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Post by morrisondylanfan on Aug 23, 2019 0:02:27 GMT
Hi all,I recently watched Morning Patrol (1987) for the first time,and it got me wondering about what other films are (the best term I could think up) sparse Sci-Fi/ Fantasy movies? The main recurring motifs I've noticed are: A Ambient soundtrack. A Post-Apocalypse or Fantasy setting where it appears most of humanity has vanished/ the lead character is trapped in one large location. The movie filmed mostly outdoors,in vast,empty locations filled with crumbling buildings and wrapped in overgrown plants. The titles I've seen that tick this list are:  Morning Patrol (1987)  Alice or The Last Escapade (1977)  Black Moon (1975)  The Survivalist (2015) And finally,the first act of Return to Oz (1985)  Thanks. |
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Post by koskiewicz on Aug 23, 2019 0:31:00 GMT
Time of the Wolf
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biker1
Junior Member
@biker1
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Post by biker1 on Aug 23, 2019 1:35:47 GMT
high life (2018) is a recent Claire Denis movie. A sombre spaceship drama, beginning with a lone space traveler and child, then flashbacking to the onboard events that explain his predicament. Slow pacing won't suit all viewers, but a quietly bleak science fiction diversion for those up for it.
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Post by hitchcockthelegend on Aug 23, 2019 1:38:46 GMT
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Post by manfromplanetx on Aug 23, 2019 5:32:34 GMT
Written, directed, and filmed by Chris Marker, La jetee (1962) is an imaginative evocative short film about a post-nuclear WW3 time travel experiment of returning to the past of the future. Sparse, told through still photos narration and sound with a setting beneath the ruins of Paris...   |
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Post by wmcclain on Aug 23, 2019 11:42:17 GMT
Late August at the Hotel Ozone (1967), directed by Jan Schmidt. Aka The End of August at the Hotel Ozone. Decades after the apocalypse, all the men are dead and we have a wandering band of young women, lead by an old woman who is the only one who remembers the world from before the war. The girls are tough and unruly, but they obey their leader, who still hopes to find other survivors. But it has been many years. The question here: the girls have never known civilization. Do they retain any degree of compassion or are they just savages? When they hear an old gramophone, is it music to them or just noise? The answer is a dark one. Not many happy stories at the end of the world. Post-apocalyptic stories are natural vehicles for tiny budget independent filmmaking. You just need countryside, abandoned buildings, loose junk and surplus survival gear. Talent and vision help, too. Some cruelty to animals in this one: a snake, a dog, and we see a cow shot and butchered by a mob of eager young women. Really. They also fish with hand grenades. On DVD from Facets Video, a company I have not encountered for a long time. They used to have a rental catalog the size of a phone book. Online now. Czech audio, with English subtitles burned into the image. Is this the original aspect ratio? I can't find a reference. The disc comes with a booklet which includes an interview with the director. Fun facts: - The film was funded by the Czech Army, which had a film unit and no idea what they were up to. Yes, the filmmakers were soldiers at the time. Everyone else involved were friends from school.
- The locations were military "no man's lands", destroyed in the War and never rebuilt.
- The girls were non-actors chosen for athletic ability. Auditions involved army obstacle courses.
- The film had no distribution. A few years later the director got an anonymous note that the Army was burning old film projects the next day; it included directions on locating his film cans. He went in and rescued his movie.
- Eventually it slipped out into international film festivals and he got an award from the Pope.
- The story was inspired by On the Beach (1959) (the book).
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Post by wmcclain on Aug 23, 2019 11:44:12 GMT
The Quiet Earth (1985), directed by Geoff Murphy. A guilty scientist -- who did not mean to wake up at all -- awakens to find the entire population of Earth has been raptured away, leaving their unmade beds and uneaten meals. Is it the result of an experiment gone wrong? Reality seems unstable. Has he actually slipped into another universe, and what happens next? I take this less as a science fiction film and as more of a metaphysical fable, structured in the classical form of: - Hell: the last man on Earth goes insane, but after blasting a statue of Christ with a shotgun and a close brush with suicide, enters...
- Purgatory: where he gets it together and first meets his companions in the afterlife, who bring love and conflict. His sacrifice for them takes him to...
- Heaven: the final scene, in an entirely new and strange reality.
I saw this New Zealand picture in the theater but remembered almost nothing about it, apart from the fabulous final scene of a giant ringed planet rising over a strange ocean. Now I see that mirrors the opening scene: the sun rises every day but is no less fabulous. I don't see it in the credits, but this is almost a remake of The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959): white man, black man (actually Maori), white woman. The DVD is out of print in North America but I was able to get it from Netflix. Import DVDs and Blu-rays are available. My rental had no subtitles but had ancient Closed Captioning. A little work with MakeMKV, CCExtractor and mkvmerge produces a mkv file with lovely SRT subtitles. Accomplishing what the studio should have done. A commentary track by the producer gives many production details. Shooting deserted city streets is not that difficult in New Zealand because everyone takes weekends off and the downtowns are deserted. He says that -- to their amazement -- the film did quite well. 
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Post by Fox in the Snow on Aug 23, 2019 14:25:02 GMT
Apart from taking place almost entirely indoors, I think this might qualify: Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010), the first film from Panos Cosmatos, the director of last year's cult hit Mandy. |
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Post by teleadm on Aug 23, 2019 15:22:55 GMT
The first movies I came to think of was:  Jean-Luc Goddard's Alphaville 1965, where a U.S. secret agent (Eddie Constantine) is sent to the distant space city of Alphaville where he must find a missing person and free the city from its tyrannical ruler.  Ranald MacDougall's The World, The Flesh and the Devil 1959. A miner (Harry Belafonte) trapped in a cave-in resurfaces, and upon discovering mankind has been wiped out in a nuclear holocaust, sets out to find other survivors.  Steve Sekely's The Day of the Triffids 1963. After an unusual meteor shower leaves most of the human population blind, a merchant navy officer (Howard Keel) must find a way to conquer tall, aggressive plants which are feeding on people and animals. If I've missunderstood the OP's intentions of this thread, I can easily delate this post. |
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Post by manfromplanetx on Aug 23, 2019 21:37:19 GMT
It has been some years but I do remember enjoying this low budget film from Roger Corman... The Last Woman On Earth (1960) The film tells the story of three survivors who are confronted with a mysterious apocalypse, which appears to have wiped out all human life on earth...   |
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Post by morrisondylanfan on Aug 23, 2019 21:46:02 GMT
Thanks for the excellent images Spike,with Robinson Crusoe on Mars looking so bright and lush. Although I've not yet seen the film, Cormac McCarthy's The road was what came to mind earlier today as the novel version of sparse Sci-Fi. I was going to mention it in the next weekly thread, but since we are on the subject, I would be really interested to read how you and manfromplanetx find Morning Patrol (1987) to be. Most reviews call it a Sci-Fi Neo-Noir, due to writer/director blending his written dialogue with large extracts from Raymond Chandler/ Philip K. Dick & Daphne Du Maurier being mixed in as dialogue,along with a number of Film Noir clips in the movie. The IMDb page: www.imdb.com/title/tt0093791/?ref_=ttfc_fc_ttWith Eng Subs: www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QU7087yKU&t=3s
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Post by morrisondylanfan on Aug 23, 2019 21:52:33 GMT
The first movies I came to think of was: Jean-Luc Goddard's Alphaville 1965, where a U.S. secret agent (Eddie Constantine) is sent to the distant space city of Alphaville where he must find a missing person and free the city from its tyrannical ruler. If I've missunderstood the OP's intentions of this thread, I can easily delate this post. Good call on the JLG, teleadm. The use of real locations gives the setting of Alphaville a striking sparse Sci-Fi appearance. 
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Post by fangirl1975 on Aug 24, 2019 17:32:34 GMT
Night Of The Comet(1984) is a play on this subgenre.
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Post by Prime etc. on Aug 25, 2019 1:50:50 GMT
In the Year 2889 - 1967
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Post by morrisondylanfan on Aug 26, 2019 0:37:17 GMT
The Quiet Earth (1985), directed by Geoff Murphy. A guilty scientist -- who did not mean to wake up at all -- awakens to find the entire population of Earth has been raptured away, leaving their unmade beds and uneaten meals. Is it the result of an experiment gone wrong? Reality seems unstable. Has he actually slipped into another universe, and what happens next? I take this less as a science fiction film and as more of a metaphysical fable, structured in the classical form of: - Hell: the last man on Earth goes insane, but after blasting a statue of Christ with a shotgun and a close brush with suicide, enters...
- Purgatory: where he gets it together and first meets his companions in the afterlife, who bring love and conflict. His sacrifice for them takes him to...
- Heaven: the final scene, in an entirely new and strange reality.
I saw this New Zealand picture in the theater but remembered almost nothing about it, apart from the fabulous final scene of a giant ringed planet rising over a strange ocean. Now I see that mirrors the opening scene: the sun rises every day but is no less fabulous. I don't see it in the credits, but this is almost a remake of The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959): white man, black man (actually Maori), white woman. The DVD is out of print in North America but I was able to get it from Netflix. Import DVDs and Blu-rays are available. My rental had no subtitles but had ancient Closed Captioning. A little work with MakeMKV, CCExtractor and mkvmerge produces a mkv file with lovely SRT subtitles. Accomplishing what the studio should have done. A commentary track by the producer gives many production details. Shooting deserted city streets is not that difficult in New Zealand because everyone takes weekends off and the downtowns are deserted. He says that -- to their amazement -- the film did quite well. Hi WMC,I hope you had a good weekend,and I first want to say that I've not forgotten your excellent Silent Running (1972) thread/post (I've been distracted by offline things.) Thank you for the tantalising details on Quiet Earth,with the Arrow Blu being one I'll now keep an eye on during the X-Mas sales: arrowfilms.com/product-detail/the-quiet-earth-blu-ray/FCD1764
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Post by vegalyra on Aug 29, 2019 18:19:15 GMT
This is a fairly low budget (I imagine most of the money went to the leads) but entertaining post apocalyptic film, with Brynner and von Sydow nonetheless... The Ultimate Warrior  New York, after some type of apocalyptic event. Brynner is a mercenary for hire/traveler on his way to an island off the coast where apparently he has some family. Von Sydow has an encampment with some survivors in the city which he has a seemingly ever loosening control over and a pregnant daughter. Food is getting low and scavengers outside of the encampment continually attempt to infiltrate it and get to a garden which one of Von Sydow's followers has grown (apparently the biotoxic/chemical warfare wiped out all the crops) after being genetically modified. Brynner is hired by Von Sydow to protect the encampment from the scavengers and eventually it comes to pass that Brynner must escort Von Sydow's daughter to safety with the genetically modified seeds.... |
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