Check Yul Head: "Westworld" at the Aero
Before preserving his DNA in that big piece of amber in the sky, author Michael Crichton left us with plenty of bubblegum to smack on. Crichton is best known as the author of The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park and for creating the television series ER, but my favorite creation of his was always Westworld, the 1973 film he wrote and directed about the ultimate staycation “where nothing can go worng.” (sic) The American Cinematheque is screening the film as a double feature with The Lost World: Jurassic Park this Friday at the Aero Theater at 7:30 p.m.
In Westworld, Crichton takes the basic premise of Philip K. Dick’s 1966 novelette We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (later turned into the Paul Verhoeven-directed Total Recall) but replaces Mars with the Wild West and implanted memories with an elaborate theme park populated by androids programmed to please — be it sexually or by letting visitors blow them away in a gunfight. Richard Benjamin and James Brolin star as two city slickers who sign up for a weekend of simulated danger, but it’s Yul Brynner’s pre-Terminator portrayal as an unflinching robotic killer that steals the show.
Photo: Beta’s a Bitch. Yul Brynner in Westworld. Film stills courtesy of The American Cinematheque.
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Website says its playing at the Aero, not the Egyptian
Corrected! And may the Lords of Kobol bless you for reading!
Yul is so hawt.
Lucinda, I will fight you for him. (Uh, in some world where we’re not fighting over a corpse.)
Rameses! That guy was badass.
Perhaps you saw me in Westworld
I acted like a robotic cowboy
It was my best role, I can not deny-aye-aye
I felt right at home inside my electronic carcass
Hmm, this is tempting. It’s playing in my nape of the neck, and, as Mike writes, it’s a highly entertaining precursor to films that came along years and decades later, including The Terminator, Totall Recall, Jurassic Park, and even Austin Powers (fembots!)
This movie scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. Of course, I love it now.
Yul’s Mine!! Mine I tell you! Mine all mine!!
Seriously, that guy is on fire. Whoo!