In honor of the Moon landing anniversary, Google has released Google Moon. I took a gander and was immediately shocked to find photographic evidence of Alien Monolith activity on the surface.
A closer look:
It can be viewed here at Google Moon. As you can see for yourself, it must be incredibly powerful to exert the massive gravitational disruption which extends for miles beyond the massive black rectangle. As the makers must clearly know we are on to them by now, I suggest spending the next few moments with your loved ones before we are all either crushed into a singularity or hyper-evolved into cosmic floating fetus god... egg... things.
If you haven't seen it yet, here is Marco Brambilla's Civilization, a massive collage of found footage arranged as an ascending tableaux of Hell, Purgatory, Earth, and Heaven. Every little nook and cranny is crammed with tiny snippets of video imagery from innumerable sources, both recognizable and obscure. It's pretty intense.
Check out Brambilla's website for more of his works. It seems to be a little hit and miss, (An exploration of cyber-cafe Counterstrike players? Yawn.) but if you are at all interested in video installation artworks, check out Cyclorama and Sequel.
Also, why do fine artists always insist on having left-to-right scrolling websites?
From Jim Wynorski, the horrible monster who must be stopped at all costs, comes a long forgotten, microbudget robo-horror with a totally sweet title: Chopping Mall. Wynorski's most recent film is Cleavagefield, a soft-core parody porn, and his vast legion of IMDB credits read like something out of the direct-to-video Necronomicon. (Lock yourself in the bathroom at night and read them aloud into the mirror. If you are not possessed by the fires of hell by the time you reach The Bare Wench Project 3: Nymphs of Mystery Mountain, I'll eat my sweet hair hat.) It should go without saying that he's somewhat disinterested in the artistic aspects of his profession compared to the financial, but in case you needed convincing, Chopping Mall was originally released in theaters as Killbots, where it totally bombed. It was then given the infinitely more awesome yet cruelly misleading new title and re-released to significantly better box office. If it had failed again they probably would have given up and retitled it Tits, Death, and Lasers! which I already prefer to Chopping Mall considering that there is a complete and utter lack of chopping in the film.
Chopping sold separately
Watch the trailer closely:
What were your favorite shots? The correct answers are A. exploding head, B. Shadow of bot holding a decapitated head, and C. bot dragging dismembered arm with shopping bag. (I will also accept D. Dick Miller saying "dead meat", but only if you knew his name or called him "guy from Gremlins") The problem is that B & C never actually happen in the good-fer-nothing movie. That's not too unusual for the film biz, but the trailer as a whole is so misleading that it might as well have been a joint operation by Michael Moore and Ben Stein. It doesn't even get the film's setup correct; the kids don't break into the mall for a party, they're employees sneaking around after hours for a party. The the shot of them glass breaking is from much further into the film. As for that totally awesome synth score: you heard basically all of it during the trailer's 53 second runtime. Misleading trailers, artless mercenary sensibilities, and awful music aside, it is hard to be too disappointed a film this blisteringly fast. By the time you've figured out that Chopping Mall isn't going to be the gleefully unhinged gorefest the cover art and trailer were promising, the credits are probably already rolling. Clocking in at a featherweight 77 minutes, there is barely enough time to fit in three acts of moderately coherent plot, let alone all the requisite boobs and blood.
Woo!
Rather than spending the time and energy to create a storyline that grows organically, all the messy expository requirements are quickly met with a pre-credit sales pitch and promotional video, complete with questions from the audience. That's better than title cards or voice over narration, but only by a teensy margin. The subject is a technological revolution in shopping mall security: the bastard hybrid spawn of Gort and Johnny-5. (The resemblance to the former, in one of the film's most erudite moments, is noted by a character who yells 'Klaatu barada nikto' at one of the bots before having his throat slit.) The bots are equipped with the latest taser and tranquilizer dart technology, are nearly bulletproof, and totally promise not to zap anyone with a giant coded identification badge... as long as they hold it very still and right in front of the bot's scanner. Meanwhile, for no reason at all, a couple of audience members roll their eyes dramatically and provide snarky comments. (Hey! That's my job!) It's interesting that the film decided to add people who are suspicious of the obviously dangerous soon-to-be killer robots, but then they say things like "the one in the middle has an unpleasant ethnic quality" about identical robots, so I guess they're a bit touched in the head. Behind the opening credits runs a montage of the mall's awesomely '80s beehive of barely contained chaos. Pratfalls and giant hair abound as kids skateboard and shoplift, people drop their food, and Miss America contestants parade around for some reason. (Probably just to cause more inevitable slapstick.) Over at the Unframed Roger Corman Movie Poster Cafe, the virginal girl who will survive to the end (minor scream queen Kelli Maroney) is waiting tables with the gal from Re-Animator (Barbara Crampton, who currently has a whole week devoted to her at Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies). The cool kids are planning a big shindig over at the mattress store (nudge nudge) that evening, and Barbara needs someone to hook up with the nerdy guy who must be placated for the party to take place. Meanwhile, nerdy guy (the conservative preppy from 'Head of the Class') is being chagrined into submission by slick guy and huge chin guy, one of whom was in Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Dead and dead.
Big jaw shows off his assets by chewing bubblegum, then goes and gets his girlfriend, huge tits, from a nearby fashion boutique. Outside, a husband and wife auto-mechanic team are apparently also showing up to the party. (If the random inclusion of expert mechanics in the cast elicits a knowing snicker from you, you're sadly mistaken; their vocation is barely mentioned again, let alone put into the service of killbot disassembly.) Yay! Party! Everyone gets nekkid while the nerdy kids watch an even worse Roger Corman movie on TV. Gazongas aside, it is a pretty tame affair, making the decision to hold it at their place of employment a little odd. (Either those mattresses are super comfortable, or every single character lives in a shitty studio apartment.) Despite the fact that no rain or other bad weather is ever shown or mentioned in the film, a freak bolt of lightning hits the top of the building and fries the master computer in charge of not letting the killbots kill. The lesson here (in case you didn't pick it up from Ghost in the Machine) is that lightning always turns electronics evil. That is why Jesus invented surge protectors. They quickly dispatch their squishy human technicians, showing enough evil foresight to hide bodies and set up ambushes, then begin their nightly rounds. The ground floor bot quickly bumps into surly janitor, Dick Miller. He waves his identity badge, but didn't get the memo about holding it perfectly still three inches from the robot's face. Also it's evil now and probably wouldn't care about the badge even if it could get a proper scan of it. Provoked by the shooting of a tazer barb into the puddle of water he is standing in, his well thought out next move is to threaten to hit the thing with his mop. Back at the party, Jaws and Chesty LaRue are getting restless about not having been killed already, so she cajoles him into leaving the store on a shirtless quest for Virgina Slims. When confronted by a bot, he also tries the casual badge waving trick to no avail. Fortunately for him, it hits him with knock-out darts before tearing out his trachea with its slender claws.
I just want to hug.
Hootie McBoob goes to investigate the status of her cigarette savior, and finds his corpse by the vending machine. (Cigarettes in a vending machine? What is this, the future or something?) The killbot then chases her back to the furniture store, blasting eye-lasers the whole way. Lasers? That wasn't in the presentation. Was that a free bonus with their lightning induced evil-izing, or could they always do that? Either way, the lightning has definitely set their targeting systems to "Stormtrooper" because they sure seem to hit everything but their victims. Also, the beams, when they do hit one of the meatbags, cause mere stumbling or the occasional squib to go off.
Nooo! Not Busty St. Claire!
I stand corrected: if the subject holds perfectly still and gets hit right between the eyes (or maybe right in the screaming mouth) the whole head goes Scanners. The rest of the kids show a little more common sense, and immediately retreat to the stockrooms to formulate a plan. Thanks to the abbreviated runtime, the movie takes a sudden left turn from slasher territory into action horror. They split into teams based on gender: team girl is tasked with escaping to the parking ramps, while team dude makes a break for the gun store. Each of these mystical quests involves something that, for anyone who has every worked in or been to a shopping mall, don't actually exist outside of movies and games. Namely gun stores and people sized ventilation ducts. Somewhere, probably in the deep South, there may be a shopping mall with a gun store, but I worked as a maintenance guy for a while, and while I did have to crawl into the ventilation system a couple times, the only spots big enough for doing so tended to be short, isolated and connected only to giant, scary fan blades. Any corporate espionage ninjas would find nothing at the terminus but a messy death at the purée setting.
On the third level, between Talbots Petite and Orange Julius
Also, if the kids had attended the killbot seminar like they were supposed to, they would know that the things are damn near bulletproof. (Though we only saw them going up against small arms fire, not shopping mall grade assault weaponry.) They do get points for bringing along propane tanks to detonate; one of my favorite mall activities.
Left 4 Dead: Vice City
Meanwhile, Barbara Crampton is having a claustrophobia freakout in the vents, and forces them go back and help the boys. They end up in the hardware store, where one of the gals instructs the others on how to make Molotov cocktails. In the second worst piece of planning in Video Updates history, they make the cocktails out of metal gas cans. Don't try this at home kids, because it won't fucking work. That's a moderate safety hazard, not a deadly weapon. The two rapidly shrinking teams join back up, and the movie reveals itself as a distinct pattern of hide - plan - damage a bot - lose a character - retreat - repeat. There are a couple of moderately impressive stunts and some pyrotechnics, but the real attraction is how the killbots keep pulling new powers out of their shiny metal asses. Why would a bot designed to protect a shopping mall have such a destructive toolset? Tazers, tranquilizers, and kung fu grips make sense. Plastic explosives, difficult to aim laserblasts, and door destroying wielding beams are a harder sell, especially when the droids should, in theory, have the ability to remotely unlock doors. They should at least have a stupid keyring. What kind of future is this where we can make super advanced robots and then force them to interact with their environment using a clumsy approximation of our hands? Otherwise, they are going to be kicking themselves for not buying Rampage Insurance from the manufacturer. Eventually things get whittled down to one droid and one final girl. (The one who didn't get laid, natch.) It may have lasers, tazers, and a small quantity of C4, but she's got a signal flare in her cleavage, so it's really no contest. Oh yeah, the movie is over. As mentioned above, Chopping Mall is a Roger Corman production. I didn't notice this while watching, because I like to chow down on paint chips while I watch movies. In retrospect, this could only be more Corman-like if he had directed it himself. All the tropes are there: high concept, low budget, and a script so basic that you can practically see its gears turning. If that wasn't enough, the film piles on the inside jokes and cutesy references. One scene near the end takes place in "Roger's Little Shop of Pets," most of the cast are Corman regulars, and every poster or TV screen has a previous production splashed across it. The bizarre eye rolling folks from the beginning? They are the main characters (not just the actors, the same roles) from Eating Raoul. In other words, unless you are well versed in the RC production oeuvre, prepare to scratch your head and wonder why such minor characters get so many lines. It's a real shame that Chopping Mall can't quite make the leap into sublime madness that cements other B-movies into the highest circles of the cult elect. All the pieces are there: killer robots, a goofy title, tits, Dick Miller, tongue-in-cheek humor, boobs, lasers, MacGyver style robot killing contraptions, and, most importantly, female nudity. Yet somehow they never congeal into a truly great bad movie. I blame the "Roger Corman Film School." As much joyful mediocrity as it has brought us throughout the years, the formula was clearly wearing thin at the dawn of the video era. Unlike fellow killer robot movie, Hardware, Chopping Mall has no pretentious or delusions of grandeur. They set out to make a cheap, mediocre genre film, and succeeded in exactly that. So even though it can hit all the same beats as a true classic (of awfulness), it will never have that exhilarating musk of failure. (It's a manly smell--like Tommy Wiseau's armpits, I imagine.) It's not just about failing upwards; Hardware is a surprisingly literate film that wants desperately to say something meaningful, even if it lacks the cohesion and quality to do so. Chopping Mall, on the other hand, is a sterile affair. A quick exchange of the audience's time and money for some breasts and blood. Of course, the transaction goes by so quickly that you'll probably never even notice that you got a little shortchanged.
Special mention should go out to the composer, Chuck Cirino, whose synth heavy exclusive score acts as a microcosm for the film itself: it aspires to fantastically awesome John Carpenter style '80s cheese, but quickly gets stale after you realize that it is exactly one riff played over and over and varying speeds and settings. This was especially harsh, considering I had just watched Moon, a film with an incredible score by Clint Mansell.
Presenting a new regular feature: Video Updates Total Babe of the Arbitrary Period of Time (VUTBAPT) This arbitrary period of time's Total Babe is the criminally underemployed Carol Cleveland. Most likely you recognize her from her work with Monty Python's Flying Circus; otherwise you will have seen her in... um... Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Possibly created when mad scientists imbued life into a bizarre homunculus composed of a pair of mind destroying gams, an equally amazing pair of knockers, and some funny. Often relegated to the status of "prop that can bleed," straight man person, or eyeball palate clenser in between all the awkward crossdressing, Carol proved time and again that she could hold her own with the boys.
Some highlights include the above sketch (one of my all time Python favorites) running around as a well-to-do aristocrat with a flamethrower in a department store, and falling in love with a pantomime horse.
Brian Yuzna's unjustly forgotten masterpiece of strange, Society, combines two of our favorite obsessions here at Video Updates: the perverse, day-glo decadence of 1987 through 1995, and the tiny sub-genre referred to as "Body Horror." One of the few movies he's done without his usual partner in crime and fellow Lovecraft nerd, Stuart Gordon, (together they created the Re-Animator film franchise and wrote the script for Honey I Shrunk the Kids) it is worth tracking down both for its anthropological value (read: gawk at the stupid haircuts) and for its third act sucker punch of disgusting peculiarity.
Starring 1989's greatest mullet as the skullwarmer of daytime TV and Baywatch hunk Billy Warlock (if you think that's a great monicker, his father was a stuntman for Kurt Russel by the name of Dick Warlock) the movie spins a timeless yarn about family, fitting in, young love, and just trying to survive as a 28 year old high school senior in Beverly Hills. (Much like a certain television show that would debut a year later.)
Billy should be having the time of his life; he's a star athlete and soon-to-be class president with a spectacularly wealthy family, an expensive Jeep Douchemobile™, and a shallow girlfriend who wears denim dresses and hair so tall it scrapes the heavens. In short, he has everything a SoCal high school senior circa 1989 could ever want.
So horrifying... yet I can't look away.
Yet poor Billy can't help thinking that something sinister is going on beneath the surface. Not only is he plagued by nightmares and hallucinations, but someone keeps taunting him with mysterious mental illness themed pranks. Unable to talk to his parents due to their incredibly distant, awkward relationship (not to mention that they seem to be the source of his unease) he turns to the family shrink, who merely patronizes him and tries to explain away the disturbing feelings as normal teen angst.
Meanwhile, he's got to deal with all the usual high school drama. (Now with 60% more class warfare.) There's the upcoming election for class president, featuring Billy versus a preppy dork straight out of Metropolitan. Actually, the whole movie could easily pass for a tacky, West Coast sequel to Whit Stillman's ode to snobby, youthful pretentiousness... if not for the occasional backward boobs shower scene.
There is also the small matter of the huge upcoming party at the even richer, even snobbier kids house. Billy's gal, Valley Girl Barbie, desperately wants to be invited, and unceasingly Lady-MacBeths him into ingratiate himself with the cool kids. (That's right, 'Lady MacBeth' is a verb now. Deal with it.) He makes an attempt at the nearby countryclub, but is thwarted by general snobbishness and the embarrassing antics of other beachgoers.
Sunscreen Facial: The gag so nice they used it twice.
After a fun filled afternoon of quasi-sexual humiliation and practicing for his later role on 'Baywatch,' Billy is accosted by his sister's dorky stalker, who reveals that he has been surreptitiously recording the family's conversations. To avoid the imminent pounding, he quickly plays back a tape of Billy's parents and sister discussing strange new ways of having sex with other snobby rich folk. A moment later, the tape devolves into some sort of violent, inhuman orgy. Billy takes the recording to his psychiatrist, who convinces him to hand over the tape. More mullet than common sense, he complies, only to return later to find that his family has rerecorded the events on the tape with innocuous versions. Again proving his total inability to deal with conspiracies, Billy calls his contact on the shrink's phone (right in front of him) and repeats the location of their next meeting place outloud. Sure enough, the wiretapper is immediately killed in a freak car accident, that Billy merely gets yelled at for walking all over. I'm pretty sure if you walk onto a the scene of an accident, step all over the blood and broken glass, and then start rooting around in the deceased's suitcase, the cops will toss you in the clink.
Time for an ol' fashion doucheoff
Around this point the movie starts to really sag, sadly. There is more intrigue, more awful fashion, and some unnecessary plot elements startling revelations. Billy's family attempts to throw him off the trail with transparent flattery, formal party invitations, and sudden ivy league acceptance letters, but his paranoia continues to grow. He loses his cheerleader girlfriend and shacks up with a dark, mysterious debutante whose mother is a mute, lumbering giant that steals people's hair... or something.Billy eventually confronts his family about all the conspiratorial shenanigans, but they are ready for him. He gets jumped by some EMTs and tranquilized, then wakes up in the hospital and, against all logic and his buddy's best wishes, goes back to the house only to get captured again. That is a solid ten minutes of action that serves absolutely no purpose. (It's implied that there is some sort of Wicker Man-esque game or ritual going on, but no one elaborates.) I imagine that if Zack Snyder were to ever see such a decadent waste of running time, he would think bitterly about all the valuable, important detail he had to cut out of his still overlong epic, then curl into a little ball and cry himself to sleep. At last it is time for the big party. Billy is paraded in front of the "well dressed" crowd and joined by the not actually dead whistleblower. The psychiatrist provides the requisite massive exposition dump while everyone else stands around acting smug and wealthy. (Except for one mustachioed redneck who won't stop looking at the camera.) It seems that the wealthy anglo-saxon elite are not actually human beings, but a species of humanoid slugs with the ability to shapeshift. They can't do it instantly or even quickly, but can change quite radically and even merge with each other.
Scariest. Picture. Ever.
Billy has apparently been adopted and raised for the last 18 years solely for this night, where he is to be devoured in a messy ritual known as 'shunting.' Not only have the snobbish slug-people been exploiting the labor of the hard working, non-slug proletariat all these years, but they have been literally feeding off the lower class as well. Bill must watch helplessly as they demonstrate the process on the appetizer.
Everyone strips down to their skivvies and begins getting all sweaty and slimy, then swarm the poor victim zombie style. Instead of biting or clawing, they simply rub and poke until their mucous covered slug skin begins to bond with him. It appears that they are also sucking nutrients out, but mostly its an excuse for a truly epic makeup effects extravaganza. Fingers get inserted into asses (not the 'normal' way--through the cheeks), limbs are stretched exponentially farther than normal, eyeballs are gouged, and a fist is rammed so far up an ass that it comes out the face. (Actually, that happens twice.) This all eventually culminates in a disturbing wide shot of the poor bastard stretched all over the room in an orgy of wealthy slug-people feeding. If Hieronymus Boschhad ever decided that hell was the year 1989, this is what he would have painted:
Slurp slurp. Please pass some lower intestine. Nom nom nom.
Meanwhile, Billy's high school chum and the slug-girl with a heart of gold manage to spring him. He flees, but ends up finding his fake family having a private sex/merging party in another room.
"I already finished. Now I just get to watch those two."
Things look hopeless for poor cappin mullet, until he gets the brilliant idea to challenge his former (well I guess current, too) bully to a duel, mano-a-sluggo. Turns out the dude is a judo expert, but Billy manages to get the upper hand when he goes all rubbery for the shunt. Messiness ensues, and it turns out that the slug-folk are filled with worms or something. Perhaps they are gestalt creatures.
It is exceedingly difficult to render a decision on whether or not Society is a good movie or not. ('Good' by Video Updates' standards, not the real worlds') While there is a vast well of entertainment to be found in how ridiculously dated the fashion is (note to filmmakers: movies about poor people are much harder for the audience to 'date') and the charnel house finale is practically worth the price of admission on its own, the second act is a crippling millstone around the film's neck. The occasional pair of tits aside, it's the part of where you start to realize that the film actually takes itself a little seriously. Enough so that it actually expects us to be legitimately intrigued by the unfolding conspiracy, even when it schizophrenically switches between piling on the red herrings and being cringe inducingly obvious. The giant mongo mom gets no explanation and serves no purpose in the story other than a momentary distraction near the end. The taunting messages Billy keeps getting turn out to be lighthearted pranks by his best friend, unrelated to the society. From a narrative standpoint whole swaths of the story turn out to be completely pointless.
So here is how I suggest you get the most out of your viewing of Brian Yuzna's Society: invite some friends over, drink (or smoke drugs if that's your bag) heavily, have some laughs and enjoy yourself, and when you start to get bored, just drink more and chit chat with your pals. Just make sure you start paying attention at the hour and ten minute mark or skip to chapter 18. Its your Video Updates Bad Movie Ala Carte!
Also, don't forget to stick around for the awesome end credits music.
In honor of the Moon landing anniversary, Google has released Google Moon. I took a gander and was immediately shocked to find photographic evidence of Alien Monolith activity on the surface.
