Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Forbidden Planet!

The Supermanesque title font is an odd fit for the psych-horrorkino that's about to come.

By far the greatest science fiction movie ever made, Forbidden Planet is pointless to discuss without spoilers, so before we get into it, I'll simply note that you can blame it for the uniformed pontificating of Star Trek and the invincible robot shenanigans of Terminator and Chopping Mall.

At this stage, crewmembers were not yet marked for death by shirt colour.

Robby was so popular he had an otherwise unrelated spinoff movie, The Invisible Boy.

But on the spoiler front, Planet cuts much deeper than you might infer from its frivolous legacy. Ostensibly an extremely loose reworking of Shakespeare's The Tempest, Planet abstracts from the personal to depict an archetypal tragedy at the level of an entire civilisation. Leslie Nielsen's spaceship crew touch down on the Forbidden Planet (1956) to investigate the strange case of Dr Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), survivor of the lost ship Bellerophon who has since made a home there with his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis).

I want to live in Casa Morbius and freak out my guests with my reinforced bunker shutters.

Morbius has been studying the fate of the planet's former inhabitants, the ancient race of ayylmaos known as the Krell, whose sudden disappearance left intact a raft of kino sets augmented by audacious matte paintings whose monumental scale feels realer and vaster than whatever nonsense slopscapes CGI has wrought.

The emptiness left by the absence of the Krell themselves is palpable and haunting.

Of course, if you've seen the film you know the secret: the Krell had managed to repress their most primal unconscious drives until their technology hit a point of singularity at which they were unwittingly released and wiped everything out in a single Event Horizon style blood orgy of annihilation. The Jungian resonance of the monster from within is subtly foreshadowed (lol) throughout the picture.

"Flying saucer" spacecraft invading Earth were already a venerable cliché by this point. Here, the saucer lands on an alien world and discharges a human crew: a clue that the monster is us in the very opening of the picture.

The bright red, curved claw of the id monster looks a lot like the comet logo on the crewmen's hats, which are of course positioned right over the brain. JuSt A cOiNcIdEnCe though!

OK, the position of the claw cast probably wasn't intended as a phallic symbol, but when your material is the unconscious mind, associations kind of form themselves, don't they?

The Krell also recall the civilisation described in Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness, who were wiped out by their mindless shoggoth slaves. And of course Warhammer's warp realm, moulded by the unconscious emotions of the living inhabitants of the material world, owes everything to Forbidden Planet's monsters from the id.

tHe EfFeCtS aRe DaTed! Yeah but imagine this fucking thing coming at you halfway into a night shift.

Bellerophon was a hero in ancient Greek mythology who slew the chimaera but was eventually destroyed for his hubris in attempting to fly to Olympus on Pegasus, the winged horse; to transcend the human condition in defiance of his remit in the celestial hierarchy. At the very juncture in our history when we aspire toward a Krell-mode point of total repression and technocorporate singularity, the savage forces we deny are real threaten to bubble over and drown everything in slaughter. Now, more than ever, I bid you remember the fate of Yugoslavia, and the partition of India, and the horror that has overwhelmed the Middle East; and to recall the archetype of Babel, and why the story was set down in ancient times.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Night of the Demons!

Not at all to be confused with last week's classy classic, this Night of the Demons is the 2009 remake of the 80s also-ran best known for popularising goth girls to the horny mind, and is the trashy peak of trashcore. Why the remake? Because the original was also trashy, but this one dials it up to 11, with more gratuitous carnage, sluttier scream queens with ludicrous silicone cans, and a soundtrack of the kind of metal you imagine methheads bang to in tin sheds. The original might have been edgy and hedonistic in its day, but with this one you can taste the spilled beer and feel the sticky floors beneath your feet. If your cinematographic palette pales at Friday the 13th levels of sleaze and gore, feel free to stick to the Universal classic monsters, but if just once a year, as the Christian lore of Halloween entails, you feel the need to let the forces of chaos and debauchery have their day, cry havoc and let spin this brain cell obliterator of a flick.

Come on guys, it'll be fun.

This Night concerns a Halloween party gone ever-so-predictably bad, set in an impressively ominous New Orleans mansion where the silent-movie-pastiche opening sequence informs us demons were once summoned and contained, waiting to rise anew and ruin everyone's festivities.

IDK what "Southern Gothic" is but I think it's this.

Our hapless protagonists are an A-Z of B-C-list scream royalty. Angela, back from the original, is played by Shannon Elizabeth, who was in the unpronounceable remake of Th13rteen Ghosts. Bobbi Sue Luther starred in Laid to Rest, which is only slightly more than you or I have ever done. Monica Keena has the unique distinction of surviving both Jason and Freddy. And Diora Baird was in the prequel to the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (but also South of Heaven, which, if you take anything from this bløg, watch).

May all our T&A queens have that one actually good movie in their filmographies.

In the highest traditions of Plato and Aristotle, our heroines debate the merits of slutty vs scary costumes, mostly settling on the time-honoured cat-ears-and-cleavage formula, to disgusted looks of the I-can't-buh-lieve-she's-wearing-the-same-outfuht? genre.

Sadly this scene does not end with them ripping each other's clothes off and some guy in a Bob Hope costume saying to camera "now that's what I call a catfight".

Meanwhile there's some plot nonsense in which Edward Furlong (rehab) tries to amass enough from street-level dope slinging to pay off an hilarious Bri'ish gangster (Nawlins in this flick is 90% white and the criminal underworld is run by fucking cockneys. I leave it to you to decide who gets to be pissed off at that; I just thought it was funny).

The bartender's Manson costume is a neat detail.

Well one thing leads to another, as things tend to do. Cops raid the party, the stragglers play spin the bottle (everyone in the cast is at least a decade too old for this but who cares), the demons awake but no one notices, and Angela gives us a new rendition of her famous dance, in which she lezzes out with Luther.

Homosexuals will never understand the profound straightness of hot girls kissing.

If anything the movie loses steam as the party shenanigans give way to demons murdering everyone, but the tone remains breezy throughout. Within a line or two of dialogue between Keena and the lead demon, Keena manages to switch from fearful to blasé as though everyone on set just forgot the tone of the scene between takes, but who cares? We know she's going to become an action heroine because she's Monica Keena, she already beat the top two stars of the genre in the same movie, and by that point there's no one else left to be the Final Girl anyway.

A decade and a half of studios trying to force iconic girlboss characters obliterated by a single still of Monica Keena on an average day.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Night of the Demon!

♪I am a man who walks alone
And when I'm walking a dark road
At night or strolling through the park
When the light begins to change
I sometimes feel a little strange
A little anxious when it's dark...

Enjoyably ripped off by Sam Raimi, the original Night of the Demon is a much more atmospheric, thoughtful affair, only slightly diminished by the fact that every image of it you have ever seen shows the fucking demon in its full climactic closeup, which effectively undermines its artfully sparing usage in the film itself. In my customary three minutes' research, I read that the demon wasn't to be shown at all but that the popularity of then-recent smash hit Godzilla made giant monsters too marketable to play down. But even granting that concession to the bottom line, Night is a subtler, smarter horrorkino than we've seen in decades, even if it did give us the creepy-clown cliché long since beaten to death.

Seeing an evil monster hiding in plain sight as a children's entertainer probably was actually scary before John Wayne Gacy, Jimmy Saville and the Drag Queen Story Hour pedos rendered it merely depressing.

Someone Or Other plays Some Guy, a fedora chudjak who thinks demonology is le silly superstition and is enlightened by his own intelligence. Over the course of the kino, his blind faith in blind faithlessness is worn down from the bailey of r/atheism bluster to the more defensible motte of agnostic cope.

All hero protagonists are chudjak-coded (no-fun stick-up-the-ass types) and all villains are soyjak-coded (overly theatrical balding beardos). Joseph Campbell talks about this (probably, idk).

In this scene, the movie subtly foreshadows impending doom by having the woman drive.

A talking point that has resurfaced and been mangled into meaninglessness by overzealous boomercons in recent years is that demons are in fact real. The truth underpinning this was never really banished from our latent consciousness: we speak of struggles with mental illness, addiction and sin as "personal demons". Legion manifested as madness in their victim before Our Lord cast them out into the herd of swine. Our understanding of the archetypes was never quite improved by the secularisation of treatment language, only obfuscated to the point that truth was written off as metaphor. Has it ever occurred to you that rationalising away demons enables you to engage in denial of your "personal" ones?

The symbols of the past loom large in the collective unconscious.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Cat People!

Believe it or not, movies were once made by people who could read.

If there's one thing on which I can't agree with Ezra Pound, it's in his negative review of Cat People. Famous for popularising jumpscares (which was rightly seen as artful at the time), this 40s RKO gem should be famouser all round. Simone Simon (which is French for Simon Simo) stars as Irena Dubrovna, a Slavic art ho qt3.14 who spends her time sketching panthers at the local zoo. Some Fucking Guy plays Oliver, who strikes up a romance with her in scenes that, much like Hitchcock's The Birds, threaten a feature-length romantic comedy before the horror creeps in to spare us that fate.

The panther, in the background, turns and moves with her as she exits the frame, as though it were her shadow. Happy accident or kinographic genius? No, I couldn't be bothered to find out either.

The idyllic romance is dogged (or should that be catted AMIRITE LOL) by ominous omens, but the pair persist unto the point of matrimony, only to find Irena rendered frigid by her paralysing fear that she will turn into a panther herself due to legends from her Serbian heritage. To be fair, it beats "I have a headache". But Irena wants to smash, so she pursues the cureall prescribed by modernity and twitter thots: therapy.

Wahmen will literally go to be hypnotised by a witch doctor who believes you want to fuck your parents before they'll try calming the fuck down.

When that inevitably solves nothing and makes things worse (hint: if they fixed the problem you wouldn't have to keep going), Irena's mood turns possessive and paranoid, and she ambiguously stalks Oliver's maybe-too-close coworker, Alice (Jane Randolph). As a panther? Only vague shadows hint. Monster movies often struggle to equivocate between plodding literalism and ham-fisted symbolism. By keeping you guessing to the end, Cat People doesn't just maintain a sense of mystery but in so doing keeps either unsatisfactory extreme at bay. Irena's pop-psychologised neurosis is a modern monster, her apparent animistic alter ego an ancient one. By casting a question mark over the symbolic clues, the nature of the horror remains in a quantum state between the two. You know, like Schrödinger's etc. etc.

A high-backed chair positioned just behind her head gives the appearance of cat-like ears...

Here she hides in the foliage like a jungle cat...

Cat People was redundantly remade in the 80s and couldn't be revisited today because of furfags.

You said it Johnny.

Fortunately the original is much less dated than most old school horror fare and can be viewed without condescension. Watch Cat People this Halloween.

Christian blôgg approved.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Event Horizon!

You remember that, right?

I recall being baffled at the late Roger Ebert's dismissive review of this cult classic in which he bemoaned its mining of the unknown in the form of the final frontier as expressing an unwarranted fear of science and discovery. You could make the same critique of Frankenstein or Jurassic Park, but Ebert didn't, which suggests to me his real beef with the movie was that it unnerved him, which apparently it did for quite a number of contemporary viewers (Ebert was always like this, was a good writer but a terrible critic, and was skewered like the fat pig he was by Vincent Gallo, who memorably said he had the "physique of a slave trader". Don't feel bad for the porcine columnist; he was a piece of shit who doxed the lead actress from Friday the 13th to his sycophantic dogs because he didn't like the movie. Rot in hell, piggy).

Roger Ebert learning why we don't do that, forever (colourised).

Anyway, I bring this up because I always just found this flick cool and not particularly disturbing, but you may react differently. The good ship Event Horizon (1997) disappeared some years ago and has now reappeared minus the crew. Lovecraftesquely disturbed scientist Dr Weir (Sam Neil) is despatched with a crew of military toughs to investigate what happened, only to find himself aboard a haunted house in space.

Neil personally requested his arm patch display the aboriginal grievance politics flag in place of the Union Jack. Naturally, the symbolism of a meddling libcuck being the one to unleash horrors beyond his comprehension flew way over his head.

Naturally, everyone starts to go craaazy out in space, reminding many reviewers of The Shining but, given the timing, reminding me more of Sphere, which came out the following year and was basically this movie underwater. Sphere is worth a spin, but never picked up the cult following that this one did, perhaps because the Event Horizon itself boasts the coolest set design in movies. Everything in it is so Gothicmaxxed that redditors to this day insist it's in the boopin snootin Warhammer 40k uuuniveeerse, but you can hardly blame a production for seizing on an aesthetic that has never once gone out of style.

"Do you think we have enough spikes and crosses?"
"No"
- set designer Joseph Bennett to director Paul W.S. Anderson (or vice versa)

From the casting of porn stars and amputees for the blood orgy scene to the reams of bonus gore footage found decaying in a Romanian salt mine, everything about this production has been recited more times online than a videogame creepypasta. When was the last time anyone talked about astroturfed hipster horror like The Babadook? Anyone you know ever say "dude, bro, you've got to see it for that scene, bruh"? For a critically derided flop, Event Horizon proved to be the little kino that could.

How'd they get this footage from my crawlspace, is what I want to know.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: DaDa!

The album cover being a modified detail from Dalí's Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire is a return tribute to Dalí, who was a major Coop fan and declared his act "musical surrealism". Dalí made a First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper's Brain, the story of which is the best thing you'll read all year.

Everyone knows Alice Cooper for his pioneering theatrical stage show and his slew of classic anthems from "Eighteen" to "Elected" to "Poison", but the thing that really stabs you in the neck as you delve into the Cooper catalogue is how eclectic it all is, like a Ween album strung out over half a dozen decades. The first two albums are as uncommercial as it gets, weird psychedelia with odd melodic gems jutting out randomly like teeth out of a Briton's gums. Then there's the era of unimpeachable classics from Love it to Death through Billion Dollar Babies or even Welcome to my Nightmare (depending on how charitably you view Muscle of Love), but even this hit-making hard rock era has its oddities like the dark jazzy atmospherics of "Blue Turk" or the James-Bond-meets-King-Crimson pastiche of "Halo of Flies". Then you've got disco parodies and showtunes on Goes to Hell, sci-fi new wave on Flush the Fashion, hair metal, industrial and more. For every wild left-turn that crashes in flames, there's one that pays off in spades, but by far the oddest and greatest Alice album is one he doesn't even remember writing or recording at all. Just as Bowie's cocaine album (Station to Station) was his best and bleakest, so too was the Coop's. Now I'm not saying you should dabble in white powder for the sake of a tune. I mean, fuck it, Minor Threat coined straight edge and their Complete Discography is one of the few punk discs that holds up after half a spin. But just as LSD seems to inevitably lead to inane surrealism and heroin to insomniac self-pity, cocaine seems to have a distinctly dark and empty energy you wouldn't guess from something that has adults bouncing off the walls like kids on Halloween candy.

Not that DaDa doesn't have laughs - "I Love America" is almost tryhard in its comic aspirations, though redeemed by the fact Cooper actually meant it - but there's a sort of desperation in the laughter, like a guy trying to distract himself from gnawing despair with a good time. The synthy opener is weirdly beautiful and almost goth, but Cooper sounds like a for-real mental patient on it, far from the theatrical madness of "The Ballad of Dwight Frye". "Enough's Enough" sounds like it was inspired by Midnight Cowboy, a tale of an abusive monster of a father taunting his boy now that his dear old mother is no longer there to protect him, set to a dissonently bouncy bit of new wave that reflects the awful glee in the bad dad's jibes. "Former Lee Warmer" is a tale of a mute, mentally retarded brother kept locked up in a family home that makes those Phantom of the Opera organ tones you'd hear in haunted house parodies actually creepy again. "No Man's Land" is actually hilarious but the casual mention of "my other personalities" brings chills back to a superficially comic scenario. "Scarlet and Sheba" is like some kind of twisted BDSM tango that evokes a dungeon with the scent of candles heavy in the air. "Fresh Blood" takes a startling detour into funk and seems to describe the unhappy lot of a Renfield stewarding a vampire from kill to kill amid the festivity of an uncaring city. "Pass the Gun Around" is a raw sketch of the end of the road against the grandest, most ostentatious arrangements on the album, with a Dick Wagner solo that sounds like David Gilmour having the worst nightmare of his life. Maybe Alice just doesn't want to remember.