Tag Archives: Science Fiction

CAPSULE: VISITORS FROM THE ARKANA GALAXY (1981)

 Gosti iz galaksije; AKA Visitors from the Galaxy

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DIRECTED BY: Dusan Vukotic

FEATURING: Zarko Potocnjak, Ksenia Prohaska, Lucie Zulová

PLOT: An aspiring science fiction writer finds he has materialized the aliens from his long-gestating novel, including a space monster.

Still from Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy (1981)

COMMENTS: Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy is a curious artifact from nowhere. Or at least, from nowhere that exists anymore: a co-production between Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, two countries that have since splintered into bits, produced under a vanished political schema.

So perhaps its not entirely surprising that Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy is like a movie that might have been itself created by aliens. The conditions that produced it—Iron Curtain envy of Western science fiction spectacles like Star Wars, and a desire to put their own Slavic spin on the genre—evaporated decades ago. But with its mishmash of tones and the reckless absurdity of its plotting, Arkana was probably still an oddball even in its own day. Let’s examine the evidence….

It begins as a sort of sitcom, sans the laughs. Robert is an aspiring science fiction author who plots endlessly, dictating into his tape recorder while wearing a toy cosmonaut helmet. His wife Biba feels neglected, and she and his relatively wacky neighbors—a photographer, his overbearing mother, and their furball dog—constantly interrupt his attempts to work. He’s also obliged to spend time with Biba’s similarly wacky family, including a headphone-wearing pop-music obsessed little sister-in-law and a blind accordion playing grandpa. It’s not funny, but the setup does establish a tone as a gentle, G-rated comedy before the first plot development: the characters from Robert’s long-gestating novel, a female android named Andra (who looks a little like a sexy C3PO) and two blond space children, contact their author via tape recorder. You see, from childhood Robert has been able to materialize the things he imagines in his mind, an ability which barely surprises his physician (who diagnoses him with “tellurgy” after Robert explains how, as an infant, he gave his widowed father big boobs so he could breastfeed to his heart’s content).

From that revelation onward, Arkana accelerates the crazy: villagers decide the safest way to approach the aliens is for everyone to approach them in the nude. Robert and Andra engage in some weird android/human sex stuff in front of psychedelic green screens. A space brat uses his eye lasers to turns Biba into a pocket-sized metal cube, a development which does not seem to amaze or upset anyone as much as it probably should. Finally, the large-snouted, slithery-tongued, slime-and-flame-spewing alien space monster (designed by none other than Jan Svankmajer!) shows up at Biba’s family dinner and massacres most of the party while grandpa plays the accordion!

So there it is: a light, kid-friendly sci-fi satire with lots of gratuitous nudity and decapitated heads thrown into soup bowls. The effects are simple but abundant, with lots of glowing blue space balls and fingers shooting lime-green laser beams, scored to synthesizer noises the subtitle track helpfully describes as “science fiction sounds.” They resemble American TV shows of the period like “Battlestar Galactica” or “Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century.”

Despite all of this apparent madness, Arkana is not seriously weird; it’s not serious at all. There are no consequences, since anything bad that happens can be reversed by the push of a robotic panel accompanied by some helpful science fiction sounds. With its mixture of innocence, spectacle, and a little taste of naughtiness, it seems aimed at teenage boys: something that, with a little cultural translation, could have fit into the catalogues American B-movie outfits of the period like ‘s New World Pictures or ‘s Full Moon Pictures. Instead, it plays like a sci-fi sitcom made by actual aliens.

Deaf Crocodile’s 2023 Blu-ray release includes a commentary track by Samm Deighan and five fairly surreal animated shorts from director : Dusan Vukotic, including “Surogat,” which won the Short Animated Film Oscar in 1962.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The humor is ‘Absurdist Sitcom Weird’:  the people are cute and likable, and the emphasis remains on gentle Sci-fi satire.”–Glenn Erickson, Trailers from Hell (Blu-ray)

(This movie was nominated for review by Devon, who called it “a bizarro sci-fi comedy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958)

DIRECTED BY: Arthur Crabtree

FEATURING: Marshall Thompson, Kim Parker, Kynaston Reeves, Terry Kilburn, Stanley Maxted

PLOT: An officer at a an American air base in rural Manitoba teams up with a comely young researcher to investigate mysterious deaths, which locals blame on a top secret nuclear project.

Still from fiend without a face (1958)

COMMENTS: This time a year ago, I was absorbing the marvels of a wondrous motion picture entitled The Giant Claw. That film built its mystery by hiding its central antagonist for a significant portion of the running time, permitting the imaginations of audiences to run wild searching for an explanation. This was followed by an enormous shift in tone due to the eventual revelation of the monster, a silly, gangly mess that drastically undercut the gravity of the story.

In some respects, history repeats itself with Fiend Without a Face, a movie in which we actually witness the murder of several townspeople by a force we cannot see, thereby building a mystery around what precisely is going on. As for what happens when we do finally lay eyes upon the title character… well, let’s just come back to that in a bit, shall we?

During the very long time that Fiend Without a Face itself waits for that big revelation, it has to fill the time with distractions. There are repercussions over the activities at the air base, which NIMBY-leaning locals blame for the mysterious deaths as well as for a decrease in dairy production. There’s the slow-burning investigation by Major Cummings, which at one point takes a lengthy side trip to a cemetery crypt. Cummings also gets the film’s romance plot, making eyes at the sister of the first victim, helped in part by an especially egregious shower scene. While none of this is boring, exactly, it’s not particularly interesting, especially since the audience is primed for a monster. It’s up to a cast of impressively obscure nobodies to sell the escalating tension through horrified stares and dramatic physical lurches. (The only cast member whose name rang any bells for me was E. Kerrigan Prescott, better known in these parts for his mad-scientist turn from Godmonster of Indian Flats.) They succeed only modestly, adding to the pressure to deliver something extraordinary at the climax.

It is a heck of a thing we ultimately get, so let’s talk about these monsters who have been sucking out their victims’ brains and spinal cords. Turns out they themselves are brains. Literally brains, with spinal cords for tails, eyestalks, and two little kickstand proboscises that deprive humans of their, well, brains and spinal cords. In the story, they’ve been wished into existence by a retired professor who Major Cummings deduces has been performing poorly vetted experiments with mental powers. In filmic terms, they’re brought to life through a combination of stop-motion animation, ill-concealed wire work, and broad acting. Oh, and they’re are goofy as all get-out. Look, I understand that special effects from yesteryear can’t be judged by the technology of today. That’s fine. But they’re still just brains, either animated to move like snakes or flown about like marionettes. The logic of brain-eating creatures that are themselves brains is impossible to parse. So you’re left with something that’s quite ridiculous, but also not quite ridiculous enough.

The climactic showdown between a group of humans trapped inside a house while a horde of flying brains tries to bust in was notable in its day for its new levels of violence and gore. (The film was called out as offensive in the British Parliament.) The setting also seems to presage settings to come, such as those seen in Night of the Living Dead or Evil Dead II. But this film’s solution is the equivalent of sending the cavalry. After all, what saves the day? How does one defeat a foe that has been created by an unholy blend of nuclear power and the untapped recesses of the human mind? Why, with guns, of course. The trio of Air Force officers starts taking out the little airborne cerebella by peppering them with bullets (and the occasional blunt instrument), resulting in a gleefully gross stew of blood and effluvia. It’s a classically 1950s mindset, using brute force to overcome the odds. This carries over to the most absurd plot element, in which Cummings saves the day by blowing up the nuclear power plant with dynamite. (Certainly no potential downside to that plan.) 

Fiend Without a Face is light fun, a solid representative of 1950s cinematic horror boasting three salient characteristics: an intriguing premise, very low-budget production, and a monster that doesn’t quite live up to the hype. File it next to similar efforts from the period like Beginning of the End, The Amazing Colossal Man, or The Crawling Eye. You know, the kind of film that works best if you just shut off your brain.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There can be no purer surrealism in cinema than the sight of these twitching brain-things besieging a house full of people, leaping and plopping like possessed frogs. The entire climax has the bizarreness of some mad medieval allegory, like a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch” – Nigel Honeybone, Horror News

(This movie was nominated for review by Paula. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: Francis Ford Coppola

FEATURING: Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz, André M. Hennicke, Alexandra Pirici

PLOT: In 1938 Bucharest, 70-year-old Dominic Matei is struck by lightning, becomes decades younger and develops psychic powers.

Still from Youth without Youth (2007)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Every now and then, Francis Ford Coppola gets to make a movie his way, unconstrained by the demands of capitalism or the limitations of collaboration. Think of the studio-destroying One From the Heart, the self-indulgently autobiographical Tucker: The Man and His Dream, or the demented epic Apocalypse Now. With big ideas, gloriously pretentious dialogue, radical shifts in tone, and a determination to Speak His Truth, Youth Without Youth is cut from a similar cloth: pure Coppola, raw and unfiltered.

COMMENTS: Francis Ford Coppola is currently in post-production on what he says will be the capstone to his career, a final epic called Megalopolis. He has cashed in his winemaking fortune to produce the film with a nine-figure budget and own it outright. He enlisted an all-star cast to bring his script, which has been camera-ready for years, to life. Beyond the vaguest of plot descriptions, little is yet known about the work that could be the great filmmaker’s final cinematic statement. But I have some suspicions about what to expect from Megalopolis. Because, you see, I’ve watched Youth Without Youth.

After the old-style credits with sweeping theme, we meet Dominic, who is old, hopeless, and suicidal. His book about the origin of human language will never be finished, his dreams are plagued by memories of Laura, the woman who pushed him away because he gave more attention to his intellectual passions than to her, and the world is rushing towards cataclysm. It’s pure happenstance that a final trip back to Bucharest leads to his fateful encounter with a bolt of lightning. (Some wild dialogue suggests divine intervention, but Coppola’s not down for anything as mundane as that.)

Once he’s hospitalized, it takes a while to get back to Dominic, because the movie is intensely interested in the accident itself: the strange process of re-growth, complete with new teeth. The snarky hospital attendants. The tedium of confirming his true identity and crafting a new one. That’s part of Youth Without Youth’s methodology. It’s not metaphorical, symbolic, or satirical. Coppola really is interested in the fundamentals of what would happen to this guy who was hit by lightning and made 30 years younger.

Roughly halfway through the film, Youth Without Youth begins to resemble nothing so much as a superhero origin story, with Dominic using his powers to escape the Nazis’ designs on the ability to extend life. It’s almost comically literal; we suspect a woman staying at the clinic might have ulterior motives once we see that she has a Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH (2007)

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SPHERE (1998)

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DIRECTED BY: Barry Levinson

FEATURING: Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, ,

Still from Sphere (1998)

PLOT: A team of scientists is dispatched to the middle of the Pacific to examine a mysterious spacecraft found on the ocean floor.

COMMENTS: An unexpected side effect of the success of Jurassic Park was the discovery by Hollywood studios that Michael Crichton had written other books. Several, in fact, and most of them characterized by (a) a deep interest in the intersection of advanced technology and human hubris and (b) shoddy writing and lazy characterization. (I devoured his books in my fresh-out-of-college years, so I readily acknowledge my role in the problem.) Their high-concept plots and sci-fi trappings were catnip for deep-pocketed producers, and soon the market was flooded with Crichton adaptations: Rising Sun, Disclosure, Congo, The 13th Warrior (from his novel Eaters of the Dead), his dino-sequel The Lost World, an old unproduced screenplay called Twister, and yes, Sphere went into production in short order.

Sphere has all the elements you need for a big box office smash: big stars, a big budget, and a Big Dumb Object to serve as the MacGuffin. It also had huge story problems, so big that Levinson and Hoffman were able to go off and shoot Wag the Dog during a break in the production, and so extensive that the final credits cite one writer as having “adapted” the book while another duo is listed as responsible for the actual screenplay. The result is why we’re here: it’s a classic mishmash of sci-fi tropes and action set pieces, but executed most oddly.

One reason that things feel so off with Sphere is that the basic story—an unexplained thing needs explaining—is free of suspense. Since research rarely makes for great blockbuster cinema, we start getting twists and turns thrown at us with a taste of every plot device imaginable. Time travel, temporal paradox, black holes, alien communication, mind control, the manifestation of dreams. Meanwhile, character is ladled out in small dollops of exposition in a belated effort to give the actors something to play. Hoffman hates snakes, Jackson hates squid. Hoffman and Stone were once lovers, and Stone once had suicidal tendencies. Jackson and Schreiber are fierce academic competitors, Schreiber is embarrassed by his glasses. Coyote is and always has been an officious, loudmouthed idiot. Everyone seems to be playing that improv game where you’re handed a piece of paper with a character trait mid-scene, and you have to backpedal furiously to justify the lay-on.

When there is drama, it’s incredibly silly. One naval officer (Queen Latifah, stunningly underused) is killed by an enormous swarm of jellyfish, which the film tells us should be no cause for alarm, so she has to flail about as though under attack from a flock of bats to gin up the excitement. Later, several of the crew are, oh, let’s just call it “attacked” by an onslaught of falling sea eggs, which frankly look like condoms being used to smuggle drugs, so you just have to take it on faith that this underwater ticker tape parade is, in fact, terrifying. Walls shake, coffee cups fall over, sirens wail, and Dustin Hoffman shrieks at the sight of an eel, but nothing actually happens.

Some of the most effective scares are derived from the notion that nothing happening is significantly more unsettling than flurries of activity. Jackson gets to play against type by not commanding the room with his stentorian delivery, and the film gets considerable mileage out of his eerie calm in the face of chaos. But sometimes that stillness is carried to such a degree that it feels like a glitch, especially when Elliot Goldenthal’s hyperactive score is working so hard to generate suspense. 

Throughout, characters change on a dime, usually to generate tension, a late reveal about the identity of a character provides the requisite shocking twist without making a lick of sense, and Levinson deploys every kind of distraction he can think of (including a hilariously overwrought attempt to manufacture horror out of a cabinet full of books), probably because he knows that the moment anything gets explained, all the air will go out of the story.  But there’s nothing he can do to cover up the truth of a script written by committee and pieced together from ideas either unfinished or shoehorned in to generate conflict. It’s a ridiculous mess, and not even a very fun one. 

Sphere is actually the book that helped me give up my interest in Crichton, thanks in large part to its comically lame finale. I’m delighted to report that the book’s ridiculous ending is carried over to the film fully intact. There’s a logic to it, but it’s dramatically disastrous, as it all genuinely adds up to nothing. Naturally, the film sells it as a triumph (accompanied by a dramatically inexplicable special effect and another Goldenthal fanfare). Sphere ends as it begins: all wet.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I was utterly confused by the end of Sphere. And equally dispirited… This project had all the resources to make a fine film, and it squandered them all, for want of a cogent screenplay.”–Kathi Maio, “Science Fiction & Fantasy” (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by ry, who observes, “it has really strange dialogue, like their timing is off or something.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

CAPSULE: COSMIC DISCO DETECTIVE RENE (2023)

AKA Cosmic Disco Detective Rene: The Mystery of the Immortal Time Travelers; Cosmic Disco Detective Rene: The Secret Society for Slow Romance 2

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Cosmic Disco Detective Rene can be rented on Vimeo until 9/14.

DIRECTED BY: Sujewa Ekanayake

FEATURING: Sujewa Ekanayake, Alia Lorae, Natalie Osborne, Genoveva Rossi

PLOT: Cosmic Disco Detective Rene is hired to investigate the light bridges cutting through the Brooklyn skyline while his lady friend Allyson considers various potential film projects.

Still from Cosmic Disco Detective Rene: The Mystery of the Immortal Time Travelers (2023)

COMMENTS: Sujewa Ekanayake’s film tackles three topics simultaneously:

  • The current state and future prospects of independent and underground cinema, particularly in the context of New York City
  • Cosmic Detective work, focusing on a case involving immortal time travelers
  • Allyson’s butt, which is “looking really good right now.”

The particulars of the final item I will hold off on for the time being to allow more thorough discussion of the first two items which are the primary focus of Cosmic Disco Detective Rene (though considering the tone of this film, it would not surprise me if Ekanayake & Co. opted for a further analysis of the third topic). Join me now as I attempt the inadvisable and review the case results from the titular Cosmic Detective.

Ekanayake hangs his cinematic musings on a delightfully flimsy pretext: a government agent asks that he determine the motives of “immortal time travelers” who are passing through contemporary Brooklyn, hopefully so as to stave off the possibility of the US government sanctioning a nuclear attack on the “light bridges” used by these entities. That’s enough plot. Possibly, even, enough review. There are two disarming sequences in Cosmic Disco Detective Rene which make me question this exercise. First, I am presumably viewing this film through my “imperialist” lens, and as such, I will be bringing my own pre-existing biases and hang-ups to this process. (I will politely disagree with the accusation, and suggest I’d be happy to discuss the issue with the filmmaker.) This ties in with the second point: that each movie should be judged on its intentions.

Sujewa (if I may), that’s how I roll. While definitions of “entertainment” can, and should, vary, every film should divert the mind in some manner. This can be for motives as basic as simple amusement, or more ambitiously, to trigger entirely new chains of thought and reaction in the mind of the beholder. As Rene absorbs his surroundings, occasionally tuning in to the “Cosmic Disco” beneath it all—a simple process: place your left hand near your left ear, with that hand’s pointer and index fingers raised upwards—potential motives for the travelers emerge. (One of my favorites concerns dangerous future-bears.) Every now and again, socio-political asides spike the easy-breezy atmosphere, which prompted me to consider some of my notions. I have no doubt that is Ekanayake’s intention.

Cosmic Disco Detective Rene is akin to a train ride of semi-focused discussion while watching dozens of potential plot-lines and stories passing by the window. I give nothing away when I tell you that Rene solves the case; New York City is not leveled by nuclear weapons. And while that’s partially the point—otherwise this movie would not have its (primary) title—the real Cosmic Disco detective work is the ideas triggered whilst traveling along this nonsensical plot structure. If you want a linear narrative, think twice before popping this on-screen; but if you want some affably catalyzed food for thought about storytelling, breaking through preconceptions, and the nature of cinema—as well as plenty of shots of Allyson’s butt—then you should consider tapping into the Cosmic Disco and giving this film a look.

See also our Pod 366 interview with the director.

Addendum: audio review for film enthusiasts who prefer audio reviews.