Futurechimp Theater: Youth Suicide Fantasy

I've been waiting for this to turn up on youtube since starting this blog four years ago, and here it is. It's public domain, so you can also download it from archive.org.

In Search Of: Other Voices

"If plants can communicate, what are they saying?" Hold up, spaceman, you're jumping ahead of yourself. Perhaps you should posit the likelihood of the first part of your question before going further. But it goes much, much further, culminating in a researcher hooking up a plant to a polygraph and cutting his own hand with a scalpel to see if the plant responds, with encouraging results. Wow.

I watched this show all the time as a little kid, and regarded it as a science program, but that was before I could think critically. It's completely insane. But it's also very entertaining, and the synthesizer score by Rinder and Lewis is top notch.

Saturday Morning Cartoon: The Fantastic Four (1978)

Slithis 8

Stage One

Stage Two

Stage Three

Stage Four

Stage Five

Stage Six

Stage Seven

Stage Eight

Futurechimp Theater: What Makes a Good Party?

Movie of the Week: Bloody Birthday

Its a dumb title, but give it a chance. When it distributed theatrically in Europe, some markets renamed it Children of the Eclipse, a more apt description. The whole premise is rooted in goofball trendy 70's astrology; three kids in a town are born simultaneously during during an eclipse in 1970. Saturn, which controls emotions, is blocked by the sun and moon. Ergo, anyone born during this eclipse lacks empathy, and a decade later on their tenth birthday they all turn homicidal.





The period details are excellent. Maybe its appeal for me is partially because I was also born around 1970, and by my tenth birthday I had a morbid-yet-gleeful obsession with horror movies. These youngsters are speaking my language. And it's very un-P.C, with the children getting into all sorts of pervy mischief (lots of gratuitous topless scenes) along with the atypical scenario of them killing their families for fun. It's like Phantasm, but with the protagonists and antagonists reversed.

Despite the grim theme, Bloody Birthday maintains an almost playful atmosphere. It doesn't hurt that the kid actors aren't at all convincing. Overall it's not well enough directed to be offensive or disturbing, so it plays out like a twisted episode of The Brady Bunch.





If you have Netflix, it's streaming over here.