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Hitchcock's Spellbound is chief among the underpinnings, and there's Miklós Rózsa's strings and hammers made visible in the opening titles. "Tomorrow" is the setting, bland laboratory walls casually give way to a half-naked test subject grimacing under infernal lights, the Committee on Human Endurance hard at work. "You might call us the sadomasochists of the space program." The telekinetic brain in the research team won't be exposed, the anxious anthropologist (Arthur O'Connell) gets his eyeballs popped for getting too close to the truth. On the run with the resident geneticist (Suzanne Pleshette), the chairman turned prime suspect (George Hamilton) is assailed by psychic tremors. "No, thank you. I leave my supermen to the comic-strips." Cold War holdovers on the verge of the Age of Aquarius, Byron Haskin's classical solidity in the face of modernist abstraction, a striking embodiment of the mutating studio landscape. (Not for nothing is Richard Carlson the head of the institute.) Doorways vanish and toys spring to life, "all that scientific jazz" and the surrealism that comes with it. An enigmatic name is uttered by the drab widow (Yvonne De Carlo), when next glimpsed she's metamorphosed into a frowzy lewdling. Barbara Nichols' plaintive Brooklynese at a remote greasy spoon, twangy music on Aldo Ray's radio as he jeeps across the endless desert, the cracked irruption of psychedelic guitars at a stodgy hotel orgy. The European physicist (Nehemiah Persoff) recognizes the new reincarnation of old dictators, the government agent (Michael Rennie) takes the long view. "They say that power corrupts..." It builds to its own Star Gate of cosmic skulls and squeezed hearts, observed by De Palma (The Fury) and Cronenberg (Scanners) and Russell (Altered States). With Earl Holliman, Gary Merrill, Celia Lovsky, Vaughn Taylor, Ken Murray, and Miiko Taka.
--- Fernando F. Croce |