Lunar Health, Camping Aliens, Home Groan Farming

In a quest to contact my space brothers, I found a recent Outer Space: Where Science Meets Science Fiction video article on AOL.com (is that thing still around?) about the five effects space travel has on you. Think of it as primer, not unlike going to a tanning booth several weeks before a tropical vacation so you don’t go up like a piece of bacon in a microwave while sucking down artificially colored adult Slushees™ on the first day at the beach without sunblock or a big foofy hat.

1. Height. According to the laws and physics of science as it applies to space travel, zero gravity can expand your vertebrae by 3%. This means you’ll have to pack extra long space britches. Warning: you will return to normal height once back on Earth. Don’t know about you, but I don’t plan on coming back. Wonder if Big & Tall™ sells extra-large Speedos™?

2. Being in space weakens your muscle and bones. Pffft — so does laying on your couch after binge watching Lost in Space on Netflix™. 

3. The size and shape of your heart can be affected. That’s if you even have one. I don’t.

4. Isolation in space can weaken your immune system. It’s claimed that unhealthy microbes can easily pass from food and other space travelers like swapping spit in a meteor shower. Solution: Just drink Romulan Ale and don’t try any lip locks in the air locks.

5. Your airless environment can be a cause of depression and sleep disorders. This is because there’s a 90-minute light/dark cycle in space versus the Earth’s 24-hour cycle. We Earthers have already solved that problem by leaving our TVs/iPads/smart phones on all night, bathing us in refreshing blue wave light. Some say that’s not good for you. I say it gives us more time to watch more TV and Internet cat videos. How can that possibly be depressing?

So it looks like I’m all set to fill out my immigration papers to gain citizenship on any planet other than this. And while I wait for a green card light signal from a distant galaxy approving my space visa, here are a few now available/upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that may or may not affect the size and shape of your heart. Or vertebrae.

THE ALIENS (available now)
“A UFO believer must choose between the aliens above he has never seen or the mysterious guide who appears in his campsite week after week.”

The mysterious guide is probably Yogi Bear coming for your pic-a-nic basket. (I knew watching old cartoons would someday pay off.)

WHO’S WATCHING OLIVER (July 3, 2018)
“A mentally unstable loner is lost in a life forced upon him. By night Oliver aimlessly wanders the streets and bars on what can only be described as a truly shocking and humiliating killing spree. His only savior and possible way out of a life he is desperate to escape comes in the form of the beautiful Sophia with her sweet eccentricity and naivety to the danger she has put herself in.”

Sophia could very well have been my babysitter, though I didn’t go on shocking and humiliating killing sprees. More like shocking and humiliating cookie jar assaults.

SOLIS (2018)
“When Troy Holloway wakes up to find himself trapped aboard a drifting escape pod shooting towards the Sun he quickly realizes the true terror of his situation. With rapid oxygen depletion and a burn-up rate of 90 minutes, Commander Roberts leads a rescue party to save Holloway before time runs out.”

Two words for Troy before plunging into the Sun: Bring marshmallows.

MANIAC FARMER (2018)
“A group of street punks led by the murderous Blasphemous Rex meet their match when they choose to terrorize a seemingly helpless farmer who ends up turning the tides on the group, and the hunters become the hunted.”

A plot so weak, even a spinach-less Popeye could rip it in half. So what does this “maniac” farmer do on his farm? Grow killer tomatoes? (Tell me you got that reference.) 

Zombie Justice, Vampire Detective, Saturn’s 7-Eleven

A new poster for Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018). Looks nifty, although after watching the trailers this whole thing is starting to smell like one of those steaming mess Transformer movies. Giant robots fighting giant monsters from another dimension, though, still looks good on paper. So yeah, I’ll go see it.

Until these machines get their metal groove on when the movie is released in March, 2018, here are a few just released and upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that may or may not be steaming messes…

BLACK HOLLOW CAGE (available now)
“A girl, who lives secluded in a house in the woods with the only company of her father and a wolfhound, finds among the trees a mysterious cubic device with the ability to change the past.”

I’m betting the “mysterious cubic device” is an outhouse. Logical when you see that outhouses have the ability to change the past as well. Ate a bad burrito last night and its causing havoc on your Lynyrd innards? Use the outhouse and presto! — you’ve been factory re-set and the past is (no pun intended) behind you.

RV: RESURRECTED VICTIMS (available now)
“In the near future, murder victims have begun coming back to life with the sole purpose of avenging their deaths. Jin-hong is a cold-hearted prosecutor who’s obsessed with catching the man that killed his mother. But when she returns home, intent on killing him, he quickly becomes the lead suspect.”

Neat twist on the zombie theme, even though they don’t use the Z word anywhere. But a rose by any other name…

DETECTIVE K: SECRET OF THE LIVING DEAD (February 16, 2018)
“When a series of unusual murders occurs, Detective K and his partner are once again called upon to solve the case. Along the way, he teams up with a beautiful woman with amnesia and together they discover vampire bite marks on all of the bodies. As they investigate further, they begin to realize that the woman is somehow closely connected to the deaths.”

Detective K. Cool name. Detective P? Not so much. And the beautiful woman with amnesia— they practically tell you she’s the vampire they’re looking for. Better to let her suck on a body part to make sure and… HEY — get your mind out of the gutter, you pervs. FYI: This one has an alternate title: Detective K: Secret of the Bloodsucking Demon. There is no part of that I don’t like.

THE TITAN (APRIL 13, 2018)
“When Earth’s resources start rapidly depleting, the human race is faced with the threat of swift and inevitable extinction. As the clock ticks down, and options become increasingly limited, space exploration emerges as mankind’s last hope. Hotshot Air Force pilot, Rick Janssen is chosen for a military experiment that will create a human being capable of surviving the harsh environments of Saturn’s moon, Titan. The experiment is successful, turning Rick into a super-human. But it also creates deadly side-effects which threaten the lives of Rick, his wife, Abigail, his family, and possibly humanity itself.”

Crud — we drink up all of Earth’s resources and Titan, the largest of Saturn’s 62 moons, is the only lunar 7-Eleven™ we can go wreck? There are lots more planets closer. And since Saturn is 746 million miles away, at $3.09 average for a gallon of gas — and correctly assuming any space rocket would get at least 35 miles per gallon — it would take $2,360,760,000.00 to fill the tank. That would buy a lot of Romulan Ale.

P.S. I saw two release dates for this — one in April and, according to the poster, supposedly in May. Pick your fav month and go with that.

Crappy UFOs, Haunted Mansions, Pre-made Zombies

Recently watched a “documentary” called Curse of the Man Who Sees UFOS (2016). In the first five minutes the cursed and excitable Christo Roppolo, looking to be in his late 50s, reenacts going to the park at night, looking up and seeing a UFO. The said unidentified flying object sets ‘ol Christo’s innards a’ rumblin’ and he quickly runs over to a tree, drops trou, and lets loose a huge, public steamer. Laughing, he recounts leaving the park with an identifiable wet stain on the back of his britches. That’s icky and funny at the same time!

The eccentric Christo, however, has video proof of multiple UFO sightings around Monterey, CA, documenting quite a few close encounters. And he does this with bowel-emptying glee. (Note to self: bring Handi-Wipes™ on next UFO hunting excursion.)

That publicly stated, here are a few now available/upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that may or may not leave you feeling like you need to ruin public parks with your steaming wrongness…

I MAKE CORPSES (available now)
“A serial killer whose work has suddenly become exponentially easier thanks to a recent zombie outbreak and thus, is able to create corpses and make it look like they were simply killed by the undead to avoid any suspicion on his part. During a zombie outbreak the dead reanimate and Ben becomes a little complacent in ensuring the corpses are disposed of correctly, and soon his handiwork rears its ugly head.”

This is a film short, which is too bad as the premise is pretty clever cool and would make for a double pretty clever cool full-length feature type thingamajig.

PLANET REHAB (available now/VOD)
“It’s a race to save mankind and hybrids from the aliens that would get them hooked on crack. One man, Dakota Schill, armed with his crack factory, fights the good fight against the alien intruders. A little crazy, a lot sexy, and definitely off the wall!”

Drug dealing aliens. Would’ve thought they’d try and get us drunk on Romulan Ale; we’d be a lot easier to abduct as alcoholics than as crackheads, who are way monkey crazy and unpredictable. Drunks just wanna sit in their own makings and not do anything else except keep drinking. Or so I’ve heard. Ahem.

DELIRIUM (January 19, 2018)
“The Hell Gang, an exclusive club made up of a group of school friends, promise their classmate Eddie that he can join the gang if he can just make it to the porch of a legendary local mansion with a dark, sinister past. Others have tried but none have made it within sight of the mansion before fleeing back in terror. And Eddie, who is rigged with a camera to prove he did it, does not return at all! Five members of the gang must now go in to find him. They set off, confident that Eddie is trying to prank them, but what they find in the old mansion is even more terrifying than the campfire stories and legends of murdered children that once lived there.”

Kinda sounds like a spin on Salem’s Lot (1979/2004) and the spooky ass Marsten House, which has been rented to vampires. (They probably had to put down a larger damage deposit to cover carpet cleaning.)

THE RUSSIAN BRIDE (2018)
“A Russian woman travels to America with her daughter to marry a reclusive billionaire, who turns out to be a madman and sends their lives spiraling into a living hell.”

Marriage is the best worse horror story ever, and nothing like the rom-coms they churn out like horror movies. If you’re married and are happy, disregard the above sentence.

Lunar Madness

In the critically butt-kissed Moon (2009), Sam Bell works on the Moon base Sarang. Since it’s the Moon, every day is a night shift. Heh. He’s been there three years, scraping the moon’s surface for Helium-3. (He gets to keep any pocket change he finds, though.) LUNAR, his employers, have sent a transmission that his shift is nearly over, and to prepare for the latest employee to arrive. This means hiding those dirty magazines in an airlock or nearby crater.

Aside from a talking computer named GERTY that runs the space station (I would’ve named it Pocket Pal 3000), Sam’s the only one on the Moon. So how is it he sees someone standing outside on the Moon’s surface? Is it a member of Pink Floyd? Is it Space Jesus? Sam decides to find out.

While gunning his future tractor to the mysterious body, he crashes and before losing consciousness, switches his suit to life support. Good thing, as there’s no air on the Moon. (I found that out from the Internet.) Sam wakes up in the sick bay and overhears GERTY having a conversation with LUNAR, telling the computer to not let Sam outside the house.

 Sam manages to trick the computer and heads back to the wreck, where he finds…himself! Bringing his doppelganger to the base, the two try to cope with each other’s existence. Talk about space madness — one Sam is agitated, the other calm and logical. If there were two of me in a space station, there’d be a fight to the death over whatever Romulan Ale was left in the fridge.

Sam #1 is getting sick and looks like he has the space flu. Sam #2 seems to be as healthy as a fresh Moon peach. Sick Sam slowly uncovers clues as to why there are two of him and… He needs to complete the mystery before the relief ship gets to the Moon and spanks his moon for crashing the company tractor.

When Sam discovers the sad truth, it’s not pretty. You’ll probably even cry comsos tears when you find out. A three-stage twist sets up a finish that, while not accompanied by UFOs or laser beams, is quite gratifying and satisfying, and any other words that rhymes with those two. Moon is an unconventional but way cool sci-fi film. Makes me wanna go to the Moon. I’ll have to put that on my bucket list.