Film

Rip It Up, Issue 65, 1 December 1982, Page 24

Film

E.T. Director: Steven Spielberg Spielberg, the Hollywoodwunderkind of the moment, has described E.T. as the most emotionally complicated film he's ever made, as well as being the least technically complicated. It's arguably the most charming, a latterday fairy-tale of an alien creature who becomes part of the lives of an everyday American bourgeois family who look as if they live two blocks away from the family in Poltergeist. It's a movie with a magical

quality, its innocent childlike visions framed within fantasies that are sometimes exhilirating (like the airborne bicycle rides) and sometimes horrific (the polythene tunnel leading into the operating theatre). It contrasts some nice gawky humour (the E.T. getting drunk or Elliot releasing all the frogs in the classroom) with some wry ironies (the E.T. camouflaging itself amongst the daughter's dolls, or passing unnoticed in the Halloween celebrations when even the mother dons a bizarre costume). Compared to the epic fantasy Raiders of the Lost Ark, E. T. is a much more human film, for all its galactic trimmings. We are allowed to see our world through the eyes of our extra-terrestrial visitor and

his three young allies and it's a society replete with objects, gadgets and gimmickry - it's a neat irony that the film itself has inspired millions of dollars of spinoff paraphenalia. Of course E. T. is a genre piece that is light years away from traditional English pantomime (if the pun is excusable) but they do share one feature in that they can appeal eaually, on different levels, toboth the children and adults in the audience no mean achievement. And it also proves just how shrewd a market-man Mr Speilberg is. WD. GALAXY OF TERROR Director: Bruce Clark This is a quickie production job from the Roger Corman stable,

directed by New Zealander Bruce Clark, complete with Japanese sub-titles, or should I say sidetitles as they run down the right hand side of the screen. Visually it's a movie for the video game generation and dramatically it's little more than Ten Little Indians in Outer Space'. A few familiar faces from television land spring up amongst the cast: Ray Walston gives a zombie-like performance as the villain of the piece (he's the cook of the spaceship, not the butler) and Zalman King proves that there are worse things than being in a television series. The movie's virtues are a few scattered, or should one say spattered, moments of horror, although these pale beside those of The Thing and the occasional line of sublime silliness. My favourite? When the rather severe lady captain says to one of the men under her, "Hold on to your shorts, were going to dump." Perhaps someone should have done this to the script before it was immortalised on celluloid. WD