoers and find new movie reviews on Fandango. Search for 'The Black Hole' on Amazon.com. Title: The Black Hole (1979). Create a character page for. Like . So the bunks of the crew members have Space Art on the walls, and instead of portholes there are big, beautiful picture windows. The emphasis is on homeyness, rather than hardware, and the results are friendly and inviting. The movie's design, by Peter Ellenshaw, borrows from painters like Chagall and Mondrian to achieve a decorative, dated modernism, perhaps to suggest that if we ever do get Out There, our present notions of futuristic design will seem cheerfully quaint with hindsight. The plot, unfortunately, trundles toward that towering bugaboo of science fiction movies, Ultimate Knowledge. One character in this story is after it, and to get what he wants he's willing to turn the others into slaves and ashtrays. His quest will eventually take him into the Hole of the title, which leads the film makers, at the finale, to attempt grandiose effects that, by comparison with the easier gimmicks of the preceding hour and a half, look a little silly. Its story, about a band of explorers and a wicked space tyrant who pretends to be nice, has a comic- book feeling. But as comic books go, this one is pretty much a page- turner. It contains a couple of mild scares, and a nasty murder. Ultimate Knowledge. THE BLACK HOLE, directed by Gary Nelson; screenplay by Jeb Rosebrook and Gerry Day; story by Mr. Rosebrook, Bob Barbash and Richard Landau; director of photography, Frank Phillips; director of miniature photography, Art Cruickshank; music by John Barry; edited by Gregg Mc. Laughlin; produced by Ron Miller; presented by Walt Disney Productions; released by the Buena Vista Distribution Company. At the Cine, 8. 6th Street and Third Avenue; National, West 4. Street and Broadway, and other theaters. Running time: 9. 7 minutes. This film is rated PG. Maximilian Schell. Dr. Anthony Perkins. Captain Dan Holland . Robert Forster. Lieutenant Charles Pizer . The Black Hole sent a generation of sci- fi fans to hell. Club. The Internet is choked with nostalgia for the youth- oriented entertainments of the not- too- distant past: Tumblr blogs regurgitating images of half- forgotten toys; You. Tube compilations of long- lost TV- show intros; countless blogs playing . With Memory Wipe, The A. V. Club takes a look at some of our formative favorites with clearer eyes and asks that all- important question: Were they really that great to begin with? One afternoon in 1. I was 7 years old. I watched it the week it was released. Judging from that trailer, I expected The Black Hole to be more or less like Star Wars. If anything, I thought it might be even more kid- friendly than Star Wars. After all, it was made by Disney. What I got instead was a slow- paced, sporadically disorienting film that ends with the human villain merging with the robot villain. After that, this hybrid man- bot is consigned. My entire 7- year- old cosmology, such as it was, imploded. I was raised on Star Trek reruns. I saw Star Wars in the theater during its original run. My favorite TV show was Battlestar Galactica. So did lasers, starships, and robots. Three years before I was born, man had walked on the moon. It seemed only logical. And by the time I was 4. Religion certainly wasn. When I was 7, I barely knew what hell was. I was baptized as a baby, and that. My grandparents believed in God. I was more likely to hear them cuss and switch the channel to Star Trek when a televangelist came on than I was to hear them pray. The infernal imagery of The Black Hole didn. Vivid and enveloping, the film was just plain awesome to behold. He was Droid Vader, and he had murderous blades that spun like propellers, and he was the most badass robot I had ever seen. I recently rewatched The Black Hole for the first time in 3. I still agree with my 7- year- old self. Hulking and sinister, he. Which is good, because the story isn. Its premise is groaningly simple: In the future, a crew of space explorers stumbles across a ship, the Cygnus, that was presumed lost decades ago. Even less probably, it. The one that light, we are reminded constantly, can. Things come to a head, the villains get their just desserts, and that. Only that flimsy story is stretched out over 9. Even when Maximilian makes his first appearance, immediately busts out his deadly blades, and slowly advances toward them, the heroes stand around chatting about him in nonchalant, professorial tones. If the characters don. The Black Hole, on a level of strict optics, is even better than I remember. Disney had to invest in innovative, computer- aided technology to realize director Gary Nelson. Nelson had primarily worked in television up to that point; his filmography was only three movies long, the most recent being 1. Technically, Freak Friday is a speculative- fiction film, but of course it. As far as hard science goes, though, The Black Hole gets a big, fat F. The movie has been lambasted for decades for its shoddy astrophysics. Earlier this year, Neil De. Grasse Tyson went so far to dub it the most scientifically inaccurate movie of all time. The fact that one of the good- guy scientists, the leaden Kate Mc. Crae, can communicate telepathically with a robot doesn. Just as Star Wars works better as fantasy as than as science fiction, so does The Black Hole work better as another genre entirely. The film is awash in mood and mystery. And the Cygnus is that castle, only tilted on its side. Ridley Scott. But the atmospheric, gore- free horror of The Black Hole works for me more effectively now that it did when I was little. The haunted, oppressive weight of The Black Hole belies the weightlessness of its setting, and that tension is at times breathtaking. If only V. I. N. CENT could be digitally erased from the movie. Barring Maximilian Schell. Like the Herbie The Love Bug of robots, V. I. N. CENT is formulated to appeal to kids, from his big, cartoonish eyes to his faux- R2. D2 shape. Voiced by an uncredited Roddy Mc. Dowall, V. I. N. CENT is annoying, supercilious, condescending, and at times downright cruel. Even worse is B. O. B., a doddering, damaged old robot (voiced by Slim Pickens, also uncredited) of the same make as V. I. N. CENT. Up to that point, the movie moves along at a sluggish clip, but at least it makes sense. Then, out of nowhere, it gets metaphysical. In a nutshell: Everyone enters the black hole; shit gets trippy; the two bad guys become one bad guy; they go to hell; a spirit floats into heaven; the good guys shoot out the other side; cue bombastic John Barry score. The camera lingers overly long on vague shots of ethereal weirdness, as if staring at them long enough might reveal mind- shattering, soul- altering truths. The Black Hole opened the same month as Star Trek: The Motion Picture. There are many parallels between the two films, most of which involve the looming influence of a far superior work, 2. A Space Odyssey. Strangelove, could not have been a coincidence.) The problem is, The Black Hole and ST: TMP mimic much of 2. In that sense, it didn. At that moment, he feels compelled to say, . Then Reinhardt, gulping down more scenery than even the black hole could stomach, equates the cattiness between V. I. N. CENT and Maximilian as a biblical conflict on par with David versus Goliath. The characters all feel puppeteered by a self- important script that can. It prepared me for the spectacle and surreality of 2. A Space Odyssey. When I did, it reminded me of The Black Hole, only reverse- engineered so as not to suck. Watching The Black Hole again after all these years wasn. I kind of wish it had been. I was, however, taught a lesson, one I couldn. BLACK HOLE REVIEWSGENRE MOVIE BOOKS FROM LORRIMER PUBLISHINGHow to get a teenager's attention. One of the easiest ways to recommend movies is to use photographs and posters. All it takes to sell a movie, even if it's fifty years old. Tweet the right image from a film and someone will reply, . But these pictorial and evocative books were rare and comparatively expensive, only a possibility as Christmas and birthday presents. But here were a set of paperbacks, published at a time when cult movies were barely acknowledged in print and most writing about movies was very dry indeed, some of them having few or no illustrations! The Lorrimer movie books were medium- sized paperbacks, much smaller than 'coffee table' books but taller than novels. They were also quite affordable - little or no colour inside. But packed with photographs, often of a controversial nature, they thrived for several productive years. The text was usually a rambling thematic essay, but at the very least, clued me into the titles, directors and stars of interesting- looking films. Unlike the newspaper critics, still very sniffy about horror and science- fiction, there was little editorialising about whether these were 'good' films or not. It was an early sign for me that I wasn't alone in my enthusiasm for genre movies, the more way out, the better. Before and since, Lorrimer Publishing has mainly released movie script reprints, like this one for Pabst's Pandora's Box. Invaluable for film studies, they specialise in arthouse cinema and international classics. But here are all of Lorrimer's 1. I think I've listed them all.. The House of Horror, 1. My first Lorrimer book was also my first that was dedicated to Hammer films. The House of Horror clued me in to the many Hammer horrors I'd yet to see. It included a brief history of the studio, a filmography of ALL the studio's movies, with an invaluable summary of all the casts and credits. I then knew what order the Dracula and Frankenstein sagas ran in! This is a light read but was an incredibly useful reference book for many years. The contents of later Lorrimer books were far more random.. Cinefantastic - Beyond The Dream Machine, 1. I bought this one for the photographs and poster reproductions, but the rambling text is still interesting and accessible. A wild musing on loosely connected sci- fi and fantasy themes, possibly inspired by the photos that were available. The text avoids the typical, endless, spoiler- filled plot descriptions and also bucks the slavish attention to auteur theory. Instead it riffs on the chaptered themes of Myth, Machines, Visions and Nightmares. Linking images and motifs observed in cave paintings, through M. An equally valid chain of influence in film history. For fresh ideas, it's no longer a fascinating read, but still a potent round- up of the variety of imagery in early sci- fi. While galleries of movie posters have now arrived online, and screengrabs are easy to upload, the internet has a long way to go before every movie publicity photo is accessible. Movie books of this vintage rarely published screengrabs, which seem to take up the majority of online movie illustration. The vast majority of photos were from studio photographers on the set, and this is where older books still have the upper hand over the internet - they also had access to photos that may not exist any more. One of the earliest Lorrimer movie books, this was first published in 1. Cinefantastic (above), but reprinted as Cinema of Mystery and Fantasy in 1. Kung Fu - Cinema of Vengeance, 1. Celluloid Rock - Twenty Years of Movie Rock, 1. The Seal of Dracula, 1. While the vampire genre of the 1. Ape - The Kingdom of Kong, 1. Cut - The Unseen Cinema, 1. Because this series enjoyed sex and violence, extreme films that fell outside of the horror genre were mopped up by Savage Cinema and Cut. Savage Cinema, 1. Italian Western - The Opera of Violence, 1. Far from simply listing the big disaster movies of the decade, this has one of the more way out texts, envisaging the ultimate catastrophe of a cinema audience engulfed in an actual natural disaster. Though it puts the decade in perspective by cataloguing the many earlier examples of destructive spectacle in movie history. Freaks - Cinema of the Bizarre, 1. While I've added to my collection of Lorrimer books through the years, and bought a few more for this article, here's the one from 1. I didn't want in the house. Just in case Amazon started making offensive suggestions. The Lorrimer books are easy to confuse with these Monarch Film Studies paperbacks which are almost identical in size, covering similarly offbeat movie subjects. The Monarch books are more dedicated to traditional film criticism, made up of essays on a single theme. There are fewer photos, but they are well- chosen, well- reproduced and often take up a half- page. These two from 1. I simply couldn't pass up. This was my first book on Ken Russell - it helped with background information on films that I hadn't yet seen, but of course he was still in the middle of the busiest decade of his career. A great photo of a young Ken Russell when he was a photographer,from the Monarch book. My selection of other British horror movie books from the 1. This article was partly inspired by the enthusiasm for similar publications on the Vault of Evil discussion group (where they float a few ideas about who all these Lorrimer authors might actually have been, behind the pen names).
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