Movies: "It will give you this wonderful new complexity."

Look at how awesome the poster for Bava's 1965 flick Planet of the Vampires is. Seriously, just ponder it for a bit. Soaked it all in? Are you ready to absorb all the weapons-grade spectacularness that poster implies?

You didn't really look.

No. I know you.

Yeah. Especially you Nathan. With your hyper ADD.

Look at it.

I'll wait.

Okay. Now: Are you ready to absorb all the weapons-grade spectacularness that poster implies?

Here's the bad news: The poster's BS. In fact, weirdly specific BS. It's not typical sci-fi "we hired some hack who didn't read the book, but he painted us a cover anyway" BS. It's the BS of somebody who watched the film, decided that they liked a fairly minor aspect of original and that they'd then spin out a weird alternative story about how they felt that more interesting aspect would play out if it was the focus of the flick. It's a poster from a weird alternate dimension where the poster artist was the director and screenwriter of Planet of the Vampires.

Here's the good news: The movie is still nifty. And I say that as somebody who is, more often than not, underwhelmed by Groovy Age Italian horror. I usually find their plotting lazy, their visual excesses tastelessly tacky, and their detached sadism more contemptuously hip than genuinely thrilling or horrifying. In this case, however, Bava set out to make a distinctly Italian answer to that cornerstone of cinematic sci-fi, American Fred Wilcox's 1956 classic Forbidden Planet, and the genre borrowed genre template and trappings provide a framework that prevents Bava from indulging in the fatal lack of focus that undermines so many of the of the flicks from him and his compatriots.

Solid screenwriting goes a long way to explaining why PotV works as well as it does. Sure, the dialog is a wooden and gets bogged down in clunky technobabble - the creation of top notch technobabble seems to be a poetic pursuit that English is uniquely suited to, sci-fi nonsense translated from another language always sounds extra fakey - but Bava and his writing team understand that the key to this flick to forward motion. The plot, which is involves two crews of space explorers fighting for their lives against murderous body-possessing alien entities, is lean and efficient. Furthermore, the campy artificiality of the sets and alien landscapes provides a context for Bava's visual excess that feels natural, rather than self-consciously showy. Finally Bava's icy brutality seems to have evolved naturally from the amorally genocidal Darwinistic calculus driving the film's baddies, instead of feeling like the heavy-handed imposition of a filmmaker hungering for extreme visuals. The result is a graphically restrained film whose darkness is conceptual and thematic.

With its dated sci-fi trappings, stilted dialog (which I'm sure isn't helped in translation), and lack of blood and guts, Planet of the Vampires doesn't demand the attention of contemporary thrill-seaking modern horror audiences. But if you're looking for a deliciously retro pop sciffy gem that's still solid entertainment, you could do far worse than Planet.

Movies: Enjoy, puny human!

It's hard to imagine the summer will give you better entertainment than Super 8. That's true whether you read that as a rousing endorsement or a statement of surrender.

In Super 8, J. J. Abrams has produced the perfect masscult artifact. Double J's alien-amok flick isn't just professional to the point that it's so slick it makes Astroglide look like P12 sandpaper; there's plenty of directors whose personal signatures embrace a smooth proficiency (see David Fincher). Nor is this a matter of Super 8's constant stream of allusions; whatever his faults, one can't say that Tarrantino's personal signature gets lost under his obsessive recycling. In fact, Super 8's perfection as a masscult object isn't strictly a matter of Abrams's direction. It also a matter of audience reception. The identifying characteristic of masscult production, if one is still allowed to evoke such such an elitist and ostentatiously divisive concept, is the way it turns both creator and audience a type, a member of some demographic, part of a mass. Further more, it contains its own interpretation: it does the work of thinking and feeling for you. What Super 8 does, and I intentionally personify the film because I believe, in this case, it clearly has an agency beyond Abrams' slender talents, is turn the life-work of a prior, superior artist into a formula and invite audiences to react not to the film in question, but to their collective memory of those prior, superior works. It's a quilt of stitched together shared experiences and we're not really responding to it as we are to those shared experiences. Super 8 isn't homage or pastiche; it's Pavlovian movie making.

I don't mean that as a criticism, necessarily. Sure, it causes some problems. Super 8's near-total reliance on the idea that audiences will respond automatically to certain visual patterns does get it in trouble. First, there's several odd plot points that only make sense if you assume you've dropped into a parallel dimension where Spielberg created the rules of logic. Though, honestly, nobody in any film acts "realistic." If they did, movies would be a tedious bore. The second, and by far more serious, drawback is Super 8's tendency to try to cash emotional checks it can't cover. Most notably, the film's E.T. Moment(TM) fully expects to slide by simply on the fact that audience members will recognize that it is the E.T. Moment(TM) and feel the according emotions. The result of this faith in a sort of response algebra is that Abrams includes several scenes that are emotionally inert, but the viewer knows, with a level of response-deadening remove, that this is the X-Scene that's supposed to feel Way-Y. See "the two males leads work out the romantic problem scene," "the two father's bury their differences scene," and "the cross-species mutual get-it scene" for examples of this dynamic in action. For the most part, however, the plan works exactly a it should.

It's hard to fault something for being so clearly the hyper-competent work of a skilled craftsman, following a clearly successful blueprint that's pretty much guaranteed to work. Often, we're told that a certain film requires a viewer "turn their brain off." While it's sad this is often used as a compliment, the directive to purposefully infantalize yourself before a supposed entertainment is usually well-intentioned. More often than not, anybody with slightly higher standards than a voluntarily auto-labotimized would find most genre dreck insulting in its brazen assumption of audience stupidity. Super 8 isn't really a shut-your-brains off sort of flick. It panders, but it does so on two levels. This is top notch pandering. Consequently, it isn't particularly fulfilling, but you don't feel dirty for having swallowed it. During the summer wave of blockbuster hopefuls, I don't think you can reasonably ask for more.

Really, just about the only folks I could see getting upset at Super 8 are genre-fans who have some irrational fetish for the material Super 8 so ruthlessly mines. To folks who make their name confusing nostalgia for quality, Super 8 must seem like a classier, younger, better put together lot lizard suddenly appeared on their stretch of the truck stop. Worse, in fact: it must be like somebody who actually trawls the truck stop looking for love watching her favorite trucker invite a clearly mercenary whore into his sleeper. Super 8 makes it clear that the art we enjoyed in our youth got most of its impact from the fact that we were young when we saw it. And, more importantly, there's no art or expertise in mining it for gems. It can be done mechanically, for a quick buck. Since you shill to the same demo, everybody already thinks the same things about all the same movies. It's a product of the aging process, not the development of taste. If you're the kind of viewer that believes a film can violate the "spirit" of, say, the late 1970s to early 1980s, then Super 8 is too honest a money-making venture for you and you should stay home and rub another one out to the weird "how'd she end up topless in a PG-13 movie scene" of your Sheena: Queen of the Jungle bootleg Betamax tape. Otherwise, you'll probably enjoy it. In fact, you almost have no choice about it.

Movies: Misremembering to be surprised.

In light of the fizzling firecracker that is media coverage of Predators, I decided to revisit the original flick.

Oddly, I was completely surprised by the very first scene.

And, I should add, I've seen Predator more often than I care to remember. In fact, I got into a nearly four-year long debate in college about whether a weapons system like Old Painless actually existed. That's how into the freakin' film I was. (The answer, then as now, is "kinda, but not the way it is represented in the flick.")

And yet, I realized that I've somehow blocked the very first scene out of my mind.

And I don't think I'm alone on this. Running through the criticism of Predator, both among the pro set and the Holly Hobbyists of the personal blog set, is the idea that one of the things that makes Predator stand out is the unexpected, genre-warping second-act twist that, one first viewing, hit folks from out of nowhere.

This despite the fact that the very first scene - what we see even before the credits - is an image of an alien drop ship dumping something on Earth.

Perhaps all the other pro-am blog types mean their descriptions to be taken in a more nuanced way, but I honestly remember the appearance of the alien big game hunter as a complete surprise. I remember the flick starting with Arnie and Co. landing dramatically on a South American beachfront - imagine a reworking of the Air Cav scene for the Reagan Era - and Arnie bantering with Apollo Creed.

But there it is, clear as day, a big ol' "Hey, this is freakin' sci-fi movie and there be aliens in them there footage" scene as the first thing we see. In fact, it oddly resembles the opening shot of Carpenter's The Thing remake, which hit screens nearly five years earlier. I have no idea whether or not this is an intentional homage or a coincidence. My general instinct is to, when in doubt, credit filmmakers with the talent and background knowledge. Given that one can find similar echos to films as diverse (yet, strangely, alike in their white-folks-in-the-bush anxieties) as Apocalypse Now and King Kong, I don't feel wholly out of place giving McTeirnan the benefit of the doubt that the allusion is intended.

More importantly, weird. Why do I always forget that the movie plays the alien card from frame one?

Now that my weird - though perhaps not so weird, does anybody remember that the second act appearance of the alien is a Chekhov's gun? - inability to remember the flick is out of the way, my impressions of the original, viewed decades later, is how dated it seems. Not the effects, which are still beautiful, if no longer state of the art. Ironically, the original Predator's masking effect actually feels right - it's imperfections suggest an actual device at work rather than the seamless irreality of CGI. Rather, it's the action that seems dated. There's something distinctly early '80s about the action.

Action doesn't seem like something that should age. Sure, there are changing norms of acceptable explicitness in films, curves of fx development, and, like all human creative endeavors, the art of disassembling fellow humans into their constituent humans is an ever eager adopter of the latest technological innovations. But action - boiled down to its basic, we're talking about energetic motion - seems like it should be a constant.

But it's none of the factors listed above that date Predator so distinctly. Rather it's the relentless dehumanizing firehose application of violence that captures a distinctly Reagan Era fantasy about the application of power: The narrative of violence is essentially unilateral and what we talk about when we talk about violence is the imposition of our will on a mute world. Post-Vietnam, we strove to redefine violence in terms of mastering the ability to deal it. Emblematic of the shift is the distinction between John Rambo and the Terminator. Both films deal with characters programmed for violence. But, in First Blood, Rambo's hardwired capacity to kill is revolt against his own nature. It renders him both pathetic and monstrous. In contrast, there's a crystalline perfection to the violence of the Terminator. He's without conflict and built for it. (And, in a neat thematic match, he excuses our heroes violence by being a robot, and therefore okay to kill.) The development of the '80s expression of violence would be the story of Rambo's transformation from a nightmare vision of what we'd done to ourselves in order to create a people who are ready to kill into a story of people always ready to unleash hell for the proper cause.

Predator is a near perfect expression of this in that we get two seemingly contradictory, but self-reinforcing projections of this fantasy: First there's the slaughter of the rebel camp, then the mano-a-xeno combat between Gov. Shwarzenegger and the titular alien (not called Predator or a Predator anywhere in the flick - the alien is simply identified as "the creature" in the credits). In the first fight, Arnie's team brings a beat down that is almost comically one-sided. In fact, not almost: Arnold and a handful of his crew find time to crack a few one liners as they mow down scores of left-wing rebels (we learn later of the rebel's Marxist sympathies - the reason it presumably okay to mow them down wholesale). The "fight" at the rebel compound is massacre. And, in the end, Dutch and Co. learn that the whole thing was a snow job. The Marxist rebels have no hostages and they were sent in as assassins. They are upset about being lied to, though this is more because a bond of personal trust was violated and not because they killed dozens of men under false pretenses. It's the killers that are important. The victims, by virtue of being victims, aren't.

In the second act of the film, by far the most interesting segment, Our Men at War start to get picked off by the Predator. The reason this section has always interested me most is this because it's here that the flick threatens to eat itself. Prior to now, the crew were straight out of central casting: the stoic indian, the weary warrior, the nice guy, the nerd, the redneck - and so on. Suddenly they all begin to crack. They show fear and their personalities cleave in bizarro, not totally logical ways. My favorite scene in the whole flick appears in this section: When Bill Duke's crazed Mac character, nearly exhausted, is chasing after the beast while wheezing out Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally." There are more thematically sound scenes - such as the brilliantly thunderous impotence of the scene where our panicked boys level the jungle in a vain attempt to tag the invisible Predator - but few get at the surreal bad ugly that threatens to engulf this flick like the disjointed, grim nakedness of this moment.

At this point in the film, it would seem like the script's been flipped and it is now the American soldiers's turn to feel what it is like to be on the receiving end of violence. It would seem as if they've been put in the place of the freedom fighters - oh, um, I mean, Communist militants they slaughtered. But, as depicted, the relationship is not all that similar. Even at the worst moments, the mercenary crew is not summarily slaughtered like the rebels were. Right when the flick looks like it's about to spiral into some dark pit of craziness and doom, the third act redeems act one and two by evoking another myth of American might. Less you think that the soldiers' ability to turn the rebel camp into an al fresco abattoir was simply due to their technological superiority, Arnie taps into the rugged lone American archetype, the survivalist killer frontier spirit that allows him to defeat the beast and demonstrate that our dominance is natural, Darwinistic.

He even survives getting nuked, so as to suggest that, while we are the only country to use a nuclear weapon in combat, we could totally take it too if we had to.

Curiously, John McTiernan, the director of Predator, put this kind of supermanish unilateral hero out to pasture himself. Recent Sly Stallone blamed - believe it or not - Tim Burton and Michael Keaton for killing off the muscle-bound action icons of the 1980s. But Sly utterly misses the point. John McClane, with his abused body and edge of panic approach to heroics, was the beginning of the end for Arnie. Not that McClane was somehow less a fantastic projection or any less morally complicated. Heroes always overstep the bounds of the moral order. (Even Atticus Finch breaks the law.) McClane reintroduced an almost Buster Keatonish sense of scale. McClane, even before the first bullet flew, was out of his class. With his informal, off-duty cop clothes in the dapper corridors of high-powered business, he doesn't fit from the jump. And his efforts always seem last second, barely pulled off, half inspiration and half luck. The image I feel most captures McClane's appeal is him, trailing a A Better Tomorrowush ribbon of blood into the bathroom to dig glass out of his feet.

That, it seems to me, was the beginning of the end for Dutch-style action hero. But then I couldn't even remember the whole spaceship at the beginning of the movie, so what the hell do I know?

Mad science: Start by asking them how their flight was. And while they're distracted, go all Wolverines on the green bastards!

Above: Train them now! An oversized head? Make sure it's dead!

The regular "Examiner" column at Slate answers the question: "Do we have an alien-contact plan in place?"

The answer: Not for any situation where we'd really need it. There is an existing protocol, proposed by SETI, for reacting to the discovery of a signal from the far reaches of space.

The protocol, adopted in 1989, is that if someone detects a radio signal seemingly indicating that we're not alone, he should get in touch with SETI researchers, who will help him verify whether the signal is really and truly evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. At that point, he should notify the International Astronomical Union as well as the United Nations and relevant research organizations. On the finders-keepers principle, the discoverer would get to make the first public announcement, but data should be made available to the international scientific community. (Source coordinates, however, would be kept secret, to avoid a situation in which anyone with a radio telescope could start up a conversation.)

And that's all Kool and the gang; but what we all really want to know is if there's a plan for dealing with aliens who show up all determined to blow up our major landmarks, kill our leading citizens, and run off with our women folk. Aside from "contact Will Smith," there is no plan.

In the farfetched Hollywood scenario wherein we detect an alien spaceship or aliens send us a Greetings, Earthlings!-type message—all bets are off. (If the Pentagon or some such has a plan for how to deal with contact, it's classified.) Naturally the response would hinge on the nature of the contact: peaceful or violent, needy (give us fossil fuels) or helpful (cold fusion). Many scientists, including Stephen Hawking, believe that contact with intelligent aliens would end badly for us—we'd be the Native Americans to the alien Europeans. "I imagine they might exist in massive ships," Hawking said recently, "having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach."

Lacking official protocol, those worried about first contact can turn to the very unofficial Introduction to Planetary Defense: A Study of Modern Warfare Applied to Extra-Terrestrial Invasion. Like Hawking, the authors believe humans would play the part of Native Americans circa 1492. They also think that, in light of the sluggish global response to natural disasters, there's little indication that we could react effectively to invasion. Since we'll probably be technologically outmatched, the best defense strategy would be guerilla warfare.

So we graffiti alien installations with "Martians Go Home" and start making Molotov cocktails. Apparently plan A is more Red Dawn than ID4.

Movies: "B" average.

So I was watching High Plains Invader a Syfy original cowboys versus aliens flick that, against the clear designs of the film's makers, got me thinking.

There's a factoid my wife likes to share. I don't know where she got it from. I don't even know if it's a true story or from a novel she read, so I present it here in the spirit of philosophical musing rather than a statement of historical fact.

There was this museum in the Victorian Era that shelled out a king's ransom for a truly amazing horse statue from the Etruscan period. For decades, this Etruscan horse was the pride of the museum, the iconic piece that served as the synecdoche for the museum the way the Spirit of St. Louis is shorthand for the Air and Space or the two-headed turtle was the symbol of the Freakatorium.

But, as the decades dragged on, the horse looked less and less like an artifact of the Etruscan period and more and more like an embarrassing bit of Victorian hack work. Eventually, the museum launched a study in the piece's origins and found, much to their chagrin, that they'd been conned into buying a fake.

The point of this mini-parable is that you can be so close to your own era's critical assumptions that you are no longer able to grasp them.

In the Great Victorian Horse Swindle story, the end result is that the prized pony ends up an embarrassing failure. Though I think the story can work in reverse too. Which is what brings back to Syfy originals, like the High Plains Invaders.

Syfy channel has made itself into a modern B-movie engine. Like B-flicks of the subgenre's golden era, SFOs are cheaply produced, populated with second-string celebs, filled with not-so-special-effects, frequently rip-off larger budget successes, quick to turn headlines into cheese (see the monster snakehead fish films), and happily recycle concepts (Syfy made two different films about the snakehead fish). The acting, as befits a B, is wooden. Often the dialogue is achingly bad. At their best, they're lively shambles. At their worst, they're God awful, soulless cash grabs. This has always been true of B-movies.

So why are B-films from previous eras so beloved and Syfy originals to roundly hated?

I'm not about to make a claim for the hidden greatness of Syfy originals. In fact, I think they're usually pretty horrible. I believe I've even used "Syfy original" as an insult to describe the failings of other films. High Plains Invaders isn't the worst of a bad lot, but it gives one ample examples of the sort of half-assed filmmaking that's made the brand a shorthand for broad-spectrum systematic cinema suckitude.

The plot is a classic rag-tag band of holdouts story. In the late 19th century, a swarm of giant insect-like alien invaders attack a small Denver town. An unlikely band of folk - from the town's doctor to a mercenary bounty hunter who was just passing through - hole up in the jail and fight for their lives. While never so painfully awful that it punishes the viewer, there's ample evidence of phoning it in on all levels of this thing:

Exhibit 1: Nobody could be bothered to provide the actors with period correct, or even vaguely period correct, firearms. Even if you're not a gun nut - I'm certainly not - you can't help but notice that some of these cowboys are packing heaters from the modern era.

Exhibit 2: The presence of several mini-McGuffinish moments in the script: odd turns of story that seem to happen mainly to pad out the running time and to semi-regularly put our protags in harm's way. There are several abortive attempts to leave town that could be justified as necessary in order to show how thoroughly and completely screwed our protags are, but other plot points are less explicable. For example, at one point, our heroes decide to make it to the jail because of the store of rifles in the jailhouse. However, after getting to the jailhouse and loading the rifles, our heroes promptly forget them and never really use them at all for the rest of the flick. Which raises a question: Does firing a fake rifle really put that much more of a strain on your effects budget? How many pistol shots make up a rifle shot? Could you have deducted four pistol shots and then at least used one of the rifles we spent all this time acquiring once?

Exhibit 3: The entire plot hinges on the fact that one of the characters is a uranium miner and that he understands a) that it is radioactive and b) that is can create massive explosions. The problem with this is that the radioactive properties or uranium were discovered in 1896. Our character is ahead of the curve on that discovery. But that's a pretty minor quibble compared to how the same character creates a nuclear explosion with the stuff: He grinds it into a powder and then sets off a stick of dynamite near it. Without getting deep in the physics weeds on this, releasing the explosive properties of uranium requires action that takes place on an atomic level. Grossly simplified, the element needs to be bombarded with neutrons which then break apart uranium isotopes into two other elements. It isn't like gunpowder. Heat has nothing to do with it.

I don't bring these up in an effort to show I'm smarter than the makers of High Plains Invaders, but rather to show that, from the smallest detail to the largest, the makers responded to cinematic challenges with a resounding, "Whatever."

And, honestly, that's pretty typical of B movies regardless of the era. Anachronisms, meandering plots, and a metaphorical-at-best understanding of science are hallmarks of the subgenre.

But you won't get hordes of monster kids defending Syfy's excretions in their blogs. Navy versus the Night Monsters, sure; but High Plains Invaders, don't be silly.

But why?

There are numerous reasons - not the least of which is nostalgia - but I think High Plains Invaders underscores a specific issue. I propose the following: We accept high levels of cheese in older films because, as time moves on, all older films look increasingly stylized and artificial. The distance between, say, The Thing and Tarantula seems smaller to us than the distance between successful modern horror flicks and High Plains Invader. But this is less a product of critical discernment than the byproduct of the fact that we accept the conventions previous eras of filmmaking as baselines (hyper-artificial rear projection work from the 50s, for example, strikes us as a singular thing, rather than a technique with gradations of successful execution that can be critiqued) while the we're alive and sensitive to fine distinctions in the cinema techniques of our own time (the quality of CGI in a flick can make or break a film for many viewers).

We approach films from our cinematic history with a benign prejudice that what is clunky or awkward in them was simply a given trait of films of their era. So, when we approach a 1950s B-film, we're simply not making the same demands on it.

The curious thing about this phenom is that, unlike the Great Victorian Horse Swindle example that kicked off this post, it actually elevates the works in question. Which makes me wonder, in the year 2060, will High Plains Invaders seem like a better film?

I think it might.

Take, for example, the whole uranium thing. Admittedly, the depiction of uranium in this film is far more accurate than the depictions of nuclear material from '50s and '60s films, where it could be relied upon to throw of a pulsating glow and make humming noises. That said, it is still quite wrong-headed. But, to some degree or another, all scientific claims grow quaint with time. Event correct understandings of the workings of reality tend to come with a fringe of era- and culture-specific oddness that ages poorly. (Darwin, for example, grasped evolution's core truths, but frequently suggested consequences of these truths that now strike us as products of his own Victorian cultural biases.) The result is that, retrospectively, the distance boneheaded depictions of the world and earnest depictions of the world shrink.

For speculative purposes, let's assume that, in the year 2024, somebody in some lab somewhere finds a way to synthesize unobtanium, the currently strictly-theoretical element that serves as the causus belli in Avatar. If this happens (or if some scientist finds a reason why unobtanium cannot exist) then Avatar's visions of militarized intergalactic unobtanium mines will look as quaintly incorrect as the bullet rocket of Méliès's Le Voyage dans la lune. When that happens, retro-cinema fans will have less reason to hassle High Plains Invaders for its boneheaded handling of science. Rather, it will just look like people of the first decade of the 21st century didn't really have any grasp of science. (A fair assessment, really.)

Advances in CGI will make even our best efforts at the art look clumsy, further narrowing the gap between crappola like High Plains Invaders and supposedly state-of-the art flicks like Avatar. When the stuff we thought was cutting edge looks hopelessly clunky and out of date, the distinctions we made between good and bad CGI will vanish for later viewers.

This not to say that you can't make quality distinctions between old films. We do, and should. But it seems to me that these distinctions always come to rest on those most primal artistic elements: plot and character, empathy and insight, line and form. It's these things that remain clear when all the other details blur.

Stuff: The Men in Black speak.

Even the most sinister of secret black op sites needs a surprising number of independent contractors to keep the place running. Take Area 51, for example. Sure it might be filled to the brim with nameless spooks and technocrats dissecting alien bodies and all that. But there's also a whole cadre of support staff and minor tech support guys who just punch the clock and make a living at the place.

Which poses a problem: You can't have these minor players blabbing about the alien microwave gun the lab boys are using to make crop circles. The conspiracy-minded might suggest eliminating these loose strings. Heck, if we can bump off foreign leaders, we certainly can snuff a cafeteria lady or the random radar operator. Here's the thing though, in the remote locales suitable for secret installations, labor isn't an inexhaustible resource. Not only will you work your way through all the qualified mechanics pretty quickly, but eventually your rep as a place where workers vanish will scare off the rest of the talent pool.

No, as unsexy as it is, better to just swear the little guys to secrecy too.

In Area 51's case, the contractual obligation to secrecy for many minor employees extended 47 years. Which means, for those keeping count, employees who worked the site in the 1950s and '60s are now free to discuss what they witnessed.

Sadly, no aliens.

The Seattle Times interviews are few Area 51 vets, like James Noce, formerly the radar operator at the infamous site. Though Noce has no tales about alien crashes, his recollections about the crash of a A-12 spy plane in 1963 should sound familiar to any UFO fancier.

Noce remembers when "Article 123," as one of the A-12s was called, crashed on May 24, 1963, after the plane stalled near Wendover, Utah. The pilot ejected and survived.

Noce says he was among those who flew to the crash site in a giant cargo plane loaded with several trucks. They loaded everything from the crash into the trucks.

He remembers that a local deputy had either witnessed the crash or had quickly arrived at the scene. There also was a family on a vacation car trip who had taken photos.

"We confiscated the camera, took the film out," says Noce. "We just said we worked for the government."

He says the deputy and the family were told not to talk to anybody about the crash, especially the press.

"We told them there would be dire consequences," Noce says. "You scared them."

As an added incentive, he says, the CIA arrived with a briefcase full of cash.

"I think it was like 25 grand apiece, for the sheriff and the family," says Noce.

Mad science: Can you hear me now?

The Guardian reports on an astronomer who claims that one of the unexpected consequences of switching to digital broadcast technology is that it makes the Earth harder to detect from space.

In the past, TV and radio programmes were broadcast from huge ground stations that transmitted signals at thousands of watts. These could be picked up relatively easily across the depths of space, astronomers calculated.

Now, most TV and radio programmes are transmitted from satellites that typically use only 75 watts and have aerials pointing toward Earth, rather than into space.

"For good measure, in America we have switched from analogue to digital broadcasting and you are going to do the same in Britain very soon," Drake added. "When you do that, your transmissions will become four times fainter because digital uses less power."

"Very soon we will become undetectable," he said. In short, in space no one will hear us at all.

Drake also notes that this goes both ways. Assuming that there's an advanced alien race out there, it is possible that they also let their communications systems develop for maximum efficiency, that is to say, max results for minimum energy expenditure. If they did, then they'd be as invisible to us as we are becoming to them.

What is true for humans would probably also be true for aliens, who may already have moved to much more efficient methods of TV and radio broadcasting. Trying to find ET from their favourite shows was going to be harder than we thought, Drake said.

Of course, this is only assuming that we want to be found. Perhaps a little cosmic camouflage is a good thing.

"It's a blessed condition, believe me": Images of African Americans in horror cinema #20.

Throughout February, ANTSS will be running images that reflect - for better or worse - the image of African Americans in horror cinema.

Danny Glover in Predator 2, 1990.

"It's a blessed condition, believe me": Images of African Americans in horror cinema #3.

Throughout February, ANTSS will be running images that reflect - for better or worse - the image of African Americans in horror cinema.

Action figure of Al Matthews's character Sgt. Apone from Aliens, 1986

Over There: Horror films and the War in Afghanistan - Part 3: The Objective

Before we make our third and final stop in this short tour of horror films set against the backdrop of our now rapidly escalating war in Afghanistan, here's links to the first two films in this series. In case anybody needs a refresher before we push on:

Part 1: Sand Serpents
Part 2: Red Sands

Our final film, The Objective, a 2008 genre-stew film by Blair Witch Project co-director Daniel Myrick, was the first of the three Afghanistan set flicks to get made. Set just two months after the 9/11 terror attacks and one month after the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, the film follows a CIA operative and his special forces escort into the Southern Provinces (currently the operational theater of Canada's military forces in Afghanistan) on the search for a mysterious radiation source.

The film's central protag is the Agency spook. He provides a affectless running narration that lets us know from the get go that this operation is not what it seems. He serves as the squads Ripley (the outside consult with a potentially different agenda). The soldiers accompanying him are, as in the other films, familiar types. His unit includes a Rock, a Vig, a Lemchek, and a couple of Fodders. We also get a pick-up Benny Fish to act as a local guide and an inexplicable Australian sniper. Even odder, the sniper later drops a significant bit of esoteric knowledge regarding the 19th century British Afghan War debacle, making him a sort of stand in for all the other white components of Bush's Coalition of the Willing.

Our crew is choppered into the badlands and, before you can turn a video camera on yourself and say you're so sorry, things start to go wrong in strange and unexplainable ways. Radios cease working. The squad is ambushed by Taliban fighters who vanish, even after after taking shots to the head. Soldiers fall victim to mysterious illness and seeing ghostly assassins through their night vision gear. Compasses go on the fritz. The land seems to be morphing around them - putting mountains and deserts where satellite photos show grassland. Even their trusty Benny Fish gets lost and, eventually, so spooked that he commits suicide.

The cause of all this, we later learn, are invisible ancient pyramid-shaped UFOs. Just what these things can do is never defined, so its best to assume that their uncanny radiation can make whatever screenwriters Myrick, Mark A. Patton, and Wesley Clark Jr. need to happen materialize. The whole mission was a ploy to get a bunch of troops to engage these things just to see what would happen when a bunch of panicked special forces guys shot at them and got their dander up. The answer, it turns out, is the special forces guys get screwed.

The Objective is an intermittently ambitious mess of a flick. Myrick started on familiar ground - the lost on mission plot is close enough to Project that one feels the flick should be in Myrick's wheelhouse - but rapidly loses his way. In BWP the sketchiness of the characterization was thematically supported by the found-films backstory. Furthermore, the thin characterization actually helped to make the unlucky students objects of identification. They didn't have any opaque fragments of personality that would stop the viewer from projecting their own personality onto the screen. Here, the soldiers are too alien - with their jargon, their easy recourse to large amounts of tremendous violence, their (remarkably sloppy and non-standardized) uniforms, their chain of command - to embody the average viewer, but too half-finished to feel like complete humans. The odd exception to this is the CIA operative. Though his voice-over is often tedious, as the film progresses it becomes clearer and clearer that he's a grade A sociopath. Not a foaming at the mouth slasher type, but a genuine a-emotional manipulator who can look a dying man in the eye and, before abandoning him to his fate, say, "Your country is proud of you." The CIA spook is the kinda guy who refers to soldiers as "assets" and says this to their face. While this kind of character is hardly a novel creation, Myrick gets points for making this vile jerk the central character of the story. It's a bold move that actually pays off in several key scenes.

Visually, without the found-film conceit as a cover, Myrick proves hesitant to go verite but unable or unwilling to commit to a more efficient, effective narrative filmmaking style. The result is neither fish nor fowl: An awkward fusion that never feels raw enough to sell as unmediated nor tight enough to drive home the story. The result is decidedly uneven. For every intriguing visual Myrick crafts, there are inert, artless stretches of what occasionally feels like lazy filmmaking. Which is ironic if you consider that they were filming in pretty brutal desert conditions. A lot of hard effort went into this film, I'm sure. I simply wish more of it was visible on the screen.

Finally, the plot derails in the last quarter. Once the viewers figure out that there's no "unified" explanation for why ghosts, and vanishing Taliban, and 100+-year-old British soldiers, and so on are all happening to our protags, the film loses momentum and becomes a collection of strung together set pieces, none of which particularly hang together in any narrative sense. The conclusion, a nod to 2001, feels more like a cop out than a wrap up.

Aside from it's obviously fictional genre trappings, The Objective is only barely a movie about the War in Afghanistan. Like Red Sands, this is a curiously American-centric flick. Again, not in a specifically jingoistic way. The Objective presents Americans as the biggest threat to Americans. Rather, this is a film about the post-9/11 mentality of America. It is, of course, a critique of the blood-soaked hubris of the Bush administration. The CIA protag's delusional willingness to march into the "graveyard of armies" on what amounts to a suicide mission for objectives that can't even be described is a fitting avatar for our post-9/11 adventurism. But the toxic, conspiracy choked atmosphere of dissent is just as much a target. The plot of The Objective sounds like a subplot of the unhinged film-rant Zeitgeist or the basis for a particularly juicy post on Alex Jones's site. I remember when, leading up to the '08 election, a blogger I know and respect posted - I believe in all seriousness - a post detailing how Bush and his cronies would seize the reigns of power permanently through false flag terror scares. These scares would give them the power to cancel the upcoming election and establish marshal law. I don't bring this prediction up to measure its accuracy (happily, it was off base), but rather to point out that in the American political culture of the mid-00s this sort of thinking was relatively unremarkable. This movie seems very much a product of those grimly anxious years.

To a degree, all the films in this mini-genre are less about the status of the War in Afghanistan than they are about our own image. To one degree or another, they're all thought experiments of Nietzsche's famous hypothesis regarding those who fight monsters. In Sand Serpents, the filmmakers assume traditional heroics - complete with noble sacrifice - will win the day. Though the fact that their hero's final courageous act is essentially a suicide bombing does little to convince us. Red Sands more pessimistically posits that we won't survive this encounter intact. It's difference between that film's djinn baddie and soldier heroes dissolves quickly, leaving behind a single soldier who is, literally, the monster he fought. The Objective suggests that we probably wouldn't be out looking for monsters if we weren't already a bit twisted inside.

Free Stuff: It's my party and I'll burst out of your chest if I want to.

This coming May 1st will not only be Free Comic Book Day, it will also mark the 30th anniversary of the release of Alien, the Scott helmed sci-fi/horror flick that launched the long-running franchise and, along with Scott's later Blade Runner, carved out a delightfully inky vision that very nearly put paid to the utopian-strain that dominated pop sciffy since its pulp days.

Never one to miss a cross-marketing opportunity, Dark Horse Comics will be re-launching their licensed Aliens series, kicking off with a free Aliens/Predator one-shot for Free Comic Book Day. BPRD scribe John Arcudi will be taking on writing duties while Sean of the Dead adapter Zach Howard and cape-and-cowl set stalwart Mark Irwin hold down the art end of things.

Some stores will be giving out special "Alien Anniversary" covers. Still free. Isn't that nice?

Movies: Aliens + Ghosts = Ghalians? Alosts?

Writing a review for Ghost of Mars feels strangely like talking about a talented retarded kid. What the kid does is not entirely unimpressive, within the extremely narrow context of his own limitations, but any objective assessment of his achievement is going to come off as ruthless criticism.

In its own clunky, uneven, and embarrassing way, Ghost of Mars isn't utterly stupid. (See how awkward this for me?)

When reviewers can't think of an intro because the film has robbed them of the capacity of insight, they leap quickly into a plot summary, like so:

In the distant future, humans have begun to colonize Mars. They are terraforming (that is sci-fi geek speak for "creating a reason for the actors to not have to wear big old un-photogenic space suits") the planet and a series of title screens at the beginning of the flick reveal that Mars's atmosphere is very nearly like that of Earth. These title cards also inform the viewer that Mars is home to a matriarchal culture. This is the first of several odd creative flourishes that aren't totally wasted, but also never completely develop into a significant subplot. In fact, one of the most interesting, and simultaneously frustrating, things in this flick is the number of odd plot devices and narrative techniques it introduces only to fail to develop them in any real way.

Into this skiffy setting, we place a western plot. Specifically, a Howard Hawksian plot. Carpenter seems to have a real thing for Hawks. He remade The Thing, which legend has it was directed via proxy by Hawks. Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 lifts liberally from Hawks's classic Rio Bravo. And now we've got Ghosts of Mars which lifts from Hawks's El Dorado. Not that this is a bad thing. If you're picking influences, you could do a heck of a lot worse.

The flick starts with Nattie "Species" Henstridge at a discovery hearing. Nattie is the sole surviving member of a crew of Martian cops who traveled to a remote mining town to secure wanted outlaw Ice "Three Kings was a highpoint" Cube and bring him back to the capital for trial. At the hearing, she begins to describe what went down on her ill-fated mission. This will begin a series of flashbacks and narratives within narratives that, at first, strikes the viewer as an interesting way to tell what would otherwise be a straightforward action story. However, it quickly becomes clear that the leaping between perspectives doesn't change the essentially objective nature of the story. We don't get into conflicting viewpoints or get our expectations messed with. It is, like the gender politics that get introduced only to ever get lightly touched on, just another example of the flick's unfulfilled potential.

What unfolded was this: Nattie and crew – including the fortune teller's daughter from Carnivale, Pam "Coffy" Grier, Jason "Why am I famous at all" Statham, and some dude who dies first – find most of the town's citizens have become possessed by the spirits of the primitive and warlike pre-colonization Martians. These Martians spend most of their time inflicting themselves with piercings, listening to their leader rant in Martian, and killing humans. The cops, along with a trio of gang members who came to spring Mr. Cube and a handful of the town's survivors, must battle their way back to safety (except we know they don't 'cause the film reveals from the start that Nattie is the sole survivor).

What follows is, depending on your standards, fun general carnage or brainless explosions and lots of running around. The standard battle plot is given a slight tweak in that every time a baddie is dispatched the ghost inside them goes looking for a new host. Consequently, taking down a bad guy is in many ways worse than letting them live. That said, this too doesn't come too much (another wasted opportunity) as the solution the heroes come up with is to shoot the crap out of the possessed folks and simply hope for the best.

In fact, that seems to the prevailing ethos of the flick in general: just shoot a lot and hope for the best. And, that plan works about as good as can be expected. Which is to say, not all that well. Both the characters in the flick and Carpenter would have done well to come up with a plan B.