MORTUARY star Christopher George also headlines William Castle’s PROJECT X, a little-known sf-thriller featuring design work by comics great Alex Toth.
proves an agreeable and knowl- edgeable presence, though even she apparently fails to grasp the significance of the film’s final shock (what appears ludicrous on the surface actually makes sense when you think about it). Also included are an interview with composer John Cacavas and the infamous theatrical trailer, in which Michael Berryman is dragged to his doom in a se- quence that has absolutely nothing to do with the film being advertised.
PROJECT X
1968, Olive Films, $29.95, 97m 22s, BD By Charlie Largent
Cold, clinical and bristling with ambition, PROJECT X, Will- iam Castle’s 1968 sci-fi/secret agent thriller, finds the much- loved genre director attempting to reconcile his vaulting artistic aspiration with his own minuscule budget.
After the grueling black comic shenanigans of LET’S KILL UNCLE and THE BUSY BODY, it’s especially bracing to see Castle take on the challenge of a multi-layered mind game like this. Based on the novels THE AR- TIFICIAL MAN and PSYCHOGEIST by L.P. Davies, PROJECT X is set in the year 2118 and stars Chris- topher George as Hagen Arnold, an American spy placed in cryo- genic preservation. A team of scientists invade his brain, re- programming his memory in hopes of retrieving the informa- tion he discovered during his mission.
Saddled with a mixed bag of actors whose one-note perfor- mances range from disinter- ested to overexcitable and a script (by Edmund Morris) pain- fully short on characterization, PROJECT X exists as an “idea” movie more than any other in Castle’s crowd-pleasing canon. With all that, the erstwhile car- nival barker does a deft job of
keeping the audience intrigued if not wholly satisfied.
The film, though threadbare, is full of invention; George’s brain waves are projected onto a small flat-screen TV where the action plays out in psychedelic splashes of color among the nooks and crannies of his cerebral cortex. Hanna-Barbara animated much of these sequences (with charac- ter designs by SPACE GHOST art- ist Alex Toth) and the colorful collision of cartoon and hyper- contrasted film is both jarring and compelling.
Populated by familiar faces like Henry Jones, Monte Mark- ham, Harold Gould (actors known primarily for their TV work), and a blink-and-you’ll- miss-it walk-on by Keye Luke, the film has a rushed, overlit TV movie quality courtesy of cinema- tographer Harold Stine (THE AD- VENTURES OF SUPERMAN). But Castle seems sincerely invested throughout and his film remains almost fascinating, a worthy entry
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