There are so many potential threats to the continuation of human existence on the planet at this time that I’m surprised to see one nobody has had the bad idea to implement in the present day. For example, there’s a giant concave mirror in 1954’s Gog which can concentrate the sun’s rays so intensely that the resulting beam of light can down an aircraft. A similar device in a lab is used against a doctor played by Valerie Vernon, essentially shooting laser beams at her.
This made me think of kids frying ants with a magnifying glass, which I don’t recall every having done, though I wouldn’t trust the little shit I was. Taking this one step further, I wonder how difficult it would be to put a giant mirror in space and use it to fry one’s enemies. I just hope I’m not giving anybody any bright ideas.
I was also reminded of an old story about an ancient army blinding another by polishing their shields so as to most intensely reflect the sun’s rays. I mention this because the title refers to a robot named Gog, and both it and its twin, Magog, are armies in the Old Testament. I fail to grasp the importance of those names, except they sound cool.
These things do various labor around a secret government facility far below ground in the desert. The facility has five levels, and personnel are restricted to certain levels, with the lowest being the most restrictive.
Although this facility is not exclusively meant to analyze threats posed by alien organic matter, it does seem to foretell a few aspects of The Andromeda Strain. This movie, like that one, starts out intelligent science fiction. Unfortunately, unlike that one, it becomes stupid pretty fast.
It opens on a cryogenic experiment being performed on a cute little monkey because science is always looking for new and clever ways to torture the poor things. One aspect of even this early scene had me on the fence as to whether it was clever or stupid, and that is the windshield wiper scraping the frost off the viewing window for the experiment chamber. The monkey will be OK. In fact, it will fare better than the scientists, who get killed one at a time when they go into the chamber, only to find the door closed behind them. After the victim is frozen solid, they fall over and there is a shattering sound that actually made me flinch.
Richard Egan has been brought in to investigate those, and other mysterious events, which have been happening around the facility. We see a demonstration of that giant sun mirror when the helicopter he’s aboard is nearly fried by it. The mirror is revealed when what appeared to be just more desert sagebrush and dirt is camouflage for the disc, which raises up like a giant makeup compact, or one of those fake clams people sometimes put in fish tanks. I just couldn’t figure out why the helicopter was in risk of disintegration, as even that aircraft is controlled by the central computer NOVAC (Nuclear Operative Variable Automatic Computer), so as to keep the location a secret. The helicopter pilot claims that not even he knows the true location of the site, which seemed odd to me, as it isn’t like he and Egan are blindfolded. That pilot must be one stupid kid.
I was pleasantly surprised to see some real computing technology of the time, such as the paper tape used to store and run programs. Something I found very forward thinking is Egan’s outrage when he discovers that paper is accessible to janitors emptying the trash, instead of being immediately incinerated when no longer needed.
That tape is also used to control the robots Gog and Magog, and it will be a revelation to exactly zero people that these are among the implements used by whomever is committing sabotage in the facility. Despite the title of the film being Gog, there is surprisingly little these things seem capable of doing. Examples given by computer lab head John Wengraf are one of them crossing the room and flipping a switch. Another is handing Egan a screwdriver, and there is a small electric shock when the two make contact. Seems to me it makes more sense to cross the room to get your own damn screwdriver instead of punching holes in that paper tape to write a program and feeding it into a computer. Oh, and you wouldn’t get shocked when it hands the tool to you.
Maybe that’s why early computer names all ended in “VAC”, which sounds to me like a model of vacuum cleaning. After all, the difficulty in programming these early computers and their limited capabilities both sucked. And I was startled by Wengraf’s explanation for how the robot knew to go to Egan, that being it works the same way “you can blindfold a snake and it will still find its prey”. I want to see them work with snakes, as I want to know both how they blindfold them and how they ensure they stay on.
The robots will prove to be far more capable than Wengraf had demonstrated, through they really only get to cut loose in the final set piece that pits humans against bots. I didn’t how Gog and Magog stood a chance, as these things look vaguely like a Dalek from Doctor Who, only with four arms—something the Dalek’s seriously need. There’s also a flame thrower on the front, which looks like an erect male member. I’ve heard of some guys experiencing a burning sensation when they pee, so these bots must be in a super bad mood. I also wondered who thought it would be a good idea to put a flamethrower on these things and I wondered what practical use it served.
Alas, the robots aren’t very intimidating, despite that appendage. The construction is awfully shoddy and, when they’re in transit, they look like they might shake themselves apart at any moment. I also never had the impression they were made of materials with any significant weight.
Back to the humans, who largely have more personality that the bots. It was interesting to see women working in every lab, though each appears to be a subordinate to a man. He has a history beyond the facility with Constance Dowling, and she says at one point: “In space, there’s no such thing as a weaker sex”, to which he replies, “that’s why I like it here.”
That remark concerned a bizarre bit with two acrobats that will test a zero gravity chamber. I wasn’t sure why it was necessary to have acrobats in there, as I thought it would make more sense to use it to train the actual astronauts. Other curious demonstrations involves various models of things like a cityscape, only for them to be used to show Egan how concentrating the sun’s rays can disintegrate a real city. I like to imagine them continually and painstakingly recreating that model, only to fry it again. There’s also a sad G-force simulator that looks like that playground equipment that four kids can hold on which spinning it around. The one here spins so fast that it supposedly kills the people on it, though what it really does is turn them into mannequins. But not Kim Cattrall from Mannequin; otherwise, there would be a long stream of people on that thing all day and night til the end of time.
There is also something interesting involving radiation and the configuration of the facility. The hallways on the lowest level, where we’ll find the nuclear reactor, are zig-zagged, because radioactive particles travel in straight lines. That is technically true (despite a stupid mistake I made in this review, which is now immortalized in print), but I suspect particles would still go right through what appear to be concrete walls, regardless of the many bends.
The filmmakers also have other interesting ideas about radiation, with Egan and Dowling supposedly completely safe while wearing normal clothes but following a guy wearing a radiation-proof suit. That guy finds in a potted plant a pellet of reactor fuel which killed a researcher. And yet the two not in protective gear suffer no ill effects when exposed directly to something which killed somebody else indirectly.
By the end of Gog, those two will have been exposed to yet more radiation, as a fight against the robots in the reactor room went on long enough for their sensors to be in the red. And yet, Herbert Marshall was there for most of that, and his sensor was white. I guess he has some sort of natural immunity to radiation or something. As for Egan and Dowling, I hope they weren’t planning on having children.
Dir: Herbert L. Strock
Starring Richard Egan, Constance Dowling, Herbert Marshall
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray