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The Humanoid (1979) is the fourth entry in our Sci-Why? Theater Series. What happens when the Italians decide they want to do Star Wars with enough leather and vinyl to make the Wachowski Brothers feel a distant stirring in their nether-regions?
Let’s find out and see how The Humanoid compares to The Dark Side of the Moon, Inseminoid, and Forbidden World…
Bring out the other gimp…
The Humanoid
Narration fills us in with the context of the universe that The Humanoid takes place in. Earth is now called Metropolis, and that tells us all we need to know about what we are dealing with here.
Metro is a city term. Polis is also a city term. So, it makes total sense to rename a planet to something that means city-city.
Next, we have to consider the strong possibility that Superman may appear in this film. I have long since given up pretending that I understand Italian cinema and maintain the belief that if you cut together random scenes from various Italian films and showed the result to me, I would honestly believe it was a real movie.
“I liked when the space vampires rose from their graves to see that girl get her eye gouged out, which made the zombies ride that Ferris wheel,” I’d say.
You’d want to mock me, but then you would see the wide-eyed innocence with which I delivered that comment, feel guilty about being a bully, and change your life.
Spaceships fly around onscreen after the opening narration. The miniature work is a couple of steps below your average Revell model. It’s got style, though. Plus, the imagery is boosted by an Ennio Morricone score that makes you feel like you walked into a genuinely clean public restroom.
A big triangle ship is on its way to Metropolis for nefarious reasons. It is commanded by Lord Graal, who is basically Darth Vader wearing a mask that feels like it should have a ball gag incorporated into it.
Operation Botox commence!
The Humanoid League
On Metropolis, Bond Girl Corinne Clery (Moonraker) is told by an Asian boy on a viewscreen to evacuate the office where she works. She does, but leaves all her coworkers to die, and that pretty much sums up the corporate experience.
Clery did not wear a bra in Moonraker, and she does not wear a bra in The Humanoid. Perhaps, she burned them all. Clery gives off the vibe that she would hand you a book by Gertrude Stein to read with one hand and a pickle jar to open with the other.
Black leather and vinyl-clad bad guys in helmets that would look right at home in Spaceballs breach the place and blast unarmed technicians with lasers. Many puffy shirts and consoles die that day. The bad guys retrieve a thing called the Capitron. It looks like an octagonal milking pail. Despite this innocuous appearance, it can modify a man into a superhuman.
The bad guys bring the Capitron back to Graal. That part of the job is a success, but the leader reports Clery got away. Graal is disappointed and grounds the underling for 100 days. I am not making that up. The man’s punishment is 100 days without whatever perks their ersatz Star Destroyer offers. Graal probably even changed the wi-fi password.
I am leady fol my crose-up…
The Humanoid From The Deep
Enter another James Bond alum: Jaws himself, Richard Kiel.
Kiel sports a beard, possibly made from carpet scraps. He has a robot companion styled after R2-D2, but it has a moveable mouth and ears. Plus, it can wag its antenna.
In this scene, Kiel gets more dialogue than I have probably seen him utter in all of his other movies combined. This makes it clear why he doesn’t get much dialogue. His voice sounds like a transwoman with a bellyful of testosterone pills and lungs full of sulfur hexafluoride.
It doesn’t help that he is also given lines like…
“Where in the cosmos did that space jockey get his license?”
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the fact that Kiel never destroyed us all for being complicit in this sort of indignant treatment. Someone should have at least held a college protest for Kiel or chained themselves to a tree.
Wouldn’t it be funny if a protester did chain themselves to a tree for Kiel, and it turned out the “tree” was Kiel’s leg?
I bet she lives in the most glamourous dam that has ever blocked water.
I’m Only Humanoid, Flesh And Blood, A Manoid
The Humanoid starts to take on Tik-Tok editing as it jumps from scene to scene of various characters doing random things that may or may not have any bearing on the plot.
For example, Asian Boy talks to weird people in white and mentions “premotions” and “hunches,” which are totally not The Force. Graal learns that his spaceship has a “nineteen-second vector.” Duly noted. Thank you for that information, movie.
And we get yet another Bond movie alum. Barbara Bach (The Spy Who Loved Me) appears wearing a beaver pelt on her head. She watches Scientist Man stick a topless woman in a plastic Iron Maiden. Instead of spikes, the plastic Iron Maiden has needles. They drain the woman’s blood to create a formula that keeps Bach young.
In case you forget, we are watching an Italian movie here, one needle goes directly into a nipple.
Graal arrives. He and Bach discuss conquering Metropolis with an army of indestructible robots created by the Capitron.
See what I mean about The Humanoid going all over the place. They are really bombarding us with plot here. The script may have been written from the transcript of a fourteen-year-old boy with ADHD given an espresso and then asked to describe Star Wars.
Instead, The Humanoid was written by Adriano Bolzoni and Aldo Lado. Aldo also directed. It would not surprise me if there is a class-action lawsuit against them for this movie.
Let the tuning begin!
More Humanoid Than Humanoid
Scientist Man spots Keil’s ship on his viewscreen. Keil also appears on a viewscreen. That means Scientist Man has a camera aboard Keil’s ship if one wants to use the pesky part of their brain that houses logic. By the way, Scientist Man is played by Arthur Kennedy. People will recognize him from Fantastic Voyage and The Sentinel.
Scientist Man works the switches of a mixing board. It is probably the same mixing board they used to produce Morricone’s score. Said mixing board captures Keil’s ship in a tractor beam.
“Great,” Keil says. “It’s like being sucked into a magnetic void!”
Keil’s ship crashes on Metropolis. He climbs out of the wreckage and banters with his robot, NOT2-D2. Keil is on his knees for his conversation. Standing up appears to be a struggle for him. Such is the life of a big person with mortal joints. The Humanoid actually uses a cut to show Keil fully on his feet.
That poor man. Seeing as how it appears Keil is about one missed glass of milk away from full-blown osteoporosis, Aldo makes sure to put him on the ground in multiple scenes.
Scientist Man alerts Graal and Bach that he is about to create his first humanoid. His explanation for the process seems written via ad-lib.
That micro-(insert noun) holds barely one gram of (insert adjective) (insert noun) activated by a micro-(insert adjective) charge, which will (insert verb) the mutation.
Suffice it to say, a rocket blows up Keil’s ship, and he emerges from the wreckage without his beard and a dialect that now entirely consists of Frankenstein-style “Neerghs”.
To Err Is Humanoid
The bad guys program Keil to kill Clery and the supreme leader of Metropolis by placing a green blob on Keil’s forehead that looks like it came off the necklace Julia Nickson wears in Rambo II.
What mean expendable?
It’s like someone makes you watch The Humanoid, and part of your brain dies. It doesn’t really matter.
Keil’s mission consists of him tossing around guys in jumpsuits and going “Neergh!” for approximately thirty minutes. At one point, he is inches away from crushing the supreme leader’s head between his catcher-mitt hands when Scientist Guy tells Keil to go kill Clery first instead. Keil then turns around and walks back the way he came for about thirty minutes more while tossing guys in jumpsuits and going “Neergh!”
It all culminates with Asian Boy holding Keil’s hands (Aldo again forces Keil to get down on his powdery knees for this scene), and saying, “May your essence return to your body. Let me reach into your heart and soul.”
This magically cures Keil. He smiles. Truly, it’s a beautiful scene and makes me believe in love again.
Dispense Icy Hot. Please…my joints…
The Humanoid Touch
Film editors are likely meticulous people who create order out of chaos. At this point, I imagine the editor of The Humanoid simply gave up and jumped out a window because the film becomes a blur of stuff happening. It all seems to treat coherence as a vague suggestion taken under advisement rather than an actual, concrete goal. It seems like Morricone gave up at some point, too. His score devolves as the film goes on. One gets the impression he put in some work on the opening credits, then drank wine for two weeks and finished the rest of the soundtrack in five minutes by jotting down random notes on blank score sheets.
“Here’sa your musica. Where’sa my lira?”
Eventually, Keil, Asian Boy, NOT2-D2, and a hero fella played by Leonard Mann (Silent Night, Deadly Night 3) infiltrate the villain’s base to rescue Clery. Bach ages rapidly and dies. I completely forgot what happened to Scientist Guy. Graal’s hands glow lightsaber-style and shoot lasers before Keil hugs him to death. Then they all live happily ever after.
Oh yeah, and Asian Boy goes back to Tibet on a crystal Viking ship. Wouldn’t want to forget that…
And that’s The Humanoid experience in a nutshell. Not good, but stylish and fun in its own stupid way. Rating an Italian movie is always a challenge. Is it bad? Is it genius? No one knows. Let’s just split the difference down the middle. After all, we’re only humanoid…
The post Retro Review: THE HUMANOID (1979) appeared first on Last Movie Outpost.
