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| The
Black Hole(1979) |
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IMDB
info
Rotten
Tomatoes info |
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| Review
by
Jon
Olsen |
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Produced
by Ron Miller. Directed by Gerry Nelson. Screenplay by Jeb Rosebrook
and Gerry Day. Cast: Maximillian Schell, Anthony Perkins, Robert
Foster, Joseph Bottoms, Yvette Mimieux, Ernest Borgnine.
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I rented
Disney's 1979 live action classic, The Black Hole. Yes, I rented a
live action Disney movie. I couldn't resist. It was a family movie,
and family movie rentals at Figueiredo's are free!
I have to say that no cinematic experience in recent memory has thrilled
me as greatly as this film's opening credit sequence. It opens on
a vast, desolate starfield. Suddenly glowing green lines crawl out
of our peripheral vision and converge in the center of the screen,
forming a spooky green grid in space. John Barry's music goes insane
and the grid tilts and suddenly we're flying over it and through it
and under it and it's become this enormous, three-dimensional celestial
superstructure. As we maneuver about it, the stars in the background
keel and pitch, this-a-way and that-a-way. And then, on the "horizon"
of this grid, there's a dip, a depression, a hole on one side that
tapers into a funnel on the other side before stretching far off into
deep space. Our POV starts to spin, and we realize this is The Black
Hole, and it's sucking us inexorably closer and closer, and then, Yaaaaaaaaaah! we're being sucked in, Yaaaaaaaaaaah! And the credits
are over!
From here, like a bad cigarette following great sex, things quickly
go downhill.
On the plus side are some wonderfully dark and atmospheric settings,
such as the brooding hulk of the starship Sygnus, perched on the purple,
swirly precipice of the film's titular space event, and the ship's
long, shadowy corridors and galleries, through which giant day-glo
cheese-puffs called "meteorites" come crashing and bouncing.
The special effects are pretty cool to look at, though they were probably
improved somewhat by the blurry, decayed video quality of the cruddy
VHS copy I had rented. I might not have enjoyed the visuals quite
as much if I had viewed the new widescreen DVD special edition version.The cast is a gathering of fairly competent actors; Anthony Perkins,
Ernest Borgnine (struggling to break free from his plumber/cop paradigm),
an uncredited voice actor who sounds an awful lot like Roddy McDowell,
Yvette Mimieux with a fetching dykey hair cut and...some other guys.
Mostly robots actually. Of course, the world's most talented cast
is doomed to death by cheese dipping when forced to work with a screenplay
as bad as this one.
Writers Jeb Rosebrook and Gerry Day have served up a circus of the
most acrid pseudoscientific nonsense yet available on video.
Notable pseudoscientific moments: a rec room where off-duty robots
play Atari video games; the phenomenon of selective zero-gravity,
whereby actors can conveniently land on two feet to intone pages and
pages of bad dialogue; proximity to "gravity fields" cause
the camera to shake violently; exposure to the vacuum of space causes
palm trees to become sugar frosted, and people slowly float up into
the air moaning, Help, Help; most exciting of all, everything becomes
highlighted in flourescent pink hues when we finally get sucked into
The Black Hole.
If AFI ever decided to follow up its enormously popular 100 Greatest
Films of All Time list with a 100 Stupidest Films of All Time, Disney's
The Black Hole could top the list. In fact, with all the horrid live
action films they have floating around out there, Disney just might
monopolize all 100 slots.
Now, if you are curious to see a good live action Disney film, rest
assured that such a creature does exist. Check out their production
of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The one with
James Mason as Captain Nemo. That flick, as they say in the industry,
is some good shit.
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