Allow me to present Eric Fogel’s The Adventures of Mutilator: Hero of the Wastelands. Mr. Fogel was a staple of 90s era MTV having created both The Head and the more popular Celebrity Deathmatch. Neither of these shows is worthy to lick one of Mutilator’s boots. Animated in the crudest manner possible, Mutilator is a tour de force of constantly shifting perspectives, unnatural spacial relationships, and absurd violence. Combine thses with a classic, 80s, post-apocalyptic synthesizer soundtrack, theme song by Deth Boat and ridiculously terse dialogue — “My arm needs bandaging; your skin will suffice.” — and you have a masterpiece of schlocky toonage. Seriously, it’s worth it just for the scene in the second video where Mutilator appears to dance his way towards a nefarious enemy before plunging his hands through the fellow’s torso. His dance is the dance of death.
Keeping with the fine Japanese, cinematic tradition of unconstrained insanity and over-the-top violence, comes Tokyo Gore Police by the same people who brought the world Machine Girl. The “plot” of Tokyo Gore Police is as follows: in the future, Tokyo is in the grip of a plague which allows infected individuals to turn their wounds into weapons. These individuals are called Engineers and in order to keep them under control a private, heavily armed police force — whose members are imaginatively named “Engineer Hunters” — is created.
All of this takes place in a world where the denizens of Tokyo are so tumid with fluids that one would expect to hear it sloshing in their bulbous, distended limbs as they waddled about. The aforementioned ability to use one’s wounds as weapons also leads to some inventive situations, such as a gentleman using his severed penis as a cannon, a woman who sprays acid from her chest after being separated from her breasts, and a woman whose torso terminates in a toothsome toothy, alligator vulva. The level of gore in this trailer reaches such a hysterical pitch that at times it appears that the filmmakers have stooped to just throwing rubber organs in the air and spraying fake blood on the camera lens. In one scene I cannot even be sure if what is being depicted is a truck driving through a pile of mannequin parts or if said parts are supposed to be human bodies.
Needless to say this clip is NSFW and brilliant in a way only something so completely ridiculous can be.
Joseph Sigenthaler has spent the last 22 years creating strangely proportioned busts from all manner of materials including oil, resin, hair, acrylic, wax, and fabric. His work is regarded as grotesque by many but I find it strangely endearing. The odd other-worldlyness of each sculpture reflects my own unique strangeness, seemingly saying, “In this place, there are others like you.”
Harma Heikens’s work combines mutant babies, prepubescent girls, pigs, and Hans Bellmer to create sculptures that elicit admiration for the imagination on display as well as feelings of acute discomfort. Of course, they might also just elicit a cry of “What the fuck!?”
Strange coincidences and eerie alignments this Tuesday morning. Steve Scott is a London based animation director and illustrator who also, apparently, has some sort of telepathic ability that has allowed him to lick the collective brain of Ectomo. This piece, entitled The Society of Victorian Mutants is as close as I believe I’ve seen to summing up the fetishes of Ectoplasmosis’s hive-mind in their entirety.
We don’t think it goes to far to say that Ectomo and Steve -if we may be so bold- should, and shall, be Best Friends Forever and we can hang out and do each other’s make-up and talk about tentacles and Cthulhu. We are sure of this, surer than anything in our entire, short lives. Make haste and hit up his site for an impressive collection of moustaches, Victorian fashion, robots, and pin-ups. Also, could you to pass him this note: “Do you like Ectomo? Circle one: Yes No”
For some reason bear skin rugs seem fairly popular here in the Pacific Northwest. My daily net-based bargain hunting usually brings me across at least one, although often I find several of varying sizes and description. Now while the pelt of an animal that could easily rend me limb from limb gracing my floors is an appealing prospect the compulsory indoctrination of all Seattle residents to be animal-loving waterheads took root long ago and I simply can’t bring myself to buy a bear skin.
But that’s ok; for while killing a bear for its pelt is a horrendous thought to me, the idea of a horrific, child-eating monster meeting justice as my rug is just fine. I will sleep well at night, my belly full of “cruelty-free” faux-chicken and green tea, secure in the knowledge that these hideous freaks simply must be destroyed.
If asked what I thought was going on this picture I would say a not wholly unwilling deer is caught in the amorous embrace of a frog monster. The deer struggles, yet for all the world bears a look of acceptance and perhaps even pleasure. The deer knows what is in store for her, to be loved tenderly, devoured horribly, and cast aside like so much befouled venison. Perhaps most disturbing about this work is that it doesn’t even being to plumb the depths of surreal horror that is the artwork of Mr. Furie.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
