With naught to fight off the mighty Zyxon Armada except our doughty determination and a few pieces of string, we nevertheless rebuffed the planned invasion and sent the bug-eyed interlopers back to the starry void that spawned them, their tails solidly between the appendages that serve as legs… and the only damage to the good Earth and its environs was the temporary suspension of the B-Masters.com domain name. A small price to pay for continued Terran safety and sovereignty!

CHERRY 2000

If Neon City is an example of American-made post-apocalyptic science fiction that strives for a more realistic, bleaker tone than is usually seen in Road Warrior rip-offs, then Cherry 2000 is a very interesting companion piece that comes from the opposite end of the spectrum. It envisions a future not terribly different from the one in Neon City — in which some manner of apocalyptic disaster has left large swathes of the United States lawless and scoured, while pockets of urban civilization seem to chug along despite the blight surrounding them — but where Neon City is an exercise in bleakness and some cursory attempt at realism, Cherry 2000 gleefully embraces all the excess, quirks, and questionable art and design decisions that embodied the 1980s, resulting in a film that comes across sort of like a post-apocalypse film as imagined by Patrick Nagel.

After having watched the Roger Corman-directed Gas-s-s-s, about the only positive thing I can say about it is that it gave me the inspiration for several possible titles for this post. Besides “It ain’t a gas”, I also considered using “A bad case of gas”, “This gas smells like methanethiol”, “Send it to the gas chamber”, and “I’ve got gas pains”. Feel free to submit your own suggestions.

SPLIT SECOND

While he was honing his skills as a guy you’d fall for even though you knew at the end of the day he’d probably cut out your heart and eat it while saying something spooky and profound, he was also working diligently on a second persona: that of a cranky, world weary hero who seems to mutter or sigh all his lines. His first big stab at this was in the do-nothing 1980s actioner Wanted: Dead or Alive, best known — if it is known at all — for being the movie where Rutger Hauer blows up a guy from KISS. In 1989, he took his world weary sighing hero act into the near future for Blood of Heroes, a movie where he got to make out with Joan Chen and slam skulls onto spikes. By 1992′s dystopian futuristic serial killer alien (!) movie Split Second, he had either become so good at acting bored that he seemed totally bored with the movie, or he was totally bored with the movie.

I know, I know, no one has posted their Corman tribute reviews yet (mine’s coming, honest), but I couldn’t let this pass without note:

Happy 82nd birthday to Roger Corman!

Update: Someone fed me bad information. Why? Why would someone do that? Don’t they know that every time someone falsely celebrates Roger Corman’s birthday, a kitten dies? DON’T THEY?

(It is, however, Ennio Morricone’s 82nd birthday. So the cake and streamers don’t have to go entirely to waste.)

It’s all sci-fi, all month at Teleport City, and this is the right way to kick it off:

MISSION STARDUST

Mission Stardust is the only film to be based on the long running and voluminous series of German pulp novels featuring the science fiction hero Perry Rhodan. It is universally hated by Perry Rhodan fans for the very good reason that it is quite terrible — that is, if you’re definition of “terrible” can be stretched to encompass a film featuring amusingly smarmy, two-fisted astronaut heroes, a truly swankadelic soundtrack, some quite good looking women, pop art set design, and a climactic sequence that finds sexy nurses with machine guns doing battle with robots who shoot lasers out of their eyes.

And coming in just before we devoted ourselves entirely to science fiction for the month of November…

FIREBALL

Fireball teaches us the valuable lesson that you shouldn’t try to solve your problems by competing in a brutal and dehumanizing bloodsport tournament; you should solve your problems by shooting people in the face.

Or at least, blog visitor Ed did, back when I reviewed Zombi Holocaust So you can blame him.

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CONTAMINATION (1980)

This, the third panel in the Ian McCulloch Triptych, finds our hero playing an alcoholic ex-astronaut, drummed out of the service after returning from a mission to Mars babbling about a mysterious light and a cave full of green, football-sized, egg-like objects.

Two years later, an apparently abandoned ship floats into New York City Harbour. On board are the mutilated bodies of the crew, while the hold is found to be full of strange green objects. When disturbed, these objects burst and shower anyone nearby with a fluid that makes them swell up and explode.

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The job of saving the world from this peculiar alien invasion falls to the boozy astronaut, the feisty female colonel who cashiered him in the first place, and a mouthy NY cop who for obvious reasons keeps having his self-deprecating remarks taken at face value.

In other words, the greatest trio of superheroes since The New Justice Team.

[No boobs, but some blood and guts – so probably NSFW.]

Some day, I will settle on a Teleport City design and stick with it. This one’s closer than most to being mildly acceptable to me. Anyway, usher in my endless George Lucas style fiddling with:

MOON ZERO TWO
England’s Hammer Films had the misfortune of releasing their nicely decorated but somewhat tepid science fiction romp Moon Zero Two in the wake of 1968’s two big genre-changing films, and as a result, Hammer’s effort comes out looking decidedly small scale and quaint. But perhaps even more crushing, Hammer released their breezy little moon adventure movie in 1969 and wound up competing directly with the actual Apollo moon landing. While a vision of the moon that included scantily clad dancing girls and scotch dispensers appeals to a certain sensibility, in the end, Moon Zero Two just couldn’t beat out Neil Armstrong actually hopping around on the surface of the moon, even though the real moon ended up not having any dancing girls or scotch — at least, one assumes, up until Alan Shepard got up there with his golf clubs.