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More gooey monstery goodness from Oats Studios (The “ZYGOTE” short film)

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Oats Studios dropped its newest science fiction – horror short film yesterday, and it’s pretty damned good.  “ZYGOTE” follows (an all grown up!) Dakota Fanning and Jose Pablo Cantillo as they try to escape an inspired and truly horrifying monster.  (Cantillo was none other than Martinez a few seasons ago on “The Walking Dead.” )

My enjoyment here was hampered just a little with some problems I had with the short film’s audio … I tried watching this both with my laptop’s speakers and with my headphones, and I found the early dialogue a little difficult to hear either way.  (I’m guessing the problem is only mine.)

Nevertheless, this was a pretty decent short film, taking writer-director Neill Blomkamp’s zeal for body horror to a new level.  (I get the sense that Blomkamp watched a lot of David Cronenberg growing up.)

Fans of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” should be pleased.  Check it out below.

 

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Cover to “Batman” #495, Kelley Jones, 1993

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From the “Knightfall” storyline.

 

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Nolan’s Relatively Mellow Summer 2017 Playlist — featuring Toxic Sundown Avenger!!

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Take this for whatever it’s worth to you — it’s my relatively chill summer playlist.  A good college buddy of mine consistently posts a “Friday Dance Party” playlist on Facebook every week.  (The Dude is on a mission to make the whole world dance.)  This, I prefer to think, is a more laid back seasonal complement.

Hey, you want to hear something really sad?  I really like Airborne Toxic Event a hell of a lot, but, when I tried to Google them earlier tonight, I typed in “Toxic Sundown Avenger.”   That is what happens when an old man tries to get into the young people’s music.

*I’m* the one who’s “sundowning.”

 

*****

[Explicit lyric warning for Daniela Andrade and Kawehi.]

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W. H. Auden’s “Dear, Though the Night is Gone,” read by Tom O’Bedlam

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Am I mistaken or is “Tom O’Bedlam” the most bad-ass Irish name ever?

 

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Neill Blomkamp’s free new sci-fi short films are goddam nightmare-inducing.

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Writer-director Neill Blomkamp (who brought us 2009’s “District 9” and who wanted to bring us a fifth “Alien” installment) is currently releasing a series of sci-fi short films via his “Oats Studios” channel on Youtube.  There have been four released so far, with a fifth, “ZYGOTE,” scheduled for release today.

The two to which I’ve linked below, “Firebase” and “Rakka,” are fantastic.  They’re both military science fiction, they’ve both got lots of gore and great special effects, and they both show Blomkamp’s trademark predilection for body horror.

They’re both incredibly dark stories, too.  “Firebase” is disturbing; “Rakka” is downright horrifying.  (The Eiffel Tower scene … yeesh.)  It might make you smile, though, to see none other than Sigourney Weaver fighting alien invaders.

If “Firebase” doesn’t make much sense to you, try not to let it hamper your enjoyment of it.  (The short’s reveal shows us that many of these disparate story elements actually aren’t supposed to make much logical sense, considering their cause.)  And you should know ahead of time that both of these short films should serve as prologues for sequels or longer tales.  (Maybe Blomkamp is planning their denouements in subsequent shorts?)

I was so befuddled by “Firebase” at first that I wound up turning it off and then returning to it later.  I still think that its writing could be cleaned up a bit.  It’s definitely out there, and strays from science fiction into fantasy and … maybe even theology.  It was “Firebase,” however, that stayed with me and really got under my skin — much more than the more straightforward invasion horror story, “Rakka.”

 

 

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“Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold

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“Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

 

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Photo credit: Peter Facey [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

 

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“The Torment of Saint Anthony,” Michelangelo, circa 1487

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The Torment of Saint Anthony is the earliest known painting by Michelangelo, painted (after an engraving by Martin Schongauer) when he was only 12 or 13 years old.  (Wikipedia.org.)

 

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“There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind.”

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I’ve run variations of that quote from Homer’s “Iliad” here at the blog before; I think the translation that I like the best is the shortest: “There are no compacts between lions and men, and wolves and lambs have no accord.”  (I read that at the preface of one of Tom Clancy’s novels — I believe it was “Clear and Present Danger.”)

The most popular translation I can find online however, is below.  (The speaker here is Achilles.)

“Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall and glut grim Mars with his life’s blood. Put forth all your strength; you have need now to prove yourself indeed a bold soldier and man of war. You have no more chance, and Pallas Minerva will forthwith vanquish you by my spear: you shall now pay me in full for the grief you have caused me on account of my comrades whom you have killed in battle.”

 

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Evolution stinks sometimes.

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Soooooo, I finally gained a true appreciation earlier tonight of how bad a skunk could smell.  I’ve smelled them before … I’ve been in Virginia for a while now, and I actually spotted my first skunk in upstate New York when I was a kid.  (They’re not pretty.)  But this is the first time I’ve encountered a full dose from an animal that was evidently nearby.

Dear Lord.

This was the olfactory equivalent of Dante Alighieri’s worst visions of hell.  The odor was at once strangely metallic, horribly organic and chemically toxic.   If one of Michael Bay’s “Transformers” were possessed by the demon from William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist,” and it wielded flatulence to punish the damned, this would be it.  If the three Kryptonian villains from 1980’s “Superman II” had been poisoned by chili laced with spoiled pork and Ex-Lax, this would be it.

Skunks might now top my list of hated animals, were it not for my enduring abhorrence of alligators.

Earwigs are moving up on that list, too — at least since I spotted one at 7:15 tonight in my kitchen.  Earwigs look like God tried to make a proper beetle while on acid.

 

 

 

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Is a bear complicit in the woods?

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When I was a boy, we had a Republican president who stood ready, if necessary, to defeat the Russian Bear.

Now we have a Republican President who seems willing to kneel, if necessary, to fellate the Russian Bear.

I realize this is the punchline for a very old joke, but … WE WERE THANKFUL FOR WHAT WE HAD.

For further illustration between the two men’s dispositions where Russia is concerned, consider the following:

“Trust but verify.”

—  Ronald Reagan, repeatedly between 1984 and 1987, during nuclear disarmament negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev.  The phrase is actually a Russian proverb; it had been taught to the president by a writer in Russia, Suzanne Massie.

“Well, I think it was Russia, and I think it could have been other people in other countries. Could have been a lot of people interfered. Nobody knows for sure.”  

“I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election. He vehemently denied it. I’ve already given my opinion …”

—  Donald Trump, 2017, about the FBI, CIA and NSA conclusions that Russia interfered in the 2016 Presidential election.  The latter quote was a tweet.

Let me close by sharing something a friend of mine from college said to me tonight:

“I miss Republicans. Family values, free trade, strong alliances against the Kremlin. Whatever happened to those guys?”

 

 

 

Nurse Your Favorite Heresies in Whispers