Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.
–Andrei Tarkovsky
Stalker (1979)
This is a heads up for the Andrei-lovin’ Zobotron as much as anyone else in SoCal: starting today (Jan 23), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art begins a complete retrospective of Tarkovsky’s films, with supplementary material. They will be screening Solaris, Ivan’s Childhood, Stalker, The Mirror, Nostalghia, Andrei Rublev, The Sacrifice, and two documentaries about Tarkovsky and his apocalyptic, mesmerizing work. Not to be missed.
Saved for a rainy day or, in this case, one in a long line of bitterly cold days, I present for your inspection, these animated promos for two Parliament-Funkadelic albums, the surprisingly literal The Motor Booty Affair and Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo Syndrome. P-Funk always had a great sense of mythology in their music, meaning that both Dr. Funkenstein and his arch-nemesis Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk are in attendance here; more like the chapters of a sci-fi serial than albums. They appear almost alien in contrast to the slick, overproduced (and quite limited) promos that are shown on, say, MTV between episodes of People Acting Awful Towards One Another.
Every holiday has its traditions and New Year’s Day is no different. In fact, New Year’s is littered with traditions mostly involving copious amounts of alcohol, weeping, and deep, unspeakable shame. However, there is a more modern tradition indelibly etched in my mind: The Twilight Zone marathon. Once hosted, on the East Coast at least, on channel 11 WPIX out of New York, now on the hideously renamed SyFy, it was a chance to absorb all of Rod Serling’s brilliant series in one, gluttonous 48 hour period. Of course, the FAM cannot play host to all 156 original episodes so today we present the less impressive Twilight Zone: The Movie from 1983.
Twilight Zone: The Movie is a sort of greatest hits, it’s four stories, directed by John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante and George Miller based on episodes “Kick the Can”, “It’s a Good Life”, and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”. Only Landis’s segment is original, based loosely on the episodes “a Quality of Mercy” and “Deaths-Head Revisited”. Landis’s segment is also responsible for the film’s infamy as it was during filming of this that actor Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen (age 6 and 7 respectively) were killed when pyrotechnics caused a helicopter to spin out of control and crash. Morrow and Le were decapitated by the rotor while Chen was crushed by one of the skids. The accident and ensuing trial, led to new regulations regarding child actors and, supposedly, the end of Landis’s and Spielberg’s friendship.
It’s a shame then that the resulting film is, as previously mentioned, unable to meet the high standards of its source material. While it’s a thrill to hear series veteran Burgess Meredith’s (uncredited) turn as narrator, the rest falls fairly flat. One wonders why original stories were not drafted as even the best retelling would not have been able to overcome fans’s memories of the television show. Still, it can at least function as an appetizer, something to entice you to delve into the original series. It’s a truly fantastic body of work and you would be doing yourself a great disservice by skipping it. So go, while there are still a few hours left.
Chances are good you’ve already heard tell of Mike from Milwaukee and his 70 minute long YouTube video review of The Phantom Menace. But have you actually taken the time to sit down and watch this vitriolic magnum opus?! I’m not gonna say “you haven’t lived” or anything, but this has got to be one of the funniest, most devastating blockbuster smackdowns in the history of cinema, let alone the internet.
Post-holiday depression can be a bitch. Let heathenish laughter cure what ails you, and pass the pizza rolls.
At least, as imagined by the late illustrator Ed Emshwiller. A future in which a twisted and mutated Santa Claus, an extra pair of arms sprouting from the sides of his torso — no doubt due to prolonged exposure to radiation — looks down upon the horrible, alien carolers that have come to serenade him in his fallout shelter. A future where robots, those accursed machines, soil the holiday in another sick attempt to replicate their creators by erecting a cold, joyless approximation of a Christmas tree. It is a bleak, bleak future dear readers. Let us hope it never comes to pass.
Soon enough I will have made Coilhouse a repository for the Complete Works of John Carpenter. Certainly this was not the intention when I started the FAM, but it seems to have turned out that way. In this case, however, it is with great sadness that I post his cult favorite, Dark Star.
As Mer detailed below, Dan O’Bannon, one of the creative forces behind one of the greatest science fiction/horror movies in all of cinema, died yesterday. Alien is almost a mythical movie at this point, a landmark piece of film of which thousands of words have been written and which has been numerated on countless lists. It is, by dint of its prestige, almost completely absent from the internet, swept away by the watchful eye of Twentieth Century Fox.
What we are left with, then, is Dark Star and here I must make a confession: I hate this movie. Well, hate may be a strong word. I have seen this movie exactly once. It was rented, long ago in the days of my long forgotten youth, under the impression that, like the box proclaimed, it was a laugh out loud comedy, a rollicking good time. It was, in my memory, none of these things and by the time the credits rolled my parents, brother, and I felt that we had surely been tricked; the victims of a cruel bait-and-switch.
Watching it now I find myself appreciating it more for what it represents rather than what it is. Since that day so long ago my taste for irony and absurdist humor has matured, but even so I find few parts of Dark Star to be funny with the exception of O’Bannon’s rightfully lauded turn as Sgt. Pinback/Bill Froog. No, as a comedy it fails, at least for me. What it does do is foreshadow the arc of O’Bannon’s career and hint at just what he was capable of conjuring up from the depths of his brain. Dark Star is the seed from which Alien sprang and, regardless of whether you love it or hate it, for that reason alone it is priceless.
O’Bannon as the legendary Sgt. Pinback in John Carpenter’s 1974 cult classic, Dark Star. (O’Bannon also wrote the screenplay.)
Dan O’Bannon –the screenwriter who penned Alien, Total Recall, Dark Star and wrote/directed The Return of the Living Dead–has died, aged 63, following a brief illness.
Think about it for a second: without this man, we wouldn’t have Ellen Ripley. For that contribution alone, Dan O’Bannon is ensured the eternal adoration and gratitude of everyone here at Coilhouse.
In honor of the departed, here are a handful of scenes and previews from just a few of the fantastic sci fi and horror films O’Bannon worked on over the years. Requiescat in pace.
More cynical types may pooh-pooh the Thriller flash mob phenomenon. “Meh. If you’ve seen one Thriller homage, you’ve seen them all.” But I prefer to receive each and every re-imagined Thriller dance as a precious, unique, and glorious internet snowflake. Will you join me? Let us twirl, Winona-like, reveling in their abundance.
It’s been quite a hiatus for the FAM. Why that was, no one knows. Perhaps the FAM was in hiding, on the lam after a particularly large methamphetamine deal went decidedly South; or maybe the FAM has been kept in a dank, dingy basement for the past two or three weeks, the unwilling plaything of a cruel and demented mistress. Like I said, we’ll never know. But the FAM is back, albeit with a gaunt visage and a faraway look in its eyes. Poor, poor FAM.
To ring in its return we present to you, our adoring, viewing audience Rowdy Roddy Piper’s breakout film, They Live; directed by the one and only John Carpenter. Now, I realize that there has been a particularly heavy dose of Carpenter on the FAM as of late and, rest assured, this will be the end. For a while. Hopefully. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. They Live is the story of a young man named George Nada who comes into the possession of a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the truth lying under the surface of our perceived reality. That truth being that the world is controlled by skull-faced aliens who jerk us about like puppets through the use of hidden, subliminal messages. This lifting of the veil terrifies Mr. Nada and he is encouraged to save the human race by masticating chewing gum and “kicking ass”. He is partnered with Kieth David — who previously appeared in Mr. Carpenter’s The Thing — who plays the part of Frank Armitage. Frank Armitage is also the pseudonym that Carpenter used when he wrote the script and is also the name of a character in The Dunwich Horror by one Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The story of They Live a has equally pulpy roots, the plot being taken from both “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson, originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and a story called “Nada” from a comic entitled Alien Encounters by both FantCo and Eclipse.
It is no surprise then that They Live turned out the way it did. This is a classic sort of quick and dirty sci-fi, with brash, one-liner-spewing heroes and a central premise masquerading as social commentary. But you know what? As cheesy as They Live can be — um, Rowdy Roddy Piper stars in this — it is still fantastic, a delectable morsel of Carpenter’s truly over-the-top films that are both unabashedly silly and truly enjoyable. It is mindless, yet guilt-free entertainment and sometimes, that’s all one need.
Every boy needs a hero. Someone he can look up to. Someone whose life he can model his own after. Someone to give him hope. In a far off land in an unspecified time, young Billy is going to bed. But before his grandfather turns off the light he decides to tell they boy a story. The story of Tarboy, an amalgam of all the poor robots crushed and driven before the implacable greed of their robot masters. Down there, in the black depths of the tar pools into which they have been discarded, their consciousnesses become one. A single mind bent on revenge wielding sticky, onyx fists.
Tarboy, created by James Lee and Hania, is a sterling example of flash animation. A brisk, epic short film, it is a perfectly packaged capsule of awesome. A fantastic robot flavored, afternoon pick-me-up.
