Keep Watching This Space

Skiffyfilms ain't dead yet. I just have to work out some content.

Youtube Friday Wonderfulness!

Yes, I've been slack in updating the blog. More content will be provided this weekend but to tide you all over until then, enjoy the following nostalgic eyeball kicks.

Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot



Rocket Robin Hood



My All Time Favourite Kiddie Science Fiction Cartoon, the incomparable Herculoids.



The Intro To Johnny Quest - very cool music by Hoyt Curtin.

The Cerpts Blog Empire Expands

Cerpts over at The Land of Cerpts And Honey blog, a long time supporter of this blog and Paleo-Cinema has started a second enterprise of his own, Bathed in the Light From Andromeda where he's sharing found audio relating to fantastic cinema. Go there now and enjoy!

The Classic Science Fiction Channel

Steve Davidson's The Classic Science Fiction Channel is well worth the time of a good science fiction nerd (and I use the word nerd in a lovingly affectionate way - few of my friends aren't nerds of some kind). You want your classic Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon? Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot? This is the place for you. Here's Steve's manifesto for the Web Channel he has created.

I started TCSFC as a simple expression of anger and protest over the ill-mannered way in which the SciFi Channel has treated its core audience, of whom I am supposedly a member. The protest got picked up by BoingBoing, and away we went.

In short: I'm not a 'Geeky Young Guy', nor is a goodly portion of the fannish community; 'What If?' is a completely unacceptable definiton for the genre: under such a definition, shopping for bread becomes SF - What If I get the rye instead of the pumpernickel? What If I go crazy and get Wonderbread instead?. And the (soon to be former) President of SFWA should cut off his tongue for suggesting that writers might think about dumbing down their content to appeal to a wider audience, even if it was meant as a joke.

Some of the content comes from Hulu which means that it's region-restricted to the USA but try downloading AnchorFree's Hotspot Shield and installing it to get around that particular silly restriction. I just tried it and it works.

Give it a go.

SF Movie Meme

That Hugo Award Winning Wabbit Mike Glyer (Hi Mike!) tagged me to continue a meme where the assignment is to mark the instances where I have read the book related to a famous sf movie. In some cases it’s the novel/story the movie was based on, in others it’s a novel adapted from the movie. Here are the rules:

* Copy the list below.
* Mark in bold the movie titles for which you read the book.
* Italicize the movie titles for which you started the book but didn’t finish it.
*

Tag 5 people to perpetuate the meme.

And now, the list…

1. Jurassic Park
2. War of the Worlds
3. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
4. I, Robot
5. Contact
6. Congo
7. Cocoon
8. The Stepford Wives
9. The Time Machine
10. Starship Troopers
11. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
12. K-PAX
13. 2010
14. The Running Man
15. Sphere
16. The Mothman Prophecies
17. Dreamcatcher
18. Blade Runner(Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
19. Dune
20. The Island of Dr. Moreau
21. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
22. The Iron Giant(The Iron Man)
23. Battlefield Earth
24. The Incredible Shrinking Woman
25. Fire in the Sky
26. Altered States
27. Timeline
28. The Postman
29. Freejack(Immortality, Inc.)
30. Solaris
31. Memoirs of an Invisible Man
32. The Thing(Who Goes There?)
33. The Thirteenth Floor
34. Lifeforce(Space Vampires)
35. Deadly Friend
36. The Puppet Masters
37. 1984
38. A Scanner Darkly
39. Creator
40. Monkey Shines
41. Solo(Weapon)
42. The Handmaid’s Tale
43. Communion
44. Carnosaur
45. From Beyond
46. Nightflyers
47. Watchers
48. Body Snatchers

I tag:

Undead Backbrain
The Land of Cerpts And Honey
Fleapit Of The Mind
and I'll think of two others later.

The Middleman (2008)

Television needs as many cool, hip fantastic fiction shows that are chock-a-block with savvy pop-culture references, quirky plotlines and engaging characters as it can possibly get. The Middleman fills the bill. Matt Keeslar plays The Middleman who works for an organisation even he doesn't know about. He's the go-to guy when you have an "exotic problem" like super-intelligent apes taking over the local mafia, trout-eating zombie infestations, boy bands that are actually invading aliens, succubi and cursed tubas from the Titanic. His new assistant Wendy Watson (Natalie Morales) is also a conceptual artist. Her room-mate Lacey (Brit Morgan) is attracted to The Middleman, whose offices are run by an android from outer space (Mary Pat Gleeson) who resembles a chunky middle-aged woman with rotten dress sense and is more sarcastic than an insult comedian.

The episodes are all deeply layered with snappy dialogue, hip pop-culture references and themed ideas. Mario Bava, Dario Argento, Frank Herbert's Dune, The Zombies, Joe 90 and Randolph Scott movies all get referenced during various episodes. Every episode contains the famous Wilhelm Scream, too. This show rocks.

The production blog of Middleman creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach is here. Just beware of spoilers. Definitely a show to enjoy when it comes on locally or when you can point your torrent client at the download.

The trailer for the start of the series is below. Enjoy!

Hancock (2008)

I like a good superhero movie. Unfortunately, this isn't a good superhero movie. I often listen to and read the buzz on interesting upcoming movies and one of the things I heard about this film is that they were doing reshoots and re-edits a few weeks before the release date. That doesn't bode well for the film. I don't know whether this was done on the feedback from focus groups or not but it does hint that either the script wasn't up to snuff or they were backing out of some tough moments in the film.

The story is pretty simple, at least before the twist. Hancock (Will Smith) is a drunk superhuman. He's invulnerable, stronger than a freight train and he can fly like a Kryoptonian and doesn't give a shit. After saving PR wizard Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman who steals the film and is, in a lot of ways, the heart of it), Hancock is encouraged by Ray to reform his image. He spends time in gaol due to the charges made against him by the owners of collaterally damaged properties he wrecked while performing his tipsy heroics, gets a makeover and bonds with Ray's family, particularly his young son Aaron (Jae Head), if not his wife Mary (Charlize Theron) who is inexplicably hostile toward him.

Without going into spoilers, you don't have to be Jim Rockford to figure out that Mary and Hancock have a history together.

The big problem with this movie is that it starts out as one thing, phases into another darker area, then backs out of it at the end of things. There are logical inconsistencies to the characters (except Ray), way too much unexplained and it simply shrieks out for a decent script doctor to come along and fix things before filming commenced. I think the makers of this film fell in love with the concept of a drunken superhero and didn't have a good place to go with it from there. The special effects (supervised by John Dykstra) are excellent but overall I see it as a wasted opportunity. It could have been much more than it was, but using William Goldman's three step movie quality guide* this one falls into the third category.

* Goldman's rating are that there are three kinds of films. The first is the film that aspires to excellence/quality but fails, the second is the film that aspires to excellence/quality and succeeds and the third is the film that was never meant to be excellent or of quality at all. This is definitely the third kind: a cash cow movie.

Hulk Vs The Incredible Hulk

Comparisons between the 2003 Ang Lee movie Hulk and the 2008 The Incredible Hulk directed by Louis Leterrier is inevitable. In essence they're both the same story, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde writ superheroically large with tincture of Mary Shelley's persecuted Frankenstein monster to add poignancy.

To begin, the differences are that Hulk was directed by a character-based movie director and The Incredible Hulk by an action movie director. Lee's interpretation of the story was almost operatic. David Banner (Nick Nolte) the father of Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) created the Hulk by experimenting on his young son, splicing genes from other animals into his DNA until his wife discovers what he is doing and he stabs her to death accidentally during a struggle. Bana/Banner is a lonely figure with disturbing memories of his childhood to plague him as he experiments with medical nanotechnology and rekindles his relationship with Betty Ross (Jennifer Connolly) just as a lab accident results in the creation of a monster fuelled by Banner's inner demons.

Hulk also has some brilliantly composed and created set pieces. The fight with the hulkdogs in the dim moonlight is incredibly brutal and powerful, the ride on the jet-fighter high into the stratosphere above San Francisco Bay fills me with awe and the desert chase sequences are utterly believable and true to the action scenes from many Hulk comics. Bana, Connolly and Nolte are fine in their roles. Sam Elliott's General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross is suitably conflicted but duty bound and the climactic struggle between Hulk and his father is like a battle between Olympian gods. The complaints heard about the film were mostly about the liberties taken with the original stories as if every comic book ever drawn and written were carved on stone tablets and handed to Moses by god. Lee's Hulk is bright, larger than life and theatrical.

The Incredible Hulk has one great weakness for me. It claims to "embrace" the 1970s tv series. This is essayed by showing a video-clip of Bill Bixby in an episode of "The Courtship of Eddie's Father", having Lou Ferrigno play a security guard (as he did in Hulk), having Banner (Edward Norton) telegraph hulking out by making his eyes glow green and playing that sappy "Lonely Man" music from the tv show during a scene where Banner is hitch-hiking in the rain. *reality check* 1970s US Network TV was mostly careful, factory-manufactured, too scared to challenge the status quo crap. (See Harlan Ellison's The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat for a brilliant and cogent vivisection of the banality of television during the third quarter of the 20th Century). If you embrace shit, you get your shirt dirty.

I'm no real fan of Edward Norton's work. Fine actor, but we don't connect. Tim Roth as Emil Blonsky (aka Abomination) is just wrong for the role. He's supposed to look like an ageing SAS commando but has the muscle tone and physique of someone who watches what he eats and takes some light exercise. He hits the right notes in his acting, but the physicality creates too much of a dissonance. Liv Tyler is dewy-eyed and pouty as Betty Ross. William Hurt's Thunderbolt Ross looks right but the acting is generic. There's nothing behind the facade. Tim Blake Nelson's Samuel Sterns (soon to be The Leader) has some gonzo moments that lighten things up, but not enough of them. I wanted to see more of him.

Having said that, the movie wasn't too bad. The Hulk himself is more sinewy than the 2003 version, less wide around the jaw. His leaping isn't as parabolic as the previous version but it works. There's a great establishing shot that swoops over the favelas of Rio which seem to go on forever. The bit where Hulk gets zapped with two sonic weapons at once has a great tension to it, as does his protection of Betty Ross during an attack by helicopter and the later scenes under a rock ledge during a thunderstorm. The big battle between Blonsky and The Hulk is okay. Two creations of computer coding fighting one another still has a way to go before it feels visceral enough.

Perhaps the real problem with the 2008 version is that the star, Edward Norton, had a big say in how things rolled. Yeah, he's a comic book geek but then so is Jon Favreau who directed Iron Man. Looking at the wikipedia page for the movie, the impression I get is that Norton meant well but some of his judgement calls on the direction of the film were ill-considered.

Marvel Studios, now they are making their own films, are building their franchises well. The Tony Stark cameo at the end of The Incredible Hulk is one of the bits that works really well. It creates an appetite for where things are going, just as the Nick Fury cameo did in Iron Man. But Iron Man created an expectation for TIH which it didn't quite live up to.

So overall, the Ang Lee Hulk is the better film, even if The Merry Marvel Marching Society didn't dig it. It explored the story in a new way, improvising and riffing in intriguing ways. TIH08 played it safe, which I suppose Marvel has the right to do with their own property, but they should throw us a few surprises when building their Universe, as happened in Iron Man when Captain America's shield showed up on Tony Stark's workbench. We need those eyeball kicks and bits of wonderfulness. (I know Leonard Sampson appeared in TIH08 - and Ty Burrell had a few great moments playing him, but something more was called for.)

Groovy Spaceships of Yesteryear #1

The Space 1999 Eagle Transporter

By any terms, except perhaps design and theme music, Space 1999 was a pretty shitty television series. The concept of the Moon getting blasted out of its' orbit by a nuclear meltdown in a waste dump isn't as silly as midichlorians or Darth Vader starting life as an annoying Mummy's boy, but it's definitely up there on the Think Again Scriptwriter! List.

But leaving that aside, the space-craft they used was a terrific piece of late Space Age design. It's easy to imagine some alternate-history NASA using something like this to ferry people to and from our biggest satellite. It looked like it could work, what with the big boosters at the back end, the thrusters under the fuselage, the replaceable service pods and the maneuvering retro rockets on the housings above the landing pads. I don't think there's been a more practical looking design in a tv series since Space 1999 breathed its' last in 1977.

The only bit that remains unconvincing in the design is the nose cone. How stable would an Eagle Transporter be when entering a planetary atmosphere? (If anyone with a supercomputer wants to model this, please do so and email me the results.) These suckers were and remain cool.

Here, crabbed from wikipedia are the types of Eagles seen in the tv series.

* Passenger - The standard passenger module, it is usually unarmed and used solely to transport Moonbase personnel. Passenger Eagles have a transport module which provides maximum seating space. These Eagles were first seen in the episode Breakaway.

* Recon - Sometimes known as Survey Eagles, this type typically has a computer bank on the starboard side of the ship. Recon Eagles are used to explore alien planets and regions of space; the sophisticated computer bank is used to obtain, store, and analyse data gathered from the planet being studied including contents of atmosphere, valuable minerals or resources and life signs.

* VIP Eagle - Seen only in the episode Breakaway, the orange VIP Eagle was used by Lunar Commissioner Gerald Simmonds; it is primarily a passenger Eagle used to transport high-ranking officials.

* Rescue Eagles - These Eagles are recognisable by their vertical red stripes. Rescue Eagles are equipped with a variety of rescue and life-saving equipment which can be used in emergencies.

* Transport/Supply Eagles - These Eagles are used to transport supplies and equipment rather than passengers. Their transport modules are designed to carry equipment and have limited seating space for passengers.

* Docking Eagle - Usually a standard Eagle fitted with an extendable airlock to enable docking with another craft in space. This was seen in the episode Collision Course when John Koenig had to dock with Alan Carter's damaged Eagle.

* Freighter Eagle - These specialized Eagles are used to transport dangerous nuclear waste to Nuclear Disposal Areas 1 & 2; unlike supply or transport Eagles they are heavily shielded to protect their crews from radiation. The waste canisters are carried in a 'pallet' type pod which links to a conveyor belt at the disposal areas. These Eagles were seen in the episode Breakaway.

* Laboratory Eagles - A specialized Eagle which carries equipment of a more scientific nature than the Recon Eagle, they are usually fitted with additional airlocks for decontamination purposes, and appear to have small but well-equipped laboratories on board. These Eagles appear throughout the series, but make their first prominent appearance in the second season premiere The Metamorph

* Winch - Winch Pods can be attached to Eagles and used for a variety of purposes. Most notably they were used to attempt to disperse the nuclear waste containers in Disposal Area 2 in Breakaway. They are not to be confused with Freighter Eagles. Winch pods can be either in the form of a grab, as seen in Collision Course when Nuclear charges were planted on an asteroid, or a magnetic winch, used for other purposes like removing the Command module of a crashed Eagle in Missing Link.

* Fighters - Although Eagles are not primarily designed for combat, they can be equipped with laser cannon and missiles for defensive purposes. When Moonbase Alpha broke away from Earth, several Eagles were equipped with weapons and used to defend Moonbase from potential alien attacks. Specialised Eagles were designated as 'Combat Eagles' in The Metamorph.

The Eagles were designed by Brian Johnson and his team, most of whom later worked on movies like the original Alien, Flash Gordon and Outland. I'm very tempted to see if they have any of these suckers for sale on e-bay... but I must resist...

Fido (2006)

There are two basic types of zombie movies. There are the ones that take themselves too seriously and are full of gore, horror, pain, anguish and chicken giblets. But on the other hand, there are the movies that use zombies as a dark mirror in which we can see ourselves. Fido is the latter, with the elaboration of being a dark funhouse mirror reflection of 1950s America.

About thirty years before the story starts, there was a plague of "space dust" that began raising the dead. The Zombie Wars were long and horrible and ended when Zomcom, a big ugly corporation came up with the domestication collar, a retro-looking piece of technology with two red lights on it. Put the collar around a zombie's neck and voila! instant (but not too smart) free labour.



The movie runs with the concept in hilarious directions with an underlying darkness. Timmy Robinson (K'Sun Ray) is a thoughtful little boy who worries about zombies. His father Bill (Dylan Baker) is emotionally distant because of a childhood trauma -- he "killed" his father during the zombie wars and his mother Helen (Carrie-Ann Moss) is chafing under the social constraints of the picture postcard Douglas Sirk suburban world they live in. Their new neighbours, the Bottoms include Mr Bottom, (Henry Czerny) who runs Zomcom in what seems a compassionate, humane manner. Timmy's schooling includes rifle training for all pupils, including nursery rhymes to aid their memory.

In the brain and not the chest.
Headshots are the very best.

When Helen Robinson gets the family a zombie servant whom Timmy names Fido (Billy Connelly in a terrifically nuanced role entirely without dialogue), her reasons are to keep up with the Joneses, but Fido's presence in their life unravels the marshmallow world of the family and the town.



One of the joys of this film are the details of the post-Zombie Wars town of Willard. (The choice of town name is an obvious hommage.) Burial rituals are changed, as are the services given by the preacher. Two coffins are required for a legal burial, including the all-important head coffin. The Robinson's single neighbour Mr. Theopolis (Tim Blake Nelson) has a teenaged female zombie companion called Tammy (Sonja Bennett). Old people are looked upon with suspicion because they could turn zombie at a moment's notice and there are even zomcom cadets, a Boy Scout type movement which provides Zomcom with useful snitches and future cannon fodder for the ongoing battle to domesticate the undead.



The satire and whimsy of this film draw the audience in to identifying with the characters to the point that when Timmy decapitates and buries an old lady, and Helen finds herself attracted to Fido, we go along with it gladly. This is a gently subversive film set in a brightly technicolor alternate history where towns are surrounded by high wire fences to keep out the undead who roam the barren countryside and your best friend in the world can be someone who died of a heart attack years ago.