Voices in the Earth is the 19th episode of the second season of the rebooted
Twilight Zone anthology sci-fi series.
In the far future an expedition returns to a desolate barren Earth where a scientist begins to see the ghosts of those who died years before.
These are indeed the same suits that can be seen in - (if you were ever unlucky enough to catch it!) - the 1994 Roger Corman version of Marvel's
Fantastic Four film from back in a time before people realised that if you were respectful to the source material then you could have a big hit on your hands (Snigger! Yes I'm laughing at you 2015 version)
As a point of interest this episode also features the lovely Jenny Agutter who's semi and completely nude scenes, viewed at an impressionable age, in
Walkabout,
Logan's Run,
Equus and
An American Werewolf in London, launched more fantasies than all the spacesuits featured in this blog
...... Just saying.
Steve
It's worth sitting through walkabout for a gander at Jenny's curlies but I'm informed it's usually cut now, in deference to legal considerations. I have seen the Corman FF effort, while an uncomfortable watch, it can't quite rival the 2015 version in awfulness. The word is, that both version were solely contrived for the purpose of retaining rights over the property. There's even a rumour that the 2015 version was edited, when the executive preview assessed that it wasn't quite bad enough. I don't remember these helmets although I can still vividly picture the Mr. Fantastic stretchy effects. Happily the invisible girl was a somewhat less challenging task to render on screen.
ReplyDeleteWell to be clear, Walkabout remains an immensely watchable film for me even if Jenny's curlies are edited out, which I don't think they are on my DVD copy although I've seen it so many times now that my mind probably just reinsert the image back in, uploaded from the "bank".
DeleteMuch like The Man Who Fell To Earth, Walkabout has been something of a constant cinematic companion which is quite a rare quality in a film; that it can travel through the ages with you and continue to speak to you outside of simply being a nostalgic trigger.
What does it for you?
The films that get the job done are probably things like: Stalker, the Tarkovsky flic, through to Conan the Barbarian. In between there are a number of Japanese flics, a bunch of westerns, spaghetti or otherwise, Runaway Train, Beach Red, and Carol Reed's Odd Man Out. Interestingly Stalker takes a couple of cues from, Aguirre the Wrath of God as does Millius's other notable venture, Apocalypse Now. Neither of those are on my, lock in a vault list but they're worth a spin. Still trying to track down Zardoz at the moment, which I think might also get in there
DeleteSome good stuff in that list but must admit to not having seen Stalker yet. I bump it higher up the list
DeleteWhat gets me is that I had assumed based on how cheap and nasty these suits are,I mean those visible external catches on the helmet look absolutely terrible couldnt they have used a hidden rare earth magnet or something?,that they were made specifically for the ff film now it turns out that the props department was simply too cheap or more likely perhaps just too poverty stricken to even build a crappy suit and instead just rented one,which to me says utterly everything about that film.I guess it just shows us how far we`ve come where todays low budget film makers can buy a great looking GSH-6a on ebay for a few hundred dollars compared to the dark days of the early nineties
DeleteI wouldn't be surprised if The Twilight Zone rented them as well. What do you think? Did the Twilight Zone pack a good budget. I never watched enough to know.
DeleteLooks like the base for the helmet is a Simpson Racing helmet, the same type used for the Daggit squadron helmets used in Galactica 1980 (Battlestar Galactica series II). There were a ton of these used in Buck Rogers "flight Of The War Witch" and a few other Universal shows.
ReplyDelete