The Jong who stole Christmas: THE RING around the ROSEWATER (or I'm dreaming / of a BLACK MIRROR)

"What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world." ---Jean Baudrillard

“Nothing says solid like a cloud,” - Jon Hamm 

If Baudrillard was alive today he'd be rolling around in his grave, trying to claw his way out of the earthen simulacrum, because a Palm d'coco de oro treatise on today's events would write itself. The sheer 'told you so' power (he declared the image had replaced the real as the dominant paradigm in modern society) would revive him to live another thousand digital ages. His quote above was made a long long time before today, the day our theater chains surrendered to a virtual terrorist and the dominos tumbled and a pair of stoner comedians created the most bizarre post-modern international incident since WikiLeaks. It's more post-modern than a Julian Assange biopic leaked on the internet and satirized by SNL.

The post-modern satirized be future shall happens!

Actually, there is no precedent for something like this at all... at least not in 'real' life, but as this incident makes clear, real life has been eclipsed by the virtual. The only TV show that seems real enough in its surreal dystopian nightmare reflection of our internet age's inevitable future is the BBC TV series BLACK MIRROR. I've been sticking their logo over every picture I can find (above and below) in an attempt to situate the surreal events of today (and yesterday) in a context by which their high strangeness might be appreciated in its full Baudrillardian splendor. In 'real life,' Sony has been extra-dimensionally skewered --a 3D sword sticking through a 2D movie screen simulacrum--the alleged giant kowtowing to the ornery David while it struggles to shake off the disorientation from being slingshotted. It's just a dumb comedy, after all. But Americans all implicitly understand that comedy is serious business especially since dictators--like militant feminists and fundamentalist extremists--tend to not understand the complexity of satire or critique or even how fiction works. If you make an action film with a bad guy saying he wants to kill the president, they might arrest the actor who said it. Witness the directorial debut of Jon Stewart, ROSEWATER, about a British-Iranian journalist detained and tortured after being interviewed by a Stewart show correspondent Jason Jones pretending to be a stereotypical cold war CIA spook.

Meanwhile there's a show that came out this past Tuesday on BBC Channel 4, a 78 minute BLACK MIRROR Christmas special and it makes the nightmare post-modern digital-internet worlds conjured by the first two seasons seem like Candyland. It even puts Jon Hamm through the ringer. Have those Brits no mercy? Is this what happens when you let atheism get in the way of peace of mind? What is Christmas even mean when such things can happen in "the world."?

This was a time for America to put its ass where it's mouth is, and stand up to a Napoleonic complex bully who talks really big but has limp missiles. But when that same kid uses the very TV-media-internet complex you see him on against you, grabs you right through it and shuts off your lights like Samara in THE RING, then you better do what people had to do to avoid being dragged down the well by Samara in that film --show someone else that weird avant garde film she made with her mind, or in this case the reverse, not show anyone the film you made about how her art is pretentious.

I'll shut up. In case she's right now snaking through the intricate back alleys of the web and on her way towards me. Just to avoid it, here's the video!



What BLACK MIRROR "White Christmas" trades on is more of an eternal Buddhist hell, making the idea of eternal torment through sheer maddening boredom and stasis (as being trapped in a virtual simulacrum world for centuries and centuries with nothing to do and no need to sleep or eat) feel horrifyingly tangible in ways Christian imagery of flames and pitchforks (or enemas and electroshock) just can't quite match. We don't know what burning in torment forever is like, but we've all been bored --and that really does feel like eternity. The recently released CIA torture report is, by contrast, a lark. And Samara's killing habit seems merciful. After all, there's no one watching once Samara's victims are taken. They don't have any demon with a sackcloth waiting just off camera to grab their freed souls before they can swim up to the white light, and keep them trapped in the well with them for ten thousand centuries. Samara Morgan isn't 'real' and Naomi Watts, our post-modern mother of mirrors isn't really scared of her. But neither is Seth Rogen's stoner scared of Kim Jong's Phantom Menace.

More terrifying than a thousand Jasons

But that doesn't allay our terror, the fear of having our one place of amniotic safety--the screen, the 'black mirror' (i.e. you can see your reflection when it's off)--used against us. Beyond just VERTIGO-style deja vu flashes of being Jimmy Stewart still hanging from the infinite height of the infinite gutter, I learned today all about the true nightmare that's just a couple decades of technology away. It's already too late to even think about going off-grid to escape it. You'd only wake the demons with the sack cloths: "We got another runner." Best to just wait and be a good boy and be nice to animals and children, and full of prayer and wise oaths, then when the modern instance of your death comes, go quietly and race with all your might towards that white light.. Because at any moment, someone could just hit pause.

So I'm going to bed and actually pray. Because in the words of the great Curtis Mayfield, "if there's a hell below / we're all / going to go."

On vinyl, invincible

Man, though, could he play guitar. "Move on Up" alone is proof we've got a friend upstairs. French intellectuals like Baudrillard can note America's fictive dominance, but if there's one thing we know, it's how to stay true to the funk even as the flames of perdition consume us, be they Christian, Buddhist, or Hollywood's. After all, we have done our share of consuming, it's only fair we be consumed too, in the end. That's karma -- cuz everything you do / you do it to you. So c'mon Buddha, c'mon Jesus, c'mon Elijah, c'mon Krishna, c'mon St. Michael, St. Anthony, and St. Francis, St. Vincent. Save us from the horrifying fate of being blocked, cloned, or duplicated, or digitized. Yea as we walk through the Uncanny Valley towards our full pixelation, we call on you, SWEET EXORCIST... on vinyl!

Retrofuturist Pharma III: The "Metatextual Cigar" Edition: ASCENSION, VENTURE BROS, SNOWPIERCER + the Plastic-Fantastic World of Kim Jong Un

While the weirdest war of isolated 'fake' reality constructs ever conceived by god or gardeners rages on-- a Hollywood stoner comedy about killing a dictator vs. a dictator whose constructed his own fantasy that's stuck in the past-- let us consider a new TV miniseries about an 'experiment' in social isolation, Syfy's ASCENSION!

This latest astro-swinger pad fantasia deftly commingles MAD MEN's early 60s cocktail sexist classist intrigue on a BATTLESTAR GALACTICA's space ark, with indoor beaches, wraparound window space views, reclinable chairs, oxygen masks for turbulence (or radiation belts), sexy stewardesses in short skirts, lower deck resentment of the first class passengers, and so on. This ain't no NOAH's space ark, baby. This ain't your mom's space ark. It is your dad's space ark (if you're my age). It took off in 1963 and neither their sexism nor clothing has changed since. So while we're all post-post everything down here, up there they're stuck at the RIGHT STUFF barbecue. In short it's a ginchier, bigger-budgeted, better written version of SPACE STATION 76 which came out this year, the same year BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW showed up on Netflix streaming! In short, it really is retro-futurism's "time," and if that wasn't enough of a post-modern anachronism (see part 1, and part 2), it's also TWIN PEAKS-y, as the focus is a Laura Palmer-esque girl's murder--that stirs up the soapy sediment as the ship passes year 51 of its 100 year mission to some far-off galaxy.

I got sucked into watching it last night via Syfy firsst showing INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), which never fails to get me teary-eyed and proud to be American, alcoholic, and human, in that order. And sure it's crypto-fascist Reagan-esque dogma, but so what? Jeff Goldblum walking back from their crashed saucer in the white salt flats, his macho fey hips swaggering in that flight suit with the cigar and Will Smith at his side, while a flaming UFO burns behind them? Perhaps the sexiest image of the entire 90s. Smith got the credit, got the 'Mr. Fourth of July' tag, but it's just as much Goldblum's movie. Both are in tippy-top form and bring out new depths in each other, and for once the wives are more than just hovercraft. Prez Bill Pullman's wife (Mary McDonnell --she'd become a de facto actual president in BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) is rescued by a a proudly non-cliche'd stripper mom / Will Smith girlfriend (Vivica A. Fox). Goldblum's ex is a presidential aide (Margaret Colin - totally off-brand sexy in oversize flannel "boyfriend" shirt, tied at the bottom in vague imitation of a halter-top). And everyone gets to hang out together, from the drunkest yokel to the most brassed-up general, with no buffers. Reagan's dream come true, it's the nations of the world quickly putting aside petty differences to fight the alien threat.

I was going to change the channel after the ID credits, but ASCENSION cleverly slid into place before they could even start rolling, as if subliminally tying itself onto the end as a post-credits teaser. Thet\ 'we're all one planet now' speeding locomotive or space ship crucible got me and I was crying too hard by then--'not until the fat lady sings' cigar smoke in my eyes--to find the remote and thus avoid another dippy Syfy-Canadian joint. But having been all up in the retro-futurist thing these past weeks, how could I switch away? I liked they 'get' how damaging it must be to one's psyche living an entire life in a giant spacecraft, doomed to never go outside and play, or learn to drive. But on the good side, it's an environment free of urban blight, STDs, and racism, though with a rigid class system of the oppressive sort most white people only ever experience while sulking past first class to our miserable 'main cabin' row. Fuck those idiots with their Wall Street Journals and entitled airs!

Cementing the Syfy connection is the indefatigable Tricia Helfer (Cylon #6- the girl in the red dress on all the posters for BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) as an enigmatic head stewardess / politico / master planner (top) who connives and controls her ambitious but weak-willed captain husband like a Lady Macbeth in space. Tall, statutesque, blonde, gorgeous with just enough Nordic alien hybrid to her TV star vibe to make her a fitting TV sci fi cult ruler, she's great but it's Laura Palmer--I mean Lorelai Wright (Amanda Thomson), a Megan Fox-esque bitch sleeping with, apparently, everyone--who becomes the focus. Her mom meanwhile has secrets, too, and the mysterious killer skulks around during radiation storms in a big hazmat suit like the killer in GREEN FOR DANGER. And the black cop (Brandon Bell) struggles to get answers while his scarred mom (?) works at the library that also rents out movies on disc (?) and tells her son to check out the works of Lang and Hitchcock to help him catch the killer. Bonus points! Not a lot, though.

There's an overriding fantasy in ASCENSION, SNOWPIERCER,  NOAH and INDEPENDENCE DAY, which is to smash through the TRUMAN'S SHOW-ish God complex-brand Ed Harris / Kim Jong Un/Jaweh-ishness of our miserable overcrowded lives and feel some direct control of our own destiny rather than being ruled by hypocritical far-off governments. It's an idea common to dreams and science fiction: one day being able to scale back the overpopulated, polluted, fucked-in-the-head society we live in, but not in a fascist brutal fundamentalist Christian or Muslim or Amish or Hassidic or TEENAGE CAVEMAN-style way--to go back instead into the locally sourced and small business past wherein the future was hip as the 60s-70s hetero-white-patriarchy could dream it, to somehow recapture the essence of what we lost as a tribe, we heterosexual white dudes. If we're just old enough to remember some of the shit our MAD MEN-ish fathers got away with in the 60s-70s, we feel resentful we can't get away with the same shit but at the same time we don't even own a tie, let alone need a whole rack of them, so gather ye perks while ye may. But oh me brothers, to have the social order openly privileging us again! To live in a cool space craft and drink martinis served by hotties in sexy outfits while stars spin by outside, isn't it worth it even if we have to wear ties all day? It's like Windows on the World or Crystal Peak, you know... the old "animals could be bred and...slaughtered" skidoo... hard to resist if you're disenfranchised from the tools of the system, como yo. And ASCENSION's pilot has a great twist ending that makes a great metaphor for what Salvia Divinorum is like if you know how to meet it halfway, or LSD or ayahuasca is like if you don't. Cuz who knows what weird things are waiting for us by the time we get to Arizona?

It's space, man... it's in the air. And we are made of dreams dreamt a million years ago by a serpentine morass of intergalactic exile DNA scary enough to make Carpenter's THING shit its pants. And we're still evolving and morphing and spinning madly through the abyss like Prometheus lashed to a giant golf ball that will never see the green.

Another example:  I used to be quietly fascinated by the Cartoon Network show, THE VENTURE BROS., which is like a queer Crystal Peak version of JOHNNY QUEST, with a well-constructed bizarro world retrofuturist vibe in which a bald ectomorph named Dr. Venture is the genius scientist son of the kind of square-jawed super dad space race titan of industry that Tony Stark had, and who's left his son this gigantic retrofuturistic scientific research center, laden with faded modular relics from the early days of the space race. There's a few things that irk me and are why I stopped watching after a scant five seasons, like the insistence on elements of gross bathroom humor that seems needlessly tacked on and which, thanks to my morbidly acute imagination, I can't really endure it unless I'm half-anesthetized upon the Usher crypt table, which luckily is how I spend a good deal of my life. That windy sentence said, if you're the type who can handle scatological humor, and loves retrofuturism , then know that it's on Cartoon Network, ready for the Pretty Polly plucking. There's a hybrid Kissinger-Mary Poppins; a foxy supervillainess with a voice like Harvey Fierstein; a Dr. Strange-ish neighborwho holds ayahuasca parties and keeps close eye on his sexy narcoleptic daughter and whose spirit guide is voiced by H. Jon Benjamin; a sex-changed Hunter S. Thomson working undercover as a female stripper; a bodyguard with a mullet and a shoebox full of Led Zeppelin cassettes; and even a secret sub-basement of mutants presided over by that weird haired haired singer of that old Brit band Prodigy. That's just off the tip of my head. And it's been years.

So savor the rich attention to retrofuturist Johnny Questian detail, the weird streak of faux-closeted gay stuff, and the brilliant idea that supervillains and superheroes have come to terms with their interdependence, and taken steps to ensure each other's continuation. And most of all, let the sweet lull of HD widescreen TV make everything that was old new again, even America... in the early 60s... as seen through Big Brother eyes... of Canadians.

Or super cool South Koreans.

SNOWPIERCER (2013, but released in the states this year) is directed by South Korean son Bong Joon-Ho, who directly addresses the brutal need for mass murder at the core of overpopulation and global warming, and how pulling the plug on the whole damned tub of foul humanity may just be the most heroic thing we can do.

In the film's post-apocalyptic ice age landscape, the only surviving life is crowded onto a giant speeding train that rarely slows down and just races around in crazy circles across the frozen tundra, mile after mile, years measured by laps around the course, frozen in time at the date it shut its doors, not unlike North Korea, circling in place above the wild American decadent south. Like NK, this train has a solar-powered silver bullet serpent pecking order, the lower classes are herded like concentration camp detainees in the rear of the train, fed bricks of gelatinous gunk and subjected regularly to harsh brutality by a police force led by a bespectacled Tilda Swinton. The front of the train holds the elite, and the very head of the train holds the 'engineer' - Wilford (Ed Harris) who makes the rules and lives high on the hog. The rear is presided over by filthy leftist John Hurt, and his right hand muscle, Chris 'Captain America' Evans.

They stage a revolt, which involves fighting (in Bong's favorite style: claw hammers in tight quarters) from car to car, each new car a shock or surprise as--among other things--the filthy urchins get to try sushi for the first time, and see just what sort of micro-livestock they've been eating all their lives. It's a brilliant, existential critique of everything from the rigged 'real truth' behind war, to conservative brainwashing, jet set decadence, reproduction's insidious con job, and class warfare. Watch it on your Kindle before boarding your Xmas plane, and see if you don't want to take a swing at one of the first class douchebags. It's better to go down swinging, after all, rather than sitting cramped in your seat for another 30 years and not lighting up your Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum victory dance cigar because they don't allow smoking on planes. You think Kim Jong Un wouldn't light that cigar? The 'No Smoking' sign went out as soon as the aliens attacked, General!

Bong's film didn't really come into any kind of theatrical release here until this year, so I'm quietly folding it in with NOAH, INTERSTELLAR and ASCENSION to make grand points about our longing to get some friends together, pack up, and head off-world, for a chance to begin again while the whole shit-house below goes up in Rekall-implanted digital flames behind us. Witness the latest slimy moves of Wall street and Republicans and tell me they all shouldn't be frozen by reverse global warming or burned in a sea of fire, or at least left behind in a shower of Matthew McConaughey sparks! Instead they'll probably have golden ark tickets and we won't. That's the depressing reality- that even in our imaginations we're third class citizens forced back into steerage, like John Cusak and his 2012 band of stow-away freeloaders. But at least if we're in the right movie we can maybe bash those first class passengers with a hammer real good. As long as we remember to do it onscreen, of course, and have the wisdom to know the difference. 

from top: TOTAL RECALL (Promo); INTERSTELLAR

NOAH even agrees. In Ridley Scott's film, Russell Crowe's plan is for his family to be the last surviving humans, and die out with grace after setting the animals post-flood free, because humanity is a vile plague, with greed and malice fueling a continual destructive turbulence wherever it flourishes.  But even then, his liberal shit of a son is sheltering the vilest of humans in the back of the ship. "My father Enoch told me that one day," Russell Crowe says, "if man continued his ways, The Creator would annihilate this world." Well that's some Creator you got, Russell, blaming all but two giraffes for the crimes of their cagers. This almighty Creator should really look in the mirror, or stick to something like a human-only plague next time, ala the forthcoming TV series version of 12 MONKEYS or the PLANET OF THE APES series, so the animals can roam free down the city streets rather than being cramped up with each other, seasick and with no room to even take a shit for over 40 days and nights.

NOAH's virtual water

Let 'The Creator' suck, then, on our own willingness to wipe ourselves out (at least virtually) before He gets a chance, or can stop us, yet again. Let us get the last laugh and a middle finger raised, the 'victory dance' cigar (or cigar wrapped blunt) smoked before we're wiped out by His humorless petty wrath. If He can't take a joke, it's by jokes we defeat Him. The fat lady sings do do doo dooo.

How bitter the fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to, goes the garbled threats to Sony. But, if terror's all we ever get, then terror better learn to loosen the fuck up. Because we're coming for it, with all the CGI and stoners we can muster. We put the props in propaganda, Kim, and we will bury you in unsold DVDs of THE GUILT TRIP. Activate... Mecha-Streisand... and George Burns forgive us.

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NOTES:

POSTSCRIPT 12-18-14: Sony backed off. The real has been eclipsed by the virtual - and watching it unfold on CNN, followed by BLACK MIRROR: WHITE CHRISTMAS and then the final episode ASCENSION was a post-modern triple threat that has completely broken my sense of self, and of America, Don Geiss, and hope, and the wisdom to know no different. 

BLACK MIRROR: Handle with Care

I'm a big fan of 70s-80s sci fi dystopia films because they show a world of space age outfits, modular furniture, free love, gigantic computers--which is reassuring as none of that happened --maybe humanity will triumph over itself after all! But then a show like BLACK MIRROR comes along and sneak attacks me right in the screen-screen-screen criss-crossed world I "live" in (computer at work, cell phone while traveling, TV at home). The world suddenly vanishes behind me, as worlds will once you cross into new ones. Since we don't need to go out anymore, the 'out' ceases to exist. The entire planet becomes indoors; a vast maze of living and work cubicles powered by exercise bikes; full-wall screens instead of windows. Surround sound, surround screens, and everyone shouting and everything paid for by 'merits' we can follow onscreen as they rise and fall with every step (each squeeze of toothpaste a merit,  as does each FF past a commercial). In this crazy world even closing your eyes to an ad costs merits and if we don't have them a shrill noise permeates your 'room' until we open our eyes again, so the commercial can resume. And that's just one grim future outlined on this crazy BBC IV TV show.

In other words, as far as nightmare dystopian parables, BLACK MIRROR is twenty years ahead of its closest neighbors and that it's on Netflix streaming is just too perfect as far as metatextuality. Watch and be warned, though: This show questions the very presence of media in your life in ways I know I, personally, wasn't quite ready for. The show has left a burnished patina of dread to my life; the usual amniotic safety of the widescreen HD image is no longer so reassuring. There's no magic at work, no hallucinations, no monsters in BLACK MIRROR - just sci fi-tinged but believable parables about where we're headed with the light speed advancements in digital media and advertising saturation, and maybe it's already too late to change. Maybe all those contracts we clicked 'I accept' on have quietly stripped us of 'real' self, like watching a commercial for the swinging pendulum from the couch-strapped pit, as thousands of avatars cheer from nearby screens, or the razor coming at your eye in a Dali or Fulci film right as you find yourself having left the last few scraps of 'reality' behind and entered the no-exit image, trapped in a nightmare feedback loop. It's a feeling I had forgotten about, safe in my mediated womb, a feeling I know only from the few times I took way way too much acid back in the 80s. But this show's got my womb all cased out and they're not afraid to cut right in with the cesarian scalpel.

The Channel 4 

If you're new to the series, I'd suggest what I was recommended: Don't start with the first episode of the first season, it's a bit disturbing, disgusting, and ultimately pointless. Save it for last, for one final sucker punch on your way out. Start with the last episode of the first season (there's only three episodes per season, ah the BBC) "The Entire History of You," then move through season 2 in order. ("White Bear" is my favorite), and then the second and then first episode of the first season. I can't tell you much more as they're all best approached cold, as "they" say. The really devastating, unbelievably on-point one is episode two, "Fifteen Million Merits." It still haunts me.

And the most terrifying part: it's all coming true faster than we can stop it. Just pressing this link here to see them on the Channel 4 (or on Netflix for a mere 8 merits a month) implicates you in the problem... I... think you should... wait. No I don't. Never mind and have a lovely day... Run! 

Growing up ALIEN: PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES, THE TERROR WITHIN

I was a young kid when ALIEN (1979) came out, too young to see it. I heard about it nonstop of course--that it was beyond scary and had a few scenes that would burst your mind. VHS didn't really exist yet (maybe a few $1,000. Betamaxes at upscale malls). and we knew it would be edited to death when it finally came to the ABC Movie of the Week, so it was all but lost to us, except through the blanched faces of the adults who'd seen it. We could try to read the novelization, maybe, but we weren't up to that level of reader comprehension. When we were finally able to rent it on VHS a few years later, we were still terrified every step of the way. By the end though --I was underwhelmed. The whole Ian Holm thing took me right out of the suspense, and the cat business was so dumb, I thought, being allergic.

Then: the summer of ALIENS (1986), and I had just finished my freshman year at Syracuse. My girl and I still just friends for I was still waiting for girls to make the first move, like a putz. So I was very pent up and tension electric, my paralysis heightening the intensity of the film when I drove up for the weekend of her ritzy Connecticut digs. Back then the point of the gore and trauma was like the threat of spanking vs. the actual spanking as a child. A good parent maybe gets us scared of it, but if we get to the point we deserve it and actually get one, then spanking doesn't work anymore. Same with gore-- The point was to get us scared of seeing it, of being scared every moment and around every corner lurked the aliens. We were all on pins and needles. But by the end, our collective fear of the boogeyman had been stretched once too often, and as a result had militarized us. Now when I see Ripley running terrified down Nostromo corridors I feel nothing as far as suspense. Not having to worry about the physical threats awaiting the final girl is a relief --repetition-compulsion disorder has proven its worth. Ripley was weaponized -- "Let her alone, you bitch!!" 

Gore is just funny now, either fake (funny) or realistic (artistic), but seldom ominous, something we're afraid to see; now we can recognize the signature of each make-up, a Savini vs. a Bottin disembowelment. Once the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, shit gets old fast. Like if you commuted to work on a roller coaster, after a few years, it's just another goddamned commute.

By the time of ALIEN: RESURRECTION in 1997, just trying to generate suspense from aliens stalking humans seemed pointless, and Ripley couldn't possibly be tougher. She was now half-alien herself, any declaration of 'you bitch' could now be only directed at the mirror, and there was no longer any recognizable human in the cast, replaced instead by French director Jean Pierre-Jeunet's METAL HURLANT-style cartoonish bizarro world exaggerations. I saw it on Christmas Day in 1997 in Portsmouth with a different girl, a real girlfriend this time, for I'd found courage to make the first move at last. This time the only cool scene is of the always welcome and super-cool Michael Wincott discussing payments and acquisition of sleeping human cargo while having a cigar and drink with military commander Dan Hedaya (below). But even there, Jean-Pierre Jeunet makes sure Hedaya's eyebrows are even more tribble-like than usual.

Then there's the alien itself. It evolves. In the first film it was truly other -- there was nothing remotely like it, nothing we'd seen before - not even remotely close to any of our species except in the most preliminary or advanced of stages. By RESURRECTION time though it was just another smart mammal, making noises that sounded like pitch shifted lions, barking dogs and braying donkeys-- the weird baroque otherness of the original HR Giger alien design prompting nostalgia rather than shivers. Even the stomach bursting scenes carry no real unease anymore.

Galaxy of Terror

That's just human culture though, ALIEN's over-exposure-disseminated fear level drainage was inevitable. Throughout its long gestation there have been imitators and films that it in turn imitated, to the point John Hurt even shows up in SPACEBALLS (1987 - below), less than ten years later, and gives birth to a Vaudeville-kicking alien, a kids' movie by all accounts -- so an alien bursting out of a stomach goes from R-rated traumatic shock to G-rated joke in under ten years.

Spaceballs

Copy cats abounded too, James Cameron even got the job for ALIENS partially based on his success as art designer for Corman's ALIEN-imitating GALAXY OF TERROR (1981). Which makes sense, as a lot of the baroque majesty and sheer alienness of Ridley Scott's original is gone for Cameron's sequel, replaced by an erector set military gun locker aesthetic and cool feminist weaponization ala TERMINATOR.

But not all films in the ALIEN imitation canon lost the Ridley Scott look, and ALIEN itself is just a very strong central link in a vast web of motifs that have been simmering for 60 years. Time enough for a space pod to carry your frozen body across the vast expanse between 1965 and 1989 for example, and with that, let's look at two drive-in classics, one an inspiration for ALIEN the other inspired BY it:

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PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES 
(1965) Dir. Mario Bava

88 minutes

*** 1/2

Some films know just how to ease you into twilight sleep. Your unconscious mind uses the impressions from the soundtrack and dialogue as paint brushes to conjure alternate vistas as you dream yourself right off the couch and into the molasses chill of something like Bava's space fantasia PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES. If you love dreaming your way through patches of otherworldly fog, eyes agog with the colors purple and red, ears lulled by the whoosh of space engines and throbbing moans of ancient races, unearthly winds, and second chakra ignited via badass proto-punk leather space uniforms with yellow piping, PLANET should be your destination. And the clear points of inspiration for Alien are numerous: for one thing, we don't have to deal with the usual origin story that sinks so many unimaginative sci fi films (such as most of Ib Melchoir's other scripts), i.e. we don't have to see the space ships taking off from Earth; there's also an ancient race's crashed ship sending an SOS that turns out to be a warning, or something.

Only FORBIDDEN PLANET before it knew that we could start from a very alien place and not need origin stories; the humans even fly in a saucer UFO instead of a phallic rocket, and we don't need to know why. PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES picked up on that - the crews here aren't even necessarily human or from Earth at all, and it doesn't matter. There's a mysterious SOS signal calling two craft here to a strange planet, where they discover an ancient crashed spaceship with dead giant aliens now reduced to calcified bones that make them look like they were giant elephant men, a bit like the huge space jockey looks in ALIEN, and there’s also a great ending which in its way harkens to the theatrical ending of ALIEN: RESURRECTION.

The film's got some issues, such as it being hard to distinguish most of the cast from each other which makes the plot. It starts just like ALIEN with space ships already out in space, being rerouted to answer a strange distress call at a remote inhospitable (but lovingly lit) planet about to be devoured by its dying sun (or something), a kind of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, where the dead rise from their plastic coverings and hot Italian girls in leather jumpsuits (the kinkiest high fashion space crew uniforms ever) become possessed--hard to follow--who's playing who from which ship and who's possessed and/or dead and who's not, etc. But, with Bava devotee Tim Lucas' commentary track on the recent Blu-ray, we learn the reasoning and craft behind a lot of the maestro's DIY in-camera special effect tricks, and this knowledge enhances our enjoyment if for no other reason than it so clearly enhances Lucas's. Never merely a scholar, fan, or biographer, his commentaries are well-known to any classic horror fan and always worth hearing, related often in a kind of low whispering flow as if on the 18th fairway. He's well-versed in what actors are playing what characters, including when one character changes actors halfway through. It's a reassuring addition, that no matter what's onscreen we know it was intended just that way by one of horror cinema's great artists. We can kick back and let the soothing space noises... lull us... to... sleep. eep... ... bleep... blip.... blip... captain, the coffin's empty, all over again! 

THE TERROR WITHIN 
(1989) - Dir Thierry Notz

88 minutes
***

This New World Alien rip smartly trims effects budget by moving the setting to Earth, but "underground" in the Mojave desert on a post-plague Earth, where only snakes and wandering mutant gargoyles survive. Aside from some terribly duck-like bills and alarming rows of teeth, the gargoyles aren't quite as ridiculous as most monsters in big rubber suits shambling around after suicidally slow-witted prey in the dead of desert daytime. Their craftiness and invulnerability make them formidable as hell, able to jump out of small spaces while being seven feet tall, as if inheriting all the DNA of both The Terminator and Michael Myers. Like other Corman pics of the era, there's eroticized monster rape to make sure the board gives the film an R, and this allows for a two-for-one shock--1) the pre-PC lurid pulp cover fetishizing of sexy girls having their clothes ripped off by all sorts of claws, ghost hands, or centipede legs (his original contribution to the Alien clone formula); 2) The inevitable unwanted pregnancy, short gestation, and ALIEN-esque cesarian birth. For me, at least, that makes it somehow less traumatizing than if perpetrated by the usual suspects. When a surviving human is found running through the Mojave brush, she's sexy, terrified, and pregnant, and thanks to the reticent scalpel of the doctor --they give a cesarian so they can study the whole fetus, instead of sluicing it through, as the lord intended, (1) doomed indeed.

Star Andreef vs. Wade

That aside, I admire the ballsy pro-choice angle when Sue (Star Andreeff) demands an abortion and the lady doctor refuses and we're allowed to wonder if it's because she's got designs on Sue's man, the 80s coiffed hero David (Andrew "Kirk Douglas’s telekinetic son in The Fury" Stevens). The doc says the reason is that Sue's too weak to undergo such a surgery, and that there's plenty of time to do it tomorrow, and that it's probably David's baby, and this after already denying the first lady an abortion she begs for, knowing what's coming. Oh man, for an alternate future with ultrasound. At any rate, David's the sort who thinks a crossbow in tight quarters is an effective weapon against a giant invulnerable monster, so his genetics might not be ideal anyway. His hair, though, is perfect and he's a decent, charismatic actor with good rapport, able to sync up with any other actor's idea of what terror is, allowing for triangulation of terror.

Most of the cast dies rapidly in their Darwinian order. George Kennedy is the C.O., and his stalwart ubiquity in big ensemble casts of the previous decade subliminally implies there's other stars around, so it's almost okay that there's not. Sexy Sue, meanwhile thinks that if her man's in trouble battling an invincible seven foot tall yet stealthy and rabidly horny monster three floors below, the best way to help is to hop in an elevator, barefoot and unarmed, to come rescue him. But the rapid cast disappearance is only the start of the greatness, because we end up with a wounded terrified under-armed pair of survivors who communicate mainly through a two-way intercom as they try to obliterate a monster mutant whose only weakness is his painful sensitivity to David's dog whistle. The last stretch is just the three of them locked in endless tussle  like THE TERMINATOR meets CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. In other words, awesome.

And there’s a dog in the film who ably helps out in novel ways (he’s their tracker and early warning system and fearlessly distracts and attacks their foes) and even survives at the end. I'm not spoiler alerting for that, because dogs get a notorious bad break in horror films. When one survives, it's a cause for note... and celebration...

So... skewed pro-choice compassion, a reasonably clear idea of where each person is in relation to one another at any given time and the usual quick rush Corman-brand momentum, all conspires to make TERROR worlds better than most ALIEN rip-offs. If only they hired Thierry Notz to make ALIEN 3, the way they hired Cameron for ALIENS, someone with Corman know-how, with a knack for doing a lot with a little, instead of wasting the opportunity on that cold misanthropic clinician David Fincher, who has no flair of science fiction, so turns it into burly all-male Brit kitchen sink drama.

If I didn't mention ALIEN 3 at all in the introduction, it's because Fincher gutted everything--it barely qualifies as a sequel, WITHIN is more loyal to the themes, even set on a stretch of desert scrub. At least they get hair, and it's dry. Setting the film entirely on a dismal mud planet that could be anywhere in any closed-down prison anywhere in shit-field England is not enough. Fincher has to incite lice (not even space lice!) shave everyone's heads and piss off the hair and makeup union. So instead of a sexy Ripley or a weaponized Ripley we get an almost gang-raped cellmate Ripley who needs to be rescued by a self-righteous Muslim, and the dog, oh goddamned you, Fincher... and for what? So another CGI blur can get thrown in another dumb cauldron of "liquid metal"? Or something? The ending's straight out of TERMINATOR 2 as I recall. Actually, maybe I need to see it again. I hear the extended 'work print cut' is better, and the alien comes out of an ox instead of a dog, as nature intended. That's not a spoiler, for one is always better off knowing these things when it comes to dogs in films by boarding school sadists.

I'm prejudiced too, for I remember renting ALIEN 3 from Blockbuster while visiting my brother in Arizona back in '92-ish, and not being able to understand what the hell was going on half the time thanks to bad pan and scanning, and seeing double thanks to a 1.75 liter of Seagram's, many one hits, and the constant interruptions by Fred's dumbass buddies. But hey, that's what Growing up ALIEN is all about, starting as a child savoring his terror in with two whole riveted families as a child in 1980, to the sequel as a college kid on a date in 1986, and now in the dry desert, drunk off my ass, after shooting empties in the backyard with an air rifle in 1992, picking on the dumbass friends of my well-armed little brother and slowly going from excited to bored to angry to just plain drunk, as a Bush-era layabout. I was never so lonely and miserable as I was in that desert with those lost boys. Damn you, Fincher.

The internet came soon after that and DVDs. AOL discs floated in from the mail like holy wafers and connected us to a buzzing phone modem of instant omnipresence. Our modem's alien bang bang-ing connecting noises lulled us into trances, like when we slept suspended in our M.O.T.H.E.R, not knowing what yet what she looked like, not knowing the modem beeping wasn't a distress signal at all... but a warning. Until the inevitable unmasking-- the grim evening we erupted out the Kane white T-shirt ether, and plopped into the opposite chair of our 1995 Astor Pl. Starbucks rendezvous to face her with a choking scream. She was our old freezarino, our empty helmet reflection dream beforehand and, afterwards, our whiskered freshwater monster. We needed to run, but just weren't fast enough to start. By then the buzzing modem was gone; we'd evolved, if you call it that. By the time we got our restful tomb prepared, it was already moved... ++

FUTURE WARD:
The Evolver Virus: PROMETHEUS, The Dead Files (10-21-12)

NOTES
1. You should know by now I don't mean Jesus, though I do believe in him, and believe that the devil is only the Kali to his Durga, and both have a sense of perspective and irony far beyond expectations.