Gog

Herbert L. Strock – 1954 – USA

Ivan Tors was one of those rare producers who had a specific vision and built up a modest empire around it; like Walt Disney on a smaller scale.  He loved science, science-fiction, wildlife and the ocean, and he produced a lot of movies about these things, but he’s probably best known for his adventure TV shows like Sea Hunt, Flipper and Daktari.  Gog is one of his earliest films, the third part in an ambitious trilogy about the fictional Office of Scientific Investigation (OSI).  It’s awkward and stagy, likely the result of it being shot for 3D, and filled with crazy dialogue.  It’s about an OSI investigator sent to look into some mysterious deaths at an underground government facility in the American desert.  He’s immediately suspicious of a supercomputer named NOVAC that seems to be running everything, including two robots ominously named Gog and Magog.  It doesn’t quite overcome its many weaknesses, and it’s no great work of art, but it seems to have had a far reach; you can sense its influence, however indirectly, on films like Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey.  You know it’s from the early days of the Cold War, incidentally, from the ludicrous flippancy on display about nuclear weaponry.  A woman lies sick in bed, complaining nonchalantly about “a little too much radiation.”  The hero bends down, kisses her, and asks how she feels now, to which she responds, “Radiant.”