OUTTAKES #006

The flu is rampant in my house right now, so no heavy blogging for the moment. Instead, you get more cartoons.

OUTTAKES #005

Happy Lent to all our overburdened clergy out there.

OUTTAKES #004

INTERMISSION: A WEEK, A MONTH, A YEAR, HALF YOUR LIFE

Another meme seems to have found it's way to my lobby, this time by way of The Sci-Fi Catholic. According to the rules, I'm supposed to pick various locales in which I'd like to live for a week, a month, a year, and half my life, and explain my reasons why. That's a dicey proposition when you're confined to a low budget universe like I am. While others get to pick places like The Matrix or Middle Earth, I'm stuck with choices like Boggy Creek, Frogtown, and wherever the heck it is Beastmaster is from. Still, with a little effort, I think I can probably come up with a few interesting B-type places in which to kill some time. So, let's see, how about...

A WEEK... on Monster Island. Introduced in 1968's Destroy All Monsters, this is the place where the U. N. dumps all those giant monsters which occasionally pop up and stomp Tokyo into dust. Not really a place you'd want to stay for any great length, but for a week it might be fun to watch Rodan and Mothra do fly-bys, see Anguirus do that rolling ball thing, and maybe even catch the Big G himself teaching Manilla how to blow smoke rings. The childlike wonder of the experience would be great. Of course, it might be really creepy if they still had the zippers up their backs. Exactly what kind of thing would choose to wear a thirty story tall lizard suit? Maybe I should change this one to the Land of the Lost.

A MONTH... on location with Roger Corman's production company in the 1960s. Not only would I have helped make about, oh I don't know, seven movies during that time period, I would have likely gotten to work with Vincent Price. We could have talked about fine art, the original version of The Fly, and what Chuck Heston was like on the set of The Ten Commandments. Too cool.

A YEAR... at the Banzai Institute for Biomedical Engineering and Strategic Information. Sure, I'm not really qualified to hang out with a bunch of adventuring neurosurgeon samurai rock stars, but with my college degree in Commercial Music & Recording, I could easily make it as a roadie  for Buckaroo Banzai and the Honk Kong Cavaliers. Helping invent cool stuff, putting on a good concert, and saving the world from Rastafarian aliens... not a bad way to spend a year.

HALF MY LIFE... on the Satellite of Love, of course. Do I even need to explain this one?

So, there you go. Not a bad itinerary for such a tight budget. The price tag doesn't really matter though because, as Buckaroo Banzai always remarked, "Remember, wherever you go, there you are." What he was referencing, of course, was the section of The Catechism which states, "The heart is the dwelling-place where I am, where I live; according to the Semitic or Biblical expression, the heart is the place "to which I withdraw." The heart is our hidden center, beyond the grasp of our reason and of others; only the Spirit of God can fathom the human heart and know it fully." Heart trumps budget any day of the week... or month... or year.

OUTTAKES #003

The resident pantsuit wearing nun at my own parish is actually one of the first people to have befriended me on my return to Catholicism. She also happens to do a lot of the best, and least recognized, charitable work at our church. But the numbers are the numbers, and I worry about the future of her order.

SHORT FEATURE: THE SANDMAN

Don't go to sleep? Darn right, not with this guy creeping around. Believe me, in no way is this the kind little sprite from Hans Christian Andersen who ushers kids off to Slumberland with a little bit of dust in their eyes. This is the late-great animator John Berry's take on the character as described in E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 short story "Der Sandmann". This one ain't for the kiddies. (Unless you really don't want them to go to sleep... ever.)

The Bible has it's own share of weird and unusual tales. Take for instance the one told in the deuterocanonical text of Tobit. (Sorry protestant readers, that's one of the books you dumped, but you can always borrow one of our Bibles if you're interested.) In that story, a combination of Jewish and oriental folklore, we meet the unfortunate Sarah, a nice lady whose first seven husbands have been murdered on their wedding nights by the demon Asmodeus. Aided by the disguised angel Raphael, Sarah's eighth husband Tobias confronts Asmodeus in the bridal chamber and defeats him with a steaming pile of fish guts.

Yeah, it's weird, but as the book's introduction in the New American Bible explains, "The inspired author of the book used the literary form of religious novel (as in Jonah and Judith) for the purpose of instruction and edification. There may have been a historical nucleus around which the story was composed, but this possibility has nothing to do with the teaching of the book. The seemingly historical data-names of kings, cities, etc.-are used merely as vivid details to create interest and charm." Despite the bizarre narrative, the book basically ends up being a reflection on the value of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Good reading for Lent, and since they use fish guts, you can even enjoy it on Fridays.

COMING ATTRACTIONS: DON'T GO TO SLEEP

There is no trailer for this 1982 made-for-TV thriller because (criminally) it's never been released on DVD and the out-of-print VHS is insanely hard to find. So here's a clip instead. WARNING: This movie contains no blood, nudity, or cursing... but the above scene may still seriously creep you out. Or at least put you off pizza for awhile.

OUTTAKES #002

Happy St. Valentine's Day everybody.

DARK STAR

THE TAGLINE

"What would you be like after 20 years aboard Dark Star, the spaced out spaceship? The ultimate cosmic comedy!"

THE PLOT

The Dark Star and her crew are nearing the end of their 20 year mission to destroy unstable planets which might interfere with interstellar travel, but not all has gone well. The captain has died and been stored in deep freeze, the rest of the crew is nearing madness from boredom and apathy, and the entire supply of toilet paper burned up in a storage room fire. To make matters worse, the small alien the crew has been keeping as a mascot escapes and sets into motion a series of escalating disasters. It all comes to a head when the AI in the ship's last bomb mistakenly believes it has received orders to detonate even though it is still attached to the Dark Star. After consulting with the dead captain, it is decided the crew's only hope is for someone to exit the ship and engage the bomb in a philosophical discussion which might convince it not to explode. Weird things happen.

THE POINT

By now you probably don't need a list of the films John Carpenter has directed. (Since he sticks his name in the title these days, I'd say he makes it pretty easy to remember.) Dan O'Bannon, on the other hand, might not be so familiar to those of you who didn't have your noses buried in Starlog Magazine throughout the 80's. Just in case you need a refresher, O'Bannon is the man who penned such movies as Alien, Return Of The Living Dead, Lifeforce, and Total Recall. (Yeah, I know, Lifeforce, but overall it's still a pretty good batting average.) With their combined pedigree it would be natural to think a collaboration between these two heavyweights would be something amazing, especially since their idea was to make a movie paying tribute to Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

But what if I told you this meeting of giants took place while the two were still film students in college? And what if I told you the sum total of the budget for this interstellar epic totaled around $60,000, just a mere $10,440,000 short of 2001's price tag? Would that lower your expectations a bit? I hope so, because you see, the effects in this film are legendary... in that special Ed Wood sort of way. You get spacecraft with aluminum walls which sway suspiciously whenever someone bumps into them too hard. You get spacesuits pieced together from muffin pans (muffin pans!) and other familiar kitchen utensils. And best of all, you get one of the most ridiculous space aliens of all time, an oversized beach ball with a pair of Creature From The Black Lagoon gloves glued to it, all airbrushed a nice orange with yellow polka dots. (Look at that picture up there; you KNOW you want to watch this.) Scramble all that together with a cast who couldn't be called actors even on a charitable day, and that's the "epic" that is Dark Star.

And yet, here we are 34 years later still talking about it. So what is it about Dark Star, much like THX-1138 before it, that somehow manages to lift it out of the ranks of the student films and earn it a place in theaters? Well, it's probably the fact that Carpenter and O'Bannon really are pretty talented, and even though they were unpolished and under-budgeted on this movie, their potential still shows through. The best example of this, believe it or not, turns out to be the confrontation with the beach ball. While the sequence is played mostly for laughs (it is a guy chasing a balloon after all), the filmmakers still incredibly manage to squeeze a little tension out of the proceedings by way of some clever camera angles, a perfect use of claustrophobic sets, and the effective trick of overlaying the proceedings with a female computer voice ticking off an ominous countdown. In fact, the technique worked so well that O'Bannon freely admits to recycling the idea for Alien. (Look, I'm not saying you'll wet yourself while watching the breathtaking beach ball scene from Dark Star, okay? I'm just pointing out that it ends up being much more effective than it has a right to.)

Despite the slapstick silliness of the alien scenes, however, most of the movie relies instead on deadpan existential humor as it explores the effects which twenty years of isolation have had on the crew. Guys sit around pining for lost surf boards, pondering the fact they can't remember their first names, or just staring out into space for weeks at a time. These aren't the efficient professionals of Kubrick's 2001, but rather a motley crew of blue collar schmoes slowly going mad. One excellent sequence has a crewman obsessively recording video diaries detailing how everyone is getting on his nerves, usually just because they've sat next to him... again. If there's a highlight though, and a scene for which Dark Star is most remembered (besides the beach ball, of course), it's the one in which the character of Doolittle takes the advice of the ship's dead captain (I'm not explaining that) and exits the ship to teach the self-aware bomb Phenomenology.

I'm not going to tell a lie here, I had to look up Phenomenology to make sure I remembered exactly what it was. (PHIL 101 was a looong time ago.) The least convoluted definition I could find is "a philosophy or method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness." (And that's the least convoluted!) There's a few ways to follow that definition to a conclusion, but the one taken by Dark Star leads to the idea that reality is an entirely subjective experience; nothing exists outside your own consciousness. In introducing the concept of subjective reality to the bomb, Doolittle hopes to convince it that the commands it thinks it heard weren't real because it's not possible to know objectively that anything is real. What results is the kind of hopeless circular argument that's been carried out by countless inebriated arts & humanities students the world over. See if this sounds familiar.

BOMB: "I recall distinctly the detonation order. My memory is good on matters like these." DOOLITTLE: "Yes, of course you remember it, but what you are remembering is merely a series of electrical impulses which you now realize have no necessary connection with outside reality." BOMB: "True, but since this is so, I have no proof that you are really telling me all this."

Alright, in fairness, these kind of arguments also go on in classrooms and lecture halls in which the participants may or may not be drunk, but you can tell O'Bannon was having fun writing stuff he and Carpenter likely tossed around after a pitcher of beer. Anyway, the argument does convince the bomb to momentarily halt the detonation sequence so it can think all this over. But the problem is that accepting reality as purely subjective leads to only one logical conclusion. Within a true subjective belief system, everything is a projection of a single consciousness. You. The entirety of the universe exists solely within you because you're the only consciousness that exists. In effect, in a subjective reality, your consciousness is God. The bomb, being a logical machine, naturally arrives at this conclusion. Which means the crew of the Dark Star is screwed.

BOMB: "False data can act only as a distraction. Therefore. I shall refuse to perceive you. The only thing which exists is myself... In the beginning there was darkness, and the darkness was without form and void. And in addition to the darkness there was also me. And I moved upon the face of the darkness. And I saw that I was alone. Let there be light."

At which point, the bomb explodes.

Ah well, so goes the potential pitfalls of dealing with modern philosophy. It doesn't always have to end badly, though. Pope John Paul II is widely recognized as incorporating Phenomenology into his writings and most people think he turned out okay. (He never claimed to be God at least.) He began wrestling with subjective philosophies all the way back in 1953 when he wrote a doctoral thesis entitled  "Evaluation of the Possibilities to Construct Christian Ethics Based on the System of Max Scheler" (Scheler was a student of Edmund Husserl, the originator of Phenomenology.) and probably reached the zenith of his thought on the subject in his 1969 book known in America as The Acting Person: A Contribution to Phenomenological Anthropology. The ideas in that book would form the foundations for the pope's Theology Of The Body, a dense work George Wiegel believes is a “theological time bomb set to go off, with dramatic consequences, sometime in the third millennium of the Church.”.

I'm not going to tell a lie here either. I don't have the intelligence necessary (or stones for that matter) to attempt to reduce Pope John Paul II's synthesis of Phenomenology, Aquinas, and Augustine into a coherent sound byte. And after two weeks of looking, I've yet to find anyone else who can do it in less than book form. As Gregory R. Beabout notes, "The Acting Person is a difficult text. In fact, at the Catholic University of Lublin, students have been heard to joke that Wojtyla wrote [the book] with full knowledge that he would one day be pope so that it could be made assigned reading for priests in purgatory." To keep things brief, let's just agree that he did come up with a solution, basically inventing a new theological language in the process, and everybody's still arguing about it.

But the question arises, why even bother coming up with a whole new theological language just to teach the same old things? Wasn't the old language good enough? Absolutely, but after a couple of hundred years of listening to modernism, people are starting to forget how to speak it. Father Richard M. Hogan suggests that "since most in our era think subjectively, inductively, and experientially, they are ill prepared to hear, or even less, understand the truths and practices of the faith taught in a structure and outline which is objective, deductive, and principled.  Even the vocabulary and language used in either the Thomistic or Augustinian synthesis is foreign to the modern ear.  If the Revelation of Christ is to be grasped and understood today, it needs to be presented to people in their own language and in their own modes of thought.  In a word, it needs to have a subjective, inductive, and experiential garb and it needs to use words which are part of the common coinage of modern culture." The alternative is to ignore philosophy, refuse to learn the new languages, and leave the world on its on to figure things out. That didn't work out too well for the Bomb though did it? Just think how much more explosive people can be.

THE STINGER

Well, this brings an end to our mini-marathon of John Carpenter movies, and probably mercifully so considering the long and rambling nature of the posts which accompanied it. It also, coincidentally enough, brings an end to the first year of this blog. My primary reason for doing this has always been to encourage myself to keep studying the teachings of my faith, and given the bizarre method I've chosen to do that with, I had no real reason to expect anyone to read a word I've written over the past year. (Let's face it, this blog is a niche within a niche within a niche.) So my sincere gratitude to all of you who, for whatever reason, have decided this stuff is worth your attention. The support has been humbling. Thanks.

FILM CLUB: EVIL BRAIN FROM OUTER SPACE

Everyone seems to have gotten a kick out of the stills I used in my first Outtakes, so I thought, what the heck, let's just watch the movie.

EVIL BRAIN FROM OUTER SPACE (1964) "A monstrous evil brain from outer space leads his minions on a crusade to conquer the universe, and unleashes hideous monsters on Earth that spread deadly diseases. Superhero Starman must rescue Earth from the menace of the evil brain while battling armies of monsters the brain sends against him."

The guidelines for participating are simple:

1. Watch the movie (at least as much of it as you can take). The entire film can be viewed in it's entirety at Google Video which has a full screen option, or at bmovies.com which uses a pop-up player. (Don't worry, it's in the public domain, so Thou Shalt Not Steal doesn't come into play.)

2. Sometime within the next three weeks send me an email at eegahinc@gmail.com with a short paragraph or two commenting on the film, preferably including any ideas it may have brought to mind regarding religion or a related topic. If you prefer to write a full review for your own blog, just provide me with the link.

3. By the end of the third week I'll assemble all the comments, along with the usual plot synopsis and such, and post the results. Everybody is welcome to cross-post any and all comments on their own blogs, just remember to kindly link back to whomever's comments you use. (A link back here would be nice also.)

4. And please remember this is an exercise of your God given free will. No one is to hold The B-Movie Catechism responsible for any mental anguish resulting from viewing the selection of the month.

So there you have this month's film club selection. Be strong.

OUTTAKES #001

Hi, folks. With literally hundreds of public domain movies cluttering my shelves, I thought I would start having a little fun with them. I hope everybody can take a little good natured ribbing.