Sarah Connor Movie Shout-outs, and More
Aliens in Love, The Sarah Connor Chronicles
, an Italian Cinderella and more movie answers!
Question: I know this isn't strictly speaking a movie question, but I thought you might know the answer anyway. In the third episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, there's a terminator that's putting together a whole terminator factory, and there's a company truck with a Japanese name - is it a reference to something in the movies?
And is the story Sarah keeps talking about from a movie? it sounds kind of familiar to me. Thanks - Greg
FlichChick: The name on the truck is "Tetsuo," and it's not an allusion to the
Terminator movies. It's sort of an in-joke, a sly reference to a bizarre Japanese movie called
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), about a man who begins finding scraps of metal growing out of his body and is gradually transformed into a perverse human-machine hybrid.
The story Sarah talks about is a Jewish folktale in which a rabbi builds an artificial man - a golem - from clay to protect residents of the Jewish ghetto, only to have the creature turn on them. It's a variation on the archetypal story of the man-man monster, and the thematic connections to
The Terminator saga is pretty clear. Unless you're a silent-movie buff, you probably haven't seen
Der Golem (1920), but this image (
http://www.ghostdroppings.com/images/photodroppings/golem.jpg) is a staple of histories of the horror film, so you might have seen it before. There's also a pretty poor 1967 U.K. movie called
It! in which a reanimated golem, under the control of a repressed, alienated nutcase (Roddy McDowell), is unleashed on swinging London. You might have caught that one on TV.
Question: I'm trying to find the name of a movie that I think is from the '60s. It's a Cinderella-like story about a girl who lives far out in the desert and meets a prince: I used to think he was played by Omar Sharif, but I can't find anything in his credits that matches. She goes to the castle where they're having a contest to see who will be his wife; it involves washing the most dishes without breaking any, and one of the other contestants uses her ring to slice breaks in other girls' dishes, The female star is wearing a large orange dress and is very beautiful - but I know she's not Sophia Loren. I'd appreciate any suggestions. - R. Bradfield
FlickChick: Francesco Rosi's
More Than a Miracle/
Cinderella - Italian Style/
C'era una volta... (1967); the original Italian title best conveys the movie's fairy-tale tone. It stars
Omar Sharif as a prince whose mother (Dolores del Rio) orders him to get married, now, and a stunning peasant girl (who
is
Sophia Loren, I'm afraid) eventually wins the competition. It's sort of like a once-upon-a-time version of
The Bachelor.
The dishwashing competition is there, as is the cheating rival, so this is definitely the movie you want. The bad news is that if you want to see it you're going to have to go the bootleg route, because I can't find any sign of a legitimate VHS or DVD release of it.
Question: I love your column and in addition to my question below, I would like to know your thoughts on the Grindhouse double feature.
I saw this movie on TV years ago and have spent hours researching what it could be, but I never get anywhere. The story involves two human-looking aliens who have come to destroy the earth: One appears as a man, the other as a woman, and I believe it's set in the 1950s. There's some light romantic comedy when the male alien falls for a blonde single mother in a rural setting; her son sees him as a father figure. There's a wacky driving scene - I think it even has silly banjo music - where the alien can't control the woman's pickup truck.
He decides to scrub the mission and stop the female alien from infiltrating a nearby military base that houses a nuclear bomb with a device that will multiply its destructive power to Earth-destroying levels. I think she flirts her way in by wearing a blue satin evening dress, but the male alien deactivates the device with only seconds to spare.
The human woman asks, "If you're alien, why do you look like us?" to which he replies "We don't look like you you look like us," meaning that Earth is a long-forgotten colony. It was probably made for TV and the actor playing the alien looks just a little like a more classically handsome Dominique Pinon, while the human woman slightly resembles Laura Dern. - Kelvin
FlickChick: OK, this is a research answer rather than an "I've seen it" answer, but much - though not all - of what you describe seems to match up with a 1970 made-for-TV science-fiction movie called
The Love War. It involves representatives of two alien planets, six from each, fighting a winner-take-all war on neutral ground: Earth. One male soldier (
Lloyd Bridges), lands in a small California town, where he falls in love with a human woman (the great, gloriously blonde
Angie Dickinson) and finds himself questioning his mission. It's not set in the 1950s, but a movie that debuted in 1970 was made in the '60s, so that's not so far off. And there's a serious twist involving the main female alien.
The aliens look perfectly human to the naked eye, but have special visors - like Cyclops' glasses in
X-Men - that let them see each other for what they are. (I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking of John Carpenter's pulpy 1988
They Live right about now.) There are
clips of The Love War on YouTube that make me pretty curious to see it.
But like many TV-movies of the '70s, it's seriously commercially unavailable. It can, however, be downloaded - just poke around a little online.
As to
Grindhouse, I'm going to refer you to my
review.
Question: After searching for hours, I came across your site and thought I'd ask you about this movie. I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the early 1980s, preceded by trailers for a few horror movies. Of the two I remember, one was Rabid and the other was something about someone killing people or injecting them with a large syringe full of green fluid. The name was something -nator or -cator eradicator, exterminator, intimidator or something along those lines. This has been driving me nuts and I'd really appreciate knowing the title. - Sue
FlickChick:
Re-Animator (1985), directed by
Stuart Gordon and adapted by
Dennis Paoli from the story by H.P. Lovecraft. It's easily available and a real blast; I vividly remember the giddy, astonished vibe at the critics' screening I attended. I'm not generally a huge fan of humor and horror but Paoli and Gordon - the cofounder and longtime artistic director of Chicago's acclaimed Organic Theatre,
Re-Animator was his movie debut - nail it.
Send your movie questions to
FlickChick.
Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast
TV Guide Talk.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the
Movie Talk vodcast.
