[the Uruk-hai's the least of your problems, kiddo]
5. The Black Hole (1979)
This little masterpiece came out before I was born, but still managed to spread its dark, dark, tentacles throughout my nubile mind. To this day I haven’t been able to gather the strength necessary to re-watch the damn thing. As a SPACE.com article asked, twenty-five years after its original released date: “Does Disney’s ‘The Black Hole’ Still Suck?” I can’t imagine how not.
There’s not a whole lot to say about this Disney crap-fest except that it might be the oddest movie in the studio’s entire, monumental library. From what I can remember (and it’s not much – I must have been five at the time), it’s something of a hybrid between Star Wars and Time Bandits…if both were on a shit-ton of acid. Someone involved (or maybe everyone involved) must have had a raging hard-on for robots because I recall unnecessary reveal after unnecessary reveal where humans are robots, robots are humans, and all these robots chase after everyone else like a pack of dogs in heat. The real monster, sans the robots, is Maximilian Schell, who 
plays Dr. Reinhart, effectively making Darth Vader look like your grandma. He’s terrifying. I don’t really remember his master plans, but he lives alone on some massive ship orbiting a black hole (hence that creative title), obsessed with reaching the other side in some sort of misguided attempt at attaining immortality. Not really sure who gets paid to write this. Extremely dark, and as I remember it, confusing, the movie was bleak, in that whole “oh-shit-we’re-leaving-the-70’s-and starting-the-depressing-80’s” way. The tagline, “A Journey That Begins Where Everything Ends”, doesn’t even 
make any fucking sense.
In a lot of ways this movie falls into the same category as Time Bandits (number 8 on my list), which is that it was marketed towards kids, but really shouldn’t have been. It’s just one major pile of unmitigated and unintelligible creepiness. Between this and Terminator 2, the eighties only really convinced me of one thing: stay the fuck away from robots. And consider becoming a neo-luddite.
Aw, I vaguely remember seeing this as a kid. Actually, I think the only think I remember about it is the awesome little robot in it, and the marketing for it.
ReplyDeleteThe one movie I remember scaring the crap out of me as a kid was Gremlins. I have a clear memory of going to see that as a kid, and then wanting to sleep in my parents bedroom that night. When I got to my parent's room, my mom, slightly annoyed at being woken up, told me that 'you guys are too old to be scared by that'. I looked over and my older brother (by 2 1/2 years) was already sound asleep in a corner of the room.
I think Gremlins is one of those movies I just stayed far, far away from. Any movie about a cute and cuddly creature turning into a ferocious man-eater is not game for a seven-year-old.
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