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 The Black Hole Released 1979 Directed by Gary Nelson  The Black Hole tells the story of the crew of a small exploratory ship who stumbles upon a previously undiscovered black hole. But more surprisingly they come across a ship that somehow defies the pull of the black hole which turns out to be the decades missing and seemingly abandoned U.S.S. Cygnus. Their own ship damaged from the pull of the black hole they have no choice to head for the Cygnus and hope to find what they need to repair their ship. When they arrive the Cygnus springs to life and they meet the mysterious Dr. Hans Reinhardt. Somehow Reinhardt has managed to survive by himself with nothing but a crew of robots of his own invention. It quickly becomes apparent that there is more to the eccentric Doctor than meets the eye and that his true nature might be much more sinister.  So it's pretty obvious this movie was meant to cash in on the wild success of Star Wars. Everyone wanted to make their own Star Wars knockoff so obviously Disney wasn't going to miss out on that. At the time The Black Hole was just dismissed as nothing more than a subpar Star Wars wannabe. But here's the thing about that. Aside from some obvious superficial similarities this is a very different movie. It's more like a bunch of people stumbled into Dracula's haunted space castle rather than a space opera. That probably contributed to it's unpopularity at the time. The movie exists as a weird dichotomy where it's both a cash in and a sincere effort and too much and not enough like Star Wars for the public to have accepted it. It's a pretty dark film and more much more adult than what Disney was known for. In fact the creators of the film were made to tone it down a bit from the original script. I suspect that lead to a lot of the flaws the movie had. Nevertheless, a lot of serious craft and artistry went into this movie. It's got some great production design and the models and miniatures are great. I will even go so far as to say that the Cygnus looks better than anything in the original Star Wars.  The picture doesn't do it justice, it looks better in the movie. When Disney made this they went big. They spent what was at the time a very large sum of money and it shows. The sets are massive. There's a lot of very impressive matte work. It has a big orchestral score with an incredibly haunting and memorable main theme. It's hardly a perfect movie and in several cases you can clearly see the strings that make actors or robots float but overall the special and visual effects were very impressive for their time. Disney wanted to rent the Dykstraflex system but ILM couldn't/wouldn't lend it out to them so they just said "gently caress it." and invented their own version. In spite of the movie's flaws The Black Hole has a lot of charm. I just love the design of the Cygnus. It looks less like a spaceship and more like a massive floating cathedral. Even the control panels on the bridge resemble stained glass windows. Between the themes of a lost ship, heaven and hell overtones, and a madman bent on hurling a ship into a scary unknown it's also very likely this film inspired Event Horizon. The Event Horizon itself has a lot of similar features to the U.S.S. Cygnus.  The Black Hole's also good a good cast. Notably veteran character actors Robert Forster, Anthony Perkins, and Ernest Borgnine. Roddy McDowall gives the voice of a wise cracking robot to great effect. They all provide reliably good performances although the film's brisk pace and focus on the visuals and general vibe don't leave them with a great deal of room for character development. That said I don't find that to really hurt the movie. And the show really belongs to Maximilian Schell who absolutely chews the gently caress out of the scenery as Dr. Reinhardt. The Black Hole was made somewhat in the mold of the old 50s/60s spaceship adventure films except everything is just bigger and more engaging in my opinion. Those films were often limited by their budget and were mostly filler but The Black Hole avoids that.  The financial failure of this movie and Tron shortly after left Disney to abandon its attempts at live action fare aimed towards older audiences. While Tron has long enjoyed a cult following and is hailed for its visual effects The Black Hole is mostly forgotten and unfairly bashed by what people do remember it and that's a shame because there's a lot to like here and the sheer scope of this film's ambition alone is both admirable and worth seeing. The Black Hole is currently available on Disney +. Previous movies of the month. 
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Nov 8, 2021 06:56
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An amazing movie that can be grouped into the type of 70s and 80s kids movies that are really dark and violent. Also, I don't know anyone who had the toys:  PeterCat fucked around with this message at 07:35 on Nov 8, 2021 |
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Nov 8, 2021 07:24
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PeterCat posted:stuff Please spoiler tag that stuff for people who didn't see the movie yet. But yeah all that poo poo is spooky and I'm sure kids being freaked out by it is probably one of the reasons it didn't catch on. It having to be in the shadow of Star Wars was very unfortunate. Also those toys are big collectors items now because no one had them back then.
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Nov 8, 2021 07:32
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CPL593H posted:Please spoiler tag that stuff for people who didn't see the movie yet. Ok, but the movie came out 42 years ago.. I mean who didn't see it 50 times on the Disney Channel growing up?
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Nov 8, 2021 07:33
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PeterCat posted:Ok, but the movie came out 42 years ago.. I mean who didn't see it 50 times on the Disney Channel growing up? I'm sure plenty of people who click on this already saw the movie and I want everyone to discuss it but I usually like to pick stuff that is underseen so I want anyone not already familiar to go in as fresh as possible. Obviously discuss the movie just put anything that might be a reveal or a spoiler in tags for the uninitiated. And for what it's worth I didn't see the movie until I was in my 20s.
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Nov 8, 2021 07:36
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PeterCat posted:Ok, but the movie came out 42 years ago.. I mean who didn't see it 50 times on the Disney Channel growing up? I don't think I've ever seen Black Hole played on Disney Channel
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Nov 8, 2021 07:59
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I feel like the main thing the OP misses mentioning is the bonkers ending. Like the whole movie is worth watching for the extremely incomprehensibly strange way this movie concludes.
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Nov 8, 2021 13:19
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is it on D+?
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Nov 8, 2021 13:50
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This was a key movie when I was a kid because it blew my mind that Disney would make something dark and weird like this. In hindsight, this does feel a lot like a Mario Bava film at times (if only a bit more blood). It's too bad that it's forgotten these days, though, Disney seems to not be that proud of any of their live-action films from before the 80s anymore.Alan Smithee posted:is it on D+? Also a Disney Movie Club Blu-ray exclusive.
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Nov 8, 2021 22:10
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I feel like the main thing the OP misses mentioning is the bonkers ending. Like the whole movie is worth watching for the extremely incomprehensibly strange way this movie concludes. Yeah the ending of the movie is bananas. Basically what happened is that Disney hosed around with the production so much that they didn't really have an ending because what was scripted was way darker than they'd allow but at that point they'd already sunk a whole lot of money into the movie. The production budget was double that of Star Wars and then they spent another six million or so on advertising. So they really needed it to work while also not having much faith in the movie it seems. It works very well for what a clusterfuck the production was and the fact that it works at all is a minor miracle. I love the ending for how weird and crazy it is. If I recall correctly the ending they just kind of came up with was more or less what was planned anyway. I think what they proposed was just going to be darker and crazier. I like the movie on its own but it's also just very interesting for what an oddity it is which is why I chose it. Egbert Souse posted:This was a key movie when I was a kid because it blew my mind that Disney would make something dark and weird like this. In hindsight, this does feel a lot like a Mario Bava film at times (if only a bit more blood). It's too bad that it's forgotten these days, though, Disney seems to not be that proud of any of their live-action films from before the 80s anymore. They really did just pretend this movie didn't exist for decades and they still kind of do. They make it available but that's about it. I'm really surprised they made it into a blu-ray even if it is a bare bones club exclusive.
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Nov 8, 2021 23:08
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Disney disowned this movie so hard that loving Anchor Bay had to put it out on DVD originally. As a kid I had a book-and-record about Vincent and Bob trying to escape Maximillian, so I thought the whole movie was about the robots. Boy was that a shock for little me.
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Nov 9, 2021 01:31
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Roth posted:I don't think I've ever seen Black Hole played on Disney Channel Seems like it was on pretty heavy rotation back in the '80s. I don't know maybe it's a different cable channel. I feel like someone could do a really great painting of the fate of Rheinhardt and the Cygnus.
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Nov 9, 2021 02:49
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This is still my jam: https://youtu.be/GUEXhDQfQoA
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Nov 9, 2021 02:58
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It's a bit striking if you go back and read media from the time and see how such a comparably forgotten movie these days was treated like a big deal. Articles always mentioned "major films like Alien, Star Trek, and The Black Hole." It'll always baffle me that this was Disney's response to Star Wars. It was noted at the time that one of the factors in that movie's success was that Disney basically hadn't been doing its job for some time and left a gaping hole in the market. George Lucas himself said one of his motivations was that the output for children and family films in the 70s was pretty dire. The movie itself is ill-served by trying to fit its spooky tale about a scientist gone mad on the outskirts of a black hole into the trappings of a "Disney movie." The conflict of interest eminates from the screen and makes for a frustrating watch. I don't know what they were thinking!
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Nov 9, 2021 03:19
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The movie is essentially Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but in space, but a darker tone and no musical numbers. Slim Pickens is great as always as B.O.B., but I feel like this picture here illustrates some of the tonal problems the movie has. The robot in the background, S.T.A.R., is sleek and menacing, while Vincent and Bob have cartoony eyes and look like floating trash cans.   Spoilers follow. The reveal that the crew has been overpowered by the robots and turned into zombies is pretty harsh stuff, and scary to children, even though I doubt most kids fully realize the implications of the transformation.  The question remains, how much of their humanity do the enslaved crewmembers retain? They have a funeral service for one when he dies, but are they doing this because Reinhardt programmed them to, or because they still remember that they are human, even if it's at a very basic level. The idea that they retain their memories and the knowledge of who they are, while at the same time they have been reduced to only being able to follow whatever orders Reinhardt gives them is more horrifying than if they had simply had their minds erased. It's also interesting to contrast the humanoids and the main Cygnus robots with Maximillian! The original robots, like Star, have a basic humanoid shape and look like they were made in a factory. Maximillian! looks like he was hammered together in a mad scientist's work shop, which isn't far from the truth. That Reinhardt is damned to an eternal hell of fire and brimstone, overlooking his destroyed ship while trapped in the shell of his demonic creation, is a great ending to the character, but again, pretty heavy stuff for a "family" movie and something that again goes over most children's heads. Maximillian Schell in Maximillian!'s shell.  PeterCat fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Nov 9, 2021 |
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Nov 9, 2021 04:45
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Vincent and Bob were supposed to have some kind of digital display for their eyes but they couldn't get it to work and they were already hemorrhaging money so they just ended up using that simple design. One of the earlier concepts for Vincent was drastically different and more in line with the movie's overall vibe. If I had to guess the reason they didn't go this direction was because of money and because Disney wanted a character that was more friendly to children. It likely would have been much more expensive to make a puppet with that many delicate moving parts and I'm sure some executive was thinking about the toys too.  Also with the other stuff you posted. The face of the drone zombie guy reminded me of a similar reveal in Beyond the Black Rainbow. It's almost certain that Panos Cosmatos was inspired by this because his film is a tribute to late 70s/early 80s sci-fi movies and the imagery of their VHS covers. This turned out to be the face behind the mask an android was wearing in Beyond the Black Rainbow.  But anyway the drones (I don't think they call them anything other than "robots" in the movie) in The Black Hole and the fate of Reinhardt are both really horrible on many levels and it's baffling to me that anyone thought it was a good idea to sell this movie to kids. And just the shot of him in hell is amazing. Not just him trapped in the robot body on the mountain but the pryotechnic work and the ghouls marching down the paths. It's some great imagery.
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Nov 9, 2021 05:20
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CPL593H posted:Vincent and Bob were supposed to have some kind of digital display for their eyes but they couldn't get it to work and they were already hemorrhaging money so they just ended up using that simple design. One of the earlier concepts for Vincent was drastically different and more in line with the movie's overall vibe. If I had to guess the reason they didn't go this direction was because of money and because Disney wanted a character that was more friendly to children. It likely would have been much more expensive to make a puppet with that many delicate moving parts and I'm sure some executive was thinking about the toys too. I think I like the design they used better. While the good robots design is very kid friendly, they are fairly sophisticated props and do interact well with their environment. I could almost see someone designing them with big friendly eyes just to make their presence more tolerable to their human crews. And who wouldn't want to hang out with Roddy McDowell the floating robot rather than what's in the concept art?
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Nov 9, 2021 06:00
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PeterCat posted:I think I like the design they used better. While the good robots design is very kid friendly, they are fairly sophisticated props and do interact well with their environment. I could almost see someone designing them with big friendly eyes just to make their presence more tolerable to their human crews. That makes sense in the narrative of the film. Especially since Vincent and Bob are just floating orbs with no human shape. It's like the robot in Moon having a screen with a smiley face on it. It gives people something to look at and react to. Agree on the Roddy McDowell bit. I also love that Bob has a hillbilly voice because he was programmed in Texas.
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Nov 9, 2021 06:14
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Ok, so, regarding one of the characters, here's a weird theory I had when I was a kid, which has no basis other than kid logic: So, Dr. Mcrae's father led the rebellion against Reinhardt and was killed. When I was a kid watching the movie, I came up with a theory that Reinhardt turned Dr. Mcrae's father into Maximillian!, the same way that he turned the rest of the crew into drones. Now, this doesn't really follow for a number of reasons, and Maximillian! doesn't appear to have any fleshy bits on the inside, though he does seem to scream when Vincent bores into his middle, and he doesn't completely obey Reinhardt either. Notice how Reinhardt asks Dr. Mcrae to protect him from Maximillian! and how Maximillian! doesn't help Reinhardt when he's trapped on the bridge.
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Nov 9, 2021 07:11
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I don't know, I still think that that is the case. Maybe there is some other evidence to the contrary? I thought the psychic link between Kate and V.I.N.C.E.N.T. was weird. I loved this movie as a kid, that colors how I feel about it now, I am sure, because I feel it still stands up, but who knows how I'd feel watching it for the first time nowadays. I think one of the things it successfully cribbed from Star Wars was the lived-in look. Most of the spaceships seemed pretty believable, very functional. I like that they at least acknowledged weightlessness. Switching to having gravity was almost like in Hunt for Red October where they started out speaking Russian, but transitioned to speaking English. I thought this was one of the first movies with CGI (the black hole grid animation at the beginning), but the Star Wars Death Star animation during the briefing beat it out, as did... Westworld? Or the Westworld sequel? I had one of the pilot action figures, as well as Maximillian. Max was kind of lame, because, while the blade arms spun, the weren't articulated so that you could raise them, they just stayed vertical. The flaps on his legs moved up and down, I cannot recall if his head moved side-to-side, or if it was just molded as part of the torso. In some places you can see where Disney spent the money to make it look good, but... that budget. 20 mil, and IMDb says box office gross was like 35 mil, nothing like the 460 mil out of 11 mil for Star Wars.
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Nov 10, 2021 00:45
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wankel13b posted:
I forgot about that, but yeah, that was random as hell.
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Nov 10, 2021 01:47
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wankel13b posted:I don't know, I still think that that is the case. Maybe there is some other evidence to the contrary? I think him trying to kill everybody and stop Dr. Mcrae from escaping the Cygnus is worth noting. And why would Reinhardt make the guy he hosed over the most into a murder robot that could easily gently caress up his poo poo? I also think the sound Maximillian makes when Vincent drills into him is meant to be ambigious. It could either be a scream or just the metal on metal sound. Though something about the fact that Maximillian might have been able to talk but just never does makes him creepier even though this is implied rather than shown or told. Oh and they spent another six million on advertising. I'll bet the reason that Disney just pretended this movie didn't exist for decades is because someone who worked in the company for a very long time was still salty about it.
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Nov 10, 2021 02:43
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This was promoted pretty heavily in the UK - there was a Black Hole-themed train that stopped at various major stations around the country. I went with a friend to it in Leeds - IIRC it was a walk-through mini theme park exhibit, with TVs playing clips from the movie as you went along. At the end you got a few free bags of crisps from whoever the promotional partner was (possibly Outer Spacers). We went through four or five times and went home loaded with crisps. Only ever once saw a Black Hole toy in a shop, though (a Vincent), and always regretted not buying it.
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Nov 10, 2021 09:11
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I remember seeing it in theaters. The part when Maximillian drilled through the book, then the dude, was schoolyard talk for months. And we all played guns for a while with index and pinkie fingers sticking out.
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Nov 10, 2021 11:35
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Splint Chesthair posted:As a kid I had a book-and-record about Vincent and Bob trying to escape Maximillian, so I thought the whole movie was about the robots. Boy was that a shock for little me. OTOH, the comic never showed what was so shocking about what was under the drones' mirror-masks but the text explained it was the former human crew so I imagined that it was some hideous tumorous mass of tissue with large veins or intestinal tubes randomly strewn about and a single asymmetrically-placed swollen eyeball (you could call it a Lovecraftian vision I guess, though I wasn't exposed to that author's works for another 4 or 5 years after that) and was a little disappointed it was just some blank-eyed dude. I thought VINCENT, Maximillian, and the sentry robots were dope as hell as a kid and was totally nostalgia-jacked when Diamond Select issued the toys a few years back. I just wished they'd gotten around to the guard robots as well. Speaking of oddly dark moments in sci-fi Disney films of that era, I'd forgotten until rewatching it a couple of years ago, but the Tron versus Sark disc duel ending with Tron doming Sark with his disk and glowing red brain matter spraying out from the initial impact and then pouring out onto the floor as he drops was a  moment. Funny thing was, I did see that one in the theater when it came out but I didn't remember that hilarious "Holy poo poo!" moment when the two dudes in spandex hopping around playing Frisbee Tag suddenly turned into a vaporwave remix of the Zapruder film.
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Nov 13, 2021 10:27
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Peyote Panda posted:the two dudes in spandex hopping around playing Frisbee Tag suddenly turned into a vaporwave remix of the Zapruder film. I don't have anything to add to what you said, I'm just cracking up at this description.
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Nov 14, 2021 01:07
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It got tossed in my mother's great garage clean-out, but I used to have a full model of the Cygnus that I put together as a kid.
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Nov 14, 2021 14:35
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Everyone posted:It got tossed in my mother's great garage clean-out, but I used to have a full model of the Cygnus that I put together as a kid. 
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Nov 15, 2021 00:38
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My parents took my sister and I to see this in theaters when it came out. I fell asleep at the beginning and slept through the whole thing.
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Nov 15, 2021 01:50
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For those who care, this is what it looked like as the model. https://fantastic-plastic.com/black-hole-cygnus-by-mpc.html
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Nov 15, 2021 15:44
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Hopefully this isn't  , but somebody archived the Cinefantastique special about The Black Hole, which goes into very extensive detail about all aspects of the production.
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Nov 15, 2021 16:16
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I'm going to watching this movie today, it's been years since I first saw it. E: CPL593H it also appears the image links you posted are broken?
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Nov 17, 2021 17:29
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The music in this slaps.
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Nov 17, 2021 18:53
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MacheteZombie posted:I'm going to watching this movie today, it's been years since I first saw it. They look fine on my screen. Also, fun bit of trivia about that soundtrack. They wanted to release a transparent record filled with multicolored liquid so when you played it there was all kinds of swirly colors. The idea was abandoned when they couldn't find a way to make it not leak. In more recent years people have pulled off liquid filled records but much like the film itself it was too ambitious an idea for its time.
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Nov 17, 2021 19:11
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Just wrapped this up. Loved the production design, but agree that there's a bit of tonal mismatch at times especially with the friendly robots. The target practice game felt out of place but I chuckled at robots being over competitive about it. The villain was super dope and so was the music. Loved that shot of the villain and his robot just before the end of the movie. Very cool stuff. Solid 3/5
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Nov 17, 2021 20:19
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An amusing thing about the design of the goodie robots is that at the time, they came in for considerable stick from reviewers (I remember Starburst's particularly hated them) for being too cute. Now, some real-life robots are actually being designed specifically to give them that big-eyed, cartoony, non-threatening Disney look. Wish I could find the link, but a recent-ish article had a whole bunch of robot 'faces' that were extensively focus-grouped to find the most appealing. The winner was pretty close to Old Bob.
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Nov 17, 2021 21:59
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Payndz posted:An amusing thing about the design of the goodie robots is that at the time, they came in for considerable stick from reviewers (I remember Starburst's particularly hated them) for being too cute. Now, some real-life robots are actually being designed specifically to give them that big-eyed, cartoony, non-threatening Disney look. Wish I could find the link, but a recent-ish article had a whole bunch of robot 'faces' that were extensively focus-grouped to find the most appealing. The winner was pretty close to Old Bob. It's pretty obvious that the reason they went for those designs was probably for toys and because they're not terribly complex so it was cheaper. But that doesn't bother me. In the context of the movie it seems likely that they were designed to look friendly to people, especially since they are not human shaped. This also does something for Maximillian because it tells us right off the bat that Reinhardt balked at the idea and designed his robot to be an imposing presence. The rest of them aren't as menacing but they do look pretty fashy and their humanoid shapes but mechanical faces make them creepy enough. A whole bunch of them stomping around is a lot less inviting than the floating digital hillbilly.
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Nov 17, 2021 22:26
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Does anyone see parallels between this film and Event Horizon? What about Alien: Covenant?
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Nov 24, 2021 08:45
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LemonLimeSoda posted:Does anyone see parallels between this film and Event Horizon? As a side note, Event Horizon scriptwriter Philip Eisner stated Warhammer 40K was an influence on said script. Maybe the links go back further. Are VINCENT and Ol' Bob early-generation Men of Iron? Did Kate's psyker abilities draw in the Chaos Gods to cause the surreal denouement of The Black Hole?
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Nov 26, 2021 18:12
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Peyote Panda posted:gently caress me, now that you mention it I see a lot of them! A ship design inspired by gothic cathedrals, damned crews, the insane creator of the ship trying to take everyone else to a literal Hell with them, the imagery of eyes being important in the final fates of said creators, and those are just off the top of my head. These are all great points you made!
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Nov 26, 2021 18:31
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