Three laughs: Street Trash

 
It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watvh them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.

Three laughs case #13:
Street Trash (USA, 1987)
Dir. Jim Muro

Some trash films are meant to be funny, but are so nasty and unapogetic in their approach that most people just think of them being vile. I don't really believe in "guilty pleasures" as such, but there certainly are some movies that might give a bit of a bad impression of you if you go around proclaiming your love for them. Especially today.

Well, I believe thet you can recognize something has problematic ideas and still enjoy it for its other aspects, especially when it comes to humor. Just try to not apply that dirty worldview to your own everyday life. Case in point is 80's trash classic Street Trash, which is certainly dark enough for my sense of humor. But I would never mistake that it is in any way a fair and reasonable portrayal of the homeless and underpriveleged and neither should anyone.

Maybe you could go deeper and see that it carnevalizes some stereotypes and general tropes attached to the lowest of the low. I wouldn't call the film a very fine satire, but it certainly takes some of the 80's ideas about poor people being trash to its extremes. The film depicts a bum's life as a struggle to live on a postapocalyptic sense in a very 80's trash movie style. There are hierarchies and power struggles even when living in a city dump and they are even more dog-eat-dog than you would find in the rest of the society. It is cartoonish and gory and totally ridiculous and that is enough for me to really enjoy watching it.

TRIGGER WARNING That being said, there's some sexual violence against women in the movie that is not funny in the slightest and that I can't condone.

Three laughs:

1. A lot of the beginning of the movie sees a new batch of Viper bottles arrive at a suburban liquor store and a stolen bottle switch owners from bum to bum. Finally when one of them takes a swig at a port-a-potty, we get the  money shot of him melting into a screaming pile of blue goo.

2. A really culturally insensitive, yet a funny scene comes when a psychotic Vietnam veteran dreams of vampiric Southeast Asian monsters stalk him in the night. The hysteria of the overplaying is a good fit for the genuine creepiness, both of the scene itself and of the mindset of one of the movie's many very unlikable characters.

3. The most immature laugh of the movie comes when an overweight wino gets his johnson cut off and it gets thrown around from bum to bum in a game of keep-away. The best part is when the film cuts to the shots of the dick flying through a clear blue sky.

Easter Special: White Rabbits and March Hares

Rabbits have proved to be a popular theme for this blog, so in lieu of better ideas, why not return to the well this easter? A White Rabbit is a driving force throughout Lewis Carroll's classic satirist fairy tale Alice In Wonderland. Carroll's story has prevailed so long since it offers something in equal measures to children and adults. In addition to rabbits there are bounds of other memorable characters and contents from nonsensical wordplay to studies of varying states of madness throughout the story (as well as it's sequel Alice's Adventures Through The Looking Glass). With such a bountiful subject matter, filmmakers through decades have been able to pick 'n mix contents for adaptations as they have chosen.

With Alice, colorful surprises are plenty, not unlike with what you get from easter eggs. But like easter eggs and their toys, the qualities vary from delicious treats and delightful wonders to saccharine yucks and grade-C toy-making. I'll take a look at three live action adaptations of Carroll's story, varying in quality. Happy Easter!

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (UK, 1972)
Director: William Sterling

This British adaptation seems to be a work against the Americanization of Carroll's story. It emphasizes the language, puns and jokes in a very British manner. The movie rolls out famous comedians in minor cameos, and does songs a plenty. Yet, it doesn't offer much more of anything than its American counter parts, say Disney's animated adaptation, already have.

Besides a few chills down your spine, at least.

Alice (Fiona Futterton) is played by a full-grown woman here, trying to pass off as a young child. The girl falls asleep on a picnic (with Lewis Carroll himself, played by Michael Jayston) and she dreams of chasing the white rabbit down its hole to a magical land of talking animals and living playing cards and such. Meeting various occupants of Wonderland, she eventually finds herself in the court of the King and Queen of Hearts (Dennis Price and Flora Robson).

The animals are presented here with actors in (quite creepy) fur suits and make up. The film plays up the whimsy and glorifies the oddness, yet comes off as boring. The songs are dull, the staging bad, the acting, particularly by Futterton atrocious. Spike Milligan and Michael Hordern make the biggest fools of themselves, running around in stupid griffin and turtle suits, goofing around just because. The joyless film comes off as a heartless and disposable adaptation. Off with its head!

★

Alice (a.k.a. Něco z Alenky), (Czechoslovakia/Switzerland/UK/BRD, 1988)
Director: Jan Švankmajer

"This is a story for children - perhaps", exclaims the narration at the beginning of this half-animated classic. Indeed, while kids can enjoy is, they have little need for a film such as this, since most of their daily entertainment is filled with unnatural wonders anyway. This is more pointed at adults who have lost their imagination and a sense of wonder with their mundane lives.

The first feature film by the legendary Czech stop motion animator Jan Švankmajer dismisses the set-up of treating Lewis Carroll's story like a fairy tale. His animation re-imagines the story to take place in a mundane environment. Characters and situations are ordinary household objects or toys, brought to life by a child's imagination. It has a dreamy logic to it, wherein anything can happen.

Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) sees a stuffed white rabbit rise up from its display case and run away. She follows the critter to a writing desk drawer. She consumes cookies she finds that make her grow, as well as drinking ink makes her shrink. Soon, she will have to defend her actions against enraged animals. Stuffed socks and stockings make for caterpillars, cardboard cut-outs for playing card soldiers and royalty. Many animals presented are a blend of taxidermy subjects, bones and toys.

While the young Kohoutová is quite sweet in her role, Švankmajer isn't one to play up too much of cuteness. His characters can pull ugly faces, act intimidatingly or petty and are generally more of a menace, yet not in a scary way. Their carefully done movements are different for every character, and the animation is incomplete enough to give an otherworldly impression. Therein lies the director's biggest charm. The film is edgy enough to be exciting without flashy colors or changing scenery. The movie doesn't show too much, and lets the viewer fill out the blanks with his or her own imagination.

Strange, charming, endlessly surprising and joyful, this is the best Alice In Wonderland adaptation by quite a wide margin.

★★★★★

Alice in Wonderland (USA, 2010)
Director: Tim Burton

Burton's blockbusting belly-landing is a Socratic ideal of everything that is wrong with Hollywood today. It's a flashy re-imagining of a popular story, with more emphasis done on appearances than on story, character development or any contents. Colorful, CGI work (also in 3D) hides the hollowness of it all, and the story is so hallow, it brutalizes Carroll's ideas to a cheap Lord of the Rings knock-off. Marketability is the king here, off with their heads to any artistic endeavors.

The film passes itself as a sort-of sequel to Carroll's events. Alice (Mia Wasikowska) has grown to be 19, and is to be married. Yet she has other ideas and runs off. Encountering the White Rabbit, she follows it down the rabbit hole again, down to Underland (which is what Wonderland is called in this piece of shit).

Meeting her old acquaintances, Alice learns that she is a Chosen One, a legendary hero that will defeat the reign of the tyrant Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and her man-eating Jabberwocky. Writing this synopsis down, I still can't believe how much this sounds like a committee had written this in order to cash in on the most profitable trends going on at Hollywood.

Burton, always one for more visual approach than a coherent storyteller, of course revels in this. The re-imaginings of famous characters from the story have jumped straight out of his drawings. And they do resemble a junior high school student's margin drawings. But they are marketable, so whatever.

The film does have a good cast, even if Burton doesn't bother directing them that much. Alan Rickman as The Caterpillar and Stephen Fry as Chesire Cat in particular are so great choices for their roles, one has to wonder why anyone else didn't get the idea before. Michael Gough has his final film role as the voice of the Dodo. Crispin Glover in all his craziness is a perfect fit for the Knave of Hearts. Pity all these character actors are interchangeable within the story. The only minor character whose role is emphasized within the story (for better or for worse) is of course Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter. Who, in the name of shallow quirkiness is named, obnoxiously and pointlessly, Tarrant Hightopp.

Ughhh.

Depp has grown to be such a major star, he gets to do pretty much whatever he wants on the set. So, here he goofs around as if there was no one directing him at all. His horrible Scottish accent comes on and off at points. Much of made of him having to become a warrior in the dire times, since Undeland needs it. Depp's final dance sequence is so dreadful, I'd like to wipe that memory out of my mind entirely.

There are a few amusing enough jokes within all of this. But as a whole it's loud, obnoxious and altogether indifferent. And inexplicably, this marketing ploy worked like a charm. The movie made over a billion dollars profit for its parent company Disney. O tempora, O mores.

★ 1/2

The New Batch Revisited

Fed up with Hollywood right now? I know I am. And I know another who most certainly was in 1990: Joe Dante. So, what better time to join us all together for the first installment of a new recurring series in this blog. The Revisited takes a look at a cult movie I've already seen multiple times and picks out the elements that make it work so good. The series also takes a look on how the movie holds up today. The best way to begin this series is to take a look at one of the most unusual, and best, movie sequels ever made. So here you go: Gremlins 2: The New Batch!

The Face Value

Joe Dante is a director straight outta Roger Corman's stable. He's an exploitation filmmaker that found fame and fortune waiting in Hollywood, mostly thanks to his peers like Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis who had risen in power and were able to produce any kind of films they wanted. With Dante, it was his unique mix of slapstick humor straight from Looney Tunes and Tex Avery cartoons, monsters and set ups from 50's science fiction, and biting satire of the good old', red-bloded mom's apple pie Americana. While such subjects undoubtedly sold in the golden age of Amblin entertainment and VHS horror films, studios tended to not quite get Dante's unique visions. One of his better-fared, however, was the anarchic Christmas tale of 1984: Gremlins.

The movie the director himself calls "The Muppet Show on Acid" showed another side to the kind of cute and cuddly plush toy critters the public of the 80's was lapping up. It's also a parody of Christmas movies, what with magic being brought to a small town consequently wrecks everybody's lives rather than brings them together. Dante clearly had a lot of fun with cartoon violence and havoc wrecking little monsters but he felt that the entire story was there. But studio execs had another idea. Ironically, the movie set to destroy the idyllic image and the cutesy feel-good everyone was selling, turned out to be a profitable machine in its own right.

Since Dante didn't want to do a sequel, the producers searched around. No one was eager to follow Dante's footsteps, and Spielberg stuck to his friend's side. So, finally the negotiations got Dante back, but also gave him more free hands to play around with the concept. As it happened, Dante had already planned to do a satire of movie sequels and how useless they are at core. The director's idea was to wreck the entire franchise to the ground before the studio could find someone to direct Gremlins 3. And he was about to have the time of his life doing it.

The Plot

The old Chinatown block where Mr. Wing (Keye Luke) keeps shop is set to be demolished in way of a hyper modern office block built by businessman Daniel Clamp (John Glover). While Wing opposes, his health is in a bad condition, and the property passes on as he dies. After that, his pet mogwai Gizmo runs away from home. He gets captured by the scientists Martin & Martin who bring him to their lab. But Gizmo manages to escape again before they find out that mogwais breed by getting them wet.

Meanwhile, Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) has moved into New York with his girlfriend Kate Beringer (Phoebe Cates) to build a career as an illustrator in Clamp's company. He founds the wandering Gizmo in the building and promises to keep him safe. But of course a freak accident gets the mogwai to breed and soon there's a whole new batch of Gremlins growing. They make a mess of Clamp's building first, and then plan to take over the whole of New York.

The Contents

The characters of the film are quite wise to how the whole ordeal is going down, going from rememberance of the first film to a whole new meta-level of consciousness. The scene where John Astin's clumsy janitor fixes a water fountain with Gizmo attempting to dodge the spraying water is played out purely for laughs. Likewise Dante makes fun of the two other rules. The characters get into an argument of the vagueness of the eating rule: how soon after midnight can mogwais start eating again without turning into gremlins? Also, gremlins can't be beaten by luring them into the sunshine since it happens to be a rather cloudy day. Plenty of scenes show them in quite bright environments anyway.

No "bright light?"

Most of the film works as a bitter letter to plastic capitalism, with gremlins standing in as ravenous consumers, always wanting more and more. But the thing is, the creatures won't succumb to society's norms and act all meek in front of rich people. They do what they want and have no need for hierarchies. Yuppie bistros, late night cable shows, even Leonard Maltin and his damning movie reviews - all get parodied in a machine gun pace.

The building itself has a lot of places set up for various types of comedy. There's a tv station for media satire, a sci-fi lab for some B-movie shenanigans and a food court for some old-school slapstick. A movie theatre set hosts the most meta joke of the movie, with Hulk Hogan appearing to break the fourth wall in order to stop gremlins from wrecking the movie they're starring in and the audience is watching! Did I mention this movie is really, really awesome?

An interesting character is that of Daniel Clamp, a clear stand in for the likes of Donald Trump and Ted Turner. In the beginning of the film he's played off as a villain, a ruthless magnate who won't allow tradition get in his way of progress. He's always seen through a monitor, video-conferencing from his office rather than to appear in place. Later on, small-time bosses in his building have ridiculously tight standards of appearance that they rule to minute detail.

But when Clamp makes his full appearance, he really isn't such a bad guy. He's a clueless buffoon that doesn't fully realize the consequences of his business decisions, yes. The real villains are his underlings, trying to suck up to the billionaire by trying to please him in the most absurd fashions possible. During the gremlin ordeal, Clamp gets a whiff of the old-timey Americana he had so forgotten, and plenty of his yes-men get their punishments in the forms of various gremlin skits.

The crudest and one of the funniest being saved for last.

As sequels often have more marketability, they usually need a host of new, marketable characters. Dante takes this idea to ridiculous lengths by having a cast of gremlins with various powers and personalities. On the monster side, there are an electric, spider- and bat-gremlin as well as an acid-scarred Phantom Gremlin and the grotesque female gremlin. In accordance there's also a googly-eyed daffy gremlin, a buck-toothed dum-dum gremlin, a Jimmy Cagney-looking gangster gremlin and, most memorably of all, the Brain Gremlin, voiced with an obnoxious Australian upper-class accent by Tony Randall.

In the midst of such a colorful cast, the human actors can't help but to feel like staticians. And that is, even though the actors are awesome. Veterans like Christopher Lee and Robert Prinsky do their outrageous roles with both grace and glee. Dick Miller, a xenophobic and a little racist all-American fruitcake in the first, has transformed into an unlikely action hero for this one. My favorite is still kathleen Freeman's Microwave Marge, a hysterical woman bringing the same kind of layers of camp to this as Una O'Connor did for James Whale's monster movies back in the day. In the nastiest, most vicious blow to the original movie, Dante even undermines its blackest, darkest scene, with Phoebe Cates having a pervertedly tragic reason for hating President's Day as much as she does Christmas.

It's American pop culture and consumerism thrown into a blender and dyed colorful and splashed to screen. Dante evokes the cartoons of old with the same kind of fast-moving never-stopping energy. Which is why it's so apt that the film begins with a short Bugs & Daffy segment animated by none other than Chuck Jones himself. Here's a clear changing of the guards if I ever saw one. It's a shame the studio interfered with Dante's actual Looney Tunes movie so much. That film has several segments good enough to make the viewer wonder if corporate culture cost us another as big a masterpiece in mischief as Gremlins 2 is.

The Legacy

Or: Why the world doesn't need Gremlins 3

Gremlins was a big hit of its time, and there were plenty of films that replicated its formula, such as Critters, Ghoulies, Troll, Hobgoblins and so on. While most of these were aimed at children or pre-teens, Gremlins had an unique nastiness that worked well on adults too, that proved hard to replicate. Seeing it as a child was actually as exciting as watching a grown-ups horror film. And there are so many pop-culture riffs and spoofs, it's impossible for children to catch them all. I only got the Public Enemy -referencing grapefruit squeeze the last time I watched it, and I've probably seen the movie 10 times.

While Gremlins 2 doesn't have as many horror elements as its predecessor (save perhaps the scene with Spider-Gremlin), it did everything else bigger and bolder. And inexplicably, fell short on the earnings. Perhaps it was due to audience's tastes having modified. Joe Dante himself believes he waited too long after the first movie. Nevertheless, that fact served Dante's ultimate goal of preventing further sequels. Nevertheless, the auteur has now and then toyed with the idea of doing another, simply because, well, the director hasn't had the kind of freedom in his work since.

But having celebrity cameos and broadening the scope just wouldn't work any more. The reason is because there eventually was a bigger film, Tim Burton's underrated 1996 film Mars Attacks! The movie plays out much like Gremlins would if they had access to ray-guns and flying saucers. Mars also takes a step further into mean-spiritedness. While the body count in Gremlins 2 is relatively low, Burton gleefully executes celebrities by the hoardes. His offs include A-listers such as Michael J. Fox, Danny DeVito, Pierce Brosnan, Glenn Close, Martin Short, and Jack Nicholson twice! Burton also plays out with an all-you-can-eat buffet of disposable plastic pop culture relics, and has silly cameos from such unlikely sources as Pam Grier, Paul Winfield, Christina Applegate and Tom Jones.

Since Mars Attacks! still isn't quite as good as either Gremlins movie, I'm thinking the most important thing is that Gremlins are hand-crafted works of love. Mars Attacks! is "just" a silly little catastrophy movie parody and a cartoon movie with plenty of now-shoddy mid-90s computer effects. At best, that's what any new version would be, since Hollywood execs think computer effects are the only way to go now. While that could bring an impressive Gremlin army to the screen, it wouldn't have the same soul.

They should rather remake Critters.

Stop! Motion Time!

As readers might know already, I'm a big animation buff. When the Oscar nominations for Best Animated Feature were announced, however, I realized that I had missed a lot of the year's crop, which is particularly a shame since the nominees include three stop motion pictures. That sort of animation is generally way more fun than CGI animation, since puppets tend to have more personality than ultra-slick computer models. Two of these stop-motioners have a spoooky horror theme, and one is just about your basic looting, plundering and causing a ruckus.

If you're curious about what I thought of Brave and Wreck-It-Ralph, you can read my reviews by clicking their titles in this sentence.

Frankenweenie
Director: Tim Burton

Tim Burton's latest film could be seen as an attempt to please his old fans, who have grown incresingly disappointed with his recent body of work. This attempt concerns updating his beloved short film he made in the 1980's to a feature film animation. The original Frankenweenie is pretty much perfect as such, and Burton tends to fall in the pitfalls of stretching the story in an artificial manner in this longer version. Still, at many points it does feel to have the creative energy and gentle satire on suburban America that Burton's good films in the 80's and 90's had. The heart of Frankenweenie, a story of love and friendship, has also remained intact.

Young Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) is a clear Mary Sue of Burton's youth, a creative boy that has few friends, and prefers staying indoors to film monster movies or do scientific experiments to going out to play. His best friend is the family dog Sparky, who is a curious mutt, and always ready for an adventure with his owner. Victor is eager to participate in the school's science fair, inspired by the new eccentric teacher Mr. Rzykruski (Martin Landau). Victor's dad (Martin Short) agrees, on the condition that Victor tries out sports, particularly baseball. On the day of Victor's game, Sparky escapes to follow his master to the field. When he runs out to catch the ball flying out to the street, the dog has a fatal run-in with a car.

The broken Victor finds a new chance to bring his friend back to life, when he learns that electricity has a way of making dead tissue twitch. But his successful experiment rises interest in his science fair rivals, all who want to try it out on their pets long gone. The climax has Burton gleefully ripping off various monster movie clichés with glee, as the creatures wreck havok. The film turns from Edward Scissorhands -type outcast drama into more of a Mars Attacks! type of mischief-making comedy. Balancing these two approaches isn't always consistent.

Fortunately, Burton mellows out by the final scene, which is as charming as it was in the original film. The puppetry is magnificent, with the animals being super-cute and the humans emotive and like Burton's drawings having popped to life. As a contrast to Burton's previous animated features, there are no memorable, eye-popping song sequences, but the story wouldn't need any anyway. The old school -style slow, black-and-white storytelling works in this film's case, but it also drove audiences away from theatres. Kids these days. As it is, it's a nice little film reminding that Burton still carries some of that creative energy that raised him to the top of Hollywood in the first place. Let's hope he can still utilize it in his live action films as well.

★★★

Pirates! A Band of Misfits (a.k.a. The Pirates! In An Adventure with Scientists)
Director: Peter Lord

The latest feature from Aardman studios blends stop motion wax dolls and CGI backgrounds in a visual style that's epic and finely detailed and hand-crafted at the same time. It's got a silly sense of humor mixing non-sequiturs and the unexpected with good, tested british wit in the fashion of Monty Python. It's got chase scenes and exotic locales and The Clash and The Pogues on the soundtrack. Yet as a whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) has declared a war against piracy, with plenty of the most notorious outlaws having already been captured. But there are still eager sea-farers out there. One such a motley crew is the band of misfits led by The Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant). They are a bit too nice to be plundering scallywags, but love the pirate lifestyle. With their antics, The Pirate Captain figures they could finally win the Pirate of the Year Award, given to the captain with the biggest booty. But seizing ships and stealing treasures doesn't seem to be his strongest skill.

Baby-talking to pets is.

When the crew runs into the young scientist Charles Darwin (David Tennant), they get informed that The Captain's parrot Polly is in fact the only remaining Dodo in the world. The prize for bringing such a zoological treasure to London would be huge. But the only problem is that London is Victoria's stronghold, and the pirates need to disguise themselves to not be caught.

While a lot of pieces in this one are at the right places, and it is funny and amusing enough, there's something vital missing in this film. As of now, it's amusing enough, if a fairly forgettable caper. It's a bit hard to grasp what's wrong with it. Perhaps the movie tries too hard to please all audiences. While the script is smart, it also lacks some sort of edginess all the best comedies have.

I also think that the personalities of the various pirates in the crew could have been played with a lot more. It's probably a joke stemming from the original children's book this is based on, to name all the characters in such a functionalist manner (i.e. "The Pirate with a Scarf", "The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate" or "The Pirate who likes Sunsets and Kittens"). But in the long run playing them all just for gags takes away from the audience's involvement in their escapades. It's a bad sign if no one gives a damn if they are going to cope or not. Also, the chase scenes aren't as elaborate as in, say, Wallace & Gromit, now just featuring too many characters screaming and spazzing out instead of rolling along, unexpectedly but with the determination of a speed train.

★★★

ParaNorman
Directors: Chris Butler, Sam Fell

I was wary of this children's horror fable beforehand, simply because it features zombies as the central horrors. I used to love zombies until they became the most overplayed and tiresome thing in popular culture and having them featured in a kid's movie was just another low in their road to irrelevance. But gladly, the central zombies here weren't either Romero-like man eaters or even fast-running video game monsters. These are good old-fashioned magic zombies, undead pilgrims rising from their graves due to a curse.

So the film features the outcast 10-year-old Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who can see the dead. His parents and older sister won't believe him and other kids at school make fun of him. One day, Norman meets Mr. Prenderghast (John Goodman), a hobo that claims he's his uncle, and that he has a ritual which protects the town of Blithe Hollow from an ancient curse. When the ritual fails and Prenderghast dies, it's up to Norman to save the village from an old evil going back to the times of the pilgrims. But Norman will learn that the best way to destroy wickedness is goodness and being nice.

The film has a nice array of characters, and the zombies in particular with their slacked jaws are suitably spooky-looking. The cast is filled with your basic small-town archetypes, with the more notable characters coming from the realm of the dead. However, the film somewhat lacks in suspense and athmosphere-creating. Anyone actually thinking this is better-crafted than Brave must be out of their mind. Even 10 seconds of a set up scene of that film's misty moors of Scotland is more exciting than this whole film.

This is by no means a bad movie, but it's Monster House meets The Frighteners stich is a bit worn-out. I do appreciate the early shout-out to Troll 2, though.

★★1/2

Les extraterrestres extraordinaire, or: the best aliens

After watching Cowboys & Aliens, I was disappointed in the film's aliens. How can an alien race that manages to do interstellar travel, resort to drooling, growling and chasing little kids around naked on Earth? I realize that the realities of extraterrestial civilizations and their behaviour is a really nerdy thing to be concerned about. But movies tend to have aliens that all look alike, act alike and still look an awful lot like us humans. If there is intelligent life in space, I'm sure that it doesn't look anything like humans. I mean, evolution is based on life forms developing over the living conditions. As the living conditions in an outer space planet can't be exactly the same as in Earth, the extraterrestial life forms must have all sorts of evolutionary developments that differ from ours. And also, aliens sure won't act either like us humans do, or like wild animals do. If a race has been so developed as to be able to travel the stars, there must be huge culturical differences to ours.

Nevertheless, in movies there has been a considerable amount of cool aliens, and thus I present to you my ten favorite races. No Star Wars or -Trek creatures here. They are not showcased enough in their movies, or are just as boring as the whole (Trek) series that has them. I favour creatures from horror films, science fiction tales and other creature features where they are the undoubted stars.

10) Ro-Men from Robot Monster

Let's kick this list off with some old-school B-movie monsters. This cult movie is famous because its creature work is notoriously crappy. The film's alien race, Ro-Men, look like space gorillas with a diver's helmet with a TV antenna coming out of it. But let's stop and think that previous sentence a while.

Isn't that actually awesome?! Hell, I've seen B-movie monsters that look like the director's cousin put on a rug. In that context, and for that budget, Ro-Men are actually pretty cool. In the film itself, they have wiped all humans from the face of the earth. All humans? No, a small family still has picnics by a cave and resists the might of the Ro-Men army. One R-Man is sent to wipe them out, but in the course of the film, he learns about love and comes into conflict with his superior officer's orders. Ro-Man's also easily distracted by soap bubbles. Also, there's some stock footage lizard-dinosaurs, and the film's plot turns out to just be an annoying little kid's dream. Or does it?

If one Ro-Man can bring all of humanity to its knees, that guarantees a place on this list. It's a fun movie to watch snippets from (not the whole thing, though), so it's recommendable to be playing on the background of a Halloween-themed party.

9) Killer Klowns From Outer Space

Speaking about totally preposterous alien races, the one that really takes the cake (to the face) are these creepy little bastards. They seem to have modeled their civilization according to our earth circuses, so they fly to the planet in a big circus tent, look like clowns, have balloon dogs as bloodhounds, kill people with popcorn and venomous pies, and of course are murderous bastards who want to wipe out all human life from Earth.

This is, of course a total parody of the kind of alien films they used to have in the 50's. But in fact, murderous space clowns are no more ridiculous than most of the creatures they tried to pass off as space aliens back then. Every sane person on earth would also tell you that clowns are scary in their own right, let alone these twisted little creatures with pointy teeth and bags full of tricks to capture unsuspecting humans.

So perhaps the circus motive is just an adaptible alien race's way to get people's attention? This would explain why the klowns look so strange. Their plan involves wrapping people up in cotton candy inside their circus tent. It's not exactly clear why, perhaps the clowns will eat them if they fall asleep. At least the gigantic klown king seems pretty hungry, and what else should such a monstrosity eat but human cotton candy? For the teenagers arriving to the rescue, the circus tent/spaceship of the klowns is full of deadly surprises, too. It would ruin a lot of fun of the film to reveal them all, but suffice to say, the klowns are more than a lottle deranged and really take their circus-theme seriously. But they manage to be banished and we never have to endure such horrors again. Or do we? No, the film never got a sequel.

8) Mars Attacks! Aliens

While Klowns might be mischevous, they also need their plan to eat. In Tim Burton's most underrated film, the Martians who stop by are essentially Gremlins, in that they cause mayhem, destruction and murder just for laughs. The big-brained, bulging-eyed bastards start the film off by setting a herd of cattle on fire. Their pranks get even more elaborate and murderous from there on.

Humans, particularly government officials, are pretty clueless in the film. Even though the quacking aliens send them threatening video letters, they believe the aliens are coming on a mission of peace. The overtly political correct world blames a single hippie's released dove as a message of war. In reality, it's just a ruse for the aliens to go around making our world their playground and to kill off a bunch of celebrities. Or in Pierce Brosnan's and Sarah Jessica Parker's case, do some weird medical experiments on them. Burton has assembled an impressive cast of stars, who mostly become victims of the martians' practical jokes. This sketchy disaster film has taken it's best ideas from a ground-breaking bubblegum card series, as silly as that sounds. But it works. The Martians wreck up every city on the planet, be it Las Vegas, Washington D.C., Paris or some midwestern town. For sheer effectiveness and having fun doing so, the martians would earn a higher spot on the list. But in the end, they are pretty easily disposed of. But hell, they at least wore their space suits all the time, and didn't die from any sort of viral disease.

7) Bad Taste Aliens

In Mars Attacks!, the Martians attempted to infiltrate the human society by dressing up as Lisa Marie with giant hair. In Peter Jackson's debut feature film, they have an even more cunning disguise: they look a lot like a bunch of twentysomething newzealandaise kids, who could be friends of Peter Jackson. But when they show their real form, the aliens are actually grotesquely bulging, bloaded lard-asses, who have trouble running. But they do work for an interstellar hamburger company, after all.

Yes, the plot of the aliens in this splatter flick is that they have come up with a delicious new treat to sell their customers: human burgers! They land on a small town in New Zealand and start chopping the inhabitants up. They chop them in such small pieces that the meat from the entire village fits in a few bloody cardboard boxes. Luckily the government knows just who to call and the aliens have to deal with The Boys, a crack commando unit of extremely violent mercenaries, who don't like aliens on their beautiful island.

But the aliens are tough: even if you run them down on your Beatle-truck and cut them in half, they will still throw pine cones at you. They for a sort of cultish movement that follows their boss blindly. Most of the aliens are third-grade workers, just doing the killing to pay off the bills. But at least the job has the benefits of free puke-tasting evenings. For weaponry, they favour hammers, mallets and other bashing weapons over rayguns, and rightly so, because they are terrible shots with Earth weapons.
Their space ship, which resembles a flying country house, is also pretty memorable. But they can't hold a candle to Derek, 'cause Dereks don't run.

6) They Live Aliens

For the award for the aliens that have managed to infiltrate the human society the best, look no further. Why, they could be sitting right behind you, now. In John Carpenter's bitter letter to the yuppie era, aliens have taken over our world already, we just don't know it. They control the banks and the economy and the governments and the police forces, while normal working-class people can't find a job or a home to call their own. The aliens also control the climate change, turning up the planet's temperature to suit their species better. When they've used up all of our resources, they move on to the next planet. And who knows how long have they been here already.

The hard-lucked Nada (Rowdy Roddy Piper) happens to find a box of sunglasses in an evicted house. He soon realizes that these sunglasses allow their bearer to see the world as it is: just a ruse to lure people into consuming in order to make the rich aliens even richer. He soon joins the underground resistance. Lucky for him, the aliens have some problems, and one is that they are pretty poorly organized. When Nada starts mass-murdering them, even their own police force only sends one squad car at him at a time. Even though the aliens have wrist-communicators (that look like Rolexes), they rarely report any sightings of Nada to the authorities. Nada doesn't even change his clothes and he can still walk the streets pretty freely. As a counterweight the aliens have the advantage of having lured some greedy, greedy humans to their side, too. They also control the media, and use it to keep the brainwashing going on. Seeing as the divide between classes has only grown steeper since the 80's, one can guess that Nada ultimately failed in his attempt to bring the extraterrestials down. Maybe you can do better?


5) War of the Worlds Martians

Martian from the 1953 version.

The original extraterrestial world-conquering plan, against which all other plans are measured, comes from the classic novel of H.G. Wells. It's been filmed many times, the most notable versions coming from Byron Haskin in 1953, and Steven Spielberg in 2005. Even Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin's 1996 blockbuster Independence Day uses the same story as a template (and has really sick aliens to go with the needlessly giant explosions and inspirational speeches). The basic plan of the invasion remains the same.

A meteor shower hits the Earth, and actually contains malicious aliens. They take out the world's electricity (if the film is set on modern times) and bring out their tripodded kill-machines. When they start to zap a lot of people to death, no amount of human military weapons can even scratch them. Cities are in panic and most of the civilizations lie in ruins. The aliens start to grind captured people to farm some sort of vegetation from their home planet. In the end, they fail with their plan, not because people were the superior people, but because the Earth has so many small virae that the aliens can't handle the athmosphere. Thus, they would've won, if they would've done more tests on climate, or would've used more protection.

Maybe this is E.T.'s big brother, out for revenge on the society, but easy on fractured nuclear families.

What makes these aliens stand above many others that try out similar things, is that these are creatures developed to thinking, not fighting. Indeed, the actual aliens are small, squishy and vunerable, just like humans are. We are both designed a large brain size in mind. But the aliens usually use an exoskeleton, such as a tripod, that makes them nearly invincible. WoW is a great story (even if the Spielberg one over-emphasizes the importance of a family's unity), and works as a lesson in warfare as well. Let's hope no alien satellite can pick up a version from the internet.

4) Prawns from District 9

Easily the most fascinating alien race of recent years, District 9's insect-like aliens become quite symphatetic by the end of the film. More so, that the humans in the film, in fact. So, it's a bit like Starship Troopers, then. After all, both films feature satiric commentary on the ills of an overtly right-winged, racist society. It's easy to feel sorry for even the most inhumane creatures, if they are treated as badly as the prawns are.

The prawns are all lower middle-class. Without a queen or upper-class to guide them, they've drifted through space and stumbled to Johannesburg, South Africa. Of course, a group of people that are used to being abused is going to be easily abused where-ever they go. So, us earthlings allow the drones to stay, but within the confined quarters that comprise the titular District 9. As the aliens there have no jobs, no homes and no way to mingle with the rest of civilization, a shanty-town rises there. Criminals see it as a way to make money. Pencil-pushing bureaucrats, such as Wikus Van De Merwe see it as a nuisance that should be cleaned off with brutal measures. Of course, once he gets a taste of his own medicine, his attitude starts to change.

The actual prawn civilization is only hinted at in the film. The prawns do have a highly developed culture, where each worker is valuable. It does resemble more of the insect kingdoms on our Earth than our human civilizations. Interestingly a human can also turn into a prawn by an infection. This may be due to the species' different mating habits, but it still creepily reminds me of The Thing. It might be a good idea to keep the aliens quarantined and not be allowed to mibgle with people, after all. Much can also be read into the fact that prawns have brought hyper-destructive weapons along with them, but lost them to human scientists. The goal for the prawns is to get back home, and they attempt to accomplish this by getting their society back on Earth. This might mean trouble for us humans if they ever will return.

3) John Carpenter's The Thing

The most inhumane and horrifying alien comes from the best horror remake of all time. The original, overrated 1951 Thing From Another World saw a Frankenstein-like monster (who was actually a hyper-evolved carrot) chase scientist around an Antarctic Outpost. Nothing about the design or behaviour of the creature was very original, save from his vegetal evolution. Thank Space Pope for John Carpenter, then, who went back to John W. Campbell's original novel, Who Goes There? to get inspiration for his creature, rather than the original film version. So, Cold War paranoia in the same vein as Invasion of the Body-Snatchers has been partly replaced by... something else entirely.

The best idea about the Thing is that while the creature is a shape-changer, it has no real form. It is more akin to a parasite, that can take over its host organism and make it act according to its whim. For the movie, the creature can also grow fangs, tentacles, feet and other creepy appendixes. It is also very, very hard to kill. Any tiny part of the creature can take on a life of its own, and work on its instincts to survive and to spread the disease. The Thing can spread from person to person in a matter of seconds, so there's a deep fear that it gets to the outside world.

Thus, the Thing is really more of an apocalyptic threat than a multi-dimensional representation of an alien race. It does come to the planet on a space ship, but for all we know, it could've been built by another alien race that Things have wiped out and are looking for new ground to spread. Of course, for a film made in the heat of the 80's, Thing also contains plenty of AIDS allegories in decomposing bodies and lacking the immunity to resist a new kind of virus. But the real strength of the film is it's delirious paranoia that piles up as the film progresses. Really, the Thing can be anyone, even your best friend. And thus he can murder you when you least expect it. Keep watching your friends.




Like most of Legolamb's Musicals, this features the entire plot of the film, so it contains spoilers, but is brilliant.

2) Predators

There are three official Predator movies. In each of them, we learn something new from our vagina-faced rasta friends. Yet still, wisely, the aura of mystery still shrouds them. It's good, because if they were to be too thoroughly explained, I would lose interest. As they are, Predators live, die and behave according to their own species' code of conduct. In John McTiernan's 1987 film Predator, we learn all the basics. Predators are an alien race that hunts for sport, and have been hearing good things about man being the most dangerous game. Predator proves his own dangerousness by taking out a team of elite commandos in an Earth jungle, but loses to the almighty power of Arnold Schwarzenegger at his pride.

However, it is not until Stephen Hopkin's 1990 sequel Predator 2, that we learn a whole lot more of the species. Most Predators have a honor code (not the one in the first, obviously, because he rather blew himself up than would lose a fight to Arnold). This means they won't kill people who aren't carrying arms, aren't of age or aren't bastards. Luckily, this still means that LA is crawling with prey from drug-dealers to gangstas to Gary Busey. Predators also like to take trophies from their victims, such as skulls, bits of spine, or skin. When Danny Glover manages to best a Predator in a fair fight, he is allowed to live, and handed a pistol from the 18th century as a trophy. Apparently the species also lives long and does regular trips to our planet. Hey, it's not like people are an endangered species.

Finally, in Nimród Antal's 2010 film Predators, we learn that Predators come in different tribes that like to hunt their own ways. They also seem to have competitions on who is the better hunter on a jungle planet. For the race, they kidnap a group of dangerous people from Earth. While it's cool to see a samurai vs. Predator show-off, one can't wonder why they only want to hunt humans. I mean, a xenomorph skull was seen in the last movie... on second thought, don't answer that.

The Predator is an iconic character, a little campy, but also a little threatening. It's no wonder Stan Winston's original creature work has stayed so relevant to the modern day. Also every film has brought something new to the table for the character, which is something not a lot of such franchises have the right to say. Then again, for a 14-year-old series, theree films isn't really that lot.




I couldn't resist. I'll just use another video on the next Arnold Project.

1) Xenomorphs, The Alien Saga

Really, could #1 be anything else? The xenomorphs are a thoroughly though-out bunch of nightmare creatures, that actually function in their own twisted logic. There are some forms of insects that lay eggs inside their enemies (such as tarantulas). The larvae then eat the host animal alive. This natural phenmenon turned on people. Alongside that and the horrifying, Freudian appearance of the fully grown xenos make the films work on a subconscious level. We all fear of being sexually assaulted, penetrated by something alien, and not being able to control what outside forces do to our bodies.

The Swiss artist H.R. Giger has done a massive body of work of nightmarish visions where bilogical and mechanical beings are connected. Yet nothing he has ever made has quite captured the imaginations and horrified people so intensily as the Alien. Most of the trick of how they work is that they are fast, silent, and move around in the shadows. Nothing is more frightening than the unseen.

Except maybe facehuggers. Those creepy bastards.

The biology of the aliens is always fascinating, and have created memorable visuals. From the ominous egg in the original film's poster to the terrible spider-like facehuggers, to the chest-bursting larvae are examples of biology at its worst. But things get even more ominous as the chestburster grows into a full-sized penis-headed nightmare overnight. The great thing about aliens is that you can get scared from either seeing just one part of it, and not knowing what exactly it is, as well as seeing a billion of them crawling up the walls readying to eat the faces off some colonial marines. And killing or wounding them is also tricky as they have goddamned acid as blood. The series would be good enough with this sort of creatures, but the first two also manage to create a library of believable, three-dimensional characters who you wouldn't want to get eaten by aliens. Except Burke the yuppie, of course.

Not as scary, but a great end opponent for our heroine.

With video games, bad video game adaptations like Aliens vs. Predator, comic books and god knows what, there should already be the time to retire Aliens altogether. Their appearance is already known, and they just can't shake audiences like they used to. Ridle Scott seems to realize this, because his would-be Alien prequel Prometheus seems to have ended up as something else altogether. When the inevitable Alien remake comes around, I hope that the makers have enough artistic vision to take their horrifying appearance to the next level and would hire another artist to work on them. As of now, we don't need another nghtmare. But still, the time may be soon. They mostly come out nights, mostly.