It’s Movie Time: The Black Hole

As always, Spoiler Alert.

I’ve spent over forty years blowing people’s minds because I’ve never seen Disney’s 1979 movie The Black Hole. Me being such a sci-fi fan, and it being an absolute classic of the genre, when it comes up in geeky conversations – which even after all this time, it still does a fair bit – people have a hard time believing I’ve not seen it.

There are lots of reasons why I missed it.

• I was eight when it came out, too young to go to the movies alone.
• My mother didn’t like science fiction, and wouldn’t take me to it.
• I lived in a little village with no movie theatre and no way to get to one, so I couldn’t even be sneaky about it.
• Home video was in its infancy, and my family was years away from getting a VCR.
• When we did get a VCR, the one rental place in town only had a small selection of movies, and The Black Hole wasn’t one of them. (Said rental place doubled as a bar and pool hall, which as a teenager wasn’t the most comfortable place to go into to rent a movie, what with all the bar flies staring. Also, the place didn’t last very long as, when the owner beat up his girlfriend, some of her friends broke in and stole all the movies. Fucking small town living.)
• My father didn’t like science fiction, so even if I’d managed to find a copy of The Black Hole, I’d never have bothered to bring it home, because he’d have vetoed it.

By the time I’d moved out on my own, The Black Hole was handy fifteen years old, and I’d pretty much forgotten about it. It would only come to mind during those geeky conversations when someone else brought it up.

I’d never been that interested in watching it anyway. But when I noticed it was the next movie in line for this article series, I was kind of chuffed that I was finally going to tick that geek box. I didn’t even look at it before I slapped the disc into the player.

Imagine my confusion when the credits started, and the name Judd Nelson appeared.

Then imagine my dismay when I realized that this was not the 1979 Disney classic, but was, in fact, a 2006 Sci-Fi Channel made-for-TV piece of dreck.

When I first started my project of watching my movie collection in alphabetical order, I realized with some chagrin that it would mean I’d have to watch Absolute Zero, which also happens to be a 2006 Sci-Fi channel movie, again. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that a) it was at the beginning of the alphabet so I’d be getting it over with early and b) it was the only one of these b-grade made-for-TV movies I had.

I didn’t appreciate getting blindsided with another one in The Black Hole.

I don’t even know what to say about it. I mean, anything I write would essentially be the same as my review of Absolute Zero. Both movies are about scientific disasters that completely fuck up the ‘science’ part, the only difference being Absolute Zero fucks it up about climate change, whereas The Black Hole fucks it up about … well, about black holes. I swear I could feel brain cells dying through the entire 90 minutes of its runtime.

So, now that I have two of these awful movies under my belt, which would I choose – besides the bin for both of them? Well, I’d have to say Absolute Zero has a slight edge, partly because I’ve never been a Judd Nelson fan, and partly because I remember shouting at the TV slightly less.

But mainly because it’s four minutes shorter.

To see other posts in my venture to watch my movie collection in alphabetical(ish) order, click here.