Don’t get me wrong, I adore Alien and Aliens, (Cubed can be dropped into the sea with the tesseract and Resurrection feels like a beta-edition of Firefly), I watched the first film during its

Alien and images are copyrights of 20th Century Fox

premier run in theaters and aside from the chest-buster in the moment before it sped away reminding me of Michigan J. Frog it excelled as a horror film, but there are elements in the pop culture surrounding the films that rub me the wrong way.

Xenomorph: I hate, hate, hate that people call the titular alien Xenomorph. First off Gorman used the term in Aliens, ‘a xenomorph may be involved’ clearly as a generic classification for any alien lifeform since aside from Ripley no one had ever seen or reported this beastie before. So, Bob, I hear you cry what should we call it? In the years before ‘xenomorph, hell before James Cameron’s Aliens was released me and my gaming group had a quite rational name for this thing, the Zeta Reticulan Parasite, since it was discovered at Zeta 2 Reticuli.

Flame Throwers: In the sequels that followed the titanic success of the first film there has been repeated reliance on using flame as a weapon to corral and herd the parasite. Good God people flame and flame throwers are useless against the creature. You can see how well they helped the first crew. Fire didn’t save one and there’s a very rational and simple reason for this. Ash was a fucking robot out to do the company’s bidding and when he suggested fire he was lying and not giving actually good advice. He already understood that it layers of silicon would help protect it against flame and fire.

A Killing Machine: From Cubed onward through Resurrection and the crossovers with the Predator franchise the parasite has been reduced to a slasher, killing to kill without motivation or purpose. In Alien and Aliens, it was following its lifecycle, not killing save when it was forced to or cornered, but breeding, reproducing. While Cameron deviated from O’Bannon’s original intent and planned lifecycle with the introduction of the Queen, O’Bannon had planned that captured organisms were cocooned and slowly transformed directly into the eggs that Kane has discovered, it still worked quite well as a highly unlikely but still credible cycle for the organism to follow. However, in the following movies the beast kills to kill and provided shock in place of horror.

Well, that enough ranting to kick off September.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

After discovering that not only had someone revived the weird psychedelic children’s program The Banana Splits Adventure Hour not only into a feature film but a slasher horror film at that I knew that I was destined to rent and review the feature.

The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, a live action sort-of furry kids shows ran from 1968 thru 1970 for just over 30 episodes and presented a mixture of live action and animation sprinkled with musical numbers. After 1970 the series aired in syndication for another decade a tribute to the heavy drugs consumed during the 70s.

The Banana Splits Movie deviates in two major fashions from the historical Banana Splits. First, instead of human performers in anthropomorphized animal costumes the Banana Splits are advanced mobile self-directed animatronics. Secondly, instead of being canceled in 1970 the show remained a hit running continuously until 2019.

The movie opens on what could have been a disappointing fake-out with Beth awaking to the sudden and horrifying image of one of the Splits standing over her as she slept on the family sofa. I feared that this was a set-up for the entire film to be a dream but luckily that was not the case.

Beth’s son Harley is a fanatical fan of the show and for his birthday his entire family, Beth, her second husband and Harley’s father Richard, and her son from her deceased husband are all going to a live taping of the show bringing along a friend of Harley’s. At the studio we are introduced to a series of quirky but not fully fleshed out characters, Paige the page, Rebecca the producer, the heartless studio executive, and an assortment of audience members. When it is learned that the series is now canceled and this will be the last performance that information along with computer code malfunctions, turned the Splits into murdering machines and everyone is suddenly in a fight for their lives.

The Banana Splits Movie could have been written and produced with a heavy sense of irony and lots of winking at the camera but that was not the path taken by screenwriters Jed Elinoff & Scott Thomas or director Danishka Esterhazy. Instead, they present the film as a straightforward, non-self-aware horror movie firmly in the slasher genre. When violence breaks out it is graphic and bloody. The stakes are real and with few exceptions that danger is presented an a suitably threatening manner. When a film, particularly a horror movie, includes children in vital roles it is always a concern. Make the children too precocious and you’ll damage the suspension of disbelief, make it clear that the kids are in no real danger and the stakes evaporate, kill the kids and you’ll lose your audience very quickly. The Banana Splits Movienavigates these treacherous waters deftly employing screenwriting solutions to all of these issues.

The Banana Splits Movie is far from perfect, there are unmotivated camera moves that are distracting, the story is told in manner that takes too long to get to the stakes and establishes certain characters too solidly at the expense of other and draining tension from the story. That said it was a decent rental and I have endured far worse horror films. For a rental fee of two dollar and ninety-nine cents I can say I got my money’s worth, and I can salute the filmmakers for avoiding the trite and worn troupe of treating this project as mere fodder for japes and jokes.

Cinema from across the Iron Curtain produced a number of fascinating and noteworthy films including not a few deeply serious science-fiction movies some of which became bastardized American version when sold to the west. (I’m looking at you First Spaceship on Venus/The Silent Star.) Horror however was frowned upon as a serious subject and relatively few true horror movies were made with the Kremlin’s approval. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the age of digital effects that has changed and this weekend I watched a recent and decent Russian horror film Superdeep.

Serbian actor Milena Radulovic plays Anya (Presented as Anna in the English dub and subtitling) a soviet era physician haunted by her transgression of her medical ethics at the behest of the Soviet military intelligence. Now, near the collapse of the USSR Military Intelligence has called upon her services again. A secret research facility hidden in the Kola superdeep borehole has gone silent and there are hints that something biological has gone awry. Anya and the officer who pressured her into the ethical lapse are dispatched to investigate, obtain any samples for future military applications, and depart from the facility before the official rescue teams arrive. Once there they find that the lead scientist has been denounced by his lieutenant and all contact has been lost with the lower levels of the facility. Venturing underground they encounter horrors and a threat to not only the USSR but all of humanity.

Superdeep is a decent and solid horror film. The characters are engaging and believable creating enough empathy that their situation generates genuine horror. Radulopvic’s Anya provides the movie’s sole point of view allowing the filmmaker to restrict information to only what Anya see and hears herself escalating the tension of the unknown without cheesy gimmicks to hide information from the audience. Production values are high with the sets and the special effect, both practical and digital, well executed supporting a robust suspension of disbelief. The film’s cinematography is dark, moody, and atmospheric without becoming overly intrusive always managing that balance between what the environment would require versus the emotional drive of the scenes. The film is not particularly gory, but it is visually disturbing with explicit images of bodily disfigurement and horror.

Superdeep’s failings are that more than once during the movie it is nearly impossible to not think of other classic films. It is not the case that Superdeep is a ‘rip-off production’ but rather certain directorial and photographic choices were clearly influenced by films such as Alien. However, this visual rhyming with cinematic classics only harms the film marginally and reduces it merely a solidly enjoyable experience.

Superdeep (English Dub only) is currently streaming on Shudder.