From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!sf-lovers Newsgroups: fa.sf-lovers Title: SF-LOVERS Digest V5 #62 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 4 Jun 1982 0108-PDT From: Jim McGrathSubject: 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. ------------------------------ End of SF-LOVERS Digest ***********************