Galloping Ghosts, Another Apocalypse, Leggy Mermaids

Wanna play rare and classic horror/sci-fi-themed pinball? Then you’re gonna have to gallop to the Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield, IL. Depending where you live if not in Brookfield, the cost of getting there will be a LOT of quarters.

The famed arcade now has said super rare pinball machines, ready to suck up your pocket change like a hobo Roomba™: Twilight Zone, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Addams Family, Godzilla (the sucky 1998 monster, not the non-sucky 1954 version), Tales From The Crypt, Creature From The Black Lagoon, Aliens, and the super-rare one-of-a-kind prototype of Predator, with red skulls on elongated skeletal spines mounted on each side of the machine. If you lose, your skull plus spine gets ripped out and hung on the trophy wall. (It’d be cool if that were true.)

$15 — $20 gets you unlimited play on all the machines all day. I would’ve paid at least $20.01. So while you inner weep with anguish that you’re not within tilting distance of the Galloping Ghost Arcade, here are a few upcoming horror/sci-fi TV series and movies that may or may not give you unlimited viewing for $20, give or take a few quarters…

THE PASSAGE (January 14, 2019/Fox™)
“Based on author Justin Cronin’s trilogy of the same name, The Passage is a character-driven action drama that focuses on Project Noah, a secret medical facility where scientists experiment with a dangerous virus that could lead to the cure for all disease — but it also could potentially wipe out the human race. When a young girl is chosen to be a test subject, a federal agent is tasked with bringing her in, but he becomes her surrogate father, determined to protect her at any cost — even as Project Noah’s work threatens to unleash an unimaginable apocalypse.”

This one’s a TV series and sounds apocalyptical-y edgier than we’re used to getting from the Fox Network. The irony here being that most of Fox’s programming qualifies as apocalyptical-y craptacular, Gotham, The Exorcist and Lucifer notwithstanding. (Hell’s Kitchen? Is that stupid thing still on the air?)

10 (January 18, 2019/Netflix)
“Sam, a teenage girl, is one of the last people on a post-cataclysmic Earth. With the final shuttle scheduled to leave the planet, she must decide whether to journey to the launch point and join the rest of humanity, or remain on Earth, a castaway in the only home she has ever known.”

This looks to be based on an episode of Futurama (“A Farewell To Arms”/2012). Don’t screw with a guy who knows his cartoons.

THE GOLEM (February 5, 2019)
“During an outbreak of a deadly plague, a young woman, Hanna, must save her tight-knit Jewish community from invaders. Turning to Jewish mysticism, she conjures a dangerous entity to protect her and her people. However, the powerful creature she summons may be far more evil than anything she could have ever imagined.”

Wrote about the original Golem before — several times. It was done in 1915 and was a German silent film, blah, blah, blah. And yes, there have been remakes with the EXACT SAME PLOT.

THE ISLE (February, 2019/Limited theater release)
“Set in 1846 on a remote island off the west coast of Scotland, where three survivors from a mysterious sinking of their merchant ship find themselves stranded on a small misty isle. The isle’s four sole secretive residents, an old harbor man, a farmer, his niece and a young mad woman, are anything but welcoming and reluctant to aid the sailors back to the mainland. The promise of a boat never materializes leading one of the sailors to question why people had abandoned the island. Through his investigation he discovers that every year around the same date a tragedy at sea would occur and young men from the island would perish. When his two shipmates meet with fatal accidents, the myth of a ghostly siren haunting the island leads him to try and uncover the truth.”

Sounds like mermaids with legs. (Come to think of it, nice visual.) This also seems to echo the plot of the new movie, The Vanishing (2019). I haven’t seen that one yet, but I don’t think it has mermaids with legs. Too bad; I might’ve watched it twice by now. 

A Box of Death

Cubeº: Cube Zero (2004), the sequel/prequel to Cube (1997) and Cube 2: Hypercube (2002), thinks outside the box, showing the people that control the test subjects inside the massive, booby-trapped, multi-roomed Rubik’s Cube™ of deathisms.

One such test subject is sprayed with fluid and thinks its water. Don’t go brushing your teeth with it just yet, pal — that there water is a flesh-eating bacteria mixed in with a fluid delivery system and… Dang, he melted before I could finish telling him he was about to die a horrible and un-flossed death.

Operated by two controllers who don’t like each other, they’re given orders on how to run scenarios on those within the Cube. One guy has an eyeball outside of his head — super ick. The other guy falls for a supermodel previously placed in the Cube and is instructed to record her dreams. (If anyone ever puts me in a Cube and tries recording my dreams, they better have a strong stomach.)

As the Cube clues (or “clubes”) fall into place, the test subjects are found to have something in common: each was sentenced to death at one point, but signed a consent form to have their lives spared if they agreed to be placed in the Cube. Wait a minute — the supermodel wasn’t sentenced to death, nor did she sign a waiver. That means there’s some gosh dang monkey business going on upstairs in the corporate office.Realizing this, the one controller who has a case of the hot potatoes for the supermodel goes into the Cube to rescue her. The Cube, though, has been rigged to reset itself and do a clean sweep, meaning it vaporizes everything inside made up of living tissue. Ouch and then some. Cooler still, when a test subject makes it through the Cube’s traps and poking things, he or she exits and is asked if they believe in God. If you say no, you’re burned to death right there on the spot. You’re gonna roast in Hell one way or another.

Cubeº: Cube Zero is more interesting than Cube 2: Hypercube, but not as good as the self-titled first one in the franchise, due to nonsensical “Big Brother” plotting. I watch these things for the boobies and booby-traps, NOT for nonsensical story lines. As stuffed sausage as the plot is, it has one ’o those Twilight Zone-type irony/twisty endings. So, like, that was pretty cool.

A Contract With Death

In The Devil’s Partner (1962), a Twilight Zone reject, Pete Jensen is a scraggly hermit who looks like he’s older than lava. He also lives in wooden shack just outside of the appropriately named Furnace Flats, NM. Let’s just say if you wanted to, you could fry an egg on Pete’s dirt porch.

Before Pete kicks the furnace, he sacrifices a goat in his living room (actually the only room in the “house”), smears the animal blood on a hexagram he painted on the floor and hides with a goat skin rug, and makes a pact with the Devil in writing, promising to loan out his soul for two years in exchange for turning young and handsome in order to get busy with Nell, the town’s young hottie.

The Devil grants Pete his wish — he’s now “Nick” and lookin’ slick! He “arrives” back in town as Pete’s nephew, moves back in to the old shack, and starts his plan to snare Nell in his web of deceit. And dang, it works, even though Nell is engaged to handsome gas station owner, David. Heck, so convincing is Nick as a happenin’ and polite young man, David even offers him a job.

But he needs to clear the field of people that are Nick-blocking his attempts to make smooch happen with Nell. First, he uses his “powers” to take out a guy with poison goat’s milk. (I thought all goat’s milk tasted like poison.) Then Nick possesses a pet dog to bite half David’s face off. Then he turns into a horse that stomps the buzz out of the town drunk. But there’s one more person Nick needs to put down — David. Prior, Scar-Face Dave has been treating Nell like a goat and plans on leaving town for good. When Nell goes to Nick for solace, he makes smooch happen. All according to plan.

Furnace Flats’ sheriff and the town doctor (also Nell’s pop) are hot on the bloody trail. Nick turns himself into a rattlesnake (implied, not shown) and goes to bite the rest of David’s face off. Dave’s ready for him — with a gun. Shots were fired, words were said, and everybody puts the clues — and bloody trail — together, and finds the snake in the grass. There it turns into a dying Nick who shall no more make smooch happen.

You don’t get to see the Devil, but you get to see his evil hands. They look dirty. All the deaths are not shown (except the goat milk guy falling to the floor), and despite Furnace Flats’ dry and dusty hot temps, at no point does Nell slip into a socially acceptable bikini. So yeah, be prepared to be let down.

50 Years of Apes

March 27, 1968 was when the world changed for the better. That’s when talking monkeys ruled the Earth and it became a sort of “planet of the apes. ” (Nowadays, the world is run by a bunch of braying jackasses.)

Planet of the Apes, one of sci-fi’s all time greatest movies, was released on this day 50 years ago. And after spawning a veritable Ape City of movies, remakes, a TV series, cartoons, games, books, toys and bubblegum cards whose included hard and sharp card-shaped gum would cut your gums like you were chewing on a razor, still remains king of the jungle.

The original Planet of the Apes movie, kinda sorta based on La Planète des Singes, a 1963 the short novel  by French quill-slinger Pierre Boulle, was adapted to the big screen by none other than Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling and Bridge Over River Kwai’s (1957) Michael Wilson. Taking the book’s premise that evolved apes were the dominant species over man, they ran with the concept and took it straight to the box office hoop, and came up with arguably the best shock-twist movie endings ever in the history of ever. (If you haven’t seen it, you might wanna do that now, then go put your pants in the washer.)

So what have we learned from Planet of the Apes over the last five decades? First, mankind is still a collective a**hole. And Zira, the female doctor chimp, is kind of a floozy, her romantic tastes crossing species like swinging from a vine. Then you have Dr. Zaius, a hard-right Republican, who tried to suppress and delete the existence of illegal aliens. Cornelius, Zira’s husband and archaeologist, was, and shall always be, a lovable wuss. And let’s not forget General Ursus, a war-maddened gorilla who lives in infamy for his Jiffy Pop™ shaped helmet and stirring war cry, “The only good human is a dead human!” Hardcore, but direct to the point.

So happy birthday, Planet of the Apes. You made this world a better Forbidden Zone.

Robots Hate You And Your Planet

What if you woke up in a hotel room in a big city, only to discover you’re the only one in the entire city? Besides pulling down your pants and running out into the street screaming, you’re probably go looking for somebody to explain WTF.

No, this isn’t a Twilight Zone episode, though it plays out like one. Rather, it’s the plot for Target Earth, an obscure sci-fi movie from 1954, which predated TZ by five years.

So Nora King, having just woken up from a flubbed suicide attempt (she tried sticking her head in a toaster – just kidding), discovers all of Chicago is bereft of tax-paying citizens. Wandering around and starting to completely lose her beans, she eventually happens across a guy with impeccably combed hair just coming to after being smacked unconscious by criminals. Aha – an excuse is established!

They go wandering and hear a piano being played in a cocktail lounge of all things. It’s here they meet a guy and his gal, both getting drunk as skunks because hey, free booze! Through the haze of sweet alcohol, they tell Nora and her crime statistic guy that the town had been evacuated because of a mysterious invading force, but that they were unable (too drunk) to go with the rest of the group.

Now there are four and… What the flap – they find another person. Now the town is starting to feel crowded. They find a newspaper with a headline warning of impending disaster, so new guy is freaks out and tries to start a car when he gets mad zapped by…an alien robot from Venus! That’ll teach him to try and jack a vehicle.

The group heads into a hotel, finds rooms and try to figure out their next maneuver. If they were of sound mind and body, they’d pry open the mini bar. Before everyone figure out a plan, a criminal shows up with a gun and holds everyone hostage. Um, I think they were doing that to themselves.

Bullets fly and then there were three. But an alien robot, scouting for loose citizens to eye fry, hears the gunfire and crashes into the hotel, eventually clanking its way up the stairs to the room where all the action is.

Heading to the roof, the robot is in slow pursuit. The drunk guy sacrifices himself to save Nora and her bullet perforated boyfriend and is vaporized by some sort of science beam. Before you can say “they’re f’d in the b-hole), the Army shows up, and using a loud speaker broadcasting a disrupt-o signal, disable the robot before it can shine a light on the situation.

You never get to see the alien robot army, just the one tin can. The introduction of the criminal with a gun didn’t make sense. Not staying in the cocktail lounge didn’t make sense either because hey, free booze! And when the “army” shows up, there’s only a couple of jeeps. And too much time is spent talking and not screaming.

Target Earth needed to find a bulls-eye.

Still Lost in Space

Now that everyone’s suitably worked into a froth over all things space truckin’ (thank you Interstellar, The Martian, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Deep Purple), it’s a no-brainer for Hollywood to jump on the launch pad and get more space-y films into orbit.

Filmed in Los Angeles but made to make us think we’re on a distant planet (not too much of a stretch), 400 Days (2015) puts four astronauts into a simulated mission to put the screws to the psychological effects of space travel. Pffftttt – I can do that from a bar stool – before last call.

As the plot goes, “Locked away for 400 days, the crew’s mental state begins to deteriorate when they lose all communication with the outside world. Forced to exit the ship, they discover that this mission may not have been a simulation after all.”

Thanks for the spoiler, Hollywood jerks. And since we’re on the subject, this has already been done – in 1959. Titled “Where is Everybody?”, The Twilight Zone’s very first episode (thank you, Rod Serling), reads almost exactly like the plot of 400 Days…

“His name is Mike Ferris, an astronaut in training who has been confined to an isolation room located within an aircraft hangar for 484 hours and 36 minutes. He has been undergoing tests to determine his fitness for spaceflight and whether he can handle the psychological stress of a prolonged trip to the Moon alone.”

And to think all he had to do was go to a dive bar, which is where Hollywood seems to be going for inspiration these days.

Future People Suck

The L.A. to Washington D.C. passenger flight  didn’t really disappear – it was just stuck in the clouds while future people de-planed a nuclear physicist, a supermodel math expert and a rocket know-it-all, and put them on trial for crimes they were going to commit. (I.e., build an atomic bomb that will eventually wipe everyone off the face of this toilet Earth, thereby denying the distant dudes the right to be born at some point in time.) Man, future people can be so pissy.

The plane, malfunctioning during a storm, climbs so high, lack of oxygen knocks everyone out and makes the engines stall. The three bomb-makers come to and try and argue their way out of being doomed to all eternity in the clouds.

No one wants to live in clouds, so they bolt back to the plane, where it somehow resumes its flight, with no one the wiser (except those three soon-to-be-troublemakers).

The Flight That Disappeared (1961) is a Twilight Zone knock-off, but it does have some good moments, including a TZ twist-o ending. But where future people – who don’t exist yet – buy their pants and shirts, leaves one to ponder.

Death Is Calling – Will You Answer?

Boarding a plane on a school field trip to Paris (what, no chocolate factory?), a student gets a premonition that flying isn’t the safest mode of transportation, with the aircraft blowing up and killing them all. I proclaim this scene to be freakin’ amazing.

Gooning out, he and a handful of students get tossed off the plane, only to watch it double explode moments after take-off. If that was me I’d kiss the ground so hard as to give it a hickey.

Not long afterward, the surviving students start dying in seemingly accidental ways. This is because Death, cheated out of grim reaping their lives, is coming to reconcile the balance sheet.

Even though it is a DIRECT borrow from a 1961 Twilight Zone episode titled Twenty-Two, Final Destination (2000) thankfully isn’t one of those mindless “kill teens” horror movies. OK, it kinda is, but not as STUPID as 99% of the genre. You know everyone’s gonna get it, but you don’t know how, which is where FD rocks.

As with the Saw movies, FD’s mouse trap deaths are pure art – and intentionally misleading, which adds more savoriness to the end result. If I explain ’em here, then they won’t have the same impact when you watch it. Speaking of impact, one chick gets a bus sandwich served up old style. OK, no more. You’re simply going to watch this one to see for your own bus-faced self.

Zombie World

A new zombie flick that reverses the role of zombie vs. human. Be right back – I have to yawn.

Yeah, a bit snarky, but enough with the zombie crap already. No matter how you spin it, zombie movies are so overdone as to be my neighbor’s holiday meatloaf. (Ironically, that thing keeps coming back to life, year after year.)

So Zombie World (2014), a Spanish horror flick at that, pit zombies against an inhuman enemy: humans. Synopsis: In a world where zombies are on the planet, a terrible event will transform humans with a rage that will be unleashed on all zombies. Now it is they who have to hide to avoid being killed or becoming infected humans.

Hmmm – zombies by nature are already dead. So how can they be killed and/or infected by humans? The only “virus” I can think of that’s capable of doing that is BOREDOM.

Incidentally, Zombie World’s plot is a twist on an old Twilight Zone episode from the ‘60s. Go look it up; it’d be a nice distraction from YET ANOTHER zombie movie.