MUSIC FROM SPACE: Siouxsie & The Banshees - HALLOWEEN
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.
Read more...
Sci-fi, Horror and All Things Geek
Rob Schrab's classic work of "drawless animation", offering the timeless message: "Halloween kicks Christmas' ass!"
(Yes, this is a re-post, from May. But nobody was reading the site back then. Besides, it's Halloween, and this is just about the most Halloweeny song around.)
The Broken Hearts are Nisha Thirkell and Amber Jane Butchart, two rather improbably glamorous young ladies. They work in a trendy London vintage clothing store, design their own clothes and jewelery, and have become UK fashion gurus in their own right. They are performance artists and club DJs. Oh, and they just happen to front a little band that's earning rave reviews, with London's Guardian declaring that they are the prime movers - and only members, so far - in a scene the paper dubbed "nu burlesque." (Seriously, there's no way two people could cram that much coolness into every day. Do Thirkell and Butchart actually exist, or is their band bio just copy off the back of the box of one of those Bratz London Punk dolls?)
Their 2007 single Black Cat is both bouncy and slinky, which is really pretty tricky to pull off. The video is reminiscent of one of those trippy old Fleisher Bros. cartoons, with Thirkell and Butchart as two live-action, pin-up doll magicians vying for the attention of a cartoon cat with strange powers. Black cat is coming!
Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.
Technocrati tags: [The Broken Hearts][Black Cat]
For far too many of us, high school was a purgatory of constant dodgeball games that left us with deep scars both metal and physical, and math classes that felt like they would never, ever end. (Mr. Carter, you told us that when we grew up, we would be glad we took algebra and we would use it all the time... But you lied! Why did you lie to us?! Why?!)
So I'm sure I'm not the only one who seethes with envy when they read about the Visual Effects and Design class that Jim Bycznski teaches at Berea High School in Ohio. (The class' official website, bhsfx.com, seems to have been hijacked by a Japanese site at present.) For several hours each day, the kids collaborate on various sculptures, props, masks, and goodness knows what else. And their work has real world applications, being put to use by indie filmmakers, local businesses, trade shows and more.
Let that sink in. These kids go to school every day, and make monsters. Vampires! Zombies! Other wonderfully gross and horrible things! And all the while, Bycznski is teaching them the kind of team-building skills and creative problem solving that they really will use all their lives. I wasted my youth trying to understand what the heck an integer was, while these little creeps get to make grotesque rubber boogiemen like Mr. Horribulus de Fangface over there!
And just to pour sulphuric acid in the wound, a lot of their work looks really good, too. Just look at this short film where a teenage mad scientist goes nuts in his laboratory. Those effects are lot better than anything you'll see in a SyFy original movie.
Fortunately, this is apparently the only such class in the nation. Let's just hope it stays that way. Your teen years are when you're supposed to be ditching class, smoking clove cigarettes out behind the dumpster and forging the bitter regrets that will follow you to your grave. Teenagers should not be having this much fun. We were taught that our monsters needed to be turned inward, so they could gnaw away at our very souls. If today's youth were to have a creative outlet for their angst and aggression, they might just grow up to be happy and well-adjusted adults!
Now, there's a prospect to really chill the blood.
Zombies have been done to death (see what I did, there?), but Spencer Susser's short film I Love Sarah Jane is less about zombies and more about their terrible aftermath. Set in an Australian suburb sometime after a zombie outbreak has swept through the streets, the film follows a group of kids in a world without grown-ups. Jimbo is a little boy who rides his bike through streets full of smashed and broken things, spending his days hanging around with other boys whose unchecked youthful aggression is quickly giving way to cruel barbarism. Sarah Jane is the local girl he pines for, but even though he could literally be almost the last boy alive, she barely knows he exists.
This is a sharp and uncompromising horror short, hideously bloody one moment and heartbreaking the next. The violence is particularly unsettling because it seems so much like plausible kid behavior, but the little moments of human connection are effective because they feel so real, too. There's also lots and lots of swearing... Do I even need to tell you this is probably not safe for work? Susser's now at work on his feature debut Hesher, and Mia Wasikowska, the film's titular Sarah Jane, will soon have another title role as Alice in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.
In the 1970s, after the original Star Trek and before the Trek movies, William Shatner just seemed to kind of go nuts for a while. In this clip from The Mike Douglas Show, Shatner launches into an inexplicable production number about "keeping it gay" as the studio audience visibly squirms. The really weird thing? Shatner's singing isn't bad!
Bill Tomlinson's Shaft of Light is a peculiar little 1996 stop-motion film that once seen in never forgotten. Set in a bleak, steampunk-ish, underground realm, the film introduces us to the Carriers, dull-witted, hunched-over robots who spend their lives hauling stuff around for the benefit of an unspecified "them". But then one day, the Carriers discover that the way is blocked. What is blocking the way? They do not know. They shall be late. It is bad to be late.
Shaft of Light did pretty well for a modern short film, screening at Sundance and other festivals and airing everywhere from Bravo to IFC to the Sci-Fi Channel. Around the same time, Tomlinson directed a feature called Artemis that I can't seem to find out much about. But that seems to be as far as he went in the movies, I get the impression that he gave up his film career a while ago. He is a restless talent, and over the years he's worked for Mattel, been a professor at UC Irvine, studied bugs, acted in Mamet plays and served as the creative consultant for something called the "Robotic Life Group" at MIT. (And what have you been doing with your life since 1996?)
Tomlinson's also done a series of art installations, including Boxed In, the large sculpture he and his sister Lynn Tomlinson created for the city of Philadelphia in 1996. If you couldn't make it out, the big fellow is holding a video monitor in one hand, and a video camera in the other. If he looks familiar, he should. He's a Carrier, encased in a too-small display window and no doubt muttering to himself about how the way is blocked.
Keith Tyson is an award-winning British artist whose work often looks sort of like science experiments gone wrong, but in the best way. Most if his work isn't as creepy as Mr. Cube over there, but it'll definitely put a nice crimp in your day.
His website is very flash-heavy and not too easy to steer, but it's worth clicking around and seeing what the heck you discover. Just think of it as the weirdest, slowest video game ever... And one where no matter what you do, you win!
Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.
© Free Blogger Templates Nightingale by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008
Back to TOP