This past weekend offered a rare respite from our recent rainy weather. And speaking of rare, we got the rare opportunity to visit one of the jewels of off-limits subway lore: the abandoned City Hall station in Lower Manhattan. The station was the first station on New York’s brand new subway line. As such, it was designed to be particularly showy. Designed by Rafael Guastavino, the station opened on October 27, 1904 as the southern terminus of the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit). It boasted Guastavino tile, skylights, stained glass, and brass chandeliers. Unfortunately some years later, transit passengers began to favor the much larger, nearby Brooklyn Bridge station. Because the City Hall station was built as a loop, it could not be easily expanded to compensate for larger crowds or extended to serve Brooklyn. And the curved track left a precarious gap between the train and the platform. Use of the station declined, until it was finally closed on December 31, 1945.

After brunch at nearby Landmarc (pancakes and bellinis…a perfect start to any day), we headed underground for the tour. The Transit Museum offers occasional tours of the old station, and despite the grime, modern safety signage, and piles of stored materials, it’s still an impressive site that lets you get a taste, albeit a sooty one, of the grandeur of the subway system when it first opened. If you don’t want to or can’t go on a tour, you can still get a glimpse of the station. Take the downtown 6 train to Brooklyn Bridge – City Hall, the last stop on the line, then stay on the train. When it leaves, it goes through the old City Hall station and uses the loop to turn around and head back uptown.

Afterward, with a sunny day at our disposal, we decided to poke around Lower Manhattan — a neighborhood that doesn’t get a lot of love but I am fast growing to really appreciate. A number of great bars have opened in the past few years — The Growler, Dead Rabbit, and the place we ate and drank at this day, Vintry — and some of the city’s best pre-war architecture still lurks around the newer glass buildings. Plus you have the old Colonial stuff, the waterfront, and a bunch of tiny, convoluted streets snaking around skyscrapers and making it all feel like some weird part of the city designed by a maze maker.

We wrapped up with visits two two of the neighborhood’s most historic locations — St. Paul’s Chapel (the oldest surviving church building in Manhattan) and Trinity Church, where we intended to pay respects to Alexander Hamilton and John Jacob Astor. Unfortunately, there are only so many hours in the day, so we didn’t get to Trinity until after closing time. Thus, I’ll save writing about that for a proper visit. But we still got to see Hamilton. All in all, another great frolic through a neighborhood too many locals dismiss as having little to offer.

Over at Alcohol Professor, I have some things to say about Odd Bedfellows, a whiskey tasting at Brooklyn’s Tooker Alley that focused on whiskey that breaks the mold and challenges the imbiber with flavors and ideas not commonly associated with the spirit.

Italian science fiction is an acquired taste, even more so than most other Italian genre films. They generally have a meandering quality to them, and the low budgets mean that a large portion of any film’s run time is composed of shots of guys sitting in front of decks of blinking lights. However, the Italians can only restrain themselves for so long, and eventually those scenes of people in control rooms will be replaced by wonderful space battles and miniatures of orbiting stations and rockets with upward drifting smoke wafting out of the backs. Antonio Margheriti, better known among the jet set who know Antonio Margheriti at all as the director of a bunch of “just entertaining enough” war and action films during the 1970s, was one of Italy’s first science fiction directors. His 1960s space “adventure,” Assignment: Outer Space proved that despite my interest in old science fiction and my profession as a journalist, combining the two into one talky film is not a recipe for maintaining my attention.

1961’s Battle of the Worlds (Il pianeta degli uomini spenti) was an improvement, but just barely. Margheriti didn’t really hit his stride as a science fiction director until 1965, when he directed I criminali della galassia — better known in the United States as Wild, Wild Planet, the first in what would become known as the Gamma One Quadrilogy. The few years between Assignment: Outer Space and Wild, Wild Planet made a world of difference. Not only is Magheriti a better director (he notched up a lot of work in the energetic sword and sandal genre during the early 1960s), but he has the full force of mid-60s pop-art extravagance in which to indulge. And indulge he does. Wild, Wild Planet is a non-stop parade of swingin’ sixties eye candy, all set to swanky, finger-snapping cocktail lounge music courtesy of Angelo Francesco Lavagnino. The reckless adoption of a lounge lizard atmosphere means that even when Wild, Wild Planet lapsed into boring stretches of plot, one hardly notices, so glorious is the celebration of groovy futurist design and fashion.

Never one to lose time, Margheriti followed up Wild, Wild Planet with two sequels in 1966 — The War of the Planets (not to be confused with Alfonso Brescia’s Cosmos: War of the Planets) and War Between the Planets (not to be confused with, well, any of the other war and planets titles). In 1967, Margheriti “wrapped up” (read: finally milked dry) the series with a somewhat disappointing conclusion, Snow Devils. This isn’t to say that Snow Devils is particularly bad; it’s just so much less than the first film. It certainly lives, for most of its run time, well within the confines of its severely limited budget — something Wild Wild Planet had no interest in doing. It also shows the limitations of Magheriti’s interest in the series, which had obviously flagged by this point. In fact, he only directed a portion of the film, leaving an undisclosed amount of it in the hands of assistant director Ruggerio Deodato — a director possessed of no small amount of infamy related to either, 1) the fact that he directed Cannibal Holocaust, one of the most controversial films of all time; or 2) that almost everything he directs is stunningly boring.

For me, however, even the worst of Italian science fiction has an undeniable charm. Snow Devils is no different. Once I got over the fact that this wasn’t going to be a swinging space adventure — with the exception of Angelo Francesco Lavagnino’s score, which forges ahead under the assumption that we’re all putting on our best future suits and cocktail dresses and heading down to the space lounge to drink space martinis — and was, in fact, going to look more like something out of the 1950s where a group of scientists endure harsh conditions and wear parkas, well then I was able to lie back, get comfortable, and enjoy the admittedly meager pleasures afforded to me by this shaggy skunk ape of a film.

The Earth of the future finds itself suddenly plagued with natural disasters caused by global warming. The polar ice caps are melting at a surprising rate, and no one can figure out why. Floods, earthquakes, I’m pretty sure some volcanos probably erupted — you know. The usual. It’s up to our intrepid heroes from the Gamma One space station to get to the bottom of this mystery. Enter Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, returning as Gamma One Commander Rod Jackson, who assembles his team and hires a sherpa that can only be described as “a really hyperactive Jimmy Cliff” to lead them to a remote weather station in the Himalayas where something mysterious has occurred that might clue everyone in to why Mother Nature had suddenly gone loco. The team contains a number of familiar faces from past Gamma One films (some of whom died previously and seem no worse for the experience), but most of them are in different roles, so don’t worry too much about character continuity.

What you need to worry about is how much time is spent filming people walking through a snow storm, rather than being full of cool space-age bachelor pads and groovy bubble cars. It’s like Antonio Margheriti took his afternoon siesta, Ruggero Deodata was distracted, and somehow Bert I. Gordon snuck in and took over the film for thirty minutes. Sharu the not-Asian Sherpa’s insane tribal dance freak-out is no salve for the lack of swankness, and the club in which it happens — high up in the mountains — is decorated more like the house of some sweet Bavarian grandma. You can almost sense the “where’s the Les Baxter Space Capades, man?” emanating off Rod Jackson and sidekick Captain Pulasky (Goffredo Unger) as they sit awkwardly on a wooden bench in front of calico drapes, resplendent in their Gamma One space uniforms.

But then, like I said, Italian science fiction films do seem to enjoy interminably slow scenes of padding. We enter into a gentleman’s contract with them, where the meandering padding and budget-conscious time-wasting is tolerated in exchange for eye-popping, goofball madness later in the film — and Snow Devils does try, I think, to fulfill the bargain. It just misses the mark. The titular snow devils eventually appear when the Gamma One team stumbles across, well, some space yetis in a cave. The not at all suggestively named Rod Jackson and his crew are taken prisoner by the yetis, who seem to be somewhat primitive despite their cave being fitted out with lots of cheap spacey stuff. It turns out the decor is courtesy of the head space yeti, who dresses like a terrible superhero and politely explains the entire nefarious plan to the Gamma One leader.

It turns out the space yetis are from a dead planet, and they’ve decided — as is par for the course — that Earth will be their new home. Unfortunately, the planet is just too populated, so the space yetis have decided to wipe out humanity by tinkering with the climate. First, they will warm the planet, melt the ice caps, and flood human civilization out of existence. Then they will use their incredible cave-based technology to trigger a new and permanent ice age full of space yetis sledding down Mount Everest and making snow angels. This plan doesn’t sit well with Rod, surprisingly, and though he is undoubtedly thankful to the commanding sace yeti for the detailed run-down of the scheme, Rod decides that no amount of face fur and jaunty capes is enough to forgive the space yetis their murderous aspirations.

Besides the ponderous natural disaster stock footage and endless plodding through a snow storm, Snow Devils other major shortcoming is its premature climax…ahh, so to speak. Gamma One versus space yetis delivers the low-budget, idiotic thrills the film has been promising you, but once it’s over you realize the movie has only been going on for an hour or so. So there’s a whole other tacked on second climax with our Gamma One crew finally back in space, leading a retaliatory strike against the space yetis’ hidden space base, where they are still hanging around, messing with our climate. It really feels like Margheriti/Deodato wrapped the film, starting packing up to go home, then realized they were about twenty minutes short of a feature length.

Luckily, those twenty minutes really deliver what I want and expect from a Gamma One film. All of the awesome miniatures, rocketships, and GI Joe action figures being swung around on wires in front of black backgrounds get crammed into the finale’s secret mission to track down, then blow up the space yeti’s cosmic base, putting to an end their dastardly plans to do to humanity with climate change what humanity is perfectly capable of doing by itself to itself, thank you very much. Fans of cheap sci-fi special effects will not be disappointed. My favorite aspect of this has to be the space walks, which are realized in one of two ways: either by dangling an actor from a wire by their ass, allowing them to sort of just flail and spin around aimlessly; or by whizzing around slick little action figures with wind-up arm and leg kicking action.

I wonder if the film might have been more of a success if Margheriti’s head had been in the game. Leaving the bulk of the work to assistant director Ruggero Deodato — and a novice Deodato at that — results in a noticeably different vibe to the film. Because Deodato is best known for his nastiest film, one might assume that means he brings a harder edge to the Gamma One series. That’s not the case, and one needs to remember that although Deodata made a name for himself with Cannibal Holocaust, it’s not his definitive film — or it is, but it’s not the nastiness that makes for definitive Deodata; it’s the pointless wandering and tedium. I can think of a lot of Deodata films I can’t stand, but only one I really like (Raiders of Atlantis). Like most Italian directors, he made films in every genre, but his contributions always end up being, for me, pretty shoddy examples of each of the genres. Whether he’s ruining the Diabolik-inspired super-villain/fumetti film (Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen) or the poliziotteschi film (Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man), he always seems to bring a grubby sort of disinterest to everything he makes.

I don’t know that all of Snow Devils short-comings can fairly be placed at Deodato’s feet. It’s not like Margheriti was a perfect hitter or anything. But a disinterested Margheriti coupled with an untalented Deodato certainly goes a long way to sinking a film that has a pretty solid high concept. The cast does what they can in familiar roles (even if some of the actors have swapped those familiar roles), but few performers can out-act scene after scene of walking wordlessly through a fake blizzard. Maybe Tarkovsky’s Snow Devils could have made that work, but not this one. The end result of this film reminds me a lot of my feelings when I watched Paul Naschy’s Assignment Terror. I mean, there is a film with a high concept that is poorly delivered upon — but at the same time, somewhat forgivable since, really, space aliens plan to conquer the earth by resurrecting Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, and the Mummy? And it’s deadly serious? Yeah, the movie turned out to be kind of dull, but still — that’s enough plot to carry me even if it’s too much plot to be carried by the film. Or, perhaps more thematically appropriate, Snow Devils reminds of another Naschyy film: The Werewolf vs. the Yeti.

Snow Devils is a pretty minor film, even when measured against the constellation of minor films that comprise the galaxy of Italian science fiction. Maybe on par with Alfonso Brescia’s sci-fi films (which I like). Much better than Margheriti’s sci-fi films from the early 1960s. It’s certainly a step down from the swingin’ madness of Wild Wild Planet, but it’s not a substantial step down — and may even be a tiny step up from the other two Gamma One films. I mean, even with all the negatives I highlighted, it’s hard for someone like me to walk away from a movie featuring world-conquering space yetis in fabulous outfits and not have at least a mildly amused smile on my face. Had I been prepared for how little of the film takes place amongst the pop art style of Wild Wild Planet, and had I expected something more along the lines of an old black and white film, my attention probably would have wavered less. Luckily, Snow Devils comes through in the end, and after a fight with a cave full of space yetis followed by little spaceman action figures zipping around between dangling bits of rock, I was more than willing to forgive the movie its trying snow trek scenes and accept it into my heart.

Of all the filmic subgenres to come out of Europe during the 60s, the Spaghetti Western is the most macro, containing multitudes. With literally hundreds of entries, it was inevitable that filmmakers would indulge in some hybridization to mix things up, with the results being, among many others, the comedy westerns of the Trinity series, gothic westerns like Antonio Margheriti’s And God Said to Cain, and the Bondian trappings of the Sartana series. Come the late 60s, such filmmakers began to experiment with style and content as well as genre, leading to some of the more “arty” spaghettis that are today among the best of the cycle, such as Robert Hossein’s Cemetery Without Crosses and Giulio Questi’s Django Kill! Arguably the best of all of these was The Great Silence, directed by Sergio Corbucci, who was one of the genre’s founders and trailblazers despite his repeated claim that he hated westerns.

According to director Alex Cox, who’s devoted quite a lot of attention to The Great Silence, the decision to film Silence in Spain’s snowy Pyrenees Mountain region was the result of Corbucci wanting to take a skiing trip. Whatever the case, it’s a decision responsible for giving the film a unique and visually striking character. You’d think that looking at footage of men on horseback looking tiny against a blinding white, snow swept backdrop would get old after a while, but in Corbucci’s hands it never fails to be arresting. And this even as telltale signs of the director’s characteristic haste and impatience – shaky transitions, shots that are not quite in focus – remain. Corbucci, any cynical posturing aside, is clearly in a rare lyrical mode here, supported by an Ennio Morricone score that eschews the triumphalism of that composer’s earlier Spaghetti themes in favor of a more disarmingly “pretty” and mournful approach.

Silence takes place in the small, isolated town of Snow Hills, Utah, where the citizens, goaded on by town boss Pollicut (Luigi Pistilli), are in a state of hysteria over a gang of “outlaws” encamped in the woods along their border. It turns out, however, that these are less outlaws than outcasts. In the English dubbed version it’s suggested that they are Mormons, but they are in any case people who are being persecuted for their beliefs, hiding out in the woods until the time that a proposed amnesty passes the ballot and allows them to return to their homes. Exposed to the elements and without food, any crimes that they commit are for the sake of survival. In response, Pollicut keeps the group in check with a small army of bloodthirsty bounty killers who hunt them like animals and trade their corpses in for cash.

The outcasts, meanwhile, have employed a defender of their own, a mute gunslinger called Silence who acts as a sort of bounty hunter of bounty hunters, charging – as the hunters also do – one thousand dollars per head. Silence is played by French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, who had become an international star with 1966’s A Man and a Woman. The fact that it was Trintignant’s only western is another thing that makes The Great Silence unique, as opposed to had it been fronted by a more oft seen Euro-western hero like Giuliano Gemma or Django’s Franco Nero (who was actually an early casting choice, but proved unavailable). Not that either of those actors would have done a bad job with it, of course. It’s just that their appearances were numerous, and their characters generic, to the point of all blending together somewhat. Silence, meanwhile, is distinct within Spaghetti Western canon, and skillfully portrayed by Trintignant in a wordless performance that nonetheless conveys intense emotion while at the same time maintaining the western avenger’s expected level of flinty stoicism.

In confronting the bounty hunters, Silence comes up against their leader — named Loco in the English version, Tigrero in the original Italian – who is played by Klaus Kinski. Loco is a standout spaghetti western villain for Kinski. While he clearly enjoys his death dealing work, he carries himself with a sardonic detachment that’s pronouncedly at odds with the maniacal sadism you might otherwise expect from the actor in such a role. In fact, the most disconcerting thing about Loco may be his complacence, apparently born of an unshakable confidence that he is on the right side of both the law and morality, and even history.

That the bounty hunters are using their legal mandate to cleanse the town of perceived undesirables becomes clear with their cold blooded murder of the husband of the beautiful Pauline (Vonetta McGee), one of the town’s only black citizens. Of course, this murder is also part of a plot on Pollicut’s part to pressure Pauline into becoming his mistress, which meets with a predictable level of success. Pauline instead also recruits Silence to enact her revenge, and ends up entering into a love affair with him that is handled by Corbucci with surprising tenderness. McGee, an American actress who would go on to become a fixture in blaxploitation films from Blacula to Shaft in Africa, was making her film debut here. As such, she gives a tough and affecting performance that, combined with Trintignant’s, provides The Great Silence with its wounded heart and soul.

And Silence’s wounds, ultimately, are revealed to be the product of Pollicut, who, once a bounty killer himself, murdered the young Silence’s parents before his eyes before slashing the boy’s throat to prevent his giving witness. This, however, is all news to Pollicut, until Silence, at a key moment, pulls back his scarf to reveal the jagged scar. Meanwhile, the wanton violence of Pollicut and the bounty hunters has come to the attention of Utah’s governor (Carlo D’Angelo), who dispatches a new sheriff to the region in hopes of calming things down in the run up to the amnesty vote. This is Burnett, played by San Francisco boy Frank Wolff, who, like many of Wolff’s characters, is played somewhat for laughs, but is nonetheless presented as a decent and honorable upholder of the law. Once in Snow Hills, Burnett almost succeeds in convincing the townspeople that taking an approach of compassion to the “outlaws” is the solution to their problem, but finds an immovable obstacle in a populace that has become inured through years of institutionalized murder.

In the end, The Great Silence paints an unforgiving portrait of a law that applies unequally depending on who is applying it, with the bounty hunters’ sanction to kill in the interest of the moneyed and powerful being its ultimate, implacable expression. Corbucci, a leftist of a particularly hardnosed bent, set out to present this in the most uncompromising light possible, offering his audience no easy catharsis, and in succeeding makes The Great Silence a very difficult film to discuss in the current spoiler-averse climate. The ending of the film, you see, is a real gut-puncher – and, like the similarly downbeat ending to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, is hard to imagine not being born of the wave of bloodshed and political martyrdom that characterized 1968.

So… um, spoiler alert.

As the film reaches its conclusion, Loco takes captive the band of religious outcasts, who have been drawn into town by the promise of food, and sends word to Silence that he will execute all of them if Silence does not come into town to face him in a showdown. Silence, despite Pauline’s protests and the fact that his shooting hand has been maimed in a fight with one of Pollicut’s goons, complies. Upon Silence’s arrival at the Saloon where Loco and his men are hiding out, one of the men shoots him through a window, crippling his other hand, whereupon the defenseless Silence is cold-bloodedly executed with a bullet to the head. Pauline, who has followed him, is then also shot down, whereupon the bounty hunters methodically massacre the outcasts to the last pleading man, woman and child. “All according to the law”, says Loco with self satisfaction, as he steps out into the snow and relieves Silence’s corpse of its gun.

So harsh was The Great Silence’s ending that it was actually deemed inappropriate for some territories, and necessitated the producers inserting an alternate “happy” ending depicting an improbable rescue. This ending, of course, only serves to underscore just how much the original ending is the only one that The Great Silence could have had, so much does the alternative clash with the tone that Corbucci strived to set. Whereas a Hollywood filmmaker might have tried to at least give Silence’s sacrifice some kind of mitigating spiritual dimension, Corbucci’s visual template, with all those tiny figures isolated in a blinding expanse of white, makes clear that his is a martyrdom that takes place in the absence of God. And it is that yawning blankness that truly may be the silence to which the film’s title refers.

Release Year: 1968 | Countries: Italy, France | Starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Klaus Kinski, Frank Wolff, Luigi Pistilli, Vonetta McGee, Mario Brega, Carlo D’Angelo, Marisa Merlini, Maria Mizar, Marisa Sally, Raf Baldassarre, Spartaco Conversi, Remo De Angelis, Mirella Pamphili | Music: Ennio Morricone | Screenplay: Mario Armendola, Bruno Corbucci, Sergio Corbucci, Vittoriano Petrilli | Director: Sergio Corbucci | Producer: Alberto Marras

I walk and bike through the LES pretty regularly. Eat and drink there plenty. And I like to think that I’m not totally ignorant of its history, but the lovely thing about New York history is that no matter how much of it you try to cram into your head, even for a single neighborhood, there is always so much more waiting to surprise you.

We strolled through on Memorial Day and, despite several hours in the cemetery, covered maybe 40% of it, leaving many of its most famous residents’ graves unvisited and waiting for a return. However, we did visit the final resting place of Boss Tweed, Jean-Michel Basquiat, DeWitt Clinton, and the Wizard of Oz.

I was going to try and write up a history beyond the basics, but that seems pointless given how fantastic this Green-Wood episode of the Bowery Boys podcast is. So I highly recommend you put that on your mp3 player and listen to it as you make your way through one of the city’s must-visit locations.

376-380 Lafayette Street, between Great Jones Street (3rd Street) & East 4th Street. Built in 1888-1889 by William C. Schermerhorn and better known by some simply as the Schermerhorn Building. It houses a recently opened French brassiere type place called Lafayette, but I remember it most fondly for the days when it’s basement housed the swanky dinner club Fez.

Merchants Building, 693 Broadway, adorned with surprisingly threatening giant owls. There are owls scattered throughout New York City — which some claim to be marks of a powerful secret society. Others just claim that architects liked owls.

A bit of randomness in this batch. 716 Broadway boasts some fantastic gargoyles and polished brass devil heads (as well as the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore). Unfortunately, the devils are dingy right now and almost everything is obscured by tarps and scaffolding. Still, you can catch a glimpse of the devils peeking out at you from behind the construction. Next door is a building featuring all sorts of menacing fellers staring down at you. Also nearby is the old International Tailoring Building, featuring a very determined tailor on its facade. And just for fun always be sure to stop by the entrance of 808 Broadway. Next to the year-round Halloween costume and magic shop is the door tot he building proper — which served as the investigative headquarters for the characters in Caleb Carr’s fantastic novel, The Alienist.

A few of the many adornments on the Grace Church School, 86 4th Ave.

These solemn characters stare at me from across Astor Place.

841 Broadway — truly one of the crown jewels of gargoyles in the area. I need to return with a better lens. The building is positively crawling with devils, Green Men, stern gods, nymphs, and satyrs. A fantastic display. Also known as the Roosevelt Building, named after Cornelius Roosevelt, grandfather of Teddy Roosevelt.

There’s something to be said for patience. Or for grim determination. Whichever you think best suits the situation. Sometimes, you endure something unenjoyable simply because you’re committed to an overarching principle, and in the end, the investment of time in that unenjoyable stint results in blossoming appreciation for some later point. That’s pretty convoluted, isn’t it? So let me say this. I watched Battlestar Galactica, the new series (I watched the old series, too, but that has no bearing on this tortured explanation). When we got to the “New Caprica” arc, I was not on board. I didn’t exactly hate the New Caprica episodes, but I really disliked a lot of them, especially any of them that spent way too much time (which would be any time) with the “Starbuck in her apartment prison” subplot. I grew increasingly impatient with the storyline. But then, just when I was on the verge of pronouncing this a “Babylon 5, season five clusterfuck,” we got the episode where Galactica — and Pegasus — undertake their fiery rescue of the New Caprica colonists. Now that whole bit — that was just some of the greatest television, ever. And I realized after the fact that it wouldn’t have been nearly as powerful or exciting if I hadn’t sat through the New Caprica episodes. Those episodes were the back-breaking hoeing of the field that eventually bore the delicious fruit of that Galactica-Pegasus rescue mission. And then, suddenly, all those other episodes were worth it.

I tell that story because exactly the same thing happened with the “Vatta’s War” books. It was when I was looking for new (to me) science fiction and space opera to keep me occupied on the lengthy train ride to and from work each day that I first had author Elizabeth Moon recommended to me. Now that I’ve finished the entire five-book run, I can look back with some amusement at how lukewarm my reaction to the first book was, versus how much I like the series as a whole. This is, at least in part, because each book just barely works as its own self-contained story. The series is much more effective when you regard it as a single book that, in deference to considerations about someone’s ability to cart around a sprawling 2,000 page cube (Neal Stephenson, of course, has no such consideration for his audience), has been split into easier to digest volumes.

Moon began writing professionally in her 30s, drawing on her background as a dual degree holder in both history and biology, as well as being a former Marine lieutenant. Her first book was published in 1988, and by 1997, she’d picked up her first Hugo Award, for the novel Remnant Population. In 2003, her novel The Speed of Dark won a Nebula Award. For my immediate needs, she had/has two long-running series that looked like they would appeal to me: the Familias Regnant series, and the Vatta’s War series. I did my usual amount of research on the subject — which consists of looking at the cover on Amazon and thinking, “Yeah, why not?” — and decided to plunge into Moon’s most recently complete series, Vatta’s War.

Trading in Danger is the first book. Vatta is Kylara Vatta, a promising cadet at a military academy — at east until the book has gone on for a page or two, after which she finds herself expelled for some ridiculous business in which she played a minor, unaware role but never the less turned out to be the most convenient fall guy (or gal) in the ensuing PR fallout. Depressed and feeling stranded once she returns to her wealthy family’s estate, Kylara is given a job her father and uncle hope will snap her out of her deep blue funk. The Vattas own one of the biggest interstellar shipping company’s around, and they have an aging hunk of junk that needs to be piloted out to a distant system and sold for salvage, making a few deliveries along the way.

Kylara reluctantly accepts the assignment and is assigned a small crew of seasoned space vets who will help her learn the ropes of being a captain. Kylara soon becomes obsessed with figuring out a way to save the old ship from getting scrapped, hoping that she can make enough money along the way to afford to refurbish the ship and call it her own. When the opportunity comes to make a boatload of extra cash by accepting a new contract at her first port of call, Kylara takes it, even when the planetary government refuses to pay anything up front. They are good for the payment upon completion of the delivery, but not having any of the money before means that Kylara is stretching her finances beyond their breaking point. When the ship’s FTL drive breaks down in orbit around the planet at which they’re supposed to pick up the shipment, Ky and the crew have to hustle and shuffle to afford both the equipment they need to purchase and resale and make the repairs the ship needs before it can depart.

And then the war breaks out.

When two planets start taking potshots at each other, Kylara’s ship is stranded in the middle of things. Terrorists destroy the satellites that relay communications throughout space, meaning that she can’t even call for help. When a group of mercenaries show up, Ky suddenly finds her crippled ship being used to house the captains and officers of other ships that were caught in the middle of things and could get away. Some of the captive captains are blowhards. Some are pirates. Some are involved in a conspiracy they’d rather no one else found out about. And some are willing to mutiny and kill Ky and her crew to cover things up.

Here’s the thing about Trading in Danger — it’s not that great. And it’s not that bad. As the first book in a series, it does just enough to convince me that I’m interested in reading the next book while failing to make me all that excited about the book I just finished reading. It’s populated largely with stock characters, but they are executed well enough that I didn’t mind. The big problem with the book is that so much of it is dedicated to talking, sitting around, and waiting — but never about or for anything interesting. Meetings with bureaucrats, meetings with lawyers, meetings with this person or that, and none of them really have much point beyond padding things out. Nothing interesting comes of it. Trading in Danger seems to be spinning its wheels most of the time, never going anywhere and never rewarding the patience of the reader with a satisfying payoff.

When the finale finally comes, it is so low-key that I wouldn’t have even realized it was the finale if I hadn’t been able to see there were only a few pages left. Instead of building slowly, then suddenly speeding up for a big jump, Trading in Danger is sort of like riding a bike very slowly toward a very modest ramp that lets you jump maybe half an inch off the ground. Sure, once you’ve made the jump, you think, “Yeah, I guess that was OK,” but it could have and should have been much better. To make the limp finale even more disappointing, the final chapters of the book are composed of Kylara telling various people what just happened, which means we have to read her recounting the book we just read multiple times to assorted supporting characters.

Still, the book is not entirely without merit. I thought Ky was a decent enough character that I want to read the next book. And Moon’s background as a former Marine means that she can get inside the head of a military cadet and the mercenaries that show up in a way many authors can’t. Like I said, it does just barely enough to keep me interested. What’s funny, though, is how quickly my opinion of the book began to change once I moved on to the second in the series, Marque and Reprisal.

Marque and Reprisal picks up almost immediately where Trading in Danger leaves off, with Ky polishing off her mission to deliver all that ag equipment. But right in the middle of that, system ansibles across the galaxy begin to fail, and Ky is cut off from her family and HQ on Slotter Key. What she doesn’t find out until much later is that the entire Vatta organization has found itself at the center of a vicious assault. The headquarters is bombed, as are the homes of employees and any ships that the unknown assailants can get to. Ky herself is attacked multiple times, though Ky being Ky, she’s able to extract herself from the situation while leaving a corpse or two in her wake.

Trading in Danger felt like we were loitering on the tip of a more interesting story’s iceberg. Marque and Reprisal makes good on that suspicion, and before too long we discover that what happened to Ky and the crew of the newly renamed Gary Tobai was nothing but the opening rumble of a fairly vast adventure. If you were, like me, wondering where the space opera was in Trading in Danger, well, here it is. The first book was really just the first tiny part of the story, and while it was a tad on the dull side while I was reading it, I was suddenly finding myself appreciative of the foundation laying it did. That investment of time really begins to pay off as I worked my way through Marque and Reprisal.

It’s a considerably more expansive adventure, not just in the number of planets and space stations that are visited, but also in the number of characters who step up to center stage. Ky still remains the focal point of the story, but supporting characters get a lot more time and development chief among those are Rafe, a roguish hustler who is actually working for ISC in the capacity of an industrial spy. He finds himself thrust into Vatta’s War when assassins attempting to kill the sole survivor of a Vatta ship bombing — a teenage boy — drive the kid and his would-be savior to Rafe’s storefront. Also joining the fray is Stella, Ky’s cousin and as much a family black sheep as Ky herself, though for different reasons (those involving a misguided love affair that enabled a guy to steal a fortune from Vatta). She also happens to have had a previous relationship with Rafe, and while the coincidence that delivers her and the young teenager Toby to Rafe is pretty hard to swallow, it’s one ill-fitting piece among many, and it’s well worth just rolling with it.

And then there’s crazy ol’ Aunt Grace, the doddering old fruitcake baker who seems such a minor character in the first book. Once the attack on Vatta’s begins and claims the lives of most of the senior employees — including Ky’s mother and father, as well as her uncle/Stella’s father — Grace decides to drop her cover and reveal herself for what she is: a war veteran and the current, ruthless head of Vatta’s internal intelligence organization. While Ky has to stumble blindly from one assassination attempt to the next with no idea what’s going on, Grace decides that the best course of action is to root out those responsible for the attacks — the scale of which couldn’t be accomplished without complicit conspirators within the Slotter Key government — and extract violent — preferably fatal — revenge.

Eventually, Stella catches up with Ky, the MacKenzie mercenaries show up again, and the scope of the plot begins to gel. Ky and MacKenzie both hire themselves out to escort a train of skittish merchant ships, and along the way, Ky and Rafe both begin to suspect that the attacks on Vatta, the galaxy-wide communication failures, and the uptick in pirate activity are all related. Then shady, mysterious Osman Vatta shows up.

Marque and Reprisal is light years more enjoyable than Trading in Danger, though it wouldn’t have been so much better if Trading in Danger hadn’t taken the time to set the stage. The second book still has some of the flaws of the first (and those flaws continue to manifest throughout the series), specifically the tendency to present us with a pretty interesting conflict, then have Ky or someone else explain that situation in detail to various people throughout the book. It is, of course, the sort of thing that would believably happen, but as readers, all it means is we have to read multiple similar descriptions of an event we’d already read about in the first place. We could definitely have used a simple, “She told him the details of the encounter.”

And there’s also the tendency to dwell acutely on inconsequential minutiae and the filling out of forms. Although the book is pretty well packed with action, that action screeches to a halt so we can do things like spend several pages on Ky shopping for ship crockery. Pretty much every detail of purchasing ship crockery is laid out for you, even though it has no real bearing on the plot (the crockery itself becomes a minor incident when it’s used as an unsuccessful attempt to smuggle a spy device onto Ky’s ship). It reminded me of Ian Fleming’s tendency to write at great length about whatever new subject he’d learned about or been told about during small talk at a party, no matter how little it had to do with what James Bond was actually doing int he book.

The pace and scale of the series continues to quicken and expand in book three, Engaging the Enemy. Stella attempts to rebuild the Vatta business, despite ansibles still being down, while Ky decides that what the universe really needs is a multi-system space force that can deal with the piracy and attacks now spreading like wildfire. Rafe, meanwhile, suspects that the fact that ansibles are being repaired at such a sluggish rate — and that many were sabotaged in ways that point to collusion on the part of ISC employees — points to something very rotten at the corporation. Throughout this and the next book, Command Decision, Elizabeth Moon reveals the full spectrum of what’s going on, and once again, it wouldn’t be so interesting if we hadn’t started out with such a humble, poky story as Trading in Danger. Ky struggles to stitch together a cohesive space force using the privateers and remnant security forces of disparate and sometimes suspicious systems. Stella continues to rebuild Vatta, while Rafe dissects and attempts to do the same with ISC, discovering along the way just how rotten to the core the powerful company had become. And all of them have to deal with the growing pirate navy that is running roughshod over the whole galaxy. It all comes to a head in Victory Conditions, the final book in the series and a fitting conclusion to what ends up being an exceptionally rousing space opera.

Despite my initial reaction to the first book, I ended up loving the series. Most of the characters are one-dimensional, maybe two, but I don’t mind since Moon explores those dimensions so well. OK, except for the eventual main villain, who is never more than a howling cartoon character on someone’s view screen. What he wants and why he is who he is, is almost totally unexplored. But I was able to deal with that. I’ve always said of movies that I don’t mind stock characters and formula when it’s well-executed, and that’s what Moon does. There are no big ideas — this isn’t Alastair Reynolds or Verner Vinge. But as somewhat simplistic, action-adventure, Moon’s series may start off with a slow burn, but once it catches on, it’s highly enjoyable, with doses of space opera, military sci-fi, political thriller, and a detective novel. I’m really looking forward, now, to starting in on the Familias Regnant series as a follow-up.

I like steampunk. Let’s just get that out of the way, since steampunk is one of those things that makes some people roll their eyes. Whatever, man. I like airships and clockwork and industrial tools that are covered with brass filigree. I don’t entirely approve of the preoccupation with brown clothing, nor do I approve of the gratuitous application of goggles to everything, but beyond that, steampunk and I get along very well. Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker was the first steampunk novel I read — provided one doesn’t include Verne and Wells and the Victorian science fiction writers in the genre. Within the genre, or subgenre or whatever steampunk is (I’m pretty sure it occupies the same territory as cyberpunk once did, only with fewer mirrorshades and more goggles), it’s a bit of an anomaly in that it’s not set during and fetishizing the British Victorian era. Instead, author Cherie Priest decides to stick to a similar time period but a different and more familiar setting: the United States, albeit a United States in which the Civil War has dragged on long past its actual conclusion and steam-powered walkers, airships, and other such contraptions are commonplace.

As the war drags on, rumors of Klondike gold draw settlers and prospectors West in search of fortune and/or relief from the endless conflict plaguing much of the country. Seattle inventor Leviticus Blue is commissioned to create a new drilling machine to speed up the process of digging for gold. The result of his tinkering — nicknamed The Boneshaker — seems promising, at least until its initial test-run destroys several blocks of Seattle and penetrates into a deep down reservoir of toxic gas that turns people who breathe it into shambling, hungry “rotters.” Seattle is subsequently abandoned, a giant wall erected around it to contain both the rotters and the “blight gas” that created them, and Leviticus Blue’s name becomes a curse — which causes endless problems for his ancestors, who had nothing to do with his reckless scheme but never the less bear the burden of his folly. Blue himself vanishes, presumed killed in the mayhem perpetrated by his out-of-control invention.

Sixteen years later, Levi’s presumed widow, Briar, has to endure the daily stink eye from the refugee community surrounding the Seattle wall but has eked out a meager existence for her and her son, Zeke. This existence is turned upside down, however, when Zeke is compelled to sneak into the dangerous ruins of Seattle in search of evidence to exonerate his father from claims that the man intentionally destroyed Seattle as part of some nefarious plot. Briar is forced to chase after him, hitching a ride over the wall with an airship captain named Cly. On the other side of the wall, she discovers not just constant danger from both rotters and the still-present blight gas; she also discovers that the city is hardly deserted, that enterprising hold-outs have created an entirely new type of town within the confines of the wall, one linked together via underground tunnels and rooftop pathways. The whole thing is lorded over by a reclusive inventor named Minnericht, who may or may not be insane and evil…and who may or may not be Leviticus Blue.

The simple act of setting Boneshaker in Civil War era America rather than in an American fantasy of the British Victorian Age is enough to set the novel apart from its contemporaries in the steampunk genre, but just setting yourself apart doesn’t guarantee you’re a good book. Luckily, Boneshaker is a very enjoyable read that has more going for it than just its not-quite Gilded Age setting, though the world the book creates is interesting and engrossing. Cherie Priest does two things very well (among others, I’m sure). The first is world-building. The Pacific Northwest of Boneshaker, even with its steampunk trappings and zombies, is a believable place thanks undoubtedly to Priest writing about a location with which she is familiar. The Seattle in which the author lived for some time may not be a walled No Man’s Land filled with deadly gas and zombies, at least not since grunge died out (sorry, but writers are required by law to make at least one grunge joke when mentioning Seattle), but having lived there means Priest can create her alternate world version of the city with much more detail and authenticity than might otherwise be achievable. Although I enjoy plenty of books by American steampunk authors set in Victorian England, many of them lack a certain level of detail that makes it more obvious that they are working in a setting about which they don’t know a whole lot. Nothing wrong with that — William Gibson practically invented cyberpunk without ever having used a computer — but when an author gets to dig in to a place about which they have firsthand knowledge, it adds a layer of believability that makes it easier to lose yourself in the story’s world.

The second thing she does really well is characters. Boneshaker frees us from plucky young men and women and gives us a heroine who is older, uncertain, and in over her head but must never the less soldier on. The book spends a portion of its time with Zeke and his odyssey through, over, and under the streets of Seattle, but those are asides really. This is Briar’s adventure, and she’s a well-rounded and enjoyable character with whom to spend time. The cast of characters around her is also well-written, buoyed by awkward good guy Jeremiah Swakhammer and complex “villain” Minnericht. Although Priest puts considerable effort into creating a believable sort-of post-apocalyptic society, she doesn’t forget to populate that world with characters worth reading about and sympathizing with. I will admit freely that parental characters usually cause me to shy away. I’m not that interested in children, and as such, stories built around parenting instincts, precocious children, and saving your child don’t always click with me. Not so here. Briar is a mom and motivated by a mother’s love for her son, but it’s not smothering, and it’s not done in a way that makes it intolerable for those of us who don’t share an affection for children. There is plenty else here to keep you occupied, and Briar as a mother isn’t the sole defining aspect of her character. Also, the kid is all right, and not around that much.

Not that this is a wholly character-driven study. We’re in a steampunk version of a ruined Seattle filled with murderous zombies, Chinese gangs, sinister conspiracies, and rowdy underground pub owners. I can’t think of a more delightful introduction to steampunk than Boneshaker. And I’m not alone. The book was successful enough that it spawned a sequel…and another…and others still, allowing Priest to further explore the world of what is now known as The Clockwork Century series. Priest fills the book with action and writes it well: allowing the adventure to be thrilling, scary, and fun while never letting the action overwhelm her characters, even when the action is overwhelming the characters (there are, after all, an awful lot of zombies in Seattle). It’s a pretty perfect balance between development, derring-do, and desperation. It makes for a book that is never dull, occasionally surprising, and always entertaining. if there is any complaint to be lodged against the story, it is that the main characters end up as little more than spectators swept up in the events around them. It’s likely that what ultimately happens in Boneshaker might have happened even if Zeke and Briar had never set foot in Seattle. Eh, I can see where that might bug people, but it didn’t bug me. I don’t think the characters are snowed over by events, and I don’t mind that we get a more realistic “group effort” sort of ensemble cast rather than discovering that Zeke is some sort of Chosen One or something.

I also appreciate that the accoutrements of steampunk — goggles, airships, that sort of thing — actually have a point int he story instead of simply being lumped into the narrative to meet the requirements of some steampunk triptych. Minus the historical faux pas of referring to zeppelins in a time period where, even if such ships existed, they would not have been named after Zeppelin, Priest manages to create a world that justifies the use of such technologies and employs them in a way that is demanded by the logic of the story. Aside from an over-dependence on the color brown (seriously, steampunks — the Victorians had all sorts of colors!), nothing needlessly irks me quite as much as gratuitous goggles. At least in Boneshaker, people have an actual reason to wear them. No one wears goggles to a formal event.

As my first real foray into reading steampunk, and since I invoked the name of the other literary “punk” a couple of times, Boneshaker was a chance for me to think about what steampunk is and what it’s trying to do. If steampunk’s point — beyond window dressing — is confused and confusing, it might be because the landscape has changed so drastically from the days when cyberpunk ruled the roost. Steampunk is very fan-driven, and that fanbase — while not exclusively young — tends to skew young. Which means it tends to skew inexperienced. It does not have the grizzled grown-ups of cyberpunk, the writers who lived through Vietnam, the social upheaval of the 60s, and the birth of the computer age in the 70s and 80s. The social upheaval that could lend steampunk meaning is only just beginning to shape its generation of writers, and it will be interesting to see, if steampunk sticks around, whether surveillance states, the war on terror, and the modern socio-political landscape (which I think is just as radical and tumultuous, if not more so, than it was in the late 1960s) lends the subgenre a depth that many claim it currently lacks.

This is assuming, mind you, that you feel like it needs depth, or that it needs some additional meaning beyond aesthetic and entertainment. Personally, I don’t think it does, and if it lacks those things, I don’t think that makes it necessarily shallow or uninteresting. In fact, steampunk has already contributed greatly to the advancement of science fiction as a whole by creating a subgenre in which women are frequently the heroes — and frequently the writers. If steampunk seems devoid of a meaning, maybe that’s because people are looking for the wrong sorts of things. what does steampunk say about technology? What does it say about our place in a technological world? I’m not sure. Maybe nothing. But what does it say about gender equality? What does it say about taking a genre that has traditionally had a surprisingly large but almost entirely ignored female fanbase and finally giving them female heroes and female authors? Beneath all the bustles, goggles, and greatcoats, that might be the thing for which steampunk will be best known. Odd that a subset of literature set in times and places not known for their racial or gender equality would be such a powerful shot for said equality, but things are funny sometimes. Like I said, the guy who wrote Neuromancer had never touched a computer in his life.

Anyway, we’ve wandered far afield from reviewing Boneshaker, but I guess tat proves (at least to me) that a story can be straight-forward adventure entertainment — which is what I think Boneshaker is — but still manage to raise important questions even if those questions are not explicit to the plot of the story. Boneshaker is fun, and part of the fun comes from the fact that it and books like it attract and inspire fans and potential authors who might have otherwise felt shut out of and ignored by the science fiction universe. That’s quite an accomplishment. That it is delivered via a classic bang-up pulp story that would have been right at home in the pages of Astounding Stories makes it even better.

The world’s first manned expedition to Mars has vanished, and men in sparsely appointed offices are concerned by swirling newspaper headlines. When the rocket reappears, the world breathes a collective sigh of relief — until it’s discovered that only two of the four members of the crew are alive. On board the returning rocket is unbuttoned shirt aficionado and expedition leader Col. Thomas O’Bannion (a particularly sleazy Gerald Mohr), who has been incapacitated by some horrifying alien growth, and scientist Dr. Iris Ryan (Naura Hayden), known to the crew as Irish and in a state of shock that prevents her from remembering any of the details of the nightmarish fate that befell the crew. A third crew member, Doctor Morbius lookalike Prof. Theodore Gettell (Les Tremayne, War of the Worlds) is aboard the rocket but dead. And requisite blue-collar Joe Brooklyn guy Sam Jacobs (Jack Kruschen) is missing entirely. Making matters worse, all records of what happened to the crew while on Mars have been erased. The only way to save O’Bannion and discern what the heck happened on Mars is to snap poor, semi-catatonic Iris out of her fugue state…

Like pretty much every punk rocker in the history of the United States, my first exposure to Angry Red Planet was via the cover to the Misfits album Walk Among Us, which depicted the band being menaced by a giant…rat-bat-spider…thing. The monster, like the album, was pretty incredible, but this being the 1980s, I didn’t really have any way to find out what they heck it was from. For a while, I think I even assumed the band itself had designed the monster for the album cover. I can’t remember when it was I finally discovered the origin of the creature, but when it finally did happen, it sparked a long and surprisingly difficult — again, this being before the internet and DVD and me being in a small Kentucky town without much of a support network for budding young film fans despite the fact that D.W. Griffith was buried just down the road (his silent corpse was of almost no help). Eventually, it all came together, and that was the day I first learned about producer-director-screenwriter Sid Pink.

Pittsburgh native Sid Pink discovered his love of film making in rather a unique way. There was a school play in which he had the role of a movie producer, and it was while he was inhabiting this role (presumably with a big prop cigar) that he thought, “Yeah, this is actually a pretty cool job.” Soon after, young Sid Pink found employment as a projectionist in a local movie theater while pursuing a business degree. In 1952, he made good on his drama club actor’s dream of being a movie producer when he made Bwana Devil, the story of a couple of man-eating lions and one of the early 3D films. So began the massive 3D trend of the 1950s. Sadly, Pink’s next film, I Was a Burlesque Queen, was not in 3D. When the novelty of that format had worn off, Pink started looking for a new hook with which to draw people into his low-budget films — and to cover up some of the cheapness of his productions. What he came up with was “CineMagic,” and the film in which he showcased it was the sci-fi film Angry Red Planet.

The first half of the 1950s was an era of great, big-budget, serious science fiction undertakings produced by major studios and resulting in classics like 1951′s When Worlds Collide, 1953′s War of the Worlds, 1955′s This Island Earth, and 1956′s Forbidden Planet — regarded by many as the crowning achievement of 1950s science fiction film. By 1958 though, audiences and Hollywood studios had moved on. With the launch of Sputnik and the beginning of the Space Race, the fantastic musings of Hollywood seemed less interesting than reality. Science fiction was thus left largely in the hands of low-budget independent producers like AIP’s Sam Arkoff and Roger Corman. It was at AIP that Pink found a home for his project.

Although small in scale when measured against the average Hollywood science fiction film, Angry Red Planet was a substantial undertaking for Pink’s production company, an epic tale of the exploration of space and terrifying encounters with the inhabitants of another planet. It would break many of AIP’s house rules — chief among them being Pink’s desire to shoot the film in color. I’m guessing Pink himself must have dumped some money Sam Arkoff’s way, convincing the notorious skinflint to permit Pink to film in color. By the time production was underway, Pink had raised $20,000 and hired Ib Melchior to direct, giving the novice movie maker ten days in which to complete the film. Compared to the budgets and timetables of the average AIP production, ten days and $20,000 was positively lavish. However, AIP was sticking largely to earthbound “monster spooks the kids” movies at the time, which were much easier to pull off on a tight budget and deadline.

Pink’s film, scripted by him and Melchior (Melchior is better known for his stints as a screenwriter, but in 1958 he wasn’t well-known for anything much more high-profile than Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall), was a much more ambitious story, one that demanded space travel and the creation of a series of Martian landscapes and sets. It turns out that $20,000 isn’t very much money for this sort of movie, and Pink quickly found himself forced to cut some corners. His first fear was that budget constraints would necessitate abandoning the use of color film. Pink’s solution was ingenious, and also the product of a mistake at the lab. According to the story, some of the film was processed using the incorrect technique, resulting in film negatives that had been “solarized,” a process which partially reverses a negative and makes part of it a “positive.” If you’ve ever made or had to sit through a first semester film student’s experimental video project, you’ve either witnessed or been guilty of solarizing abuse. Highlights are swapped, and the whole thing looks a bit weird and even cartoonish.

What could have been a disaster for Pink was turned into the film’s most striking asset. Rather than scrapping the ruined footage and starting over, a cost that would have indeed forced Pink to shoot the entire film in black and white, he decided to use the mis-processed film, noting that the process had given the film a bizarre, otherworldly quality while masking much of the set’s shoddiness. Pink changed the incident from mistake to process and dubbed in CineMagic. The negatives were then tinted — red, in the case of Angry Red Planet — and suddenly the “ruined” film became the finished movie’s primary selling point.

This allowed Pink and Melchior to cut costs in a number of ways. First, they were able to salvage the mis-processed film. Second, they could save lots of money by shooting black and white that would, through CineMagic, eventually become color. It eliminated the need to produce film positives for large chunks of footage. Positives are the prints of the film that would be projected, containing true colors, as opposed to negatives (if you’ve ever worked with negative and slide still film, it’s basically the same). Usually, filmmakers would have to create positive prints of films for projection, but with CineMagic, this was not necessary, saving Pink a substantial amount of money on lab work.

Also, the funky effect and tinting allowed Melchior to shoot really cheap sets — and in some cases, just still drawings — and have them look weird and alien. What would otherwise be an obvious shoddy tropical jungle set left over from Bwana Devil suddenly becomes a psychedelic Martian landscape. Someones drawing of a futuristic city becomes a glowing Martian metropolis. And a shoddy little monster model has almost all its short-comings masked, transforming it into the terrifying rat-bat-spider monster thing. The process never really caught on, but it’s pretty effective in turning Angry Red Planet from a cheap, low-budget sci-fi film into a cheap, low-budget sci-fi film that looks really cool.

According to Sid Pink, he wrote the first draft of the script sitting at his kitchen table, with his children serving as judges of would and would not be cool. I assume they were involved only in the Martian portions of the story — that or Sid Pink’s children have a voracious appetite for scenes of guys standing around in meeting rooms and stock footage of airfields. The dinnertime script apparently still needed a little punching up — shocking — which is when Pink called in Ib Melchior to snazz things up a bit with more scenes of guys in military uniforms sitting at a meeting table. The end product script has a sort of easy-going charm about it, with the fact that most of it is kind of dull being snowed over by the eye-catching weirdness of its Martian sequences, which Iris recalls through a series of flashbacks.

So it is we learn about her terrifying tale of how O’Bannoin absolutely refused to zip up his space shirt, preferring to strut around the spaceship with his glorious, slightly sunken-in chest fully exposed so that the rest of the crew might fully drink in his roast beef-esque physical beauty. When he’s not combing his luxurious mane of chest hair, O’Bannion is flashing his smarmy smirk and sleazing up to Iris with all the finger-snapping panache of a just over-the-hill lounge lizard oozing up to an unlucky broad and asking her if she likes Perry Como. With this revealed, it’s no surprise that Iris lapsed into a state of hysterical amnesia. I wished intently for the same fate to befall me.

Sadly, it was not to be, and it also turns out there is more responsible for Iris’ state of mind that being endlessly hit upon by an oily superior officer who cannot figure out how to work shirt buttons. Their rocket lands successfully on Mars, and all seems wondrous until Iris checks in with her first of many screams, when she thinks she spies a life form peeping at her through the ship’s portal. This is, predictably, chalked up to feminine vapors or whatever it is that afflicts all women, even smart lady scientists. Donning their jumpsuits and space helmets, the intrepid quartet of astro-explorers step out of the rocket, onto the surface of Mars, and directly into CineMagic.

Not surprisingly, Mars in not happy to have them, and the quartet of blundering adventurers soon find themselves on the wrong end of everything from carnivorous plants to the aforementioned rat-bat-spider (plus some crab) monster, which they somehow mistake for a tree, even from a distance and even though it’s a fucking giant monster assembled out of the parts of rats, bats, and spiders. It’s not like it was camouflaged or obscured. It was standing in the middle of a field, in full view, minding its own business when these earthfolk come up and start breaking off his leg spines and mistaking it for a tree. After every calamitous but ultimately non-fatal encounter, the crew retreats to the relative safety of their rocket — possibly for safety, but also possibly just because O’Bannion was chafing under the weight of a fully concealed chest. But each time they venture out again, they dare to wander a little bit farther, ultimately finding a large body of water across which seems to be a giant city. So with no caution despite their previous close shaves, the crew piles into a little rubber dinghy to visit this incredible discover — only to stumble upon even more deadly Martian locals.

Despite having been in the game for a while, neither Pink nor Melchior were overly experienced — which is probably the thing most responsible for Angry Red Planet’s successes. A more experienced film maker might not have been willing to just throw a red tint over ruined film and call it magic. A more experienced director might not have allowed Gerald Mohr to deviate from the usual depiction of a heroic spaceship commander — good posture, kind yet authoritative, competent, and brave — and play his character like a middle-aged suburban swinger on a bender while in Reno for a weekend conference. But Pink and Melchior were not experienced, so they just let these things slide. And those things are a large part of what elevates Angry Red Planet to the status of minor sci-fi B-movie classic. CineMagic does work, and Mohr is hilariously…oozy.

Although Mohr is the standout, the remainder of the cast is OK if not particularly talented. The bulk of it is just extras dressed up in military uniforms and charged with solemnly uttering a line or two, a role for which wooden delivery seems both unavoidable and appropriate. It’s the usual bunch of “guys who were in one episode of every television show ever made.” As Dr. Irish, Naura Hayden has a great scream face, gets to pour beakers of colored liquid into one another, and sort of saves the day in the end, which is a nice change of pace. Of course, she also can’t tell the difference between a tree and a rat-bat-spider monster. But she’s not a bad character, even if her tolerance of O’Bannion’s Serge Gainsbourg-esque approach to captaining a spaceship seems unrealistically high. And as everyman Sam, Jack Kruschen is…well, the same as all the other people who have played this character. I can’t believe he didn’t wear a Brooklyn Dodgers cap and talk about his sweetie back home at Coney Island. The final member of the crew, Les Tremayne’s Prof. Theodore Gettell, spends so little time sleazing around with his shirt undone or talking about how he’s just a regular Joe, that he becomes inoffensively competent and forgettable.

Although I found CineMagic to be very effective, especially when it’s masking the marionette nature of the rat-bat-spider (and crab) monster (seriously, that thing is just so awesome), the process didn’t really catch on, even among budget-conscious filmmakers at places like AIP. However, this was not the end of the science fiction road for either Pink or Melchior. Partnered with AIP and working with Danish film producers (no doubt for some sort of tax credits), Pink went on to direct another minor cult classic, Reptilicus (co-written by him and Ib Melchior), as well as Journey to the Seventh Planet (also with Melchior). Melchior on his own had his ink-stained screenwriting fingers in two more low-budget sci-fi classics: 1964’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars and the English-language version of Mario Bava’s interstellar spook show Planet of the Vampires. All in all, that’s not a bad bunch of movies.

Angry Red Planet’s reputation is built largely upon still images of the effectively creepy rat-bat-spider monster, but beyond that nasty beastie, there’s a cheap but fun slice of B-movie science fiction waiting to be enjoyed. It’s not a film of lofty intentions or deep messages. It’s just classic, low-rent space pulp where most of the imagination went into masking the low-budget more than coming up with a great screenplay. CineMagic is eye-catching, and the Martian scenes are fun. The cast is game, and Mohr is particularly entertaining as the astronaut who seems miffed that spacesuits don’t come with big gold disco medallions and rocketships just don’t stock enough Brylcreem. It demands little of the audience and offers them the same, but it was enough for me. Like much of what AIP released, Angry Red Planet is just about perfect Saturday matinee fodder.