Expensive UFOs, Ghost Selfies, Fear of Fear

Found some really cool Close Encounters of the Third Kind art (by artist Daniel Keane) on the Internet. (The term “world wide web” is so Netscape 3). This got me thinking about that recently released Navy jet fighter footage of a UFO pretty much outmaneuvering them as if playing paranormal dodgeball.

Made public (finally) by the Pentagon last December, the footage was shot back in 2004 and was so convincing the Pentagon emptied the collection plate for $22 million to study the “40-foot-long Tic Tac” and its relatives. And yet we can’t come up with a few hundred bucks to fix that @#$%! pothole on the street in front of my house? I already did the research — it’s definitely a hole. It’s so big, you could put other holes in it.

Here’s how the government rationalized the fund folly — retired Cmdr. David Fravor told CNN’s The Situation Room the money spent on the program was a drop in the bucket relative to the military’s over half-a-trillion-dollar annual budget. Pffft — I would’ve done the legwork for 82% of that amount.

On that promissory note, here are a few just released and upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that the military may or may not spend a million billion dollars to study…

IRRATIONAL FEAR (available now)
“Six therapy patients are brought together at a secluded cabin to confront their strangest fears. But these fears won’t just hurt them…they will kill them.”

My strangest fears include never getting to ride in that Death Proof (2007) Chevy Nova™, invisible dog poop on visible sidewalks, and getting bitten by a radioactive spider and webbing my pants in front of the Green Goblin. That would be embarrassing on so many levels.

MALICIOUS (Summer, 2018)
“When a young college professor Adam and his pregnant wife Lisa suffer a traumatic event, they find themselves along with Lisa’s sister Becky haunted — and connected — to a malicious entity. It is only when Adam calls upon Dr. Clark, a professor of parapsychology at the university, that the true horror of what they have encountered becomes clear.”

Lots of movie gals getting knocked up by evil these days: Restraint (2018), The Lullaby (2018), Still/Born (2018), Prevenge (2016), Shelley (2016), Devil’s Due (2014), Delivery (2013), The Clinic (2010), Grace (2009), etc. And let us not forget Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the gold standard for crib horror. (Honorary mention: It’s Alive/1974.) Why, there’s enough pregnancy-gone-wrong movies to fill up 40 weeks. Heh. For a really lurid take on this genre, try Inseminoid (1981). If the title doesn’t fill your diapers, the plot will: “A space-team member goes berserk after being impregnated by something on another planet.” It appears somethings on other planets don’t practice safe sex. I bet they don’t even pay child support, either, those losers.

AURA (November 8, 2018/UK— 2018/2019/US)
“Said to revolve around the concept of photographing your own aura, known as Kirlian photography.”

So you take a selfie of yourself sucking in your cheeks in like an anorexic/narcissistic supermodel and a ghost demon shows up in the photo? Just as it’s not making that two-fingered “peace sign” dealie behind my head, I’m okay with the photo-op. Ready for my close-up.

200 HOURS (2018)
“It’s 1986 and a group of graduate students are close to discovering a cure for sleep using an experimental new drug, but something goes terribly wrong with a test subject. After their department is shut down, the team moves forward in secret — only this time on themselves.”

Sounds like a rip-off of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) and Flatliners (1990/2017). More rip-offery: The movie’s logo rips freely from Stranger Things (2016). And the bra that gal is sporting? I’m wearing the same one!

Military UFOs, Teen Witches, Holiday Flesh-Eaters

UFO fans can rejoice — a TV series is being developed around the famous 1980 Rendlesham Forest Incident, wherein American military personnel, stationed in England, not only encountered a landing UFO, but recorded their observations (on YouTube™) and even walked up and touched the glowing, freaky thing. (Hope they washed their hands, because, you know, space germs.)

From the press release: “The alleged sightings began on December 26, 1980 when U.S. Air Force security patrols stationed at RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk, England saw lights descending into nearby Rendlesham Forest. When servicemen went to investigate, they found a metallic object with glowing lights in the middle of the forest, and when approached the object moved through the woods, causing farm animals to panic. In daylight the next day, impressions were found in a triangular shape in the forest clearing, and on December 28, deputy base commander Lt. Col. Charles Halt and several other servicemen took radiation readings at the clearing and noticed lights in the distance.”

“The show will reportedly wave a complex family drama into the real-life events, which will span the 1980s through to 2020, which will mark the 40th anniversary of the Rendlesham incident.”

I’ve seen lots of documentaries about Rendlesham and, despite the commercials, I want to believe. Thus is the power of television. Until the show premiers, which is in the works as we speak, here are a few just released and upcoming horror/sci-fi you may or may not want to believe in…

MERCY CHRISTMAS (available now/VOD)
“Mercy Christmas follows Michael Briskett as he meets the perfect woman. His ideal Christmas dream comes true when she invites him to her family’s holiday celebration. Michael struggles to survive once he realizes HE will be Christmas dinner.”

A cannibal Christmas movie? Another reason for the season. I’m no gourmet chef (although I do make a mean bowl of stove top popcorn), but what would be an appropriate wine pairing with holiday human flesh? My go-to would be Steel Reserve™ (okay, not really wine, but man, what a kick in the pants). Probably some red chardonnay that’s deep, complex and stays with you long after you’ve tasted it. Kinda like flesh. Hope they’re also serving those neat pop-up dinner rolls. It’s like eating fluffy chemicals, but man, what a kick in the taste buds.

THE DEVIL’S TOY BOX (available now/VOD)
“Cynthia O’Neil enters a haunted asylum known as the Madison Seminary in search of her father who went missing in the asylum while shooting a reality television show.”

Kinda makes you wonder what the Devil considers toys. Slasher Gumby? Silly Blob Putty? Matrix Monopoly? I’d buy ‘em. Just so we’re transparent here, The Devil’s Toy Box was also one of the names of Hellraiser’s (1987) The Lament Configuration (aka, Lemarchand’s Box), a puzzle box, that when solved/opened, would summon Hell’s most Goth entities to welcome you to their depths. As local urban legends go, The Devil’s Toy Box is also cabin in Louisiana that when occupied, makes people go insane. Probably because of intermittent Internet connection, questionable plumbing and no bars for your Evil Smart Phone.

THE LURKER (2018)
“A group of theatre students, celebrating their final show, begin to slowly disappear one at a time.”

Seriously? This is a horror movie? The students probably snuck off to partake in the weed, or in my case, Steel Reserve™.

THE WITCH FILES (2018)
“A group of marginalized young women form a powerful coven and find they have the ability to grant their every wish. Though they soon realize the danger of messing with powerful forces beyond their control.”

I liked this better when they called it The Craft (1996). So yeah, high school chick witches. I’ll stick with TV’s Sabrina, The Teenage Witch (1996 — 2003) ‘cause she’s such a cutie.

Sharks Can Be So Cruel

Just because you have the proper noun Jaws in your movie title doesn’t make it part of the Jaws (1975) family. Nor does reusing dialogue, plot and swiping footage from the Jaws series (as well as Great White/1981 and Deep Blood/1989) qualify as an actual movie. More like cut ‘n paste plagiarism. The only thing cool about Cruel Jaws (1995/aka, Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws and The Beast), which is guilty by a jury of its peers of the above crimes against humanity, is its title. Everything else is just regurgitated bait.

A territorial 35-foot great white shark, thought to be the by-product of military fussing, is attacking and eating the flavorful folks in Hampton Bay, an affordable (at the time) small Florida coastal town. There’s an upcoming Regatta (a sporting event consisting of a series of boat or yacht races) party, and the marauding shark could chomp into their profits. The local sheriff and a teen shark expert (“Sharks swim, eat and make baby sharks…”, a line directly lifted from Jaws) go on the hunt for the “readily available on a moment’s notice” monster. The plan is to kill it. There’s the cruel part.

To bring an emotional element into the mix, they feature a little girl in a wheel chair. “Daddy — give that shark a punch in the nose for me…” That is SO cute. Then there’s a rich kid on a yacht with his friends, armed with guns and gasoline. May the yacht rest in peace. Elsewhere, one of the main characters looks exactly like pro wrestling legend Hulk Hogan, so a fair guess would be he’d use a folding metal chair to take down the mouthy monster in a no-holds barred shark cage match. You could have a zebra fish as the referee. Heh.

All that and the best scene comes when the shark, taking the bait (raw rump roast) dangling from a helicopter, ends up eating the civil aircraft and its occupants — as dessert. Sharks need roughage in their diet.

Cruel J seems to mark his territory around a sunken military ship, presumably where he was born and set free upon the boat’s demise. So this is where the squeaky clean teens and Hulk Hogan go to plant dynamite. (Sure hope the ref isn’t watching.) The ship, though, is loaded with valuables that local criminals try to retrieve. CJ cares not for thieves.

As painfully bad as Cruel Jaws is, you should probably watch it (on YouTube™ for free) and turn it into a drinking game. Do a shot every time you see a stolen scene/dialogue from Jaws; You’ll be passed out cold long before the part where a barking seal interrupts a crooked local amusement park owner’s hot-air balloon speech and knocks him into the dolphin tank. (They don’t show it, but the dolphins likely tore the guy in half and feasted on his land guts. I’m pretty sure of it.)

King Kong’s Illegitimate Step-Brother

There were/are a lot of titles for the 1976 South Korean King Kong rip-off, A.P.E. (I think that stands for “A Primate Enlarged.”) There’s Super Ape, King Kong Returns, King Kong eui daeyeokseup, The Great Counterattack of King-Kong, Attack of the Giant Horny Gorilla, and Hideous Mutant. I get horny gorilla, but hideous mutant? It’s a 36-foot monkey, not a result of in-breeding. Then again…

Speaking of gone wrong, A.P.E. is right in the wheelhouse of campy z-grade, starting with the gorilla busting out of his Uber oil tanker, then, in the middle of the ocean (which appears to be only waist deep) battles a shark and rips it in two after much hammy splashing.

The not-Kong makes it to shore and goes on a stomping spree. The military has a hard time believing the frantic calls about the brute busting a move as well as buildings. Meanwhile, Ape fights off a giant snake, kids in the park and someone out for a relaxing hang glide.

Nearby a movie actress, whose boyfriend kisses her like a Grouper fish swallowing a smaller Grouper fish, is doing a forced-into-sex scene. Ape goes ape for the gal, hunts her down (grabbing her during a puppet show — don’t ask), and the rest of the movie is one long headfirst plunge down the silly slide.

Not surprisingly the movie studio behind this a.r.t. was sued for big bananas due to its similarity to the also goofy King Kong remake, released in 1976 as well. But this one had Ape flipping off the military during a failed attack. Didn’t even see so much as an “up your nose with a rubber hose” in the Dino De Laurentiis version.

Monstrous Minnows

So the government-funded “Razorteeth” project to assist with the Vietnam war was kind of a not-so-much. The plan was to dump a bunch of “super breed” piranha in North Vietnam swimming pools and let nature take its course. (All the had to do was give a bunch of little kids all the Kool-Aid™ they could drink, put ‘em in the waterways and let nature take its course. Problem solved.)

Two horny teens, out looking for a place to get their horn on, happen across a vacated military installation, and find a pool/fish hatchery. Off go the clothes, in go the appetizers. Have you ever seen a hot dog eating contest? The teens are the hot dogs and the genetically-engineered piranha are the contestants.

Later, when not so much as a crumb of the teens can’t be found, an insurance investigator happens across the compound, finds the pools drainage switch, and empties it…right into Lost River Lake, where a filled-to-capacity resort and summer camp waits for their turn on the hot plate. If you’ve seen Jaws (1975), you know it goes from here.

Menu items include summer camp kids, pets, and lakeside resort guests… The plan, though, isn’t to stop the piranha from eating anything that sticks its pink toes and fingers into the water, but rather to keep them from reaching the ocean. (Saved for Piranha II: The Spawning/1981.) That’s the military for you. Cut your losses, think outside the box, look at the big picture.

The piranha are only seen as toothy blurs, driven into voracious hunger frenzy by tasty floaters (think oyster crackers in tomato soup). When you do get to see one up close for a second, it looks like the chest-burster from Alien (1979). Same facial expression, anyway. They’re probably cousins. Elsewhere, some token female nudity, which is pretty much required in order to hold your interest in this one-punchline joke. I liked it, though. The female nudity, not the fish.

No Fizzle In This Missile

1958’s The Lost Missile is categorized as a sci-fi movie, but it’s kinda sorta not really. For one thing missiles – lost or not – are pretty much fact. (What do you think we’ve been shooting at Godzilla for the last 60+ years – milkshake straw wrapper spitwads?) Secondly, there’s no uninvited space alien or laser guns to show said party-crashing extraterrestrial the door. Matters not – The Lost Missile is a gripping moment-by-moment flick with battle-ready military, explode-y bombs, real estate damage, and more importantly, panicking.

So this unidentified missile — about the size of a vertical submarine — is zooming through space, aimed STRAIGHT AT EARTH. Dang – of all the flippin’ planets out there, it had to choose us. Wanting to show off their military superiority, a nation on the other side of the world (they don’t say who, but I’m looking in your direction outer Mongolia) shoots a rocket (or “missile”) at it. Nice move – they only succeeded in diverting the runaway weapon right into our atmosphere. And I say “our” because it’s heading straight for New York by way of Canada.

What follows next is pretty exciting, even though 90.3% of the movie is built around stock Civil Defense footage showing people evacuating the city by heading into bomb shelters, movie theaters, basements and apocalypse-proof hall closets. (It should be noted that doomsday’rs head straight for the bars.)

Thankfully, a scientist and his science fiancée (or would that be “sciencée”?) have been working on a hydrogen warhead in-between practicing for their honeymoon. The plan is to stick it in a ready-to-launch rocket and shoot it at the missile, thereby blasting it into nuclear fallout particles/morsels to rain harmlessly down upon our breathable faces/lungs.

Lots of exciting footage of real Air Force jets ineffectively firing missiles at the lost missile, which is wreaking Rodan-like destruction in its low-atmosphere trek around the world. Yeah, they gotta fluff the pillows with taut apprehension as it liberally applies to school kids, countdowns, relationship-y stuff. But even with the weapons of mass distraction, The Lost Missile brings home the excitement groceries.

Giant Bug vs. Enormous Bug

There is only one thing The Deadly Mantis (1957) has over the almost identical Them! (1954), a nuclear monster movie hailed by the American Film Institute as one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time: The bug looks cooler. Yeah, I said it.

The giant ants in Them! look like someone stuck pipe cleaners into a couple of potatoes and spray-painted ’em with Rust-oleum™. The giant mantis in The Deadly Mantis looks exactly like a mantis, all alien-esque, spindly and icky. (While we’re on the subject, The Outer Limits’ Zanti Misfits (1963) look more like what ants are supposed to look like minus the big bulging eyeballs, though I’ve seen a few of those things crawling around just after last call.)

Taking the page-by-page format of the “giant insects eat civilization” right out of the Them! playbook, the title 200 foot-long Mantidae (biology name) was de-iced after a volcano thawed it from its icy cube in the North Pole. (I didn’t know they had active volcanoes in the North Pole. Snowball fights, yes; but lava?)

The military stationed up there (building a massive early detection network) sustains severe preliminary damage as the mantis feeds itself on mess hall chow (servicemen). Then it flys south, theorized to be heading to South America where I here it’s warmer than the North Pole and more suitable for getting an all-around tan. (Note to self: Use that tanning salon coupon before it expires.)

On its way for a vacation, the mantis buzzes Washington, D.C., and takes a poop rest on the Washington Monument, totally mocking visiting hours. Jets are dispatched, but the launched missiles rarely connect with their exoskeleton target. (Note to the city down below: the air force was just trying to help, man – get over it.)

One heroic pilot accidentally rams his jet into the bug due to London-grade fog that seems to be covering the entire East Coast, ejecting before ka-BOOM! The mantis hits the ground and crawls into the Manhattan Tunnel, mimicking the giants ants that took up homeless camp residence in the vast Los Angeles drainage tunnels and mocking New York Port Authority’s toll charges. The bail-out pilot leads the charge into the tunnel, armed with chemical gas can bombs, and throws it right onto the face of mantis. In your face, deadly mantis!

But for all its plagiarized similarities to Them!, The Deadly Mantis has two very funny scenes. One is with a bunch of military guys jailhouse rockin’ each other in the rec room as there are no dames around at the North Pole, and the other where a scientist and a dame (visiting journalist covering the story) and a military dude are theorizing how big the monster is, guessing that it’s probably over six-feet tall. This while the mantis is right outside their window and rising up over three stories. I just about crapped sno-cones over that one.

In conclusion, while the sci-fi sorta classic The Deadly Mantis looks good, it isn’t as good as Them!

P.S. For more big bug fun, watch 1957’s Beginning of the End – it features REAL giant grasshoppers. Those things goon me out for some reason.

Sharkenstein

Sharkenstein. I don’t know why I’m rolling my eyes; this was of course bound to happen. Then again, when the film-making community regurgitates stuff like Sharkula (2015), Sharktopus (2010) and Shark Exorcist (2016), any chances for the great white shark to be nothing more than a pounded-into-the-ocean-floor punchline went out with the tide.

So here’s what someone had swimming around in their head…

“In the final days of World War II, a secret experiment to weaponize sharks is shut down and destroyed by the Third Reich. But now, 60 years later, a small ocean town is plagued by a bloodthirsty, mysterious creature, one built and reanimated using parts of the greatest killers to ever inhabit the sea – the Sharkenstein monster!”

Yeah, I’ll watch it when it comes out in August 2016. It’s part of my sickness.

FYI: Nazis using sharks seems to be the go-to plot these days. Check out Sky Sharks, due 2017…

“Deep in the ice of the antarctic, a team of geologists uncover an old Nazi laboratory still intact where dark experiments had occured. In order to conquer the world, the Nazis created modified sharks who were able to fly and whose riders are genetically mutated, undead super-humans. A miltary task force called Dead Flesh Four – reanimated US soldiers who fell in Vietnam – is put together to prevent world downfall.”

Aliens & Smooching

Invasion of the Saucer Men was released in 1957 and occupied an era where teen dudes dressed in suits and ties, referred to chicks as dames, and counted it as a plus if they made it to first base (smooching with no tongue application) with said skirts. Everybody in those days were black and white as color wouldn’t be invented until the ‘60s. And yet the teens that happened upon the invading saucer men kept insisting to the cops that these “little monsters” were green. Looked grey to me.

So yeah, aliens land their saucer on Earth at night and proceed to lurk around in the woods that serve as camouflage for first-basing teens. But these aren’t your ordinary extraterrestrials; they’re only a few feet tall,  featuring inside out scrotum heads and probably stink like Uranus. (I never get tired of that joke device.) But their best feature is gnarly hands that have dripping needles protruding out of the fingertips. And that dripping liquid is…ALCOHOL! The good stuff, too, not the Two-Buck-Chuck stuff you/I get at the mini-mart.

First customer/victim is none other than the Riddler (aka, Frank Gorshin) who plays one of two drifters, and packs a bottle of the good stuff wherever he goes. And when he ends up drunkenly encountering the aliens and they inject him with even more booze, well hey – let’s get this party started! Unfortunately, it was a clear case of over-serving as he died from acute alcohol poisoning.

Meanwhile, the military shows up and surrounds the flying saucer, and with a bullhorn, demanding they present themselves: “Come out! Can you hear me, spaceship?” (I don’t know why, but that cracked me up.) No response, so they shoot it with explosive-grade ammo. Nothing. Then they try using an acetylene torch – and end up causing the ship to explode. Shrugging their shoulders, the military gets in their jeeps and drive back to the base.

But it’s the horny teens who save the day. Discovering that the aliens melt and explode when exposed to light, they rally all the cars at the make-out zone in the woods to surround the creatures and simultaneously turn on their headlights. Ka-BOOM! Invasion denied. Then they go back to power smooching. It’s as if getting to first – and possibly second base — was more important to them than halting an alien invasion. And they’re right.

Extraterrestrial Lighting

If you were visiting, renting or gassing up in Phoenix, Arizona on Thursday, March 13, 1997 at around 10PM, you were one of the tens of thousands of people who witnessed the Phoenix Lights, the biggest UFO sighting in the history of the entire flappin’ universe. (Except the Pleadies System – UFOs gas up there.)

To commemorate that TRUE event is the indie sci-fi “film,” Phoenix Incident, releasing in March 2016, but after already circulating in foreign countries and cheesy horror movie blogs (ahem) since 2015. Here’s what that incident is about…

“Blurring the line between fiction and reality, the fact based, sci-fi thriller revolves around a military conspiracy and the controversial missing person’s case surrounding the infamous 1997 event.”

“With the support of the victims’ families, along with classified military documentation, cockpit recordings, Air Force pilot interviews, actual FLIR footage, and first-hand recovered video evidence, Phoenix Incident exposes the military’s engagement with extraterrestrial contact, and the collateral damage of four civilians.”

Smart of the movie to include actual footage of the Phoenix Lights on that fateful night UFOs came to town. But why watch the movie when you can see the documentary made by Dr. Lynn D. Kitei, who actually filmed the extraterrestrial visitation and made The Pheonix Lights: We Are Not Alone (2008), a documentary out of it? She has nice hair and washes her hands, so there’s no way in heck she could be lying about this stuff.

Sure, there are those who cry hoax and seek to rob us of The Truth, claiming the lights were nothing more than a fighter jets dropping flares before returning to the nearby Luke Air Force Base, which is military procedure when completing a training mission that wastes taxpayer money. What a flaming load. Why won’t skeptics realize that UFOs often disguise themselves as flares in order to probe our air space without undue attention?

Debunkers suck.