After far, far too long a time, I finally popped the movie Dark Star (1974) off the reader-requested review queue at 366 Weird Movies. Not only is it a long-standing cult favorite for being the first theatrical release for both John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon when they were still film students, it’s also a quirky and unique sci-fi comedy whose “hippies in space” motif is just enough to flirt with the list of weirdest movies of all time.
Tag: movies
IMGUR posts: 1980s Action Figures and Vintage Pulp Novel Cover Art
So you all might be noticing by now, I’ve been tinkering around with IMGUR a lot lately. I can’t help getting hold of a social media platform and eventually experimenting with it to see what kinds of nifty posts I can make in that medium. The IMGUR format is underappreciated; it’s more like a super-Tumblr since you can post any amount of text appended to images and chain images together into albums. Not bad for a site that originally started as a side-feature for Reddit.
Continue reading “IMGUR posts: 1980s Action Figures and Vintage Pulp Novel Cover Art”
My IMGUR image essay on a peculiar sci-fi trope went viral
I couldn’t help but notice a trend as I explored the covers of pulp genre media. In sci-fi, horror, and speculative fiction in general, there’s one damsel-in-distress pose that’s almost guaranteed to show up. It’s rampant on comic books and pulp fiction novels, and shows up in TV and film spanning from the earliest decades to the most recent.
I’m talking, of course, about women in glass tubes. And once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere, until you have to wonder if there’s a global conspiracy to encase females in crystal cylinders. Many golden age sci-fi rags did it; some did it up to three times in their print run. Video media has done it from the original run of The Outer Limits to the film The Hunger Games. It was even performed as a science experiment at a world’s fair! Women in glass tubes, nicknamed “tube girls,” just fill the genre to the point where you never find the end of it.
Continue reading “My IMGUR image essay on a peculiar sci-fi trope went viral”
IMGUR dump: Vintage Science Fiction from the Golden Age
My latest IMGUR image essay is a tour of Golden Age Science and Speculative Fiction. It’s a nostalgic trip through sci fi as I discovered it growing up, from TV series to movies to magazines to the glory of paperback novel hounding at used bookstores. It was a damn fun post to throw together and I hope everyone has fun remembering the classics or discovering the forgotten gems from the sub-Atomic Age of Sci-Fi.
UPDATE – Related science fiction stuff:
- The Most Underrated Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Movies – Looking for sci-fi movies that actually peg the apocalypse? Here’s a list of the more realistic takes on the end of civilization as we know it.
- Things CoronaVirus Has Taught Me About Apocalyptic / Dystopian Sci-Fi – COVID-19 pointed out the plot holes in our concept of what an apocalypse would look like.
- Groundhog Day and Time Travel in Sci-Fi – On Groundhog Day, we marked the best time travel movies which treat the premise with the playful fun it deserves.
- Five Sci-Fi Novels Just Waiting To Be Adapted To Film – While Hollywood is scrounging the bottom of the bargain comic books bin looking for yet another superhero movie, these epic science fiction languish in the darkness without a film adaptation.
- Why Do We Force-Feed Dystopian Literature To Students? – You’re not living in a dystopia; I checked for you.
- Best Devotional Items For Alternative Religions – Show your faith in the new breed of gods for the thinking age, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Dr. J.R. “Bob” Dobbs.
New At 366: Run Away To Frankenstein Island!
Cor blimey, it feels good to finally get Frankenstein Island off my to-review list! 366Weird indulged my Apocrypha recommendation, read this hysterical mess and marvel at the bad B-movie even MST3K never touched!
Oh, and if you tried to visit this site in the past ~48 hours and found it gronked, that’s because a hosted server update clobbered my custom .htaccess Apache voodoo, and I had to grovel to tech support to reset everything and then re-install new, improved voodoo. I can now commence transmitting my madness to the unsuspecting Interwebs.
But wait, there’s more! You’re here because you’re curious about legendary schlock-director Jerry Warren’s magnum opus, so here’s some bonus material outside the normal scope of a 366Weird write-up:
Continue reading “New At 366: Run Away To Frankenstein Island!”
New at 123ish.com: Is Disney A Monopoly, And Should We Be Worried?
Disney has recently raised some harrumphs in the geek community for becoming the owner of both Lucasfilm and Marvel properties. Is that enough to make Disney The Mouse That Roared? I discuss that question in the context of the big picture: In 2019, what media company isn’t a gigantic, world-crushing monopoly? As I demonstrate, hardly any.
As an addendum, literally the day after I posted this, rumor has it that Disney may shut down Marvel Comics right after acquiring it. If so, my prediction there:
“And here Disney just acquired two properties which – hold your fire, please – may prove to not be so valuable in a few years’ time.”
…proved more prophetic than I intended. Oops.
Other Disney-related things I’ve had to say over the years:
- The Cult of Don Bluth – Former Disney animator, he struck out a career on his own and briefly beat the Mouse that Roared at his own game. Now fighting to get the classic arcade game Dragon’s Lair realized on screen.
- Forgotten Gems Of Disney’s Dork Age – Disney put Generation X through hell in the 1970s, but these were its least stinky turkeys during that creative holocaust.
- Best Disney Villain Figures – Paying tribute to the best of the baddest in Disney, with handsome collectible figurines.
Seriously, I don’t say much about Disney because it overall sucks.
New at 366Weird: Eating Raoul (1982)
At long last, I got the opportunity to vindicate this gonzo cannibal comedy for the brilliant social satire it was: Light-years ahead of its time. I offer Eating Raoul (1982) as a candidate for the Weird Movies’ List apocrypha.
Paul Bartel was writer, director, and co-lead, which makes this probably his magnum opus in his too-short career. But for what few opportunities he did find, Paul Bartel was a master of deadpan black comedy, albeit a little too reserved for the tastes of modern audiences.
New at 366Weird: LEMORA: A CHILD’S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL (1973)
I’m probably, what, one of the five or so bloggers to review this forgotten nightmare? Brace yourself for an edgy take on the vampire mythos with our review of Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural. Your skin crawling may not be entirely from the conventional scares.
This movie is a freak in so many other ways!
- The only movie directed by Richard Blackburn
- The only acting role for Lesley Taplin
- Starring exploitation actress Cheryl Smith when she was of sub-legal age (and playing a 13-year-old).
Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith would go on to a famously seedy B-movie career including Caged Heat, The Swinging Cheerleaders, and Video Vixens!, but also cult movies like Phantom of the Paradise, The Incredible Melting Man, and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. Sadly, her star set too soon when she died from heroin complications.
I don’t write about vampires often, so here’s some other monsters I have written about…
- Who Needs Halloween When You Have The Real Life Horror Of China? – Much scarier than vampires, isn’t it?
- The Best Cannibal Horror Movies – Pleased to eat you!
- Junji Ito, Legendary Horror Mangaka – You’ll never look at a spiral the same way again.
- History of Witch Torture – You’ll be on neither party’s side.
- HP Lovecraft Books That’ll Give You Nightmares – Lovecraft made the most innovative monsters, besides being a poop.
Gimme Your Weird Love: Our 366Weird Picks For Valentine’s Flicks
Valentine’s Day just got very warped: Three of us weird cinephiles (your humble author included) pick our top five weird movies to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Is your vision of love bizarre and unconventional? Do you hope to win a mate over by your quirks alone? Is your idea of the perfect couple closer to The Addams Family than mainstream rom-coms?
Well you got 15 (don’t sweat the math, I checked) certified weirdest movies to choose from to mark this pesky wanna-be holiday. Giles even wrote a poem about it! What a hoot!
XOXOKQ : But bonus content has since been added:
Continue reading “Gimme Your Weird Love: Our 366Weird Picks For Valentine’s Flicks”
Geek Gifts Lists: Valentine’s Ideas
So it’s almost Valentine’s Day here, and you know we’re all about the geek love at Penguin Pete’s! I don’t usually do this kind of thing, but conveniently one of my gigs is at Krononaut, which curates lists of cool stuff we find on Amazon.
What’s the difference between that and the zillion other Amazon list blogs out there? Well, we make sure the product is in stock, has a price range in the median of ~$40 for a comfortable disposable income budget, and we organize things by theme. If you happened to be looking for a certain niche item, you can search Amazon and wade through pages of irrelevant results, or grab one of our lists and have a concise assortment between six and ten items long that’s targeted exactly at what you were shopping for. Sound nifty? You’ve no idea!