Reviews

For some reason people seem to think this movie is a comedy. It is a feel bad tragedy with a mean ending. The whole movie is like going to a funeral. Like the pregnant cop lady says at the end about the senslessness of it all, "I just don't understand", how anyone could call this a comedy.

Project X (1968) was a mystery & a science fiction film. The premise is that in the year 2118, the world is very overcrowded and there are two main powers, the Oriental East, and the occidental West. A mysterious message from the main character says that the East is going to destroy the West in 14 days but then he loses his memory due to an anti-torture drug he has taken. The race is on using mind reading technology to try and find out what is going on, but someone is really working for the other side? Who to believe? What is the threat? The movie correctly predicts that genetic manipulation would soon be a real possibility. The ability to read minds with machinery, and the need to go thru an elaborate deception is explained in some detail, they do a good job setting it up, but it complex and hard to follow in one viewing. Henry Jones as the head scientist lends some believability to the situation, making keen observations, but whose side is he on? Greta Baldwin is a very friendly young woman from 2118 that makes me think that there is hope for the future if there are a lot of women like her then. Christopher George as our amnesic hero does a good job portraying a good man thrust into an immoral situation. All in all it was a better than average Sci Fi movie for it's day, with many thought provoking ideas embedded in it. Incidentally I know how this movie can be seen in 1999.

I actually have a videotape of "Project X" and that makes me one of the few people that has actually seen this movie in the last thirty years. The movie deals mostly with biological warfare, human genetic manipulation, and mind machine interfacing. It was prophetic in a way that it predicted that Genetic Engineering was a coming thing. Despite it's rather low budget look, Henry Jones as the head scientist gives this movie an aire of reality. The mystery is the meaning of the last message the amnesiac agent sent to the West, a doomsday message, and we are kept guessing to the end what that doomsday message means. A memorable moment is when Karen Summers meets our amnesiac agent and the friendly way she acts and picks him up is something I've often imagined might happen to me someday. No wonder the bad guy kept breaking into her room, he was the only other guy to see it. Another scene that is memorable is when the released anger thing, whatever it was, does whatever it did to the meanie bad guy. That's something I have never forgotten.

Well if you haven't seen this movie, you missed a classic and good luck trying to find it.

I remember the preview of "Fire Sale", it had Don DeLouise starting to announce this film as being something you surely shouldn't miss, when a couple of painters carrying a ladder walk in front of him which makes him stop and he silently cusses them out. He was right, if you missed Fire Sale in the theatres you missed it and it has vanished like something into the twilight zone. In the early '80s I knew a guy who had seen the movie but since then nobody but me has ever mentioned it. I just ran down a movie from 1968 called "Project X" and it took me a year and a half to get a copy of it, it cost me a thousand dollars, and I had to convince the studio to give it to me, and they gave it to me for free when I finally convinced them the movie was long lost, I don't think they knew it was. It may be a similar situation with "Fire Sale", I think that I'm going to make my next project to get "Fire Sale".

Leonard Maltin's review of this movie was horrible. Calling it a black comedy is ridiculous! Nobody is killed, nothing gruesome happens, maybe no bad language, (I forget). It's a very main stream comedy, with big name stars, of the same type as "It's A Mad, Mad World". The scene with the brothers trying to insure their Comatose dad would be a classic if they would'nt hide this film away like some kind of lost treasure.