ufo Tagged Articles at Cinematical

There seems to be a slow and steady drive towards remaking everything that ever appeared on British television. I suppose that's all right (they do have fantastic shows and made-for-television movies in the United Kingdom) but what happens on that dark day when Hollywood runs out of British productions? Yikes. Let's not think about that, and turn instead to the dark version of 1980 that's being remade for the modern viewer, as Variety reports that British favorite UFO is being re-imagined for the big screen. UFO will be helmed by Matthew Gratzner, and will star Joshua Jackson.

The British premise for UFO was set in the near future (ten years in their case -- the show aired in 1970 and took place in 1980) where aliens had conquered Earth. Naturally, they didn't do so with altruistic means, but to use us as an organ harvesting ground. Humanity's future lay with SHADO, (Supreme Headquarters Aliens Defense Organization), a covert organization pretending to be a movie studio, who defend against the alien horde. Many have tried to remake UFO and failed, the last evolved into Space: 1999. (I can't find any reference as to V took any inspiration from it. The timing screams that it wasn't a coincidence.)

Jackson will play Paul Foster, a test pilot who joins SHADO. Foster is one of the original characters, and had an interesting little conflict after he became involved with the enemy. Since Gratzner praises his ability to show Foster's "inner conflict," the movie will undoubtedly take that and run with it. The movie is aiming to begin filming in the spring.

I haven't been a fan of Hollywood's "Let's Remake Everything That Was Ever Popular!" plan, but I was pleasantly surprised by the reboots and reincarnations of Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, and even J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek movie, which is out on Blu-ray and DVD today. I'd argue that maybe science fiction is immune to the remake syndrome, but then you have Michael Bay's two awful Transformers movies. So that sort of shoots my theory in the foot.

Whatever the case, it's been great to have so much quality science fiction to choose from lately. There's also a hell of a lot out there that deserves a second look. Forgotten series from the 60s and 70s that have classic storytelling, great characters, and a lot of elements that make up truly good sci-fi: robots, spaceships, and time travel. So while you're enjoying that slick new Trek Blu-ray (even the menus are amazing!) and waiting for James Cameron's Avatar to hit screens, here are some classic science fiction properties that need some new life.

Space: 1999

This was my first introduction to Martin Landau, and even now whenever I see him in something I keep expecting him to don a white tunic and take command of things. Landau co-starred in this with his then wife (and recent Mission: Impossible co-star) Barbara Bain. The series was set in the "far future" of 1999 via 1975, and revolves around the Moon getting knocked loose from orbit around the Earth. When it goes bye-bye, it takes with it the 311 inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha. So the Moon, in effect, becomes their U.S.S. Enterprise, and they have adventures around the galaxy. Highlights included the Eagle, a spaceship that looked like it was made out of scaffolding. My best friend had a model of this when we were kids, and it was highly coveted. There have been some attempts to revive it, even as a movie, but nothing has happened. Yet.

Click here for the disco-tastic opening credit sequence for Space: 1999, then head beyond the break for more sci-fi reboots we'd like to see..

There's nothing like a good midnight screening of an alien abduction flick to really get your film festival off to a good start, so when I saw Fredrick Wolcott's Beings on the schedule, I knew I wanted to check it out. The film was preceded by a fun little short called Coming to Town, which is about two Santas -- a naughty one and a nice one. The nice one is the jolly old St. Nick we know and love; the naughty one drives an old, beat up car while chugging booze from the bottle, accompanied by a grungy drunkard of an elf and a violent, nasty little leprechaun. Naughty Santa has come to answer a plea for revenge from a chubby girl who's being bullied, and the result is darkly hilarious.

Then we settled in for Beings, which was preceded by a warning that the film could cause seizures in people with epilepsy and severe vertigo for the rest of us -- and the warning didn't lie. The first ten minutes or so of the film, I started to feel dizzy and nauseated just from the motion and flashing on the screen. The premise of the film is that a UFO has crashed in a sea in Russian territory. The spaceship was equipped with video surveillance equipment throughout the ship, and Russian scientists have been able to restore video footage from the alien vessel (in a handy plot twist, the aliens used video technology surprisingly similar to our own).

The footage the scientists retrieve is terribly disturbing -- so bad that the Russian government decides to share it with the president of the United States. It shows four young college students, two male and two female, who have been abducted and held aboard the ship, being subjected to experimentation by the aliens. From this point, the point of view of the film shifts to the retrieved footage, so that we are watching the events unfold from the aliens' perspective.

Try to fit this title on a marquee: Three Men Seeking Monsters: Six Weeks in Pursuit of Werewolves, Lake Monsters, Giant Cats, Ghostly Devil Dogs, and Ape-Men. It's the name of a book by Nick Redfern that Universal has just bought the rights to. Now get this: the book is non-fiction. Redfern is a Ufologist and his book tells of his adventure with two buddies as the trio visited legendary mysterious places around Great Britain, including Loch Ness. The best part is that Redfern is a punk, one of his friends is a goth herpetologist (a reptile and amphibian expert) and his other friend is 6'6" and 400 pounds. Basically, this is the book I was craving as a subculture-centered, Fortean-minded, mysteries-of-the-unknown-obsessed teenager.

Fortunately, I never knew about this book (actually it came out many years after I'd stopped reading about UFOs and such), because if I was a fan and had looked forward to it being adapted into a movie, I would have been very disappointed to learn that Jon Heder is set to star. The one-note Napoleon Dynamite actor, who is surprisingly not yet a has-been despite not yet starring in another hit since his cult-fave introduction, will be producing with his brothers, Doug and Dan (his twin! there's two of them!), and he is expected to play the author (who is bald). I'm not sure who he could get to play the big guy, but for the goth herpetologist let me suggest Heder's School for Scoundrels co-star Todd Louiso, who has at least played a snake expert amusingly before, and who I can totally imagine dressing up to play Vampire: The Masquerade.