hey this is patrick o'reilly jumping in for a quick disclaimer in light of some recent events we recorded this episode a little in advance to assure that our reviews would continue to post on schedule as a result i find myself in the uncomfortable position of needing to assure you the listeners that any baseless murder accusations leveled at the recently deceased were made entirely in jest with that in mind please enjoy our review of saturn 3. we're on a mission from god wendy so i got that going darling looks like i picked the wrong way to quit sniffing blue light of my life we enjoy your films i thought they smelled bad on the outside welcome to vintage video where we'll be reviewing every major film release of the 1980s in real time i'm patrick o'reilly i'm jesse bayless and i'm richard wells and today marks the 40th anniversary of the release of saturn 3 on february 15 1980. it was written by martin amos from a story by john berry and directed by stanley dawnin it was released by associated film distribution and if you want to be technical it was directed by john berry for a few hours yeah and then it was started by stanley dawning and then he left and then he died he left this movie to go work on uh empire strikes back and contracted meningitis and died on set yeah which you know then some dp that was just like his like assistant ended up doing being the dp for that whole movie that's insane um the budget here was ten million dollars it made nine million dollars so that's a million in the hole but i really think that the budget comes through with the crazy amount of set yeah the assessment is enormous all the practical effects i think are phenomenal i think all the opticals and the visual effects for space are terrible which is crazy because in 19 what 68 2001 of space odyssey looked incredible well and and two years prior to the making of this film yeah it's star wars right and so they're clearly trying to like hype that up and get that angle covered um i think it is important to note um i have like a whole little section prepared here sure go forward a little filibuster here um we're going to pass this bill regardless of how long you can talk obviously star wars changed a lot of things for science fiction and for filmmaking everyone wanted to get on the heels and get this sweet star wars money right now i think had john barry been able to properly direct this film which it just said that he couldn't like that he wasn't on set it was his first time directing right uh but they they took it away from him and other production problems you know aside i think that this movie would have come out in 79 right and other movies that came out in 79 are alien star trek the motion picture and disney's the black hole so it would have looked better than two of those three yeah exactly no okay hold on i know what you're gonna say we've had disagreements with that star trek picture is beautiful uh it's but but where i agree with you is that it's a different look of science fiction yes alien is a much more gritty science fiction and that's why this is standard drama mostly saturn 3 is definitely more like the black hole as far as like campy science fiction sure where you're gonna have like robots and weird little legged landers and and these crazy spaceships that don't make any sense at all yeah uh what does physics have to do with that yeah uh and and black hole also deals with a crazy guy on a space station with an evil robot which i think is funny that is funny uh so i think that the style of science fiction they chose for this one was not the direction that they should have gone like obviously more should have don't think it should have been like a psychological horror you think it should have been um i think it could have been a good psychological horror had it been edited together and i'll get into that the editing later on but i think that the whole style and visuals tone was wrong right right i think that and i think star trek would not have been the right visual tone either that i think it needed to be more like alien it needed to be a little dirtier and it needed to be a little more grit but the set is incredible the set is great there's so many lights and it's so big and there's so many little things going on in details and they run around it yeah the running around definitely felt 2001 inspired to me because they do a lot of the exercise in the in the loop and and i felt really bad for farrah fawcett yeah she was running without a bra and i wonder how many takes that she had like and she's on a full run like yeah and it's just like oh as i'm a man and i know that that hurts yeah and it was funny when i first saw that john berry was the director i was like wait john barry like john berry orchestra john barrett yeah yeah the james bond theme not him um different guy but it's it's also kind of depressing to think that if john berry had gotten along better with kirk douglas that he would have been you know alive for longer yeah because meningitis is is a very like simple just contact cause's death very quickly so it's like literally if he hadn't been working on empire strikes back he wouldn't have died right or at least not that way so it's just a just a weird are you are you implying that a final destination scenario would have been yeah well that's what happens richard you joke but that's how the world works final destination every time you avoid that they mean kirk douglas for his death kirk douglas murdered him and he's still around i mean we're recording this right now but kirk douglas the murderer is still at large if you've seen him he was 62 in this film 62 62 in that movie and naked do you know how old farrah fawcett was 63 32. oh that's right she celebrated her birthday on set 30 years younger than him this is like it's just another classic hollywood tradition of we could just put any young hot lady with any old dude well at least the point of this movie is supposed to be that he's too old for her yeah i guess i don't even understand her backstory like they they they go into she's never been to earth she's never been to earth but like where the hell did she come from because she wasn't born here because like me at the base baby very first i thought she was supposed to be his daughter on the space station and then that she's a little young to be his daughter see i i thought robot but it started getting really creepy if that was the case i thought she was an android of some kind and that's why she's just like like so spacey yeah we but i remember we wrote a scene in like the seventh or eighth grade that took place in the 1700s and i had a joke in there where someone said oh that's his wife she's she's old enough to be a sister that's disgusting um but yeah uh so yeah donnan was already producing the film and filled the role that uh john berry left uh i think capably i don't think the directing was the problem i think the editing was a big part of the problem and like i said we'll we'll we need to get through a little bit more of the story before we can get into that and before we even get into that sean connery was considered for the adam character michael caine was considered for the harvey keitel benson character i think that could have been interesting well they're much closer in age which is interesting um kytel refused to dub over his voice uh for fixes and post because they didn't like his thick brooklyn accent so they brought in roy doe trees that makes me so happy yeah i didn't know it was him until we looked it up afterwards but that makes me so happy which i i mostly know roy doe treats through the game of thrones audiobooks i only know him through that no that's not true he's he has like a million credits and he's done a lot of things that you've probably never heard of but i think he also holds like a guinness record for doing the most different voices on an audiobook yeah for the yeah for one of the game of thrones book he did 224 voices and that's the guinness book of world records oh my gosh but you know he's so great at these things because so i was listening to the books in one book he does that or over the course that was one i think that was over one book he did that many voices crazy maybe i'm wrong maybe it was over the course of the series but i'm pretty sure it was a single book uh but i was lit so i was listening to the books in order and he did uh the first one the second one and the third one and then he wasn't available to record the fourth one that's right and i started listening to the fourth one and i'm just like i can't do this i i'm done apparently i'm done with game of thrones i love these books but i can't listen to this other person read this book and um and apparently i'm not the only one because he went back in 2011 and re-recorded it so it had been previously recorded and released and they re-recorded it and released his version of it which it thankfully i then found and they actually had him play a character on the show too yeah yeah yeah so you can get the complete roy doe trees series of game of thrones books yeah and if you'd like to hear him recite all of harvard kaitel's dialogue for this movie go check out saturn 3. screenwriter martin amos wrote a novel called money which appears to be a fictional account of the making of this film and the protagonist john self is playing the john berry part um with lorne guyland filling the kirk douglas roll that sounds like a good like old-school hollywood name slash like masculine character um it was nominated for uh three razzies for actor and actress for kirk and pharah and for worst picture uh this is our second rezzy nominated film of the year true um what was the first one caligula no uh cruisin cruisin was yeah interesting because you guys hated caligula um hector the robot was eight feet tall and cost a million dollars which was a tenth of the budget of the film that's crazy and it took 20 people to operate it's crazy to me that they bothered with like an actual like robot puppet thing that looked as as clunky as that is because they literally could have fit a person in that suit and you just had it right like you don't need 20 people like put somebody in there just have them walk around well i think for a lot of it it was a guy in a suit but yeah for the parts where it wasn't it's like that was unnecessary yeah but they get every every second out of it that they can oh yeah um uh right as the movie starts the first thing that struck me was the font that they used for the opening credits yeah which looks like the indiana jones phone that's exactly what i was thinking as soon as i saw the first name i was like that name should say lawrence caston why [Laughter] but uh yeah it's just it's just the indiana jones font with the white outlines of black letters and right and and i thought that something was wrong with the audio because it's silent it's completely like the third or fourth shot of the movie uh and and i get it you know i guess space is supposed to be quiet no one can hear you scream from what i understand so i'm not sure that we watched the right version there's a wrong version well there was a there was a cut where a bunch of stuff was removed a lot of stuff a lot well yeah from the from the list of things that were removed it was a lot of content uh and everything that they listed in that list of content i don't remember from the film so i think we watched an edited version did we um i i whatever version this is first of all the quality of it was great yeah it was really nice transfer but uh yeah it did not have any of the scenes that were described in that list uh i think we looked at the same list yes i've seen it uh but yeah and i i can only imagine that that would have helped the story in some way i wonder if i can find that other version um we have elmer bernstein doing the soundtrack here he's great um but most of his soundtrack was removed right yeah and but there's a little bit like i could there's stuff that sounds like the theremin ghostbustery stuff um in places i loved the score yeah i was i was super into it that whole opening sequence with the with the one yeah like type opening with the spaceship flying overhead and this crazy score going on i was like this is great i love it although i was not thrilled with the weird satellite dish on the bottom of this space yeah it honestly looked like they painted it and it like melted a little bit and they were just like whatever that's fine we'll just say it's like part of the ship and it's like no that looks like a wet paper plate take it off of the model it looks like garbage that needs to come off right away i thought the same thing i was like it's not even symmetrical the way it's sagging it's like just all weird warped very weird um but we start with all these little pods are getting launched out a bunch of people are getting their assignments and they're calling all the the captains to their ships to send them off to uh in various deck this is a really awkward like if that's how you launch every spaceship with like a parade of people like walking in like military lines to bring like your supplies to your ship and watch it like it just seems very theatrical to get a spaceship launched it was so awesome like i was so excited because it's like to describe the scene it's like the it's like patent giving his speech right this enormous image in the backdrop of the logo of this organization which we never mentioned uh but all these people kind of come up in silhouette and just stand up with like it's like the it reminds me of bugs bunny at the hollywood bowl like it's just like this very flat like stage like thing happening and i would have sworn it was like blue screen if there wasn't the reflection in the floor yeah but when i was watching i was just like wow that's actually like what is that rear projected this whole wall of whatever this is great um i was very confused to start with though because uh i wasn't sure if this guy is actually benson or not he's not captain captain benson james is being called to his ship yeah and they're getting ready in the locker room to go on their assignments yeah and benson's like oh well you know i heard you failed your right all your tests you're mentally exactly crazy but why hide the identity of this person who we don't know who it is only to have this reveal well harvey keitel was a known entity at the time at least yeah but i didn't understand i didn't understand what they were going for i i was like it's like they're really taking their time to hide the identity of this person as if we've seen this person before and we're supposed to not know who it is uh because there's no mystery because the people who he reveals himself to don't know who he is either yeah i was thinking this when we watched the movie that it felt like this she this scene should have come at the end um where you revealed it oh it's the same as passengers yeah it's the same as possible oh my god passengers would have been a fabulous movie if they had reversed what the freaking edit we were like halfway through the movie before i was like oh they they edited this wrong we shouldn't have known that chris pratt broke her out until till the end of the movie or at least like the end of the second act they totally did this wrong it was such a good movie if they had just moved that scene yeah but gave andy garcia a line but this is before tarantino so we do things in the order they happen we don't want to confuse the audience um so yeah so he's basically he's being berated yeah benson is is ripping on this person he's like oh i heard you're a total psychotic and you can't go to space because you're too crazy how'd you even get here anyway why are you in this why are you dressed the same as me in this room with me anyway i gotta go on my spaceship to my assignment because i'm not crazy but you are and crazy man sits down and like pulls the emergency lever which just opens the ceiling of the locker room to the just cold expanse of space and when it sucks all the air out it pulls the guy out what is that lever for what it's normally used if someone farts or something in the locker room you can suck it out real quick but um but the part that confuses me more there's so many things that can fit me about this but he does he's not like buckled in or anything he's just sitting in a chair in the corner there's no reason he didn't get sucked out and the guy who did get sucked out was bracing himself by holding on to a metal bar attacked to a bench attached to a bench in the locker room and it's like why did he why did one guy get sucked out and the other guy didn't also why did he freeze instantly and then get shattered shattered and he hits a bunch of wires on his way out and he just explodes like he was frozen it was like something out of cube yeah it did look like the beginning i was like i was like 100 on board with this movie at this point i was like yeah yes it very quickly gets on it's like no no this is a sci-fi movie with crazy murderer in it so get ready for that um but so benson has now been killed by vincent who takes on the role of benson and is benson for the rest of the movie um and they're heading to uh i had to had to phrase my notes very specifically they called it an experimental food colony it's like is it experimental food or is it an experimental food colony i think it's the latter of those two um they're working on scaling up this uh photosynthesis process so they can create like what is it like plankton or something some kind of plant life that they're creating food they're basically providing the food supply of earth right and they're they're supposed to be trying to find ways to accelerate that process because people on earth are starving so starving in fact that they are eating now small domesticated animals right yes um and so this this is basically just a giant hydroponics lab that's been mined into the inside of a comet why we're doing this in the middle of space i'm not there um i loved the effect of them going through the ring of saturn because it's like under water it looked like just a bunch of rocks laid in like a reflective pool and then they ran the camera really close to above them and then they doubled that image yeah and then they and the ship and and they it it was either sped up or stop motion there's like a couple of instances in this movie where i can't tell if it's just really sped up image or if it's an actual stop-motion image but it had this kind of jittery effect to it but yeah the way it was like moving between just seeing all these like pebbles and things clunking off of it and stuff as it's flying through that's a really neat weird little effect uh i i don't know again reminiscent of the of the like uh warp scene in uh 2001 a space odyssey where just like weird images are like flying at you and flying away from you at the same time and um but yeah so we we ride with vincent now benson to the uh he could have picked two more different names it's a little confusing well you want to you want to blend in well you want to be able to answer to benson very quickly so it's a good thing his name was vincent because i would turn every time i heard the word benson if i was vincent um when you're one of three people yeah it's like benson oh that's me i think he's talking to you um but yeah uh so yeah i even have the note here space station has a weird melty plate under it um but yeah so they're in eclipse right now as he's landing on the ship which means that they lose all communication outside of this right for like 22 days right um so they uh alex and adam uh played by farrah fawcett and kirk douglas respectively lead him into the laboratory um and he takes off his helmet so they don't know what benson is supposed to look like so this is benson as far as they know and he's carrying all these heavy tanks that are just a bunch of robot parts yeah i feel like it's kind of weird because like they they don't seem to have any knowledge of why he's there or anything like i feel like somebody would have told them be like hey we're sending a dude up he's gonna do this specific stuff and that's gonna be good for you yeah but instead it's just kind of like uh hey i'm here with the stuff and they're like what is it he's like don't look at it don't touch it no no contact um so yeah uh he talks to them for a while in their room because they're clearly living together in their separate compartment of the lab but then adam tells alex uh because he's not intimidated at all by the this the presence of this new man he's like oh take him to his room show him show him where he's gonna be staying and so she walks into his room and she says can i get you anything to help you sleep or and he says i'm probably just going to take a few blues and all blue dreamers yeah he's he's got these pills called blue dreamers to help you sleep but um it's not clear if they're just sleeping pills or if they're actually like like you get intoxicated yeah they must they must be something else though like i mean the fact that they're called blue dreamers like dreamers like implies that there's some hallucinogenic properties of these things and the fact that like you know she's really into like wanting to try one of these and like the other dude's like yeah i've been there done that it's it's all right i was trying to draw some biblical parables to this where it's like obviously his name is adam yeah that's like the big one right and here is a woman who we don't know where she came from as in so she came from his rib is what you're suggesting well i'm what i'm suggesting is that what they were trying to do and now here's here's this other person tempting him yeah trying to trying to convince him to here you try it we should try this we should do this uh and that would obviously the blue dreamers or the apples yeah that would eventually bring down paradise right but it had nothing to do with bringing down paradise and and and in the bible there was a robot robot victor well hector is like from troy right yeah yeah which was just like he was like a big warrior or something he was like the strongest something like that it's immortal i'm not about my greek yeah i mean um uh paris uh made out with helen of troy and took her away yeah and agamemnon was pissed but was looking for this was sean connery right uh he was actually in time um and uh so they found got the army and obviously achilles was leading the ground forces um uh okay i'll keep going achilles achilles cousin was killed he got pissed and so he challenged hector he kills hector and like drags hector body around for a while i'm impressed your greek mythology knowledge where did that come from greece greece he watches that movie on luke constantly john travolta was great but yeah so he offers her some of the blue dreamers and she's like no that's cool i'm good and then she goes back and she's like hey have you ever heard of blue dreamers are they cool i want some blue dreamers like he tucked one in her pocket like he's a creepy little drug pusher yeah well he's got no uh no i wanna say no diplomacy but he's got no like uh courtesy like he's just very upfront i i say what i mean i do what i yeah he's on the spectrum somewhere i think yeah i mean he's psychotic definitely psychotic sure um in the middle of the night they hear the dog barking because there's a dog on this ship and lately in these movies from the 80s the dogs fare very well and uh so this the dog it turns out is locked in the lab again which is a common occurrence that the automatic doors because dogs don't have souls the doors won't open to allow a dog to there are two people well now there's three people and a dog on this ship you think the lady could keep track of it yeah but she doesn't i don't know where our dog is there's only three people here dog is standing outside that door making a little jingly sound right now yeah you didn't hear that no haven't i got my headphones on um but yeah uh so the dog was locked in the lab again uh alex in helping the dog escape goes to check in the capsule that benson left and tries to open it and immediately he's there on top of her like no contact he closes the thing up again and but he scares the dog away when he tells her no contact and so she's like following the dog what's the dog saying like sally sally and she's like sally come here sally and he's like oh the dog has a name and she's like yeah you've never had a dog before and he's like yeah we just call them food we just call it lunch because that's what earth is devolved into and yet she's desperate to go there yeah it's like i don't understand her like they all they do is make earth seem like it's a horrible place people are starving maybe she's always wondered what her dog tastes like i can't eat this one it's the only one i got yeah it's unethical i feel like she gets a little bit of an opportunity later to find out and doesn't partake yeah that's true she does pass on an opportunity to eat this dog um but yeah so benson starts building hector and he shows them that this tube that he wasn't letting them touch is literally full of like genetically engineered brain matter yeah but it's like the size of like five brains lumped into one big clump and uh but it's empty it's like freshly formatted brain and uh and he's like oh so this is like a fully functional brain he's like no no this is totally useless i have to program it but he uses direct interfacing like how do you do that and he's like points to the creepy little you know hole yeah he's got a big uh a little jack in the back of his neck and he literally plugs a wire directly from the robot into this hole in the back of his neck so that it can understand what he's uh the instructions that he's giving it and then it sort of has an algorithm where it can extrapolate from there to kind of program itself a little bit uh he spends a lot of time building this robot yeah um we it's almost like a montage of him building it and adam and alex kind of having weird little conversations they're they're kind of just going about their business yeah while they're doing it but yeah they have a little conversation um there's a scene where he's throwing the globe well first of all they try the blue dreamers my note was alex and adam split the blue dreamer for no reason there's no effect shown other than like they just have a long conversation afterward and i guess we're supposed to assume like oh they loosened up and had a conversation but yeah they've been talking this whole time um but i was trying to get a free good free stream on the layout of the globe that they're throwing back and forth to see like if there's any like like any crazy discrepancies it's got a lot of weird little like on the continents it's got like a lot of weird little colored things that are attached to it but it looks more like indications of of information and not necessarily like a piece of the land sure has shifted or something like that nothing's under water that didn't yeah it didn't it didn't look that was there in new zealand uh it's very important there's a whole subreddit devoted to maps without new zealand people just leave it off of the map for some reason or did you see the one recently where in russia where they called it japan they had australia and then new zealand was labeled japan which is right off the coast of australia everybody knows that uh so when hector's up and running he is definitely not the robot that i expected him to be i thought my computer at work took a long time to start up yeah this thing like you have to sit and watch every tube fill with fluid it has a whole cardiovascular system yeah but then like the head is just this tiny tiny tiny little thing it looks like johnny five's face or something well if you knocked the top of wally's head off like that's what it looks like yeah it's just it's kind of weird because like i figured i'm like oh okay well you have this weird little like you know uh you know pixar lamp on top of a of a robot because you have a man inside the rest of the robot and you're trying to make it not look like a man because this thing is like hulking and huge and i'm like so you have a dude in there walking around and then you have like this really skinny little like you know mechanical head on top to try to cover that up but no apparently the whole thing was just some sort of robot that took 20 people to animate yeah he he takes uh the finished robot into alex and adam's room to show them like oh look i finished the robot but when they first get into the room there's like a sound being played by their speakers which is just like a really annoying like high pitch grinding sound yeah and when he walks in he says like oh you're you're blinding him or you're blocking him you need to turn that sound off and so then they turn the sound off and he walks the robot in and he's like oh yeah you know tell him to do anything he could literally do anything and they're like pick up that flask and it just bends the flask in half and hands it to him he's like oh i'm glad i didn't ask you for a handshake and it's like this never pays off later that it's clearly specific sound that this thing makes will stop the robot in its trash yeah uh also that the robot does not like being made fun of right the robot kind of like has like a an audio cue that it's like frustrated or angry which is clearly something that it learned from vincent benson yeah so we see a little bit of adam playing chess and he's and he's playing against the robot for a while and then benson plugs into the robot and kind of controls him to uh to help him uh learn how to play the game properly well and like i said like this is one of those instances where i can't tell if it's stop motion or just they just sped up the film it kind of looked like stop motion of me in this one it was really kind of jerky i don't know why it's actually moving the pieces i don't know why you would bother with you know filming some you know mechanical puppet and then speeding up the film like right a little well i guess because if if they couldn't make it move fast enough yeah yeah because it's because it is literally just guys trying to grab hold of things yeah yeah um but yeah it had this weird kind of jerky motion to it and i hate chess boards where you can't tell what the pieces are it was very clear future chess is all about confusing pieces yeah because the game gets boring after a while and then you have to mix it up by making the pieces look interchangeable they should all look like pawns and you just have to remember where they started yeah that's like the genius person yes um yeah or like there's not even pieces on the board you just have to remember how it started damn i lost um but yeah so while they're working in the lab uh there's a laser cutting a rock in half or something i guess and uh that's very important for food production you wouldn't understand of course i wouldn't and they're standing very near it and it explodes presumably they hit like a hot like or like a pocket of water or moisture inside and it got hot and exploded and it blasts a tiny sliver of rock into alex's eye and then like benson freaks out and starts grabbing her head and he's like oh hector will get it out and she's like oh god no yeah no i saw what i think into a flask yeah it's like tried to pick up a can yesterday and bent it in half it's actually a really tense scene i i was just like oh i don't she's like just get adam adam can do with this yeah yeah she's like really upset and it keeps like zooming in on the eye like like like a like you're adding an optometrist and it's like like flipping around yeah it's like ten times magnification ten times and it's just like getting this little claw close it's not it's not even like a fine-tuned claw like yeah like a pair of tweezers it's this is his normal i wish it had just been like a big like lego hand like like lost in space robot just like and just pinched smooshed your eye and your head just explodes i don't understand if like did benson like intentionally cause this accident to happen because it feels like he wants to prove his robot's capabilities but i don't know how he could have caused this to happen i don't know that he could have i also think that he's very hard to read throughout the whole film so it's hard to determine what he did on purpose and what happened by happenstance well i think we'll get to more of what he does a little bit later but i had a terrible problem with him throughout the film of i have no idea what his motivation is yeah i don't understand why unless he knew she was there and he was trying to get to her right so he he starts to become really obsessed with her yeah you know and so does hector because of the direction right but did she did he know like why did he go there in the first place why did he take kill this guy and take his place and go there like is he just because the guy makes it sound like saturn 3 is a [ __ ] detail anyway when they're in the locker room at the beginning he's like well you know i probably would have pretended i was crazy too if i knew i was going to go to saturn three freaking garbage planning i think to me what happened was he got angry and he killed this guy and and we can kind of get that impression later on in the movie where he reacts i don't think his intention was to replace him the whole time no i think that he he got frustrated and killed him although he is he's going to be longer yeah he's going into his suit i i think he was there with the express purpose like he obviously entered this workforce with the intention of doing this job and was upset that he didn't get the job so this is just his reaction to having been told no you're not good enough you can't do this so i'll find a way to do this i'm gonna go anyways yeah so that was his sole motivation so once he gets there he doesn't have any ill will towards the people there like what's his what's his motivation after he gets there i guess just to do his job because he's crazy when he gets there his motivation is to do his job but then his motivation becomes oh i'm gonna get this girl because she's more attractive than i expected and uh yeah it's really confusing throughout like it doesn't seem really obvious what he wants i would love to see like the results of whatever test he took back on like at the space station where they're just like oh what did your computer program and he's like well this is um it's a dog sculpture looks like it doesn't look like a dog no it was sculpted out of a dog it started as a dog it's like the the the employment test at blockbuster yeah exactly hold on we're gonna have the conversation that benson has with the robot right they're a one-on-one which is weird because he's just talking to himself yeah it was it was frustrating me already that he's trying to talk to the robot and the robots responding through text on the screen i was like wait what year is this and the robots can't talk like robots could talk when this movie came out but he made but he made the point yeah that immediately happened to answer my concern but i was just like already frustrated and then even kaitel's like why aren't you talking stop texting me and talk this is dangerous you're taking your eyes off the road i also i don't know if this was the standard computer noise from back in the day yeah but the sound of the text appearing on the screen in this movie is the same sound of text appearing on the screen in alien oh interesting and and i don't maybe that was just sounds computer made or maybe they took it directly from that production yeah i'm not sure uh but because i know a lot of the sound effects in alien like just and they're burned into my mind because i've seen that movie so many times yeah uh and so i thought it was a strange coincidence but i don't know anything about computers from the 70s yeah i think that his uh hector's response like it was a little confusing to me when he's like i'm not ready yet like he's not ready to start talking because hector's being very hellish yeah so i wasn't i wasn't quite sure if that meant that like oh you need to like download more of your brain into me or like i'm biding my time until i have something worth saying yeah i think it's a little of column and a little column b but he also at this point is texting messages like oh by the way you're a murderer and he's like what no uh blank that please he's like it's like but he knows everything you know he's like okay i'm gonna blank that okay but you did kill a guy and he's like i said blank that oh sorry oh sorry my bad sorry mr killer sorry dude don't kill me um and he says i'm not malfunctioning you are right which is essentially the whole the whole like premise of 2001 a space odyssey which is that hal makes the point that whenever there has been an error in the hal 9000 series it has always come down to human error like it's not me it's you guys that screwed up it can only be attributable to human error this sort of thing has cropped up before and it has always been due to human error and it turns out the reason is because the people who programmed it built in this like subsystem that caused a problem yeah and that's exactly what's happening here is that while he's programming it he's also infecting it with his psychotic brain disease and he's turning it into a murder bot that is obsessed with farrah fawcett's character um who in the entire movie is wearing almost nothing but pajamas or nothing yeah it's either pajamas or no clothes um but yeah so he keeps he keeps telling it to forget that he killed anybody um and then and then the robot kills sally yeah the the dog is back in the lab and uh they hear the sounds of it being wounded and alex runs in to try and find the dog and then finds its mangled corpse on the floor uh probably because it inherited the idea that dogs are for killing and eating from the robot other than extracting pieces of rock from people's eyes the only thing that these hands seem to be able to do is crush things right um and because it even breaks one of the chess pieces when it loses yeah and it's just which it loses because it it can't see far enough ahead to understand a sacrifice play and again a chess um foreshadowing unlike the last foreshadowing the sound that payoff right did um did hal ever play chess with them yes that's that's a pretty common thing i guess with the ais computers that play chess i feel like that far in the future no one's going to play chess with a robot because it's just like not even not even in the thing when he dumps the that's in the present though isn't it relatively uh in tron uh but i guess that's supposed to be in the present too yeah it just feels like you're it's it's just rng situation you're just like oh did i set you for exactly my skill level because otherwise you're to beat me and if you're any less then i'll beat you and that's the end of the conversation there's literally no way you're going to beat a robot at chess easy there deep blue yeah um but yeah so the dog is dead uh hector is terrified by alex running up to him she's just screaming about the dog having been killed and he grabs her by the wrists and lifts her off the ground yeah it seems like it would be incredibly painful i don't like both in if that was reality and on set like she's dangling from his little metal arms by her wrists and uh benson is trying to tell uh hector to put her down but he's not listening to benson and he says you have to tell him because the robot's in love with her and he'll do anything she says so he says she says hector put me down and then he he puts her down and she had blood on her hands and i don't know if it was from the robot picking her up or from the dog corpse i i i think it was supposed to be from the sally juice no the from the robot like just squeezing her dude okay that's how i read it but yeah oh i i don't remember how close she got to the to the dog's remains there um but uh she runs back to her room with adam to tell him what happened and then basically benson is like hot on our heels and it's like hey guess what we're leaving now we're going to go to earth yeah and because i guess he kind of has gathered that she is interested in earth because she keeps asking him questions about it and so he's kind of like come with me we're going to go to earth and adam's like no that's not going to happen right now so do you think at this point that um benson benson realizes that the robot is crazy well um benson knows i think yeah i don't think adam knows yet because they seal it in the lab and it so starts clawing its way into the door it starts disassembling the door to get back um but yeah uh right now he i think he knows that this adam knows that benson is crazy but uh no i want to know if benson thinks the robot's crazy so he's like he's like i'm gonna take the girl and get out of here because this robot's crazy i do think that's part of it is he's like yeah i they're right i shouldn't have come up here and uh i'm gonna take you and we're gonna leave now he was just like i'm not waiting for the eclipse to be over we're gonna get on a ship right now and we're gonna leave because i can't i can't fix this robot um and uh so he tries to leave with alex and then he gets in a fight with naked kirk douglas well that that's coming up oh okay uh so the they overload uh hector when he goes to charge up right that's right um and then he tells benson to dismantle hector which he does but then there's this crazy reverse uh footage of hector putting himself back together yeah yeah it took me it's i had to watch it i watched it twice just to verify that it's it's just playing in reverse in reverse um but it's pretty clever the way they do it um i guess whatever part of benson is still functioning benson hector uh well that'll become blurred later uh that he's communicating with their older robots to have the older robots reassemble him yeah um it's at this point that that's when benson barges in and says i'm taking alex right and uh and just uh so at this point they don't even know that hector is back together yet correct and uh he tries to leave i was really confused when they said disassemble him and he disassembled the vents and disassembled hector so like benson's intentions were good at this point yeah like they weren't well they weren't semi good yeah i mean yeah i guess he still wanted to steal the girl away girl but like he didn't he like he he never intended for this robot to do anybody any harm correct i think that's true he was just trying to do his job um but uh but adam is resistant and the two of them start fighting and they get each other and choke holds back and forth yeah kirk douglas is a 62 year old naked man fully naked and straddling harvey keitel yeah um he gets bashed over the head real hard with his tank yeah and is he knocked unconscious um i i don't know if he's completely he's he's down for a bit but um while that's going on uh benson is able to get his hands on alex and drag her down the hallway where they run headlong into hector who the freshly reassembled hector and uh then he gets his hands on harvey keitel yeah and murders him so alex assumes that benson is murdered here right we all assume that he's murdered his hand gets severed right correct uh and then adam and alex are crawling through some tunnels for some reason yeah and then just robot arms are like punching through the floor and trying to grab at them like they're in a crappy haunted house yeah this seems to be a trend i think in in films of this time too that you know like all spaceships are made of like crawl spaces with grates over top of them yeah i don't know if this is taken from like actual ships or something like that because we're specifically alien or just all from aliens well and they keep turning their back on hector and he goes where they where'd he go it's like well why don't you just keep watching him keep an eye on him guys the ground above you you can see through it that's the whole point of it uh they uh they try to lay a trap for him uh in the lab in the lab with i guess there's like a tank of nitro well they're in like the control center of the ship and they're they're like they tried they tried to lock the doors but you know like we already know that he can get through the doors right and then uh they cut he comes over like the inner benson comes over the intercom system right or at least what they thought was benson because they hear his they hear his voice they're like oh like we thought he was dead and like he's on this video screen and he's clearly not dead and then we cut we cut to like the mutilated face of that it's just been like sitting on top of of hector's little tiny robot head he uh he hannibal lectered his face on yeah and and so i don't know if the implication was that perhaps in this time hector did a full download of benson yeah i think i think they are combined now yeah um which is super crazy because that's the exact same thing that happens in black hole oh is it um the the downloads themselves to the robot well no the compression of the black hole merges the bad guy and the crazy robot into one consonant being and they reign over hell yeah interesting such a crazy ending to that movie i love it but i think that this scene is trying to this is now establishing that this robot can basically do any voice that he's heard like he could just mimic benson even though benson's now dead yeah he's a deep fake robot yeah because he turns away uh well i guess i was not turning away because it was just coming by to check in yeah that after the the eclipse is over um they're getting a check in from a ship that's like hey is everything okay down there we're just checking in since you're coming out of eclipse and using pharah fawcett and kirk douglas's voice the robot is like oh yeah everything's fine here we had a little bit of trouble but we're all good now how are you uh how are you foreign conversation anyway uh but then but then they go and set to go to try to set the trap right or for hector by basically pulling out up the floor panels taking out the metal grating which is like the structure underneath it and like laying the the sheet metal or whatever is on top of it back over it so like he would fall through right but for some reason it's a oh there's just water under the lab well it's liquid nitrogen because they wanted to freeze him and break him but i don't know why they have a pool of liquid nitrogen because because they they got him into it before he he's already fallen into it once right but when he came out he's frozen yeah did they get him in it before yeah um so they because they lay this trap once before and he throws a rock through it to prove that it's attractive i thought that was this time yeah that's this time no this is there's a time they do they do it twice which is why right we're just at the first time here so this is the time at which he comes and he yeah he he's chasing them and she's she's standing there as bait right and he comes up and you know starts to like uh they put a platform over it and he starts to walk forward but he notices it and he's like this is a trap he picks up a rock and throws it at it and breaks the thing and then adam turns on one of the other robots and knocks him into it right and that's the first time he falls right and then they run around some more right yeah so then he comes out and he's covered in ice because he got so cold from the liquid nitrogen um but he's still able to move and chases them around um but then they're like knocked unconscious like first first they go up they they try to escape while he's frozen but when they get to the surface the ship explodes which got like a genuine reaction from you oh yeah i wasn't expecting that at all because they're right when they get to the surface they're running up to the ship and it explodes on the surface and they're like well i guess we'll go back inside and they go to bed they sleep and they wake up in separate chambers and uh the robot is talking to them and and telling them come this way come to the lab we're gonna come fix everything that you broke now and uh and threatens them like i'm gonna cut off your air yeah you're going to get home this whole ship is going to kill you if you don't do what i say this whole ship's a bunch of buttons yeah and that's when whenever nothing but a damned radio with doors that's when adam realizes that that he also now has the same port in the back of his neck right that benson did that the plan is now that he's going to do what he did to benson which is suck all of benson's knowledge out and kill him and then put his face over benson's face and then alex will love him yeah it really would have been a happy ending if it didn't interrupt it but on his way to the lab adam stops by the grenade department and he gets a grenade or some kind of explosive device um and when they get into the lab he basically tackles hector into the tank while setting the grenade well i like how he kind of goads him into like getting frustrated again that was like it's like by the way captain i'm a major and and we are going to get back to work but i'm still in charge here right uh which is a reference to the fact that farrah fawcett is for the first time in her career not being credited as fairfax majors yeah she just got away from a major and now she's stuck with another major um yeah and so he jump tackles him into this tank and they both explode and die yeah and are frozen for preservation right and then i guess she just leaves she's like i guess i will go to earth it sounded kind of nice and then it ends with like she's on a shuttle going to earth and there's really ominous music yeah wait is she going to die is she going to kill people and she's also headed towards like a black and gray planet earth yeah it's like this doesn't seem like an ending that i want for her yeah [Music] i forgot to tot i totally forgot to mention my favorite part of this movie if i if what i think i saw is actually what i saw oh yeah the robot erection was the best part of this movie yeah there's they're they're showing like the connection there well yeah yeah so basically you know benson walks into the room when when we're first kind of introducing hector and and hector is shown mimicking all of benson's motion so like he raises his hand and his and the robot's hand goes out he taps his fingers and he taps his fingers the robot taps his fingers and then or whatever his claws yeah and then uh and then they're both looking at alex and we don't see anything happen to benson but then they cut to like this close-up of like a robotic arm thing just like raising up slowly into the air yeah so you just kind of led to assume that uh he was mimicking events in there yeah um i wanted to play this clip of fair faucet on the tonight show in 1987 where carson is taking some cheap shots at this movie okay then you did a couple of movies that were not the greatest successes in the world did you really have a point there where you said oh wow you did saturn three i remember with that that's a good one well you know it didn't really no i worked for you for a while now an interesting story the title of that before i s before we finished uh before i started was the helper and it was very interesting it was about um a man manufactured robot who fell in love because he felt the emotions of the man who had made him and it was very interesting the script before we started and then i don't know what happened no lately you did the burning honestly like i think what we got is better than what she describes us yeah the first draft of the movie but the title the helper is just that's a dumb title but i thought it was funny that he's so harsh that he's just like you did a bunch of terrible movies after you left that show that you're famous for yeah that's pretty rough yeah um but yeah i think that's the whole that's the whole movie right yeah um i think what jesse was talking about earlier was um it was when it was aired on television they they reincorporated a bunch of scenes they put stuff back in yeah okay and i i won't read the whole list but there's the massive list of stuff going on outside the space station oh interesting uh wait so you're saying that they i'm sorry and maybe i missed right so you're saying that they actually added stuff back in when they put it on television correct so we did watch a theatrical release i think so yeah okay yeah there's stuff uh it's a nice transfer to not be the full version of the movie i think uh they discuss how how hector got put back together they discuss uh uh or they i guess they show more of the mutilation of benson's body okay uh and so all this stuff was put back in for a tv release which is weird so you have the actual like more mutilation and gore for the tv yeah yeah um yeah there's something about like benson sabotage is the airlock system to keep adam outside uh uh blowing out airlocks and stuff like there's a whole bunch more action pieces yeah there's a lot of weird editing too like this the scene where he's talking to the robot about uh that he's a killer and he's like oh blank that blank that but there's like uh what seems like a day or two later like suddenly we have the same camera angle from him talking to the robot of like him talking to farrah fawcett or something else and it's just like that was clearly a part of that previous scene but somehow it ended up here yeah well and yeah i remember this this movie occurs over the course of like 20-some days yeah it takes three weeks to unfold well i think that they probably had a lot of problems because they you know lost a director after they started shooting right you know so i think that they you know they were kind of trying to make the best of a bad situation and what they whatever they had yeah i think what would have helped move the story along is as far as sort of trying to make it seem like they've been there for weeks instead of having this planetoid i'll say and we'll say moon moon because they don't really it's a it's like an asteroid right yeah because it's it's not it's not a moon of saturn because they would just call it one of what it's and if it was saturn three it was like the third biggest moon they would call it whatever the third base yeah uh instead of having it be eclipsed by saturn they should have just had it like rotate around to the dark side and then they could have been just like a couple of days versus 20 some days which seems it's like way too long yeah we missed a lot of their character our exceptions just 22 days and and and like jessie was saying is like what is the what's going on here what is benson trying to accomplish in all this time other than just building and fine-tuning this robot it would have been interesting like had it become his jack torrance obsession yeah like fine-tuning this robot i'm gonna make this robot perfect because i'm not perfect so this robot has to be perfect but there can only be one shining slash 2001 a space odyssey parody film and that is passengers so we've already covered it well honestly i was thinking that this movie has some bones to it that that could be good if it was remade i mean i think that there's some interesting ideas there about you know so much of it is is like beat for beat 2001 a space odyssey yeah i mean i like the idea i mean i like the idea of you know that's this this you know robot learning to sort of be psychotic and be a killer from from a man and yeah you know and and the idea that it you know develops feelings as such what was that russell crowe movie is it virtuoso virtuosity with denzel washington where they it's kind of a similar thing where they they mix all the worst serial killers together into a like a virtual reality person and it comes to life yeah it gets out of the system um i was reading some things from the wikipedia here and apparently the production pre-sold the movie for four million dollars to nbc right that's where most of their money came from maybe maybe that's why they had to put a bunch of shots back there like shoot we sold a movie for yeah a lot more money than it's probably worth uh which was like yeah that's like the ultimate scam yeah um i have to say too that i'm pretty sure that michael douglas is a clone because how do you inherit a voice yeah it is a nice thing it's like it's not possible genetics to inherit the exact same voice of your father if you closed your eyes and listened to kirk douglas talk it is michael douglas's voice like i just could not get over it uh it was really bothersome to me i just like i can't believe how much they sound alike that's funny it's it's crazy too to think that michael douglas is older now than kirk douglas was in that movie yeah and yet kirk douglas is still arriving i mean he might not be by the time this episode posts but presently he's still around he's like 102 and he's a murderer and because of him being a murderer the director of this film is stanley dawnin who is probably best known for his work directing charade or singing in the rain um uh the writer was martin amos this is his only screenplay everything else that he uh has writing credits for were based on novels or he just got a story credit he didn't actually write the screenplay because i saw i see him as a writer for london fields which is incredible it just came out right or recently like last year last year i mean it was it was held for for a long long time oh okay i didn't know that yeah because um amber heard they they wanted her to do more nudity oh and she heard that and and she she didn't want to do it so they got body doubles and just yeah and they just intercut it with her and apparently that's like some kind of contract violation about doubling you know you have to talk to me about that and they didn't and they're trying to pass it off as her so she tried to hold up the production and like all kinds of people were like trying to sue but i guess it all got settled and they finally got released to terrible reviews uh but did you just have the devil replace her and the rest of the movie then you don't need it then you're done um but the other writer uh credited writer is john barry um who like we said uh it was a did mostly production design he worked on clockwork orange uh superman's one and two star wars four and five and then passed away of uh viral meningitis on the set of but oddly enough did not do the production design on this movie right uh stuart craig did the production design on this movie and he's still working today he did all the harry potter movies uh he did uh looking at the mission uh memphis belle chaplin uh mary o'reilly mission is that the one that's a roland jaffee with robert de niro oh okay but yeah he's still he this is his first the production designer's first credit as a breakfast designer um he was probably like john berry's assistant and got stepped up for this movie it must be because uh because the sets for this again i can't stress enough how how great this film is it's like bond level stuff the the work that they did um well i think i think some one of the things that happened was um their budget got cut way back so once they had already started yeah once they had started so they were they were in production and another film that this this company was producing that itc was producing was uh raise the titanic did really poorly yeah and then they cut the budget back so i imagined that they had built these beautiful sets and then had to you know do scale yeah scale scale back the movie as best they could but we'll cover the titanic later too i have that one so that's coming later in 1980. um farrah fawcett played alex here you obviously know her from charlie's angels or logan logan's ron sorry raise the titanic i'm sorry it didn't it didn't do poorly it uh it went over budget oh okay that makes sense yeah um and fairfax is also in cannonball run next year um for us not for you guys sorry um kirk douglas was adam still alive somehow elderly aunt man's dad i know him mostly uh the first thing i was close to is twenty thousand leaks under the scene here but spartacus is probably a very close second yeah i think this is the first movie i've seen him in so okay yeah my my opinion of him is not very high currently yeah you haven't seen it runs in the family no nobody did uh it was kirk douglas michael douglas and michael douglas's son who i think has since like dropped out of acting yeah i think so um but uh i know like spartacus is the more famous obviously of the movies that we the twenty thousand leagues but twenty 000 leagues i think just because like disney was so prominent in our childhood like because vhs had come out and i like his the songs that he sings oh yeah me too so many great people in that movie i need to rewatch it it's been too long um harvey keitel has benson obviously probably best known for his tarantino roles but he's been a lot of scorsese stuff too and uh the original bad lieutenant um but for tarantino he was the wolf and he was mr white and then i love that he wanted to just be the pimp in uh taxi driver a taxi driver yeah like like he actually asked to to play that role like originally supposed to be i think a black man and he was like wait no no i really want i want to be this guy that's cool um okay so up or down what do you think jess don't bother this isn't up for me uh i i definitely recommend at least watching this movie i think i'm gonna go up also on this one really yeah i think it's worth it just for the killer robot um that's that's enough for me i'm a simple man i have simple needs one of those needs is a killer robot and one of those needs is a robot erection everybody could use one um letterboxed uh so i put this one after midnight madness but just ahead of uh what was the killer santa movie uh well good night ahead of tuala good night okay uh so i guess this is gonna take up my number four spot whoa wow you were excited about this one uh so it should be uh my brilliant career uh and then mad max the fog and then saturn wow that's pretty high i'd rather watch saturn three again then again how i'm doing this is like when i rather watch this again and i'd rather watch saturn three than american gigolo yeah okay um i think it's also uh for me slotting into the number four spot our lists look very different but um or no i guess five the fifth slot i'm gonna put this just below caligula but above midnight madness so my my top five right now are mad max the fog my brilliant career caligula and this fascinating you guys have a much higher opinion on this movie than i did it's just fun it's fun and it's crazy i think that's everything for this one um if you guys have any thoughts you'd like to share we are vintage video pod on twitter facebook instagram and letterbox or as i've said before you can find each of our full movie rankings for the year check us out at vintagevideopodcast.com please consider rating us on itunes to help new people find the show and if you take the time to leave us a review we will thank you personally in an upcoming episode if you're feeling especially generous you can also support the show through patreon.com vintage video podcast thank you so much for listening and i hope you'll join us next time when we will be discussing don't answer the phone which imdb describes as a deeply disturbed vietnam veteran terrorizes the young women of los angeles and taunts a radio psychologist with descriptions of his grisly crimes i would say that that is inaccurate yeah uh we leave you now with the trailer for don't answer the phone run if you must hello operator it's an emergency can you help me hide if you can scream if you are able who's there but above all if you are alone don't answer the phone [Music] he is out there somewhere in the property behind you beside you ready to kill again [Music] no attempt to conceal the body it's almost like he wanted to be discovered the nurse the starlet the students the secretary i am frightened of you what does that do to you you recognize this person because i'm too strong if you are alone don't answer the phone rated r you