Customer Reviews

Kronos

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(27)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I just finished watching "KRONOS: Ravager of Planets" and it was excellent! Starring Jeff Morrow of "This Island Earth" fame and written by Irvin Block (Forbidden Planet), KRONOS has above-average effects for it's genre and the story is very good. The giant alien machine/robot from outer space, known only as "KRONOS", is a fresh idea thrown into the mix of 50's classic invaders-from-space type films. If you enjoy collecting classic b&w 50's Sci-Fi, then KRONOS is an excellent addition to your DVD library. I only wish the DVD special features contained more. The Theatrical Trailer, Scene Selection and Feature Movie are the only options on the DVD. Anyway, it's still an enjoyable and fun classic Sci-Fi flick, which no collector should be without!

What a great monster! I always loved watching "Kronos" as a kid....who couldn't love this massive metal giant rectangle stampeding across the country using it's piston shooting legs?!?!? And now the new DVD release finally gives us the film in it's original widescreen (scope!) ratio....WOW!!! I remember the full-frame version chopped off newspaper headlines and other action terribly. This new transfer looks great. Ya, the movie suffers a little bit from talky moments, but it's still campy fun and whenever Kronos is on screen...it's Fantastic! Industrial Mayhem!!!! Kronos will suck you dry!

The creators of this movie deserve credit for having tried someone a little different in the alien menace line, a genuine mechancial monster which actually has a rational purpose in mind (i.e. the harvesting of energy for an alien world which has already exhausted its natural resources--and note the ahead of its time warning that we might someday be in the same predicament.)

Considering the limited budget they had available, they did a decent job. I think the opening credits are downright elegant in their clean simplicity and Kronos itself is a beautiful Art Deco menace.

Of course, the science is ridiculous. Power planets CREATE power, they don't contain power. Getting energy by sucking it from a power plant is like getting shoes by sucking them from a cobbler!

Also, I still wonder, since the walking pistons on Kronos only go up and down, how did it get any forward motion? Wouldn't it have just eventually drilled itself a nice hole in the ground and disappeared from view?

One bit of trivia. In the role of the handsome scientist's funny sidekick is George O'Hanlon, later the voice of the cartoon's George Jetson, playing one of his few live action roles. Every time you hear him talking about the danger Kronos poses to mankind in that distinctive voice, you expect him to suddenly shout out, "Jane, stop this crazy thing!"

An innovative, interesting 50's science fiction film, "Kronos" departs from many of the other films of the day; aliens arrive from a distant galaxy but they don't visit us themselves instead they sent a skycrape sized robot to do their dirty work. This unusual science fiction minor classic manages to overcome a low budget and mixed visual effects to create a startling and intelligent science fiction 50's thriller.

Dr. Leslie Gaskell (Jeff Morrow) discovers an asteroid that mysteriously changes course as it comes close to Earth's atmosphere. The asteroid is really an alien UFO that launches an alien intelligence. This intelligence takes over the mind of a scientist (John Emery)to sabotage the computer at a research facility. Although Gaskell suggests Earth use nuclear missles to destroy it before it reaches earth, the asteroid crashes into the ocean. The next day a giant robot emerges with a mysterious agenda and with plans to destroy the Earth.

Directed by Kurt Neumann("The Fly", "Rocketship X-M") "Kronos" was one of the last films that Neuman directed (he died in 1958 the year after this was released). Based on a story by visual effects supervisor Irving Block (who did optical effects for a number of low budget movies in collaboration with Jack Rabin and Louis DeWitt), "Kronos" has a number of innovative ideas going for it to separate it from the pack of low budget sci-fi movies of the time. Although dated and with glaring gaps in the script, the film has its moments. The visual effects although dated look quite good for the time and the film makes great use of stock footage. The only glaring error is the fact that the shadow from the blades from the helicopter are moving waaaay too slow to make sure that the ship would stay aloft. To be sure the film has its "Plan 9 from Outer Space" moments (such as John Emery's horrid performance).

Jef Morrow's performance as Gaskell almost makes up for his appearence in that turkey "The Giant Claw". Featuring George Jetson himself George O'Hanlon as Gaskell's side kick Dr. Arnold Culver, the performances are typical for the most part of 50's films and pretty convincing as well.

A nice transfer from Image Entertainment is a highlight for this film. The blacks are solid with nice, rich blacks and gray scale. There's also the original theatrical trailer included as an extra. It's a pity that there's no commentary track or retrospective featurette on director Neuman's career.

I guess you had to be there. 1957 - at a drive-in on a warm summer night with your boyfriend and a car full of friends because it only cost $1.00 for the whole car full. I can remember this movie and it really scared me at the time. Now, revisiting it after almost 50 years, the nostalgia was overwhelming - but the story was no longer scary. Instead, I enjoyed the 50's feeling of it and how they strived to make two cereal bowls look like a flying saucer and a mechanical robot with piston legs that only went straight up and down move across the land! I found it a delight and a great addition to my collection of 50's "B" movies.

The very beginning of the 1950s saw a few big-studio, middle-budget science fiction films, notably the ones made by producer George Pal for Paramount studios: "When Worlds Collide" (1951), "The War of the Worlds" (1953), and "The Conquest of Space" (1955). All three were Technicolor productions with minor celebrities in the starring roles. But most of 1950s sci-fi cinema - with the wonderful exception of Disney's "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea" (1954) and Universal's "This Island Earth" (1956) - were strictly low-budget affairs, for the "B" position on the marquee. Having to craft the film on a shoestring, however, could provoke the genius of those involved. The superb "Thing from Another World" (1951) furnishes one example, the audacious "Kronos" (1957) another. Both belong to the alien-invasion genre. "The Thing" gives us an organic invader, a carnivore-vegetable-man portrayed by James Arness, and "Kronos" a predatory mechanism on a colossal scale whose purpose is to drain the earth of its energy resources. In both cases what my old teacher Fred Burwick liked to called "the vampire esthetic" is in full play and the nemesis therefore operates on the dual assumption (i) that life is a zero-sum game and (ii) that humanity is ripe for the picking. What sets "Kronos" apart from other genre-films of its category is its big conception. In "The Thing" (this is a strength) all the action occurs in a limited setting - the arctic base - and within a limited time-span: the production observes the Aristotelian unities. "Kronos" (this, too, is a strength) corresponds not to the classical but to the romantic ideal: a lone pickup truck driver on a desert road sees a meteor fall into the nearby sands; a glowing light zaps him, converting him into a remotely programmed zombie whose goal is to penetrate "Lab Central" where he will transfer the possessing intelligence to the facility's director. The context widens at each phase. Thus "Lab Central" is the nexus of atomic and space research in North America, so that it is also the logical place for a cosmic invasion of the earthly realm to begin. Yet even as the CEO falls under alien domination, his subalterns discover an anomalous "asteroid" that has assumed orbit around the earth, and, on their special equipment, they are able to deduce that it is other than a natural phenomenon. Screenwriter Lawrence Louis Goldman and director Kurt Neumann create a sense of human beings isolated in the large spaces of their desert laboratory; there is an especially claustrophobic "vault" where the center's main computer and many devices may be remotely accessed. The nicely calculated lighting, rich in shadow, contributes to this cloistered and oppressive effect. The most visually dramatic moment comes when a trio of scientists have gone to the Mexican shore near where the "asteroid" fell into the sea. The thing dubbed "Kronos" appears one morning on the beach, as tall as a skyscraper, sleek and metallic, able to move about on piston-like cylindrical legs. Its first act is to drain the energy from a Mexican power plant (true, the science is a bit shaky!) after which it begins a relentless, destructive march toward Los Angeles and environs, attracted by the nuclear weapons stored at the Port Hueneme naval base. The special effects, while minimal, are quite effective; the black-and-white medium supports them well, as does the efficient editing. The ending is a cliffhanger, not to be given away here. Outstanding is the alien character of the invader, manifest not only in the giant mechanism of "Kronos" (taking his name from a Titan), but in the human beings whom the mechanism's guiding mentality so brutally dispossesses of their proper identity. Jeff Morrow (who plays "Exeter," an alien, in "This Island Earth") takes the leading role, as Dr. Lester Gaskell, backed up ably by Barbara Lawrence, John Emery (as the lab director), and the omnipresent Morris Ankrum, who more or less made a career in sci-fi second features. (Ankrum has a role in "Earth versus the Flying Saucers." "Kronos" has another link to "EVFS." Both boast location sequences filmed on the shore at Point Dume, in Malibu.) The writers give the players intelligent dialogue and the players take it all quite seriously. The DVD restores this film to its original wide screen format. Sci-fi cineastes who do not know this film, or who know it only from faded prints or late-night television broadcasts, will want to own this disc, made from a high quality source. Strongly recommended.

Far more intelligent and absorbing than your typical giant-rampaging-monster-on-the-loose flick, Kronos is one of my top picks for `most underappreciated science fiction film,' possessing one of the more ingenious SF concepts of the 1950s (see also Monolith Monsters), as well as one of the decade's coolest, ahead-of-its-time alien invaders. The cast includes familiar genre stalwarts Jeff Morrow (Creature Walks Among Us, The Giant Claw), John Emery (Rocketship X-M, The Mad Magician), and Morris Ankrum (zillions of B-westerns and SF flicks), with Barbara Lawrence (Oklahoma!) as the lady scientist/love interest. The moody B&W cinematography is by Karl Struss (Island of Lost Souls, The Great Dictator, Mesa of Lost Women), and the curiously Angry Red Planet-like score is by Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter (too many genre credits to list). Competently directed by B-film veteran Kurt Neumann (The Fly, She Devil), the film unfolds like a mystery, building slowly at first, adding a few plot twists, then really kicking in with the appearance of the colossal metallic "energy collector", subsequent scenes of devastation, and final assault on Los Angeles. The always-imaginative if chronically underfunded Jack Rabin-Irving Block-Louis DeWitt effects team (World Without End, War of the Satellites, Atomic Submarine) gets a major assist from 20th Century Fox budget dollars this time out and it shows, particularly in the design and execution of the monolithic robot itself and the scenes of mass destruction, effectively realized through the clever orchestration of miniatures, animation, mattes, stock footage, and spacey sound effects. The script may not always hold up to intense scrutiny (why don't the aliens just send their device to suck energy directly from stars?), the science is more comic-book than Isaac Asimov, and it's almost impossible not to think "George Jetson" every time George O'Hanlon (GJ's voice on TV) opens his mouth; but if this was in Technicolor it would be revered today as one of the SF greats (just compare this to the extremely overrated "classic" This Island Earth some time).
The Image DVD presents the film in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio, and while the source print exhibits some light speckling throughout, the brightness, contrast, tonal values, sharpness, and detail are uniformly excellent. A middling-quality trailer and 16 chapter stops are the only extras, but this is still a must-have for any serious collector of 50s science fiction, especially at the recently-reduced price. I'll probably be sorry I said it but, in the right hands (James Cameron? Darren Aronofsky?), a modern remake of this could kill!

KRONOS will puzzle you. On one hand you have your typical stock footage heavy slow talker sci-fi 50's film, mixed with a wholly original monster (which I can see now was the template for STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME's Probe ship), an environmental message and psychiatry... and all of this is bundled into a mere 78 mins, and it still feels like it was padded to even make that... but don't let this put you off KRONOS. While there are moments that don't make sense, (why does KRONOS need a living host to compel it? Why is New York City so worried that it will land on their heads when it in fact crashes off the coast of Mexico? Is it just me, or do our hero's spend a lot of time just sitting around?)... there is still something here worth watching, talking about and worth owning. Presented in widescreen and featuring the original trailer, KRONOS is a worth addition to any DVD library. If I could have anything added to this disc, it would be a commentary track. While most (if not all) of the cast and crew associated with this film are dead, commentary from a Sci-Fi film historian (something along the lines of the UNIVERSAL releases) would have really helped to expand this film, and give it some added punch.

I liked this movie a lot. Usually, movies like this suffer from the lengthy exposition and gradual build up to action, (i.e. the monster stomping around) but this movie is so well crafted that that part was just as much fun as the monster. Sure, the scientific explanations are flawed at best, but,considering how well The Da Vinci Code sells, I don't understand why suspension of disbelief would be so difficult.

Kronos is one of those science fiction movies from the 50's with an interesting story. Kronos is a huge energy absorbing alien robot that has comes to earth to accumulate all of its energy. It sucks energy from power plants to an H-bomb; as a result it grows larger and larger. It's not a bad movie, I recorded it years ago and recently purchased it on DVD and now enjoy the better quality.