A gripping masterpiece of neo-noir psychological suspense. A mesmerizing meditation on the mysterious nature of identity. An inscrutable, profoundly unsettling fever dream, issued from deep within the director’s anguished psyche. A phantasmagorical family saga that ends in murder and betrayal.

There can be no doubt that the fine folks at The Asylum are fans of the special breed of 50s era science fiction; an era in which the mysterious atom reigned supreme. So intrinsic to the conclusion of WWII, viagra a symbol of American dominance and ingenuity, healing and a portent of The Future the atom was also viewed with fear, and whole oeuvres were built around the concept of atomic energy run amok, creating vast, horrifying menageries of over-sized, irradiated monsters. What else but fanatical love for this bygone age could explain the existence of films like Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus or the soon to be classic Mega Piranha starring former pop icon Tiffany and former Brady Buncher Barry Williams? How else would one explain the decidedly sub-par visual effects except as a desire to retain the essence of those films? This, dear readers, is devotion. This is love. Now to patiently await the remake of Them!.

I always thought danger along the frontier was something that was a lot of fun; an exciting adventure, like in the three-D shows.” A wan smile touched her face for a moment. “Only it’s not, is it? It’s not the same at all, because when it’s real you can’t go home after the show is over.”

“No,” he said. “No, you can’t.”

Story goes like this: there’s an emergency ship en route to a plague-ridden planet, carrying essential medicine. The pilot finds a stowaway; a young girl, Marilyn, who just wants to see her brother.

The pilot now has a problem: he has enough fuel to get himself to the planet, but no one else. Interstellar law is clear: all stowaways are jettisoned immediately.

But space captains are heroic sorts. Whatever harsh decisions the author puts in their background to prove their grit, this is still a story. This time will be different. Marilyn is the perfect, plucky sidekick-in-training; surely the pilot can figure out some way to save both her and the planet’s populace.

No. There is no solution. She says her goodbyes and is ejected, with “a slight waver to the ship as the air gushed from the lock, a vibration to the wall as though something had bumped the outer door in passing, then there was nothing and the ship was dropping true and steady again.”

The above is from Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations. When it came out in Astonishing Science Fiction in August, 1954, it shocked the hell out of the magazine’s readership, used to the last-minute triumph of human ingenuity.

Godwin’s classic was only the beginning. The ensuing decades would see American sci-fi delve into realms unthinkable to its forebears. Desperate to shake off the genre “urinal,” as Kurt Vonnegut so succinctly termed it, writers first ditched one of the key assumptions: that the hero will always save the day. Maturity, in this view, meant uncomfortable truths. Often, it meant unhappy endings, not just for the protagonists, but frequently the entire world.

This is a scattershot story of how the bleak tomorrow came to reign, and how it changed our visions of the future.

Any Invader Zim fans here? If you fell into reluctant love with the tiny, spiteful Irken invader and his robotic companion Gir, you might have been keeping up with the recent blog posts of show creator Jhonen Vasquez. Over the past few weeks, Vasquez has been sharing daily bits of behind-the-scenes Invader Zim trivia, complete with grotesque digital illustrations, unforgivably long rants, and anecdotes that will probably get him killed very soon. Evidently, this stuff has been building up inside Jhonen and eating through his soul like some kind of psychic bile, until it exploded into a month-long pontification of, well, DOOM.

Above, Gir and Zim by Jhonen Vasquez, from Invader Zim Fact #25 – just one of the numerous drawings that accompany Invader Zim Facts. With his zip-up dog costume, built-in jets, and an unmistakable squeaky voice, adorable Gir gained a fan base as rabid and vast as Zim ‘s. However, Rikki Simons, comic book creator, colorist on the show, and the man behind the squeaking, paid dearly for his involvement with Zim. Sometimes our work consumes us, and Rikki serves as an all-too-real reminder of what happens when we push ourselves too far. In a spectacular display of callous indifference to his once-colleague, Jhonen showcased a jarring, never-before-seen video interview with Simons in “Invader Zim Fact #31“. From the post:

A bit of info on the video:  It’s apparently a fragment from a documentary about voice actors by “Ani-Mazing” Magazine, one of the many publications I’ve never had the pleasure of taking with me to the bathroom.  The thing never got completed, and Rikki was actually the last person the filmmakers interviewed.  That’s just what the guy told me who gave me this thing.  If you ask me, AniMAZING Magazine should have stuck with magazines because the interview sucks as far as interviews go, and the sound and camera work is just awful.  The title of this last post comes from something the interview touches on, that Rikki, besides playing the lovable GIR, also played the lovable Bloaty the Pig.

Watch below, and be sure to stick around until the very end.

(Update: The original playlist is gone, but you can still watch the whole thing here, courtesy of Lionsgate.)

It’s Good Friday today, the celebration of that penultimate event that preceded the most important of Christian miracles. In the spirit of this solemn occasion the Friday Afternoon Movie presents the story of a serial killer who impales his victims with a spike mounted to his video camera’s tripod. Happy Easter!

Released to intense controversy, Michael Powell’s brilliant Peeping Tom from 1960 is a film whose reputation has undergone a renaissance in the ensuing decades, starting in the 1970s. Martin Scorsese, in the book Scorsese on Scorsese, paired it with Fellini’s 8½ as a complete education in directing, saying:

I have always felt that Peeping Tom and 8½ say everything that can be said about film-making, about the process of dealing with film, the objectivity and subjectivity of it and the confusion between the two. 8½ captures the glamour and enjoyment of film-making, while Peeping Tom shows the aggression of it, how the camera violates… From studying them you can discover everything about people who make films, or at least people who express themselves through films.

Such effusive praise aside, Powell made a fantastic picture, one that manages to match the suspense of his contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock whose classic Psycho was released in June of that year, a mere three months after Peeping Tom.

The story of Peeping Tom is a simple one. Mark Lewis is a quiet man who works on a film crew, with aspirations of becoming a filmmaker. To supplement his income he also takes racy photos of women. He lives in a house willed to him by his father and rents out part of it while he poses as a tenant. He slowly becomes interested in Helen, who lives below him with her blind, alcoholic mother. Mark also likes to kill women with the aforementioned tripod, filming them as he is doing so. The explanation for this particular psychosis is that Mark’s father was a prominent psychologist who made his reputation by constantly harassing and terrifying his young son in order to better understand the psychology of fear, all the while filming his reactions, going so far as to wire all the rooms in the house.

To contemporary audiences this is all very old hat but again, at the time it was scandalous. The racier version of a scene with Pamela Green, in which one whole breast is exposed for two whole seconds, is credited with being the first nude scene in a major British feature, but even the cut version of this did nothing to silence the outcry. People were appalled of the idea of camera as weapon almost as much as they were by the fact that Powell cast himself as Mark’s psychologist father with his own son playing the role of Mark as a child, and the backlash effectively ended Powell’s career in the UK. A movie that can be read as an implication of its audience as voyeurs and the directors of horror films as psychotic killers, terrorizing the innocent for entertainment it was perhaps ahead of its time. The reevaluation of Peeping Tom is well deserved and Powell deserves all the recognition he can get.

Lucky, lucky Los Anglicans. Your cup runneth over: Tarkovsky festivals, the approaching Hollywood Forever film season, Kenneth Anger screenings… and soon, an encore presentation of Birdemic: Shock and Terror:

Only last month, Cinefamily housed the drunkenly enthusiastic world premiere of this cinematic Tour de Farce. The screening was hosted by Tim and Eric in cahoots with Severin Films, who turned the entire West Hollywood theater into “a temporary aviary with epic displays of Birdemic special effects, props and costumes that… put the Smithsonian to shame.”

Some background on the film from Severin’s official press release:

Birdemic, described by [writer/producer/director] James Nguyen as a romantic thriller, is a horror/action/special-effects-driven love story about a young couple trapped in a small Northern California town under siege by homicidal birds. Birdemic also tackles topical issues of global warming, avian flu, world peace, organic living, sexual promiscuity and lavatory access.

Nguyen, a 42-year-old Vietnamese refugee, wrote, cast and shot the film over the course of four years using salary from his day job as a mid-level software salesman in Silicon Valley. The film pays homage to Hitchcock’s The Birds via location shooting in Mission Bay, California, as well as an appearance by star of Tippi Hedren. When rejected for an official screening slot at Sundance, Nguyen spent eight days driving up and down the festivals nearby streets in a van covered with fake birds, frozen blood and Birdemic posters, while loudspeakers blared the sounds of eagle attacks and human screams.

Severin’s executive producers took one look at Nguyen’s labor of love and bought the rights to Birdemic for the next 20 years.

After the premiere screening last month, Nguyen and Birdemic co-stars Alan Bagh and Whitney Moore stayed on hand for a lively Q&A session with their soused and roaring public. They laughed, they cried, it was better than Cats. Now, thanks to popular demand, Birdemic is hitting the open road. Screenings are scheduled in thirteen cities across the continental US, starting April 2nd. Not since The Room or Troll 2 has a film been so poised for Ironic Hipster Fan Luv.

Hey… can we talk about Ironic Hipster Fan Luv for a sec?

Or not. In fact, I’m going to put the rest of this post under a cut, because I honestly don’t know if its ouroboric tone will be interesting, or merely irritating, to the majority of our readers. If you’re not already rolling your eyes with your arms folded across your chest, I invite you to read on!

I’m really not sure what I have to say to properly convey the danger of robots to you people. Really, at this point I feel that the risks should be self-evident; but almost on a daily basis I am proven wrong. You just do not seem to understand where this road leads to and my words appear impotent, unable to realize the dark future I see should mankind continue down this path towards sentient mechanical beings.

And yet, I find myself unable to just give up. Someone has to be the voice of reason, if only to be able to point out that they told you so; and that person might as well be me if only because I like being right and I am an accomplished pointer, if I do say so myself. With that in mind follow my index finger and gaze in horror and wonder at the sculptures of Andrew Chase. Chase, unlike most who crusade for our demise by automatons, has his sights set squarely on the animal kingdom, making him, perhaps, even more despicable — for what kind of man would set such a plague upon the beasts of the Earth, innocent and pure as they are? Chase has no such qualms, creating giant, lumbering steel pachyderms and lithe, gear-driven, and indefatigable cheetahs. The savannas of the future will be occupied by metal giraffes, wading through the corpses of extinct fauna to hunt down the last of humanity with laser eyes under a smog-choked and blackened sky, mark my words.

And you’ll have only yourselves — and Andrew Chase — to blame.

Ah, the legendary 14th episode of Nu Pogodi (“You Just Wait!”), a ’70s/’80s children’s cartoon outlining the tormented, love-hate, co-dependent relationship of Zayatz and Volk (bunny and wolf), the Wile E. Coyote & Road Runner of the USSR.  Their relationship spanned 16 “classic” episodes (from 1969 to 1986) and included plenty of substance abuse, violence, “bad touches,” and one very awkward romantic dinner.

The 14th episode – with its murderous rabbit simulacrum, metrosexual hair-cutting/pants-pressing robots, junky schteeempunk Volkswagon (YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?!), and zero-G flight simulators that play Space Race-inspired Soviet pop music. Episode 14 – my first exposure to electronic music of any sort. The techno kicks in at 2:57, when the main Space/Technology portion of the episode begins. In this episode, the wolf chases the rabbit around the “Dom Yunogo Technika,” which translates roughly to “House/Society of Young Tech-heads.” (That’s my best 5 AM translation, at least).  Before 2:57, there’s a short mini-episode in which Rabbit & Wolf share a dinner together – the aforementioned date, which ended in hilarious tragedy and made the show go down in Russian gay animation/film history, as both Rabbit & Wolf are male.

As with all episodes of Nu Pogodi, which can be found on YouTube, the wide-ranging music is one of the best parts. This episode is one of the best examples of that. The tracklist of Episode 14, which includes some appearances by Western artists, is this:

1. Alla Pugachova – Million Alyh Roz
2. Digital Emotion — Get Up, Action
3. Digital Emotion — Go Go Yellow Screen
4. Bonnie and Clyde – Leroy Holmes
5. Methusalem (Empire) – Black Hole (Bavarian Affair)
6. Digital Emotion — The Beauty & The Beast
7. Zemlyane – Trava u Doma
8. VIA Leisya Pesnya – Kachaetsya Vagon

If hundreds of pages of Philip K. Dick have taught me anything it’s that in the inevitable overpopulated, smoggy, and rain soaked future advertising will be everywhere. Surrounded by it, we will be assaulted by high-tech neon shillery to the point of utter desensitization. Advertisers will have to think up increasingly invasive ways to grab the attention of eyeballs shielded by shiny, all-weather sunglasses and absurd personal computer visors. Short of implanting the desire for a particular product directly into our cerebellums with a biochemical cocktail delivered by evil looking needles, they will no doubt turn to something akin to what is on display here in this video by Scott Amron.

Bypassing the optic route all together, Amron advocates a more tactile approach; his beverage container swelling with protuberances in an allergic reaction to hot liquid, pushing their tumescent ridges into the palm of the purchaser’s hand, creasing it with ad-man braille. Coffee clenched in hand it is all you can do to keep from shrieking as it gropes you. Unable to tear you away from the horrid alien porn displayed on your visor screen while you wait for the bus the next step is no doubt to simply envelop your extremity and forcibly drag you away to some previously unknown destination to buy jeans.

via core77

While it must be said that all actors start somewhere it must also be said that some start lower than others. Sonny Chiba, before starring in the martial arts films that would bring him international success, was no different taking roles in scores of what can only be described as truly terrible films. This is not to say that his output since then has been of stellar quality and one could say that he never quite graduated from the B-movies of his youth but then one might risk Sonny Chiba punching one in the face so hard that one’s eyeballs exit explosively from one’s colon.

Today, the FAM takes a look at one of those early films, Invasion of the Neptune Men from 1961; a title that simply screams B-movie. The then 22-year-old Chiba plays one Shinichi Tachibana, a mild-mannered astronomer, who in actuality is the superhero Iron-Sharp, or Space Chief as he is called in the English dub. When mysterious metal aliens arrive to invade Earth, it’s up to Iron-Sharp/Space Chief to stop them.

It’s standard, ’60s era sci-fi/superhero fare with the distinct advantage as being a pretty awful example of the genre. With a kitsch factor this high it was no surprise that it was featured on the cult television series Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1997. Indeed the movie was so bad that it almost succeeded in fulfilling the plans of Dr. Clayton Forrester to drive Mike Nelson, Tom Servo, and Crow insane. They are only saved by a surprise visit from characters from the 1958 Japanese television series Planet Prince. The movie received fairly harsh treatment from the three, including one off-color moment in which they refer to Chiba’s character as “Space Dink”. The MST3K version also omits footage of the destruction of Tokyo which was actual World War II bombing footage — the writers’s feelings being that it had no place in a kids’s movie.

Regardless of such questions of taste, Invasion of the Neptune Men remains a prime example of ’60s era, Japanese cinema awfulness; a must watch for anyone looking to expand their knowledge beyond the likes of Godzilla.