This is an unusual tape, because I think it wasn’t recorded by me. It’s been recorded off a satallite or cable service, probably in the Middle East, as I think this tape was given to me by a friend of my wife’s family, who lived and worked in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
So the first recording is from a channel called Star Movies (Satellite Television Asian Region), and when you see the pre-movie ident, you might find it rather familiar if you had Satellite TV in the 90s.
Star is obviously another News Corp company, so they are reusing graphics.
Picture quality is awful, too – I don’t know if that’s bad Satellite reception. Huge amounts of noise.
So first on this tape is FX 2: The Deadly Art of Illusion. It’s the sequel to the moderately well received F/X Murder By Illusion.
The film opens with a scene that looks like it belongs in a different movie – which it does, as they’re filming some science fiction film, obviously with lots of special effects (the F/X of the title in case you’d never heard that) and the scene ends with an explosion not going off at the right time. I’m not sure the health and safety on this set is very good. This much isn’t a surprise if you’re familiar with the first film, but there’s a nice fakeout when it’s revealed that the effects supervisor on this film isn’t star Bryan Brown as Rollie Tyler, but some other guy. Nice gloopy monster effects, though.
However, Rollie is watching the filming with his son, and when the robot appears to go out of control, he shuts it down. (Notice the Arabic subtitles, a clue this wasn’t recorded here).
Back home, with girlfriend Rachel Ticotin, he gets her to try his new invention – a motion capture suit linked to a creepy clown doll.
Ticotin’s ex husband Mike, and actual father of the boy (not Rollie as I said earlier) is a cop, and persuades Rollie to help him trap a serial killer. You can’t beat some fake boobs for a laugh.
But there’s something awry about the sting – Rollie thinks there were two people there, not just the killer. And Mike gets killed during the operation. His boss on the sting is Philip Bosco, so based on the casting principle that you cast a villain actor to play a villain, I will not be surprised if he’s somehow behind this, and Mike was killed deliberately.
Rollie tries ringing old friend Leo, Brian Dennehy from the first film, but he’s just got an answering machine on. So he works on the tape he shot from a camera during the botched operation, trying to identify the second man in the flat. There’s a nice moment when the image of the man is on a monitor, when suddenly the man himself looms out of the dark behind the screen, looking for Rollie.
There’s a big fight, and of course they get to use Rollie’s animatronic clown doll.
It’s looking bad for Rollie, until a car turns up, and shoves the killer’s car under a truck.
It’s Leo, who got his messages after all.
They set to work bugging Bosco’s phone, and investigating which of Mike’s old cases might have been the reason for his murder. They contact Liz Kennedy, an attorney friend of Leo’s, played by Joanna Gleason.
There’s some investigation, and Leo thinks it all has to do with some solid gold Michelangelo medallions.
They enlist Mike’s son to help them read the computer files – this film is very high tech. They use a modem and everything. (Interference on the screen is on the recording, not on the film itself.)
But the killer from earlier is still around, and he tracks Mike’s son to the mall, so Rollie has to try to rescue them, and there’s a great scene in a supermarket, as Rollie lays traps and distractions to deal with the bad guy.
He even gets shrinkwrapped in the end.
But the bad guys go after Leo, and kill his girlfriend.
Leo, Rollie and Liz go after the bad guys once they’ve picked up the gold medallions. There’s a lot of gadgets to take out guards. But when Leo confronts the group, he’s double-crossed by Liz. I didn’t see this coming.
Oh God, a henchman with a little pony tail.
It all works out in the end, and they even get to return the medallions to the Vatican.
The next film on the tape is the real reason I was given this tape. It’s No Highway in the Sky, a fairly obscure movie from 1951 (despite starring James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich) and the reason I wanted to see it is that it’s based on the snappier titled novel ‘No Highway’ by Nevil Shute, which I read at my wife’s suggestion, and loved. I’d always categorised Nevil Shute in my head as a writer of fairly ordinary adventure novels, but in fact he’s a lot closer to a Science Fiction writer than I was expecting. No Highway is almost science fiction, in that the central premise revolves around a particular scientific point about aircraft engineering, and talks about planes which didn’t really yet exist, but his speculation is based on his background as an engineer, and is barely one step ahead of reality (at the time) so it barely feels like speculation. Also, a nerdy hero who has trouble interacting with his colleagues, and who solves problems by thinking hard about them was right up my street.
Jack Hawkins plays Dennis Scott, the new head of metallurgy at a the Royal Aircraft Establishment. He meets one of the scientists working there, Theodore Honey (played by James Stewart) who is running an experiment putting the tailplane of a brand new airliner, the Reindeer, through a vibration test, because he’s calculated that after a certain time, the aluminium will develop stress fractures. “What do you expect will happen” asks Scott. “I expect the tailplane to fall off” he replies.
Scott drives Honey home, hoping to learn a bit more about him. He’s only interested in his work, and the general pursuit of knowledge. He has predicted that the Reindeer tailplane will develop dangerous fractures after 1440 hours of vibration, which rather surprises Scott, since the Reindeer has been in service for a while now
He’s living with his daughter Elspeth, who also likes reading, and is conducting an experiment with her goldfish. She’s played by Janette Scott, who would go on to appear in Day of the Triffids and also in the lyrics of ‘Science Fiction Double Feature’ from The Rocky Horror Show.
Later, Scott talks to Penworthy, a test pilot, who he knows from previous jobs. (That’s Dora Bryan as the barmaid, by the way.) He talks about how the official report on accidents always blames pilot error. “Whenever something goes wrong with their calculations and there’s a smash-up: Pilot Error.” He particularly mentions a recent crash of a Reindeer plane in Labrador, blamed on pilot error, which piques Scott’s interest after what Honey told him about the Reindeer design.
He talks to the Inspector of Accidents (played by Wilfred Hyde White – was that man ever young?) who reiterates it was pilot error, but tells him that the plane had had 1407 hours of flight before the crash, a figure eerily close to Honey’s figure of 1440. And more alarming, they didn’t find the tailplane during the investigation.
So Honey is sent to Labrador to search for the missing tailplane and look for evidence of fractures. I love old-style boarding of planes.
Oh dear, this plane is a reindeer.
Glynis Johns plays a Marjorie, a flight attendant.
I’m amazed by the number of massively famous faces in this film, many in uncredited roles. Now it’s Kenneth More as the co-pilot. I guess this was the time of the studio system, where even big stars were under contract to studios, so they’d appear in whatever films were shooting for the studio.
Honey gets a guided tour of the cockpit, but he’s alarmed when he’s told this is a Reindeer (I presume he didn’t bother to look at the tailplane when he was walking out to it). He’s even more alarmed when he’s told this was one of the test planes, and it has logged 1422 hours so far.
Also on the plane is movie star Monica Teasdale, played by Marlene Dietrich. Honey tells her his fears that the plane might crash and tells her the safest place to be if that happens. At first she thinks he’s mad, but she starts to wonder whether he might be right.
There’s a rather beautiful scene where Monica and Honey talk. They talk about their lives, what they might leave behind. Honey tells her that he chose to tell her about the danger, and about where to go to be safest, because he and his wife had watched her films, and had seen one the day before his wife died (in a bombing attack during the war) and about how her work makes people happy. She in turn tells him how important his work is, and how it might save people’s lives. It’s all played very understated, almost in whispers, and it’s quite lovely.
The plane finally lands, safely, and the pilot is really angry and Honey frightening the passengers and delaying the flight. Honey manages to get into the cockpit and when he realises the plane is going to continue with the rest of the passengers, he drops the undercarriage to ground the plane.
Honey is in a lot of trouble, but both Marjorie and Monica Teasdale are on his side – Monica went to the Royal Air Establishment to speak on his behalf, and Marjorie has been looking after his daughter in his house.
And at the end, in a rather rapid flurry of events, we learn that the tailplane has been discovered from the crashed Reindeer in Labrador, and it’s definitely a fatigue fracture. Then, immediately after that, the news arrives that the plane in Gander that Honey had flown on has just made its first flight since being repaired, made a perfect landing, then the tail fell off which taxiing.
And when they bring the news to Honey in the hanger where he’s testing the tail, they’re about to give him the news when the tail falls off the test rig too. And Honey even realises why it didn’t fail at the predicted time – he was testing in a heated shed, while the real planes fly at much lower temperatures. A happy ending.
This is a lovely film, and I only wish my recording were a little better.
After this, there’s a documentary about Duran Duran. Seen here when Paul Coia was on guitar.
After this, there’s almost all of a recording of Aliens, which is such a weird coincidence with the documentary we had a couple of days ago, given that these two tapes are years apart.
The tape ends just before the end of the film, so I won’t be talking about it, despite it being an almost perfect movie.
VHiStory 