Happy Halloween Weekend, You Things From Another World, You

The above pics are from my previous review of the trick or treat episode "Catspaw" from Star Trek TOS.

Go Tell It On The Mountain

Recently, I sat down to watch a movie I knew nothing about, other than it starred Clint Eastwood and featured mountain climbing. The movie was The Eiger Sanction, and it was a pleasant surprise.

Eastwood, who also directed, played a college art history professor with the awesome name of Jonathan Hemlock. Unbeknownst to the college and the cute coeds who make googley eyes at the prof, Hemlock is also a government assassin who worked for the shadowy agency C2.

Hemlock is sent to “sanction” or terminate the people who killed one of the agency’s own. He realizes this is pointless, but accepts the work for the money which he uses to buy black market art pieces (hey, everybody got to have a hobby).

I wasn’t expecting the movie to have the “American James Bond” vibe that it did. Most of this was courtesy of Hemlock’s creepy agency boss who goes by the name, Mr. Dragon, played by Thayer David. Dragon is an albino with white eyes and a need for his office to be bathed in red light, a spectrum which he can tolerate. Hemlock and Dragon’s exchanges bring to mind those of Bond and his boss M, but with a bit more venom, as Dragon is a real asshole (both characters know this). Dragon even has a nurse named Miss Cerberus, a combination of Nurse Ratchet and Young Frankenstein’s Frau Blucher, who changes his blood!

The movie, based on a popular novel by “Trevanian” (a European sounding pseudonym for American writer Rodney William Whitaker) is slower paced than contemporary action movies, or even James Bond movies of the time. However, the mountain climbing scenes were well done – no CGI or crappy process shots - with Eastwood and company actually climbing the mountain in Europe, as well as mountains at US locations seen earlier in the film in sequences showing Hemlock training for the Euro-climb.

George Kennedy was a treat as Hemlock's old pal and climbing trainer, Ben Bowman. Here he brings a bit of the fun and energy he had in his Academy Award-winning role in Cool Hand Luke.

The movie is a little on the longish side, it could easily have had 10 minutes trimmed off, but Eastwood was in top form, as were many of the lovely unclothed ladies featured in this R-rated film. And the film is topped off by a nice romantic John Williams score.

Does The Future-NRA Know About This?

The new Fox series Terra Nova is the most expensive show on tv, with an estimated budget of $4 million per episode. But there appears to be an area where they are skimping on the dineros: props.

Now, every sci fi series has had to take "found" objects, modify them, and turn them into futuristic props of some kind. The old Star Trek was famous for taking fancy silver salt shakers and, with some snazzy sound effects, turning them into Dr. McCoy's 23rd century surgical tools.

The prop people on the original Star Wars took a German broom-handled Mauser pistol, added machined parts, a scope, a new muzzle, and created Han Solo's iconic blaster.

But Terra Nova, according to this piece at io9.com, apparently took some orange and blue plastic NERF toy guns and...just spray-painted them black to use as guns. They didn't use the NERF guns as the basis of a new cool future weapon, adding cool new parts to it, as the Han Solo weapon above was created; they just took something that was one color and painted it another.

For $4 mil per episode, I would have expected some original designs, manufactured just for the show (after all, in the storyline, the tech comes from 100 years in our future). But, seriously, spray-painted plastic NERF guns? That's something a movie with a $4,000 budget would pull.

Patroling The Highways And Byways In Style

Remember The Highwayman, the jaw-droppingly stupid 80s adventure series starring Sam J. (Flash Gordon) Jones and, in his inexplicable 15 minutes of fame, Australian weirdo Jacko as dudes who patrol the roads of the near-future in a big rig that just happens to covert into a helicopter? (Yeah, it was a Glen (Knight Rider) Larson production.)

Here's the $3 million luxury RV version, but instead of converting to a copter, they added a mini-bar. (from Yahoo News)

Marvel Short Kicks Butt

In this Marvel Films short at ComingSoon.net, we get to see just why Phil Coulson is an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Funny and cool at the same time. It will be included with the Captain America movie DVD out next week.

Avengers Assemble a Trailer

Here's the newest trailer for The Avengers movie, due out in May 2012 (via io9.com).

This. Is. Looking. Good.

Steve Jobs - Tribute

Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs passed away earlier this week at the age of 56. Mr. Jobs gave the world its first personal computers (the Apple II), popularized smartphones (the iPhone) and believed in a little computer animation company (Pixar) when others didn't.

The amazing logo above is the work of Hong Kong art student Jonathan Mak Long, which I found in this Yahoo News piece. I love it for its stark simplicity.

Catch 1970s Fever All Over Again!

When I was a junior space cadet, I lived on the movies and tv series of the 1970s.

I feasted on everything from re-runs of Star Trek, Space: 1999 and UFO, first run episodes of Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers, to Ark II, Space Academy, Return to the Planet of the Apes (animated monkeys!), and, of course, Land of the Lost on Saturday mornings.

Trips to the movies included fare such as Message from Space ("Hey, walnuts!"), Alien and some movie called Star Wars.

Now, there's a blog that helps us re-live those special, polyester-clad days - it's called Space: 1970.

Do stop by, and tell 'em Bad News From Outer Space sent ya.

Terra Nova Limps Across Our TV Screens

Alright, Terra Nova, you and me are gonna have a little chat. I just watched your two hour Fox Network pilot again, and you definitely do not have me hooked. SPOILERS AHEAD.

First of all, WHY do you want me to watch you, for what reason? It’s not the dinosaurs, which, I’m sorry, while they look like decent “Walking With Dinosaurs” caliber viz effects, they are definitely NOT “Jurassic Park”-level effects, which we as an audience are expecting. Seriously, it’s been 18 years since “Jurassic” premiered in theaters and Steven Spielberg is one of your producers. Couldn’t you just use the ILM software from back then?

Also, Spielberg apparently doesn’t want to use the same dinos from the Jurassic movies, so instead of everyone’s fave Tyrannosaurus Rex, we get their limp Cretaeous stand-ins Carnotaurs. In place of Velociraptors we get the goofy “Slashers” with their blade-tipped tails which are an entirely MADE UP species of dinosaur. I’m sorry, but you’re not simply taking liberties with animal traits/abilities (like the spitting dinos in JP), you’re just making shit up. Not cool.

Another Spielberg influence is apparently that we humans cannot be shown killing a dinosaur, even one that is trying its darnedest to slash/chew/eat/devour us. You can fire an A-Team episode's worth of ammo at the suckers but they will never fall -- "their hide is too tough" or some nonsense -- or even be scared off by the sound and muzzle flashes. This is a bunch of baloney.

The physical look of Terra Nova is great. Using amazing Australian locations, with lush jungles, craggy rocks and water falls; you’ve built a wonderful “frontier town” (although it’s just a bit TOO comfy, with its modern buildings, amenities, technology and defensive weaponry).

No, Terra Nova, the real reason I don’t like you is the Shannon family. In the future of 2149 where the story began, with its dwindling resources and severely pollution-damaged earth, there is a two child per family limit. According to the pilot, Jim and Liz Shannon simply decided to have a third child, risking their entire family’s safety in the process. Well, they are indeed found out, and Papa Shannon is sent to prison for a spell. The Shannons knowingly broke the law in having a third kid and they hid her for three years before the Terra Nova project came along to save them all. If Terra Nova didn’t exist what kind of life could their youngest kid have in 2149 (talk about an “illegitimate child” - was she going to live her whole life in the house's airduct?).

It would have been better from a story standpoint if Liz Shannon got pregnant despite taking government-supplied contraceptives, so instead of Jim Shannon telling Commander Taylor they had a third child “because it seemed like the thing to do” which is a witless moron’s answer, he could have said something a bit more profound and sympathetic, e.g., “We did everything we were supposed to; we didn’t plan to have Zoe, but her spirit would not be denied.”

Mrs. Shannon apparently comes from some means, and the overall vibe is this family gets whatever it wants. They have a third child against the rules, hubbie breaks out of a maximum security prison (apparently due to a lot of money being put in people’s hands), Zoe their little girl is taken from wherever the hell she was being held for two years while Pops Shannon was in the joint, the family is reunited and gets to start all over again in the past. They come across as over-privileged people, and that’s not someone I’d like to root for each week.

Couple of Hoods

Star Trek is a Registered Trademark and Copyright 2011 by CBS Studios Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended with this parody. Screencaps from Trekcore.com.

We Have Foreign Movie Sign!

Blastr.com has a fun post looking at foreign movie posters for some very well known American sci-fi movies.

Now most of these movies are iconic films in the genre, but you'd never guess it from these weird ass graphics. It's one thing to use Campbell's Soup cans in the Army of Darkness poster. We get it, foreign ad agency guy: the dude who plays Ash has the same last name as the "Andy Warhol soup." Fun-nee.

The Ghostbusters poster is six kinds of fucked up. What the HELL is that thing supposed to be, a jester?

The Gremlins poster looks like a cheap supermarket greeting card.

King Kong has a shark in one hand, a snake wrapped around the other, and one foot on the Titantic, but at least he's all ferocious and shit.

In the Empire Strikes Back poster, Yoda looks like he's had the contents of six vacuum cleaners dumped on his head, which is the correct look for Yoda in the PREQUELS but certainly not in Empire.

Willow...really, WTMcF?

Next Stop Blue Screen Mountain

Vulture at NYmag.com has this great clip from the new Sarah Michelle Geller series Ringer.

Now if you recall, old Hitchcock movies like North by Northwest had obvious process work, where you could plainly tell that an actor was in the studio and not on location. Same for many of the early James Bond movies where Connery was in a nice cozy English studio for the close ups of him driving his Aston Martins and such.

We see a speedboat in the clip's opening and closing moments, then they cut to Sarah, playing identical twin characters on-board. The problem is that it is OBVIOUS this was shot in a studio. Did they even TRY to match the on location lighting?

If this clip is any indication, the special effects budget is about the same as a Starbucks' vente.

Working For A Living

(With apologies to Chuck Jones.)

Star Trek is a Registered Trademark and Copyright 2011 by CBS Studios, Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended with this parody. Screencaps from Trekcore.com.

It HAD To Happen Sooner Or Later

Mainstream movies of the last several years seem to be having more explicit sex scenes; films like Ken Park, 9 Songs, Shortbus, The Brown Bunny, Lust, Caution, Antichrist, and Blue Valentine dip a toe, or other body part, into territory usually reserved for adult films (especially those that feature actual sex and not just the simulated variety).

Now comes the news that a porno company is making a sci fi film, called Horizon, with heavy emphasis on the sci fi. (This is via blastr.com.)

Great! Just what we all look for in our porn: more plot!

These porn actors and actresses have enough trouble trying to act in complex scenes involving pizza delivery and cable repair, imagine having to deliver lines about post-apocalyptic conditions on Mercury and alien invasion tactics. The mind boggles.

Up, Up, and AWAAAY!

File this under, "If I had a million bucks just lying around doing nothin'."

Sideshow Toys is offering an amazing Superman figure, based on the likeness of THE Man of Steel, the late Christopher Reeve.

The costume is spot on -- when costume designer Yvonne Blake adapted the blue and red togs from the comics to the real world, she nailed it (compare this version to the costume interpretation in the new Zack Snyder film - guess which one will be remembered the longest). The figure's body is incredible, with just the right amount of musculature to emulate/duplicate the physique that Reeve worked so hard to create (no padded-muscle-suit wearer he).

The range of motion is terrific, based on the gallery pics. The figure looks very life-like in the poses featured.

The one slight flaw is in the figure's expression. The sculptors did an astonishing job, but something about the eyes is not right. Compare this to Hot Toys work on a similar Michael Keaton-Batman figure, wear they got it 110% right.

The (Animated) Adventures of Jonny Quest

Jonny Quest, which ran for only one season in 1964, is one of the greatest animated adventure series ever made.

George Lucas must have seen this series as a geeky kid starting film school, as Jonny's adventures crossing the globe, traveling to exotic lands and encountering "scum and villainy*" (often with a supernatural bent) feel like mini-Indiana Jones tales.

I bring up this beloved series because an enterprising guy named Roger Evans has recreated the opening titles of Jonny Quest with stop-motion animated figures. It's a hoot and a half, and a real work of love. Evans does nearly shot for shot recreations, with some tweaking here and there (e.g., the Quest jet design). Here's the original article at io9.com.

And the JQ theme by Hoyt Curtain is still one of the greatest pieces of music ever composed for TV!

*yes, I know that's from Star Wars not Indy!

Monkeying around with Planet of the Apes

The latest Planet of the Apes movie, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is still chugging along nicely at the box office, proving to be a surprise hit.

You may remember its original title was Rise of the Apes, but cooler and perhaps hairier heads prevailed at Fox Studios and they put the franchise moniker "Planet of" back in there as it should be.

What you may not know is that in the reboot/rethink process the film went through several possible titles, which are presented here for the first time:

How the Planet of the Apes Got Its Groove Back

Manos: The Hairy Paws of the Planet of the Apes

To Wong Foo, Thanks For the Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes vs. Frankenstein and Jesse James

Stop! Or My Ape Will Shoot

Honey, I Shrunk the Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes 2: Electric Monkey Boogaloo

Destroy All Monkeys (Planet of the Apes in Japan)

Planet of the Apes: The Banana Hangover

Cowboys & Apes & Aliens

WTF?, Planet of the Apes

Justin Bieber: Never Say Planet of the Apes

Final Destination: The Planet of the 6pes

Tyler Perry’s Madea Straightens Out the Planet of the Apes

Your Time is Up

Writer/director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca and The Truman Show) has a new scifi film coming up called, In Time.

In the near future, units of time are bought and sold. If you want to buy something, you give them minutes of your life, if you want to live longer you have to work very, very hard for those precious extra minutes.

Here's the international trailer for In Time by way of io9.com.

Droid Safety

Here at the space station, a cute girl with an R2-D2 bike helmet gets our full attention. Now this is an item Uncle George's marketing peeps should have thought of a long time ago....

(This item was originally found at the blog Pop Candy, run by the lovely, talented and geektastic Whitney Matheson.)

Replaced have I been, Yes!

Well, the Star Wars Saga Blu-Ray release is coming up on us.

Uncle George decided to replace the puppet Yoda in Episode I: It All Goes Into the Shitter From Here with a CGI version to match the digital Yoda in Episodes II and III. io9.com's article on this has a nice pic comparing the muppet with the digi-version.

Now I love, love, love the Stuart Freeborn-created puppet used in The Empire Strikes Back, but boy oh boy, the puppet in Episode I is...just something, ain't it? LOOK AT THAT FUCKING THING! It looks like Yoda's dumb, drunk-n-hopped-up-on-painkillers, "look-alike" cousin.

Adios, fucker.

Timeline of the Planet of the Apes

Being into all things monkey, I heartily recommend this article at Rope of Silicon, where blogger Brad Brevet posts a timeline for the original five Planet of the Apes movies.

Before the Saw series became a yearly Halloween "treat" for the last few years, the period of 1970 to 1973 saw the release of a new Apes movie each year. And while the budgets for each successive movie were slashed considerably, they were able to tell some imaginative, thought-provoking, exciting and fun adventure tales that still hold up today. Original Planet of the Apes screenwriter Rod Serling would have been proud.

Stick them to the Game Grid

Here's the lightcycle chase from Tron, as interpreted by rolls of Duck Tape-brand duct tape, from io9.com.

Way awesome.

Of (Giant) Mice and Men

Ever have that dream where you wake up in the "Land of the Giants" and that creepy giant hand they always used is s-l-o-w-l-y moving in to scoop you up.

Maybe it's just me....

Anywoo, "Land of the Giants" was fortunate enough to feature not one but TWO great main title themes from the Maestro of Movie Music himself, John Williams. Here's Season One, and, my fave, Season Two.

LOOK OUT! IT' S MONDAY!

Yup, it's Monday. The start of another work week, or work weak if you prefer.

If you're like me, that's means a grief-filled day. In that spirit, here's an io9.com post about the Five Stages of Grief thru the lens of the Schwarzenegger Conan movies.

If you need a sugar rush to get through today's festivities, here's a fun piece from cracked.com looking at Marvel super-heroes and Hostess Snack Cakes. I particularly like the second item with the Hulk versus the Roller Disco Devils, which are a bunch of dudes in their mid-forties on roller skates, listening to tunes with lyrics like, "Yeah! Yeah! Baby" and "Wo! Wo!"

Review the Block!

I’ve been re-reading "Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In" by the one and only Joe Bob Briggs. It’s in that spirit that I present the following review. The drive-in will never die!

I took the landspeeder down off blocks, and since it hovered there in the air, I drove it down to the Arclight in Mos Hollywood to catch this little alien invasion flick that was made “across the pond,” as they say, in non-Communist Britain.

It’s called Attack the Block. It’s about these teenagers with funny accents who don’t own Xboxes and don't have much parenting going on, so they go around mugging women for their jewelry.

Then an alien lands smack dab into a car parked on the same street where the Little Thieving Rascals are doing their mugging.

Then the alien critter attacks the lead teenager named Moses.

Then Moses goes all Sammy Sosa on steroids on ET and kills it with a baseball bat.

Then the kids meet up with Nick Frost the neighborhood pot-head, and later the local drug dealer who wants Moses to be his new Number One Guy.

Then MORE aliens fall from the sky, except these are A LOT nastier than the one Moses clubbed.

Then the kids and the woman they mugged have to defend their ghetto block from crazy aliens while staying out of the path of the drug dealer’s bullets.

No breasts (except if you count the female alien, and I don’t). Several excellent beasts with day-glo teeth. Drive-in Academy Award nomination for John Boyega as Moses the Denzel Washington look-alike teen leader. Heads roll. Three quarts human blood. One quart alien blood. One motor vehicle chase with crash. Motorcycle, scooter and bicycle chases with minimal crashes. No kung fu. Samurai sword fu. Baseball bat fu. Kitchen knife fu. Oven fu. Not a lot of plot to slow things down. Excellent tunes from bands I never heard of. Three stars, BNFOS says check it out.

Of Capes and Cowls

The amazing folks at io9.com have some cool first photos from two very anticipated movies.

First up is the dreamy Anne Hathaway in her Catwoman garb from The Dark Knight Rises. From the pic, it looks like the thieving kitty stole the Bat's wheels.

And here is the first look at star Henry Cavill all suited up as Superman in Man of Steel. I like the tone of the image, what with all the sparks, rubble and busted metal, and I like that they're not using the Brandon Routh version of the costume, but, seriously, what is with the textured look to the costume?

Ever since the first Spider-Man movie, does every superhero costume has to have shit, i.e. a printed pattern, all over it? (Or was it Billy Zane's The Phantom that started the trend? But in that movie the Phantom's costume was more or less "tattooed" with tribal art and skulls, things associated with the character, and not just some silly grid pattern.) Are solid colors simply verboten? That aesthetic even carried over into the 2009 Star Trek film reboot, with the little delta symbol plastered all over their uniforms instead of having it simply be a solid color. The new Spider-Man reboot costume looks like it was made primarily from recycled basketballs due to the silly patterns in it.

Christopher Reeve and his classic costume showed you don't need little textured crap all over everything. It showed you need a very talented actor to bring the character to life. The actor makes the costume work, not vice versa.

Pot, Kettle

Star Trek Copyright 2011 and a Registered Trademark of CBS Studios, Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended with this parody. Screencap from Trekcore.com.

Transformers 3 Fried My Circuits

Star Trek is Copyright 2011 and a Registered Trademark of CBS Studios, Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended with this parody. Screencaps from Trekcore.com.

We're Mad about Cracked!

For perhaps the first time in history, we get TWO comic book movies released in the same month: X-Men: First Class came out yesterday and on June 17 Green Lantern will hit the big screen.

To celebrate this momentous moment in human/mutant/alien history, I've been reading some very funny shit on Cracked.com, like "5 Comic Book Movies Way Worse Than Batman and Robin," which includes such gems as the Captain America and Nick Fury tv movies. If you didn't know, tv Cap's shield is just a giant plastic see-thru Frisbee. Why? Perhaps so he can peep at the totally creepy David Hasselhoff and the puppies pic posted in the article.

There's also "The 7 Least-Faithful Comic Book Movies," which pokes the fun at Stallone's Judge Dredd flick (say it with me now, "I EM the law!") and the aforementioned, and much Bat-nipple-adorned, Batman and Robin. Perhaps my favorite comic book movie-related Cracked post is this one: 5 Upcoming Comic Book Movies That Must Be Stopped, which looks at some long in development pictures, including Shazam!, Sub-Mariner, Luke Cage, and two heroes who actually made it to the screen this year, Thor and Green Lantern. Yes, this Cracked article is a few years old, but we hear at Bad News From Outer Space bow to all things funny, and besides that whole space/time continuum is a twisty, bendy river that flows back into itself, or some shit like that.

Some choice observations from that last article: "The Green Lantern is more of a class or profession than it is a man. Similar to "the sheriff" or "the mayor," or "an asshole,"" "according to the movies the vast majority of gangland activity before 1991 was comprised of double-dutch competitions, choreographed roller skating and breakdancing to save the community center from an evil strip-mall developer,"and "(Sub-Mariner's) powers are roughly equivalent to that of a jacked-up Aquaman, a character most famous for being ridiculously useless."

Great Bird

Star Trek is Copyright 2011 and a Registered Trademark of CBS Studios, Inc. No infringement of these rights is intended with this parody. Screencaps from Trekcore.com.