junagadh75

"Where Time Began" is an adaptation of Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth", with some variations to make it more salable (such as a love interest). It seems to have been aimed at a juvenile audience and is in the same vein as the Kevin Connors/Amicus Studios adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Like many genre films, "Where Time Began" has very hokey characters and dialogue. The ineptitude with which the journey to the center of the earth is conducted is quite startling, in fact. The stupidity of their dialogue (especially the exchanges between Glauben and her idiotic fiancee Axel) gives the film a strong tone of campiness and unintentional humor. When Olsen shows up to rescue them midway through and complains that he's had to listen to their stupid chatter for the past ten miles, the viewer can commiserate. However, given the fact that it is a low budget film, the sets, photography and giant creature special effects are actually pretty good, and they manage to maintain some atmosphere throughout the production. Once the characters arrive in the pseudo-prehistoric world at the center of the earth, the film especially picks up, and the revelation of the origin of Olsen provides an interesting twist. For this reason, "Where Time Began" is a reasonable entry in the journey-to-a-lost-world genre.

"Spermula" is about a race of bodiless aliens living on the doomed planet of Spermula, and their attempts to eradicate the human race so that they can have their planet. The Spermulites take the form of women whose mission is to suck all the sperm out of the human males, thereby dooming the species; despite admonishments that they do not enjoy their sexual acts with the human males, all of them eventually begin to succumb to the temptations of the flesh. The famous Udo Kier plays a Spermulite who has been accidentally made a male (with an inconsiderable member), and who refuses to ask the "Great Mother" that he be made a female: he wants to be male and marry a woman. This unique and bizarrely stylized satire of conventional sexual morality somehow never became a cult hit - and very undeservedly too, as it is filled with some of the funniest dialogue this side of "Andy Warhol's Bad". As I understand it, the French filmmakers dubbed this into English themselves for their own aesthetic purposes, but I'm not entirely sure of this. It is now very obscure, but well worth the effort it takes to ferret out a copy - and hopefully some day it's worth will be more widely recognized and appreciated.