Sci-Fi Malady

We conclude horror month by reviewing Don Coscarelli’s sci-fi horror masterpiece, Phantasm. This movie is a suspenseful fright fest which gives us The Tall Man, one of the most iconic villains ever. It is also more than that. The Tall Man is a stand in for death and the movie an evaluation of how we deal with death culturally. The reason Mike and Reggie can never defeat the Tall Man, except in their dreams, is that dreams are the only place death can be defeated. We discuss all of this, as well as some trivia about the movie and some good natured humorous nitpicking.

We move away from horror films with bad CGI to a horror film with no CGI. It is John Carpenter’s The Thing, the one made in 1982. This movie has a little bit of everything, Kurt call me Snake Russell, Keith David, scientist shooting AR’s at a dog while hanging out of a helicopter in the arctic, scientists armed with flamethrowers, because, Dr. Wilford Brimley, oh, and a shape shifting alien that is either just trying to get home or kill all of humanity.

Bad CGI month, um, I mean Horror Month as we review the Canadian Indy film and cult classic Cube 2 Hypercube. What is a Hypercube? It is a four dimensional death trap where time, gravity and the law of physics are random. If that wasn’t enough the cube if full of random death traps that make jigsaw squeamish. Why? No one knows. The government and super secret hacker boogeyman Alex Trusk built for…something and are experimenting on people by killing them for…reasons. Of course one of the subjects is a sleeper agent.

Spoiler - everybody dies.

Cube 2 is a weird and wild mind bleep. If you don’t mind it actually not having a resolution or making sense, it is an amazing sci-fi, horror, suspense survival drama that even bad CGI and a mystery box JJ Abrams would be ashamed of can ruin.

We kick off the 2nd annual horror sci-fi month with a review of Stephen King’s cult classic, The Langoliers. Stephen King movies are hit or miss. Some are great, like The Shining. Some are horrible, like the other Shining. And some, well, like this one, are just too long.

I loved this film as a kid. I like parts of it now. While its fun and has some interesting parts, it just does not hold up. The CGI is aged and bad. The acting, bad. The pacing, glacial. all that said, it is still worth a watch.

Horror Month returns! All this month we review Sci-Fi horror films! We are looking into tales of time travel gone wrong, dimensional demons, and tales to chill your soul! Or maybe the bad CGI will make you laugh.

Time to wrap up our trip to The Expanse and say goodbye to the Belta Lowda’s and InyaLowda’s. Well, until season 4, or until we decide to discuss the novels. We finish up discussing season 3 and we spend a lot of time discussing if we really want Admiral Souther leading our fleet and if Errinwright is actually a bad guy or just an uber nationalist acting out of a misplaced sense of tribal loyalty to his own. Yeah, that sentence is a little crazy and made most people label a liberal. Oh well. We also talk about where season four might be heading and the awesome discovery that whatever built the rings was destroyed by something they found…and what is Ghost Miller’s real purpose?

Next week - horror month returns!

Who continue our discussion of The Expanse this week as we dive into season two. Season two gives us a deeper dive into Mars and the major Martian players. Season two also gives the interesting moral dilemma of how many people would you kill to advance the human species and make a breakthrough that will benefit all of mankind. Jules Pierre Mao is caste as the villain and most evil man among the human race - however, if you knew that you could cure all disease for all time, but you would have to run experiments that would kill 10 million people, would you do it? We spend a lot of time on that question in this episode as well as talking about new characters introduced.

Expanded September, in which we review the SciFi turned Amazon original series The Expanse, kicks off with a general discussion of season one and all things expanse. We break down the main characters motivations as well as the role of the proto-molecule as both plot device and science, and attempt to dig into the observations the authors/writers are making about the human condition.

We conclude Copycat August in September with a discussion of Alien and how it was stolen, I mean copied, I mean inspired, I mean, bears a similarity to the Ixtl in the novel Voyage of The Space Beagle. The Voyage of the Space Beagle has an Alien that gets onto the ship full of space scientists, has super strength and intelligence and lays its eggs inside humans and gets defeated by being tricked out into space. Alien has a alien that sneaks onto the ship full of space scientists, lays its eggs in humans and is defeated by being blown out of an airlock. 

Yes, clearly different stories. One goes dun dun dun da da dun dun and the other goes dun dun dun da da din din. 

Or maybe they are different stories because their isn't a face hugger, scientists aren't space truckers and the Ixtl doesn't really remember a Xenomorph.  

The real question - does it matter? You can't hold a patent on any space survival story written, even if its 30 years later, because you wrote a short story about a crew surviving a hostile Alien trying to take over their ship (and laying eggs inside living human bodies). There are only so many concepts and as long as the authors characters are original and there is at least some effort at a unique setting/plot, then maybe its ok to be inspired by or even retell with a twist a story that came before. 

Ok, maybe James Cameron copied aspects of Harlan Elison's works for Terminator, but certainly GIANTS such as Lucas and Roddenberry did not? Well, maybe not Gene so much, but his successor Rick Berman maaaaay have stolen the Borg from Dr. Who and George, well George stole from everything he ever watched and the amalgamation was Star Wars, but if there was one science fiction franchise Lucas was really inspired by - it might have been Dune. 

This week we discuss how The Borg are influenced by the Cybermen and how Star Wars owes far more than a desert planet to Frank Herbert.