Festivity, Revels, and Nocturnal Dalliances
They Were 11 is an interesting take on sci-fi anime from the eighties, and definitely a marked departure from the space operas overflowing from the previous decades and the wham-bam sci-fi actioners that defined the eighties. There is really only one action scene in the entire movie, and that’s a pie fight.
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To the very limited extent that the German science fiction series Raumpatrouille Orion (full English title: Space Patrol – The Fantastic Adventures of the Starship Orion) is known in my own United States, it tends to be the victim of a certain unfair association. On those pitifully rare occasions when it’s mentioned, it’s seldom without being compared unfavorably to Star
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Solar Adventure — in which nothing happens that would have anything to do with a solar adventure, other than to say that many of the events depicted in the cartoon do indeed occur in the sunlight — managed to remain unique in its own right among the quilt-work series of films of which it is a part.
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Even in the realm of Joseph Lai movies, Space Thunder Kids stands out as exceedingly incompetent. Assembled willy-nilly from a bunch of other slapdash animated movies, it exists outsides the boundaries of film, film criticism, and human sanity.
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One year for Christmas, my parents got me a bizarre amalgamation of rock opera and radio play, starring Richard Burton: Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds.
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For all its failings, Battle Beneath the Earth is a difficult movie to hate. In my case, this is partly due to it having the disarming quality of seeming like it was the result of someone watching me play army men on my bedroom floor when I was six and then making a movie out of it.
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East German production house DEFA got into the scifi game with the solemn The Silent Star. In the Dust of the Stars trades that gravitas for disco style, interpretive dance, and nudity.
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The imagination apparent in every aspect of The Silent Star‘s design is a joy, with a story that is solid and economical enough in its construction to survive instances of ideological lip service.
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