You know, I’ve never actually really believed that death is inevitable. I just think it’s a rumor.

- David Carradine

David Carradine Dies [New York Times]

Woe is the giant monster movie. In recent years it has fallen by the wayside, its corpse bludgeoned by the likes of Matthew Broderick and shaky-cam footage. For the giant monster movie enthusiast, the film landscape is a wasteland, populated by the picked over bones of long forgotten titans. Luckily there are those that remember fondly the heady days of Godzilla and Gamera.

The Asylum are a group of such like-minded people and do they have the perfect film for you, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. Even the title lets you know that they are not fucking around. There will be no philosophical exposition here about, say, man’s impact on the environment. No, this movie is about a shark that can eat the Golden Gate bridge and an octopus that can crush a submarine with one arm going head to head to see just who is the most bad-ass imaginary monster in the world. Period. End of story.

What, you need more? How about Lorenzo Lamas and Deborah Gibson? Yeah, you read that correctly. Go ahead, picture it in your mind: A silhouette of a man on steel wheels rises over the hill, a blood red sky to his back. Suddenly, a voice!

He was an octopus cop, and good at his job. But he committed the ultimate sin, and testified against other octopus cops gone bad. Octopus cops that tried to kill him, but got the shark he loved instead. Framed for murder, now he prowls the badlands. An outlaw hunting outlaws, a bounty hunter, a Renegade.

Then, BAM, right into “Foolish Beat”. Then a giant shark jumps out of the water and eats a goddamn jumbo jet.

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus trailer : poeTV : Thanks, kid icarus!

December 2008 marked the passing of an era in photography as Polaroid Corporation ceased manufacturing instant film, meaning that soon the only way you’ll be able to admire their otherworldly ability to rob reality of spacial relationships will be at garage sales and on Flickr. lens culture posted this fantastic infomercial for the SX-70, the quintessential instant camera. Watching this ad, with its detailed animation of the internal voodoo taking place inside the camera’s body and the chemical process of the self-developing film I’m struck by the ingenuity of “vintage” technology. There’s something about these kinds of devices that I find infinitely more interesting than current gadgets.

I think it has mostly to do with the fact that this kind of gadget is much more about miniaturization than anything. While current technology has a preoccupation — one could say obsession — with combining as many disparate facets of modern existence into a single carapace, something like the SX-70 was meant solely to shrink an otherwise bulky endeavor; in this case the entirety of a photo-lab physically crammed into an object that could fit inside a coat pocket. As astounding as the abilities of a Blackberry may be, it pales in comparison to the idea of, say, a tiny, collapsible printing press.

Polaroid SX-70 Ad [YouTube] : lens culture

Twelve years ago author and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson received a call from a man named Tony. Tony was interested in obtaining a copy of a documentary Ronson did about the Holocaust for his employer, whose name he did not wish to reveal. After some cajoling Ronson finally extracted the gentleman’s name. Turns out it was Stanley Kubrick.

That was the last Ronson heard until a few years after the legendary director’s death when Tony called and asked if he would like to come poke around Kubrick’s mansion. What Ronson found there was a cinemaphile’s wet dream: thousands of boxes containing thousands of meticulously organized photos, memos, and letters, years of Kubrick’s career minutely categorized and filed. Ronson would spend five years sifting through them before they were carted off to their new home at the University of the Arts London.

Continue Reading…

Giants poke and prod the denizens of Fritz Lang’s vast city, doing their best to bend them to the filmmaker’s will.

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Up until now the only way one could see Metropolis — Fritz Lang’s cinematic masterpiece — in its original, uncut form was to build a time machine and travel back to Berlin between January and May, 1927. When it was released in America, Paramount edited it considerably, leaving us with the beautiful, yet confusing, version we have today. All this has changed recently with the discovery of the previously lost footage in the film archives of Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires by the current curator Paula Félix-Didier.

Among the footage that has now been discovered, according to the unanimous opinion of the three experts that ZEITmagazin asked to appraise the pictures, there are several scenes which are essential in order to understand the film: The role played by the actor Fritz Rasp in the film for instance, can finally be understood. Other scenes, such as for instance the saving of the children from the worker’s underworld, are considerably more dramatic.

ZEITmagazin has a number of stills from the newly found footage available to peruse and one can see that they show a fair degree of wear. This does little to diminish my excitement. Metropolis has always been a movie that I have loved and the opportunity to see Lang’s original vision is simply fantastic.

“Metropolis”: Key scenes from the famous movie rediscovered [Zeitmagazin] : Coilhouse

A few months ago Vanity Fair recreated some of Hitchcock’s most famous scenes for its Hollywood Portfolio issue; pulling imagery not just from the more popular of his films, but also those frequently relegated to the realm of Hitchcockian fanatics.

The results are brilliant, and remain true to Hitchcock’s horror-noir sensibilities rather than galumphing off into a demesne of half-cocked ideas conjured by those with no love for for the molasses paced fright-fests for which Hitchcock is famous. It’s highly recommended you click through to If It’s Hip It’s Here’s juxtaposition of Vanity Fair’s images against the original scenes from which they drew inspiration.

Vanity Fair’s Hitchock Shots Compared [If It’s Hip It’s Here]

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the most profound. Photographer Sam Taylor-Wood’s project “Crying Men” consists of images of celebrities, all men, simply sobbing. In one way or another the subject of each photo is a masculine figure, making the heartbreak etched in the faces of those who were able to summon a memory painful enough to elicit a convincing reaction all the more poignant.

I am not particularly interested in what essentially amounts to the hero-worship of American Royalty. I do not care about these men. But their sadness, achingly conveyed in the shattering of their celebrity facade, makes me feel some strange connection with them. As if in despair we’ve found our common ground.

Crying Men [Arab Aquarius : NotCot]

When word started spreading in Seattle that someone was making a film entitled Cthulhu my local ilk became cautiously excited. Not only was someone taking a shot at producing a quality piece of Lovecraftian cinema, they were doing so locally. Unfortunately, the film ended up being a confused mess of sloppily applied Lovecraftian mythos infused with a political and sexual agenda.

In the latest issue of The Stranger (Seattle’s local alterna-newspaper), Cthulhu’s screenwriter Grant Cogswell published a piece outlining the long, torturous journey that was getting the film completed. It’s quite a read, detailing depression, suicide attempts, insane parties, drug abuse, and the eventual realization that sometimes it takes more than hard work. However I’ll spare you all the hard lessons of Mr. Cogswell by outlining exactly where he went wrong.

Continue Reading…

Eliza put out a call for suggestions and the Ectomite Hive Mind responded with a bevy of bizarre links and nostalgic requests leaving us with a hodge-podge of old childhood favorites and surreal art-house films. Thanks to everyone who took the time to post and if you don’t see your contribution here, rest assured it will make an appearance in the very near future. Now, go Ectomomites! TO THE JUMP!

Continue Reading…

Two sentences was all it took to get me more interested in a film than I’ve been in years. Hopefully this — in concert with Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow — is the beginning of a new golden age in the pulp scifi of yesteryear being brought to the theater.

Iron Sky [Synabetic]

“The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultraviolence.”

A Clockwork Potato: Milk-Plus [Mr. PotatoMash] : Toycutter

Is it art? I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that it appears to be a creature out of The Dark Crystal with huge, pendulous testes, hanging from gymnastics rings and covered in stick-pins. Yup, thanks John.

Abdopus aculeatus octopi lead a life of sex, murder, and gender obfuscation but only once. After that they die. Thanks to Jenny and everyone else who sent this one in!

Welcome your new cephalopod masters with a t-shirt. Thanks, Vinnchan.

Hikashu, who appears to have been Japan’s answer to the Talking Heads, sings “Puyo Puyo”. Thanks, bubliki!

The trailer for Angels and Idiots, a new film by animation god Bill Plympton. Thanks, Monkey!

Photo: Pink chirashi apartment mailbox advertising in Japan [YenX] : Thanks, Mark

As you know yesterday was Brownlee’s birthday which meant that today I had to take an extra long shower. It’s no use though, no matter how long I scrub I just can’t get clean. In any event here is a nice little animated sandwich of spoof-tastic Fox Kids and Kids’ WB cartoons between two, moist slices of anime. I hope they will entertain you, our loyal readership, and I pray that, perhaps, they will help me to repress the events of last evening. Please, God…

• FLCL: We’ve entered the final half of this spectacular mini-series, and only two more to go. Will you just look at those eyebrows.

•Eek! The Cat and The Terrible Thunderlizards: Eek! did a number of film spoofs during its run and the two that stand out, to me, are “Lord of the Fleas” in which Eek is trapped in a shopping mall with some penguins — one of whom hysterically exclaims “Shut-up, Piggy!” — and this episode entitled “Eekpocalypse Now!, which thoroughly hits upon every major joke one could make about Coppola’s film. This one is for the adults, unless you were an eight year-old who loved movies about Vietnam. The Terrible Thunderlizards was its own show but was later merged with Eek! to create a variety show more like our next two entries.

•Tiny Toons: “A Quack in the Quarks” is the second episode of this seminal show and features a loose parody of Star Wars and a plethora of fourth wall shattering humor. In this episode Plucky Duck is kidnapped by aliens to Planet X to save it from the nefarious plot of Duck Vader. This was the beginning of a real golden age of Warner Brothers cartoons in the late 80s/early 90s that include Animaniacs, Freakazoid, and the Animaniacs spin-off Pinky and The Brain. Oh, and a Watchmen reference!

•Animaniacs “Super Strong Warner Siblings” is a brilliant send-up of the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers which always marked the end of cartoon time. Animaniacs also did an Apocalypse Now parody which, while excellent, did not follow the plot as closely as Eek!. Next up is one of the many “Good Idea, Bad Idea” clips followed by my favorite, Pinky and The Brain. In this episode, entitled “Battle for the Planet”, Brain once again acknowledges his Orson Welles influence by attempting to fake an alien invasion ala the Mercury Theater’s broadcast of War of the Worlds.

•Paranoia Agent: Someone has some unpleasant secrets…

Saturday Morning Cartoons XXVI [YouTube]

Back in the early 90’s David Cronenberg adapted Naked Lunch to film, a release that had a profound effect on my development, introducing me not only to the works of Cronenberg but also Burroughs and then further into the strange labyrinth of cinema and beat poetry. Naturally, the film was received with a mixed reaction; an unsurprising turn of events considering the combination of both Cronenberg and Burroughs was likely to stir the hornets nest of fanboyism for the latter. Personally, I found my first (and subsequent) viewing of it similar to the abject horror followed by near post-coital bliss of the insipid Reese’s commercials from the 80’s; two great tastes that did indeed taste great together.

While I could prattle on about my love for Cronenberg, Burroughs, and the combination of the two artist’s work for hours on end I’m also able to admit it’s not going to be to everyone’s tastes. Regardless, if you’re enough of a thick-skulled bint not to wholly appreciate the film in its entirety (it’s ok, we still love you, but you only get half an Octobee for Christmas this year), simply mute your TV; because this movie is pure eye-candy ladies and gents. Hit the jump for more stills from Naked Lunch.

Continue Reading…