The Black Hole (1979, dir. Gary Nelson)

The strange thing is: I saw this in the cinema in 1979 when it was first released. I was fourteen; not some mewling kidster, and yet I had almost no memory of the film at all. So when it came on the telly I thought I'd have a watch, refresh my memory. My memory has now been refreshed. Or re-staled. One or the other.

So, yes, it's not a good film. 'A Journey That Begins Where Everything Ends' says the poster tagline, an ill-chosen phrase that encourages the viewer to bracket with that 'everything' good script, acting ability, plot logic and the merest gesture towards scientific plausibilty. To appropriate T S Eliot: O dark dark dark. All the aforementioned go into the dark.

Instead of a USS Enterprise or Millennium Falcon, the film opts for the Rusty Old Water Tower model spaceship.

The crew are: lantern-jawed space captain Robert Forster; weirdo science officer Anthony Perkins; the excellently named Joseph Bottoms as Lieutenant Pizer; weirdly skinny Yvette Mimieux as a telepathic space doctor, and Ernest Borgnine, acting as only Ernest Borgnine can. Which is to say: only ever acting Ernest Borgnine, regardless of role. There's also a Dusty-Bin-alike robot, voiced by Roddie MacDowall in a manner that strongly implies 'will that do? can I have my cheque now please?' The robot is called V.I.N.C.E.N.T., and in one nod towards verisimilitude it does indeed seem to lack ears.

As they approach the black hole the gravity makes the whole ship shake and rattle. 'Gravity 6960 still climbing!' says the pilot. 'Gravity's close to maximum!' Will they be torn to pieces? Luckily, no: when they get closer-in gravity falls away 'like in the eye of a hurricane'. Because THAT'S HOW GRAVITY WORKS.

They board a vast survey vessel orbiting the Black Hole, and meet a Captain Nemo-esque figure called Reinhardt Madscientist, whose Eyebrows are Pure Evil.

Maximillian Schell is the actor here, and at no point is his Melodramatic Wickedness in doubt. The only thing stopping him literally chewing the scenery is that this is the future, and he has robots to do the scenery-chewing for him. The robot henchman in this case is a massive floating red Devil Robot also called Maximilian. This robot is evil. Evil ... to the max! And also evil to the Imilian.

Schell says the original crew all perished, and that he just happens to have built an equivalent number of mirror-facemask-wearing android robots, who look like humans in big cloaks, limp about the ship, sleep in the original crew quarters, and eat the vast amounts of food being hydroponically grown on board. But are robots, honestly. Robots. Anthony Perkins at first hero-worships Schell, but then the Perkins Penny drops and he snatches away a mirror mask to reveal -- a lobotomized zombie original crewman! The film has invested (in narrative terms, but also evidently financially) a great deal in the audience finding this mystery absorbing and its solution shocking; but it is neither. More, the script then tosses the whole thing carelessly away: the zombies, says the ship's own Dusty-Bin-type robot, a red model with a Good Ole Boys accent called, I think, R.E.D.N.E.C.K., 'are beyond all help ... death would be a kindness to them now'. So they might as well have been robots. Except to emphasise the evilness of Evil Schell. And the eyebrows have done that already.

Anyway, Schell has been waiting for twenty long years to journey into the black hole; and tonight's the night. As if the arrival of our heroes at precisely this moment isn't massively creaky coincidence enough, we also discover that Dr Macrae is the daughter of one of the original crew, though I forget which. Anyhow: Nemo refuses to modify his schedule, and into the hole he goes, uninvited guests and all.

BOOTH: But that's impossible!'
REINHARDT: The word impossible, Mr Booth, is only found in the dictionary ... OF FOOLS!

'But how will you escape being crushed by the incredible forces?' Booth presses. 'I shall enter the black hole,' Reinhardt decares, magnificently, 'at the optimum angle of rotation!' So off they go, whilst our heroes run around firing lasers at aggressive robots, and giant meteors crash randomly into the ship. It's at this point that the previously jovial, likeable Ernest Borgnine character decides for no reason to betray his friends to certain death, steal their Water Tower spaceship and scarper. He is killed. And whilst we're on the subject -- Borgnine's acting. At all times in this movie Ernest Borgnine keeps the exact same expression on his face. Whether he is joshing with his captain, exploring the Cygnus, interrogating a zombie/robot, eating supper with everybody else at the captain's table or betraying his friends to certain death, his face does not change. No matter what is going on externally, or what conflicts he is struggling with internally, Borgnine looks like this:

The only other thing I have in my notes here (shuffles papers frantically) is that at one point a crew member does some high-gravity calculations at a computer console. The character says, distinctly: 'R squared over d squared times sine squared ...' Which impressed me. But then I'm easily impressed. Schell's character dies when a television falls on him, which perhaps verges on space-bathos. Then he goes to literal hell, and our heroes fly through the black hole to literal heaven, because that's what's waiting for us on the other side, depending on our virtue or otherwise.

Tim Maughan notes, with respect to this film: 'It was made the same year as ALIEN for about 5 times the budget.' He adds, eloquently: 'Ouch.'