After spending a couple of days at Disneyland during the Christmas holiday season, I was reminded of this ecological disaster movie from the 1970’s. Witness people packed in to a space like sardines, witness the repeated equipment breakdowns and infrastructure collapse. And the air ain’t that great to breathe. I don’t think I ate anything remotely resembling the type of swill the people in “Soylent Green” are reduced to consuming though. Check it out. Another fine Charlton Heston performance is in store for you.
2024 UPDATE:
What I should have commented on back in time, when this post was first written, is the notion of coverup. The greatest coverup of all time!!!! Humans are being sustained through Government provided food that is derived from dead bodies! You may be partaking in your deceased neighbors’ remains or even munching on a dearly departed relative. HOW SICK A CONCEPT IS THIS?!!! As resources disappear and food sources vanish, why not recycle fellow, recently deceased humans? Wow. A revolting and shocking solution. Don’t worry. Your government would never participate in a coverup of this scale or lie outright to your face. Right?
Classic science fiction film starring Charlton Heston as an astronaut stranded on a planet where apes rule and humans are slaves/brutes hunted for sport and used for medical experimentation. The proceedings move along at a fairly steady pace thanks to Franklin Schaffner’s able direction. Ground breaking makeup work by John Chambers and a pun-filled, satiric script by Rod Serling. This movie caught the public’s imagination and four sequels, each weaker than the last, were spawned as a result. Very striking beginning to this film as Heston is the last astronaut to enter hyper sleep and the space ship passes through star fields and time before entering the Planet’s atmosphere. The scenes with the three astronauts traversing an arid landscape in search of water and any signs of life are marked by visuals of spectacular vistas of vast emptiness. Very haunting. My favorite film of the “Apes” series.
“Beneath the Planet of the Apes” is my favorite sequel in the ape picture cycle. Charlton Heston, “Taylor” and his companion, “Nova”, continue on their quest to find an Eden on the scorched planet away from the dominant species apes they have more than had their fill of following the telling of the first Ape movie, “Planet of the Apes”. The two end up being imprisioned by a mutant race of humans living among the nuclear war shattered ruins of New York city. The mutants worship a doomsday bomb that comes in to play later on in the movie. Enter James Franciscus as “Brent”, the only surviving astrounaut of a resue mission to find out what happened to Taylor and his crew who were lost to Earth after their space mission left them stranded on the Planet of the Apes. Well, needless to say things get a little wild as an ape expedition is mounted to explore the “Forbidden Zone”, a squalid, desert landscape which was more than likely one of the ground zero landing locations for nuclear missles in some far distant war. Let’s just say that the apes, the mutants and the remaining astronauts are not playing on the same page so conflict ensues. End of the World? You’ll find out.
A varied collection of unusual movie and music video clips.
