Category: Sci-Fi in July

Sci-Fi In July: I Married A Monster From Outer Space (1958)

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They say that horror movies reflect the anxieties and fears of a culture at the time of release. If that’s true then I Married a Monster From Outer Space says a lot about America in the late 1950s. Made on a shoestring budget and initially run as the b-side in a double feature with The Blob, it nevertheless dips its toes in anticommunist rhetoric and the changing roles of women in the post-war decade.

Marge Farrell (Gloria Talbott) is a nice girl set to marry Bill (Tom Tryon) a nice guy. The night before their wedding he is attacked by an alien monster who then takes Bills form. The alien follows through with the wedding, but a year into their marriage Marge is beginning to suspect something is wrong.

Bill rarely goes out. He’s stopped drinking. Dogs bark at him, and cats hiss. Worst of all she’s still not pregnant. The doctor assures her it isn’t because anything wrong with her, but maybe Bill should come in for a few tests.

One night she notices Bill get out of bed and leave the house. She follows him down the road, into a field, where she sees him enter his spaceship and take his true form.

Marge runs to the chief of police who swears he believes her, but behind her back indicates she’s overworked, tired, or just plain crazy.

She confronts Bill who admits everything. His planet, along with all the women folk was destroyed by their son. They found Earth to be hospitable and hope to colonize it. They can apparently have sex with human women, but as yet cannot figure out how to impregnate them.

Marge runs to her doctor who makes comforting motions that he believes her, but he doesn’t do anything about it. Bill indicates there are more just like him, and they’ve taken over the bodies of other men in the town.

Fully realizing she cannot tell which men are aliens and which are human, she still runs to other men for help. Never once thought she could just form an army of women to destroy the aliens.

During World War II women had to fill the gaps left by the men in the workforce. They got jobs in factories, making weapons, and manufacturing goods. They made money and enjoyed an autonomy rarely found before the war. When the men came home some of them were reluctant to go back to the way things were.

This film seems to indicate that maybe they should.

It can also be read as an anti-communist film. The monsters look just like us, that’s the same line of fear Joseph McCarthy had been spreading for years.

If you take this a little further the men whom the aliens have taken over are mostly childless. They have failed the American ideal of masculinity. The men who destroy them are family men, good, old-fashioned manly men. True Americans. Marge is smart and tough, in today’s parlance she’s a badass. But she’s more than happy to take a backseat to the men and let them save the day. By the time the credits roll, she’s happy to go back to being a happy housewife.

Or maybe this is all a load of bollocks. Maybe it is just a silly little science-fiction horror film, riffing on Invasion of the Body Snatchers that came out a few years prior.

I’ll say this: the effects look good for what they are. At 78 minutes it doesn’t overstay its welcome. All of that stuff I just wrote is fun to theorize about, but I’m not sure it makes for an enjoyable watch. For a low-budget sci-fi flick from the 1950s, you could do a lot worse. But it isn’t the first film in that genre that I’d recommend.

Sci-Fi In July : The Girl With All the Gifts (2016)

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A young girl sits counting in her cell. Suddenly an alarm sounds and the lights come on. Armed soldiers come calling. Though she can walk she sits down in a wheelchair. The soldiers strap her arms and legs down and her head so she cannot turn it. She is wheeled into a classroom with numerous other children likewise strapped to wheelchairs.

Soldiers look in on the classroom calling the kids names like “freaks” and “abortions.” Their teacher, Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton) is the only adult who is kind to them. In a moment of grace, she touches the girl’s head. Immediately, the soldiers, led by Sergeant Parks (Paddy Considine) come in and chastise Helen for touching a student. He then spits on his hand and pushes it under one of the children’s nose.

Immediately, the kids go feral, writing in their wheelchairs and attempting to bite the soldiers. They are zombies. Or more correctly, they are zombie hybrids. They will attack with fury when they smell humans, but can also talk and think like normal people.

They may also be the key to a cure. The zombies in this film were caused by some sort of fungus that grows inside the brain. These kids were In Utero when the virus first came about (the film occurs some ten years after the beginning of the apocalypse). They absorbed the virus when their mothers got it which may have caused them to be…well not immune as they are definitely hungry for human flesh, but special. The scientists, led by Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close) think this specialness may lead them to a cure.

I feel like I’m getting bogged down in the plot, but really what I’ve just described happens in the first ten minutes or so. But it is such an interesting setup for a zombie movie I wanted to dig into it a bit.

All of that occurs at a well-guarded military base, but just after those events, it is attacked by hundreds of zombies and overcome. Our heroes narrowly escape and the rest of the film finds them traveling into London in hopes of rescue.

That girl I mentioned is named Melanie (Sennia Nanua), she is smart chatty, inquisitive, and kind. In the time we spend with her on the base, she always says hello to the military people even when they are cruel to her. She always asked a lot of questions and was the top student in her class. This both endears her to her capturers and ingratiates them.

The look and feel of the film has a lot in common with the recent television series The Last of Us (the series came out in 2023 but was based on a game from 2014 game – the book this film was based on also came out in 2014 so I’ll let you be the judge of who created this look first). The landscapes are overgrown with vegetation while the city buildings and infrastructure are beginning to collapse. This creates a beautiful yet eery look to everything.

The plot is your basic quest scenario but it is well done. This type of movie often will involve a child but they are usually just there to add a sense of danger. Melanie is something different. Because she is a zombie the other do not sense her as food. She is safe from them. But when she gets hungry she is a force of danger. Yet she is also the human’s only hope. That makes the plot more interesting than your standard zombie fare.

This all worked for me quite well. I dug the the look of the film, the action scenarios, and all of the characters. If you like zombie films I highly recommend this one. It also has a fantastic ending.

Sci-Fi in July: Palm Springs (2020)

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I love Groundhog’s Day-type movies. There is something really interesting about watching characters relive the same day over and over again. Ironic, since when our daily lives feel like that, we want to strike out and do something different.

Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, I think that is what makes these films so interesting. Because the characters are literally stuck on the same day, getting a reset whenever they fall asleep or die, they are free to do whatever they want. Knowing everything will go back to normal the next day, they can do all the things they were too afraid to do in real life.

Palm Springs came out in 2020 when many of us were stuck in lockdown. It felt like every day was the same because we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. It is fun reading reviews of the film when it came out because everyone was feeling like they were stuck in their own time loop.

It does a couple of interesting things with the concept. First, the film is a romantic comedy which I don’t believe has ever been done with this type of film. Second, it brings other people into the time loop with fascinating results.

We suspect something is different from near the start. Niles (Andy Samberg) behaves strangely. He attends a wedding reception in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. He gives an impromptu speech that seems well-rehearsed. He dances to impress a girl, Sarah (Christin Miloti), but his moves incorporate all the other people at the reception in a way that seems impossible.

Of course, he’s been stuck in the time loop for a long time. That’s something else that’s different about this movie. Normally we enter the loop with our main character, here he’s already been inside it for years.

He starts to hook up with Sarah but before they get too far he’s attacked by a strange man named Roy (J.K. Simmons). Niles runs into a cave and even though he shouts for Sarah not to follow, she does anyway.

Now she’s stuck in the time loop. They are stuck together. They get to know each other. They have fun. They do crazy stuff. She tries to kill herself. It is all the same basic time loop movie stuff, but they make it fun.

Roy is also stuck in the loop. Years ago he and Niles connected at the wedding reception, got drunk, had a lot of fun and Niles took him to the cave. Now Roy hates Niles for putting him into the loop.

One of the interesting things about this film is that it delves a little into what a time loop would do to you psychologically. Niles has become ambivalent about everything. Nothing matters because it will all reset tomorrow. At one point Sarah becomes depressed and tries to kill herself. Later, she’ll become angry and she lashes out violently against some men. Niles stops her because he says, that while those people won’t remember what she did to them, she will. Knowing she is capable of such violence will take its toll on her own mind.

But mostly it is a silly little romantic comedy. The jokes don’t always work for me, they are a little too broad and silly for my tastes, but I still laughed quite a bit. What makes it work in a big way is the chemistry between Samberg and Miloti. Christin Miloti is especially great. I haven’t really seen her in anything, but she deserves to be a star. Together they make it work. I wanted to spend all the time with them living through each day, even though it was the same day.

Sci-Fi In July: Paprika (2006)

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I rarely remember my dreams. Sometimes I remember them for just a few seconds as I’m walking downstairs in the middle of the night to use the toilet (for I am of the age where I walk downstairs in the middle of every night to use the toilet) but by the time I get there the dream has been forgotten. Like mist, it fades away no matter how hard I try to capture it.

I’m not one to put much stock into dreams and their significance. Once in a while, I’ll remember a dream and it will seem to have some deeper meaning. During my brief tenure in graduate school, I had a dream about my grandmother, some hot air balloons, and a bunch of turkeys which guided me through a major decision, but mostly I think dreams are just your brain playing Etch-A-Sketch while you’re sleeping.

Paprika is a Japanese animated film from the mind of Satoshi Kon (who also made Perfect Blue). It is a strange, beautiful film that is all about dreams, reality, and our relationship to movies and pop culture.

Taking place in the near future scientists have invented a machine that allows others to view (and even record) people’s dreams. It was built as a psychiatric tool, but it has been stolen by a terrorist. The devices, called DC-Minis, are prototypes and lack restrictions, thus anyone (including terrorists) can enter anyone else using the machine’s dreams.

Our hero is Doctor Atsuko Chiba, the head of the psychiatric department developing the DC-Minis. She’s secretly been using the machine to help people outside the purview of the research facility. When she does this she uses the alias “Paprika.”

One of the people she’s been helping is Detective Toshimi Konakawa who has been having recurring dreams about a murder case he has been unable to solve.

Together (along with Doctor Toratarō Shima the chief of staff for the institute and Doctor Kōsaku Tokita, the childlike inventor of the DC-Mini) they try to solve the mystery of who stole the device.

I think. Honestly, the plot of this film was beyond my grasp. Like a lot of films that deal with dreams, Paprika embodies dream logic to tell its story. Things are constantly changing, morphing before our eyes. Characters jump into painting and movies on a whim.

There are a lot of movie references within the film. Not to specific movies (at least none that I caught) but to genres like mysteries and romances. In doing so the film seems to be toying with the idea of reality versus fiction and how movies and books and stories sometimes seem more real than reality.

Or something. Seriously, I’m not sure what I just watched, but I sure as heck enjoyed watching. The animation is simply gorgeous. And weird. And wild. And trippy.

Go see it.

Sci-Fi in July

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After a month without a theme, I wanted to come in strong. Science Fiction isn’t a genre that I love. Or maybe I should say it is a genre I don’t watch all that often. I love many science fiction films – from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Alien, Jurassic Park to Mad Max Fury Road. But again it isn’t a genre I necessarily turn to regularly.

So, I thought it would be fun to watch some this month (and I just love me some rhyming monthly movie themes).

Sci-fi is a genre that’s hard to define. In a pinch, I’d say it takes place sometime in the future and deals with technology and ideas that we’ve not yet thought of. But that just scratches the surface. The genre often blends with fantasy. What’s that old line about technology becoming so advanced that it is indistinguishable from magic? And stories set on alien planets with alien life are not so different from magical creates in fantasy stories.

Looking at the sci-fi genre on Letterboxd turns up all the Marvel movies and Star Wars and where do you draw that line?

I don’t know. Don’t really care. I’m gonna watch films I think fall into the science fiction category and we’ll leave it at that.

I think this is going to be fun.