A Day At The Races – Millennium – tape 1594

Well, here’s what I hope will be a treat for me. First on this tape is A Day at the Races, a Marx Brothers comedy. To my shame, I’ve never seen a Marx Brothers film before.

But before that, an even bigger treat for me. It’s a bit of Dean Friedman on Top of the Pops from UK Gold, singing his other hit, Lydia. I love this song. And this is a live performance, with the Top of the Pops Orchestra, and it’s very true to the original recording.

After this, it’s another forgotten classic. Toast, by Streetband (featuring Paul Young).

The performance also features the band in a kitchen set. I wonder if it was a bespoke set, of if the BBC reused a sitcom set from somewhere. I don’t recognise it.

There’s also a video of Queen performing Fat Bottomed Girls. Not their finest hour, perhaps.

Then, we’re into A Day at the Races.

Groucho is a horse doctor pretending to be a real doctor at a Sanitarium that’s struggling financially, under the ownership of Maureen O’Sullivan. But a crooked owner of a racetrack wants to take it over and turn it into a casino.

I’m not quite sure what I expected. There’s an awful lot of singing and dancing. And in the sequence with the poor black townsfolk, the brothers even black up. Well, Groucho and Chico black up, and Harpo cosplays Frank Gorshin in Star Trek.

I’m not one hundred percent sure the climactic horse race plot really made any sense at all, but I suppose applying logic to a movie like this would be churlish.

I’d have preferred fewer songs and more jokes myself.

After this, there’s a movie that I might be the only person who remembers it.

It’s Millennium, a science fiction movie starring Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd.

It starts off with not the worst air crash I’ve ever seen.

Kris Kristofferson in the air crash investigator who has to piece together what happened to the flight.

At the crash site, he meets Daniel J Travanti, a physics professor who seems to have a hobby of visiting crash sites.

There’s an odd moment when he’s in the hangar where the debris is being collected, and Kristofferson asks one of the ticket officers for coffee, and she runs off. A bit later, when they’re listening to the cockpit recording, she comes with coffee. It’s co-star Cheryl Ladd, so you know these events are significant.

The voice recorder has a strange bit at the end where one of the flight crew is shouting “They’re dead. They’re all dead. Burned up.”

And several digital watches retrieved from the crash site are still working, but counting the time backwards.

Ladd meets Kristofferson again as he’s heading back to his hotel, and they hook up remarkably quickly. But she seems oddly keen to stop him going in to work.

There’s a nice shot where he says goodbye to her in hsi very untidy hotel room, walks a few steps down the corridor, remembers something and goes back to find the hotel room completely clean and the bed fully made. This was all done in one shot, so I imagine there was a team of people shunting beds around to achieve the effect.

That evening, just before leaving the hangar, he notices a glowing read light in some debris, finds a gadget of some kind, fiddles with it, and stuns himself. All of a sudden there’s three strange women checking him – and one of them is Ladd, but with a rather different hairstyle.

Then we’re with her as she passes through a glowing gate, and she and her colleagues are elsewhere, time travellers on a mission of some kind.

They’ve caused a paradox, causing Timequakes in their time. It’s not a pleasant future. People are dying, and only Ladd and her team get any medicine and decent food. They’re pampered because of their jobs.

As Ladd prepares for another mission, we return to the present, where Professor Travanti is giving a lecture on time travel. “If you want to look for time travellers, look for them in places where there are people who will not be seen alive again.”

Then we see Ladd and her team doing their job. They travel to 1963, and an aeroplane which is going to crash, stun all the passengers and remove them, as corpses dressed as the passengers are put back on the plane.

There’s some freaky, almost hellraiser-like makeup in the future.

Ladd has to return to 1989 to meet Kristofferson the day before he finds the stunner, so we get a nice Back to the Future part II replay of scenes we’re already seen, but with some different perspectives.

As we’ve already seen, she fails to stop him finding the stunner, and he’s still got a bit of it. And Professor Travanti has another piece, left on the plane in 1963. When he tells Kristofferson about where it came from, Kristofferson tells him he was on that flight, the only survivor. We’d seen the young him on the plane.

Ladd returns to pick up the scanner and explains what she’s doing. They take living people from the planes, to their future, because nobody in the future can have children. Travanti fiddles with the stunner and accidentally sets it off, killing himself. This wasn’t supposed to happen, and causes a catastrophic paradox. Kristofferson goes into the future with Ladd, as the timequake is hitting them. They decide to take all the people they have captured, and send them into ‘some new future beyond the paradox’. This bit I don’t buy at all. They had a nice little predestination paradox story, then they fudge it at the end, and we don’t even get to see what this new world is like.

But there’s some nice pyrotechnics while the time base is exploding.

BBC Genome: BBC One – 8th October 1993 – 21:30

After this, there’s a trailer for Between The Lines.

Then, Dr Terror’s Vault of Horror has the eponymous doctor introducing Crucible of Terror.

There’s a few minutes of the film before the tape ends.

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