Movies for When You’re the Only Person Awake
The early morning is a strange time. The world belongs to you, in those wee hours. If you’re lucky, you just might see something odd.
Introduction
When I was a young teenager, one of my favourite things was staying up stupidly late — so late that it might as well be early, like 4 or 5AM. I did this for one simple reason: everyone else was asleep, and it felt like the night was mine. I could do what I liked, long as it wasn’t too noisy.
Back in those days, British TV used to switch off shortly after midnight. There were four channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4) and, one by one, an announcer would voice over the channel’s logo wishing you good-night; then cut to a title-card that said “programming would resume at 5AM” or whatever… and finally cut to snow and static.
Now, we have hundreds of channels and none of them go off the air any more — they’re all automated to keep playing through the night, a bit like putting your music on shuffle.
What I discovered, however, was not the channels logging-off for the night… what I discovered was the stuff they would show immediately before and after.
Channel 4 had, and still has, a remit to be experimental and show things that just would not be picked up by the other three “original” channels, and they would do entire theme-nights! Starting at 1AM they might do two hours of obscure anime movies, or sci-fi, or other oddities that somehow just slipped behind the seat cushions and were lost from popular memory.
BBC2 would cut to CEEFAX, their version of a text-based television information service called Teletext. Teletext sent simple text and block-graphics encoded down the TV signal, which meant you could use your TV (if it had the option) to flick through pages and pages of data. News, weather, horse racing results, travel, financials, programme listings and more. Some time after close-down, but before regular programming came back, CEEFAX would be all the BBC would show!
Starting at around 4AM, ITV would do its own weird little stuff, too. In the UK, ITV was always a regional channel, which meant that it was licensed out to different broadcasters in different parts of the UK and they would show variations on programming as a result. What did this mean? Local adverts, and the very early morning was their time to shine! Camcorder-recorded birthday wishes, anniversary announcements, local shops and dealers — it was a beautiful little cavalcade of normal people sharing snippets of their lives.
You see, now things are tightly controlled. Everything is run through a communications team, or a content panel, or a public relations department. Is it on-brand? Does it resonate with our target demographic? Will the shareholders see value? Back twenty-five years ago, there were still little corners of the pie you could dig your spoon into, without the corporate gatekeeping and gamesmanship blundering in to tell you no.
Sure, you couldn’t just broadcast anything, but what went out at 2AM certainly wasn’t considered important. After all, the channels shut down for some portion of the night — it was just dead air — so how much could what preceded or succeeded it matter?
That meant it was a bit messy, a bit weird, a bit off-kilter and it was absolutely god damn brilliant. It was art. And in those hours, it belonged to me.
The Messy, Weird and Off-Kilter World
If you’ll indulge me, I have a clarifying example of what I mean. One of my favourite films, probably my favourite in fact, is a 70 minute toy commercial made in 1986. Hasbro’s The Transformers toyline was going great guns, and they wanted to break into movie theatres on-top of their successes in cartoons and comics. The script had one goal: sell toys. Specifically, the new toys. The old ones weren’t moving as much now, so it was time to shake up the range!
The script, which went through a few revisions, was violent. Back in the 80s, a U (“Universal”, UK) or G (“General”, USA) was kiddy-fare, but if they could just eek the rating up to a PG then that meant it had edge… bite! Nothing would sell a movie faster than that to younger people! They dropped in a couple of swears for good measure, then sent it for story boarding.
One character was dismembered, pulled apart by the limbs, another two were shot by so many lasers that their bodies temporarily fused before being blown apart again. Optimus Prime was to punch Megatron so hard that the latter’s torso shattered. The script-writers had a whole bunch of “old toys” to kill off and they were having fun with it.
Some scenes got dropped — either for pacing or just for sheer violence — and then the whole shebang went over to Toei Animation studios, Japan, for filming. Whatever it was that Sunbow/Marvel Productions got back, it was clear it had to be tweaked in some places… there are a few points in the film where the animation style changes noticeably. Rumour, always unsubstantiated, has it that there were a couple of bits that were still too damn violent, but more likely its a result of outsourcing and last-minute script tightening.
The studio got a few Big Name actors to appear, including Orson Welles; Leonard Nimoy; Eric Idle; Robert Stack and Judd Nelson. They were alongside the regular cast from the The Transformers TV programme.
Lastly, the producers put together a grab-bag of small-time musicians and cobbled together a sound track. Vince DiCola wrote a synth-driven incidental score, Stan Bush headlined with his power-chord hero anthem The Touch and various heavy/hair metal bands filled out the rest — topped off by “Weird” Al Yankovich performing Dare to be Stupid.
The film was released, and it failed. Kids hated seeing these characters killed off and replaced. It turns out they didn’t just see them as products, after all! The violence was criticised. The score was considered deafening. It didn’t go unnoticed that, due to his death shortly before release, this was technically Orson Welles’ last film… and what an ignominious note to go out on! A toy commercial for some awful Japanese robots! Oh, the huge manatee!
The whole experience soured Hasbro so much that they extensively reworked their “GI Joe” movie to avoid killing the main character and just flat-out abandoned their cinematic plans!
What were they thinking? Serious grown-up actors like Orson Welles? A heavy metal soundtrack? Violence and the death of beloved characters? A cyberpunk anime visual style, courtesy of Toei? In a cartoon for getting kids to buy plastic cars and planes?!
No. Never again! From then on, scripts must be properly approved. Run through focus groups. Tested with audiences. Legacy characters cannot die; or if they do, they come back tout de suite. Branding! Image!
…the only problem is, you see… that original sin, that 1986 The Transformers: The Movie… the real issue with it? It absolutely rules. It just rocks from start to finish. It’s pacey! The violence and death give it stakes! For Christ’s sake, if they’ll kill Optimus Prime then nobody is safe! The cyberpunk visual style is breathtaking — some of the backgrounds particularly are gorgeous! The soundtrack is a blast, who would not want to hear an arrangement of the The Transformers theme tune as performed by a stadium heavy-metal rock group? It’s rough, it’s ready and it is just the most fun 70 minutes of toy commercial you could want to watch!
Citizen Kane arguing with Mr. Spock about killing Elliot Ness and John Bender? What part of that sentence could possibly be disliked!
It is Art.
It is Art that tells a tight little story, is well-acted, is visually appealing and is scored perfectly. Every imperfection in one component just happens to perfectly match a dexter imperfection in the next and, as a result, it all tessellates precisely and organically.
Not only would such a film never be made by a company like Hasbro now, they would not even have made it then if they had known! It was off-brand, it was upsetting to audiences, it was outside of the input of focus groups!
It was, to quote its own tag line, beyond good, beyond evil, beyond your wildest imagination!
Contrast it to the crass, frat-boy excess of 2007’s Transformers and the differences are stark. Who’s the target audience? Blokes who were kids in the 80s/90s. What do they like? Boobs, cars, explosions. What do the Bad Guys want? Who cares, a cube or something? They’re there to shoot and get shot. Will any important characters die? Yeah, but we‘ve already scripted the sequel where they return, because each of them is an important piece of intellectual property. We don’t want to walk away from money on the table like that!
Don’t get me wrong, plenty of people like the 2007 film and that’s fine. More power to you. My point is that it’s a targeted, planned, committee-driven approach that focusses on profit, not art.
I genuinely believe that the best, truest art in film, TV and radio is messy. It’s organic. It happened because ideas happened and then someone picked them up and ran them over the touch line. Branding, corporate tone-of-voice, communications SWAT teams… all of those things are carcinogenic to that and I chafe against it whenever I encounter it. It is the antithesis of Art, I say.
Movies to Gear-Shift Your Mind At 3AM
Well, that’s my story. How, in the wee small hours of the morning, I used to be able to see some very cool and interesting stuff on television. Who’ll play me in the dramatisation of that, I do not know!
But you know what I loved most about it? I loved that I felt like I was the only one in the world watching it. Everyone else was asleep, and it was just me experiencing this quirky, sometimes bizarre, package of television. I was the only one seeing it, and once it was done it’d never be seen again.
That’s followed me through into my movie collecting, and I’m pleased to have an excellent set of productions that fall neatly into that headspace: odd stuff you might find when you’re channel surfing in the early-hours and, if you told someone about it, they’d look at you like you were mental. They are movies for when you are the only person awake.
Black Magic M66 / ブラックマジック M–66 (1987)
In this short anime thriller, two killer robots are being transported by the army, but they’re accidentally switched on. They’re designed to do two things: kill a specific target, and to not stop until they do so… it turns out that the target they’ve got is their creator’s daughter, because he left a picture of her in their memory as a test subject!
It’s the same concept as The Terminator, but no less fun since the idea is turned up to 11 and shaken out over a much more pacy script. These robots truly are nigh-on invulnerable and indestructible. Plus, in animation, things can just be done so much bigger than they could be on film.
The Big Bus (1976)
Before Airplane! there was this gem of the spoof-disaster-movie genre. A high-tech company has created Cyclops, the eponymous big bus, which is so large and luxurious it includes a dining room, a lounge complete with piano-playing crooner, and a pool! However, unknown to the elite travellers on its maiden trek, but knownst to us, the bus is threatened by sabotage!
It’s not as mad-cap, a joke-every-fifteen-seconds as Airplane!, but the cast all do a similar job of playing it (mostly) straight in a preposterous situation that only gets more ridiculous as the movie goes on.
Canadian Bacon (1995)
John Candy’s last film is usually derided as a weak-ass dig at Canada from a director (Michael Moore) who should stick to documentaries… but personally I think it’s an absolute riot and a superb send-up of American foreign policy six years before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Alan Alda is president of the USA and, with the collapse of the USSR, there are no more baddies to blame America’s failings on! Without a scapegoat, he desperately turns the US media and body politic against their goodie-two-shoes brother, Canada. A posse of deranged American patriots then cross the border to attack, and the whole thing just gets sillier and sillier.
Any of the Showa-era Godzilla films
Ol’ Zilly started out terrorising Tokyo in 1954 as a metaphor for nuclear war. He had a couple of subsequent adventures, including meeting the top banana himself, King Kong, but it was in the mid 1960s where things got good.
And by good, I of course mean demented. Godzilla strutted his stuff against a backdrop of ever-more preposterous villains… and, by contrast, he was now the hero! Granted, his saving of humanity was probably more of a side-effect than a direct intention, but Godzilla was here for us anyhow!
Mooching with ill-deserved confidence across cardboard city scapes, like a rubbery colossus, Godzilla defended the Earth from King Ghidorah (a dragon with three heads and no arms who must be a delight at buffets); a robot version of himself; a giant lobster; Kumonga the spider; alien invaders; a “smog” monster and Gigan. The latter, for no apparent reason, had a circular saw in his midsection. Each adventure was delivered with the absurdist whimsy that Japanese film makers bring so well.
For additional comedy value, turn on the English dubs — they are hilariously child-friendly!
Fritz the Cat (1973)
Or, indeed, any of director Ralph Bakshi’s catalogue. Bakshi is a fabulous film maker, who loves mixing both reality and cartoon as evidenced by his extensive use of rotoscoping and Roger-Rabbit-esque blending of real actors with toons. He also did not shy away from adult themes and especially loved taking pot-shots at racist caricatures.
Fritz the Cat is, on its face, a shock-jock attempt at vulgarity but, more deeply, tells a story about American societal malaise in the 1970s. Fritz is a sex-crazed, self-obsessed jackass who struts his time on the stage against a background of police brutality, sexual exploitation, race relations, white supremacy and drug culture. Fritz is the lens Bakshi lets us look through to see these much more interesting stories in the background.
Ralph Bakshi toyed with these styles and themes over the years, from Wizards (1977) to Cool World (1992). If you really want a blow to the psyche, especially as a White Liberal, try Coonskin (1975). It’s a satire of racism and racist tropes through the vehicle of the “Uncle Remus” stories. Bakshi purposely uses the ugliest stereotypes of humans that he can find — Black, White, Jewish (his own heritage)… everyone. It’s a film intended to sucker-punch establishment racism and skewer it on its own cruelty and moronic stereotypes. It also has a fabulous cast of Black actors and musicians, including Barry White and Scatman Crothers.
Heavy Metal (1981)
This film lives up to its name: a living heavy-metal album cover, brought to life in an anthology of stories set to a recurring theme of evil. The opening animation, of a car driven by an astronaut falling from orbit down to Earth and then driving across the desert sets the tone of epic excess.
A living orb, the embodiment of evil, tells a little girl about its exploits across time and space. It’s manifested flesh-eating zombies on a World War II Allied bombing raid; a Homelander-style psychopathic “space hero” in the future and more. The only person who can stop it lives many years hence, in a desolate wasteland, and the orb has come here to kill the girl... to ensure she can never grow up to be that person!
John Candy and Harold Ramis lend their voices for good measure.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence / 戦場のメリークリスマス (1983)
A movie whose ending never ceases to make me cry, this features David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto — both of whom I dearly miss. They give a glorious performance that is just brimming with sexual tension.
Told through the eyes of Colonel John Lawrence (Tom Conti), the story is ostensibly a war yarn of captives and captors. Mostly a Japanese production, it owns up to the brutalities and cruelties that Imperial Japan inflicted on its prisoners. At its simplest form, it is a story about a rebellious South African soldier called Major Celliers (Bowie) and how he riles and defies the camp commandant Captain Yonoi (Sakamoto).
However, and equally evident in its source material “The Seed and the Sower”, by Dutch prisoner of war Laurens Van Der Post, the film is underpinned by a theme of deep, homoerotic desire.
Indeed, the very first scene is a Japanese soldier being disciplined for having a physical relationship with a Dutch prisoner. When Celliers arrives, Yonoi takes a strong interest in him and tries to break his spirit. Celliers, however, is defiant until the end. Yonoi, increasingly obsessed with the South African, takes to watching the major sleep and is begged by his underlings to get out from under his spell. It all culminates in the Major kissing Yonoi, in front of the camp, leaving him visibly shaken, hot and blushing. The embarassment and dishonour force Captain Yonoi to schedule Celliers’ execution.
The final scene between Lawrence and the erstwhile brutish muscle of the camp, Sergeant Hara, is set after VJ Day and just before the sergeant’s execution for war crimes. Be warned, it is simply heart breaking.
Orca (1977)
Written-off by critics as a Jaws cash-grab, Orca the Killer Whale has always hit differently for me. I’m struck just how moving the movie is, and this stems from three factors that, in my mind, set it apart from the other jawsploitation films of the 70’s and elevate it to a worthwhile tale in its own right.
The first is the soundtrack. Ennio Morricone scores the film with a haunting, desperate tone — it’s like hearing a forlorn angel crying over the grave of their lover. Morricone is one of my favourite composers, so his presence alone is worth the cost of entry for me.
Secondly is Richard Harris as the main character, Nolan. Harris was a superb actor and he brings such a deep, guilt-ridden despair to the role. He plays Nolan as a tortured man, initially callous and unfeeling but who later comes to regret his actions deeply, showing the utmost remorse.
Lastly is the reverse-“Moby Dick” set-up: Nolan is a distant, unhappy man who lost his family to a drunk-driver. Whilst out hunting on his boat, he misses his target, a male orca, and accidentally snares a female killer whale. Dragged on board, she miscarries and delivers a dying fœtus on the deck, before being cast back overboard. In her grief, the orca rams herself into the boat’s propeller, dying horribly. Watching all of this is the female’s mate, anguished and enraged. The male orca then starts a reign of terror against the nearby fishing village where Nolan lives; goading him to come back out to the ocean and face the consequences of his cruelty.
Given what we know of orcas, their intelligence and their power… to be honest there’s nothing that strikes me as outrageous about the plot. Almost overpowering, also, is the sense of fatal destiny: some mistakes, once they’re made, cannot be atoned for and all that’s left to do is play it out.
Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise / 王立宇宙軍~オネアミスの翼 (1987)
The first anime film I ever saw! This is a pretty film — the style errs towards Studio Ghibli, but without their somewhat saccharine, Disney-esque bent. With the glaring exception of Grave of the Fireflies (1988), which is so heartfelt and tragic as to be almost unbearable, Ghibli have a tendency towards the twee.
In this movie, we follow a kingdom (not unlike Japan) in an alternate 1950s. They have TV… but the TVs are round, not square. They have money, but the coins are sticks rather than circles. They have telephones, but they look more like gramophones than normal handsets. The kingdom are in a cold-war with their neighbouring state, and it ends up focussing on their space race.
The main character is Shirotsugh, a loafer coasting through the miniscule and underfunded Royal Space Force, who meets a religious lady living in abject poverty. She inspires him to do better. He trains, works hard and makes an effort to get the Space Force to succeed.
It’s thoughtful, deep and complex; well-acted and beautifully animated and scored.
Patlabor / 機動警察パトレイバー 劇場版 (1989)
Patlabor, the first in a series of films, is a superb crime thriller with the window dressing of GIANT MECHA! A detective and police force are on the trail of a mysterious saboteur who has caused all the construction mechs (giant robots with human pilots) to go berserk at a building project in Tokyo.
Who did it, and why? What’s causing the “labor” mechas to go on violent rampages? Tokyo’s Police Special Vehicles Section 2 are on the case — young police officers piloting massive robots — and they need to hurry… there’s a storm heading in for Tokyo and it’s going to cause whatever-it-is to spread to every robot in Tokyo!
Rhinoceros (1974)
Originally a stage play, Rhinoceros is a metaphor for the spread of fascism. The idea is that something so ridiculous should never ensnare the mind of a rational human, but it slowly did until everyone was under its spell in both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy… and increasingly in other places…
Our story follows Gene Wilder as Stanley, an otherwise normal and everyday fellow. To his surprise, at lunch with his pompous friend John (played by the always delightful Zero Mostel) he sees a rhinoceros run past the restaurant! In the coming days, he not only sees more rhinos… but it becomes apparent that people are actually turning into rhinos! The media and government initially write it off as foolishness, but eventually come to see it as a bizarre epidemic.
One by one his friends become rhinoceroses, including John, until it is just Stanley and his non-committal girlfriend Daisy left — holed up in their apartment, surrounded outside by rhinos.
The last sane man that is besieged on all sides by snarling; deranged; deadly beasts… it feels strangely relevant, just as the original play was in 1959.
Robot Carnival / ロボットカーニバル (1987)
Another anthology, this is an anime collection of short-stories around the themes of robotics and artificial intelligence. They’re myriad, fascinating and beautiful. Some are straight-up action, others are spoof romances. Cloud is wordless, beautiful and eye-misting. The final segment, Strange Tales of the Meiji’s Machine Culture: Westerner’s Invasion, is a satire of Japan’s isolationism, racism and exceptionalism in the 19th Century. A moustache-twirling villain, literally called “The Westerner”, is attacking Japan and he must be stopped! The only solution, of course, is giant robots.
Rock & Rule (1988)
Rock & Rule is bizarre. It is bizarre and amazing. It was produced in Canada by Nelvana, and despite having nothing to do with him looks like the output of Ralph Bakshi.
It’s heavily stylised, looking like a cyber-punk anime, and features strange animal-men hybrids who rule the Earth after a massive nuclear fallout. The story is built on the power of rock music (no, really) and features singer/guitarist Omar and his band trying to stop the evil Mok Swagger from summoning the ultimate evil to let him rule the world!
Not only is it adult, epic, gorgeous, at turns tear-jerking and exciting, it also includes Iggy Pop, Debbie Harrie, Earth, Wind & Fire and Lou Reed! It was a catastrophic box office loss on release, but it’s gone on to develop a well-deserved second life as a little-known cult favourite. Strap in and feel the G-force, because this is one hell of a ride.
If you’re feeling extra dedicated, there are two cuts for you to try. One has a different actor and subtle rewrite on Omar, to make him a little less of a jerk, and some different scenes and plot beats.
Sharks! Pirates of the Deep! / Great White Death (1981)
Don’t you just hate it when nature programs are all, like, proper and stuff? “Oh this is a shark and it’s shy and endangered and lovely and and and” — BAH! I likes me sharks like I likes me women: toothy, malevolent and accompanied by overly dramatic music!
Also known as “Great White Death”, this is a mondo nature documentary that makes extensive use of new and stock underwater footage of sharks, interviews with shark attack victims, a few of re-enactments and some real footage of victims — including a diver being pulled on board a yacht who has had his leg bitten off by a Great White! The close up of his face is staged, but the rest of the scene, as far as I know, is a genuine recording.
If you like schlock, footage of sharks being badasses, melodramatic music and narration from Glenn Ford then this is a super way to while away an hour. It does indulge in some hokey superstition and “primitive culture” paternalistic crap, but it also brings a needful awe and majesty to our flesh-hungry friends that many modern nature documentaries are sadly lacking.
Time Masters / Les Maîtres du Temps (1984)
Say, do you like the works of French artist Mœbius? Do you like stunning, air-brushed animation; harrowing storytelling and interstellar intrigue? Try Time Masters.
A small child is marooned on a terrifying world when his father is killed driving their high-speed vehicle. With only a comm-link to a nearby star ship, he has to try to save himself from the monstrous inhabitants of the planet. The vessel is transporting both royalty and their treasury, with plots and machinations aplenty, and they have to try to reach the boy before all hope is lost! They pick up an old man, who has visited the planet before, in hope that his recollections can guide them…
UHF (1989)
What if Weird Al, but TV station? Mr. Yankovich (I can’t remember the character’s name, and honestly it doesn’t matter) is a classic Gen X slacker who, somehow, gets put in charge of a small-time TV station out in the ass-end of nowhere.
He ropes all his pals in to make their own, original programming… and it’s a hit, coast to coast! They raise money in a telethon to prevent a malicious mogul from buying up the station, and hijinks aplenty ensue.
Honestly, Weird Al is a terrible actor, but he is also a very funny man and that’s all that’s needed here. While most of the foreground jokes are weak there are still some knock-outs in there, and keep your eyes on the background, because there’s usually something hilarious going on there.
My personal favourite background-joke is two homeless men, one blind, doing a Rubick’s Cube. The blind man is making quick, random changes to the cube, each punctuated by asking his friend “that it?”. It’s so dumb it’s hilarious!
A Winter Story / Siôn Blewyn Coch (1986)
Contrary to what many North Americans may think, Britain has indeed made cartoons that are not Peppa Pig! While our big exports are shows like Downton Abyss; Shylock Holness; The Great British Bastard; Planet Smurf with David Natureborough and that one with the public toilet that’s bigger-on-the-inside and can appear in literally any studio lot in the BBC, we do also make a few cartoons, from time-to-time.
These days it’s mostly for quite young kids — yes, Peppa is a plot to turn all your stupid Yank children into proper little British gobshites — but our back-catalogue includes many for-kids-but-slyly-adult animated escapades. This includes takes on George Orwell’s Animal Farm, vegetarian vampire ducks, dangerful mice and a young man who became a super hero every time he ate a banana. For full-on adult comedy, we also gave the world Aaagh! It’s The Mr. Hell Show!, Monkeydust, Rex the Runt and Stressed Eric.
But I want to share with you a delightful one-off Christmas cartoon from Wales. Personally, I think the Welsh people are badly underrepresented in British animation — not least of all because of their lovely dialect — and this goes a little way to redressing that. The whole cast of A Winter Story is Welsh, the cartoon was produced and animated in Wales and was released in both English and Welsh.
It’s an ancestor that passed down much of its DNA to later films like Chicken Run. We follow a small family of foxes who are trying to get something to eat on a cold Winter night. They head for a nearby farm, where a shrewish farm lady and her dimwitted husband keep chickens. The foxes run amuck, chickens get everywhere, and the story ends with the fox family feasting on a bird that was accidentally shot by the farmer. Meanwhile, he and his wife are knee-deep in snow, scouring the countryside for the foxes, and a particularly audacious chicken is sitting down to their Christmas dinner in front of a log fire!
It’s pretty, it’s fun, it nips along at a good rate, and it’s very Britishly Christmassy: it’s cold, a little frightening (in a good way), dark, and involves the wicked getting their comeuppance. The soundtrack, naturally provided by a Welsh children’s choir, is also wonderful.
Why not give some of these a go? Just think of all the great artists, musicians and writers who create amazing things… but for whatever reason they never get “discovered” or catapulted into the public consciousness. These programmes have been lost down the back of the sofa, and they deserve a little stretch of their legs.
Let me know how you get on with them, or indeed if any of these might already be favourites for you. A mental gear-shift could be just the thing next time it’s 3AM and the world belongs to just you.
All images used are the properties of their respective owners, studios, producers and distributors. For some productions, it’s difficult to track down their current rights owners. Many original studios are now closed. Where possible, I’ve listed the current rights holder (either from chain of ownership on their respective Wikipedia pages or from recent DVD releases) and where not possible I’ve listed either the last-known rights holder and/or distributor.
All images are used under Fair Use terms for review and critique.
