Sci Fi music videos - Wild Boys

An occasional series musing over science fiction themed or influenced videos.

“Wild Boys” is very much a product of its time, a big haired 80s ruled over by MTV and the utter neccessity of PROMOTE PROMOTE PROMOTE above all other considerations.

To be fair, compared to modern pre-teen knicker wetter acts, Duran Duran did actually have some sort of musical ability despite the hairspray. But that wasn't really the point here. The point was “Let's spend a million quid on a Mad Max style video and get it on Superheavy Rotation in the States”.

The promo director Russel Mulcahy, an Australian already well known for his three minute epics “Vienna” and the Indiana Jones mining “Love's Great Adventure” he shot for Ultravox, was brought in as the go-to man and the objective was achieved.

And how it was achieved! No mere band playing in a sea of pyro here, Mulcahy took the apocalyptic twaddle of the lyrics and put them in a veritable Thunderdome of Hot Gossip style dance choreographed by Arlene Phillips, bald men who looked like Howard Jones' mental chains dancer on bad amphetamine, oddly intercut clips of Rusty Lee, and a crappy looking animatronic fire-breathing head not even as convincing as Zaphod Beeblebrox's second one in the BBC version of Douglas Adams' classic novel.

Whatever plot seemed to involve the band – a tubby Le Bon with a Glenn Hoddle haircut sadly not being drowned on a windmill, Nick Rhodes in a cage, John Taylor strapped to a car roof being tortured with pictures of himself, and the other two Taylors trapped in some kind of aerial indignaties – as hostages of a group of pretentiously dancing baldies with feathers stuck to their heads. In the meantime, camp men with hair – one of them strutting around like a Ballet Rambert trained chicken – are fomenting rebellion, probably inspired by the Duran folk's nuclear powered Rock and Roll.

The rebellion is eventually triggered by a man flying one of the Ewok gliders from “return of the Jedi” to attack the baldies, as eventually other rebels join in with other curiously Endor based fighting tactics. The Duran chaps are released in the chaos after a couple of meaty thwacks from their guitars across unsuspecting skulls, and eventually take part in a victorious parade of victory aboard their steampunk tank.

Glorious stuff! Enjoy it all!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 30.03.14

Lair of the White Worm

This is a mid 80s British Horror film, appearing the same sort of time Lifeforce was made, and dated by the fact that Amanda Donohoe as the posh leading lady flashes a CD Player as a sign of her status. Based on a Bram Stoker novel of the same title, it thus takes a gothic setting and injects yuppie-nalia into the mix.

It's a silly film in many ways, featuring a young pre fame Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi, but the whole film is dominated by Amanda Donohoe.

These specs win all the prizes of ever

 Ludicrously oversexed, prone to showing hitchhikers round her mansion in bra, panties and thigh high boots, as well as the lady of the manor she is the priestess of an ancient snake worshipping cult, devoted to feeding young virgins to the Dionin, a snake slash dragon creature in the anglo saxon tradition.

There is a storyline, concerning archaeologist Capaldi's investigations in the vicinity of Donohoe's huge pied-a-terre, but it's a Ken Russel movie and thus always likely to throw plot aside in favour of lurid visuals and gratuitous nudity. The special effects around the Dionin creature itself are terrible, but there are some fantastic make up jobs lavished upon Ms Donohoe, and her OTT IN CAPITALS performance makes it an entertaining watch.

How has she lured this spotty hitchhiker to his doom?

"Warriors! Come out to Play-Ay"

“The Warriors” is a film I can remember primary kids talking about in the playground back in 1983, the sort of kids who’s parents weren’t too bothered about allowing them to watch the dreaded “Video Nasties” or their ilk. My memory might be playing tricks, but I reckon there were a couple of rough kids who even had leather waistcoats to match the films titular heroes.

I can’t believe it has taken me so long to get around to watching it. Especially given that the movie is full of classical allusions; characters called “Cyrus” and “Cleon” and a storyline adapted from Xenophon’s “Anabasis”, the true story of how that Greek historian and mercenary managed to extricate himself and 10,000 others from way behind enemy lines during the various Persian conflicts of the 5^th century BC.

Right from the opening credits, the film is a hoot.

We start with some late 70s synth music, sounding vaguely like that used in “The Equalizer”, backing a montage of various gangs heading for a mass meeting in The Bronx. We see The Warriors, a mixed race gang of bare chested waistcoat wearers who look like they’ve just wandered out of rehearsals for a Village People video, setting out from Coney Island, intercut with the other gangs heading down on the New York subway, the graffitied and grimy setting for much of the film.

Some of these other gangs make The Warriors look like a triumph of machismo. There are a bunch of purple velour clad disco gousters, East Asian guys in Viet Cong drag and funny conical hats, the “Electric Eiliminators” and resembling tattooed gay sailor skinheads crossed with straight-edge Minor Threat fans, the Turnbull ACs. 

Later research indicates the mime artists are called "The Hi Hats"

 All these pale, however, to the Marcel Marceau looking white faced bowler hat wearing group of mime artist gangbangers who must have terrified the subway commuters of NY out of their minds with their no doubt silent demands for money with menaces. It is impossible to see them without a vocalised chuckle, but remember that director Walter Hill had an awful lot of gangs to differentiate and characterise for the camera. They are still funny though.

Of course, the moot all goes wrong, and some evilly sneering mass of dirty hair shoots the charismatic Cyrus, leader of the head gang “The Gramercy Riffs” (Mirror shades, martial arts wear). Naturally The Warriors are framed for the murder for turf war ends, and they have to battle their way through twenty miles of hostile territory, their movements relayed by a late night female soul DJ who we only ever see the glossily painted mouth of.

Their journey is a modern day odyssey through the Underworld, a frantic run through cemeteries, urban deprivation and a NY subway who’s rattling, spray tagged trains are a mechanised character in their own right. On their way they encounter minor gang The Orphans, seemingly led by David Schwimmer, pick up a female follower for the writers to lob misogynistic dialogue at (“You may as well have a mattress strapped to your back”), dodge the cops, beat up the hysterical “Baseball Furies” with their theatrically painted faces and New York Yankees attire and in another nod to Neanderthal 1979 values, fall into a trap set by Runways look-alikes and cliché tough girl dykes “The Lizzies”.

A Baseball Fury. As seen in the Sensational Alex Harvey Band

 At all stages there is choreographed, curiously non fatal violence, all slow motion camp kicks and Rocky type punches that have the power to launch their targets 10 feet through the air. There is a particularly memorable rumble in the world’s grubbiest public lavatory, where doors explode off their hinges as a bunch of roller skating dungaree wearers crash through them.

Sadly, there is no screwdriver fight with the mime artists.

The film ought to be too silly for words, and in many ways it is, but it is still a gripping watch. We never find out anything much the lives of these underclass pussy obsessed ruffians, but we can tell that it is a tough one, forged in crumbling tenements a million miles from Broadway and Tribeca. No art school CBGBs punks here, these are just uneducated, brutal men (and one woman. One!) struggling to survive in a New York that at the time was bankrupt. In their way.s

The story is simple, but it works. For if it gripped 2500 years ago, it will still grip now.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26.03.14s

The Moon-a-Mucks Aboard Spaceship Moon

So, if it has been established (!) that the moon is indeed a giant spaceship, who are the intelligences behind it? What are the entities that hollowed it out using huge steampunk sounding engines and rendered the surface a mess of lava and slag? What is their purpose?

Looking at all the evidence for Spaceship Moon, I can venture a few theories of my own.

The moon was once a beautiful, fertile world that orbited the star Epsilon Eridani 11 light years away. However, the action of a passing mini black hole ejected the world from that stellar system, and catapulted the Moon across the local region of space in the direction of the sun. As soon as the sun got too far away, all life died, including the sentient inhabitants who were much fond of gardening and other agricultural pursuits.

When it had nearly reached the heliopause, a group of wandering bio-mechanical life forms encountered the dead, lonely world, and were greatly saddened. Luckily they specialised in planetary renovations, so having claimed salvage rights, they endeavoured to recover the moon's lost beauty, evidence of which had been left by the former inhabitants.

As had been theorized, these tall, 8 tentacled creatures, resembling a semi-metallic, upright squid, used their vast technological advances to hollow out the moon, install living quarters for themselves, and take up vast amounts of space with an inertial gyroscope drive, and terraforming equipment to green the Moon once again.

They wept, so they did, at the devastation they caused to get their engines of creation in place - their had still been a certain sterile beauty to the Moon - but remembered that given time the Moon would be a treasure of the heavens again, and time was something these near immortal life forms had in abundance.

So they set a course for the nearerst habitable looking solar system, our sun. It took a while for their inertial propulsion system to bring the colossal mass of the Moon into the Earth's sphere of influence. But once they had done so, contrary to geological evidence a mere 10,000 years ago, they began to work. The Quartz moonflowers began to grow.

Moonflowers are two metre tall sunflower like pseudo-plant designed to provide oxygen, through a complex light driven reaction with the quartz crystal matrix. But they need help, and this is where the moon-a-mucks come in.

Moon-a-mucks are a metre long, soft grey creatures, with a beak like a platypus only in a trumpet, or horn shape. They have bright green eyes, and don't need to breathe, existing as they do on joy absorbed from the eleventh dimension. When a moon-a-muck is fed with joy, its grey fur fluffs up, and it begins to sing a song in the electro magnetic spectrum that radiates out everywhere in the universe...so when you smile on a sunny day, that is caused by the moon-a-mucks song, the song of a creature only I suspect exists on our narrow minded little world.

But the moon-a-mucks prime function is to sing to the moon flowers in the sub-surface growing rooms. Their songs cause the quartz crystal structure to resonate like someone rubbing a wine glass with a wet finger, and as it does so it stretches, before snapping back in place with a melodic molecular shattering, releasing oxygen from the Sio4 structure.

As the oxygen is released, the moon-a-mucks collect it with their lunar-flippers into a special feldspar container on their backs before carrying it deeper underground on their moon-a-muck railways to deposit in caves.

We don't see this, how can we? When every time we send a probe or lander, the tentacled moon-masters gather up their singing flocks of moon-a-mucks and herd them to underground barns where they won't be found or heard...they tell them to be very quiet and bribe them with moon truffles.

The purpose of all this is to one day flood the lunar surface with oxygen, held in place by gravity generators so it doesn't leak out into space, and then commence the Greening of the Moon.

One day, the moon will rise, and we will find it as green as an emerald. And the tentacled moon masters and the moon-a-mucks will be waiting, for those they deem worthy...

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 22.03.14

Spaceship Moon

I have to admit, with a really shameful and apologetic face, that I find UFO culture to be endlessly fascinating. I have a number of books on the subject, some of them of the classic “The Unexplained” magazine reports collected in a single volume, another with some wonderful illustrations of Nordic blonde spacemen apparently dressed as fish. And account of the classic sexual encounter between a Brazilian called Vilas-Boas (not the football manager) and a spacewoman with blood red pubic hair.

Another is a rather more sober volume with a black cover illustrated with the so called Washington Invasion photos of definitely-not flying saucers giving the Capitol a buzz in the 50s. Within it, are some rather strange theories about the moon.

Now let me say straightaway that the UFO stuff is all utter rubbish, and most of the reports a four year old with a reasonable sense of scepticism could see through. I find them interesting as a cultural document of their times, and the deep seated sub and supra conscious fears of folk through the various tumults of the nuclear age. And one idea that a few people had on the go was that the moon was some kind of spaceship, expounded upon in the sober black book.

We don't really know how the moon came about – a fissioning of an original larger body into the Earth and Moon, a capture of a straying Moon, separate accretion from proto-planetary matter, or the most supported new theory, that of a Mars sized object striking the proto Earth and splitting the Moon off from it. So I suppose if your mind is out there enough, why shouldn't the Moon be a spaceship (Populated by who???!!!) that has decided to plonk itself in a pseudo-tidally locked orbit around the Earth (Why???!!!).

The evidence? Well the fact that the craters are all the same depth, supposedly, indicates that Spaceship Moon has an outer “Weather Shield” to protect it from extremes of heat and radiation that is easily penetrated by meteorites before they are stopped by the second Space Shield, a far more substantial barrier. Others claim to have spotted glittering bridges, buildings and even giant lettering. Apparently a couple of Russian scientists put this theory together in 1970 – avoiding deportation to the salt mines – saying the lunar seas were the result of molten slag and lava being created and spewed out by the giant machines that powered Spaceship Moon.

So remember this, the next time you to to bed with the moon shining in through the window. The man in the moon may harbour a terrible secret, and who knows, it could be far deadlier than what HG Wells envisaged dropping in on is from Mars.

And it wouldn't have so far to come, either.

Copyright Simon Hodgson / Bloody Mulberry 21.03.14

Sexy Sexy Robots

I suppose when most people are asked to think of sexy sci fi robots, they will come up with something drearily conventional, like the Liz Hurley Austin Powers fembot, or perhaps the deadly perfection of the Terminatrix Kristanna Loken;

Nothing wrong with that I guess, as she is an extremely attractive proposition, but it's a bit dreary isn't it? A bit fanboyish sticky stain on mattress to be awkwardly explained to mother? And she's not really very robotic either.

In the same way that Patti Smith said "If you are male, then choose something other than female" on the Old Grey Whistle test while singing "Land" (it's not called Horses you know, that song), why not perhaps look at something that is a little more mechanical. Like the Robot Maria from "Metropolis".

I realise I'm being a little female-centric at the moment, so for those more into cybernetic men, enjoy the practical, utilitarian sexiness of Donald Moffat as Rem from the TV series of "Logan's Run."

Still, it's all rather obviously human. Doctor Who tale "The Five Doctors" featured the Raston Warrior Robot, asexual yet sleekly elegant, and clearly an inspiration for the weird woman who walks around in modern day crap Krypton Factor "The Cube".

In the same way that there is a fetish for attractive amputee Russian ladies - so I've been led to believe - then some folk will be drawn to the stumpish Disney versions of R2D2 that were seen in "The Black Hole"; VinCENT and Old BOB. Note that Old BOB is a bit beat up, and is thus ideal for those with a "Crash" style orthopedic fetish...callipers and the like.

But to me the sexiest robot of all is found in the strange sci-fi vehicle for Kirk Douglas' saggy old bottom, "Saturn 3". Hector is a God Class robot designed to be trained by direct input from someone else's brain. Unfortunately the person concerned is deranged murderer Benson, played by Harvey Keitel, who rocks a pony tail and a hole in his head, and issues forth sensational dialogue at Farrah Fawcett. Dubbed by Roy Dotrice for some reason.

"You have a wonderful body...may I use it?"

But it's no joy for Harvey or Hector, as the robot develops a parallel obsession for Ms Fawcett, and pursues her up and down accompanied by strange bionic man style sound effects, killing dogs and eventually wearing Harvey Keitel's head on top of his own.

Sexual perversions - which weren't his fault - aside, Hector is a magnificent creation. All shiny chrome fashioned in a futuristic version of Michaelangelo musculature, he is a robot of fearsome power with a four foot long brain kept in a jar in his back. Forget the fact he has an angelpoise lamp for a head and walks like an arthritic miner, this is a polished, sophisticated, and terrifying, machine that deserved to be in a far better film than this one.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18.03.14

The Planet of the Artists

I read now that the Mars One colonization project – a one way trip to found a new society on Mars, essentially – has now found a producer for the reality TV programme that is going to be constructed around it.

While the whole thing smacks of an eccentric rich Dutchman's idea of highly publicised group suicide to some, there is no doubt that sooner or later someone is going to have to try and colonise another world in that very fashion...what kind of people will they be? Will they be scientists, dry, practical yet crackling with mechanical invention? Or oridinary people, drawn by inducements to leave an overcrowded Earth for our real life future “Off-World Colonies” on plasma rockets of shining silver?

Or perhaps, the technology to send people extraterrestrial will become available to artists.

What could a planet settled by artists, and a society begotten by artists be like? Peaceful with an intense co-operation and indeed socialism in the Martian wind? Or competitive, talents of all kinds striving to out-do each other in the new world they created?

Movements will divide up the five continents after the devastating war between the conceptualists and the realists. Sculptures cast their new style idols high above the inconceivable red landscape, organic forms in brass and bronze glinting in the reduced sunlight, so high that across the Straits of Da Da the Island of the Photographers can see them plain. The photographers document themsevles, document themsevles taking pictures of each other, feedback in the lenses choing to eternity.

The photographers forget to feed themsevles, so intent with their documentation and display thereof are they. They rely on food-drops from the poets, who make edible books out of their poetry because on mars paper is not only edible but a delicacy...the future poet of Mars thinks that his words are literally and doubly so food for the soul and so should be distributed free from sub orbital space capsules.

How does a poet know how to build a space capsule? They have made lyrical the instruction manuals and their iambic factory workers can cope with this form of industrialisation.

The land of the architects, which on the southern shore of one of Lowell and Schiaparelli's canals, which are really real but highly misunderstood, is one of holes. For reasons of contrariness, all land above 5 metres in height is levelled with powerful instruments, and vast holes are dug, holes that are in the shape of buildings that aren't there...a Chrysler building made of nothing, a Palace of Knossos in insolid air, Eiffel Tower up not down, girder shapes etched in the rock, into the depths.

Of course, these architectural spaces being sacred, their creators don't dwell in them and live in crude tents in the super-dry terraformed atmosphere, throats coated in sand so they can't speak.

Finally there is the Continent of the Painters, a community engaged in an endless project – to reproduce in entirety the night sky on the ground in utter exactitude. It is a beautiful wonder, and to avoid spoiling it, they live underground, deep enough so their rabbit digging does not fracture the art. They painted the land black, and picked out stars in titanium oxide white, Tio2, tinting them occasionally yellow or red to match in utter exactitude the tints of Capella, Betelgeuse and the rest. The poets don't feed them because they don't like their slavish copying of nature; they have learned and evolved to subsist off their own paint.

The project never finishes, because every new comet, meteor and nova has to be added in, streaking the blackscape in more white and making the painters scream “THIS MASTERPIECE OF CREATION SHALL NEVER BE FINISHED”

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 14.03.04

"Between Thought and Expression..."

"...there lies a lifetime."

Lou Reed wrote these words in 1968-69, and he was clearly a far more considered man than I am. For his statement is sometimes true, a thought can sometimes gently stimulate the synapses for what seems like an age, before impulse finally makes its way to sensuous, charming mouth or expressive hands, like the spark expanding along the metal loops of a Tesla coil before it crackles into reality, a flash of inspiration in a bar; a bedroom; or even on rainy streets where puddles are irridescent with oil dropped from ill maintained cars.

The person brings forth elegance and flourish like a skater posing at the end of a spin. The effect is deadly.

How wonderful it must be to be able to allow your brain to effortlessly pick the right thing to say or do, for it to act with studied contemplation before it lands the bowler on the hat-stand without even looking.

Me, I operate at the two other extremes. One is where the lifetime's contemplation becomes eternal, a never ending lightning streaked fog of indecision and panicked pondering, agonising over whether something is the right thing to do. By the time the decision is made, the moment is gone and the action is trapped within a pile of dust long after you've died.

The other extreme is where expression is so fast, it actually proceeds thought and almost rips it' way backwards up your spine to explode a “Oh my god, how could I have said that?” bomb in your mind. Sometimes its the only way to try and break the cycle of obsession described above, but the dangers are countless.

Most of the time you just end up mentally slapping yourself in the face, or scrubbing your knees with a brillo pad.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 04.03.14

Me and My Mental Hospitals

The town's old mental hospital...marked by a red brick tower, a landmark still standing today even as the rest of it was ploughed under salted earth to make way for a supposedly luxurious housing estate which like every other such development in this town has ended up nothing such.

I was taken there by a next door neighbour for reasons I can't remember. “Would you like to come to the mental hospital with me?” - I can't imagine me saying yes to that as a 6 year old, nor my family agreeing to this. I wonder what the circumstances were? Perhaps they had a lasting effect, although I wasn't given ECT, I just sat in a brown and cream canteen drinking orange squash.

Much later...19? 20? I ended up visiting the mental health unit at the R D and E Hospital in Exeter. I called it Bedlam...it was a massive gothic building perched at the end of the site, entry through a huge flight of stone steps up into a door you always feared might shut behind you forever. Inside, as my brain erupted with obssesive behaviours disruptive to life, all was bege officers with beige soft armless chairs found only in mental health settings. Men wearing sandals and socks talked to me about my dreams. And I helped them fail to diagnose the obvious.

Hometown mental health unit for outpatient maniacs. Now a hotel, when before it was a maze of narrow staircases and staff who said things like “'Shrooms” to appear down with the kids. I in my long sleeved purple top wasn't even a drug user, although I was just starting to self medicate rather badly.

The counselling unit at my University deserves a mention, as I was in it virtually every week for three years. It was falling down, and the offices were tiny. I always dreaded seeing someone I knew there. When I did, we manoevered around and around to pretend we weren't going in there. He and I are now both writers, but he is a far more famous and richer one than I.

The new local unit. I've never been in it. Apparently the top job of any staff member is to help the patients watch Jeremy Kyle all day. Have we really progresses from the days of head cages and hosings down?

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 03.03.14