Nerd Rant: The Loch Ness Monster Resurfaces in Louisiana Private Schools

When I was a child, I read books about modern legends such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster (in between reading books published by Crestwood House about movie monsters, of course). I would often get the books out of my elementary school library, with the certainty that these supposedly "real" monsters would never be discussed in any of my classes. How times have changed.

According to several news articles that I've read across the Internet, private religious schools in Louisiana are using a textbook published by the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) Inc. that identifies the Loch Ness Monster as proof that dinosaurs still exist in the modern world and thus validates "Young Earth Creationism", the idea that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, and invalidates the theory of evolution. Many of the articles reprint the textbook passage that mentions Nessie, which I will also do so here:

“Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? ‘Nessie’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.”

It should also be noted that the school in question, the Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, is accepting students through publicly funded vouchers. In other words, taxpayer money is being used to teach kids that the Loch Ness Monster conclusively disproves the work of Charles Darwin and all of his successors. Really.

I'd normally laugh at this, except that someone is getting paid with government money to perpetuate such a preposterous idea. I mean, if you're going to challenge a widely-accepted scientific theory, shouldn't you be using something that actually qualifies as, you know, evidence? Claiming that the modern legend of the Loch Ness Monster invalidates evolution is like claiming that the Elvis sightings from the 80s and 90s invalidates the idea that repeatedly ingesting drug cocktails of Valmid, Quaaludes, codeine, Placidyl and phenobarbitol can be lethal.

Have you seen me lately?

Then again, maybe I should write an angry letter to ACE that claims discrimination over their curriculum's omission of Raystown Ray, the lake monster from my home state of Pennsylvania. Why should taxpayers fund private schools to talk about foreign monsters when we have plenty of perfectly good monsters right here in the US of A?

All I can say is that if the Loch Ness Monster is going to stay in a creationist-centric biology curriculum that's funded by taxpayer money and used in private religious schools, then The Crater Lake Monster (1977) must be mandatory viewing for the students. Each viewing will then be followed by an essay test where students must describe in detail how they'd use construction equipment to fight a rampaging dinosaur.

Teach the controversy!

Nerd Rant: Someone Actually Paid $70 Million to Make a Film Called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

I've seen a lot of things at the movies. Gory things, offensive things, full-frontal things, and so forth. Some were great, some were good, some were average, and some were very, very bad. Yet of all the things that Hollywood has put into the movie theaters lately (as opposed to the wild and woolly world of direct-to-video), last weekend's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter leaves me speechless. During the same summer as Battleship, a movie based on a board game, and it's this film that leaves me speechless. I thought that the humorless The Raven from last April that featured Edgar Allen Poe as an amateur detective was bad enough, but now we get the 16th President of the United States as a dour vampire slayer.

Come on, Hollywood! You've got a film about an axe-wielding president who kills monsters and this is the best that you can do? What, did the $70 million budget give you cold feet so you decided to play it serious for fear that a campy horror film would alienate or anger viewers? Did you get so high on CGI that the resulting digital haze made you forget how ridiculous this whole idea is? We live in a time where a toy series called "Presidential Monsters" is making its rounds among the horror collectibles crowd and yet you couldn't bother to include some inspired, morbid mayhem to salvage your misguided mash-up of historical drama and creature feature?

Yes, this action figure really does exist. Yes, a Lincolnstein movie would be

much more entertaining than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

I think they should've cast Hugh Jackman as Abe and rewritten the script into a movie musical, where Abe could sing and behead vampires while swinging his axe in rhythm with the tunes. Imagine Abe slaughtering the bloodsucking undead while singing the Gettysburg Address; what could be cooler than that? Throw in roles for other stage theater-inclined X-Men movie vets for name recognition purposes (e.g., James Marsden, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, etc.) and change the title to something more outrageous--say, Honest Abe vs. Dracula--and this could've been a b-movie blockbuster smash.

A 19th century historical figure that fights vampires? 

Been there, done that, and on a cheaper budget too.

There is so much wasted potential in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. I guess we'll just have to wait until September for FDR: American Badass!, which stars Barry Bostwick as FDR, Ray Wise as General MacArthur, and Kevin Sorbo as Abe Lincoln. Yes, really.

Here's Abe clobbering the cyborg version of John Wilkes Booth (a.k.a. "John Wilkes Doom")

during a time travel team-up with the Dark Knight on Batman: Brave and the Bold.

It's Martian Tripods Versus Steampunk Tech in War of the Worlds: Goliath

Fans of H.G. Wells and the steampunk genre, take note: The animated War of the Worlds: Goliath is scheduled for worldwide release in fall 2012.

Goliath is a sequel to Wells' original novel, and it will take place 15 years after the first invasion. An international defense force called A.R.E.S. has been established using technology derived from the fallen tripods, and it is called into service when a second wave of Martians arrive. In this alternate steampunk timeline, there are armored battle zeppelins and human-made tripods, and A.R.E.S. is led by none other than Theodore Roosevelt. (Move over Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter--War of the Worlds: Goliath will have Teddy Roosevelt, alien fighter!)

Goliath is also a reunion of sorts for some of the cast and crew from the Highlander TV series (1992-1998). This film was co-written by David Abramowitz, a creative consultant for most of Highlander's run, and the voice cast includes Highlander vets Peter Wingfield, Adrian Paul, Elizabeth Gracen, and Jim Byrnes. Goliath is the second War of the Worlds sequel project for Adrian Paul: He also had a starring role during the second season of the syndicated War of the Worlds TV show (1988-1990), which was a sequel to George Pal's 1953 film adaptation of Wells' novel. Additional voice cast includes Adam Baldwin (Firefly, Chuck) and James Arnold Taylor (Star Wars: The Clone Wars).

A diagram of human-made tripods, courtesy of Heavy Metal.

Click here to visit the official War of the Worlds: Goliath site.

The Weird World of Eerie Publications Book Review: Reviving the Horror Comic Book Through Recycling

Of all the media formats that have distributed the horror genre to the masses, few have had it more difficult than the comic book. Congressional hearings that were held during the mid-50s based on nothing more than a fleeting fit of public hysteria caused horror comic books to suddenly vanish from newsstands everywhere and dealt a crippling blow to the comic book industry in general. The horror comic eventually came back during the 60s and 70s, with DC, Marvel and Warren Publishing contributing titles that would help this format recover. The most notorious contributor to the horror comic revival was Eerie Publications, which is the central topic of Mike Howlett's engaging and informative book, The Weird World of Eerie Publications: Comic Gore That Warped Millions of Young Minds.

Howlett's approach to the history of Eerie Publications and its contributions to the horror comic format is exhaustive, almost to a fault. Howlett obviously loves the work of Eerie Publications and you'll finish the book with the conviction that he could tell you anything and everything about that company at a moments' notice. Yet even if you only have a passing familiarity with horror comics and the titles produced by Eerie Publications, Howlett's book is worth purchasing for a snapshot of what pulp horror publishing was like during the 60s and 70s. Curiously, Weird World also indirectly highlights the conspicuous similarities between low-budget horror comic publishing and low-budget exploitation horror filmmaking. Read on for my complete review.

The ideal companion text for Howlett's book is Jim Trombetta's The Horror! The Horror!: Comic Books the Government Didn't Want You to Read!. (Read my review of that book here.) Trombetta's book covers the rise and fall of the horror comic during the early 50s, and Howlett covers the revival of the horror comic during the 60s and 70s (albeit from the perspective of Eerie Publications). Reading these books together will give horror fans a more complete picture of horror comic history and how the horror comic format was forced to change due to cultural and political events and changes in public media consumption and in the publishing industry. Where the books differ is in terms of approach: While Trombetta's book largely explores the recurring themes and imagery in horror comics from the 50s, Howlett devotes his book to the history of Eerie Publications and its artwork, artists, publication staff and newsstand competitors.

The story told about Eerie Publication's horror comics as told in Weird World largely revolves around two individuals: publisher Myron Fass and editor Carl Burgos. Fass specialized in the publication of low-budget pulp magazines, and Howlett's book reviews the full range of trashy and unscrupulous magazines that Fass produced in addition to Eerie Publications' horror comics. In following his preference for material that's cheap and quick to produce, Fass published multiple horror comic titles (Horror Tales, Terror Tales, Tales from the Tomb, etc.) by re-publishing horror comic stories from the original golden age of horror comics during the early 50s. Burgos, a veteran comic book artist, oversaw the production of the Eerie Publications' titles. Before working for Fass, Burgos' most noteworthy accomplishment was his creation of the Human Torch character during the 1940s. When Marvel Comics revived the character for its Fantastic Four series in 1961, Burgos received no compensation from Marvel for his creation; his falling out with Marvel estranged him from the mainstream comic book industry, which led to his editor role at Eerie.

Howlett details how Fass and Burgos could get away with publishing multiple horror comic titles by mostly recycling horror comic stories that were already published back in the 50s. Eerie Publications would release some completely new material from time to time, but rehashing old material was Fass and Burgos' dominant method of publication. However, instead of just republishing the original stories, Fass and Burgos would hand the stories over to artists who would re-draw and re-script the stories with varying degrees of faithfulness to the source material. Some revisions were similar to the original stories, while others would take the stories in completely new directions. Either way, the new versions of the stories were always much gorier and more sexualized than the originals. Some stories would be republished up to three or four times; all Fass and Burgos did was hand an old story to a new artist and provide a new title, and thus the story could be regarded as "new". Even the cover art was recycled over and over again with minor variations. (Click here to see a gallery of Eerie comic cover comparisons that I assembled in a previous post.)

While I was reading Howlett's book, two things came to mind:

* Eerie's method of repeatedly recycling creative content and adding lots of gore and sex to each reiteration is almost symmetrical to how low-budget horror films were made during the 50s, 60s and 70s. Cheap horror films frequently recycled plots, props and footage from other movies, in addition to using stock footage and background music to pad thin production budgets. During the 60s and 70s, the grindhouse conventions of sexual titillation and increasingly detailed gore effects were used by low-budget filmmakers to promote their otherwise obscure horror films.

* If anything, the revival of the horror comic book proved exactly how hollow the 50s Congressional hearings and the subsequent Comics Code Authority (CCA) really were. In the case of Eerie Publications, it not only republished the very same stories that Congress set out to ban, but it also made them gorier and sexier than their original versions. Furthermore, Eerie couldn't be restricted by the CCA because it called its publications "magazines" and not "comics" and thus was not subject to CCA oversight.

The only problem I had with Weird World is its occasional excess of minutiae. I understand how Howlett wanted to ensure that everyone who was involved in Eerie Publications got their due, but there were times in the book when I was struggling to keep up with who's who outside of Fass and Burgos. Yet this complaint is minor, because the book offers so much information and artwork that horror fans are sure to enjoy. I highly recommend The Weird World of Eerie Publications for both horror and comic book fans who are interested in learning more about the horror genre and its relationship with the comic book industry during the 60s and 70s.

Destroy All Humans! Big Willy Unleashed Review

This summer marks the 50th anniversary of the Mars Attacks trading card series. In honor of this milestone in dark-humored alien invasion gore, I picked up a copy of Destroy All Humans! Big Willy Unleashed for the Wii. The attitude of the Destroy All Humans! game franchise is very close to that of Mars Attacks, so it only seemed fitting to get this game while reminiscing about viciously funny alien invaders.

All of the other Destroy All Humans! games were made for Playstation and Xbox systems; Big Willy Unleashed is the Wii exclusive in the series. I never owned a Playstation or an Xbox, so playing Big Willy Unleashed was my first chance to experience a full Destroy All Humans! game. Overall, the story chapters, missions, graphics and level designs in Big Willy Unleashed range from good to average; yet where this game becomes a must-buy (albeit at a discount price) is in the variety of alien toys it lets you play with while you terrorize humans around the world. Keep reading for my complete review.

Each of the Destroy All Humans! games center on the character of Crypto, an alien warrior clone from the Furon race of space invaders who sounds a lot like Jack Nicholson when he talks. Big Willy Unleashed takes place during the 70s and Crypto's mentor Pox has used the remains of the countless human casualties that Crypto left behind during the previous two games to open a fast-foot franchise called Big Willy. A rival chain called Kluckin's Kitchen is starting to overtake Big Willy's domination of the fast-food market, so Crypto's various missions in the game involve securing Big Willy's expansion into new markets while undermining Kluckin's Kitchen. (The game mentions some of the events that happened in the first two Destroy All Humans! games, so you might want to read over their plot details in Wikipedia if you can't play them on any game system that you own.)

Most of Big Willy Unleashed's humor stems from satirical jabs at both the sci-fi genre and the 70s (a.k.a. "The Me Decade"). Horrible polyester fashions, disco music, roller-skating, the oil crisis, Patty Hearst, Colonel Sanders, poorly-dubbed kung fu movies and the Vietnam War are all fodder for jokes during the game, and the raunchy double entendre of "Big Willy" is used in every context imaginable. To squeeze some extra humor out of 70s clothing styles, the game includes unlockable outfits for Crypto to wear (my favorite is the ugly green leisure suit). The jokes mostly work, although I was disappointed that the game designers didn't satirize even more areas of the decadent 70s. At the very least, there should have been at least one nod to Don Coscarelli's Phantasm (1979), a textbook example of weird sci-fi, the undead and ghastly 70s fashions colliding in a single movie.

Each of the locations in the game is open worlds that consist of both main missions and odd jobs. There are four locations: a coastal metropolis named Harbor City, a small Midwestern town named Fairfield, an island resort near Malaysia, and a Pacific Rim country named Vietmahl. Each location is filled with numerous human characters to kill and plenty of vehicles and buildings to destroy, but the locations feel somewhat small in comparison to other sandbox games. For example, the Harbor City location only allows you to access (and demolish) a few blocks in its port neighborhood, thus leaving the rest of the city intact no matter what you do. It's frustrating seeing rows of office buildings in the background that are begging to be knocked down, and yet there's not a thing you can do about it. (Then again, Harbor City does have an amusing boat tour you can take in between killing humans, so there's that.)

But enough about the hit-and-miss aspects of the game--where Big Willy Unleashed delivers is in its copious amounts of murder and mayhem. This game allows you to do everything that alien invaders have been doing to humans in novels, comic books, TV shows and movies since The War of the Worlds was published back in 1898. This might be nothing special to gamers who played previous Destroy All Humans! games, but as a newcomer I had a blast blasting humans for hours on end.

When you play as Crypto in ground missions, you get a jet pack, a few telepathic abilities, and a selection of weapons that would make fellow clone Boba Fett green with envy. You can hypnotize humans to do your bidding, take over human bodies for infiltration purposes, and use psychokinesis to pick up and throw people and objects (the Wii's motion controls work very well with the psychokinesis feature). The weapons allow you to kill people in a variety of ways, including electrocution, disintegration, and cranial explosion. If you run out of ammo, no problem--you can use your transmogrify ability to transform inanimate objects into more ammo.

The two best weapons are the ones that are unique to Big Willy Unleashed: the zombie gun and the shrink ray. Taking a cue from z-grade sci-fi movies such as Invisible Invaders and Plan 9 From Outer Space, the zombie gun allows you to turn people into zombies that will attack other humans and turn them into zombies. This weapon is ideal for when you are outnumbered by police and soldiers and you need a distraction so that they'll shoot at something else, but it's just fun to use so you can start your own little zombie epidemics. The shrink ray is only available after you complete all of the main missions, and it can turn people and objects into harmless, toy-sized miniatures. I highly recommend that you finish the main missions first and then complete the odd jobs later, because the shrink ray comes in very handy when finishing the odd jobs part of the game.

Crypto also gets two vehicles to use: a flying saucer and a giant robot that's designed to look like the Big Willy mascot so as not to draw attention to itself when it's not in use. The Big Willy robot kind of looks like the mascot for the Big Boy chain of restaurants. The saucer comes equipped with a sweet selection of weapons, from the precise death ray to the wide-reaching sonic blast, and the Big Willy robot allows you to pick up and throw objects, utilize both short- and long-range weapons, and eat people's brains for fuel. If those aren't enough, you also have to option to call in extra Furon forces whenever you completely finish everything at a location (both the main missions and odd jobs), which then turns the location into an alien invasion combat zone.

There are very few games out there that work simply because of their insatiable appetite for destruction, but Big Willy Unleashed is one of them. What it lacks in refinement and innovation it makes up for in dark humored destruction. Furthermore, if you'd prefer to go into the game with infinite ammo, invincibility and large selection of weapons, there's a list of readily available cheat codes you can enter to do just that.

Why should Martians have all the fun?

For fans of the sci-fi subgenre of alien invasions and cult classics such as Mars Attacks, the game Destroy All Humans! Big Willy Unleashed is worth the purchase. It has players wiping out humans by the dozen for the purpose of facilitating covert cannibalism on a global scale through a popular fast-food chain; if that isn't your idea of a good time, then this game isn't for you.

Happy (Belated) Father's Day to Geek Dads and Dads of Geeks Everywhere

Like the good geek that I am, I spent this last weekend with my dad celebrating Father's Day. My dad's a bit of a geek too; while our respective areas of geekery have never been quite on the same wavelength, Dad always made it a point to encourage my budding geekiness even if he didn't always approve of where it was going.

This year's Father's Day gave me the chance to reflect upon how crucial my dad was to one of the most precocious, demanding times of my life: my obsessive-compulsive infatuation with Star Wars during the late 70s and early 80s. Sure, my folks spent tons of money to placate my addiction to all things from a certain galaxy far, far away, but my dad when the extra mile by putting together a few Star Wars model kits that my impatient and unskilled pre-pubescent personality couldn't assemble but coveted nevertheless. Read on for more about my dad's heroic feats of modeling glue manipulation and modeling paint application that he performed to keep his oddball offspring satiated.

As any normal person knows, toys and model kits are not the same thing. Toys are usually designed with durability in mind so that they can withstand the rigors of play, while model kits are much more fragile and are intended for hobbyists to use their skills to bring out scale-accurate details in miniature versions of much larger objects, objects such as cars, airplanes, boats and so on. This difference was lost on me back after Star Wars was released, because I noticed how the Kenner Star Wars toys were lacking details that the MPC Star Wars model kits had in spades. The fact that I couldn't play with the model kits meant nothing to me; all I knew is that the kits had something that the toys didn't, so naturally I HAD TO HAVE THEM.

My father, bless his heart, could've told me to be happy with the Kenner toys as they were--he certainly spend enough of his hard-earned money on them for me. Yet he was willing to put up with my kid-sized demands (and probably at the behest of my grandmother) and he put together some of the Star Wars models for me, starting with C-3PO and R2-D2 in 1977.

Back then, I couldn't understand was how the Kenner action figures of the droids were missing such important movie-accurate features, such as C-3PO's exposed wired mid-section and R2-D2's third leg and retractable utility arms--even the large-sized figures that Kenner produced lacked these details. I also couldn't understand how Kenner could produce regular TIE fighter toys and put Darth Vader in them in the toy ads, when everybody knew that Darth Vader had his own special TIE fighter. So, when MPC released a Darth Vader TIE fighter model kit in 1978, Dad put that kit together for me too.

(Kenner did release Darth Vader TIE fighter toys in 1979--one for the action figures and one as a smaller, die-cast metal replica--but both of those lacked the elongated rear deck that was in the movie version. How dare they!)

You'd think that after my dad put together three models that I would finally get the hint that models weren't toys and that I would stop pestering Dad to put this stuff together for me, but no. Much to my dad's chagrin, I just couldn't make the connection. So, after Empire Strikes Back hit the theaters in 1980 and to assuage my disappointment over the birthday gift I received that was Kenner's cheapjack Hoth Ice Planet Adventure Set (which included a small, bisected cardboard AT-AT walker mounted to a 2D cardboard background), Dad broke down and put together the Battle of Hoth Action Scene diorama (which included two complete AT-ATs and one AT-AT that was "battle damaged").

Wouldn't you know it, Kenner released a complete AT-AT vehicle for the action figures in 1981. My parents gave me that toy too, although I'm still surprised to this day that my dad didn't tell me to be satisfied with the AT-ATs from the diorama, that maybe I should have the action figures ride them like ponies to get my money's worth.

There was a fifth Star Wars model for which I didn't ask but a relative got for me anyway and my dad tried to assemble: the Darth Vader Action Model. This model was a bust of Vader that included parts that were supposed to make the eyes glow and a plastic tube with a bristled disk that was supposed to re-create Vader's "rasping breathing sound". Dad couldn't get the extra stuff to work, but the Vader bust itself came together very well.

The kits listed above weren't the only models from my early years; there would be more Star Wars models later on, as well as some Robotech models during the mid-80s. In those cases, my dad in his wisdom left me to my own devices for those kits, so I could learn on my own what model making really involves and how poorly I'm suited for that particular hobby.

I still don't know how Dad maintained the patience to put the Star Wars models together for me, but I'm impressed with how he pulled it off and that he did it more than once. For that, I salute my dad's devotion to my geek quirks, and I extend that salute to all of the fathers out there who made the extra effort to gratify their children's budding interests in robots, monsters, spaceships, superheroes, and all other things geeky.

Can you spot the error on this blister card?

The Return of Dracula (1958): A Classic Monster in Eisenhower-Era America

I was looking around Netflix's on-demand list of horror titles the other day when I found this curiosity: The Return of Dracula from 1958.

When I was growing up in the 80s, books about horror movies usually divided Dracula movies into two eras: the Universal era during the 30s and 40s, and the Hammer era during the 50s, 60s and 70s. Thus, to see an American Dracula movie from 1958 listed anywhere was a surprise to me, so I decided to watch it to see how the King of Vampires fared in America during the 50s.

The Return of Dracula begins with Dracula (played by Francis Lederer) fleeing the authorities in Transylvania. He murders and assumes the identity of Czech artist named Bellac, who is traveling to America to visit his cousins in California. While maintaining his guise as Bellac, Dracula stays with Bellac's cousins while he begins to build a new army of the undead. In other words, this movie is Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943) but with vampires.

Given the time it was made, I could see why a Hollywood studio would think that Dracula could fit in with the Cold War paranoia that was prevalent during the 50s in America. After all, the movie features a foreigner with a strange accent and a strong aversion of Christian iconography who arrives in small town America to seduce young people into a depraved lifestyle; if that isn't a Red Scare-based film plot, I don't know what is. Furthermore, if my anti-communism assumption is correct, then it's fun to see a movie like this depict a Halloween costume party--which includes a kid dressed up as Satan--as a wholesome, all-American activity. (Boy, how times have changed.)

This film isn't nearly as bold and stylish as Hammer's Horror of Dracula, which appeared later in the same year, so it's understandable why this movie didn't lead to more American-made Dracula films in the years since. Nevertheless, The Return of Dracula does have its charms, particularly Lederer's portrayal of Dracula. Even though the body count achieved by this Dracula is quite modest in comparison to other versions, Lederer's interpretation of the role reminds viewers that Dracula's greatest power is neither his superhuman strength nor his invulnerability, but his seductive, indomitable will.

If you can get past the idea of Dracula resorting to the lowly crime of identity theft to continue his feedings, then I strongly recommend The Return of Dracula to Dracula film completists and retro-horror fans. If you wax nostalgic for the times when syndicated TV stations would run older and sometimes lesser-known horror and sci-fi movies on the weekends, this movie is for you.

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus: Building Better Biomechanical Worlds

Being the obsessed Alien franchise fan that I am, I saw Prometheus last weekend in IMAX 3D. I was very impressed with the whole experience, both the quality of the 3D and Ridley Scott's return to the franchise that he started. Yet when it came time to write this review, I had no idea where to begin. Scott's film has so many details and ideas that I could rapidly identify and understand due to my appreciation of all four of the Alien movies, yet I keep seeing reviews, articles and posts on the Web that gripe over how incomprehensible and creatively bankrupt they think Prometheus is. So, since this is a fan blog of sorts anyway, I'm going to drop the pretense of providing some kind of neutral review and discuss the Alien prequel as an Alien fan. Besides, my general rule of thumb about movie franchises is that the best of them build upon ideas and themes over the course of several movies, so it is pointless to discuss sequels--especially third, fourth and fifth sequels--without mentioning the previous movies.

Here's my short, spoiler-free review: Prometheus is a fantastic movie, both as a prequel and a stand-alone. Scott shows a genuine interest in bringing new ideas into the Alien franchise, which is the main reason why this film works. Sure, the visuals are amazing, the effects are impressive and the cast is top-notch, but it all would've fallen apart if Scott didn't want to push the franchise into bold new directions. If you have any interest in Alien and its sequels--or if you have any interest in films that successfully blend horror and sci-fi--Prometheus is an amazing cinematic experience.

That said, I can see why Scott remained noncommittal about the Prometheus's status as a prequel. By making an indirect prequel to Alien, Scott is able to explore a theme that is present in all of the Alien movies but couldn't be adequately explored in those other films due to their emphasis on a monster-driven narrative. The theme in question can be summed up in the slogan of the omnipresent mega-conglomerate in the Alien universe, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation: "Building Better Worlds". Read on for my spoiler-filled thoughts about what drives Prometheus and how it broadens the Alien franchise into frightening new areas of deep space dread.

One of the curious details about Prometheus is how its plot parallels that of Alien in the sense that they are both about space travelers whose true mission has been concealed from them by sinister interests. In Alien, the crew of the Nostromo thought that they were returning an ore refinery from some distant mining operation back to Earth, only to find out that their employer, Weyland-Yutani, used this mission as a front for them to retrieve a deadly alien organism from the planet LV-426. In Prometheus, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) think they are leading a scientific expedition to the planet LV-223 to learn more about the human race's possibly extraterrestrial origins, only to find out later that they are merely facilitating the wish of their elderly benefactor, Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), to become immortal through seeking favor with an advanced alien race, the Engineers. Whereas the android Ash (Ian Holm) in Alien was willing to jeopardize the Nostromo crew by letting an alien life form on board, the android David (Michael Fassbender) in Prometheus meticulously analyses the Engineers' remains on LV-223 and deliberately exposes the expeditionary crew to unknown alien pathogens in order to understand the dangers present before allowing Weyland to meet with a surviving Engineer.

(It should also be mentioned here that a previous post I wrote, which was a speculative comparison of Prometheus to Alien vs. Predator (2001), turned out to be accurate. While both films feature scientists who travel to a remote location to seek out "ancient astronauts"--and they both feature terminally ill characters named Weyland who meet similar ends--Scott's movie brings many more interesting ideas and visuals to the screen than Paul W.S. Anderson did in his crossover story.)

While this comparison may sound like Scott merely rehashed the same story he directed back in 1978, it is quite the opposite. Scott uses the plot device of a space expedition to learn more about the Alien through their creators, the Engineers. Prometheus begins with one of the Engineers roaming Earth before life evolved out of the oceans, only to have him sacrifice himself in a way that will ensure that his DNA will be encoded into the life forms that will subsequently evolve. The prequel uses this opening to later provide motive to the space expedition, that the scientists are traveling to another planet to understand humanity's true origins.

It is never explained why the Engineers wanted to incorporate their DNA into the early life of prehistoric Earth at all. The movie plays up the idea of humans meeting and understanding their true creators, along with a few fleeting conversations between characters about the nature of divinity and faith. Yet the early scene with the Engineers also suggests something else entirely--that the Engineers planted their DNA on Earth for possible future colonization. In other words, by adding their DNA to the building blocks of life that were already forming in Earth's ancient oceans, the organisms that would later evolve and the ecosystems that surround them would be compatible with Engineer biology and thus make the Engineers' colonization easier to achieve with a breathable atmosphere, non-toxic food sources and diseases that could be understood scientifically and cured. Think of it as extremely preemptive terraforming, the process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of a planet, moon, or some other astral body to make it habitable by humans--or in this case, Engineers.

The idea that the Engineers seeded Earth with their DNA for possible colonization explains a few of the film's plot details which are otherwise vague. For example, the Engineers visited Earth multiple times since their initial DNA seeding and left behind a star map to tell ancient civilizations where they can be found--that's how the crew finds LV-223, as well as what prompted the expedition in the first place. These ancient visits could have been surveys by the Engineers to see how their DNA seeding process was evolving and if Earth could still be considered fit for colonization. As for the star map, it could have been the Engineers' way of coaxing any space-faring race of humans that would rise out of Earth to visit their labs on LV-223 so that the Engineers could assess human technological development without drawing unwanted attention to themselves.

Terraforming and space colonization has been the recurring themes in each Alien movie, which hinted at (but never fully detailed) how humanity during the time of the movies have developed all sorts of off-world operations, including colonies, ore mines and prisons. In fact, the main setting of Aliens, the Hadley's Hope colony, was a terraforming operation that was established to turn LV-426 into an Earth-like planet through an atmosphere processor. From the films' contexts, Weyland-Yutani is a major corporate player in the space colonization industry--ergo its "Building Better Worlds" slogan. In Prometheus, we see the early years of Weyland-Yutani when it was just the Weyland Corporation, but even in those early years space travel and colonization was on Weyland's agenda. When we first see corporation founder Peter Weyland in pre-recorded holographic form, his is surrounded by construction that is taking place on one of his colonies. It is in the common themes of terraforming and space colonization where the name "Prometheus" finds its significance: Much like how the mythic titan Prometheus shared fired from the ancient Greek gods with humanity, self-proclaimed world builder Weyland uses his ship, the Prometheus, to learn the secrets from aliens that have been building worlds long before humanity existed.

Where the Engineers differ from Weyland-Yutani in their approach to terraforming is in the area of microbiology. Instead of building giant machines such as an atmosphere processor to make a planet habitable, the Engineers appear to understand that habitable ecosystems are initially built on the microscopic level. That explains the melting Engineer at the beginning of the movie, as well as the dark liquid that the expedition team finds in the Engineers' labs on LV-223. The dark liquid contains some kind of micro-organism that is capable of deconstructing preexisting DNA and bonding with it to create new complex organisms. Of course, this DNA bonding weapon is deadly and unpredictable, as it clearly led to the deaths of almost all of the Engineers on LV-223, but the exact logic behind the weapon is never explicitly stated.

The Engineers planned to send the DNA bonding weapon to Earth (even after an unexpected delay that lasted over 2,000 years) to wipe out humanity, but it is unknown why they chose DNA bonding as a weapon as opposed to some other technology. It could be that it was intended to further shape Earth to the Engineers' exact specifications, much like the red weeds that the Martians planted on Earth in H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds novel. It could also be that instead of creating a less complex bioweapon such as microscopic pathogen, the Engineers concluded that their DNA bonding weapon would be more effective because it could attack humans on both micro- and macroscopic levels.

The DNA bonding weapon ultimately sets the stage for the evolution of the Alien as it is seen in the original films. Prometheus shows two different kinds of proto-facehuggers, and a proto-Alien emerges from one of the Engineers at the end of the film (in a scene that reminded me so much of the Newborn birthing scene in Alien Resurrection). The logic behind the DNA bonding weapon matches that of the Alien's lifecycle, in the sense that both can adapt to almost any environment and they both reproduce rapidly through parasitic infection and bonding with the host's DNA. In fact, the prequel strongly suggests that the Alien, as it is seen in the original movies, is the perfected version of the Engineers' imperfect DNA bonding weapon.

Everything I'm rambling about here is purely speculation based on what I've seen in Prometheus and in the original Alien movies. The prequel ends with a cliffhanger, and the answer to why the Engineers would want to wipe out the human race--even over 2,000 years after their original target date--has not yet been provided. I think that the Engineers want to destroy the human race because their own civilization (which by the time of Prometheus could span multiple solar systems and even galaxies) has started to fall apart so unexpectedly and at such a rapid pace that colonizing Earth is their only option left for survival. If this is so, it would give greater significance to this line of dialogue from the prequel: "Every king has his reign and then he dies. That is the natural order of things."

The sequel to Prometheus could prove everything that I've written here to be wrong. Nevertheless, any prequel or sequel that can provide this much food for thought is a success in my opinion, and I look forward to seeing what else Ridley Scott has in mind next for his fascinating franchise.

A Review of Dark Horse's Aliens/Predator: Panel To Panel Book

As the U.S. release date of Prometheus draws closer, I'll wrap up my reviews of items from my personal Alien collection with a book by Dark Horse called Aliens/Predator: Panel To Panel.

If fans want good Alien artwork, they can either pick up books that feature artwork by the original Alien designer H. R. Giger or they can get behind-the-scenes books that detail the production of Alien, its sequels and its crossover spin-offs. Yet fans should not overlook Aliens/Predator: Panel To Panel, because it features Dark Horse's best comic art of the Alien and the Predator and their various incarnations. This book features page after page of full color art of facehuggers, chestbusters, Warrior Aliens and Alien Queens, as well as Predators and various Alien oddities.

Best of all, this book allows you to enjoy great Aliens, Predator and Aliens vs. Predator art without having to pick up the omnibus collections of each title. The quality of the Dark Horse stories range from good to mediocre to atrociously bad, and the quality of their art is just as variable. Thankfully, the less adequate artwork of Aliens and Predators is nowhere to be found in Aliens/Predator: Panel To Panel.

Ray Bradbury, 1920 - 2012

Today marks the passing of Ray Bradbury, one of the greatest science fiction writers ever to grace the genre. I honestly don't know what to write here--his body of work and artistic influence are so large that I no idea where to begin. He truly was a giant in his field.

Of the many stories he wrote that I've read over the years, one of my favorites is a short story called "The Fog Horn". Before reading it, I never thought that a story about a giant prehistoric monster could be such a heartbreaking meditation on loneliness--Bradbury was that good. This story would later inspire The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), a movie that featured innovative stop-motion effects work by Bradbury's long-time friend, Ray Harryhausen.

There a plenty of more detailed Bradbury obits out there and I particularly recommend the one by Cartoon Brew, which will give you a better idea of how Bradbury's interests and talents extended beyond the written word.

Snow White and the Huntsman Review: A Fairy Tale Super-Sized

With Hollywood's recent inclination toward remakes and re-imaginings, it should surprise no one that classic fairy tales would be due for a makeover. Take Snow White for example: In 2011 and 2012 alone, this tale has already been re-imagined as a TV show (Once Upon a Time) and a feature-length adventure-comedy (Mirror, Mirror). With Snow White and the Huntsman, Snow White gets upgraded from a simple fairy tale to a grandiose sword-and-sorcery epic, and the end result is much better than you'd expect it to be.

I'm usually not into the sword-and-sorcery subgenre of fantasy films, unless the film features lots of monsters and/or it includes the work of a legendary special effects artist such as Ray Harryhausen. Nevertheless, Snow White and the Huntsman is an entertaining fantasy epic, with a large cast of characters, great special effects, and scenic cinematography. Of course, this movie wears the influences of the recent Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies on its selves, which actually helps the movie in spite of how obvious the influence is. For example, when one of the major villains dies, it happens in such an explosively convulsive manner that the word "horcrux" immediately sprang to mind. (Go watch the movie and you'll see what I mean.)

One of the more intriguing aspects of the movie is how it inserts elements from the more traditional telling of the Snow White fairy tale into the rescaled story. Familiar plot elements such as the poisoned apple, the seven dwarfs, and the shape-shifting evil queen are all in Snow White and the Huntsman, but they inserted in creative ways that give the movie its own distinction among other Snow White adaptations. (Then again, I couldn't help but to think of Mel Brooks' 15 Commandments joke from History of the World: Part 1 when the movie arrives and the, er, proper number of dwarfs.)

For as enjoyable this re-imagined Snow White movie is, Charlize Theron's portrayal of the evil Queen Ravenna really stands out among everything else. Not only does Theron play the role with the right amounts of cunning, arrogance and resentment, but the script gives the Ravenna character a more substantial background than most of the evil queens in other Snow White adaptations. While it's not completely explained, Ravenna appears to have been around for quite a while before the events in the movie and that she's harbors a seething, unspecified grudge that goes far, far beyond losing the title of the most fairest of them all.

If you think that this summer's line of blockbusters is lacking in the sword-and-sorcery area, go see Snow White and the Huntsman. It's fun in its own right, and it'll tide you over until The Hobbit arrives in December.

Micro Machines Alien Collection Review

There was a time during the 80s and 90s when Micro Machines, a toy line produced by Galoob, was the go-to line for miniature replicas of all sorts of vehicles, both real and fictional. Micro Machines started with vehicles such as cars, trucks, boats and airplanes, and then it profited greatly by producing miniatures of vehicles from popular sci-fi franchises such as Star Trek and Star Wars. In fact, those miniatures proved to be popular enough that Galoob would expand those licenses to include micro-sized playsets and a new line of larger vehicle toys that would fit scale-sized micro figures.

With two major sci-fi franchises under its belt, Galoob decided to add licenses of other sci-fi titles to its Micro Machines line, including Alien, Predator and Terminator. This review will cover the Micro Machines Alien collection, including pictures of each item in the collection. Read on....

Looking back, the addition of R-rated sci-fi franchises such as Alien, Predator and Terminator to a toy line aimed at kids doesn't make much sense, particularly R-rated sci-fi franchises that aren't known for unique and collectible vehicle designs. Yet of these three titles, Alien had the largest selection of franchise-specific vehicles and it's those items that make the Micro Machines Alien sets worth the purchase.

Galoob released three Micro Machines Alien sets with four miniatures per set. The miniatures can be classified into four categories: vehicles from Alien, vehicles from Aliens, Alien characters, and human characters. Because the sets were produced before Alien Resurrection, none of the vehicles or characters from that sequel is included in these sets.

---

ALIEN VEHICLES

The Nostromo cargo ship (the ore refinery that the Nostromo towed was not included in any of the Micro Machines collections):

The Narcissus escape shuttle:

The derelict space ship on LV-426:

Each of these vehicle miniatures features highly-detailed sculpts that allow fans to see certain aspects from the Alien movie represented in them. You can see the circular openings in the underside of the derelict ship where Dallas, Kane and Lambert entered to find the Alien eggs, and you can see the airlock door in the Narcissus that Ripley used to push the Alien monster into the deep void of space. I think that the Nostromo sculpt is the most noteworthy in this group, because it conveys how large the ship was supposed to be even in its miniature reproduction.

---

ALIENS VEHICLES

The USS Sulaco:

The Colonial Marines Dropship:

The Armored Personnel Carrier (APC):

The best thing about the Aliens vehicles is that two of them include moving parts. The Dropship includes booster engines that unfold, and the APC has moving wheels, a rotating frontal gun turret, and a rotating rear gun turret that can be folded behind the vehicle to move through passages with low overhead clearance. The Sulaco miniature is somewhat disappointing, because its small size forces some omissions of detail in its sculpt; nevertheless, it's accurate enough to be a worthwhile addition to the Micro Machines set.

---

ALIEN CHARACTERS

This category includes the Warrior Alien from Alien, the Alien Queen from Aliens, and the Dog Buster from Alien 3.

Due to their diminutive size, the micro figures in the Micro Machines sets aren't nearly as impressive as the vehicle replicas. These figures are ideally meant for pint-sized play with the larger Alien vehicles that were produced in the Micro Machines "Action Fleet" line, such as the Narcissus and the APC, and the Micro Machines Alien Transforming Playset (and presumably with the Predator Action Fleet vehicle and Transforming Playset).

That said, the sculpts for the Warrior Alien and Alien Queen are interesting for what they are. Many details are omitted to accommodate the figures' tiny size (e.g., the Queen's smaller arms look like strange bumps along her rib cage) and the Queen is positioned in an awkward stance, yet the figures still have enough details to admire. In contrast to the Warrior Alien and Queen Alien is the Dog Buster, which is the worst figure sculpt in the collection. I'm not sure why they choose the Dog Buster over the adult Dog Alien from Alien 3, but Galoob should have chosen a better sculpt to complement the other Alien figures in the collection. Between its odd coloring and awkwardly lumpy design, the Dog Buster stands out like the figurative sore thumb when looking at the Alien collection in its entirety.

---

HUMAN CHARACTERS

This category includes Ripley and Kane from Alien and Hicks from Aliens.

There's nothing exceptional about the human figures, except that there's enough detail in the Ripley figure to know that it's the Ripley from Alien and not Aliens or Alien 3. The Hicks figure looks like he could be almost any of the Colonial Marine characters from Aliens. I can understand why Galoob wouldn't want any of the space convict characters from Alien 3 included in their Alien toy sets, but adding Kane with a facehugger wrapped around his head while wearing his spaceman tightie-whities is a baffling choice.

To be fair, the Micro Machines Alien collection pales in comparison to the Alien collections produced by Konami in Japan back in 2003 (see here and here). Not only did that collection include creatures and vehicles from all four Alien movies, but the slightly larger sizes of the miniatures allow for sculpts that are much more detailed than Galoob’s. Furthermore, the Alien license for Micro Machines was discontinued before it could add even more items to the collection, items such as a Power Loader, an LV-426 playset, and an eight-wheeled land rover from the extended cut of Aliens. Yet the Micro Machines Alien collection has enough well-made items to make it worth the purchase, and you can get the entire collection in only three sets for a reasonable price. For Alien fans, that’s worth a recommendation.