So here is an animated series that I think would have been quite popular, but sadly no network was willing to pick it up so all we have is this 4 minute demo reel.
Shows that could have been
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Category Archives: Horror
Sunday Night Movie: Journey To The Seventh Planet
So there I was last night playing around with the Netflix instant queue on my Xbox 360 when I saw this title pop up.
Hmm, this is a 50′s SF film I had never heard of and I was in the mood for something light and fairly mindless. A badly imagined trip to the planet Uranus just was the thing.
This film from 1962 is Danish. I wonder just how many danish SF films are there? T stars John Agar who made a career out fo B-Sf films though this particular movie is several grade lower than his standard fare.
It starts with voice-over narration to let us know that it is the year 2001 and mankind has made the earth a paradise. There are no nations and no wars and all of man energies have been harnessed for peaceful and exploratory goals. To quote the narration: ‘All the planets close to the sun, including Saturn, have been explored.’ The writers were clearly using values of ‘close’ that are unfamiliar to me.
Anyway the UN has noticed regular radiation pulses coming from the planet Uranus and has dispatched an international crew to investigate and see if there is life. There is little expectation for life as they suspect that the planet has a surface temperature of negative 400 degrees. As they enter orbit and a brief period of weightlessness an alien intelligence, vast, cool, and unsympathetic —wait that’s from a better story — the evil alien mind takes over theirs and probes it for their dreams and fears. (1962? I wonder if this film was a favorite of Gene Roddenberry?)
They land and the landscape around the ship changes from bleak and frozen to lush and rich woodland. Our intrepid crew don’t realize this ’cause apparently they have no external cameras. They plan to take hours testing the suddenly hospitable atmosphere before exiting the ship. The Evil Alien Presence — as impatient as an author awaiting a rejection slip — opens the door to their craft flooding it with rich breathable air.
Freaked beyond measure, the crew logically decided to leave and head for home. No they didn’t, they went ahead and walked outside, sans suits. I couldn’t PAY my players to be that stupid.
They quickly encounter old flames, childhood homes, and apple trees, all apparently equally loved by the repercussive crewmen. Let’s not consider where the apple-fetish might take us,
Further exploration indicates that a forcefield surrounds their landing site. A handy stick can be pushed through the field so they know it can be penetrated, but have no way to determine what the conditions are beyond. With due care and planning remote probes are sent through the barrier to ascertain the conditions. You don’t believe me do you? Well, you’re right. The German kid, on his first mission, sticks his arm through and finds out what it feels like to be a frozen TV dinner. Lucky for him the budget did not include one-arm effects and he is allowed to recover in a day with no ill effects.
The rest of the film is the crew exploring the frozen world in very thick non-pressure suits, encountering lovely ladies and accepting them as their long lost loves, fighting giant one-eyes bipedal rats, and fighting with a Cycloptic-brain that pulses radiation at 750 roentgens.
If you are into MST3K fare, but without Joel and the Bots then this might be for you.
The Horror, the horror
The End times are here.Both H.P. Lovecraft and Harlan Ellison have come to ….Scooby doo.
Sunday Night Movie:The Exorcist
When Chris MacNeil’ s daughter Regan begin behaving strangely, Chris does what any mother would do and takes Regan to the doctors. Despite advanced technology and level of medical examination that borders on medieval torture the doctors can find no cause for Regan’s increasing bizzare and violent acts.
When Chris’s director dies mysteriously after visiting Regan Chirs is pushed out of the light of reason and enlightenment and is forced to confront the growing possibility that Reagon is possessed.
With only the help of Father Karras a priest whose own faith has shattered, Chris must find the one person who can save Regan’s soul, The Exorcist.
Weekend Update
So today I hung out with my pal Bear. It was a typical Sunday Afternoon for us. First we visited our local specialty bookstore, Mysterious Galaxy. I did not buy anything as my ‘to read’ stack is currently five books high. (I personally am not a fan of buying books when I have not finished reading the ones I purchased the trip before.) Then a quick stop at our local games store Game Empire — nicely located next to Mysterious Galaxy — where I picked up an expansion deck for Munchkin as a gift to my sweetie-wife.
We had a large lunch at Outback Steakhouse. hmm I love that Sundays I do not count calories. we discussed my re-invented zombies and I am pleased to say that now two friends — both fans of the zombie movie genre — have enjoyed the ideas I bounded around about re-inventing the zombie. I still am not sure that I have a plot that will fully form, but it could be that it will just take time. My Macbeth ideas bounced around my skull for nearly a decade before they became Cawdor late last year.
I am very sorry that Conjecture’s programming looked so weak this year. I love going to my local conventions, but I am there primarily for programming and it is on that basis that I judge if a con was a failure or a success for myself.
Revenants
So tonight I continued work on my zombie idea. I am really taken with the mechanics of my revenants, and what that means in a larger context. The fantasy/horror version of our world is falling into place and the first broad strokes of plot are also starting to form a puzzle.
You see the plot is a puzzle me before it is a puzzle for my readers. I’ll get the plot in bits and in pieces. I have to find ways of tying those bits into a whole, usually by means of the proper characters and the proper viewpoint.
Still, if I undertake this project it will be my biggest challenge to date. A real world setting, a novel length horror story, and a reinvention of what is now a very solid monster.
A visit by a goddess
So there I was at work today, my mind slightly wandering between tasks when suddenly a goddess visited me. Of course if I were an artist I would cite the muse as the deity that brought a bright and sudden illumination to my mind, but since i am not an artist I’ll blame Ereshkigal Summerian goddess of the dead.
That would be fitting as my lighting quick inspiration was about the dead, or more specifically the undead. After watching The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue, cinematic zombies have been on my mind. To tell the truth they are never very far from it anyway. I have always had a fascination with survival situations and the Zombie Apocalypse ranks right up there in fun though and game experiments.
Even if you posit the existence of supernatural undead who attack and consume the living the sort of apocalypse envisioned by filmmakers simply isn’t possible. The hard cold mathematics are there simply are not enough dead people lying about to cause that sort of carnage.
According to the CDC the death rate in the United States is 803.6 per 100,000 per year. (stats are from 2007.) Let super impose that on my hometown of San Diego California. San Diego City has a population of 1,359,132 and so statistically has 10,921.98 death per year. That breaks down to 29.90 deaths per day. The top three causes of death are Heart Disease, Cancer, and Stroke all of which are primarily diseases of the elderly and constitute 25.4%, 23.2%, and 5.6% percent of death respectively. These three causes total to 54.2% of all deaths. The majority of your zombies are going to be frail old bodies that break easily.
So let’s wave our wand and revivify all the dead in san Diego for the last three days. That’s going to be 89.7 zombies, of which 48.6 are going to be ex-Senior Citizen Zombies. (Those beyond three days are almost certainly in the ground or burnt and hardly a threat to anyone.)
San Diego City has an area of 372.1 square miles. This yields in our zombie apocalypse .24 zombie per square mile, and most of those are old frail bodies. I think a scenario of 1 zombie ever 4.14 square miles is a very under-control situation.
The outlook for a zombie apocalypse grows even fainter when you realize that most people die in hospitals. The bodies are one, locked in cold vault and unable to get at victims to spread the infection and two in a situation where is it easy to lock down and isolate the carriers. Yes, you in the back? Oh, you want to point out that it takes only a single bite to transform a human to a zombie. Good point, but remember the Zombie consume their victims. In a fight where the zombie clearly wins, there is no transformation because the victim body has been destroyed not converted. We only have conversions when there is a partial victory by the zombie. A bitten vicitm who escapes to die later. Not a very good vector for a rapid spread disease.
The explosion of epiphany I had today was a zombie scenario that can yield a zombie apocalypse. I envisioned a new zombie. One that certainly draws up the ghouls from George A Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead, and also on the zombies of the Caribbean with additional influences from revenant mythology.
I found my mind just running away from me with ideas and details about how this new undead ghoul would work and the unique dangers it presented. Story elements began to present themselves and scenes started to play in the theater of my mind. I can’t go into details here. I think — I’m not certain — but I think I may have my first horror novel germinating in my grey matter.
I have never written a horror novel, and I have never written a novel set in the here and now; so there are real challenges ahead of me. Not the least of which is that no solid story may develop, but it will not be from lack of trying!
Sunday Night Movie:The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue
Like another movie I own, Planet Of The Vampires, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is a film that has been released under a bewildering array of titles. Released in 1974 this is a zombie movie that is post-Night of The Living Dead (1968) but preceded both films that ushered in the Zombie Apocalypse®, Zombie and Dawn of the Dead (1979.)
Placed in such a unique position in zombie movie chronology The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is a film particular to its time and place in history. For quite a while it was wholly unavailable on home video and therefore rarely seen. I myself had not heard of this Italian/Spanish co-prpduction until it was mentioned during Zombie week at tor.com.
Today the Zombie Apocalypse® is a well established meme in the greater trans-world culture. Nearly everyone knows what is meant by the Zombie Apocalypse® and it is a common parlor game to thought-experiment your survivalist victory against the hordes of undead. In these thought-scenerios the undead are nearly always the ghouls envision by George A Romero in his film Night of The Living Dead. If one is a heretic, you propose an apocalypse of Zack Snyder’s fast zombie from the re-make of Dawn of The Dead, but most purist reject these zombies. (I do not, I own both versions the 1979 and the 2004 on home video.) If one is utterly desiring of death and failure, you might go with the Dan O’Bannon zombies of Return Of The Living Dead, but really who is interested in an apocalypse of indestructible zombies? Continue reading
Sunday Night Movie: The Ghoul
So, yesterday I was cruising through instant view movies on Netflix and I came across a 1933 film, The Ghoul, with Boris Karloff. In the 
mood for something different, I added it to my queue to be my Sunday Night Movie.
The Ghoul is story about an Egyptologist who has become so enamored with his subject that he now believes that the religion of the ancient Egyptians is factual. He spend the majority of considerable fortune on acquiring a mystic gem that reputedly can grant immortality to a person if it is sealed with the person in their tomb.
(Apparently it is immortality on the other-side, not here. on Earth.)
Because the gem is very valuable there are a lot of people willing to do violence and deceit to steal it. Because he was rich and spent it all there are heirs who are cross and unsure what is happening. Of course no one believes the ancient story and dismisses the notion that to steal the gem from the tomb will cause said Egyptologist to rise from the dead and seek out the gem, murdering all who stand in his way.
Okay, that is a pretty decent set-up for a horror film. Sadly, this is not the film they delivered. This is a scooby-doo movie. Everything at the end of the movie has a ‘rational’ explanation. Rational is in quotes because if I think it through the explanation cannot stand up to fact as presented.
Spoiler alert……proceed no further if you care about spoilers concerning a film released in 1933.
The Egyptologist is shown weak and dying in his bed (see above). He can bare sit up he is so weak. Later, after he escapes his tomb because he had been ‘buried alive’ he’s running about, overpowering much young men and killing them, and bending iron bars with his bare hands. For a guy on his deathbed just hours earlier he’s one kick ass dude!
While there are plenty of interesting ideas and set-ups, this film just doesn’t work. I would have preferred something with the supernatural in it rather than meddling kids.
DVD Review: The Lost Skeleton Returns Again!
A few years ago, before I had met my lovely sweetie-wife, I saw a charming movie at the local Art House theater. The movie was The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. A tongue in cheek send up of bad SF/monster movies of the late 50′s and early 70′s. the film gave us many memorable comedy bits including the famed Amish Terrarium. If you have not seen this movie you need to see it.
Yes, not every scene works as well as it could have. Some scenes drag on too long, but overall I enjoyed the movie.
This week the sequel hit the DVD shelves. It’s rare that I buy a DVD without having seen the movie, but I was willing to take that risk with a Lost Skeleton sequel.
The good news is I felt I got my money’s worth. This was charming and funny. It was clear that the cast enjoyed working with each other again. (those whose characters had died in the first film were playing the twins of those original characters.)
Unlike cheap SF films of the era they actually tried to shoe-horn in character growth as part of the comedy and it mostly worked.
What didn’t work was that this film by its very nature could not be as original at the first. Many of the jokes are extensions of gags and jokes used in the first film. Because of that they lose punch and comedy needs punch.
There is nothing in the film as original or as quote worth as the aforementioned ‘Amish Terrarium.’
I can’t wholeheartedly recommend buying this DVD unless it really strike your fancy. Best rent it first.