This blog was begun Thursday night, March 26th, and completed the next day :
On my walk tonight it was truly weird to see no cars coming down Zelzah. Actually, I saw one or two, but that was in a four minute span as I went north from Nordhoff to Prairie. You wouldn't even see that few on Christmas. It was as if Zelzah was a remote highway out in the desert. I mean there was no one. It's good that folks are honoring the stay-at-home though, weird or no weird. I am obeying it, too, but I've gotta get my walks in to maintain my health and my sanity. You can still walk in L.A, thank goodness, and wasn't it ironic and prophetic that "Missing Persons" was the group who said nobody did that?. Aliso is closed and I assume Santa Susana is too (haven't checked), so thank God for the university, or as I call it : "my backyard". If I didn't have it, I couldn't live here. But yeah.......it's a real Ghost Town out there.
Tonight's movie was called "The Yesterday Machine"(1965). I found it on Youtube, in continuing with our recent trend, and while it was a black and white low budget sci-fi, it did not have the production values of the other films we've seen during our run in the Public Domain. That's putting it charitably. In contrast, "Indestructible Man" was the equivalent of a Summer Blockbuster and "27th Day" of an Oscar nominated Art Film.
Howww-ever, and there's almost always a "however" in my blogs, despite an aesthetic that makes "Plan 9" look extravigant, "The Yesterday Machine" holds your interest with an intelligent script, if little else. As the movie opens, two college kids are stranded in the Texas outback, their car broken down on the roadside. It is nighttime, and the students, a young man and his girlfriend, make their way across a sparsely wooded field to look for help. They come to a barbed-wire fence, replete with "No Trespassing" sign, and of course they ignore it and pass through, pulling apart the wires to gain access. In the distance they see the lights of a house, and in true Texas Chainsaw fashion they approach, heedless of the danger ahead. This could be because the film was made in 1965, a full nine years before the Massacre was known to theatergoers, but as they walk through the woods a long tracking shot reveals that Tobe Hooper might have seen this film and been inspired, and that is not all. The rest of the evidence, though, will have to wait.
For the moment, our couple is accosted on their way toward the house by two armed men whom we never see. Our POV faces the college boy as he begs them not to shoot. Who are they? Are they thieves? Psychos? Residents of the house? "Negative on all three, good buddy". That's me saying that.
We in the audience will be privvy to who these guys are, but like the college kid, we will hardly believe what we have seen. Holy Smokes and my goodness gracious, how could this be possible! Despite his plea, the gunmen do open fire on the couple. The kid is wounded but his girlfriend gets away. The next we see him, he is in the hospital being questioned by the local police detective (the legendary Tim Holt, one of our favorite actors). We don't hear what is being said. Back at headquarters, Lt. Holt is visited by a newspaper reporter looking to get a scoop. Holt tells him he'll never believe the kid's story.
"Try me", he replies.
Holt repeats the kid's tale, of crossing the woods and over the fence onto private property. "We needed to find a phone, to call for help". As Holt speaks, we are shown in flashback what took place. As the couple walked closer toward the house, suddenly the two men jumped seemingly from out of nowhere. "It was like they appeared out of thin air". Now, we in the audience are shown these men. They are civil war soldiers.
The reporter isn't fazed. "Okay, so you've got some guys playing dress-up. That's not uncommon out in the boondocks. There's fellas who're history buffs, who do recreations of famous battles. Maybe these guys just got liquored up afterwards and decided to scare those kids, and it got out of hand".
"But I've got something to show you", Holt says, unwrapping a cloth he's taken from his desk. He holds up an odd looking bullet. "This slug was removed from the young man this morning. Have you ever seen one like it? I haven't, and I've been a cop for over thirty years. We had it examined down at ballistics and they couldn't i.d. it either. Finally, because of the kid's story, we took it to a military historian in Dallas who knew right away what it was. He showed us an encyclopedia with a picture in it. This slug was from a bullet made only for Springfield rifles between the years of 1860 and 1865. It was made as ammunition for the Civil War".
The reporter remains skeptical. "Okay, so these guys wearing the costumes are into authenticity. Let's say they had a few old bullets lying around".
Holt continues :"Besides the historian, we talked to several manufacturers. Firstly, that ammo was strictly regulated. Slim chance it would ever get into civilian hands. Second and more importantly, the powder wouldn't fire after a hundred years. That bullet should've been dead as a doornail".
Now the reporter is intrigued. "Okay, so what're you getting at"?
"That kid's story", says Holt. "He swears those guys just appeared out of thin air. And there's something else. His girlfriend ran off, she got away, but I've had my deputies combing those woods and every road in the area. They can't find her anywhere".
Holt then leans back in his chair and looks the reporter in the eye. "You know, when I was in Germany during the war, my unit was one of the first to liberate a concentration camp........".
He goes on to describe that instead of finding emaciated prisoners, they found healthy young people wearing clean new clothes. He goes on to explain the history of Nazi experimentation in advanced science. Now the reporter understands.
"Are you saying they had a Time Machine at that place"?
"That was the conclusion", replies Detective Holt. "The Nazis used the prisoners as guinea pigs for the first experiments. The early version was likely more of a 'de-aging' machine because it didn't transport the prisoners off the premises, only made them younger. But we captured the scientists involved in that project, and they confessed they were working on a Time Machine".
"Okay - but all of this was twenty years ago! All of those Nazis are dead or in prison. What does your story have to do with what happened here"?
"Well you see.......there was one scientist who was never captured. He escaped to South America and over the years was said to have entered the United States. Here's the kicker - he's rumored to have hidden out here in Texas, though it's never been investigated. And he just happened to be the lead man on the project. He was the designer of the Time Machine".
So there you have it! The college kids were accosted by Actual Civil War Soldiers who came out of a Vortex created by a Time Machine! The machine was invented by a Nazi Scientist who appears to have taken up residence near Dallas! Lately I've had a tendency to almost write down the entire movie for ya, so I'll try not to do that here (gotta go for my walk, lol), but what will happen is that Lt. Holt, the reporter, and the sister of the missing girl (a nightclub singer), will all go in search of the Mad Scientist and his Time Machine, which they fear has transported the girl into Another Century.
As you can guess, they will eventually find the Scientist, and this will be the best part of the movie, and redeem it from it's lousy production values and lack of action. The Nazi Scientist is played by an actor named Jack Herman, who (it says on IMDB) was a veteran of Yiddish Theater. The irony, right? But there have been many instances in movie and TV history when Jewish actors have played Nazis, in order to ridicule them. Think of Colonel Klink in "Hogan's Heroes". And here, in "The Yesterday Machine", Jack Herman gives a tour-de-force performance as the Mad Scientist, obsessed with going back in time to save Hitler and win the war, "So vee can rool zah voorld for zee next touzand yeers"! There is an extended scene where he explains the physics behind the Time Machine, and it somehow makes sense, haha. It's just a great, great bit of motion picture entertainment in that "Good Bad Movie" way. The final twenty minutes with Jack Herman is reason enough to see this film and for me to give it Two Solid Thumbs Up (and Two Huge Thumbs for Herman himself). Finally I want to mention his house, the one the college kids were walking toward when they were attacked at the beginning of the movie. When we eventually see it, it looks almost exactly like the house in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre". That was the other bit of evidence I was talking about regarding Tobe Hooper and the possibility that he saw this film and was influenced, knowingly or unknowingly. When you combine the house with the surrounding scrub woods and the fluid and lengthy tracking shots that follow the kids in the darkness, it all bears a resemblance to what we'd see nine years later in "Chainsaw", at least in essence.
"The Yesterday Machine" is no classic, not even close, but it's more than worth a view for Jack Herman's incredible performance and for a highly literate script (with some interesting scientific concepts regarding time and space). See it if you like "Good/Bad" Sci-Fi. /////
Well, that's all for the moment. Whew! Man......am I overdoing it with these long reviews? If so, sorry, but I've got nothing else to do, haha. I'm not working at the moment, and I can only read for so long. I'm trying not to go to the store any more than necessary, or even go out at all except for my walk. So, I write. Hope ya don't mind. See you tonight at the Usual Time.
Tons and tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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