Back Into The Zone, Faustian Felines, Soul For Sale

In case you forgot, one of the cornerstones of horror and science fiction is the The Twilight Zone anthology TV series, wrote/co-wrote and hosted by Rod Serling, from 1958 to 1964. And now it’s back in the form of the cleverly-named The Twilight Zone, arriving April 1, 2019 on CBS All Access. This re-boot will be hosted by Mad TV’s Jordan Peele, and will air every Thursday until the ratings say otherwise.

Given that The Twilight Zone is regarded as one of the greatest TV series of ALL TIME, this is good news for fans of science fiction, horror, the paranormal and fantasy with a surprise twist. (By comparison, The Outer Limits, a competing, similarly-themed TV series (1963 — 1965), featured a monster-of-the-week and no moral lessons taught by said monster-of-the-week.)

To feed your Twilight Zone monkey until April gets here, check out Tom Elliot’s Rondo Award winning show, The Twilight Zone Podcast. Tom does a respectful job, with interviews, reviews and readings from classic Twilight Zone episodes. Or if you’d rather not do any of the above, here are a few just released/upcoming horror movies that may or may not take you to the outer limits…

HUNTING EVIL (available now)
“A broken man returns to society after serving time but hits dead ends to turn his life around until he meets an enigmatic man who promises him riches. But when the piper calls, it’s in the form of evil incarnate and wants his soul in return.”

Cool — what’s the going rate on selling your soul? If I could get enough to cover rent, sign me up.

LEGEND OF THE DEMON CAT (February 5, 2019)
During the Tang Dynasty, a Chinese poet and a Japanese monk join forces to investigate a demonic cat who has possessed a general’s wife and wreaked havoc on the imperial court. The investigation takes some gruesome and unexpected twists, leading the monk and the poet to unravel the mystery behind the decade’s old death of the legendary, beautiful concubine, Yang Guifei.”

A woman possessed by her cat. Aren’t they all?

SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK (August 9, 2019)
“A group of young teens must solve the mystery surrounding sudden and macabre deaths in their small town.”

For those of us who’d rather watch horror movies than read ‘em, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is three children’s books written by Alvin Schwartz and illustrated by Stephen Gammell. The series  began in 1981, a year when people’s street-wear and haircuts were pretty darn horrifying. So much so, there’s one illustration that looks a heckuva lot like me driving around in my Chevy Camaro Z/28, blasting out “Don’t Stop Believin’” on my after-market installed Pioneer™ cassette deck. That alone qualifies as one of the scariest stories ever.

HERE COMES HELL (March 1, 2019/UK)
“A 1930s dinner party descends into carnage, gore and demonic possession in Here Comes Hell, a genre-clashing horror comedy.”

Early reviews are calling this, Downtown Abbey meets the The Evil Dead. I’ve seen The Evil Dead but not Downtown Abbey, which is apparently a long-running British drama TV series and not the name of a street hooker.

Aliens, Extraterrestrials, Space Brothers

Besides being a well-researched book on extraterrestrial visitations and the infamous the Roswell Incident (UFO ran a red light, crashed, and we put the alien driver in jail and denied bail) and beyond, it’s the title that’s pretty dang clever: Fifty Shades of Greys. Man, that’s funny because greys are what we call aliens, probably because they look so depressed all the time.

Written by Raymond Szymanski, a retired Air Force Engineer, the 2016 book claims that the UFOs and aliens from the outrageous 1947 Roswell Incident were brought to the Wright – Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio to be examined and kept in obscure covered passageways. That’s a pretty bold proclamation. An Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio, home of Orville Wright, the guy who invented UFOs? Mr. Szymanski — you just hit pay dirt.

Another coincidence, then, that we’re being invaded with movies and documentaries of our depressed space brothers. Here are a few just released sci-fi movies and UFO documentaries to give you a few more shades of greys…

ALIENS: ZONE OF SILENCE (available now)
“After her brother vanishes from the Mexican desert, a young woman sets out to uncover the truth about his disappearance. When she discovers an extraterrestrial presence, she must risk her life to expose the desert’s otherworldly secret.”

An almost note-for-note rip-off of The Phoenix Incident (2015), The Phoenix Tapes ’97 (2016) and Phoenix Forgotten (2017). Despite the plagiarism, the fact this is YET ANOTHER found footage flick should make you wanna better spend your time elsewhere, like abducting beers.

ALIEN CONTACT: OUTER SPACE (available now)
Many people think of Space as a quiet and desolate vacuum of emptiness, but new evidence reveals that space is rife with activity beyond our comprehension. Just as we sent Voyager and Pioneer probes beyond our solar system, aliens have probes of their own that may have arrived as early as the 1600’s. While Tesla was the first to successfully communicate with neighboring worlds using radio waves, we have received recent signals from intelligent sources. In 1989, Russian Space Probe Phobos 2 photographed a UFO on the surface of Mars just prior to losing contact. Scientists have determined that the craft was real and of a thin elliptical shape over 20 miles in length. We are not alone in outer space and while the aliens may be initiating contact, they could also be here already.”

Seems to me if aliens wanted to contact us they would just send us an IM on Spacebook™ or something. Or maybe its because they haven’t found intelligent life here on Earth worth talking to. That’s probably it.

E.T. CONTACT: THEY ARE HERE (available now)
“E.T. Contact: They Are Here documents the jaw-dropping stories of individuals from around the world who share similar accounts of extraterrestrial and otherworldly encounters. Through a series of groundbreaking on-camera experiments on human DNA, and interviews with leading scientists, viewers will find themselves pondering the nature of their own reality or yet the true origin of the human species. E.T. Contact may ultimately show that the traditionally unexplained is, in fact, far more attributable to science than fiction.”

The trailer for this one is pretty funny as it features straight-faced academics supporting the belief of extraterrestrials’ existence and, by extension, their frequent visitations to learn how our back doors work. Take heed, space brother; I just ate a Taco Bell™ Fiery Doritos Locos Taco Supreme™.

ALIEN CONVERGENCE (available now)
“When flying reptilian aliens begin to take over the world, the remaining survivors must band together and fight back with newly developed fighter jets.”

Aliens can fly? Well dang — that makes ’em even cooler than first thought. Aside from complexion, wondering, though, how this differs from Flying Monkeys (2013)?