Friday, May 03, 2024

red is green and green is read, I've got this film stuck in my head

You might recall my doomed attempts to remember some identifying details about some long-ago and dimly-remembered TV advertising tag lines (details like what product they were actually advertising, for instance), and also this plea for assistance with some details of a half-remembered comedy sketch from the 1980s/1990s.

I also put up a request for assistance in placing a film based on an equally vaguely-recalled single scene which had stuck in my mind for some reason, presumably after seeing it, or part of it, on TV a very long time ago:
Well, I came across the tweet above earlier by means of some search I can't remember the purpose of now, other than that locating this particular tweet wasn't it, and was inspired to have another go at solving the mystery. I'm not sure whether my Googling keyword selection skills have improved since last time, or if the page I found didn't exist when I did the original search, but whatever the reason I'm pleased to be able to say that I have located the film in question, and it's called Battle Beneath The Earth, a fairly absurd-looking science-fiction thriller from 1967. I mean, some of the details I'd recalled above were pretty clearly wrong - it wasn't set during World War II, the dastardly Oriental villains were Chinese, not Japanese, and I'd remembered the hypno-brainwashing mantra slightly wrong - instead of this:
the new sun rises in the east; the west is dead
it's this:
red is green and green is red, the east sun rise(s) and the west is dead
But, you know, pretty close - crucially, close enough that using "the west is dead" as a search string and excluding the word "witch" from the results to get rid of all the Wizard Of Oz stuff reveals the existence of this page which contains both the quote (slightly misquoted, to my hearing of the original anyway, but good enough) and the title of the film. 


Pleasingly, I was able to validate that this really was the film I remembered by looking for the specific scene on YouTube, which has the full movie, for anyone interested in camp 1960s vaguely-racist paranoia. The specific brainwashing scene I'd sort-of-remembered is here

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