sf, page 33 of 34

I distinctly remember seeing this film in the old East Grinstead cinema, probably as the B-movie to some more major film. The trouble is, it was released in 1973, which would have made me about 2 years old at the time, so perhaps it was a re-release I saw, or it just took a while to reach these shores from France, where it was originally released as La Planète sauvage.

The reason it stuck in my memory was that I wasn’t feeling too well at the time, having something of a stomach upset, and I had to leave the cinema when there was scene of two alien Draags sucking little particles of food from a big yellow cloud, which made me feel queasy! Since then, every so often I’ve wondered just what was that film with that scene in? (Also what was the B-movie which had no dialogue, just a long battle between two medieval knights, one all in black?) And then along came the answer, released on DVD.

Fantastic Planet is a French animation created by director René Laloux and French/Polish artist/writer Roland Topor (whose novel, The Tenant, has just been re-released with an intro by a favourite author of mine, Thomas Ligotti — funny how these things connect). It’s fantasy/SF with an obvious sixties psychedelic feel, not to mention an unintentional hint of Monty Python, as, at the start, we see a woman running in fear through a sparse forest before being toyed with and captured by an enormous blue hand. The blue hand proves to be that of a Draag, the native giant race of this planet, who imported human beings (called Oms — hommes in French, geddit?) as pets, only to find them escaping into the wild and breeding like rabbits. As a result, every three years there has to be a de-omming by a series of nightmare devices, like the sticky spheres in the pic below.

The first half of the film follows a young Om as he grows up pet to a female Graak child, being dressed up in ridiculous clothes and subjected to various unintentional cruelties, till he escapes, taking with him one of the Draags’ automatic learning devices. He is found by a group of wild humans who use the learning device in their battle for freedom, culminating in a rocket journey to the “Savage Planet” which orbits the Draags’ home planet, and which the Draags visit regularly via meditation.

Along the way, there’s some pretty trippy visuals, including a scene of four Draags entering a meditative state where first their clothes change colours, then their bodies transmute into abstract shapes. The Draags’ planet is full of animate vegetation and creatures that prey on the Oms, lapping them up with sticky tongues like the ants they are, giving the setting a real Bosch-like feeling. The soundtrack (playable in isolation on the DVD) is rather typical of the era, aiming to transport you to another planet with its ethereal, oohy vocals and heavily chorused organs, but regularly dumping you firmly in the sixties when it brings in a funky wah-wah guitar or (worst of all) a rather clichéd sax solo for the moment when one of the Om females does a strip-tease as part of the wild humans’ religious rites.

Interesting to see it again after all this time, though.

I can’t remember how I first came across this album now. Mojo listed it as number one in their “Top 50 Eccentric Albums” feature a couple of years back, and its opening track was sampled to eerie effect on Alan Moore & Tim Perkins’ The Highbury Working, in the Ignis: No. 1 With A Bullet segment, repeatedly playing the line “What’s in store for me” after Moore recounts how Joe Meek shot his landlady then ended his own life with a single-barrelled shotgun. But I think it was while doing a Google search for weird science fiction soundtracks (something I’m into — see my Spacewreck project for my own attempt) that I came across it on Amazon and ordered it.

This has to be one of the strangest albums ever released. Not necessarily strangest-sounding, just strangest. Entirely Joe Meek‘s concept (though arranged by Rod Freeman and performed by The Blue Men), it manages to mix late-50s guitar pop with mid-60s trippiness as Meek invites us on an audio journey to the moon — well, his version of the moon anyway — to “Hear A New World”. “Without it,” he says in his liner notes, “you have discovered only one third of outer space” — politely assuming his listeners have gone even that far. (His success with that anthem of space-age optimism,Telstar, was two years in the future.)

The result feels like a glimpse into some childhood fantasy world, so long-cherished it has passed into objective reality. Rather like the Demons, Witches, Imps and so on of E R Eddison’s The Worm Ourobouros, Joe Meek’s moon is inhabited by Dribcots, Sarooes and Globbots. The Globbots are “happy, jolly little beings and as they parade before us you can almost see their cheeky blue-coloured faces.” (Meek tried to get his band, The Blue Men, to wear space-suits and paint their faces blue while playing live, but they were none too keen. If only he’d waited ten years, he’d have had trouble trying to stop them from doing it.) The Dribcots, meanwhile, have a “Space Boat” that “looks rather like an egg, and it floats about 100 yards from the surface of the ground. It glides about 20 m.p.h… It is driven by huge inductance coils…” The liner notes are peppered with this sort of specific detail, giving the whole thing the air of something Meek actually witnessed rather than made up. (Elsewhere, in the notes to “The Bub Light”, he says, with the searching-for-words air of an alien-abductee’s account, “This is a wonderful sight — a great patch of the sky becomes filled with different coloured lights, almost I should imagine like the end of a rainbow, except that each light takes on a different shape… This lasts in our time about ten hours…”) Unfortunately, the Globbots and Dribcots are represented in their respective tracks by Pinky and Perky-style sped-up voices which, along with a military marching drum, gives some sections of the album the feel of a cartoon soundtrack. The Sarooes, however, are a “rather sad people” whose life is “a hard struggle”; “they have a form of rationing which is a strain and they seem always to be sad”. Rather like the postwar Brits of Meek’s childhood, perhaps. The sad Sarooes get two tracks, the first of which, “Love Dance of the Sarooes”, describes the way these green people “dance for almost four hours non-stop, and then fast for three days”, and their music is certainly at the moodier, weirder end of this album’s spectrum.

It’s when the music breaks free of the constraints of 50s teen pop to move into the genuinely weird, with wooshy sound effects, Hawaiian guitar and detuned pianos, that it really gets going. “Glob Waterfall” is a moody mix of atmospherics and cymbal crescendos that wouldn’t be out of place on an early Doctor Who soundtrack (as in the sort of library music released on Doctor Who: Music From The Tenth Planet — a CD that’s a bit over-priced for 19 minutes of music, though). “Valley of No Return” sounds like some 60s western movie’s exit music, though oddly is not one of the handful of tracks Meek recycled for The Outlaws’ western-themed instrumental album Dream of the West.

This CD, from RPM records, comes packaged with a half-hour Joe Meek monologue on his life and work, and a clip from a 1964 World In Action episode about the record industry. A real oddity, a real — dare I say it? — space oddity.

Zathura is, essentially, a space version of Jumanji. Both films are about a magical game whose every turn throws its players into a series of fantastical events or challenges based around a certain theme. (With Jumanji it was jungles. Both films are adaptations of books by US childrens’ author Chris Van Allsburg.) In Zathura, once young Danny has wound up the clockwork game and pressed the battered “GO” button, their father’s house is transported into space and subjected to, amongst other things, a robot rampage, attack by Zorgons, and a visit from a passing astronaut.

It’s plenty of fun. I liked the banter between bickering brothers Danny and Walter (“That’s your robot?” “At least I’ve got a robot”), and the whole thing came close to conjuring that special excitement you feel at a certain age when you see films and totally get lost in some zany little world of pure adventure. (Which happened for me with The Goonies in 1985.)

But it doesn’t really have much substance. Once the game gets going, for a while it just feels like a bunch of disconnected episodes. It only starts to develop a more emotionally meaningful strand with the appearance of the astronaut, whose identity eventually provides a somewhat mind-boggling twist. Also, despite being set in space, the film has a more closed-in feel than Jumanji, because although you get the occasional awe-inspiring shot of an enormous planet or sun, the action is basically limited to the house. There’s quite a funny suspense moment when the older brother, Walter, gets a wish, just after arguing with his brother for the n-th time, but aside from that, once its hour and a half is over — and unless you’re a kid — Zathura doesn’t really linger, aside from a distinct feeling of having just had some fun.