To cut straight to the chase, this is the kind of ideal adaptation that every literary work deserves. You can feel the respect for Lovecraft here. It’s due to complete reverence to the source material that the film succeeds so completely in transporting you into Lovecraft’s world.

The short story itself is a pioneering meld of bizarre mysticism and straight-up science fiction involving a skeptical professor, the backwoods of Vermont, and ancient aliens known in Lovecraftian mythos as the “Mi-Go”. Like so many Lovecraft stories, the dialogue is sparse and the characterization even more so, giving the filmmakers lots of room to play. But instead of expanding within the initial conflict, the filmmakers have added a third act to take place after Lovecraft left off.

This is a very gutsy move, but a necessary one. The problem with many feature films based on short stories is the inevitable dilution of the original material. The HPLHS has solved the issue by creating a tight play-by-play of the short story and then a climax and denouement. Thankfully, nothing feels out of place and could very easily have been part of Lovecraft’s original tale (if the scribe were one for convoluted escape sequences involving biplanes, that is).

Another thing the script does very well is humanize the main character of Professor Wilmarth—something Lovecraft himself never really did, as his characters often served as vehicles for a greater mythology. The actors here are spot-on. Daniel Kaemon as Noyes is an ideally innocuous-looking everyman until his true nature is revealed, at which point his mustached visage seems suddenly sinister. Matt Foyer—sporting an old-fashioned toupee in place of his real hair—could pass for a leading man straight out of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

If you’ll pardon the anachronistic comparison, THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS plays a lot like a TWILIGHT ZONE episode: driven entirely by ideas and unfettered by any modern sense of theatrics or visual fireworks. (Coincidentally, star Matt Foyer refers to the classic “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” episode in a behind the scenes feature.) The Mi-Go aliens themselves, brought to life by modern digital technology, are still undeniably creepy in that jerky, primitive, stop-motion sort of way, and they somehow retain the sense of mystery that would have prevailed had they never fully been shown on screen. They have structure, of course, but no one in the effects department is “showing off”, and the film is all the better for it.

As for black and white… you don’t miss the color. At all. In fact, a film like this shot in color might detract from the atmosphere. The retro production value is executed so well that you could not be blamed for believing the film to be an actual relic from the 1930s. It is a splendid deception—one that makes you want to be fooled again, as soon as possible. Please, can we pretend it’s 1931 all the time if means we get movies this good?

[Also, do yourself a favor and watch the making-of features on the second disc. It handily captures the enthusiasm of the filmmakers, even in details as subtle as a tumbler of plastic tentacles sitting in the middle of a table like so many vases of flowers.]

THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS is available on DVD (along with countless other Lovecraftian goodies) at the HPLHS website: http://www.cthulhulives.org

Click on the thumbnail for full size image…

Since its initial release in 1962, MARS ATTACKS has made an indelible impression on pop culture, inspiring legions of fans around the world.  Now, Topps is proud to announce MARS ATTACKS’ triumphant return to its trading card roots. Coinciding this summer with the landmark half-century milestone the company is pulling out all the stops for collectors to re-connect with the cult classic while ushering in a whole new generation of fans.

The commemorative trading card set, currently in development for release in July, is a cornerstone of the 50^th anniversary campaign. In addition to reprinting the 55 iconic cards which comprised theoriginal series, Topps is adding 25 never-before-seen subjects.

Ten cards, painted by Jason Edmiston, are based on storyboarded sketches from original series pencillers Wally Wood and Bob Powell that did not originally appear in the 1962 card set. Edmiston’s finished works pay homage to the pulp sci-fi style of Norm Saunders, the master painter who first gave MARS ATTACKS its signature look. Fifteen all-new cards are provided by Eisner award-winning comic book artist John McCrea, the acclaimed illustrator of IDW’s forthcoming MARS ATTACKS comic book series.  McCrea is known to comics fans as the co-creator of Hitman (in collaboration with writer Garth Ennis), among numerous other high-profile assignments.  His new, powerful imagery for the card set will provide fans with added insights to the comics as well as to the all-new MARS ATTACKS universe.

A variety of extra inserts are also designed to add collectibility and fun: limited edition multi-colored parallels and 3D lenticulars will be randomly included in packs. And, for the very first time, Topps will be including MARS ATTACKS sketch cards in boxes. Many talented artists are on board to provide their one-of-a-kind hand-rendered sketch art.

The original MARS ATTACKS series enjoys the distinction of being the most sought after and valuable non-sport trading card set of all time. Its legacy status has earned the new series Topps’ full “Heritage style” treatment.  In order to preserve the product’s retro sensibility, all cards will be printed on thick, old fashioned card stock. Similarly, the design treatments for the display box and wrapper mimic the now-classic 1962 packaging.

“I’m a huge fan of MARS ATTACKS from a long way back. I own about half the original card set from 1962 and have a pretty big collection of collectibles and doodads,” Layman said in a press release. “It’s always been a dream of mine to destroy the Earth and inflict huge degrees of suffering on the rest of humanity. With this series, I finally get my chance.”

2012 marks the 50th anniversary of MARS ATTACKS, so keep your eyes open for a number of related product launches throughout the year.

Step back in time and take a look at the entire original run of MARS ATTACKS cards from Topps!

GOG cover image courtesy MGM

GOG is credited as having influenced many of the “mad machinery” films in its wake, most notably, Jim Wynorski’s cult classic CHOPPING MALL (1986), a film about several mall security robots who go on a bloody rampage. Wynorski has no shame in admitting his reference material, as he explained to me in a 2010 interview (where he also gives a great synopsis of the film).

“Julie Corman [producer and wife of screen legend Roger Corman] came to me saying they wanted something with a killer in the mall,” the filmmaker shares, “so Steve Mitchell and I took a nod from the film GOG, an Ivan Tors  movie from the fifties. In GOG there were two robots on tank treads that would run around and do errands for scientists. The Russians take over the computer and the system and the robots turn deadly and go after people in this underground scientific complex. It is a film almost nobody has ever seen. You’d have to be a real die hard sci-fi fan to even know about this movie. A lot of people think we took the idea from the movie TRAPPED, which is a TV movie about dogs in a mall, but we did not. We stole it from Ivan Tores in the 50’s. By steal I mean homage it.”

The film has been lost to generations, relegated to collector’s circle bootlegs…until now. MGM, as part of their new “Limited Edition Collection” (surely influenced by the good folks over at Warner Bros.), have digitally remastered GOG and made it available on disc for the first time. While the package is admittedly bare bones as far as extras go, fans should rejoice at simply being able to enjoy this film once again.

CHOPPING MALL trailer:

By Fred Burdsall

Fiend Without a Face first started out as a story that appeared in Weird Tales (possibly the best fantasy/horror fiction magazine ever) back in 1930 as “The Thought Monster” by Amelia Reynolds Long. The film’s director, Arthur Crabtree, also gave us Horrors of the Black Museum in 1959.

A lone sentry on patrol hears a crunching, slurping sound in the woods and goes to investigate. A farmer out checking on his cows in the early morning is attacked and the sentry arrives seconds later to find a dead man and no sign of the killer. Official cause of death: Heart Failure. The Air Force wants to do an autopsy but his daughter, Barbara (Kim Parker), won’t allow it and hands the body over to the local authorities.

The Adams farm comes under attack and the old couple die as horribly as Farmer Griselle did. The Air Force get control of the bodies and an autopsy shows they had their brains sucked out of their heads and that the spinal cord is also missing. Major Cummings (Marshall Thompson) checks in on Farmer Griselle’s daughter and ends up in a fight with  Constable Gibbons. Gibbons gets the mayor’s OK to search the woods for the “mad G.I.” and seconds after leaving his house the mayor meets the same fate.

The major encounters Barbara again at the home of Professor Walgate (Kynaston Reeves), where he gets the cold shoulder from her and not much information from Walgate. All the members of the search party return to town except Gibbons. They organize a town meeting with the Major and Gibbons makes his horrific return from the woods. He is now completely insane. Cummings informs Barbara of his suspicions about the professor and while checking around the local cemetery, is locked in a tomb. When he doesn’t return, Barbara calls Captain Chester (Terence Kilburn) and together they rescue him in the nick of time.

The major confronts the professor with his pipe that he found in the tomb and he comes clean about his work on “Thought Materialization” and the creatures it spawned, a creature that looks like a human brain and feeds on intellect but is invisible to the human eye.  The decision is made to shut down the power plant but it’s been vandalized to the point where it can’t.  The professor’s house comes under attack and as the radiation level reaches the danger zone, the creatures begin to materialize. There are hundreds of them all around the house. Convinced that destroying the power plant will take away their source of energy and kill them, the major and professor make a run for it under cover fire but the professor falls victim to his own creation. Once inside, Major Cummings sets the fuse and escapes with seconds to spare before the building is destroyed and the creatures melt away.

Considering the time this was made (1958), the movie was remarkably graphic in its use of gore. Every brain that got shot was shown bubbling black blood and collapsing in on themselves. Shot in England, Canada, and even Germany (the stop motion animation effects) the script itself is fairly standard but the special effects–especially the sound effects–are fantastic work for its time. So do yourself a favor…watch and enjoy the Fiend Without a Face. You’ll be glad you did.

Next month, we’ll find out why Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things!

By Fred Burdsall

Back before the dinosaurs died off (sometime around 1968), a little film called Mad Monster Party made its way to my local theater, and like any kid…I had to see it. So, armed with some cash courtesy of my parents, I marched in and was handed a clip-on button that simply read “The Green Slime Are Coming.” I had no idea what that entailed, but if it’s slimy and green…I’m there. It took an agonizing four weeks but one day the marquee read “Saturday at noon..The Green Slime.” This was it, no turning back: Give me the worst chores you got, mom, cause I’m going to see The Green Slime, and I need money.

That being said, let me tell you all about it.

An asteroid is on a collision course with Earth–cue psychedelic late ’60s rock from Richard Delvy and we are on our way. They blast it out of the sky and it falls on Jack Rankin (Robert Horton of Wagon Train fame) to do it. He’s rushed off to Gamma 3, run by his former friend Vince Elliott (Richard Jaeckel). Apparently they had a falling out over Dr. Lisa Benson (played by Luciana Paluzzi, who real nerds know as Fiona Volpe from Thunderball) and an active member of Gamma 3. After quick hellos and some macho posturing, Vince asks to join the team and is welcomed aboard. Guess he didn’t hear the chances of outrunning the blast are next to nothing.

Reaching the asteroid they split into three groups, drilling and planting explosives when they encounter a greenish ooze that forces them to abandon their equipment and head back to the ship on foot. Dr. Halverson (Ted Gunther) is reluctant to leave this discovery behind but time is running out and they have to go. No one notices the green splotch on the leg of one of the spacesuits and off they go, miraculously surviving the blast. Their spacesuits are put into decontamination and this causes the slime to mutate and grow into a one-eyed, multi-tentacled monstrosity that lives on and kills through electricity. (Why do I NOT have a toy of this in my collection? I must be getting old.)

Once it’s discovered, they try to capture it with gas guns and rope…no such luck. Lasers prove even more harmful. Their blood grows into even more of the creatures. How do you kill something that feeds and grows off your weapons? After an attack on the infirmary, they trap one of them in there and watch on the monitor as its blood begins to congeal and form more creatures. Elliott devises a plan that will lure them all to C Block, where the power will be shut off and the monsters hopefully contained. What could possibly go wrong? Well, Doctor Halverson for one decides his research is much too valuable to lose, so he rushes into C Block to retrieve it and gets baked. Elliott opens the block door to save him and this allows the Green Slime to run loose once again.

The decision is made to evacuate and destroy the station but the hatch won’t open. Apparently they are all over the outside of the ship as well and, against orders, Elliott takes a team out to fight them off. Will the ship be able to escape? Can Elliott and Rankin put their differences aside to save the day? Will the earth fall to the Green Slime? One way to find out: Watch and Enjoy The Green Slime. Cue that groovy theme song, baby.

The film was directed by Kinji Fukasaku, who you may know better for his two Battle Royale films. He also shot the Japanese footage for Tora! Tora! Tora! and the fantastic Yakuza film Graveyard of Honor. Well, I can’t believe it’s been a year already but here we are. Hopefully Santa Claus will drop a few boxes of baseball cards under my tree this year. I’m sure he’ll hook me up with some Doctor Who goodies and maybe even figure out a way to get my beloved Cubbies back on track, but in the meantime, everyone have a great holiday–be safe, save me a cookie and Dr. Pepper and we’ll do it all over again next year. Now if you’ll excuse me, the Ghost of Christmas Past just walked in and he wants to show me something, so I gotta go.

By the way….I STILL have the button.

This particular dystopian future is one in which the curing of diseases has resulted in a population explosion of globe-threatening proportions, while the environment has been thoroughly violated by smog so thick travelers must wear oxygen masks when venturing outdoors. At the outset of the film, childbearing is officially outlawed on punishment of death. “Legal” babies are branded with a mark that’s visible when scanned by authorities, and citizens are encouraged to fink on anyone irresponsible enough to get pregnant or carry a new baby to term.

And that’s exactly what gets Russ and Carol McNeil (Oliver Reed, Geraldine Chaplin) into trouble: Carol finds herself unable to settle for adopting one of the state’s artificial children—vaguely animated dolls that first come across as amusingly campy but soon become not only a believable element in this world, but a truly chilling prediction of our current infatuation with purely synthetic life—so she allows herself to become pregnant in spite of her husband’s gentle but firm protestations.

By the time Carol sidesteps the handy radioactive abortion kit installed in the bathroom, we’ve already seen what happens when a family is discovered with an illegal child. A constantly hovering predator drone outdoors lowers a large, unbreakable dome over an offending mother, father and child spotted by a woman in the streets early on in the film. Pronounced guilty as charged without the slightest hint of anything resembling due process, the family members are left inside their airtight prison to contemplate their transgressions…as they suffocate to death.

Of course, while Russ and Carol undertake clever precautions to keep their newborn a secret, that secret is eventually discovered by the neighbors. Unwilling to take the risk of rebelling against totalitarianism on their own, the couple (played by Don Gordon and Diane Cilento) becomes overly infatuated with the McNeils’ baby. The McNeils begin to resist the jealous pair’s increasingly creepy intrusions on their time, with a dreamy and disturbing montage of the neighbors cooing over and cuddling the baby providing a really ominous and macabre moment of frisson. You can probably guess exactly where that relationship goes once the childless couple is made to feel unwanted.

Some viewers may be able to anticipate the ending. These days, we’ve been so conditioned to anticipate blow-the-doors-off-the-entire-movie twists and narrative jolts, I can only report that you may be pleasantly surprised, as I was, by the climax.

Low-key is truly the operating principle for this film. It’s not a noisy soundtrack by any means, but the use of sound effects and bizarre music choices throughout is effective and enjoyably surreal. It’s 1970s sci-fi, so be prepared for the jumpsuits and the occasionally primitive guesses about far-flung computer technology. The film can’t help but be a bit dated, but the production design by Anthony Masters (2001: A Space Odyssey) and art direction by Peter Hajmark and Harry Lange are surprising, too. For what seems to be very much a modestly-budgeted film, they deliver a nightmarish world created out of stark and deceptive simplicity.

Fans are bound to have all manner of free-associations bouncing around inside their heads while watching—everything from 1984 to Gattaca to Children of Men, and more. But the film doesn’t feel (reverse?) derivative in the least, and boasts two strong lead performances by Chaplin and well-known cinematic wild man Reed, who does “brooding” better than anyone. I had just viewed this for the first time while engaged in a request from home to find some “old” but “good” science fiction films, and Z.P.G. is one of those movies I think you’ll wish you’d seen a long time ago.

George D. Allen produces the MovieFrightFare videos hosted here on FM, as well as writing articles and producing videos for the Movies Unlimited blog, MovieFanFare. Like everyone else, he’s impatiently waiting for The Devils to get a legitimate release.

Our fangs to Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders for permission to reprint this hoot.  Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

50 Glorious Scifi Movie Intro Voiceovers

Any movie that starts with Morgan Freeman’s cask-aged voice, telling us we’re screwed, is off to a great start. Many science-fiction movies open with voiceovers, which prepare you for greatness… or bombard you with backstory. Here are 50 of our favorites.

Too bad War Of The Worlds goes downhill a bit after that amazingly portentous opening. No movie could live up to the promise of Morgan Freeman reading H.G. Wells, more or less verbatim, but it’s still a sad thing.

The greatest voiceovers tell you what kind of movie you’re in for, and also give you the information you need to hit the ground running. Take Sean Connery’s iconic voiceover from Highlander, which is so awesome, you need it written out for you to appreciate its greatness:

Sadly, most voiceovers that launch movies either try to pack in way, way too much backstory (“And then there was a man named 92ZorkX, who built a mega-cube in his pants”) or go way, way overboard with the cheese. Here are 48 more voiceovers that mostly go way over the top, sorted by type:

In The Year 2727, Some Messed Up Shit Happened!

Perhaps my favorite kind of opening voiceover is the kind where the narrator starts out by intoning, “In the year 2027, we realized we had gone out of the house without any lower garments, and the Earth was reduced to rubble as a result. The survivors lived in caves, eating scraps of jerky. Until one day, a new hope appeared.” Here are ten of the most awesome voiceovers that begin with a date and end with a sad recitation.

Anything Sounds Cool If You Say It In A Creamy English Accent

It’s really true. You can narrate anything in a smooth English accent, and it sounds awesome. It’s like spreading brie all over your frontal cortex, eliminating all of your B.S.-detectors. Someone with an English accent is saying it, so it must be brilliant. Right?

What The Hell Are You Talking About, Crazy Announcer Guy?

You know a science fiction movie is going to be totally absurd when it starts off with a voiceover that just throws a giant ball of crazy at your head. Someone who is trying not to giggle gives a little speech about how there was a guy named Zaark 795, and he rose up against his brother, the Bishop of Pluto, because they both wanted the power of the Dodecahedron-o-gram. Yeah. Anyway, here are the nonsensical opening voiceovers that make us happy to be alive.

You Can’t Have An Apocalypse Without A Gloomy Speech

It’s just the law of apocalypses: You can’t feature the destruction of all (or most) life on Earth, without throwing in a gloomy monologue explaining exactly how we blew it all to hell. It’s the way things work around here. Typically, these monologues include scenes of devastation as well as a droning voice talking about viruses or bombs or people not washing their hands. Here are some of the greatest.

Science Fiction Movies That Start With Deep Personal Monologues

Some science fiction movies start out with a more personal touch — one character giving an internal monologue about their feelings. Either it’s a character being introspective, or it’s some kind of noir deal, where the person talks about their pain in a hardcore, tough-guy way. Here are some of our faves.

Voiceovers That Turn Into Conversations, And Weird Voiceover Spoofs

This is sort of a catch-all for two categories that didn’t quite deserve their own pages: monologues that start out as a voiceover, and then turn into someone talking to the camera; and voiceovers that are just sort of demented, silly or satirical. They’re both a bit different from your standard science fiction voiceover, in any case.

So, was that monstrous fun, or what?  More where that came from @ www.io9.com.