{"id":3372,"date":"2016-03-30T21:03:49","date_gmt":"2016-03-31T02:03:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=3372"},"modified":"2016-03-30T21:03:49","modified_gmt":"2016-03-31T02:03:49","slug":"belated-movie-reviews-34","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2016\/03\/30\/belated-movie-reviews-34\/","title":{"rendered":"Belated Movie Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

When The Gamma People<\/a><\/strong><\/em> (1955) came across our screen, my Arts Editor and I didn’t know what to expect. To our burning, frightened eyes were revealed: vile attacks on innocent journalists; packs of rampaging children; grotesque carnivals; and mad scientists. What fun! But is this a progenitor film? Consider:<\/p>\n

It takes place in a fictional European country named Gudavia, numbering amongst its inhabitants a Colonel Koerner, whose bearing and activities might be best employed in the movie The Mouse That Roared<\/a><\/strong><\/em>, or, stepped up a trifle, grouped with the antagonists of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang;<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>if neither of these movies have passed your optic nerve, then think of bumbling, narcissistic fools occupying high places with low faces, in countries that never existed …<\/p>\n

We encountered a\u00a0group of men, and possibly women, with horrible, frozen faces and unreasoning motivation for destruction, controlled by a whistle. \u00a0I thought we might be seeing the predecessors to zombies, those\u00a0speedsters\u00a0from Zombieland<\/a><\/strong><\/em>, not the slow, inevitable creatures from the original Night of the Living Dead<\/a><\/strong><\/em>; not being a scholar of zombies, I cannot say how the cladistics<\/a><\/em> work out…<\/p>\n

Upon command, a\u00a0group of children attacked\u00a0a\u00a0man with little mercy, upon which my Arts Editor remarked, “Oh! \u00a0Reminds me of Star Trek. \u00a0He must be a Grup<\/a><\/em>!”<\/p>\n

And yet another Star Trek reference: the grotesque masks worn at the carnival brought to mind the horrible video visage seen in\u00a0The Man Trap<\/a><\/strong><\/em>. \u00a0Since this film\u00a0predates the original Trek, I can only assume that the costumes were mothballed after the movie was released and later resurrected to be used as props in other productions.<\/p>\n

All the comparison\u00a0was just\u00a0for fun; we were confused from the beginning, in the collision of farce with mad scientist, zombies and packs of feral children, rounded out by a gruff American journalist, and his slick, somewhat swishy\u00a0British colleague who stumble into this circus of a country.<\/p>\n

And for all of it, it’s not badly acted. In particular, Michael Caridia<\/a> as Hugo, the obnoxious,\u00a0Nietzsche-like boy who undergoes conversion to, well, humanity, actually pulls off the entire ridiculous role rather well. And the British journalist was played by\u00a0Leslie Phillips<\/a>, who went on to provide the voice for the Sorting Hat<\/em> in the Harry Potter series. So we can see there is some talent here.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for this film, in the end the actors’ talent was eclipsed by the unfocused randomness of the plot. \u00a0All in all, a merry little romp that I can’t quite recommend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When The Gamma People (1955) came across our screen, my Arts Editor and I didn’t know what to expect. To our burning, frightened eyes were revealed: vile attacks on innocent journalists; packs of rampaging children; grotesque carnivals; and mad scientists. What fun! But is this a progenitor film? Consider: It \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3372"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3376,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3372\/revisions\/3376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}