Everything about the phrase William Shatner's Gonzo Ballet leads you to expect hilarity. It calls to mind images of ballerinas dancing to the Shat's version of Mr. Tamborine Man from his cult classic album The Transformed Man, or even - Oh, please, oh, please - Shatner himself pirouetting around the stage.
But William Shatner's Gonzo Ballet is nothing like that. Based on Has Been, Shatner's semi-recent and surprisingly acclaimed musical collaboration with Ben Folds, this is a serious dance project, more PBS than Doctor Demento. After decades as a camp figure, Shatner has really pulled off an impressive comeback late in life, earning a new respect for his acting and his music. The Transformed Man, indeed.
Today's adaptation of Alice in Wonderland comes to us from that strange period in the 1970s when porno movies briefly broke into the American mainstream.
In 1974, producer Bill Osco brought the world the softcore Flash Gordon parody Flesh Gordon. The movie was a big hit, so in 1976 Osco set his sights on pornifying the Lewis Carroll classic. Osco's Alice in Wonderland (sometimes re-titled Alice in Wonderland: A Musical Porno) played in multiplexes alongside Star Wars, and was a massive success, earning 90 million bucks and scoring some surprisingly positive reviews. Roger Ebert was one of the critics charmed by the film, writing of leading lady Kristine De Bell, "Maybe it's her perpetual look of total innocence and astonishment in the face of Wonderland's jolly pastimes that makes her seem so sexy. She looks just like the healthy blond with wide-set eyes and Toni curls that sat across the aisle in high school -- or should have."
Every adaptation of Alice is weird in its own way, but Osco's Alice is weirder than most. Here's a musical number that would be perfectly at home in a cheapie kid's movie of the era.
And here's a sequence that absolutely could not be mistaken for a kid's movie. There's no nudity, but this clip is probably not safe for work due to adult concepts, ladies in their underwear and some extremely creepy talk about parts of Humpty Dumpty I don't even want to think about.
The film has been released in both X and R-rated versions, but it's not widely available today. I've never actually seen it, and judging by the clips online, I think I might be OK with that. Porning up Flash Gordon is no big crime, that comic strip was pretty kinky already. But you start porning around with beloved children's stories and doing musical numbers about Humpty Dumpty's bedroom troubles, and I am out of there like a White Rabbit late for a croquet date with the queen.
Today is the 50th(!) anniversary of The Twilight Zone. Let's have a look at those awesome opening graphics, shall we?
From the first season:
Bernard Herrmann's original theme, pre-"Dee dee, dee dee". As classic as the later theme has become, I've always liked the creepiness and melancholy of this one even more.
Ah, yes, that nerve-jangling theme by Marius Constant. The sunset graphics were pretty basic, but effective.
A very early-'60s approach for season 3, with the vortex graphic and more sedate, "modern" type.
Aw, yeah, people. Here's where the TZ credits reach their apex. I love how they suggest strange cosmic happenings by throwing random crap at you that they found in the prop department. This show was damn near the best thing ever.
Finally, we go back to the beginning, for the titles from the pilot episode. It's a good thing Rod Serling later decided to do his own narration, huh? This narrator makes me feel like I'm about to take a ride on the Monorail at Disneyland.
George Romero, the man who pretty much invented the modern zombie genre with his 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead, is currently working on his debut novel, which will be set in his Living Dead universe.
According to Romero's UK publisher Headline, The Living Dead will tell "the full story behind the living dead: how they came to be [and] what they can and cannot do". The book begins in San Diego, where a corpse suddenly awakens in the middle of an autopsy.
Romero has had a rocky but always fascinating career. The original Night of the Living Dead was a low-budget hit that would go on to have a massive influence on later horror pictures, but due to a copyright mishap the film quickly lapsed into the public domain and Romero saw only a fraction of the profits he would've enjoyed otherwise. In the '70s and '80s Romero had a very successful run of horror films and TV projects - although, as he told us in a Darkworlds.com interview, he sometimes longed to move beyond the horror genre that made him famous. His film career cooled in the '90s, but then early in the new millennium zombies made a big comeback, and so did Romero. He directed 2005's Land of the Dead, 2008's Diary of the Dead, and is currently in production on an as-yet-untitled zombie indie, his sixth film in the Dead franchise.
Here we have the very first film version of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Cecil Hepworth's silent production from over 100 years ago. The footage is narrated by Simon Brown of Britain's National Film Archive, and thank goodness for that. Brown's behind-the-scenes commentary is really interesting stuff, but Hepworth's actual film is just freakin' awful. Hepworth may have been a true pioneer of the cinema... But Georges Méliès he was not.
Growing up, we all thought 2009 was going to be full of rayguns, flying cars, robot butlers and all that. This news story, about the billionaire "first clown in outer space" seems like something that leaked into our universe from that other, better 2009... Or at least something from a really great Vonnegut story.
Read more...
In China, there is a community of dwarfs who have built their own fairytale theme park on the side of a mountain. The village is made up of dwarf-scale houses shaped like mushrooms, and the dwarfs dress up like fairytale pixies and perform for tourists.
The village has been controversial, with some claiming the dwarfs are being exploited. But spokesman Fu Tien says that the dwarfs started the village to escape prejudice they faced living around larger people.
"As small people we are used to being pushed around and exploited by big people," he said. "But here there aren't any big people and everything we do is for us."
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In the coming days, we'll look at just a few of the many, many screen versions of Lewis Carroll's classic story, Alice in Wonderland.
No matter what you do with Alice, no matter how much you try to bland it out and cute it up, it's still a Freudian free-for-all with babies turning into pigs for no reason at all, caterpillars smoking hookahs, and a cat that disappears leaving only its grin behind. It's fascinating to look at the various versions of Alice and see how the story was handled in different eras, what they chose to emphasize or leave out. Often, an Alice adaptation says a lot more about the filmmakers than it says about Carroll's story.
1933's Alice in Wonderland, like a lot of Wonderland adaptations, also includes a lot of material from Carroll's Wonderland sequel, Through the Looking Glass. The film was an all-star production, featuring Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, Gary Cooper as the White Knight, and, in this clip, none other than W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty.
The film is generally pretty faithful to Carroll's text, and it brings the various creatures of Wonderland to life using pioneering special effects makeup that is both amazingly effective and hideous. Bear in mind, as you watch this clip, that this was long before the days of CGI and rubber prosthetics. They didn't even have the technology to superimpose Field's eyes onto Humpty's egg-head, so presumably they just encased him inside of some big, hot, uncomfortable puppet head and rolled the cameras as long as they could until he got too cranky and they had to give him a break for scotch and cigars.
Fields makes a surprisingly good fit as Humpty Dumpty, doesn't he?
The film isn't currently available on DVD, but at this writing the whole thing can be seen on Youtube starting with this clip. If you've only got time for an excerpt, this is the one to see, featuring the truly nightmarish Mock Turtle, Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee as beer-gutted schoolboys with melting faces, and a Fleisher Brothers cartoon version of The Walrus and the Carpenter. Jesus, this thing makes Un Chien Andalou look like an episode of Full House.
Seth Rogen, starring in a Michael Gondry movie, based on the old superhero character the Green Hornet. I know, I can't quite wrap my head around that sentence, either. But this movie really seems to be happening, and as proof there's an on-set video showing Rogen in costume. Or it could be his stunt-double. He's wearing a mask, so it's hard to tell. But in any case, this is what the Green Hornet costume will look like. With Seth Rogen in it. The fat, sarcastic kid from Freaks and Geeks. Yep.
The video is below, but it plays inconsistently on different browsers, so if it's not showing for you, you can always go see it on Splash News.
"Science fiction plucks from within us our deepest fears and hopes, then shows them to us in rough disguise: the monster and the rocket." - W.H. Auden
Who is he, this one who is called "Greg Stacy"?
Greg Stacy began the MONSTERS AND ROCKETS blog in April of 2009. Prior to that, he was editor of the popular sci-fi/horror news website DARKWOLDS.COM. He has also written for LA WEEKLY, OC WEEKLY, UTNE READER and LOS ANGELES CITYBEAT. He always feels weird writing about himself in the third person.
