If you never saw this in the theater as a little kid, you can't understand how overwhelmingly awesome the music and beginning was where some movie screen sized AUTOCAD grid swirled around in 3d representation of a Black Hole. This was cutting edge thrills 8n 1979! I liked the hovering robots; so cool. AFAIK, no SCIFI had executed that concept so well. This film, however, was uneven in that it went from Hardy Boys mystery, to Scooby Doo to Amityville Horror (a film I still am too scared to watch, after having read part of the book as a teen) in a very short time!
Yeah. It’s a B-picture, but it is a fantastically ambitious B-movie, memorable amongst all the battle-beyond-the-stars level Junk being cranked out around then
Also had weirdly erratic practical effects. The sets (miniature and otherwise) were excellent, the model work on both the Cygnus and Palomino was great, and even Max managed to be pretty effective, especially if you were familiar with the Traveller RPG robot designs he was probably ripped off from - and then you had the utter failure of Vincent and Old Bob, who would have embarrassed even Irwin Allen into chucking them into the bin as rejects.
@@richmcgee434 Could be. Traveler started in 1977, this movie came out in '79, and I didn't start playing it until 1985, so I have no idea what was there at the outset. I remember reading that the guys who *built* Bob and Vincent were not happy with the eyes. They'd intended them to be CRT displays that could change expression with a lot more subtlety, but Disney just said, "No, we just want big eyes with buttons for pupils." They'd also intended to do more with their four retractable arms. They had originally been intended to be able to grab pistols and use 'em with all four arms, making for some cool fight scenes, but they couldn't make it work, either for a lack of time or a lack of skill, I dunno. So the idea that they had built-in guns was a last minute fix that no one was happy with.
@@mahatmarandy5977 Yep, I'd heard the same. Not surprising - the same folks that came up with Max could not have been satisfied with Vincent and Old Bob.
I, too, saw this film as a kid and found it almost as scary as the Space 1999 episode where a glowing stagelight maw with tentacles pulls helpless victims in and then shoots them back out smoking and digested. Both gave me nightmares for months!
Yes that particular space 1999 episode frightened the crap out of me too as a kid too and is probably my favourite episode even now. I thought Maximilion was the best thing about the black hole too, which actually was very impressive on the big screen back in the day, but you did notice the wires holding up Vincent and old Bob at times. However Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica on the big screen (which were shown here in the UK in cinemas!) were better and much more fun 👍
When it comes to conversations about scary movies and TV from childhood I've been amazed at how many times that _Space: 1999_ episode has cropped up when talking to people of a certain age. That, and the surprise rabbit-from-the-hat in the _Twilight Zone_ movie, were the two most terrifying memories of my childhood. Even _Alien,_ which I watched at far too young an age around the same time, didn't traumatise me in the way those two things had, although to be fair I had been warned what to expect in the meal scene. _The Black Hole_ was tame in comparison, although for years I remembered the Maximilian murder scene as much more visceral, with gruesome sound effects and blood that were nowhere to be found when I eventually re-watched it years later. It must have had a big impact for such a relatively innocuous scene that's mostly implied rather than explicit.
Disney execs in 1977: "This _Star Wars_ thing is a hit! What can we do? What do kids want?" "How about Gothic Horror in space with Judeo-Christian subtext, graphic onscreen murders, psychedelic imagery, & maybe Ernest Borgnine...?" "I'm listening." "And goofy ass robots!" "Perfect!"
it really was just bad timeing must have been filmed at some time as star wars. there been many screenplay before the end one over many years. you just can not turn a flim out in some year like that
@@kevinpoulton Nah. As Stam said, a script had been floating around for some time, but it wasn’t particularly impressive. Star Wars hit (1977), in 1978 Disney heavily modified said script, giving it a bit more intellectual heft (which they then panicked about, and chopped some of it out), and rushed the movie into production, and it hit theaters in 1979. The production cycle was almost exactly as long as Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and just as half-assed.
Nothing says "family friendly entertainment" from Disney, like finding a crew full of zombies led by a lunatic and his murder-happy robot that end with a trip to Hell. I don't know if this movie is good exactly, but it's unique, that's for sure.
I recognize that this film is flawed - especially the ending - but I still love it. I'd actually like to see more attempts at a "Jules Verne in space" style story. It was a clever way of going retro, a'la Star Wars, but pulling from a different sci-fi tradition. Also, the production design is amazing, and I adore how the ships are self-lit rather than having magic flat studio lighting. Also, seriously, the Cygnus bridge (3:00) is one of the greatest pieces of set design ever.
@@frankshailes3205 Yeah, I don’t get why people don’t like the ending. People say they want original stuff, but when they get it they bitch and moan, and say, “This smart stuff is stupid, I wanted it to be more like Star Wars!”
@@frankshailes3205 Me too. An ending that has people asking questions is sometimes a good thing. Reinhardt went to Heaven, Maximillian to Hell? For years I thought it was Kate's father inside Maximillian. When Reinhardt meets her, he says "You have your father's eyes." And then, at the end, the camera zooms in on the eyes inside Maximillian. Was that the actor Maximillian Schell's actual eyes? Or was it her father!? Hmm...
Oh man. Love ya Stam Fine but I think we're on two completely different levels with this movie. I've loved it since I was a kid and now I look back and think it's one of Disney's crowning achievements. Just like David Lynch's masterpiece DUNE, The Black Hole is epic science fiction that was so far ahead of its time it remains completely misunderstood to this very day. The bleak atmosphere of this film really messed with me as a child and inspired nightmares that formed my twisted imagination. The soundtrack by John Barry is beautiful and absolutely haunting. While I understand why a lot of people don't like it, for me it's a 10 out of 10.
Well said. This got me just at the right age. It's deliberate pace, great production design and creepy feel still make it an enjoyable watch as an adult.
I miss the times when Disney actually dared to do something new and used the best available technology to pull it off. "The Black Hole" and "TRON" are 2 absolute prime examples of them doing what NOBODY ELSE would have dared. That is the Disney i fell in love with as a kid and what i still cherish the most. John Barry's score was even one of the first Digital Recordings ever. Personally i would have loved to see the Black Hole remake that was originally slated to be directed by Joseph Kosinski, who showed with "Tron Legacy" that he really is more than capable of treating a legacy IP with the proper respect. But then sadly... Disney annexed Star Wars and that was the end of it.... At least Konsonski gave us Top Gun Maverick.
@@frankshailes3205 It’s core was rotten then, too, but the company was in seriously bad financial straights, and they were willing to try a lot of stuff just out of desperation. By 1984 they were fine financially, and their movies get less impressive.
I really don’t want a remake. While this movie is admittedly a mess, that’s a major part of its charm. I don’t want another gritty, under-lit mess of a movie with a realistic depiction of a black hole that will be indistinguishable from Modern Cookie-Cutter Space Adventure #457. I want this. It has character. It’s interesting. It’s got ambition and is slapping away at an idea it can never quite get a hold on. Yeah, it kinda sucks, but it kinda sucks in a way that no one had ever sucked before, and that’s pretty noteworthy. A remake would suck in a much more conventional way, and I’m just not interested in that.
I LOVED this movie as a kid and have VERY fond memories of it. I loved the art direction and just how haunted the Cygnus felt, complete with gothic architecture in space, undead crew members, a murderous enforcer robot, a mad scientist running the whole thing, all in the shadow of an all-consuming infinite gravity well. The perfect movie for my space nerd childhood.
I saw The Black Hole in theaters in 1979. It was an awesome experience! Not long after, I had the book, and as many of the toys and models as I could find. When VCRs finally came around, I bought the VHS versions (full screen and letterbox), when DVDs came around, I bought it on that format as well, again with Blu-Ray, and now own it on Digital. I still have the toys and models around here somewhere, and the book is still on my bookshelf. Disney's first PG rated movie really made a lasting impression on me. It's still a staple in my "I haven't watched that in a few months.... let's put it on!" I've easily seen it over 100 times, and still love it to this very day.
Seeing this as a six year old in 1979, the part that scared me almost to death was when Dr. Reinhardt was floating in space after the destruction of the Cygnus, and then he pops up into frame. The ending made no sense to me back then, and now at 51 I’m still not sure what to believe as there are many interpretations of what it all meant.
The movie that I list as a "movie that scared me as a kid". Also, and I found this out recently, Max the robot is based off of a set of knight armor with the same name. The Star Wars link is more than just what you see on set. A lot of people who worked on Star Wars worked on TBH. If you get a DVD copy of the movie, "Through The Black Hole" is included on it. Its the documentary about how the movie was made narrated by Harrison Ellenshaw, son of the famous Peter Ellenshaw, who both worked on Star Wars. There was a comic series by Gold Key called "Beyond the Black Hole" that was issues 3, 4, and 5 (1 and 2 was the comic based off the actual movie). Issues 4 and 5 only came out in Spanish.
I saw this when I was 8yrs old at a double feature drive-in movie theater: The Black Hole and Superman: The Movie. Glorious and magical childhood memory!
This film haunted me for years as a child watching it on Christmas Day in 1985. The journey through the Black Hole into Hell then Heaven and out the other side was a trauma! I watched it years later and I'm very fond of it now. It has great Set Design, good effects and I don't know what the critics problems were with it. It's also years ahead of it's time with some of it's themes and it was very brave of Disney! R.I.P. to all the main cast who are no longer here. I think Joseph Bottoms is the only one left!
Crazy how they showed this movie at my middle school yearly movie along with Black Beauty. It was insane to watch and as an adult I always wondered if the school admins really knew what it was about or just rubber stamped it because it was Disney 😊.
I've come across it on tv by accident this one time, and I loved it! It was touching, intriguing, and in some places - scary. Great effects, interesting story, unnerving aspects. Wish more sci-fi were like this.
Anthony Perkins' death scene is my favorite movie death. What they didn't show is the take where the robot's Moulinex attachment suddenly stops, and Anthony Perkins' body pinwheels around and around until he flies off the blades and hurtles into space.
For a guy who loves the crappiest years of Doctor Who, it's strange to hear you diss one of my favourite childhood classics like this! Not only did I LOVE this movie as an 8 year old, my parents bought me some incredible merch like puzzle game books and sticker albums that I loved well into my teens. This was a GREAT kids movie!
I saw it alone at the theater as a kid. Several elements stuck with me. It's no Star Wars but I still enjoy the black hole animation, scary outer space feel, and creepy quiet vibe. Great actors, lovely Yvette!
I remember seeing this film in the theater when I was 9. My favorite was old B.O.B., then V.I.N.C.E.N.T.. I was terrified of Maximillian, they truly came up with the brute of space androids.
I posted this comment elsewhere, but I would have loved to have been in the pitch meeting for The Black Hole... _“We need a space themed movie pronto!”_ _“Do I have a movie for you... it’s about a mad scientist on an ship full of the lobotomised ex-crew trapped on the edge of a black hole. He’s guarded by a silent killer robot that guts people with rotating metal blades. The average age of the cast is 50, and the ending will show a literal DESCENT INTO HELL for the villain!”_ _“Uh... this is for kids... how?”_ _“There’s a small robot with big eyes.”_ _“SOLD!”_
Exactly. The film is such a shitshow. Even the production design is schizophrenic. Some of the sets are stunning, like the vast bridge of the Cygnus, while other things - like the robots - look cartoonish. The direction is awful. The live action shots are more TV than cinema. They must have had a good cinematographer though. Nothing about the film makes a lick of sense. And the actors - apart from Schell and Borgnine - all behave as if they’d ODed on quaaludes. Which - after getting the final script - maybe they did.
Mate, this is such a great film. I watched it with friends over the xmas break having not seen in in decades and was the most fun I've had with a film in so long. Made me want to chase people around with spinning metal bottle openers all over again.
I only have three memories concerning this film : 1) The sight of Maximilian in hell at the end of the movie - that haunted me for quite a while; 2) The awesome marketing campaign which included great toys in my box of Shreddies. We had great toys in our cereal back in the day ; and 3) A news story about the movie being held up at Canadian customs because they assumed that 'The Black Hole' was a pornographic movie.... This last memory may be apocryphal. Anyway cheers and thanks for another great review - I'll need to check this out on Disney Plus.
I think this movie may have been an early example of the dark ‘children’s’ films of the 80s. Maximilian (in or out of Hell), the owl from Secret of NIHM, nearly everything from Dark Crystal, the death of Artax from Neverending story, Mambi from Return to OZ, and the death of Optimus Prime has to be worth several lifetimes of trauma. That look in the eyes of 80s kids? They seen some shit.
Would not be surprised about the last story. After all, Norway banned "The Life of Brian", prompting the Swedes to advertise it with the line: "The movie so funny, they banned it in Norway."
I didn't watch it in the theater, but it wasn't due to a lack of desire, it was from a lack of transportation. The nearest theater was well over a dozen miles away and 11 year olds don't know a whole lot of licenced drivers. I did watch it on HBO and always figured it to be a good movie. I have it on DVD (only because i couldn't find a 4k or Blu-ray version) but once i do, I'll be in my collection
I’m on the opposite side, Roddy McDowell is my favorite character in the movie, then again when isn’t Roddy McDowell my favorite character, he’s amazing.
My dad brought me to see this when I was 7 I bet he never thought he had to try to explain about hell to me from watching a Disney movie back then, but I do enjoy this movie still watch it to this day
5:50 -- RE: The Ending with Winehard + Robo-Maximillian; I have known this movie for a long time, I have watched it more times than I can count. But I had never thought about the poetic justice of Reinhard being forced to hide within his monster machine after having converted most of the people around him to mindless cyborgs. Its a fitting ending to prove he deserves the Hell around him.
Love this movie. Seeing it as a kid, it was weird, trippy and creepy with some cool old school sci-fi tropes.Had the novelization and a couple of the action movies. This and Tron are the best sci-fi Disney ever made.
"It's Lovecraft, But For Kids!" is my motto. Loved it more than Star Wars as a 10 yr old, Star Wars was too "charming", too "fantasy" in a "everyone lives happily every after" way, whereas with The Black Hole, literally everybody dies, probably, or is lost in an eternal chasm of the mind, who in heck knows really, they certainly don't get cheesy medals and fanfares :). Sure, the direction+acting is more like a stage play. But the bleakness of it was more suited perhaps to that. Like some Greek tragedy. Watched it only recently, and as an adult it's very flat and I found myself skipping until certain vital beats, but as a kid, it was the best and strangest thing I'd ever seen. I'd go around citing VINCENT and BOB until I had no friends left ;) and I'd draw Maximilian robots over lots of things, and have various nightmares about it all. The music still haunts me to this day.
It was a lot like Star Trek the Motion Picture in that it had some great ideas, some really amazing visuals, mixed in with a more than a handful of cheezy effects too and a lot of really boring stuff in between for long stretches. However, that ending was like nothing ever before or after, not just in kid movies but any movie!
A big part of why this likely underperformed at the box office is that ST: TMP was in theaters at the same time. Apparently, people could only abide one sci-fi film at a time then.
@@Scimarad I still bores the hell out of me. The director’s cut didn’t improve anything in my mind. Ultimately I just don’t think it’s a very good story.
And both TBH and ST:TMP heavily feature the use of blaster beam in their musical scores. The overall quality of the 2 movies may have been hit-or-miss, but John Barry and Jerry Goldsmith both delivered top-notch soundtracks for those films.
I saw this at a drive in as a kid, double feature, 1st Condorman, then The Black Hole. Thanks to Condorman film, it made The Black Hole seem 10 times more exciting. Plus the only Disney film to ever scare the crap out of me as a kid. Your right Stam, it was a bit like a Poseidon adventure in space.
So tired of people reviewing sci/fi space movies and ALWAYS end up comparing them to Star Wars. SPOILER: The Black Hole is NOT Star Wars!!! It's a damn fun movie I've happily enjoyed since I saw it at theaters back in the day.
Maximillian scared all of my classmates and the Maximillian/Maximillian ending was ...baroque, a word none of us would learn for years. Still a major moment that more kiss should experience without forewarning.
This is one of Disney 's odd patch Films from the late 70s onwards along with Watcher In The Woods and Something Wicked This Way Comes, I think they were feeling experimental at the time.
Well you inspired me to finally re-edit the film to either remove or minimise as much of Vincent as possible and still have it mostly make sense. I've had the idea of doing something like that for quite some time and the result (after several hours work and excising almost 10 minutes of footage) is that Vincent is now almost entirely inoffensive.
Why ? Vincent made more sense than 3PO.. translates how many languages? My phone can do that... Vincent fixed the ship, Bob did sanitation..both jobs made much more sense than hell even R2.. ships should be able to automate most his job even.
All Disney movies from the late 70s-mid '80s are fascinating, because they show a Disney that's radically different from today. A Disney that was in dire straits, between fleeing animators and artists, delayed or cancelled animated features, constant hostile takeover attempts, and while many of these movies still feel like they're following their time's fad, they did it in an unexpected fashion imo. Escape From Witch Mountain, The Black Hole, The Watcher in the Woods, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Tron, Return to Oz. All incredibily fascinating.
On one hand I applaud Disney for trying something a bit new. But that was the problem: it wasn't really new. The art direction, costuming, sets, looked and felt like it belonged in a 1950's scifi flick. That, plus it was just a few scifi things tagged onto "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". Their filming of Verne's novel with James Mason is one of their live-action masterpieces, but once was enough. There were simply too many characters onboard the Palomino: two at most, plus the robot V.I.N.C.E.N.T. would suffice. The red, menacing robot was truly a masterwork of design, scary enough to frighten Darth Vader (almost). Lots of head-scratching elements: a woman with ESP...and a robot who could pick up her brainwaves! A wild-west style laser shootout! Scenes with people in space (presumably a hard vacuum), but still able to breathe, function and remain conscious! A black hole that leads to Dante's Inferno! Plus the black hole itself was not well-represented, as in it's less of a whirlpool and more of a black sphere (the event horizon) with super-hot gas and plasma circling it at near-c speeds. It's a fun movie, but like most movies, unplug your cerebral cortex before viewing.
I can explain the weird shit in the ending. It’s pretty easy: It’s Dante’s Inferno. When Dante gets to the heart of hell, Satan recognizes that he doesn’t belong there, and swats him so hard that he flies all the way back out of hell to the surface of the earth. Borgnine’s first line in the movie, when seeing The Black Hole, is, “It’s like something out of Dante!” And there are a few other lines here and there. In gist, Dr. Reinhardt (Who’s a loose combination of Captain Nemo and Werner Von Braun) really really really wants to be God, or at least *a* god, if he can’t do that. He believes (As he states) that different physical rules apply on the other side of the black hole, and he’s obviously fanatical about it. So fanatical that he lobotomized his whole crew when they complained. Durant/Perkins is kind of swept up in this. He has a line calling voyaging into the black hole, “A sacred pilgrimage to what may be the mind of God,” which is an odd thing to say. There’s also tons of vaguely-religious imagery in the film: the Cygnus looks like a cathedral, that scene with the captain wandering through an endless row of identical crew’s quarters that look like monk’s cells, the funeral, etc. So I think what the idea was is that they meet Reinhard, he’s babbling about God and blah blah blah, we write him off as crazy, he jumps into the hole, dragging the Palomino Crew with him, and then it turns out that while he was crazy, he wasn’t entirely *wrong.* The black hole actually *is* a back door into the afterlife, just - oh, shit! - the bad part. So he gets to bond with Maximillian (Yeah, I don’t get that part either) and reign in hell (Seemingly horrified by the realization), and then an angel shows up recognizing that they’re not supposed to be there, and escorts them out of hell, through heaven (Which we only get to see one corridor of) and back to the physical universe. That planet off in the distance at the end is supposed to be earth. The telling of the tale is really muddled, but that was the intent.
Same here. I remember that the book had kissing in it! Little boy me was so glad they kept that out of the film, much more terrifying than the crew's unmasking.
I love this film, it's not a great film, it's not even something I'd honestly be able to say was a good film. But damn, it was a dark film for a kids movie back then. Mostly, I love the design. The robot costumes are scary to me in a way stormtroopers never managed (well, until they walk), Maximillian absolutely terrified me as a kid. The embodiment of silent malice. The ship. omg, I loved that ship design. Let's put a victorian exhibition hall into space and light it from within. OK OK so maybe what I love is the set and costume designers read the summary of the story (charming mad scientist in space, does bad things with his crew and lives in isolation) and absolutely ran with the idea - and then unfortunately someone wrote dialogue and put actors in it and realised they needed to try and find an ending. I still love this film though for the batshit insane fact that Disney greenlit it during this period of their films. That a bunch of kids (like me) were taken to see it because 'Oh it's a new Disney film' and ate it up whilst our parents sat uncomfortably next to us.
Gotta say I usually love your reviews but this ain’t one of ‘em. It’s a well made film with one of the scariest robots since Darth Vader. Maximillian gave me nightmares as a kid. John Barry’s score is one of his best. The production and special effects are very well done. Does it have problems, sure. Can it be clunky in some scenes, sure. Overall though, it’s a really good sci-fi film that left an impression on me as a kid. Oh and one more thing, WINGS is one of the greatest tv comedies ever made. Keep up the great content.
Back in the 90s this movie impressed me so much as a kid. Back in school a friend of mine and I were both HUGE Sci-Fi nuts and he loved this film so much, he always told me how cool the robot Maximilian was. It made me wanting to watch the TV recording my parents took a year earlier or so. And so i did. The sheer size and setting really sold me and it was also my first contact with actor Maximilian Shell. I already had known Ernest Borgnine by then from Airwolf and many other movies where you always saw his friendly face as a supporting actor. The ending of "The Black Hole" was absolutely trippy.
👍 This was a good movie. A space-terror, action-adventure with good music, some haunting aesthetics, tropes from 2001, Silent Running, Star Wars, Demon Seed, etc. It didn't feel or look like a PG movie then or now.
I saw this in the theater when I was 9, and at the time, this movie was the best! The big screen showing the awesome effects (to a 9 year olds eyes anyway), and the music was just perfect. As usual, when you see something as an adult that you loved as a kid you think, “what the hell??”😅 I still have fondness for this film, but turn it off shortly before they all get sucked into the hole. The ending is just too corny for me.
I recognise and agree that TBH is not the best. Far from the best in fact. But, I do like this era of film making, not for it's quality, or the actors, but for the feeling. It was a time when film making was throwing off the mid-seventies stride with the late sixties drag, and really becoming something, even though that something represented the end of the decade, and the unknown of what the 1980's...or early eighties would bring. In essensce, the late seventies (76-79), those four years where a time of...not so much interest (all times have their own interest) but more... well, something like the black hole really: a time of graivty pulling you towards something inexplicatible and changing everything most were probably comfortable with. But why the late 70's and not the late 60's or 80's or 2010's (2010 tens?). I think the answers is 1. A personal thing, but 2. I could say a time when film was still slightly naive? Or maybe I just liked John Barry's scores, or the feeling of true widescreen cinema. For me, and maybe others, if subsconciously realising it, and now looking back, it was the full blooming of cinema before the era of home video, which if not destroying cinema, would certainly destroy the magic of the experience.
I agree it's very flawed, with long stretches that bore or annoy me, but I admire its ambition and when it's good it's very good. This was at a time when Disney was in a strange and really interesting & adventurous phase of its history. I'll take an interesting "failure" over a dull "success" any day.
I've watched this film a few years ago and completely forgot about it, it literally took the whole length of the video for me to remember that I'd seen it
Saw this when I was a kid. This wasn't a typical live action Disney movie. Seeing it in the theater is the best way to really enjoy it. John Barry's music was great. 2 shocking moments that I still think of was the gruesome death of Anthony Perkins' character and that sudden in your face close up of the dead villain's face during the conclusion.
Love this movie. Harsh treatment by many, but it's ending and gloomy atmosphere had me at the cinema. I had just turned 11. Oddly I recall it it much more clearly when it hit the TV screen in the early to mid 80s typically over Christmas and to me it's a memory of a time when tv was, pretty much everything over the festive period, oh chocolate and lots of toys if you were good.
Even as a 10 year old kid (watching it in the theater), I got that going through Disney's Black Hole was a portal between Heaven and Hell. Reinhart, Max and the semi-dead robot crew are now stuck in a Dante like hell, which Reinhart is now, what he was doing to his crew, trapped as an emotionless robot that he made "For All Eternity", with the other crew robots marching over the hellish rocky structure of the broken Cigus. Where as Holland and the others are led the other way through heaven (by an angel) to a new universe to live in. The comics of the film did continue and the rocket lands on a planet with other human-like people, giving them a better ending.
I always loved this film as a kid, but I think it suffered with two different aesthetic styles from the time. You have the big epic style of 2001, Silent Running, and that taste. Then you have the big budget adventure of Star Wars and several of those knockoff sci-fi adventure flicks. I think the Black Hole was trying to hit both styles and though I have a soft spot for it, I will admit it may not have worked on
I enjoy this movie. Yes, Maximillian killing Anthony Perkins makes one of my earliest childhood memories of covering my eyes during a scary part of a movie(along with the Raiders of the Lost Ark face melting scene). I love V.I.N.CENT, he's one of the most badass robot characters in Sci-Fi. If I can't have R2-D2 by my side, I want V.I.N.CENT.
The tone of this movie was all-over-the-place. To whom was it supposed to appeal? Are you 9-years-old? Then, we've got some undead work zombies. Are you a parent? Then, we've got a couple of toy robots.
Ever seen Dragonslayer? Admittedly, it was a co-production with Paramount Pictures, but still, it doesn't get much darker than a dead beautiful princess' leg getting chewed-off and little baby dragons getting skewered, all in the same scene. Dragonslayer is fantastic, BTW.
@@fredleggett923 I might have. I find that sometimes unless I've seen something as a kid I don't quite have the same level of attachment to something. I never saw Krull as a kid, I saw the ending about 5 times as I'd always miss it being on, usually at christmas.
I thought for it's time it was a visual masterpiece and the Cygnus looks like a glass Cathedral in space the Religious allegory was undeniable. The in camera & optical effects hold up remarkably well for a film made around forty five years ago. And while it not a thrill ride a minute. I can live with it P.S The Maximilian Schell joke was on the money 💰
The reviewer is correct. The movie generally blows, but has a few high points. Westworld was a better movie. (Don't get me started on the Westworld TV series!)
I saw this on its premiere back in 79 and yes it was forgotten for a long time. I remember the drive to the theater more then the film, it was all snowy and very cold day. (insert one of your quips about cold days here). Fun review.
the ONLY thing I really remember from seeing this in a theater was a scene where the wires holding someone 'floating in space' were so blatantly obvious.
Great job, Stam. I don't remember this film at all. I'm off to find it and watch it. The turning Anthony Perkins into a smoothie line was epic and including Aunty' Beryl, as you do in all your videos, floors me every time. Have a fab weekend buddy 😀
I agree, his 18 min ones are more fun. His 7 minute ones really leave you wanting. The 30 minute eipsodes are really pushing it, but he still keeps them funny.
Love every vdo you produce. I have been meaning to say how hard i laughed when you commented about steve1989 the mre guy. He is excellent too and it was so random. Thanks for great fun
Don't forget that this movie was a tie in to Disneyland's new ride and attraction, "The Black Hole". In the early 80s, in Los Angeles California, I rode on that ride with friends. It was basically an indoor roller-coaster, with lots of flashing lights and effects. It was pretty decent. The long lines of folks waiting for their turn snaked through lots of space launch facility stuff, because the wait could be an hour+. Disney usually did a good wait line. Unfortunately, the movie was indeed stupid crap, suitable only for kids. The merchandising was probably regrettable too. Disney hauls in billions just on the stuff they sell to kids. I think they make movies just to sell toys to kids. Disney=$$$!
For all its flaws, it's still one of my childhood favorites. The John Barry score is AMAZING!!!
The Black Hole is a fabulous film, an underrated classic. It was also in pre-production long before Star Wars happened.
An ending that will haunt your childhood.
That’s the truth ! Is it heaven or hell or pegatory ? A lot to take on for a kid under 10!
An ending that proved to be just as controversial as the ending of 2001:A SPACE ODYSSEY.
I won’t hear a bad thing said against this film. It’s majestic, and sits pride of place in my mind palace
I agree with you and I enjoy watching the film and think it’s great and really entertaining to watch
Majestic is a very odd descriptor for this film. For whatever charm it has it’s extremely clunky.
Agree
Stam Fine likes James Bond and Doctor Who ( both of which I hate) but doesn’t like this (which I love) - I guess we can’t be friends…
Same as others here.
If you never saw this in the theater as a little kid, you can't understand how overwhelmingly awesome the music and beginning was where some movie screen sized AUTOCAD grid swirled around in 3d representation of a Black Hole. This was cutting edge thrills 8n 1979! I liked the hovering robots; so cool. AFAIK, no SCIFI had executed that concept so well. This film, however, was uneven in that it went from Hardy Boys mystery, to Scooby Doo to Amityville Horror (a film I still am too scared to watch, after having read part of the book as a teen) in a very short time!
Definitely agree with all of this...except the part about Amityville Horror being too scary to watch. 😂😉
Yeah. It’s a B-picture, but it is a fantastically ambitious B-movie, memorable amongst all the battle-beyond-the-stars level Junk being cranked out around then
Also had weirdly erratic practical effects. The sets (miniature and otherwise) were excellent, the model work on both the Cygnus and Palomino was great, and even Max managed to be pretty effective, especially if you were familiar with the Traveller RPG robot designs he was probably ripped off from - and then you had the utter failure of Vincent and Old Bob, who would have embarrassed even Irwin Allen into chucking them into the bin as rejects.
@@richmcgee434 Could be. Traveler started in 1977, this movie came out in '79, and I didn't start playing it until 1985, so I have no idea what was there at the outset.
I remember reading that the guys who *built* Bob and Vincent were not happy with the eyes. They'd intended them to be CRT displays that could change expression with a lot more subtlety, but Disney just said, "No, we just want big eyes with buttons for pupils."
They'd also intended to do more with their four retractable arms. They had originally been intended to be able to grab pistols and use 'em with all four arms, making for some cool fight scenes, but they couldn't make it work, either for a lack of time or a lack of skill, I dunno. So the idea that they had built-in guns was a last minute fix that no one was happy with.
@@mahatmarandy5977 Yep, I'd heard the same. Not surprising - the same folks that came up with Max could not have been satisfied with Vincent and Old Bob.
The robot Maximilian terrified me and still does. It’s his silence, his creepy “devils eye” and… well just everything.
And his brownish/reddish/purple-ish coloring. It makes him seem more demonic somehow.
@@BugRib 👍
He's a very effective design - which just makes the glaring contrast with Vincent and Old bob that much worse.
If Satan was a robot, he would be Maximilian.
@@johntracy72 absolutely! He is the devil in robot form. Totally agree!
I, too, saw this film as a kid and found it almost as scary as the Space 1999 episode where a glowing stagelight maw with tentacles pulls helpless victims in and then shoots them back out smoking and digested. Both gave me nightmares for months!
Yes that particular space 1999 episode frightened the crap out of me too as a kid too and is probably my favourite episode even now. I thought Maximilion was the best thing about the black hole too, which actually was very impressive on the big screen back in the day, but you did notice the wires holding up Vincent and old Bob at times. However Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica on the big screen (which were shown here in the UK in cinemas!) were better and much more fun 👍
That was a terrifying episode.
I re-watched it recently and still: wtf Gerry Anderson?
When it comes to conversations about scary movies and TV from childhood I've been amazed at how many times that _Space: 1999_ episode has cropped up when talking to people of a certain age. That, and the surprise rabbit-from-the-hat in the _Twilight Zone_ movie, were the two most terrifying memories of my childhood. Even _Alien,_ which I watched at far too young an age around the same time, didn't traumatise me in the way those two things had, although to be fair I had been warned what to expect in the meal scene.
_The Black Hole_ was tame in comparison, although for years I remembered the Maximilian murder scene as much more visceral, with gruesome sound effects and blood that were nowhere to be found when I eventually re-watched it years later. It must have had a big impact for such a relatively innocuous scene that's mostly implied rather than explicit.
@@andrewsearson9802
Do you know the series & episode number; or episode title?
@@Ytnzy250 The episode is called Dragons Domain and is from first season, not sure what episode number though 🤔
Disney execs in 1977:
"This _Star Wars_ thing is a hit! What can we do? What do kids want?"
"How about Gothic Horror in space with Judeo-Christian subtext, graphic onscreen murders, psychedelic imagery, & maybe Ernest Borgnine...?"
"I'm listening."
"And goofy ass robots!"
"Perfect!"
That was awesome. They were on the fence until "goofy ass robots"! 😂👍
it really was just bad timeing must have been filmed at some time as star wars. there been many screenplay before the end one over many years. you just can not turn a flim out in some year like that
I love that you recognized the Judeo-Christian subtext. Most people weirdly don’t even seem to grasp that.
@@kevinpoulton Nah. As Stam said, a script had been floating around for some time, but it wasn’t particularly impressive. Star Wars hit (1977), in 1978 Disney heavily modified said script, giving it a bit more intellectual heft (which they then panicked about, and chopped some of it out), and rushed the movie into production, and it hit theaters in 1979. The production cycle was almost exactly as long as Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and just as half-assed.
Nailed it!
The John Barry score is what makes this movie.
I love this movie! Always have since I saw it in theater as a kid.
I saw it in the theatre, too. I enjoyed it, but kids are daft, and so was I.
Ironically, Maximilian Schell ended up in a Maximilian shell.
Nothing says "family friendly entertainment" from Disney, like finding a crew full of zombies led by a lunatic and his murder-happy robot that end with a trip to Hell.
I don't know if this movie is good exactly, but it's unique, that's for sure.
I recognize that this film is flawed - especially the ending - but I still love it. I'd actually like to see more attempts at a "Jules Verne in space" style story. It was a clever way of going retro, a'la Star Wars, but pulling from a different sci-fi tradition. Also, the production design is amazing, and I adore how the ships are self-lit rather than having magic flat studio lighting.
Also, seriously, the Cygnus bridge (3:00) is one of the greatest pieces of set design ever.
In 1979, I thought the ending was the best bit.
@@frankshailes3205 Yeah, I don’t get why people don’t like the ending. People say they want original stuff, but when they get it they bitch and moan, and say, “This smart stuff is stupid, I wanted it to be more like Star Wars!”
@@frankshailes3205 Me too. An ending that has people asking questions is sometimes a good thing. Reinhardt went to Heaven, Maximillian to Hell? For years I thought it was Kate's father inside Maximillian. When Reinhardt meets her, he says "You have your father's eyes." And then, at the end, the camera zooms in on the eyes inside Maximillian. Was that the actor Maximillian Schell's actual eyes? Or was it her father!? Hmm...
Oh man. Love ya Stam Fine but I think we're on two completely different levels with this movie. I've loved it since I was a kid and now I look back and think it's one of Disney's crowning achievements. Just like David Lynch's masterpiece DUNE, The Black Hole is epic science fiction that was so far ahead of its time it remains completely misunderstood to this very day. The bleak atmosphere of this film really messed with me as a child and inspired nightmares that formed my twisted imagination. The soundtrack by John Barry is beautiful and absolutely haunting. While I understand why a lot of people don't like it, for me it's a 10 out of 10.
Agreed.
Hear hear!
Absolutely
Shit yeah!
Well said. This got me just at the right age. It's deliberate pace, great production design and creepy feel still make it an enjoyable watch as an adult.
I miss the times when Disney actually dared to do something new and used the best available technology to pull it off. "The Black Hole" and "TRON" are 2 absolute prime examples of them doing what NOBODY ELSE would have dared. That is the Disney i fell in love with as a kid and what i still cherish the most. John Barry's score was even one of the first Digital Recordings ever. Personally i would have loved to see the Black Hole remake that was originally slated to be directed by Joseph Kosinski, who showed with "Tron Legacy" that he really is more than capable of treating a legacy IP with the proper respect. But then sadly... Disney annexed Star Wars and that was the end of it.... At least Konsonski gave us Top Gun Maverick.
Sadly Disney later consumed itself right down to its now-rotten core.
@@frankshailes3205 It’s core was rotten then, too, but the company was in seriously bad financial straights, and they were willing to try a lot of stuff just out of desperation. By 1984 they were fine financially, and their movies get less impressive.
I really don’t want a remake. While this movie is admittedly a mess, that’s a major part of its charm. I don’t want another gritty, under-lit mess of a movie with a realistic depiction of a black hole that will be indistinguishable from Modern Cookie-Cutter Space Adventure #457. I want this. It has character. It’s interesting. It’s got ambition and is slapping away at an idea it can never quite get a hold on. Yeah, it kinda sucks, but it kinda sucks in a way that no one had ever sucked before, and that’s pretty noteworthy.
A remake would suck in a much more conventional way, and I’m just not interested in that.
I LOVED this movie as a kid and have VERY fond memories of it. I loved the art direction and just how haunted the Cygnus felt, complete with gothic architecture in space, undead crew members, a murderous enforcer robot, a mad scientist running the whole thing, all in the shadow of an all-consuming infinite gravity well. The perfect movie for my space nerd childhood.
It felt a bit like Forbidden Planet. That's a classic as well.
I saw The Black Hole in theaters in 1979. It was an awesome experience! Not long after, I had the book, and as many of the toys and models as I could find. When VCRs finally came around, I bought the VHS versions (full screen and letterbox), when DVDs came around, I bought it on that format as well, again with Blu-Ray, and now own it on Digital. I still have the toys and models around here somewhere, and the book is still on my bookshelf. Disney's first PG rated movie really made a lasting impression on me. It's still a staple in my "I haven't watched that in a few months.... let's put it on!" I've easily seen it over 100 times, and still love it to this very day.
Seeing this as a six year old in 1979, the part that scared me almost to death was when Dr. Reinhardt was floating in space after the destruction of the Cygnus, and then he pops up into frame. The ending made no sense to me back then, and now at 51 I’m still not sure what to believe as there are many interpretations of what it all meant.
The movie that I list as a "movie that scared me as a kid".
Also, and I found this out recently, Max the robot is based off of a set of knight armor with the same name.
The Star Wars link is more than just what you see on set. A lot of people who worked on Star Wars worked on TBH. If you get a DVD copy of the movie, "Through The Black Hole" is included on it. Its the documentary about how the movie was made narrated by Harrison Ellenshaw, son of the famous Peter Ellenshaw, who both worked on Star Wars.
There was a comic series by Gold Key called "Beyond the Black Hole" that was issues 3, 4, and 5 (1 and 2 was the comic based off the actual movie). Issues 4 and 5 only came out in Spanish.
Despite this movies many flaws, it is paradoxically also somewhat charming, intriguing and haunting.
This was and still is an awesome movie . I loved it back in the day and I love it now .
I saw this when I was 8yrs old at a double feature drive-in movie theater: The Black Hole and Superman: The Movie. Glorious and magical childhood memory!
This film haunted me for years as a child watching it on Christmas Day in 1985. The journey through the Black Hole into Hell then Heaven and out the other side was a trauma!
I watched it years later and I'm very fond of it now. It has great Set Design, good effects and I don't know what the critics problems were with it. It's also years ahead of it's time with some of it's themes and it was very brave of Disney!
R.I.P. to all the main cast who are no longer here. I think Joseph Bottoms is the only one left!
Crazy how they showed this movie at my middle school yearly movie along with Black Beauty. It was insane to watch and as an adult I always wondered if the school admins really knew what it was about or just rubber stamped it because it was Disney 😊.
I've come across it on tv by accident this one time, and I loved it! It was touching, intriguing, and in some places - scary. Great effects, interesting story, unnerving aspects. Wish more sci-fi were like this.
Maximilian Schell ended up in Maximilian’s shell. 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
"Maximillian Schell ending up inside Maximillian's shell" is the pun this movie was made for!
Anthony Perkins' death scene is my favorite movie death. What they didn't show is the take where the robot's Moulinex attachment suddenly stops, and Anthony Perkins' body pinwheels around and around until he flies off the blades and hurtles into space.
Director's Cut
What, him falling off the catwalk and hitting high tension lines and getting fried on the way down wasn’t enough for ya? :)
For a guy who loves the crappiest years of Doctor Who, it's strange to hear you diss one of my favourite childhood classics like this! Not only did I LOVE this movie as an 8 year old, my parents bought me some incredible merch like puzzle game books and sticker albums that I loved well into my teens. This was a GREAT kids movie!
I saw it alone at the theater as a kid. Several elements stuck with me. It's no Star Wars but I still enjoy the black hole animation, scary outer space feel, and creepy quiet vibe. Great actors, lovely Yvette!
I remember seeing this film in the theater when I was 9. My favorite was old B.O.B., then V.I.N.C.E.N.T.. I was terrified of Maximillian, they truly came up with the brute of space androids.
I posted this comment elsewhere, but I would have loved to have been in the pitch meeting for The Black Hole...
_“We need a space themed movie pronto!”_
_“Do I have a movie for you... it’s about a mad scientist on an ship full of the lobotomised ex-crew trapped on the edge of a black hole. He’s guarded by a silent killer robot that guts people with rotating metal blades. The average age of the cast is 50, and the ending will show a literal DESCENT INTO HELL for the villain!”_
_“Uh... this is for kids... how?”_
_“There’s a small robot with big eyes.”_
_“SOLD!”_
Exactly. The film is such a shitshow. Even the production design is schizophrenic. Some of the sets are stunning, like the vast bridge of the Cygnus, while other things - like the robots - look cartoonish.
The direction is awful. The live action shots are more TV than cinema. They must have had a good cinematographer though.
Nothing about the film makes a lick of sense. And the actors - apart from Schell and Borgnine - all behave as if they’d ODed on quaaludes. Which - after getting the final script - maybe they did.
Mate, this is such a great film. I watched it with friends over the xmas break having not seen in in decades and was the most fun I've had with a film in so long.
Made me want to chase people around with spinning metal bottle openers all over again.
I only have three memories concerning this film : 1) The sight of Maximilian in hell at the end of the movie - that haunted me for quite a while; 2) The awesome marketing campaign which included great toys in my box of Shreddies. We had great toys in our cereal back in the day ; and 3) A news story about the movie being held up at Canadian customs because they assumed that 'The Black Hole' was a pornographic movie.... This last memory may be apocryphal.
Anyway cheers and thanks for another great review - I'll need to check this out on Disney Plus.
I think this movie may have been an early example of the dark ‘children’s’ films of the 80s. Maximilian (in or out of Hell), the owl from Secret of NIHM, nearly everything from Dark Crystal, the death of Artax from Neverending story, Mambi from Return to OZ, and the death of Optimus Prime has to be worth several lifetimes of trauma. That look in the eyes of 80s kids? They seen some shit.
Would not be surprised about the last story. After all, Norway banned "The Life of Brian", prompting the Swedes to advertise it with the line: "The movie so funny, they banned it in Norway."
I didn't watch it in the theater, but it wasn't due to a lack of desire, it was from a lack of transportation. The nearest theater was well over a dozen miles away and 11 year olds don't know a whole lot of licenced drivers. I did watch it on HBO and always figured it to be a good movie.
I have it on DVD (only because i couldn't find a 4k or Blu-ray version) but once i do, I'll be in my collection
VINCENT kind of annoyed me as a kid (obvious R2D2 knockoff), but now that I understand his witty wisecracks he's probably my favorite character.
I’m on the opposite side, Roddy McDowell is my favorite character in the movie, then again when isn’t Roddy McDowell my favorite character, he’s amazing.
Ah yes, Maximillian Schell’s classic “Drunk Period.”
The ending where Maximilian and Reinhardt merge is like the devil and the burning ship hell below.
That's what me and my school mates concluded too. That Disney put this to children to work out, now that was bravery like nothing else.
Aren't there denizens worshipping them at the end? Down below on the rocky landscape?
Maximilian Schell in a Maximilian shell....
My dad brought me to see this when I was 7 I bet he never thought he had to try to explain about hell to me from watching a Disney movie back then, but I do enjoy this movie still watch it to this day
5:50 -- RE: The Ending with Winehard + Robo-Maximillian; I have known this movie for a long time, I have watched it more times than I can count. But I had never thought about the poetic justice of Reinhard being forced to hide within his monster machine after having converted most of the people around him to mindless cyborgs. Its a fitting ending to prove he deserves the Hell around him.
Love this movie.
Seeing it as a kid, it was weird, trippy and creepy with some cool old school sci-fi tropes.Had the novelization and a couple of the action movies.
This and Tron are the best sci-fi Disney ever made.
"It's Lovecraft, But For Kids!" is my motto.
Loved it more than Star Wars as a 10 yr old, Star Wars was too "charming", too "fantasy" in a "everyone lives happily every after" way, whereas with The Black Hole, literally everybody dies, probably, or is lost in an eternal chasm of the mind, who in heck knows really, they certainly don't get cheesy medals and fanfares :).
Sure, the direction+acting is more like a stage play. But the bleakness of it was more suited perhaps to that. Like some Greek tragedy. Watched it only recently, and as an adult it's very flat and I found myself skipping until certain vital beats, but as a kid, it was the best and strangest thing I'd ever seen. I'd go around citing VINCENT and BOB until I had no friends left ;) and I'd draw Maximilian robots over lots of things, and have various nightmares about it all. The music still haunts me to this day.
It was a lot like Star Trek the Motion Picture in that it had some great ideas, some really amazing visuals, mixed in with a more than a handful of cheezy effects too and a lot of really boring stuff in between for long stretches. However, that ending was like nothing ever before or after, not just in kid movies but any movie!
A big part of why this likely underperformed at the box office is that ST: TMP was in theaters at the same time. Apparently, people could only abide one sci-fi film at a time then.
@@neesi1570 Nah. TMP came out in late December. TBH came out in summer. They weren’t competing.
The Motion Picture bored the hell out of me when I was younger but it's grown on me since and I love the new Director's Cut that came out recently.
@@Scimarad I still bores the hell out of me. The director’s cut didn’t improve anything in my mind. Ultimately I just don’t think it’s a very good story.
And both TBH and ST:TMP heavily feature the use of blaster beam in their musical scores. The overall quality of the 2 movies may have been hit-or-miss, but John Barry and Jerry Goldsmith both delivered top-notch soundtracks for those films.
Best Disney film, full stop!
Yes, please stop.
I saw this at a drive in as a kid, double feature, 1st Condorman, then The Black Hole. Thanks to Condorman film, it made The Black Hole seem 10 times more exciting. Plus the only Disney film to ever scare the crap out of me as a kid. Your right Stam, it was a bit like a Poseidon adventure in space.
So tired of people reviewing sci/fi space movies and ALWAYS end up comparing them to Star Wars. SPOILER: The Black Hole is NOT Star Wars!!! It's a damn fun movie I've happily enjoyed since I saw it at theaters back in the day.
Like the 1970s Spiderman Movies, my Inner Kid Critic says this movie is AWESOME!!!!
That chocolate wrapper simile is perfect for so many knock off movies.
"their turd-polishing machine has been booked solid for years" LMAO
Maximillian scared all of my classmates and the Maximillian/Maximillian ending was ...baroque, a word none of us would learn for years. Still a major moment that more kiss should experience without forewarning.
"Turd polishing machine" LOL
This is one of Disney 's odd patch Films from the late 70s onwards along with Watcher In The Woods and Something Wicked This Way Comes, I think they were feeling experimental at the time.
Wow! Ouch! I don’t always agree with your reviews. But I always enjoy them (I wish you’d been my boss giving me my yearly review…).
Well you inspired me to finally re-edit the film to either remove or minimise as much of Vincent as possible and still have it mostly make sense. I've had the idea of doing something like that for quite some time and the result (after several hours work and excising almost 10 minutes of footage) is that Vincent is now almost entirely inoffensive.
Vincent and Bob are brilliant.
Why ? Vincent made more sense than 3PO.. translates how many languages? My phone can do that... Vincent fixed the ship, Bob did sanitation..both jobs made much more sense than hell even R2.. ships should be able to automate most his job even.
"Just like the time auntie Beryl tried to restore a Rothko with liquid paper" you are one sharp dude.
All Disney movies from the late 70s-mid '80s are fascinating, because they show a Disney that's radically different from today. A Disney that was in dire straits, between fleeing animators and artists, delayed or cancelled animated features, constant hostile takeover attempts, and while many of these movies still feel like they're following their time's fad, they did it in an unexpected fashion imo. Escape From Witch Mountain, The Black Hole, The Watcher in the Woods, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Tron, Return to Oz. All incredibily fascinating.
The effects are great. Maxamaillian is really scary. The crown of this film is the score. I continually return to the score. That is great.
He is right about Disney's turd polishing machine being booked for years, haha
The Black Hole wasn't perfect, but I still enjoyed it. I thought Maximilian was an awesome design and my Dad had bought me a model of it. Awesome!
SAW THIS ON MY BIRTHDAY IN THE THEATER!
On one hand I applaud Disney for trying something a bit new. But that was the problem: it wasn't really new. The art direction, costuming, sets, looked and felt like it belonged in a 1950's scifi flick. That, plus it was just a few scifi things tagged onto "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". Their filming of Verne's novel with James Mason is one of their live-action masterpieces, but once was enough. There were simply too many characters onboard the Palomino: two at most, plus the robot V.I.N.C.E.N.T. would suffice. The red, menacing robot was truly a masterwork of design, scary enough to frighten Darth Vader (almost).
Lots of head-scratching elements: a woman with ESP...and a robot who could pick up her brainwaves! A wild-west style laser shootout! Scenes with people in space (presumably a hard vacuum), but still able to breathe, function and remain conscious! A black hole that leads to Dante's Inferno!
Plus the black hole itself was not well-represented, as in it's less of a whirlpool and more of a black sphere (the event horizon) with super-hot gas and plasma circling it at near-c speeds.
It's a fun movie, but like most movies, unplug your cerebral cortex before viewing.
First time I watched TBH in 1979, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in Space.
I can explain the weird shit in the ending. It’s pretty easy: It’s Dante’s Inferno. When Dante gets to the heart of hell, Satan recognizes that he doesn’t belong there, and swats him so hard that he flies all the way back out of hell to the surface of the earth. Borgnine’s first line in the movie, when seeing The Black Hole, is, “It’s like something out of Dante!” And there are a few other lines here and there.
In gist, Dr. Reinhardt (Who’s a loose combination of Captain Nemo and Werner Von Braun) really really really wants to be God, or at least *a* god, if he can’t do that. He believes (As he states) that different physical rules apply on the other side of the black hole, and he’s obviously fanatical about it. So fanatical that he lobotomized his whole crew when they complained. Durant/Perkins is kind of swept up in this. He has a line calling voyaging into the black hole, “A sacred pilgrimage to what may be the mind of God,” which is an odd thing to say. There’s also tons of vaguely-religious imagery in the film: the Cygnus looks like a cathedral, that scene with the captain wandering through an endless row of identical crew’s quarters that look like monk’s cells, the funeral, etc.
So I think what the idea was is that they meet Reinhard, he’s babbling about God and blah blah blah, we write him off as crazy, he jumps into the hole, dragging the Palomino Crew with him, and then it turns out that while he was crazy, he wasn’t entirely *wrong.* The black hole actually *is* a back door into the afterlife, just - oh, shit! - the bad part. So he gets to bond with Maximillian (Yeah, I don’t get that part either) and reign in hell (Seemingly horrified by the realization), and then an angel shows up recognizing that they’re not supposed to be there, and escorts them out of hell, through heaven (Which we only get to see one corridor of) and back to the physical universe.
That planet off in the distance at the end is supposed to be earth.
The telling of the tale is really muddled, but that was the intent.
That story book of this movie is a part of my child hood I'm glad I'm not only one that remembers it.
Same here. I remember that the book had kissing in it! Little boy me was so glad they kept that out of the film, much more terrifying than the crew's unmasking.
I love this film, it's not a great film, it's not even something I'd honestly be able to say was a good film. But damn, it was a dark film for a kids movie back then. Mostly, I love the design. The robot costumes are scary to me in a way stormtroopers never managed (well, until they walk), Maximillian absolutely terrified me as a kid. The embodiment of silent malice. The ship. omg, I loved that ship design. Let's put a victorian exhibition hall into space and light it from within. OK OK so maybe what I love is the set and costume designers read the summary of the story (charming mad scientist in space, does bad things with his crew and lives in isolation) and absolutely ran with the idea - and then unfortunately someone wrote dialogue and put actors in it and realised they needed to try and find an ending.
I still love this film though for the batshit insane fact that Disney greenlit it during this period of their films. That a bunch of kids (like me) were taken to see it because 'Oh it's a new Disney film' and ate it up whilst our parents sat uncomfortably next to us.
I loved this film in spite of what the critics said.
I remember desperately wanting to see this movie at the theatre...that never happened.
You did miss out. I saw it in the theater at least twice, probably three times, and it was pretty wonderful
Gotta say I usually love your reviews but this ain’t one of ‘em. It’s a well made film with one of the scariest robots since Darth Vader. Maximillian gave me nightmares as a kid. John Barry’s score is one of his best. The production and special effects are very well done. Does it have problems, sure. Can it be clunky in some scenes, sure. Overall though, it’s a really good sci-fi film that left an impression on me as a kid. Oh and one more thing, WINGS is one of the greatest tv comedies ever made. Keep up the great content.
Back in the 90s this movie impressed me so much as a kid. Back in school a friend of mine and I were both HUGE Sci-Fi nuts and he loved this film so much, he always told me how cool the robot Maximilian was. It made me wanting to watch the TV recording my parents took a year earlier or so. And so i did. The sheer size and setting really sold me and it was also my first contact with actor Maximilian Shell. I already had known Ernest Borgnine by then from Airwolf and many other movies where you always saw his friendly face as a supporting actor. The ending of "The Black Hole" was absolutely trippy.
A tribute to the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey in some ways.
👍 This was a good movie. A space-terror, action-adventure with good music, some haunting aesthetics, tropes from 2001, Silent Running, Star Wars, Demon Seed, etc. It didn't feel or look like a PG movie then or now.
Creepy, and childhood-terrifying. And yet, you could get a Maximillian or Vincent figurine as a “prize” from Shreddies cereal.
I saw this in the theater when I was 9, and at the time, this movie was the best! The big screen showing the awesome effects (to a 9 year olds eyes anyway), and the music was just perfect.
As usual, when you see something as an adult that you loved as a kid you think, “what the hell??”😅
I still have fondness for this film, but turn it off shortly before they all get sucked into the hole. The ending is just too corny for me.
The tone of this movie is so crazy. Even the soundtrack is nuts.
I recognise and agree that TBH is not the best. Far from the best in fact. But, I do like this era of film making, not for it's quality, or the actors, but for the feeling. It was a time when film making was throwing off the mid-seventies stride with the late sixties drag, and really becoming something, even though that something represented the end of the decade, and the unknown of what the 1980's...or early eighties would bring. In essensce, the late seventies (76-79), those four years where a time of...not so much interest (all times have their own interest) but more... well, something like the black hole really: a time of graivty pulling you towards something inexplicatible and changing everything most were probably comfortable with. But why the late 70's and not the late 60's or 80's or 2010's (2010 tens?). I think the answers is 1. A personal thing, but 2. I could say a time when film was still slightly naive? Or maybe I just liked John Barry's scores, or the feeling of true widescreen cinema. For me, and maybe others, if subsconciously realising it, and now looking back, it was the full blooming of cinema before the era of home video, which if not destroying cinema, would certainly destroy the magic of the experience.
3:35 "Nuttier than a squirrel's stool sample" 😆
I always thought the meteors rained down on the Cygnus on the their way into the black hole.
Exactly. They even say that the Black Holes Gravity is pulling them in.
I agree it's very flawed, with long stretches that bore or annoy me, but I admire its ambition and when it's good it's very good. This was at a time when Disney was in a strange and really interesting & adventurous phase of its history. I'll take an interesting "failure" over a dull "success" any day.
They just gave up towards the end and did LSD. 😂😂😂😂
I've watched this film a few years ago and completely forgot about it, it literally took the whole length of the video for me to remember that I'd seen it
With all that said… I still LOVE this movie!!!
Saw this when I was a kid. This wasn't a typical live action Disney movie. Seeing it in the theater is the best way to really enjoy it. John Barry's music was great. 2 shocking moments that I still think of was the gruesome death of Anthony Perkins' character and that sudden in your face close up of the dead villain's face during the conclusion.
Love this movie. Harsh treatment by many, but it's ending and gloomy atmosphere had me at the cinema. I had just turned 11.
Oddly I recall it it much more clearly when it hit the TV screen in the early to mid 80s typically over Christmas and to me it's a memory of a time when tv was, pretty much everything over the festive period, oh chocolate and lots of toys if you were good.
Even as a 10 year old kid (watching it in the theater), I got that going through Disney's Black Hole was a portal between Heaven and Hell. Reinhart, Max and the semi-dead robot crew are now stuck in a Dante like hell, which Reinhart is now, what he was doing to his crew, trapped as an emotionless robot that he made "For All Eternity", with the other crew robots marching over the hellish rocky structure of the broken Cigus. Where as Holland and the others are led the other way through heaven (by an angel) to a new universe to live in.
The comics of the film did continue and the rocket lands on a planet with other human-like people, giving them a better ending.
We all type "LOL" all the time, but "nuttier than a squirrel's stool sample" laid me out. I had to pause the video.
I always loved this film as a kid, but I think it suffered with two different aesthetic styles from the time. You have the big epic style of 2001, Silent Running, and that taste. Then you have the big budget adventure of Star Wars and several of those knockoff sci-fi adventure flicks. I think the Black Hole was trying to hit both styles and though I have a soft spot for it, I will admit it may not have worked on
I enjoy this movie. Yes, Maximillian killing Anthony Perkins makes one of my earliest childhood memories of covering my eyes during a scary part of a movie(along with the Raiders of the Lost Ark face melting scene). I love V.I.N.CENT, he's one of the most badass robot characters in Sci-Fi. If I can't have R2-D2 by my side, I want V.I.N.CENT.
The tone of this movie was all-over-the-place. To whom was it supposed to appeal? Are you 9-years-old? Then, we've got some undead work zombies. Are you a parent? Then, we've got a couple of toy robots.
I watch this from time to time, it's way too dark to be a Disney film.
Ever seen Dragonslayer? Admittedly, it was a co-production with Paramount Pictures, but still, it doesn't get much darker than a dead beautiful princess' leg getting chewed-off and little baby dragons getting skewered, all in the same scene.
Dragonslayer is fantastic, BTW.
@@fredleggett923 I might have. I find that sometimes unless I've seen something as a kid I don't quite have the same level of attachment to something. I never saw Krull as a kid, I saw the ending about 5 times as I'd always miss it being on, usually at christmas.
You've clearly never seen "The Watcher in the Woods".
I thought for it's time it was a visual masterpiece and the Cygnus looks like a glass Cathedral in space the Religious allegory was undeniable. The in camera & optical effects hold up remarkably well for a film made around forty five years ago. And while it not a thrill ride a minute. I can live with it
P.S The Maximilian Schell joke was on the money 💰
The reviewer is correct. The movie generally blows, but has a few high points. Westworld was a better movie. (Don't get me started on the Westworld TV series!)
Saw this one in the theater!
I saw this on its premiere back in 79 and yes it was forgotten for a long time. I remember the drive to the theater more then the film, it was all snowy and very cold day. (insert one of your quips about cold days here). Fun review.
the ONLY thing I really remember from seeing this in a theater was a scene where the wires holding someone 'floating in space' were so blatantly obvious.
I've always loved this movie.
A non-masterpiece but if u love sci-fi, you’ll be pleased to c this
Great job, Stam. I don't remember this film at all. I'm off to find it and watch it. The turning Anthony Perkins into a smoothie line was epic and including Aunty' Beryl, as you do in all your videos, floors me every time.
Have a fab weekend buddy 😀
It's on DIsney+, if you're a subscriber to that service.
Whenever I hear Aunty Beryl mentioned, I think of that Bacardi cinema advert that ran for the entire decade.
It's a kids movie? That should have been ''R'' rated.
I remember this movie fondly. Can we call this a cult classic?
Love it, wish these were longer!
I agree, his 18 min ones are more fun. His 7 minute ones really leave you wanting. The 30 minute eipsodes are really pushing it, but he still keeps them funny.
Here: ua-cam.com/video/XQMWs7IfsyA/v-deo.html
Love every vdo you produce. I have been meaning to say how hard i laughed when you commented about steve1989 the mre guy. He is excellent too and it was so random. Thanks for great fun
Don't forget that this movie was a tie in to Disneyland's new ride and attraction, "The Black Hole". In the early 80s, in Los Angeles California, I rode on that ride with friends. It was basically an indoor roller-coaster, with lots of flashing lights and effects. It was pretty decent. The long lines of folks waiting for their turn snaked through lots of space launch facility stuff, because the wait could be an hour+. Disney usually did a good wait line.
Unfortunately, the movie was indeed stupid crap, suitable only for kids. The merchandising was probably regrettable too. Disney hauls in billions just on the stuff they sell to kids. I think they make movies just to sell toys to kids. Disney=$$$!