Spaced out?

Blast off and tune in to these great sci-fi flicks

by Ted Drozdowski

Like the Western before it, the space opera has become one of our most beloved film genres. Below, we offer a selection of some of our favorites, all available on video:

Flash Gordon (1936-1940). With wobbly rocketships that looked to be made of aluminum foil and sounded like an electric shaver, this trio of serials -- Rocketship, Mars Attacks the World, and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe -- set a standard for low-tech that would have made Ed Wood proud. The plotting and dialogue are risible; and the acting, from Buster Crabbe (Flash), Jean Rogers/Carol Hughes (Dale Arden), Charles Middleton (Ming the Merciless), and Frank Shannon (Dr. Zarkov), is atrocious but never bland. With unforgettable fire dragons and disintegrating chambers, plus Liszt's Les préludes.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Michael Rennie's ass-kicking pacifist Klaatu and his robot Gort star in this then-subversive parable about the wrongheadedness of war and militarism. The first, and perhaps best, exploration of the notion of enlightened cultures in space.

War of the Worlds (1953). The star is allegedly Gene Barry, but it's George Pal's special effects that captivate: soldiers and tanks glow white-hot and disintegrate under Martian heat rays, invading airships with the lines of bad-ass sports cars hover over the landscape like destructive winged demons. And there's an icky little long-armed stump of a Martian scout who must have been quite a shiver-inducer when he made his big-screen splash. The scope of the battle scenes make this film a precursor of Star War's delightful sprawl.

Cat Women on the Moon (1954). Also known as Rocket to the Moon, this flick -- and believe us, it's a flick -- speaks for a genre of delightful lunar cheese, movies like Angry Red Planet and Rocketship X-M (starring Lloyd Bridges). In the '50s, when the notion of space exploration was just an ash in God's eye, our fascination with the potential for interstellar travel produced a series of films with sleek metallic spaceships, countdowns, blastoffs, whirring dials -- all in an effort to reflect what it indeed might actually be like to soar into space some day. Of course, as in all films of this sort, the realist ambitions are offset by the discovery of awesome babes on the Earth's satellite.

Forbidden Planet (1956). This sci-fi version of Shakespeare's The Tempest remains a Freudian delight, with willful papa Walter Pidgeon's jealous psyche -- in the form of an invisible, clawed behemoth -- wiping out the potential suitors of daughter Anne Francis. Ambitious and complex, the plotting -- though slow -- blows away sheer genre flicks, including latter-day efforts like Star Wars and Independence Day. And the '50s infatuation with nuclear technology as a positive force that can nonetheless be corrupted is a post-Cold War theme that's still the stock-in-trade of contemporary flicks like Chain Reaction. Marks the first appearance of the iconic Robbie the Robot.

Barbarella (1968). Pure fluff, extending the tradition of the babes-in-space-flicks of the '50s (see Cat Women on the Moon). Director Roger Vadim's campy satire transformed Jane Fonda into a sort of Venus in futuristic furs -- and made her a star. Based on the French comic book and set in the 41st century, this has our heroine encountering carnivorous puppets and a host of other critters and criminals while proving that -- unlike the prophecy of the song "In the Year 2525" -- titillation won't be erased from our genetic code by evolution.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I still don't understand what the hell happens in this film's climactic rebirth/enlightenment sequence. And maybe that's the beauty (besides director Stanley Kubrick's entrancing visuals) of 2001, which uses space as a place to contemplate the nature of God and of humanity. Certainly one of the most captivating imaginings of the world of deep space, and one that influenced the look of successors like Star Wars and Silent Running -- even the patently cheesy Battlestar Galactica.

Solaris (1972). Scientists monitoring a planet covered by a sentient web are haunted by images from their ids. There are shades of Forbidden Planet and 2001 in this film's wrestlings with the identity of God and man. But Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky creates a mood of edgy claustrophobia and cold beauty that's genuinely alien.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). A sort of inner-space opera dealing with an everyman's quest to understand his place in the universe. That's the theme this film shares with 2001, but here the action's earthbound -- which gives director Steven Spielberg a chance to re-explore the enlightened-aliens theme (see The Day the Earth Stood Still) and trot out the grandest UFOs ever captured on film.

Alien (1979). Had it been made seven years later, Alien would have been heralded as an AIDS allegory. Instead it's an arty, shit-scary ensemble film with a wonderful cast (launching Sigourney Weaver's career), breathtaking visual conception (thanks to futurist artist H.R. Giger's set and critter designs), a genuinely frightening story well told, and a truly horrible alien. Monster movies get no better.