From Zombos' Closet

LOTT D: The Terror That Came From Sci Fi!

There's more than horror lurking through the darkened hallways of The League of Tana Tea Drinkers. Science fiction terror prowls and snarls its way along the floorboards, too. So here's a sampling of those terrors that came from sci fi to give you unpleasant dreams.

 

TheoFantastique warns us to Keep Watching the Skies!: Through its various printings Warren’s book has become something of a classic among science fiction film fans and scholars, and in a big way.

Classic-Horror faces The Incredible Shrinking Man!: The Incredible Shrinking Man is considered one of science fiction's best films. Its strengths, however, lurk more in the horrific implications it presents than its science fiction.

Uranium Cafe treats us to a double feature of Cat Women of the Moon and Missile to the Moon!: The theme is a familiar one for the 50s and 60s. A group of men, with maybe one female in the gang, are stranded somewhere, an island, lost civilization on the far side of a secret mountain or a planet like Venus or even the earth’s moon, and there they encounter an all female race of something similar to Amazons.

Igloo of the Uncanny wonders how I Married a Monster From Outer Space!: One of the many great things about watching American Sci-Fi from the 50s is that it gives you a rare glimpse of a bygone era, where things were very much different. IMAMFOS (short for 'I Married A Monster From Outer Space'. Very handy. Saves me writing out 'I Married A Monster From Outer Space' for no good reason) has a wonderful example of this.

Strange Kids Club runs amok with Xtro, Eat and Run, and My Teacher Is An Alien!: If you've ever wondered what really happened to Al Capone, chances are he was eaten alive by a 400 lb. alien named Murray.

Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies finds a Galaxy of Terror with Inseminoid!: Of course creative people are always drawn toward the medium in which they can express themselves most freely, and thus once the freedom offered by the science fiction of the 70s became clear--from gravity, from Earth, from the need for basic storytelling logic--it might have been predicted that the vacuum of space would suck a few intrepid horror filmmakers through the hull of their genre and out into the horrible, terrifying void.

Kindertrauma admires the voluptuous horror of Alien!: I once facetiously said that horror heroine Ellen Ripley officially belonged to the world of sci-fi because she broke bread with robots and drove a spaceship to work. The truth is, no amount of blinking computer lights or sparkling stars can keep ALIEN from being one of the purest examples of a horror film in existence.

Necrotic Cinema takes a refreshing breadth of space madness in Pandorum!: I certainly felt the look of the film was influenced by Event Horizon, Outland and Alien and that school of thought in regards a space ship. That a rusted and dark and a smoky, ill-lit space ship looks cooler than a brand spanking new craft where everything is spit polished and working.

And here's Dr. Gangrene's recommended movie of the week #25: Tarantula!:

Who Can Ever Forget Vampira?

Flashback courtesy of Professor Kinema...and Terence O-Flaherty writing in the San Franciso Chronicle, 1984 (click to enlarge)...

Professor Kinema's Zacherley Fanzine Issue 3 (Part 2)

Part 1

Professor Kinema's Zacherley Fanzine Issue 3 (Part 1)

More Zacherley the Cool Ghoul history from the crypt of Professor Kinema...(click to enlarge)...

Movie Review: Inception (2010)

Zombos Says: Excellent 

If Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, the Wachowski Brothers, and William Gibson walked into a bar, while Christopher Nolan was bartending with a very attentive ear, you would probably wind up with Inception, a stunningly original yet quite familiar movie that plays with its characters' minds and ours. In a disappointing cinema summer dotted with rote remakes and uninspired beginnings, Inception is refreshingly innovative in how it uses thematic elements from other movies to illustrate its complex but involving premise.

Familiarity comes from its intricate Mission Impossible-styled exploit involving futuristic corporate espionage, frenetically violent chase scenes that would make Jason Bourne flush, and deployment of essential but presumptive technology, normally found in movies like Blade Runner, Johnny Mnemonic, and Dark City. The complexity of its premise comes from the mind games played by Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team of lucid dreamers, who are employed by conglomerates to steal corporate secrets by invading and manipulating the dreamscapes of their business rivals while they sleep. In Cobb's world, these "extractions," as they are called, appear to be a routine method of corporate raiding, so potential victims are trained to fend them off. This sub-conscious defense mechanism throws up "projections" which--conveniently simplified for us by Nolan's stunt people--look like car chases and assailants with guns. I'd like to take that MBA class.

Extraction involves having an "architect" first create an elaborate dreamscape for the exploit to be carried out, connection to a handy, attache-carried device that administers sleep sedation drugs to victim and extractors simultaneously, enabling them to dream together, and enough suitably conflicted psychoanalytic staples like transference and resistance--also embodied by those projections--to allow for coercion and disengagement as psyches are thrust and parried against each other.

The novelty here is how Nolan's psychological dreamscape, along with his unobtrusive explanation of its laws during a training session for the new architect on Cobb's team, Ariadne (Ellen Page), plays off the natural, visual-storytelling qualities possible in cinema. Matrix-like CGI effects and protracted, precision body-slamming, enhanced with bone-jarring thumps and whumps, is exploited for all it's worth. Scenes eagerly gobble up the screen's symbolic potential in screeching, glass-crunching car chases, a locomotive rampaging down a city street, and endlessly determined pursuers with rapid-firing guns acting--as Cobb explains--like anti-bodies warding off his team's intrusion. It reminds me of a similarly effective suspense-building googaw used in Fantastic Voyage, in which a team of miniature scientists is injected into the body of a diplomat to remove a dangerous blood clot. They must stay one step ahead of the body's anti-bodies eager to dissolve them like any other foreign organism, and they need to exit the body before time runs out and they grow back to their normal size.

In Inception, Cobb and his team must also complete their mission before time runs out. He's given a chance to end the forced separation from his children (he's been blamed for his wife's death). Saito (Ken Watanabe) hires him to do an "inception" instead of an extraction. Inception involves planting a subliminal idea instead of finding secrets. Saito wants his rival, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), to split up the company left by Fischer's recently deceased father, to prevent it from becoming a monopoly that would put him out of business. It's tricky, more difficult than doing an extraction, and carries a greater risk to success because it involves fabricating multiple levels to the dreamscape. And the idea to be planted must be plausible enough for the victim to have thought of it on his own for it to work.

There's more standing in the way: a projection of Cobb's dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), keeps showing up in his dreamscapes trying to stop him. Buried deep within Cobb, his Id and super-ego are seething in repressed guilt, conjuring up a monster that threatens his team's safety. Remember Forbidden Planet and Morbius' monster from the Id? Nolan apparently does.

Cobb's elaborate plan for the inception exploit involves three elaborate levels of dreamscape to break down Fischer's defensive projections, each level going deeper, requiring a chemist's (Dileep Rao of Drag Me to Hell) extra potent sedatives to keep them there. One problem with using such strong sedatives is the potential for entering "limbo." Explained earlier, when a dreamer is killed in a dream, he normally wakes up. But going deeper into the dreamscape requires a dreamer to be more heavily sedated, so if he's killed, instead of waking up, he enters a mental place of isolation called limbo, where every minute of waking reality becomes years of dream time.

Nolan expands and contracts time as the inception is carried out aboard a plane in flight. Ten minutes in real time expands to hours in dream time, increasing as each dreamscape level is reached. A carefully orchestrated "kick" (see the Glossary of Terms)  is needed at each level to awaken dreamers from that level, eventually bringing them back to reality. Slow-motion turmoil, zero-gravity fighting, scene-freezing a van plummeting off a bridge, and Mal's final interference builds Inception's nail-biting suspense, simultaneously interfering with our perception of time passing onscreen while paradoxically forcing us to pay closer attention to what's happening as it blurs what's real, a dream, or a dream within a dream.

Like he did in The Prestige, Christopher Nolan sets up his illusory dreamscapes' rules, misdirects with them, and then surprises us with its revelations. As one character remarks "you mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."

In Inception, the dreams are indeed done on a large and mesmerizing scale.

Professor Kinema's Zacherley Fanzine Issue 2 (Part 2)

More Zach from the vault of Professor Kinema...(click to enlarge)...and Part 1

Professor Kinema's Zacherley Fanzine Issue 2 (Part 1)

From the vault of Professor Kinema...(click to enlarge)

Trading Cards: 52 Famous Murderers and No Bubblegum

One of the key elements established by the modern horror film is that you don't necessarily need monsters to generate terror. Rather, very often, as the old cliche goes, the worst monsters of all are ourselves. In other words, the real-life evils of the human mind can be far more terrifying than any make-believe supernatural entity. Perhaps that's why the serial killer sub-genre has proliferated so much in recent decades. (Vault of Horror: The Lucky 13)

I left graduate school with a degree in Forensic Psychology and a notion I could pursue a career probing the depths the human mind can sink through, assisting a criminal justice system burdened by such unsavory matters. It would be a lark, providing lots of fascinating party talk and dinner chat to titillate my listeners.

My notion was first tested when I was told to wear clip-on ties while in the agitated ward of a correctional facility--so I wouldn't be strangled by any of my spontaneous charges. It was vigorously challenged when sitting across the long, narrow table from me--on one of those days you've missed the coffee cart when you really shouldn't have--was an explosively violent young man wearing a straitjacket, threatening to jump over the table and choke the life out of me before the guard could stop him. What bothered me most wasn't how casually he said it, but that I believed he had a good chance of doing it, straitjacket or not. I looked at him very carefully and said, as calmly as possible, "that wouldn't be a good idea." He agreed and smiled. I started breathing again. I wondered if that guard, now suddenly standing very far away, had his cup of java that morning.

I gave up the notion entirely after watching another inmate perform a card trick. It's the one where each card is flawlessly used in telling a story, no matter what the arrangement after shuffling. This person didn't miss a pip as he went through all fifty-two pasteboards. I was impressed. He was very personable, fairly charming, always cheerful. I became depressed afterward when I found out he had placed his infant son in the oven and turned up the heat. Way up. It was the voices in his head, I was told. They told him to do bad things. I wondered if those voices helped him with his magic tricks, too.

Another notion soon occurred to me that perhaps pursuing a career in computing would be better than wearing clip-on ties and conducting Rorschach tests with serial stalkers. It was. Still is. My conversations at social gatherings are not as titillating, but I can live with that. Which brings me to Mother Productions' 52 Famous Murderers trading card set.

I doubt anyone would seriously want to trade these like Harry Potter's Famous Wizards Cards, or flip for them in the schoolyard like we did with Baseball cards (I always lost). And no matter how you shuffle this deck of infamous serial killers, their stories are always chilling and saddening.

So it's all right to be scared: the next time you're at the movies, tucked in your seat as you stare up at that make-believe serial killer cavorting safely-distant onscreen, look around you.

You never know who may be smiling at you.

Professor Kinema's Zacherley Fanzine Issue 1 (Part 3)

Here's the last installment of Zacher-Lore, Issue 1 (1988). But have no fear! Issue 2 of Professor Kinema's (that's Jim Knusch, natch) Zacherley fanzine, is arriving by bat-courier next week. And Vampira waits patiently in the wings--just for you, darlings.

"Jim Knusch's articles on film and TV history have appeared in numerous magazines including FilmFax, Scarlet Street, Psychotronic Video, Screem and Scary Monsters. He is also the co-editor (with Dennis Daniel) of a superb book called The Famous Monsters Chronicles, detailing the life and times of the legendary original monsterzine and its creators." (E-gor's Chamber of Horror Hosts)

Trading Cards: Midnight Madness Robot Killer

Here is the twelve-card story for Robot Killer, from Rosem's Midnight Madness Card Set. Story is by Steve Kiviat, and illustrations by Alfredo Osorio. (Copyright 1990 by Rosem Enterprises.)

(Shroud of the Undead, Jungle Parasite, The Pharaoh's Revenge)

Click on the images for a larger view.

Comic Book Review: I, Zombie 3, The Dead of Night

Zombos Says: Good

I don't know, Diogenes. How can you be sure she's a bloodsucker?

Horatio--Do you think she'd be talking to a guy like that if she wasn't?

Okay, I'll admit this is one of my guilty pleasures of comic book reading. Although Roberson and Allred keep Gwen and her odd friends squeaky clean for a brain-munching zombie, a ghost with Barbie's fashion sense, and a moonlight-afflicted hairsute friend that looks like Zombos' miniature schnauzer in a hooded sweat top, this horror-lite series is fresh and lively with color and character.

In this issue Gwen finally meets Mr. Amon, the mysterious guy in the big, spooky house, and Spot's body-hairdo gets mussed when he's outed by his nerdy friend. His other nerdy friend is in neck-deep trouble with a paintball vamp hookup, but Horatio and Diogenes, the white coat dressed pair of investigators, are close at hand to stop her blood-pecking.

Or were close at hand until Gwen falls head over heels for Horatio. Actually, Gwen was practically tossed his way by the vamp when she collided into Gwen in front of Dixie's Diner. But it looks like Gwen and Horatio's chance meeting may blossom into something more.

The vamp, by the way, is the one on the right of the cover. Vamps always dress sassy, like vamps, so they're easy to spot. I'm not sure why Gwen insists on wearing green, though; it doesn't go well with her purple skin pallor at all. Browns and earth tones are more apropos for a cute zombie like her.

Comic Book Review: X-Files/30 Days of Night 1

Zombos Says: Very Good

We've been on a lot of murders, Scully, and for the life of me, I can't recall one involving a 25-foot human popsickle. (Fox Mulder)

Wainright, Alaska.

It's going to be a very long night for Scully and Mulder: a human popsickle of headless truck drivers is sticking high out of the ground; Mulder didn't read the memo about wearing a coat; and fanged-fiends with a taste for blood and guilty pleasure for mangling their prey are afoot in the snowstorm.

Steve Niles, along with Adam Jones, serves up 30 Days of Nights' sexless, violently madcap vampires with the sexy Dana Scully and devil-may-care, madcap as a Fox Mulder in this smart crossover, six-issue series from IDW and Wildstorm.

The art by Tom Mandrake serves up the snowy drifts with the fearful nocturnals to chilling effect, making this twenty-two page issue a pleasing mouthful of setup for what promises to be a gripping story even Chris Carter can sink his teeth into for the big screen. (Chris, you owe us one, big time.) The ending splash page is one of the best hooks I've seen for picking up the next issue.

The usual old--"just stay out of our way"-- rivalries abound. Fox goes head to head with "Frenchy" and the local--way out of their depth--FBI contingent as evidence is bagged and tagged. Scully warns Mulder not to jump to the scent, but he's already hot on the trail after he learns blood's the one thing in short supply.

Between Frenchy and Mulder, want to bet who wins before the night is over?

This issue provided by DC Comics for review.