watchlist_extended

The film Days of Eclipse is based on a novel by famous Soviet science fiction writers — brothers Arcady and Boris Strugatsky. The action has been transferred to the Central Asia where a young Russian doctor gives treatment to children and tries his hand at writing. Introducing us a young contemporary at the crossroads (for the first time in Sokurov's work), this film becomes the first part of a cinema trilogy.
This character, whose formative years pass in the situation of broken and showing its cracks way of life, becomes a link between three of Sokurov's films. The whole 'trilogy' is joined together by the bitter irony regarding worn–out sacral symbols. Films Days of Eclipse, The Second Circle, The Stone, made in different years, are linked up with each other by one common plot: permanent co–existence of real everyday life, of so to say daily routine, with messages or messengers from Nowhere.
The young athlete from Days of Eclipse played by young non–professional performer Alexei Ananishnov is no less an archaic symbol of the former power of the collapsed Soviet empire than a recording of Brezhnev's speech sounding in the film or huge plaster cast Hammer and Sickle sticking out in the desert.
Dmitry Malyanov from Strugatsky's novel A Milliard Years before the End of the World has nothing in common with the character of Days of Eclipse beside the name. In fact, for Sokurov's hero the end of the world has already come and the border of this end has fallen on his life. The character who has been brought to the world of alien climate, alien speech, alien customs, learns not to be surprised at the cases of violence against others and himself — in order to survive, speaks to a dead body, tames and feeds exotic reptiles, and, on top of that, meets an angel appearing as a child.
This film was successful with the cinema audience of Perestroika years. Alexei Ananishnov later played the main part in one more film by Sokurov Mother and Son.
The film has been listed by the European Cinema Academy among 100 best movies of the XX century.
Alexandra Tuchinskaya
English translation by Anna Shoulgat, © 2002.
Prizes and awards:
1988. Special Award Felix of the European Cinema Academy to the composer Y. Khanin.
1988. NIKA Award of the Filmmakers' Union of the USSR to the Director of Sound V. Persov as Best Director of Sound.
1989. Laureate of the competition for Best Russian film of the year.
Award of the Filmmakers' Union of the USSR to S. Yurizditsky as Best Director of Photography.

On the Caribbean island of Matul, white doctor David Menard is trying to stem the tide of cannibal zombies that are returning from the dead. Arriving on the island are Anne and reporter Peter West who are looking for Anne's missing father. The pair soon find themselves under attack from the zombies.

A private detective is hired to find the elusive computer hacker "Trinity." Part of the Animatrix collection of animated shorts in the Matrix universe.

Strit and her friends live in the future where the Earth has become so polluted that they must live underground. As legend has it, a creature that “Walks on Air” will guide them to a place where there are blue skies and green meadows.Set in a world so ravaged by pollution that the humans have been forced underground, this distinguished animated cautionary tale warns of the consequences of our current disregard for the environment as it tells the story of a young girl and her friends who set off on an exciting quest for the pristine, natural paradise of their dreams.

Gwen is a young girl adopted by a nomad tribe in a desert post-apocalyptic world. When Gwen's friend is kidnapped, she and an old woman called Roseline embark on a trip to bring him back.

Staff and students at a rural school react to a warning of an imminent nuclear attack, not knowing whether it is real or a mistake.

The world is a blazing atomic hell. Civilisation is dying in agony... What do you do? ...THROW A PARTY! The Third World War has happened. Bombs are dropping everywhere, even Elwood, Melbourne, Australia. In the ruins that follow, three survivors find a bomb shelter. Only to find that the survivors in there are having a party.

2003 animated short film directed by Kōji Morimoto

Elodie and Elias have been living by themselves ever since most of the human race has disappeared from the face of the earth. However, with the unexpected arrival of Gabriel, a boy a bit older than themselves, their harmonic relationship is about to come to an end.

Stanley the Pembroke Welsh Corgi is left behind in the break of an apocalypse. All he wants to do is get back to his owner...

A baby squirrel asks his grandfather to tell him what happened to all the men. The old squirrel reveals that all the humans were killed years ago in a terrible war. The surviving animals started a new society, based on the lessons taught in the Bible.

Set in an underground dungeon inhabited by bundled, ragged human beings, after the nuclear holocaust. The story follows the wanderings of a hero through the situations of survival. People wait for the Ark to arrive and rescue them while their habitat falls apart.
Delving deep into the dusty and long abandonded vaults of b-cinema in search of lost gems always leaves me with a bittersweet taste. On one hand the discovery of unexpected gems where no one would think them possible is a rewarding experience. On the other hand though it makes one wonder how many of these remarkable low-budget oddities, personal love affairs of directors never quite famous and now all but forgotten, have almost forever slipped from memory?
n any case what we have here is a little post-apocalyptic gem from Poland that is really better than it has any right to. The dystopian near future of O-BI, O-BA finds a group of survivors of the nuclear war that ravaged the Earth inhabiting an underworld concrete bunker and biding their time as they wait for the mysterious Ark, an air ship of some kind that will come and save them. The Ark proves to be an elaborate hoax, carefully designed to give hope to the malnourished and desperate denizens of the bunker, while in the meantime the dome that separates their miserable existence from the nuclear winter outside is slowly caving in.
What first striked me about the movie is the design of the bunker and the depiction of the survivors. The survivors are gaunt, filthy and terrible-looking penitents, dressed in rags and aimlessly wandering the neon-lit halls of the bunker like automatons. The bunker is a rundown, seedy place, with bright neon lights peering from all sides like the eyes of malignant beasts.
On one hand it is a slightly 80's depiction of the dystopian future but the movie never stoops down to MAD MAX cheese. Instead it combines biting political satire with the bleak outlook of a world with no future, black comedy with barbs on apathy, religion and power. The survivors, for example, are fed some kind of flour dropping from a tube that hovers in the air - later on we discover the food supervisor uses books and the Bible itself as filler for this meagre meal. There are many such short symbolic touches, perhaps not life-changing or faith-restoring, yet playful, clever and inspired.
One thing is for sure; O-BI, O-BA is not your run-of-the-mill sci-fi schlock. It overcomes its modest budget with creativity and has genuine artistic aspirations both from a writing and directing perspective. My opinion is that it should have been filmed in black and white instead of colour though. The director uses atmospheric light and shadow to great effect and it would have registered even better in stark black and white. The blue-green neon on the other hand outstays its welcome after a while. Just a minor gripe in an otherwise solid b-movie with its heart set in all the right places.
Imagine a less bleak THE ROAD (Cormac McCarthy) being injected with the satire and humour of DR.STRANGELOVE and you're getting there. See it if you can find it.

They have evolved over the course of millions of years, leaving them quite capable of fending for themselves in the bamboo forest. One day they crossed paths with the most industrious of primates – man. The story of an animal species who has to share the most private aspects of its life with human beings.

Scope is a prisoner on a behemoth space station and is chosen, like all his fellow prisoners, to 'volunteer' for the exploration of far-away planets. Landing on planet Australia 458, he is given a hero's welcome with all the sex, booze, and violence that any one man can stomach. But as his new caretakers push him towards even more heinous and deplorable acts, Scope finds that his freedom comes with a high price; his own violent demise, broadcast live for the viewing pleasure of Australia 458's inhabitants.

John Ellman (Boris Karloff) has been framed for murder by a gang of racketeers. He is unfairly tried and despite the fact that his innocence has been proven, he is sent to the electric chair and executed. Dr. Evan Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn) retrieves his dead body and revives it, as part of his experiments to reanimate a dead body and discover what happens to the soul after death.
Dr. Beaumont's use of a mechanical heart to revive the patient foreshadows modern medicine's mechanical heart to keep patients alive during surgery. Although John Ellman has no direct knowledge of anyone wishing to frame him for the murder before he is executed, he gains an innate sense of knowing those who are responsible after he is revived. Ellman takes no direct action against his framers; however, he seeks them out, wishing to know why they had him killed. Each dies a horrible death, and in the end it is their own guilt that causes their deaths.
Confronting the last two villains, Ellman is shot. Having fulfilled his divine mission to bring about justice, he dies, just before he would have explained death and the afterlife to the curious Dr. Beaumont. Beaumont is warned not to continue his experiments, citing the Biblical Scripture, "For the LORD thy God is a jealous God (Deut. 6:15a)."

2003 animated short film directed by Shinichiro Watanabe

The protagonist finds out that some children were left behind in a sinking school, and is slowly driven mad as he tries to save them. A parable on the theme of the Last Judgment, numerous catastrophic events reveal a certain ambiguity in their origins, accompanied by the terrible suspicion that the things going on are some kind of a performance or theatrical production.

1984 film directed by Juliusz Machulski

In Arborville, California, three high school students try to protect their hometown from a gelatinous alien life form that engulfs everything it touches.