Laboratory (1980)

Directed by:

Robert Emenegger

Allan Sandler

Sandler / Emenegger Productions cranked out around a dozen science fiction films in less than two years (!) Each were talky, indifferently directed, as bare bones as a community theater production, contained at least one washed up former star (+ their nepo babies) and had costumes, props, sets and sfx that only managed to shine a spotlight on the rock bottom budgets. Among these were pure sci-fi movies, sci-fi comedies and the occasional horror / sci-fi hybrid like their KILLINGS AT OUTPOST ZETA (1980) and WARP SPEED (1981). This is another of those, perhaps the last I'll be covering here actually. If it's remembered for anything today, it's for the unique appearance of the aliens.

Frequently compared to disco balls, the extraterrestrials seen here are played by humans outfitted in head-to-toe silver sequin onesies! At times, you can even see the zippers on the backs of the costumes. While these beings do look rather silly much of the time (appearing particularly arts-and-crafty in low light situations), they also look kind of cool when they're lit and photographed correctly, which they sometimes are here. There's just something about the way bright light glimmers off of the suits that really does capture an otherworldly feel. Also, I'm sure it was much cheaper taking a trip to JOANN Fabric than it would have been hiring special effects artists.

Still, I try not to harp too much on issues caused by budget restraints because some filmmakers are able to overcome them. The alien lens flare aesthetic won't necessarily even be a problem for some viewers, namely those of us who have seen our fair share of older genre films and are already accustomed to suspending our disbelief for the sake of an otherwise well-made, imaginative or thought-provoking film. Just because a movie is cheap and has unconvincing special effects, doesn't necessary mean it can't be good. It also doesn't mean shoddy fx work and cheapness can't be charming and actually add to one's overall enjoyment. Corman's IT CONQUERED THE WORLD (1956), for instance, succeeds even though it features a creature that looks like a snaggle-toothed rutabaga.

The plot used here is a simple one. An alien council decides to kidnap a half dozen "lower life forms" (humans) for observation and study. Among the unwilling test subjects are LA-based musician Linda Bruce (Camille Mitchell, daughter of Cameron and also star of the aforementioned Warp Speed), jogger Jed White (Ken Washington), streetwise Jerry Hansen (a pre-star Martin Kove), priest Father Rowan (Garnett Smith), rich housewife Gloria Van Buren (Corinne Michaels [Camacho]) and an unnamed Asian lady (June Kim), who is referred to only as "That Oriental Lady" or "Subject 31D" by the others. All six are engaging in normal activities on Earth when a large orange light that resembles a fireball sweeps out of the sky and whisks them away. They all awaken in separate white bedrooms dressed in ill-fitting white jumpsuits without a clue as to where they are or how they got there.

Jerry is the first to be let out of his room. He wanders down a corridor and enters a lab where the aliens are conducting experiments on "That Oriental Lady," which involve "probing" her with a metal rod inserted into her belly button. The aliens have certain weapons at their disposal, like a red "restraint field" to hold their specimens in place, can appear and disappear at will and also possess strong mind control / telepathic abilities that enable them to make people fall asleep and make them mute merely by waving their arm and demanding it. Jerry is put in one of the restraint holds and has to stand there helplessly watching the whole experiment play out. The subject doesn't take well to the probing, becomes ill, is decapitated by a laser and then has her head stuck in a glass domed case.

The remaining five characters wander hallways endlessly and sit around in their rooms talking for long stretches, occasionally taking part in some test (like a game that will shock participants if they don't hit buttons in sync with their partner) or allowing for minor character insights. Jerry is a loner, but he and Linda still find a little time for romance. Jed has some electronics knowledge that he hopes to put to good use blowing up the lab. Gloria is bitchy, pampered, uncooperative and has a history of both alcoholism and mental problems. The priest is your usual creepy religious fanatic who thinks they're in purgatory, believes this is some kind of test from God and constantly goes on bug-eyed rants.

Not only is this not much to look at, with dreary, boring, sparse sets, but it's also not very pleasurable on the ears, with a droning music score, poorly recorded audio and often indecipherable electronic voices for the aliens. However, the main problem here is the script. The story just isn't terribly interesting, many story points are muddled and the film ends up going nowhere. Toward the end, one of the characters is forced to play a computerized "communication game" with colored flashing lights and musical tones, almost exactly like the electronic memory game Simon (which had just hit the market a few years prior), which is used to briefly speak to the aliens. I couldn't even figure out why this was necessary since the aliens already know how to speak English!

I also had a difficult time determining just where this whole thing was taking place. Though the humans are trapped in a normal looking building with normal looking rooms and furnishings like one would find on Earth, there are tons of cut-away shots to a large, white, glowing, spherical ship floating through space. For the longest time, I thought the abductees were actually ON the alien spacecraft, but toward the end I suddenly realized that the aliens had merely taken over an abandoned military hospital on Earth, put the humans in there and have been conducting their experiments on them from the safety of space. Since the aliens show up in the hospital at will, I couldn't figure out if some of them were left on Earth in charge of things or if they had the ability to teleport down to Earth from space to tend to their subjects. A lot of this isn't adequately established or explained and it's kind of annoying. The ending also sucks.

Having previously acted for the likes of Wes Craven, Roger Corman, Paul Bartel, Andy Warhol and Andy Sidaris, Kove already had a presence in B movies when he appeared in this, though apparently not enough of one to actually get his name on the video box despite being the top-billed star! Soon after, he'd land the part of Detective Victor Isbecki on the hit TV series Cagney & Lacey and became a big 80s star, which led to notable villain roles in box office hits like The Karate Kid and Rambo II, which he's best remembered for today. Now in his late 70s, he's been enjoying something of a career resurgence thanks to the Karate Kid reboot, Cobra Kai. Good for him, but unfortunately this isn't a good showcase for his talents and he's stuck playing a bland hunk romantic hero role. The most developed character is actually the second female lead played by veteran TV actress Camacho, who gives the film's lone standout performance. At one point she even gets to go on a long, deranged monologue about her traumatic childhood while locked away in a padded isolation cell!

The associate producer was Anne Spielberg, sister of Steven, and the editor was Burton Lee Harry, who'd later direct the "classic" SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT PART 2 (1987). IMDb has this listed as a 1983 release, but the copyright date in the end credits is 1980 and "Released in 1980" is written right on the United VHS box, which was, to my knowledge, the only home video release this ever received. It would occasionally pop up on TV in the 80s and 90s, both in the U.S. and UK, which is where most viewers saw it.

★1/2

Último deseo (1976)

... aka: Last Desire

... aka: People Who Own the Dark, The

... aka: Planeta ciego (Blind Planet)

Directed by:

León Klimovsky

As I've no doubt already pointed out elsewhere on this blog, I don't think director Klimovsky has really been given his due in horror circles. The fact his film THE WEREWOLF VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMAN (1971) helped to kick start the busy Spanish horror cycle of the 70s after it became a surprise international hit is only part of the reason why. He also cranked out over a dozen genre films in just one decade (an accomplishment back then; not so much now in the age of digital "filmmaking"), which makes him one of the most prolific genre directors of the entire decade, though again that's just a small part of his legacy. When one takes a look at Klimovsky's horrorography, they'll notice a lot of films that, on the surface, appear to be dredging up Universal Studios-style classic monsters for the umpteenth time. While it's true that his films are usually highly uneven, he never made what most would consider a true genre classic and he's not the visual stylist that many of his contemporaries were, what's usually not pointed out about his films is that he almost always puts a unique spin on tired tropes. 

Klimovsky's THE DRACULA SAGA (1972), for instance, mixes a Gothic vampire film with ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968) and delivers some genuine surprises along the way. THE VAMPIRES NIGHT ORGY (1974), another of his low budget bloodsucking yarns, is basically a warped version of Brigadoon (1954). When it came time for him to make his Frankenstein film, he instead delivered I HATE MY BODY! (1974), an amusing pseudo-feminist Nazi mad scientist romp about sexual politics. So it comes as no surprise that when Klimovsky decided to tackle a nuclear holocaust the resultant film was going to be anything but ordinary.

Though he made around 75 films in all genres, Klimovsky is best known these days for his numerous collaborations with Spanish horror legend Paul Naschy. Naschy is present here as well, only he's billed pretty far down the cast list and was never promoted as the film's actual star. Top-lining the cast of Euro-horror heavy hitters is sultry German-born Nadiuska. Now I've already written a little biographical information about this actress in my review for DEATH HAUNTS MONICA (1976) and don't want to repeat myself here only to say that when she did this film her fame was such that not only was she billed above the title but even her personal make-up artist was given a shout out in the opening credits. Still, she and Naschy are just two of the familiar faces in a cast filled with horror film regulars in what is actually something of an ensemble piece.

The film opens with numerous vignettes introducing all of the principal cast and, quite surprisingly, it does an above average job introducing its many characters and does so with a good deal of humor. Nadiuska plays Clara, a high priced call girl who's something of a veteran in her field and currently has pretty novice sex worker Marion (Julia Saly, another frequent Naschy collaborator and his co-star in THE NIGHT OF THE WEREWOLF) under her wing. Seemingly on the opposite end of the spectrum is Berta (Teresa Gimpera - NIGHT OF THE DEVILS), a busy homemaker with two young children whose insurance salesman husband is frequently out of town. Somewhere in the middle are a pair of in-demand models; Luna (Leona Devine) and Tania (Diana Polakov), but apparently even Vogue gigs aren't enough to pay all of one's bills. All five ladies are looking to pick up some extra cash "entertaining" wealthy men at a weekend party at the mansion home of Lily (Maria Perschy) and her lover Victor (Tomás Picó). Lily's home / brothel, called Vilmore, caters only to wealthy clientele and, being wealthy and all, they tend to be more perverted than the rest of us mere peasants.

Among the five men scheduled to attend the next party are esteemed academic Prof. William Fulton (Alberto de Mendoza - Horror Express), obese world-famous surgeon / chess aficionado Dr. Edward Robinson (Ricardo Palacios) and Robinson's colleague, Dr. Meisser (Emiliano Redondo). After receiving an urgent emergency phone call, a Russian ambassador (Barta Barri) has to cancel at the last minute and ends up sending his young attaché, Vasily Seriabrakov (Jess Franco film regular Antonio Mayans), in his place. Rounding out the quintet is Naschy's character, Mr. Borne, who's first seen sport shooting birds and making some kind of shady business deal. He's later described as being a former Foreign Legion soldier turned international drug trafficker turned adventurer / outdoorsman. While he may be a criminal, he's managed to never get caught, and he's rich, which means he's welcome there.

In a scene surpisingly similar to, yet predating, Kubrick's acclaimed Eyes Wide Shut by decades, the men are asked to go upstairs, put on robes and rubber monster masks and then meet their hostess down in the candle-lit cellar for a cult-like ceremony that involves food, booze, drugs and the five working girls, who have been hired to offer the men "pleasure without limits." Lily informs them that their "great master" is one Donatien Alphonse François aka the Marquis de Sade, which should give you some idea about the tastes of all of the socially-respectable male participants. However, the fun and games are interrupted by a sudden tremor in the home. A nuclear bomb has been dropped somewhere nearby. Venturing upstairs, they discover the two maids - Greta (Carmen Platero) and Anita (Estela Delgado) - have both been blinded by the blast and now have cloudy white eyes. While the underground cellar acted as a bomb shelter and spared the hedonists a similar fate, they'll soon have other, equally problematic issues to deal with...

Professor Fulton decides it would be best for them to stay put and only venture out whenever necessary, i.e. when their supplies are low. Due to radiation levels and nuclear fallout being carried there by the wind, he proposes mostly staying in the cellar for at least two months. However, they're short on food so the men venture out to find a local market. While in the village, they encounter a panhandler who's been blind from birth, who informs them that the villagers were having some kind of outdoor celebration when the bomb exploded and now everyone there has been blinded. They've since gathered at a local monastery. Victor loses his mind, starts murdering the blind villagers and has to be put down himself, but the damage is already done.

As the survivors await the radiation to reach them before they retreat to the cellar for awhile, tensions arise and everyone is at each other's throats. Berta turns out to be Lily's former lover, but left her for a "normal" life with husband and kids, and now the two have a chance to rekindle their relationship. Clara reveals that she survived a suicide attempt and now has a renewed desire to live, becoming romantically involved with Fulton. Having dealt the death blow to Victor himself, Dr. Robinson goes crazy, starts stripping off all of his clothes and crawls around on all fours snorting like a pig (!) and lapping up spilled milk from the floor.

Though now short on sight, the villagers are still able-bodied and none too happy about what Victor did. When Vasily and Marion go back into town to look around, they're surrounded by a mob and promptly murdered. The villagers eventually show up with rocks and sticks and lay siege on the home, determined to get inside and kill everyone, and this thing suddenly (though briefly) becomes something of a NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD rip-off, with crazed blind folks instead of zombies! They break windows, try to bust through doors and this even copies the NOTLD tension between Ben and Harry Cooper, except with Fulton and Borne arguing about whether or not it would be wise to retreat to the cellar. Once the ambush survivors are out of the house and on the run, the film takes a few unexpected turns before delivering a grim and surprisingly haunting finale.

I'd previously only seen the 82 minute English-language dub of this one and, while I enjoyed it, I much preferred this re-watch of the longer, restored, Spanish-language print, and am bumping my score up by half a star as a result. Yes, this is still flawed and somewhat disjointed even in its uncut form, but the script (written by Vicente Aranda, Gabriel Moreno Burgos and Joaquim Jordà) is more ambitious than usual, with well-placed laughs (including some absurdist humor that would be more at home in a surrealist film), inventive ideas, fairly solid characterizations and (gasp!) even elements of social commentary. Though it takes awhile to get to its more horrific content and is a bit light on exploitative elements, there's an unpredictability to the whole thing that more than makes up for it. 

The performances here are all pretty solid, most especially from leading ladies Nadiuska, Gimpera and Perschy, though I'm also quite surprised this never seems to register very highly for fans of Naschy. His macho, tactless character is one of his better roles and he's given a lot of sarcastic ("What do you suggest? That we teach them braille?") or just plain distasteful one-liners that are quite amusing.

In addition to cutting out over ten minutes, the English-dubbed version (supposedly prepped by Sean S. Cunningham) also Anglicized the credits and substituted portions of the original music score. After an extremely limited run in American theaters in 1980, this was issued on both Beta and VHS in 1981 by Sun Video Corporation. In 1987, it was reissued by Star Classics (who had the best cover art) and then laid dormant until Code Red resurrected the title in 2012 on DVD and then released a much-improved Blu-ray three years later. Canada and Spain are the only two other countries this appears to have been officially released in.

★★★