Article-I.D.: ucbvax.7544
Posted: Sat Jun  5 05:49:33 1982
Received: Sun Jun  6 00:33:41 1982

>From JPM@Mit-Ai Sat Jun  5 05:47:03 1982

SF-LOVERS Digest         Saturday, 5 Jun 1982      Volume 5 : Issue 62

Today's Topics:
                       SF Movies - Poltergeist,
                SF TV - Dr Who,  SF Topics - Supermen,
                  Random Topics - Pogue Carburetor,
                    Humor - Genderless Video Games
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Date: 4 Jun 1982 0108-PDT
From: Jim McGrath 
Subject: Poltergeist


                             Poltergeist
                           By VINCENT CANBY
                   c. 1982 N.Y. Times News Service

    NEW YORK - More than any other Hollywood film maker of his 
generation, Steven Spielberg has preserved the wonderment of childhood
while growing up to make the sort of movies he always loved as a
child, but bigger and better and far more imaginative. He's a 
brilliant technican who still has doubts about the dark.
    His ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' was the last, dazzling 
word on sci-fi fantasies, not about the end of the world but about the
beginning of a benign new one. ''Raiders of the Lost Ark'' is every
cliffhanging adventure film ever made, wrapped up into one hilarious
odyssey, but with few of the anticlimaxes usual in such films.
    Now, in ''Poltergeist,'' co-produced by Spielberg, directed by
Tobe Hooper and based on Spielberg's original story, he has come up
with a marvelously spooky ghost story that may possibly scare the wits
out of very small children and offend those parents who believe that
kids should be protected from their own, sometimes savage
imaginations.
    I suspect, however, that there's a vast audience of teen-agers and
others who'll love this film. Indeed, ''Poltergeist'' often sounds as 
if it had been dictated by an exuberant 12-year-old, someone who's 
sitting by a summer campfire and determined to spin a tale that will 
keep everyone else on the edges of their knapsacks far into the night.
    ''Poltergeist'' is full of creepy, crawly, slimy things that jump 
out from the shadows. It contains playful ghosts and mean ones. It's a
film in which childhood wishes and fears are made manifest, as in the
image of a gnarled, long-dead tree, something to climb during the day
and play in, but which, at night, casts scary shadows on a child's
bedroom wall.
    ''Poltergeist'' is like a thoroughly enjoyable nightmare, one that
you know that you can always wake up from, and one in which, at the 
end, no one has permanently been damaged. It's also witty in a fashion
that Alfred Hitchcock might have appreciated. Offhand, I can't think
of many other directors who could raise goose bumps by playing ''The
Star-Spangled Banner'' behind a film's opening credits.
    The setting is an ordinary, quintessentially middle-class, new 
California subdivision called Cuesta Verde, where every house looks 
alike and comes equipped with the same vast assortment of appliances.
Every family in Cuesta Verde is more or less on the same social, 
economic and book-club level.
    However, it's to the credit of Spielberg and Hooper, and to the 
screenplay by Spielberg, Michael Grais and Mark Victor, that though 
the members of the Freeling family are typical, they aren't the 
nonentities one usually finds in such movies. This is as much a 
reflection of the manner of the movie as it is of the characters.
    Steve and Diane Freeling (Craig T. Nelson and Jobeth Williams) are
in their 30s, happily married, doing all right financially and the 
parents of three children, a daughter in her midteens (Dominique 
Dunne), a son several years younger (Oliver Robins) and a 10-year-old 
daughter, Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke). Carol Anne, a small, blond 
beauty, becomes the innocent hostage of the occult forces that, one 
night, come flying out of the untended television set.
    It's one of the nicer variations on the film's ghost theme that
the Freelings, though baffled by this visitation, are not initially 
panicked. Diane Freeling is enchanted when she finds that she can play
games with the unseen creatures, rather as if they were to be treated
as rare pets.
    Suddenly, however, for reasons that are finally explained, they
turn mean. All hell breaks loose, requiring the services first of an 
intelligent, somewhat embarrassed psychologist (Beatrice Straight), 
who moonlights as a parapsychologist, and eventually those of a most 
eccentric exorcist, a tiny woman played by Zelda Rubinstein, whose 
last film assignment was in ''Under the Rainbow.''
    Further details of the plot should not be revealed. More important
are the film's extraordinary technical effects, by which we are made 
to see and experience the terrible assaults these angry spirits make 
on the Freelings, sometimes occupying their minds as well as their 
house. These effects are often eerie and beautiful but also 
occasionally vividly gruesome.
    The structure of the film is not perfect. It seems to have two 
endings. This isn't because there are two, but because the film's 
exorcism rite is so spectacular that one really isn't prepared for 
still another confrontation, which doesn't quite measure up to the 
first one.
    Miss Williams, still better known as a New York stage actress than
as a film actress, is charming as the beleaguered Mom, a modern sort 
of woman who isn't above smoking a little marijuana after the kids are
safely tucked into bed. Nelson is also good as the stalwart but not
stolid father, and the children are excellent, especially Miss 
O'Rourke. The style of the film is probably best exemplified by the 
performances of Miss Straight and Miss Rubinstein, who play it 
absolutely without facetiousness, though with great good humor, and 
never look silly.
    There's some controversy about the individual contributions to the
film made by Spielberg and Hooper, best known as director of ''The 
Texas Chainsaw Massacre.'' I've no way of telling who did what, though
''Poltergeist'' seems much closer in spirit and sensibility to 
Spielberg's best films than to Hooper's.

    ''Poltergeist,'' which has been rated PG (''Parental Guidance 
Suggesped''), is a movie that parents will want to consider very 
carefully before sending off very young children to see it. Though 
it's as harmless as a nightmare, it could also prompt some.

------------------------------

Date: 4 Jun 1982 0109-PDT
From: Jim McGrath 
Subject: Poltergeist


                             Poltergeist
                         By RICHARD FREEDMAN
                        Newhouse News Service

    (UNDATED) Poltergeists are things that go bump in the dark. Though
not exactly Casper the Friendly Ghost, traditionally they're more 
mischievous than menacing.
    Not so the spooks haunting ''Poltergeist,'' perhaps the first 
PG-rated movie that would send Casper gibbering in terror up the 
aisles.
    Co-written and co-produced by Steven Spielberg (''Close Encounters
of the Third Kind'' and ''Raiders of the Lost Ark''), who also 
apparently helped Tobe Hooper (''The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'') with 
the direction, this is a dandy ghost story - both very funny and very 
scary at the same time.
    The family afflicted with poltergeist problems are the Freelings, 
who live in a nice new tract house in a recently created mid-American 
suburban development. They have three nice children, of whom the 
youngest and cutest is Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke).
    Steve (Craig T. Nelson) and Diane (Jobeth Williams) Freeling are 
your average American husband and wife. He sells real estate. She 
tries to settle breakfast squabbles between the kids.
    They all watch too much television, and at sign-off time, when the
kids are finally in bed, Steve and Diane settle down to share a 
friendly joint before enjoying the sleep of the just.
    But why does that gnarled old Arthur Rackham tree outside the 
children's bedroom window seem to be clutching for them when the 
lightning flashes and the wind howls?
    And why does Carol Anne's pet canary just keel over in its cage
one Sunday afternoon and have to be buried in a cigar box, only to be 
unceremoniously exhumed by a bulldozer the next day to make way for a 
swimming pool?
    Perhaps it's because the little girl thinks she's in touch with
the ''television people'' who emerge from the flickering screen after 
''The Star-Spangled Banner'' has been played and the set has gone 
blank for the night.
    In any case, before long all hell has broken loose in the Freeling
household. Ordinary objects fly through the air crashing into each 
other, wraiths left over from the finale of ''Raiders of the Lost 
Ark'' whisk through the living room, and Carol Anne herself is sucked 
into a closet by a magnetic light ray.
    Being the normal, rational folks they are, the Freelings seek 
professional help from parapsychologist Dr. Lesh (Beatrice Straight), 
who arrives at their haunted house sensibly equipped with her own hip 
flask and accompanied by a pair of fellow spookologists.
    Dr. Lesh assures the Freelings that unlike real hauntings, which
can go on forever, poltergeist phenomena usually last ''only'' about
two months. But they're a memorable two months.
    With Carol Anne still trapped in the closet, further aid clearly
is needed. Enter Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), a solemn midget exorcist 
who lectures the afflicted parents perhaps a bit more thoroughly than 
they - or we - need about the rules governing the spirit world before 
restoring their daughter to them.
    Like any tale of the uncanny, ''Poltergeist'' demands from its 
audience a willing suspension of disbelief.
    One does wonder why, in a neighborhood so densely populated that 
television reception is impaired and Mister Rogers pops unasked into a
football game the Freelings are watching, nobody calls the cops when
the poltergeist creates such a racket.
    But such is Spielberg's cinematic mastery that we're willing to go
along with any inconsistencies reality might impose on his nightmare 
world, and even to forgive the rather trite explanation the film 
ultimately offers for its grisly goings-on.
    Only one scene is truly horrific, though, in this refreshingly 
unexploitative horror film. The rest of ''Poltergeist'' provides 
splendid entertainment for anyone over the age of haunted little Carol
Anne.

    ''POLTERGEIST.'' Wonderfully funny and scary ghost story by Steven
Spielberg (''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'') about an average 
suburban American family menaced by things that go bump in the night.
Rated PG. Three and a half stars.

------------------------------

Date: 4 Jun 1982 1250-EDT
From: Larry Seiler 
Subject: Doctor Who - the Definite Article

Dear Kevin Rudd,
    In reference to your question, "Doctor who?":  yes.

Dear "pur-ee!pur-phy!retief",
    In reference to your question, "What is Doctor Who's real name":  
well, that depends on what you mean by "real".  Almost certainly that 
would not be his name on Gallifrey (excuse my spelling, please).  But 
in at least one early Doctor Who movie, he was explicitly referred to
as "Doctor Who".  And even in the Tom Baker series, there are
references.  For example, once when the Doctor was masquerading as an
android that was intended to masquerade as him, he tells another
android "Nobody knows who's Who around here."

    By the way, is it too much to ask that people sign their messages 
with human-readable names?  I would rather refer to people by name
than by alphabet-soup computer designations.

Larry Seiler

------------------------------

Date: Friday,  4 Jun 1982 14:45-PDT
From: jim at RAND-UNIX
Subject: Supermen

                           Compare and contrast


       Stranger in a Strange Land         Gladiator
       Robert A. Heinlein                 Philip Wylie
       (c) 1961                           (c) 1930, 1958

1. VALENTINE MICHAEL SMITH born   1. HUGO DANNER born amid friction
   amid friction between parents.    between parents. Develops into a
   Develops into a superman with.    superman via genetic engineering.
   Martian help.

2. Trying to find his place in    2. Trying to find his place in
   society, joins a carnival as      society, joins a carnival as a
   a magician .                       strong man.  Makes a friend named
                                     VALENTINE MITCHEL.

3. Immolated by an enraged mob.   3. Immolated by a lightning bolt.


I liked Heinlein's version better (except for the slapstick scenes in
Heaven).  It's interesting to read both books together and notice the
difference in approach:  Heinlein basically interested in the human
potentials and Wylie in human arrogance, which occasionally needs to
be slapped down by God.

I'm guessing that the parallel is intentional, because of the
similarity of names (as well as the themes, of course).

------------------------------

Date: 25 May 1982 11:50 edt
From: Boebert.SCOMP at MIT-MULTICS
Subject: The Pogue Carburetor

This isn't SF, but it should be.  Ralph Ginzburg, late of EROS, the 
Federal Pen, and Moneysworth, is running ads promising the secrets of 
the 200 mpg Pogue Carburetor, one of those legendary inventions like
the eternal razor blade that are suppressed by the monopolistic
meanies of big biz.  The ad caused a severe nostalgia shock, for about
25 years ago a friend and I built one from the original patent
drawings (which, as I recall, went back to the 30's), after an article
we had uncovered in, I think, an ancient issue of Modern Mechanix.

We got the patent drawings through friend's father, who was a
consulting engineer.  The device is essentially a gasoline preheater.
It consists of two adjacent spiral chambers, the kind of arrangement
you would get if you laid two strips of paper together and then wound
them into a coil.  Gasoline went through one and exhaust through the
other.  The vaporized gasoline was metered into intake manifold
through an LP gas valve.  We never got to verify the 200 mpg claims
because our silver soldering technique wasn't up to the task and we
(evidently) got a leak, because the thing exploded, flew clear over
one house and landed in the adjacent yard.  Such adventures were only
possible in the years BN (Before Nader).

Earl

------------------------------

Date: 4 Jun 1982 0814-PDT
From: FEATHER at USC-ISIF (Martin S. Feather)
Subject: Video Games

What do you call a PacMan that doesn't eat anything?

PacIfist.

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End of SF-LOVERS Digest
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