Last night’s Vintage Sci-Fi screening in Golden Hill (http://sdvsf.org/) featured two movies, Cyborg 2087 and Dimension 5 (both with numbers in their titles!) made under the same auspices — a studio called United Pictures (not to be confused with United Artists Pictures or United Producers of America, the cartoon company formed by Disney exiles who created Mr. Magoo), director Franklin Adreon (who’d cut his teeth directing some of the later Republic serials, and you can tell by the extended fistfights and other big action scenes between the characters, which go on way too long for their plot points but were clearly the aspect of filmmaking that most turned him on), screenwriter Arthur C. Pierce (when I first saw his name on a film shown at one of these screenings I said, with a mock excitement suddenly dashed, “Ah! Screenplay by Arthur C. … uh, Pierce”), composer Paul Dunlap and producers Fred Dunlap and Earle Lyon. Both were illustrations of the adage that “B”-movie studios “get ’em on their way up and on their way down,” since the stars of these films were both actors very much on their way down. The star of Cyborg 2087 was Michael Rennie, 15 years older than he was when he unforgettably played Klaatu in the original version of The Day The Earth Stood Still (which is so much better than the ghastly quasi-remake with Keanu Reeves it pains me to have to write “the original version of … ”) and very much looking it (and almost certainly stunt-doubled in his big fight scene at the end). He plays Garth A7, a cyborg (part-human, part-robot) who is sent back to the Earth of 1966 (when both these films were made) by rebels from the established order of 2087 to kidnap a scientist named Professor Sigmund Marx (Eduard Franz) — a fascinating combo character name that interested me far more than just about anything in the film itself — just before he announces his new discovery, a powerful communications tool called “radio-telepathy” that allows one person to impose his or her will on anyone else electronically.
The time machine looks like a cement mixer and, since United Pictures didn’t have the budget for any optical work, there’s no buildup with lights or sparkles — it just appears and disappears in a simple stop-motion cut. Garth appears in what at first looks like a Western movie set — and I was hoping Pierce would have him land in a movie set and check out his equipment because at first he would have assumed his equipment had malfunctioned and taken him 100 years further back than he intended. Alas, Pierce wasn’t so imaginative because the old, decrepit buildings turn out to be the remnants of a Western ghost town attached to a tiny but still functioning city, and the other people we meet at the start of this film are two obnoxious comic-relief characters, Sam Gilmore (Tyler MacDuff, who does the “Old West” accent schtick so fully some of his lines are incomprehensible) and Rick (James Hibbard), who are exploring the ruins looking for some sort of treasure. Meanwhile, another cement mixer from 2087 appears and out from it come two “Tracers” (Dale Van Sickel and Troy Melton), agents from the future government out to track down and kill the rebel Garth. They’re sort of like the Storm Troopers from Star Wars except their costumes are green instead of white and their helmets look like United Pictures’ costume department bought them from a sports equipment store’s football section. Also in the hunt are Dr. Marx’s assistant, Dr. Sharon Mason (Karen Steele), and another scientist who works in the same lab, Dr. Carl Zellar (Warren Stevens, who was previously in a flawed but far superior major-studio sci-fi production, Forbidden Planet), and the gimmick is that if Dr. Marx announces radio-telepathy and the invention is exploited in 1966, it will be used by unscrupulous people to start a dictatorship that will end up ruling the world.
So the good
guys have to stop Dr. Marx from announcing his invention by 9 a.m. the next day
— whether by persuading, kidnapping or killing him — and the bad guys have to
stop the good guys from doing that. The 2087 characters have ray guns that can
zap people and kill them instantly — though the rays they emit are invisible
because, once again, United Pictures’ production budget didn’t have any money
for optical effects — and Garth uses one to kill one of the Tracers while he
(or his stunt double) beat up the other. At one point Dr. Mason walks down the
streets of the deserted ghost town calling out to Garth — and of course I
couldn’t resist joking, “Garth barada nikto” — only to be caught by the surviving Tracer, who
hangs her with a steel chain from a ceiling beam and periodically bumps himself
or his weapon into her to swing her around in what looks more like a consensual
S/M sex scene than a woman kidnapped and strung up by a terrifying alien from
the future. In the end Dr. Marx is persuaded not to make his announcement, Dr.
Mason declares her love for Garth and he tells her that he has to go back to
the future and he can’t take her with him because that would disrupt the time line
— “and besides,” I joked again, “you’re no Patricia Neal” — instead he tells
her that neither she nor any of the other 1966 humans he encountered will have
any memory of him once he leaves, and after that happens she pairs up with Dr.
Zellar as God (or at least Arthur C. Pierce) obviously intended all along. This
might not have made a bad movie if done with some amount of excitement and
pathos — as James Cameron did with a strikingly similar plot line in the
original Terminator (though at
least Michael Rennie was a more expressive actor than Arnold Schwarzenegger —
but then there are rocks that are
more expressive than Arnold Schwarzenegger!) — but in the hands of Franklin
Adreon and Arthur C. Pierce, Cyborg 2087 is that most annoying sort of bad movie, one that isn’t entertaining
enough on its own merits but isn’t bad enough to be enjoyable as camp either.
Indeed, it’s the sort of film that makes Ed Wood’s Plan Nine from
Outer Space look like a masterpiece by
comparison!
