SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

tomgillespie2002 Here's a first for me - a pre-Hays Code science-fiction romantic musical comedy. Just Imagine, directed by David Butler, envisions a 1980 where everybody flies rather than use cars, are given numbers instead of names, eat food and drink alcohol in pill form, and have their life partners decided by a judge. Just Imagine is a true oddity, and should be seen by anybody interested in obscure curiosities or the evolution of sci-fi in cinema. Despite the wonderful Oscar-nominated set design, the film is also very, very bad, plagued by wooden acting, forgettable songs, and some plain old weirdness.J-21 (John Garrick) is in love with LN-18 (Maureen O'Sullivan), but the fact that he has reached the peak in his field - aviation - is stopping him from achieving greater things. Due to the limits of his field. the judge deciding on LN-18's ideal partner is the favouring smug and loathsome aristocrat MT-3 (Kenneth Thomson) instead. After witnessing a successful experiment to bring back a man, who dubs himself Single O (vaudeville performer El Brendel), back to life after being frozen in 1930, J-21 is approached by a scientist who has perfected a 'rocket plane' capable of reaching Mars, and wants J-21 to be the pilot. Joined by Single-O and his best friend RT-42 (Frank Albertson), J-21 sets out on a mission into the unknown in the hope of becoming a hero and winning the hand of his true love.Some early moments of Just Imagine are truly wonderful. Riding high above the city in their aircrafts, R-21 parks up next to LN-18 for a mid-air chat amidst the backdrop of skyscrapers. The special effects throughout are wonderfully charming and hold up well 75 years on. These brief delights are sadly few and far between, and the film spends the majority of its hefty 110 minute running-time churning out blandly-filmed song-and-dance routines, including a bizarre number about never killing a fly because it may be in love with another fly, Brendel's tiresome and unfunny shtick, and taking its sweet time to actually get into outer space. When we finally lands on Mars, we are in Ed Wood territory, with scantily-clad natives and plonky fight scenes. It flopped upon release due to the decreasing popularity of musicals at the time (pre-Busby Berkeley), but Just Imagine at the very least deserves to be seen once and never again.

tavm Just watched this bizarrely quaint sci-fi musical from the early talkie era on YouTube. It takes place in 1980 from a 1930's perspective in a big city where food and drink are in the form of a pill, airplanes instead of cars are used for everyday leisure travel, and marriage is decided by the government. Oh, and characters use single letters and numbers instead of regular names for their identities. One more thing, one of the characters is awaken after 50 years having been struck by lightning at the end of his previous life. I'll stop there and just say this was quite entertainingly creative when the writers depicted what they imagined things could have been like so far in the future. Among the players worth mentioning: Maureen O'Sullivan, just before her star-making role as Jane in the Tarzan series, looking quite luminous in her youth. Marjorie White, a sassy blonde comedienne who steals many of her scenes making it such a tragedy she'd die a few years later in an accident. And El Brendel, a forgotten comic who provides the lion's share of the funny scenes that I highly enjoyed. Why this has never been available on VHS or DVD, I don't know but I'm glad I now saw this on YouTube as uploaded from the Fox Movie Channel as evidenced by the logo of that network that occasionally showed on the lower right hand corner of the screen. So, yeah, Just Imagine is worth a look. P.S. This is the second film in a row-after Whoopee!-I've seen that had a crack at Henry Ford that I read was a comment on his anti-Semitism. I enjoyed them both times.

garysheski-800-163660 Going through my old movies, I watched JI again first time in a long while, I had forgotten how incredibly BAD it really is! (See my previous post). Worse than REEFER MADNESS, worse than anything Ed Wood could conjure up, in fact, a friend and I were amateur filmmakers in the '60s, with a hand-held 16mm camera & battery-operated tape recorder for sound, the junk we made were D.W.Griffith & Cecel B. DeMille epics compared to this one!! There is but one scene, the "Don't Swat a Fly" song & dance number of White and Albertson, but even that one has to be removed from the context of the whole film to enjoy at all.If this was a sci-fi "thriller" of 1930, I'm glad I didn't live back then to imagine what 1980 would be like!! SSSOOO BAD, it can't even be classed as "so bad it's good". If there were a negative rating system, this one would be at the very top of the list, WWAAYY beyond classification in ANY category! Many films, good or poor, have been lost over time, but how this one survived is beyond my comprehension: It should have been destroyed in 1930, and the producers/writers court-ordered to pay back the money invested! I could go on and on, but anyone who posts to say it's any good, should be considered an enemy of society!

dbborroughs I finally got to see the film that haunted me since childhood. For years I saw stills from what I was told was a lost film and was amazed at the huge scale of the sets that rivaled what Fritz Lang had done with Metropolis. They were amazing and awe inspiring.I wish I could say the same about the whole movie.Made in the early days of sound this movie is terribly dated. The music seems to be only used during the musical numbers and the jokes seem to be a step above okay vaudeville. Its not bad, its just not good, or good consistently.The plot has a world where everyone is a number some fifty years in the future (ie. 1980). In connected plot lines a man from 1930 is brought back to life and his antics form a ind of comic relief. Meanwhile a young man, unable to win the hand of his lady love ends up going to Mars. Its all a bit madcap and silly.The amazing thing is how much of this has been stolen from over the years with films like Queen of Outer Space and Sleeper seeming to have pulled off bits of plot for their own.Is it worth seeing? Yes. The sets are amazing, even today. The problem is that the rest is hit or miss and the film now is little more than a curio and entry in film history.