Presented for the aesthetics, not so much the content. The style of 1950s educational films carried over to the late '60s and then, amazingly, the late 2000s.

I watched these on Tubi, using an adblocker. Links are to IMDb, which -- impartial database that it is -- has more suggestions for available streams:

Coma [IMDb]. Russian language, with subtitles. Fairly incredible Inception-esque CGI dreamscapes, or should I say comascapes. Directed by Nikita Argunov.

Attraction [IMDb]. Russian language. Watch with subtitles, if possible. Tubi only had the cheesy dubbed version. Directed by Fedor Bondarchuk. More impressive CGI*, and interesting views of modern Moscow.

Invasion [IMDb]. Russian language, with subtitles. It's a sequel to Attraction, and Tubi calls it Attraction 2: Invasion. Directed by Fedor Bondarchuk. Again, it's very interesting to see footage of metropolitan Moscow and think of it as a real place, especially in the midst of this pointless Cold War II we are having, ginned up by the usual bad actors (war contractors, CNN, New York Times, Clintons, etc).

All of these are Western-style popcorn pictures but superior in some ways to the stultifying, never-ending Marvel Universe. Coma harks back to Philip K Dick's novels Ubik and A Maze of Death as well as obvious cinematic parallels such as The Matrix, ExistenZ, and Dark City. The art direction echoes the science fiction landscapes of artist Simon Stalenhag, where impossible things loom in the distance, or overhead.

*The second image above comes from a page of concept art from Main Road Post, the CGI studio for Attraction.

So memorable, in fact, that it was stolen for a 1977 Mario Bava film:

"Your honor, the replacement of the poisonous berries with a boxcutter makes this non-infringing, or in the alternative, permissible under the Fair Use doctrine."

In the book:

1. Merricat Blackwood goes shopping in town Tues and Fri, not Tues only. (Why change that?)
2. Merricat has a private "Snakes and Ladders" type game that helps her cope with town visits. ["Crossing the street (lose one turn) came next, to get to the grocery directly opposite. I always hesitated, vulnerable and exposed, on the side of the road while the traffic went by."]
3. Local men in coffee shop: Jim Donell is the town Fire Chief (we don't learn this until the end of the book) and "Dunham" is a carpenter who did some work at the Blackwood estate. Donell wasn't involved romantically with Merricat's older sister Constance. Donell doesn't put out a cigarette in Merricat's coffee.
4. A central (past) incident, referred to throughout the story, is the poisoning of the Blackwood family at the dinner table six years earlier. Constance was accused and acquitted but is still blamed by the townspeople. Merricat had a brother, Thomas, among the murdered family members. Very little is said about him. Julian, uncle of Merricat and Constance, survived and still lives with the two sisters. "Uncle Julian" had a wife, Dorothy, who also died at the table that night.
5. Julian was sickened by the arsenic and shattered by the deaths and became an invalid thereafter. The book doesn't give his age but we assume late '60s. He is depicted as much older and frailer than Crispin Glover's interpretation of him in the film. Glover captures his intermittent sharpness of mind.
6. There is more detail about Julian's original position in the family. He and Dorothy were living under the roof of his brother John (Constance's and Merricat's father, one of the poisoned family members) and he was sensitive about his dependence. This was not helped by John, who kept an eye on how much food they ate at the table.
7. The book Merricat nails to the tree is a small ledger kept by her father of monetary sums owed to him and "people, he thought, who ought to do favors for him."
8. Nosy, pushy people circling around the house calling out for Constance, after the murders, is a regular occurrence. At first the sisters assume Charles is one of these.
9. Merricat doesn't go to town a second time for sugar. She is home with Constance (but upstairs) when Constance invites cousin Charles into the house.
10. Charles' father was Arthur Blackwood, John's brother. Arthur shunned Constance and Merricat after the murders, and Merricat spent time in an orphanage while Constance was on trial. Once Arthur was dead Charles was free to visit the sisters (or so he tells Constance). Charles also tells Constance that Arthur died broke.
11. Charles is hostile and sinister towards Merricat almost immediately. On his second day in the house he says to her (pretending to talk to her cat Jonas): "I wonder if Cousin Mary knows how I get even with people who don't like me?"
12. Merricat is our point of view character so we have to guess at conversations between Charles and Constance held outside her hearing. We know he's obsessed with the Blackwood family fortune, locked in a safe in the house, and that he's attempting to persuade Constance to get outside more and "do something" about the troublesome Merricat and addled Julian. There are no overt scenes of Charles romancing Constance or speaking Italian, as in the movie. That he might have been using sex for persuasion is hinted at near the end of the book. See item 22.
13. Mostly there is no sex; it's all absent, repressed. Charles embodies the threat of maleness to the feminized household but is not a Lothario.
14. The "Merricat should never be punished" scene takes place in the estate's abandoned summerhouse. Merricat imagines the entire family sitting around the dinner table agreeing that she should never be punished. It's a fantasy but also, possibly, in some sense, a flashback. Perhaps Merricat was spoiled as a child, so badly that she never developed a conscience. Jonathan Lethem speculates about this in his afterward to the Penguin edition.
15. Charles keeps insisting that Merricat be punished for pouring water on his bed and spreading dirt and leaves around his room. He never touches her. The scene of him angrily manhandling her on the stairs, and the suggestion that the sisters are flashing back to similar parental abuse, are completely invented in the movie.
16. At the climax, after the fire is out, Donell throws the first rock through a window and the townspeople invade the house, destroying furniture and valuables. The sisters try to escape into the woods; they are surrounded and heckled but not touched. Constance keeps Julian's shawl over her face so no one can see her. The grabbing and manhandling of the sisters never happens in the book.
17. Charles keeps yelling for people to get the safe out of the house. He doesn't try to break into it, as in the movie.
18. No dramatic gunshot stops the heckling. The doctor announces Julian has died. Charles (who seems to have joined the mob) wants to know if "she" killed him. The doctor says it was a heart attack. (Not suicide by smoke inhalation as suggested in the movie.) The mob disperses because a death has occurred.
19. The catalog of destruction to the house goes on for several pages. This is shown in the movie in a series of shots of furniture, dishes, etc being smashed. The book emphasizes the sadistic, systematic thoroughness of the destruction. (Silverware removed from drawers and bent, Constance's harp thrown out a window, etc.)
20. The life of the sisters, post-fire, is very primitive. All their clothes are burned. Constance makes herself a garment out of an old suit of Julian's. She makes a dress for Merricat out of a red and white checked tablecloth. They wall themselves into the house, which becomes overgrown with vines.
21. Charles comes back to the house once. He tries to trick Constance into coming out so his friend can get a photo for the magazines. He is still obsessing about the money in the house. He stands in the driveway yelling but the sisters don't acknowledge him. (In the movie he enters the house, attacks Constance, and is killed by Merricat.)
22. After several years (?) of living as shut-ins, the sisters hear some furtive movements outside the derelict house one night. They muse that their property might have to be renamed Lover's Lane. Merricat cracks, "after Charles, no doubt." Constance replies, "The least Charles could have done was shoot himself through the head in the driveway."
23. The poisoning of the family is never openly explained. There is no subtext of child abuse or sexual abuse, as in the movie. Just hints that patriarch John was a controller and a snob and the family was hidebound in its class assumptions and conventionality. We're left to assume that spoiled child Merricat was starting to find her family disagreeable (12 is pretty old to be sent away from the table without dinner) and planned the murders in a way that spared Constance. The book is a tale of co-dependency: Constance protects Merricat and neither show remorse for the killings. The movie adds motivation of an abusive parent because all Hollywood films must have an abusive parent as a villain.

The main change is to make the antagonist, Charles Blackwood, a nastier piece of work. In the movie he openly romances his first cousin Constance and physically grabs and pins down her sister Merricat, the 18 year old, in a moment of anger. In the book, the romance is buried to the point of invisibility and there is no grabbing. As with all Hollywood films today, there is the obligatory suggestion of parental violence or abuse. Jackson depicts John Blackwood, the dead father of Constance and Merricat, as a controller and a snob but not necessarily an abusive monster.

The motive for the book's central crime -- the unsolved poisoning of John and several family members -- isn't explicitly given in book or movie but the film's climactic staircase scene makes the suggestion that Charles' grappling with Merricat has awakened memories of similar behavior by John. it's implied in the reactions and facial expressions of the sisters during Charles' attack; Merricat even yells out "Father! Stop!" It makes the movie seem more powerful but it isn't Jackson's story; in the novel the reader has to decide who the monster is.

Shirley Jackson was a committed wife and stay-at-home mother of four whose feminism came out in her strong, complex writing. Passon's film version is also strong but leans to less complex, woke explanations for the characters' behavior. Possibly it's the only way to get a film made today.

Update: Notes on differences between book and film.

The obligatory multi-race, multi-sex crew is transporting some plant life by rocket. On board are a captain and a doctor (Caucasian self-identified females); a scientist (Asian self-identified male); and a technician who accidentally stows away on the ship (black self-identified male). The Mission Control and corporate HQ people back on Earth are all white men wearing Nikes (just kidding -- they are all off camera and off mic in the movie so we don't really know).

There's not enough air for the stowaway and the ship can't return to Earth (for reasons not adequately explained) so the first decision the space team has to make is whether to kill the black dude. I'm not kidding about this; it's actually in the movie.

The most ethical choice is to eliminate the one air breather who "lacks the training" to crew a ship to Mars. Everyone acknowledges this in a meeting held with the black technician not present. The plot pivots on whether a team member or members should take a risky action that may mean they don't have to kill him (because he is a nice guy).

A sane solution might be to finding a way to turn the ship around and go home (the stowaway is discovered minutes after departure -- Earth is still visible out the porthole) or draw straws to see who goes out the airlock but no. The movie is designed to inure us to the kinds of decisions (military, Ayn Randian) that must be made in a universe run by Silicon Valley corporations. Someone has to go -- it's just a question of which expendable(s).

Left to right: Dr. Krupov, played by Rhys Williams, Dr. Wu, played by Peter Brocco, and Dr. Schneider, played by Benson Fong.

In the quasi-spy spoof Our Man Flint (1966) a cadre of globalist villains called "Galaxy" attempts to use climate catastrophes to unite the world. The DVD commentary takes a libertarian slant on this. Alex on Film writes:

But what is it these nerds in lab coats want? Money? Power? Women? None of the above. No, they want to make a better world for everyone. They want to “organize the potential of all mankind” for good, putting an end to war, hunger, and poverty.
Our man Flint, however, is having none of it. The commentary has something I found very interesting to say about this, seeing how Flint’s rejection of this altruistic mission expresses: “the underlying theme of the movie . . . the rugged individualist versus the scientific collective . . . and that was what Coburn was most proud of . . . the idea that he could play, that he could represent the American spirit, the idea that you could constantly learn and strive and be your own person, and that’s how you kept progressing rather than a group of scientists who decided that this is what’s good for you.”
Well, I’m sure it would be wise not to trust this bunch of scientists. After all, those who won’t submit to their Utopian schemes are either sent off for reconditioning or, if unreclaimable, to the electrofragmentizer. But there’s also an air of the populist rejection of elites and anti-intellectualism embodied in Flint as well, for all his own ostentatious culture and learning.

The modern-day Drs. Krupov, Wu, and Schneider might be Klaus Schwab and The World Economic Forum, with their trans-humanist dreams of a techno-mediated global society. Stripped of high-flown rhetoric, their schemes boil down to corporate exploitation of the GPS-tracked, facially-recognized masses, authoritarianism with a science fiction face. Populist rejection of this isn't anti-intellectual, it's smart. Yet to The New York Times and other center-right organs, the people who oppose the so-called Great Reset are the crazies, not the planners.

One could take it a step further and note that climate (and biological) crises are the planned (or exploited) catalysts for world unification under Davos Man's enlightened scientific (or corporate) rule, making Our Man Flint quite prescient (or presciently crackpot, again, if you believe the Times).

It's important to distinguish mere flat-earth-ism from legitimate political concerns. As Thomas Pynchon and others have pointed out, the original Luddites didn't just "hate technology," they hated the way it was being used by the elite to disenfranchise them. Today, there are reasons besides disliking progress for opposing 5G, the war on cash, and social credit schemes cooked up by the men in lab coats.

(Photo via )

In Burton's film the usual small group of disadvantaged outsiders wins the day -- nothing subversive about that, it's the plot of every other Hollywood film. Subversive would be a group of US oligarchs in league with the Martians to provide a casus belli for "lockdowns" and other authoritarian interventions.
Even in 1962 the trading cards didn't lack precedent. Such shocking scenes of violence and mayhem abounded in the EC Comics of the 1950s, before the Comics Code clamped down.

There is actual pathos in these scenes, as well as dark humor, unlike Mars Attacks, the movie, where gruesome deaths play purely for yucks. As Collider says, "Burton’s movie feels like it was thrown together by cynical maniacs," and that wasn't intended as a criticism.

images from "the internet"

The second James Bond film, From Russia with Love (not to be confused with Trailer Park Boys' grease film From Russia with the Love Bone), is a First Cold War entertainment. The white hats are spy Bond (Sean Connery) and Russian agent Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi), the black hats are, among others, SPECTRE operatives Donald Grant (Robert Shaw) and Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya).

Alex on Film says this about Grant and Bond:

The line where Grant talks about Bond having to crawl and kiss his (Grant’s) foot isn’t in the book. Was it improvised? Bond is, of course, a gentleman agent (what he’s called in the trailer) and a snobbish member of the upper class. He’s on to Grant as soon as he orders the wrong wine at dinner. In the book though Grant is a psychopathic serial killer triggered by phases of the moon, not someone with much of a class consciousness. He’s only working for the Russians because they let him kill people...

Watching the movie again after many years got me imagining things from the viewpoint of the women. My comment on Alex on Film's post (with added screenshots) follows.

Poor Rosa Klebb. She learned a valuable lesson here: Never send a “paranoid murderer” to do the work of a real spy. Instead of testing Grant’s muscle tone by sucker punching him,

she should have been asking him if Chianti was really the best thing to drink with grilled sole.

Then, after her plans were thwarted by Bond, a super agent whose superiority she failed to anticipate, she goes after him alone, relying on a maid costume and poison tipped dart to stop him.

Also, while admiring Grant’s physique at the beginning, she should have been asking him if he had any class anxieties that might impair his judgment in a contest of wills with a real English (well, Scottish) gentleman. In the final Bond/Grant confrontation, Grant becomes rattled by Bond's savoir faire and loses the advantage.
And what will be Tatiana’s story here? A zealot for Mother Russia, pimped out by the woman-admiring Klebb, she loses her heart to the English agent...

Promptly after the credits roll, the agent will dump her for his next paramour, and she'll end her days in a dreary MI5 decoding pool. Or will she use her extraordinary beauty to “land” another English gentleman? Or will she be exchanged back to Russia to be debriefed about SPECTRE, sadder but wiser, but unlike Klebb, still alive? We can only speculate.