Watched Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain last night.

What a strange movie that was.

Yeah, it was a little too much for me, I had found it at a free bid outside a discount used book, CD, DVD store back in TN.
No case just the disc. Lots of stuff that I will never forget but I feel that these 70s films are all the same after awhile.
This, Night Porter, Dammed, salo etc all pushing the limits at the time of censorship and now they are worshiped but haven't really done anything since.

I feel Fellini is the only stand out true director of these times. But its also like art, if you go around looking at lower priced art under a grand
you will see the styles that are from certain decades and people don't do that stuff anymore, just the fad for 1 or 2 decades.

Anyway just finished watching Golden Bat (1966) [LSTD01051]
Had to watch one side then the second side a few days later.
Fun live action Tokusatsu, wish there was more, teddanson needs to do a page about the golden one, I would read that.
Seems that this is the 2nd or 3rd film that they did and that Ogon, hes a character from the 30s!!!

Funny thing about that, I also acquired a copy of E. Elias Merhige's "Begotten" for free because the video store owner who I'd been working for a while had it in the backroom for ages and I was the only person even remotely interested in it (I just told him I'd read an article about it once). I think I've only ever watched it once and I think The Holy Mountain is a relatively easy act to follow compared to that one.

And that reminds me of this other time this woman came in looking for some DVDs that'd play in the backseat monitors of her car so her kids would have something to watch and I decided to find out why they didn't work, turned out the player installed in her car was Region 1 which meant that there was pretty much nothing she could play for her kids that'd be subbed or dubbed in Finnish. I wonder if she ever found anyone who could change it to Region 2.

Re-watched Alien for the first time in over a decade, still great. I think I got more out of it this time now that I've worked with people like Dallas, i.e. people who don't possess any particular leadership qualifications and are presumably only in charge because someone has to be.

Something I regret to this day is that I saw Spaceballs before I saw this movie, which took some of the air out of John Hurt's big scene the first time I watched it.

I watched the little things on HBO Max. It wasn’t a great movie. The last 5 mins had 2 really entertaining but small twists. I did enjoy the last few minutes because of that. You have to watch the entire movie to understand these twists so I don’t know. I guess it’s a good watch if you don’t have anything else to do. The films resembles Seven but not on par.

i just found Gerry Anderson's SPACE;1999 on remastered SHOUT FACTORY DVD, and decided to give it a spin.

WOW; the 70's wonkiness is R.E.A.L. it is hilarious!!!

as it happens, Episode 4, "Ring Around the Moon" is very special indeed, as i remember seeing it as a boy,
somewhere from the late-80's/early/mid-90's-ish, thereabouts, i believe.

all of my adult life, i occasionally recalled some sort of oddball Sci-Fi show i saw as a kid
where some manner of alien brain was continually whispering "WE HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE"
in response to some guy's persistent string of questions about the universe, and then up and exploding and dying over it all.

well, i had long assumed that that had to have been DOCTOR WHO or something,
but it so turns out that SPACE;1999's "Ring Around the Moon" was my culprit all along!!

indeed, while i remembered the gist of it well enough, the eyeball space-brain thing was actually repeatedly intoning "WE ACKNOWLEDGE"
in response to our hero Captain's series of facts about the brain alien's long-gone race.

Essentially, i remembered it well, considering, and it was worth the price of this silly, silly vintage series alone
to finally, FINALLY complete the circle on this personal childhood memory...

HAHA I just picked up a copy of Spaceballs on DVD last week for .50 cents.
Need to watch that one again.

Coincidentally, I just recently finished watching season 1 of that show! Apparently Space 1999 was shown on Finnish television way back in the 70s but got canned because of all the parents complaining. Combine that with the last minute cancelation of the broadcast of the original Night of the Living Dead in the 90s and the general distaste for sci-fi (All four Star Trek shows except the original were ended abruptly, which was particularly egregious with DS9 since they ended the series on a massive cliffhanger), I still have an intense loathing for Finnish TV networks.

I love the aesthetic of the series, it was pretty obvious they were going hard for that 2001 Space Odyssey inspired look, unfortunately the science half of the "science fiction" in the show is seriously wonky - so bad that it just undermined the attempts to be cerebral with it's themes, like Star Trek. I can live with the dodgy special effects, and I could've lived with the whole premise of "nuclear explosion throws moon off orbit" since they actually addressed the fact that such an event would have tremendous geological impact on planet earth itself, unfortunately it didn't stop there and Barry Morse's character spouts so much dodgy pseudoscience that it almost feels like he's gone senile and the rest of the crew just entertain his notions as to not hurt his feelings.

Which is why I decided to postpone jumping straight to season 2 and watch the original Battlestar Galactica instead.

The first series of Space 1999 is really good. Even the intro is impressive.
The second series becomes rather silly and the overall quality of the show drops, imo anyway. This is old British tv so it has series not seasons, although in the case of this particular show it is Year One and Year Two.
Pretty sure all of this was filmed on 35mm but maybe I'm wrong. There's a BD release which is remastered (newer remaster not the same as older DVD remaster). Mono audio originally but the BD release has some other options iirc.

I've got the older remastered DVD box sets (one for each year) of this myself, PAL R4 but I think they're the same as UK R2.

I watched bits of this when I was a kid, but back then I didn't find it as entertaining as Doctor Who or Blake's 7 so never saw all of it until much later. Probably well after becoming an adult actually.

You are quite correct, it was filmed using 35mm film for both series.

It’s too early for video (quality video that’s easy to edit that is) and it’s for color TV, that almost always implies 35mm.

Btw, check out Doppelgänger/Journey to the Far Side of the Sun if you’d like to see a live action version of the same sort off thing. This was a popular Sunday afternoon movie on TV when I was a kid.

I saw that one after someone mentioned it here, I think it was firehorse or you zeta????
It was fun but for me its the same low to medium budget stuff that I can watch but sometimes steer away from.
If it had monsters great, but making you think from a week story and lower budget just isn't for me to own for multiple viewings.

Even 1999 is just too low budget for me after a while, I haven't seen the show in years and there is a free channel on Pluto to watch it,
I just can't sit through an entire episode but could back in the day.

Guess I should have been more specific; it still exists on 35mm.
Most older British tv shows only exist on video tape now, if they exist completely at all that is.
I think UFO might exist on 35mm too and that's earlier (1970)... relevant because it's another show made by the Andersons.

The very first Doctor Who story made in colour (1970), Spearhead in Space, was filmed on 16mm.

Just watched the S5 finale of The Expanse.

I think that had something to do with an industry strike. They used to shoot indoor/stage scenes on video, but the studio video cameras at the time were huge and bulky and couldn't be used for outdoor scenes so they used film cameras for on-location footage, which is visibly different. The video camera crew was unavailable during the shoot of that story so they shot the indoor scenes on film as well.

Kind of goes to show how passing up on immediate short-term cost savings ends up bearing long-term benefits.

Anyway, I think all the Gerry Anderson productions in colour were shot entirely on film, probably because he was heavily gunning for that North American market that he never managed to break into. Ironically, his stuff was hugely popular in Japan. In a weird roundabout way, if it weren't for Thunderbirds, we might not have Gundam or Macross or Transformers!

indeed, THUNDERBIRDS basically presented Japan with the pattern for their Sentai/Combiner/Super Robot series that dominated the 70's and spilled over onto the 80's...

I just find it amusing that what was a mere technical workaround for the puppets' inability to walk convincingly - the overdesigned equipment they used to actually enter their vehicles - inspired endless amounts of stock footage in every super robot series ever. Not because they couldn't animate the characters walking; it just looked cooler.

But y'know, it didn't stop there; because Thunderbirds and such were popular in Japan, Dinky toys (who had the license) exported the toys to the Japanese market themselves, but all those die cast toys were really heavy and expensive to transport, so they didn't stay on the Japanese market for long; but it was long enough for the Japanese toy companies to take hint and move into making die cast toys themselves, of which I think the original Mazinger Z was the first, which in turn inspired every super robot toy to carry the spring loaded fist gimmick, all the way up to Diaclone.

I’m not a Who expert but I am a long time fan. The original show was video or mostly video, mostly shot live to tape because video editing wasn’t really a thing. It sucked to do and every edit cost something. This is why BBC stuff always used good actors even for kids crap, they didn’t want to do any retakes if possible. Shoot it like it was a play as much as possible. They used a popular three camera system for this. I don’t know if it was standard from day one but by the time of the 2nd Doctor it’s in use. When outdoors, film was used. Video cameras were mostly a studio only thing back then, even news men were still shooting a lot of film in the 70s. I think it’s because video back then just couldn’t handle the whole range range of outdoor light anywhere near as well as film, more durable, and would probably need a smaller power source.

The first episode in color has a lot of outdoor footage and location scenery (not shot in doors at BBC TV center) and therefore uses a lot of film. It being 16mm probably had more to do with them wanting smaller cameras than anything, if I had to guess. Shortages weren’t usually so bad by the 70s and the difference in price for the film itself, once you’ve already decided to shoot outside, to take the entire cast and crew on a location shoot for an big season premier...negligible.

Anderson would have used 35mm simply because, for him, every shot is an FX shot and he was using established methods. And also, American/world money/market. You’ll find that there is a ton of classic TV shot on film, at least partially. It wasn’t a retro high fantasy pants fetishized way of making a movie, it was simply the only choice. Early video was extremely bad.

The studio video cameras back then were also absolutely colossal; they were far too unwieldy for location shoots, besides the problems you mentioned. A 16mm camera was extremely portable in comparison.

Anyway I looked up to find out exactly why the story was shot on film and it wasn't just shot entirely on film, it was shot entirely on location as well, which makes sense.

Yeah, Spearhead from Space was a “TV spectacular” on several levels. The Doctor gets more flamboyant, he’s driving an actual car around, explosions, color, new intro, it must of been mind blowing for the puny number of BBC viewers who a) lived within range of a color transmitter, b) bought a new TV, and c) doubled their license fee...which was probably not even %1 of the UK. It hardly even looks like the same show.