The Real Slim Stayvun

 The final conclusion of the Stayvun McDaniel trilogy drops:

Freddy Vs Stayvun!

 Stayvunkino is bacc on the menu:

Stop Motion Dreams: Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad!

If I were ever to bring a little goblin of my own into this world, I have a plan to show him only silent movies in his early years, raising him to appreciate that lost art and believe it was the full extent of the potential of cinema (which is not far off base). I have always maintained the great tragedy of film is that the values of Griffith and Chaplin - didactic messaging, editing for logical continuity - took hold whereas the values of Méliès and Keaton - dream logic, editing as magic tricks - did not.

1,000 hours in MSPaint.

But when my spawn has emerged sufficiently from its larval stage, I will spring on it another kind of long-abandoned cinemagic in the form of the creations of Ray Harryhausen, the stop motion animator behind Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans and One Million Years BC. Besides Greek myths and dinosaurs, Harryhausen persistently returned to the topic of Sinbad the Sailor from the 1001 Nights. Unburdened by continuity, I like to think of these films as simply other stories about Sinbad that might have developed out of word of mouth over the centuries. Like classic James Bond, the details change but the sense of adventure and wonder provides the only throughline we need.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

Opening to the catchy strains of Bernard Herrmann's score, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad freely adapts episodes from any voyage of Sinbad's but the 7th as well as Homer's Odyssey. Landing on a strange island Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) and his crew encounter Sokurah the magician (Torin Thatcher), fleeing with a purloined magic lamp from a one-eyed belligerent obsessed with roasting Arabs alive.

Harryhausen tried to warn us.

Fortunately Sinbad and his crew are able to hold Rep. Crenshaw off long enough to escape to their ship, but the cyclops capsizes their boat and recovers the lamp. Sokurah is determined to get back to the island and reclaim the lamp, but Sinbad keeps refusing all the way back to Baghdad. Eventually Sokurah resorts to magic to shrink Sinbad's princess gf (Kathryn Grant), telling him the only way to restore her to normal size is to return to the island and brew a potion out of roc eggs.

A subplot introduced but never mentioned again is that the shrinkening fucks up diplomatic relations between two kingdoms, threatening war if it is not reversed. The fact that this is totally incidental fallout from Sokurah's monomaniacal plot makes him such an endearing villain. All he wants in the world is his lamp! Sokurah INNOCENT!

Despite the amazing coincidence that the only way to reverse the spell is to go back to Sokurah's island, Sinbad never seems to figure out that Sokurah is behind the shrinking, giving us the only clue we have to Sinbad's characterisation: he's an immense dumb-dumb. This is wildly consistent in spirit with the original tales, in which Sinbad was not so much a hero who set out to right wrongs as he was an Arabian W.C. Fields whose trade voyages always ran into disaster after fuckup until he made it back to Baghdad with an inexplicable fortune in gold, only for the same thing to happen to him again a few years later. This may be attributable to Scheherazade making shit up on the fly, but if in nothing else these movies are remarkably faithful to the fact that Sinbad has the best and worst luck in the world at the same time, whereas his endless succession of hapless crews have all the worst and none of the best.

Damn, Brittany and Abby Hensel look like that?

It's fun having kind of a double plot in which Sinbad has one goal and Sokurah another, both barely tolerating the other until the first opportunity presents itself to fuck the other over. Even the crew, who get variously rekt by the roc, the cyclopses and mother nature, are mostly scumbags on conditional release from the hangman's yard who think nothing of betraying their captain whatever chance they get. Yet this is charmingly offset by the tiny princess and her interactions with the genie of the lamp, which have a well-judged childlike whimsicality. The movie ends with a cool creature fight in which Sokurah's pet dragon pwns Crenshaw epic style.

America first bitch.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

Harryhausen returned to Sinbad in the 70s with Golden Voyage, a non-sequel featuring TV's Doctor Who, Tom Baker, as its villain, Prince Koura, who seeks a magic fountain that will restore his youth which he keeps losing every time he casts one of his spells. Despite this, he keeps doing it throughout the movie.

There's nothing quite so intimidating as a villain who will die if he uses his powers too much. Fortunately he makes it to the third act, because Sinbad would have felt awkward otherwise. This rather dumb device aside, Golden Voyage has some great animated antagonists to make up for Grampa's brittle spine, most memorably the Kali statue, who busts some sicc moves:

I guess they never miss, huh?

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger

Disappointingly, Eye of the Tiger doesn't feature Sinbad fighting Rocky to the strains of Survivor, but it does feature a prince transformed into a baboon, a retvrn to monke Sinbad cruelly seeks to reverse in order to stop some other dude from ascending the throne and Sinbad's love interest (Live and Let Die's Jane Seymour).

Do not try this with a real baboon.

The said other dude is the son of Zenobia (Margaret Whiting), a main antagonist more campy and hammy than a panto villain. Sinbad and his crew travel to frozen Hyperborea to find a cure for the prince's simian transfiguration with Zenobia, her son and a gold minotaur ("Minoton") who rows their very coolly designed boat in pursuit:

Since Zenobia's whole plan is to get her rather dopey son onto the throne, presumably so she can puppeteer him, it seems really dumb of her to bring him along with her, especially when we know she can conjure minions with her magic, which she does in the opening scene. At least her characterisation is consistent though, as everything else she does in the movie shows a similar amount of cognitive reasoning skills. At one point she turns into a seagull, shrinks herself, gets caught and put in a jar by our heroes, and has so little of her magic potion left to reverse the transformation that she ends up with a seagull foot permanently. Good thing it wasn't the head.

Womp womp.

It's a shame Zenobia is such an egregious bumblefuck because her boat and Minoton are cool. Or would be, except the Minoton goes out like a bitch pulling away a block to create a door into the pyramid.

And it was all for nothing. Zenobia would have chewed her way through that much scenery in no time.

Fortunately this is offset somewhat by the climactic creature fight between Troglodyte and the sabre-toothed tiger. This location was cool and the fight was particularly brutal.

Eye does the least out of the three to disguise the fact that these movies are written around a bunch of stop motion setpieces, but as a kid I didn't give a fuck because the creatures were cool. There's no way they would ever do more of these with stop motion animation, and that's probably for the best because Hollywood would balls it up like they do everything, but maybe one day we will see more unrelated Sinbad adventures.

Fs in chat for Richard Corben

Heavy Metal artist Richard Corben died yesterday. Corben is perhaps best known for his creation of Den, who appeared in the Heavy Metal movie. But did you know that Den appeared in prototypical form in animation as early as 1969?

NSFW vid.

In Neverwhere, Corben himself plays his earthly protagonist, a Dilbertesque office drone friendzoned by a 3 and oppressed by his neurotypical boss. The following Arthur Fleckian exchange takes place between them:

"You're without a doubt the most inept employee on the face of the earth."

"THAT, Mr Johnson, would be too much of a coincidence."

Killshot. Gamers: 1, society: 0. Based Corben then frees himself altogether from his imprisonment in corporate purgatory with the help of a machine that transports him into Neverwhere (1969), where he becomes the muscular Chad we all know and love:

Neverwhere (1969) is populated by all sorts of goofy monsters Den must fight in order to save a princess, and that is all the plot you need. The animation is pure soul, a labour of love Corben made in his spare time. Watch it in tribute to a great drawist!

The HP Lovecraft films of Stuart Gordon

Spoilers:

The charmingly overwritten yet impressively atmospheric works of OG (original gamer) HP Lovecraft may never be faithfully realised on screen, but fortunately they've been cheerfully and freely adapted by the late Stuart Gordon as a loose series of endearingly characterful gore flicks. While this is closer in spirit to the ear-shattering-fart-noise /tv/ pasta than the spirit in which the original stories were lovingly crafted, they're entertaining enough to be notable.

Re-Animator

If you've never found a dead cat in your fridge, you weren't a student.

Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs, these flicks) is an astutely observed case study for why smart people are the dumbest people in the world. Re-Animator concerns his misadventures in the art of bringing dead people and comical cat puppets back to life with an hilariously glowing green serum, but this is window dressing to the metanarrative which is that the whole movie is a setup to a visual pun about giving head.

Image censored for nudity.

Far from evoking the existential terror of man's insignificance in the face of an endless universe of hentai monsters, Re-Animator mines the slapstick potential of an antagonist whose head commands his body, which can't see and bumbles around comically, toward a singular purpose: to boldly go where no decapitated physician (presumably) has gone before; to tongue-spelunk Barbara Crampton's canyon. If it were me I think a higher priority might be to find some way to reattach my misplaced cranium, but I am not a medical genius.

They call him Ted the Caver (they don't).

The use of one of those dummy things with the organs you can take out and rearrange as a replacement head for the body is nicely creepy/funny. Leave a comment if u know the name for one of those.

Tragically for our orally inclined villain, he's cock-, or, rather, tongue-blocked by Herbert at the last second and a battle ensues, leading to a Pet Semataryesque denouement.

Say Herb, what do you think we should name him?

From Beyond

Not content to stop at one extremely loose HPL adaptation starring Jeffrey Combs as a scientist with poor judgement with a villain with a semidetached head facilitated by strategically framing him near the bottom of the screen molesting Barbara Crampton, Gordon followed up Re-Animator with From Beyond, swapping out the blues and greens for a distinctive bright pink theme.

Colour coding your movies is such a simple step to take to make them stand out yet you never really see it.

This time the premise is that Crawford Tillinghast (Combs) and his pervy mentor Dr Pretorius (Ted Sorel) have put together a machine that when activated allows them to see creatures that are all around us in some parallel dimension, which unfortunately allows them to see us too, and eat us.

They look sort of like eels, in keeping with Lovecraft's signature seafood phobia.

Following the first disastrous use of this machine, in which Pretorius is apparently killed, Tillinghast is committed to the funny farm where he is studied by Dr Katherine McMichaels (Crampton), who determines the exposure to the device has enlarged his pineal gland. What ensues is a movie more indebted to the fantasy metaphysics of Freudian mythology than that of the Lovecraft cycle, with psychedelic-era theories of third eyes and experiences far beyond the doors of everyday perception gleefully chopped, screwed and Frankensteined together in Gordon's characteristic style.

????

Pretorius returns empowered with the knowledge of extradimensional shapeshifting and an agenda to fingerblast Crampton's crevice almost suspiciously reminiscent of Re-Animator's antagonist's oral designs.

♫I'm gonna finger bang bang you into my life/Girl, you like to finger bang and it's alright♫ - Dr Pretorius

The singular imperative throughout the Gordon mythos seems to be to access Crampton's snatch by any means available in this world or the next, a goal she becomes increasingly willing to facilitate upon discovering that activating the machine activates her below the spleen. In true librarian-letting-her-hair-down style, she loses the glasses and dons a BDSM outfit Pretorius kept around the house for purposes of his home movies (really). From Beyond is stopped from going full porno only by the intervention of based black ethnonationalist Ken Foree, who heroically slut-shames her for trying to seduce him.

"The white devil must not be allowed to dilute our proud melanated Wakandan strain" - Ken Foree

After a while Pretorius figures out how to activate the machine by himself, causing enough distress to our heroes that they wind up back at the koo-koo zoo, where the hapless Tillinghast's third eye activates, causing him to eat some brains in a bizarre yet pointless detour into Return of the Living Dead territory.

Ah, my favourite brain soup...cream of nowhere.

The movie goes further off the rails when Katherine escapes from the hospital and returns to blow up the machine with the old pipe-bomb-out-of-nowhere routine. Presumably she got it from Acme Co., same as Wile E. Coyote.

If every time this happened in a movie the character just whipped it out from behind her back with a comical sound effect, I think the audacity would override the plot hole.

Who cares though?, as the conclusion is appropriately entertaining for the setup, with Combs once again giving his life (maybe) so Crampton can perhaps survive sort of although perhaps, Pet Sematarily, dead would have suited her better. From Beyond is probably the highlight of the cycle for its distinctive look, creature design, and madcap escalation, and maybe the first few minutes of screentime are even loosely based on the story.

Castle Freak

10 years after Re-Animator Combs and Crampton now play an unhappily married couple, with Combs assuming the role of frustrated exile from the Crampton clam. They're sleeping in separate rooms after he killed their son and blinded their daughter in a car accident some time prior, but the family stays together for the daughter's sake or maybe because Combs just inherited a castle in Italy.

Even though they're playing different characters each time, this feels like exactly where all of them would end up.

They move in only to find the castle is already occupied by a Castle Freak (1995)!!! Raised in a basement dungeon, chained, beaten, castrated and subsisting on a trickle of water from a leak, C. Freak is as sympathetic a movie monster as ever chewed off his own thumb to escape his manacles, and as tenuously connected to Lovecraft as anything in the Gordon ouevre.

He's just like me.

He even dresses as a spooky ghost upon seeing his appearance in a mirror and, later, in a poignantish moment for a movie called Castle Freak, dumps the disguise when he realises the daughter can't see him. If only he had the power of speech they might have gotten along famously and populated the castle with little Gollums of their own.

We're spanning time.

Released direct-to-video and barely resembling its nominal source material (The Outsider), this one is somewhat of a footnote but is worth catching for the creature makeup and performance. Jonathan Fuller gives C. Freak a fantastically creepy gait, and Combs and Crampton are as good as ever. There's even a wholesome scene of prayer with the mother and daughter.

Christian blogge approved.

Dagon

At last, a chance to use this image not for no reason.

Dagon loses fat points for starring neither Combs nor Crampton, but redeems a few for actually being somewhat Lovecraftian, albeit goofily. A mishmash of the stories Dagon and The Shadow over Innsmouth, it stars an unlikable couple who bitch and fight all the time even though they're rich and on a boat in Spain. The main guy demonstrates by way of contrast how important Combs' vulnerability was in selling his seething nerdish manlet as a credible protagonist, someone we could root for despite his actions or personality. Combs Lite has the glasses but comes off as simply arrogant, while his Spanish gf is of the genre of femoid who feels entitled to throw his laptop into the sea because she didn't get his undivided attention for five seconds.

Depicting relationships realistically is always a mistake.

Fortunately the boat is wrecked by a storm and they have to seek help in the creepy local fishing village of Imboca (In mouth - do u get it?). The locals begin to reveal ever more ichthyological features and Not Barbara Crampton is captured, leaving Not Jeffrey Combs to try to escape the fish-people in a series of narrow escapes including an effectively suspenseful scene in which he must swap out a bolt from one doorway to another to prevent the Imbocans from invading his hotel room like a dismembered professor invading Barbara Crampton's puss.

There's some excellent creature makeup in this one, such as this hotelier's gills which only become visible as he turns away from the camera.

Soon Not Combs meets an elderly inebriate who gives him the backstory: once Imboca was full of normal humans, but when the seas ceased to yield a sufficient catch they turned to this guy, who invoked the great old one Dagon to bring fish and gold back on the menu.

This dude look like he about to start speaking Klingon.

Naturally the cult of Dagon starts murdering everyone and turning everyone else into Birdseye fish fingers. There follow far too many scenes of Not Combs fighting rejected Spongebob characters in the rain and making out with DevianTART tier monstergirls.

Kurt Eichenwald has pumped enough bilge to this movie to keep the British navy afloat for a year.

Finally he faces down the townsfish as they gather to sacrifice Not Crampton to our titular cephalopod, but while occupied torching the Imbocans he proves too late to prevent Dagon from flooding Not Crampton's poop deck with his briny black spooge.

@ least it's good for ur skin

She insults /oursquid/ a little bit by begging Not Combs to kill her, but he hesitates and is once again too slow to stop Dagon from dragging her down to Davy Jones' locker for a postcoital spoon. He looks like this:

He wants a hug :(