Last night, during a bout of insomnia, I flicked through pay-per-view hoping to find a movie worth watching. For some strange reason, the Disney sci-fi flick “the Black Hole” was in the queue. “I remember seeing that in the movie theater when I was ten years old! The end of that movie was so cool!” After a few more minutes flicking through the offerings and seeing nothing better, I figured “Sure, I knew it wouldn’t look anywhere near as cool as I remembered it, but what the hey?”
Gah! By the end of it, my mouth was hanging open in sheer disbelief at how bad it was. Kind of like this - :eek: This movie was like a subpar episode of “Voyager.” No, it made subpar Voyager episodes look GREAT in comparison. I would have been willing to accept the obvious blue-screen space visuals, but some of the “effects” verged into Ed Wood territory. Some particularly outstandingly bad points -
The flying robots. Of course, this was a post-Star Wars movie and it was apparently required by law that anything even vaguely science-fictiony had to have a cutesy-wootsy robot. They looked like they were made out of cardboard.
At one point, Yvette Mimieux states that their ship is on a mission to explore the universe for “habitable life.” WTF?
Exactly why is Mimieux’s character able to telepathically communicate with a robot?
A giant asteroid smashes into the ship. It is a gargantuan ball of flame - unlike say, a giant asteroid that IRL would be a great big ball of ice. I’d even be willing to overlook that rather unscientific visual, if the film-makers hadn’t insisted on showing the principle characters running away from the great big ball of flame, that would no doubt emit so much heat they should have all been instantly incinerated.
Anti-gravity wires! A character loses his grip, and starts floating away into space, with a little help from some conspicuously noticeable wiring.
In the ‘climactic’ escape via climbing up to the shuttle, the heroes spend more than a few minutes in the void of space, even yelling to one another, with no effect whatsoever.
Two words - Ernest. Borgnine.
The ending vision of Hell was still kind of cool, but not enough to make up for that plodding, plotless mess. If only there were a black hole to chuck this film into.
So, have you ever re-viewed a movie that you know would be dated, but was worse than you imagined?
This movie was a big Christmas day premiere on ITV or BBC in the UK when I was a kid. My mother insisted I sat down to eat Christmas dinner instead though, and as it was before home VCRs were about I never got to see it for years.
Read the book many times over though and to this day something about the “forbidden” knowledge makes it irristable to me now, love watching it flaws and all. Best things are the **music **and the hell ending - very creepy, must have been quite a shock to audiences of its day.
This weekend I rewatched The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Gawd, what a horrible piece of dreck! The acting, the story, the dialog, the characters - all awful and embarrassing. I can’t believe I liked it at one point. I somehow managed to watch the whole thing, but I have no idea why. I’m stupider for it now…
I saw The Black Hole with my mom :eek: was I was 12. As we were standing in line to buy tickets outside the theater, a woman in a rowdy group across the street shouted, “Hey, wanna see MY black hole?”
I also remember seeing my first PG movie, Meteor, in the same theater that same year. As an adult, years later I watched it again and pronounced it dreck. But my twelve-year-old self was very disturbed by my first sight of a dead body onscreen (a bloody arm sticking out from under a pile of rubble).
At first I misread the OP as The Black Cauldron, and I was thinking, , that’s not a scifi movie, and I liked it!
I’ve never seen The Black Hole, but I remember seeing the trailer on Youtube awhile back. It looked awful. I like bad scifi movies from the '50s and '60s but once you get around the '70s they pass good-bad and go straight to bad-bad.
My dad took my brother and I to see both Star Trek TMP & Black Hole, he fell asleep during TMP but remained awak for BH so I guess it was somewhat entertaining. I have the BH Overture on my I-pod.
Pump Up The Volume with Christian Slater. My wife and I remembered it as some coming of age, rebel against authority movie from our youths that we both enjoyed. It was on TBS or something a few months ago, and we watched it. It was brutally bad.
Yep! The big glass ship gets destroyed, and the heroes simply walk out into the void in order to reach the escape pod / shuttle. That’s when one of the characters starts to ‘float away’ with help from some very visible wires.
I have always maintained the Maximillian doesn’t get his due among the all time movie monsters. That bastard is mean, violent, sadistic, evil,calculating and just plain ol’ creepy and menacing.
Definately the Scariest Monster I ever saw in movies as a kid.
The Black Hole - I must have seen it when it came out, so I was 10/11. I remember being really freaked out by it, the idea of infinity and getting sucked into a void.
Apparently it got nominated for Best Visual Effects!
, that’s not a scifi movie, and I liked it!