Monsters For Perverts

My love for Vincenzo Natali and his wonderful Splice is already well documented on this blog. As such I was delighted to see today that Sideshow Collectibles is planning to release a 1:1 scale replica of the nascent Dren creature. That's a pic of their sculpt at right, though at this stage it appears to be just an unpainted maquette. The detail looks good and Natali himself had this to say about it in the press release:

"Sideshow has sculpted Baby Dren with all the love and passion that a proud parent could ever bestow on a child. Every muscle, bone and tendon is perfectly recreated. No geneticist no matter how brilliant could hope to compete with this exquisite work."

Perhaps, if little Dren sells, we'll see a maquette of the fantastic mature creature at some point:

Also coming from Sideshow this year is what may well prove to be the ultimate scaled replica of Giger's 1979 creature from Alien (right). In the last decade there's been a glut of Alien toys, statues and busts, many of them beautifully designed and lovingly produced, but I doubt any of them will hold a candle to this 28" tall (star)beast. At $799 it ain't cheap, but I suppose it's all relative because I once paid about a hundred more than that for a 1979 18" Kenner mint-in-box. The Kenner will always be the holy grail for collectors, and rightly so because it's a primo piece of genuine historical ephemera, but truth-be-told if you've ever seen one the sculpt is very rudimentary (it was just a child's toy after all). So from that perspective I guess the realism and quality of this new Sideshow piece makes it a bargain? Or maybe not. Regardless, get all the details on it at Twitch here.

For the record, I actually quit collecting toys about eight years ago when I ebayed a pretty extensive collection of horror toys, models and other ephemera (mostly Alien, Dawn Of The Dead, 70's & 80's horror and Universal Monsters) to score some quick cash. Occasionally when I see some tasty items like these I consider jumping off the wagon, but honestly I'm glad I quit because I just don't have the money to blow on this stuff anymore. Toy collecting is an expensive and very addictive habit. Not to mention what a pain in the ass it was to keep it all dusted!

Of course the big joke here is that we're talking about "toys" based on two of the most overtly sexualised creatures in the history of monster movies. As Devin at Badass Digest already pointed out today, baby Dren's head is essentially the head of a cock, complete with a slit-like urethral opening for a mouth. And of course Giger's stalking nightmare is everyone's favourite hybrid of big, scary phallus and vagina dentata, dripping with K-Y® Jelly (they actually used K-Y in the movie).

To illustrate that point further, I used to have a 1:1 scale chestburster and facehugger, both made by a Japanese company called Tsukuda Hobby (at the time Japan dominated the Alien toy market, with virtually nothing being produced in the US). They were flesh coloured, and made of this soft vinyl that was disturbingly reminiscent of the weird plastics they use to make sex toys. Couple those attributes with the fact that there was a life sized pussy on the belly of the facehugger and the chestburster looked like a rearing schlong with teeth, and it's hardly surprising that every single one of my friends who picked them up commented on how blatantly erotic they were.

Seeing all these creatures on screen, in the context of the films is one thing, but holding them in your hands really drives home the extent of their sexual nature.

I'd like to point out that unlike some people I don't subscribe to the view that Alien is just one big Freudian metaphor for anal rape. For me the sexuality more or less begins and ends with the creature designs and the architecture of the derelict spacecraft.

Kill Sports

Check out my post over at IllCon on fictional sports in SF and horror movies. It covers the sick death games found in Hostel, Cube, Rollerball and Death Race 2000, among others.

Dren Lives!

And the hands-down, utterly perfect poster design for Vincenzo Natali's Splice - beating out already impressive designs from the US and Germany - is this sublime quad from the UK. Click on it and Check It Out. Beautiful. I hope one of our few remaining arthouses in Sydney runs a short season... are you listening CHAUVEL??

Splice

US and German one sheets for Splice have quietly shown up over at Impawards. They certainly aren't shying away from revealing Dren in all her glory.

Chiba City Nights

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...

Reading those words in 1985, I had no idea how prophetic they would become. William Gibson's Neuromancer was a life changing novel for me, opening my world to a whole universe of ideas about the potential of computers and the power of information; our relationship with (and addiction to) technology; and very plausible speculation about a future of post-human evolution through neural augmentation. It isn't hard now to imagine us becoming so immersed in our tech that it becomes an extension of ourselves. I'm already completely dependent on my computer for access to music, movies, comics, news, communication, creativity, stimulation, relaxation.

Last night Fangoria reported that the reigns of the floundering Neuromancer adaption have been handed over to one of the most visionary and intelligent film-makers working today - Vincenzo Natali. This is very exciting news, and if you have any doubt about his suitability for the project, check out his cult cyberpunk sleeper Cypher.

I'd all but lost hope for a good Neuromancer film, because last year the direction it was heading in was looking very, very dire. Some complete hack of a director attached; that no-talent nancy-boy from the Star Wars prequels cast as Case and some pre-production art that made it look like some kind of horrible steampunk abortion. Uuuuurrgh.

The question is: can Neuromancer still be relevant in a world where Gibson's ideas have been so ruthlessly pillaged by every facet of our culture for 25 years (technology, design, philosophy, fashion, movies like The Matrix, eXistenZ, Sleep Dealer, Ghost In The Shell, etc)? In a world where so many of his once fantastic concepts have more or less passed into the realm of the banal? A world where the legacy of the great cyberpunk writers - Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, Jack Womack, Neal Stephenson and their progenitors PKD, Alfred Bester, Ballard and Burroughs - is sullied by those shamefully idiotic steampunk ninnies? Not to mention the whole cyberpunk "sub-culture", which has always been a pathetically sad affair (art is art, why do people need to pretend it's real?).

With Natali at the helm (and rewriting the screenplay), I think Neuromancer could be subtly tweaked into something that is once again cutting edge SF. Last year's brilliant Mexican indie Sleep Dealer, Duncan Jones' upcoming Source Code and this year's mega budgeted Inception prove that we're still fascinated with the concepts that lie at the heart of cyberpunk. After all, although much of Gibson's Sprawl series is now hopelessly dated, the essence of it still looks like a future that we're moving towards (corporate supremacy, sensory immersion in technology, physical/neural modification, AI, over-population, environmental disaster - dystopia).

But where does all this leave Natali's long mooted adaption of J.G. Ballard's High-Rise?

Dren

A real teaser poster for Natali's Splice has finally appeared. Can't wait to see the final one sheet.

"As he sat on his balcony eating the dog..."

Some exciting news emerged tonight (as reported by bloody disgusting) that Vincenzo Natali is still attached to his long-in-gestation adaptation of J.G. Ballard's seminal SF novel High-Rise. The project has been on his slate for several years now, but I've been wondering for a while if he might have abandoned it. I've always thought High-Rise suited Natali perfectly. It's thematically similar to Cube in that it's about ordinary people dropping their veneer of civility and resorting to violence in a desperate and claustrophobic situation. Another similarity to Cube is the central role that the architectural environment plays in the story, how it influences and defines the character's actions.

Our bizarrely evolving relationship to technology and the urban environment is a theme that runs through my favourite Ballard stories (Crash, Concrete Island & High-Rise) and I don't think that the ideas he postulated in those novels have dated at all. In fact I think they're more relevant now than when they were written, and show a real prescience to Ballard's vision of where we're headed as a society (it's not optimistic).

Having only just lost this great SF writer last April, it's heartening to know that one of his most beloved novels is in the capable hands of an intelligent, independent film-maker. Too many of Philip K. Dick's SF stories have been reduced to dumbed-down action fests, but with first Cronenberg's Crash and now Natali at the helm of High-Rise, Ballard's cinematic legacy may fare better.

Autopsy: 2009

Looking back at my first post below (from March last year), It's interesting to see how my expectations for 2009 panned out (or didn't).

My most anticipated film - Natali's Splice - has still not seen a release since being picked up by German company Senator International some two years ago. There's been talk of Senator's financial woes and possible studio meddling to tone down some of the films more confronting elements and give it a more "mainstream appeal". Ugh. An example of this short-sighted stupidity is the studio's idea to change the name from the evocative Splice to the utterly generic Hybrid.

There's still hope though! The film debuted at last years Sitges Film Festival to a positive critical reaction and came away with the festival's award for Best Special FX. Since then it's been added to this years Sundance midnight section where it will hopefully generate some buzz and find a new distributor. In the meantime the excellent twitchfilm.net is hosting a diary written by Natali documenting the experience of taking his monstrous labour of love to Sundance. The first entry can be found here.

So, looking back at my first post again, it's interesting to note that Romero's latest zombie film (going under the working title of "... Of The Dead" at the time of that writing) has since received a proper name as Survival Of The Dead, and opened at various festivals to very mixed reviews (it really seemed to polarise people). It's been picked up for distro by the genre-friendly Magnet and I for one can't wait to see it. I'm not a Romero apologist (I'll happily admit that about half his output has been pretty wonky) but I've found a lot to like in both of his "neo-dead" flicks. Yes, even Diary.

My prediction for an '09 release of Stuart Gordon's latest Lovecraft adaptation The Thing On The Doorstep was wildly off the mark as it seems to have all but vanished from his slate of future projects. The burly auteur spent the year working in his original medium - the theatre - on a one-man production called Nevermore... an Evening with Edgar Allan Poe starring who else but Jeffrey Combs. According to bloody disgusting he may now be attached to a horror project called The House On The Borderland which although not an H.P.L. adaptation, seems very Lovecraftian in nature. From bloody disgusting: "the supernatural thriller focuses on a family that relocates to a relative’s rural home only to discover it guards the border between our dimension and another which is inhabited by a race of hostile creatures." Sounds promising.

As far as the rest of the movies mentioned in that first post - Q.T. really silenced the nay-sayers by serving up a satisfying and exciting exploitation epic in Inglourious Basterds. A pretty amazing feat given how rushed the production was. John Hillcoat's The Road is finally getting a theatrical release this month after long delays. Early reviews have been pretty mixed, but at least it seems to have retained the grimness of Cormac McCarthy's book. Finally, Winding Refn's little metaphysical viking pic Valhalla Rising has still only been seen by a few festival goers but his other '09 film Bronson is one of the few last year that really surprised me. This hypnotic Kubrickian homage really blew my mind, in no small part due to Tom Hardy's intense performance. It easily made my top three for the year along with Neill Blomkamp's stunning SF debut District 9 and my biggest surprise of the year - von Trier's Antichrist. Von Trier was a director I had long dismissed as a pretentious art-wanker of the most annoying kind, but this sublimely beautiful and deliciously disturbing horror movie has had me completely re-evaluating my opinion of him (I've since watched Breaking The Waves for the first time and loved it). So in the end, not one of my top-three movies for last year was a film I was looking forward to - they all took me by surprise. A lot of the fun of being a film geek is the anticipation and speculation that comes with looking forward to movies, but the weird thing is that the end result is so rarely what you expected.

So, in the words of last year's real fantastic fox: CHAOS REIGNS!