SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner bugging out in SHOOT OR BE SHOT

Apologies for the dearth of posts around these parts lately, but hopefully I can make up for it with today's Shatner Sunday, a magnificently odd clip from the 2002 indie Shoot or Be Shot featuring Shatner as an unhinged, wannabe screenwriter.

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New, depressing photos from the set of the Muppet comeback movie

Forgetting Sarah Marshall star/puppet aficionado Jason Segel is masterminding an upcoming comeback movie for the Muppets, and a few photos from the set have turned up online. The shots show the Muppet film studio (a redressed version of the real Jim Henson Studios on La Brea in Los Angeles) having fallen to ruin, with everything looking broken, skuzzy and sad. Click here to see a gallery of photos and learn more about the film.

Man, seeing the rusted hulk of the Electric Mayhem bus from the original Muppet Movie is a lot more depressing than it should be.

EDITING THE DEAD

George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead, re-cut into an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure Youtube series. Admittedly there are plenty of times here where they sort of cheat and you're only presented with one "choice," but it's still a clever idea, well executed.

Cthulhu Mythos as Imagined by Kids

As part of an art project for a group of kids in Canoga Park, David Milano had the kids draw the ancient and terrible creatures from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. The results are horrifyingly adorable.

SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner vs. Borgnine in THE DEVIL'S RAIN

The Devil's Rain is an absolutely crazy 1975 horror movie featuring a startlingly eclectic cast, including William Shatner, Ernest Borgnine, Ida Lupino, John Travolta, noted satanist Anton LaVey and many more. Best remembered for its truly nightmarish (and very drippy) ending, the film has plenty of other unforgettable moments along the way. In this scene an uncharacteristically timid Shatner goes up against Borgnine's Satanic priest.

HI-FI PIZZA OF THE APOCALYPSE 11: RUBIK'S CUBE: THE MOVIE

Inspired by this apocalyptic moment from an old Daniel Clowes Eightball comic, Hi-Fi Pizza of the Apocalypse is a Monsters and Rockets feature where we chronicle the spectacularly unnecessary Hollywood rehashes, recyclings and recombinings that serve as ominous portents of the End Times.

This is apparently a thing that is really happening: Rubik's Cube: The Movie.

SPLENDORMAN

Will Splendorman visit you today?

Craig Ferguson on RED DWARF

Today most of us here in the US know Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson as the host of his own frequently wonderful late night show on CBS. Before that he portrayed the nefarious British boss Mr. Wick on The Drew Carey Show. But before that, way back in the '80s, he had a memorable guest starring role on the long-running UK sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf. In the episode Confidence and Paranoia, the show's protagonist, Dave Lister, contracts a form of mutated space pneumonia that makes his fevered hallucinations come to life. Ferguson appeared as the bellowing, hucksterish personification of Lister's confidence. Young, husky and sporting a magnificently broad American accent, Ferguson is all but unrecognizable in the clip above. (The clip is just a segment of the episode, and the whole thing is worth tracking down if you've never seen it before.)

SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner sings Cee-Lo's **** YOU

This clip was all over the place this week, but if you missed it... Well, maybe you'd do just as well to keep on missing it. Shatner singing Cee-Lo Green's catchy and very much NSFW hit **** You sounds like it should be great fun, but somehow it doesn't really click. Shatner seems like he's struggling to keep up with the music, and the results are neither awesome nor awesomely bad.

I think the proximity to George Lopez temporarily robbed Shatner of his innate awesomeness. It's a phenomenon scientists refer to as the Lopez Effect, in which any awesome celebrity rapidly loses their awesome the longer they remain on the set of the George Lopez Show. Shatner dared to cross the Lopez Event Horizon, and we all paid the price.

The Clash's Paul Simonon shows off his artwork

He doesn't play music much anymore and that magnificent punk rock pompadour is long gone, but Clash bassist Paul Simonon is keeping busy these days as a fine artist. His impressionistic bullfighting scenes and paintings of bacon and eggs could be considered kitschy, but they have a nice intensity to them.

(Until today I hadn't known that was him on the cover of London Calling, smashing that bass. Apparently he's regretted it ever since, as it was his favorite bass!)

Phil Tippett's stop-motion JURASSIC PARK

Back in the 1980s, special effects maestro Phil Tippett created amazing stop-motion animation for movies like The Empire Strikes Back, Robocop and Dragonslayer. He switched over to CGI for 1993's Jurassic Park, but he did some of the film's pre-visualization work with old school stop-motion. He's posted one of these stop-motion sequences on his official Youtube page, and it's fascinating to see this famous scene accomplished with old-fashioned effects techniques. It doesn't have the absolute realism of the finished film's CGI, but it's quite effective in its own right.





Tippett's also posted a trailer for a new stop-motion project called Mad God, although he's cruelly disabled embedding. It looks absolutely stunning, I can't wait to learn more about it.

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