Star Trips

Cinema sci-fi takes off

With Star Wars fast becoming the biggest moneymaker ever (box office receipts are $12 million a week), the movie industry is wasting no time jumping onto the spacewagon. 20th Century-Fox is already plotting its first Star Wars sequel, and other film makers are rushing to make their own sci-fi flicks before the fad wears thin. Judging from some of their plans, that may not take too long.

This month End of the World will come to 200 Southern and Midwestern theaters. The film tells of an earthling scientist who comes upon a band of aliens cleverly disguised as six nuns and a priest. Filmed in three weeks, the picture cost $500,000 (compared with Star Wars'$9.5 million). If the world survives this picture, End Producer Charles Band plans to return by Christmas with another quickie titled Laser Blast.

The big studios have joined the space race as well. Fox hopes to plow some of its Star Wars profits into Alien, the tale of an otherworldly creature who takes to mugging U.S. spacemen. American International Pictures plans a spacey adventure titled The Incredible Melting Man, in which a returning astronaut poses some sticky problems for the p.r. boys at NASA. The poor fellow has to gulp down gallons of blood in order to keep from liquefying. Universal Pictures plans to remake The Thing from Another World, originally directed by Howard Hawks in 1951, and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), which will star Lily Tomlin this time as an incredible shrinking woman. Even the Disney studios are joining the sci-fi follies with a new kid flick titled The Cat from Outer Space.

Few people are as pleased with Hollywood's new trend as Producer George Pal, whose sci-fi films of the 1950s regularly won Academy Awards for their special effects. Not only are Pal pictures like The War of the Worlds (1953) and When Worlds Collide (1951) being rereleased, but the latter is about to be remade by Director John Frankenheimer. Pal himself, now 69, is at work writing a sequel to his 1961 film The Time Machine. Says he: "Star Wars has proved again that a special effect is as big a star as any in the world." For now, anyway.

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