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mst3kproject · 4 years

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The Ship of Monsters

Check me out, I’m being topical! I had another review almost finished for today, but when I saw the news I knew I had to set that aside and find a movie about life on Venus. This one is a ridiculous Mexican film starring Lorena Velazquez from Samson vs the Vampire Women (looking only slightly less like Cher) and one of those amazing cardboard robots you only get in the very worst of late 50’s and early 60’s sci-fi.

An atomic war on the planet Venus has killed off all the males, so an expedition is sent out in search of replacements, consisting of a native Venusian named Gamma, her Uranian navigator Beta, and their robot Tor. After promising the Empress that they will bring back only the most manly of men, they wander the solar system a while collecting creatures with penises before an engine problem forces them to land on Earth. The first human they meet there is Laureano Gomez, a singing cowboy with a well-earned reputation for telling tall tales. One might assume one could predict the rest of the movie from there… but then Beta turns on Gamma and reveals that her true mission all along was to conquer a planet to feed the vampires of Uranus!

I gotta say… I did not see that coming.

The Ship of Monsters is supposed to be a comedy. It’s seldom funny when it’s trying to be, although it mercifully avoids being the kind of desperately unfunny a lot of bad comedies are… possibly this is because it’s in Spanish, and by the time I’ve realized something is stupid there’s another subtitle to distract me. The jokes, such as they are, are pretty standard. Tor the robot was created by an alien race, who were aware of Earth but never bothered exploring it because they thought the inhabitants weren’t very intelligent. Laureano is in the habit of telling ridiculous stories to his drinking buddies, so of course when he claims the Earth is being invaded by space monsters they don’t believe him. That sort of thing. The movie is much funnier when it’s just showing us absurd situations, but to nobody’s surprise, The Ship of Monsters is at its funniest when it’s trying to be serious.

This hilarity comes in many forms, covering just about all the possible bases for a dirt-cheap 1960 sci-fi film. We have spaceship sets made of cardboard, covered with buttons that don’t actually press and levers conveniently placed so people can bump into them during fight scenes. We have Tor, with his tin can body that’s always a little dinged up but never in the same places, giving us clues as to what order the scenes might have been shot in. He also has wiggly spring antennae and makes a little whirring noise every time he moves. We have space babes in silver bathing suits and glittery high heels. Vampire-Beta, sporting plastic fangs that look like they came from the bottom of a cereal box, could be the female counterpart to the guy from Dracula vs Frankenstein, and the puppet used to represent her in flight is nearly as bad as the one from The Devil Bat.

The ‘monsters’ of the title are a bulging-brained Martian prince, a scaly cyclops, a spidery creature with venomous fangs, and the mobile skeleton of what appears to be a *damn worwelf (he tells us that his race has Evolved Beyond Flesh... apparently not Beyond Bones, though). The costumes are all terrible, particularly the warwulf puppet, whose backbone extends into his mouth and who has to be carried around with his feet dangling in any shot that’s not a close-up. It’s nice, though, that a little imagination went into them, and somebody gave a bit of thought to the idea that a monstrous appearance is relative. The Martian tells Beta that he admires her ambition and might even marry her if she weren’t so ugly by his planet’s standards.

At the end, naturally, this alien invasion is defeated by Laureano, his twelve-year-old brother, and a cardboard robot, while Gamma just stands around and screams. With a movie like this I expect nothing less. The denouement contains my favourite intentional joke in the whole thing, in which Gamma stays on Earth with her True Love, and Tor the robot takes his, the Jukebox, back to Venus with him! Tom Servo would have given a speech to congratulate the happy couple, and I can just see him breaking down into happy tears before he got five lines in.

(The wirwalf skeleton is not present at the climactic fight, by the way… no explanation is offered, and I strongly suspect that they broke the puppet trying. I rather enjoy this omission, because it lets me imagine him getting lost or maybe buried by an enterprising dog, and finally finding his way back to the landing site only to learn that they’ve left without him.)

I called Laureano a cowboy but he only has one cow. Her name is Lolobrijida and she is the very first time I have ever seen a movie spur a hero into action by killing his cow. She gets a proper Teenagers from Outer Space death, with her skeleton left behind propped up by metal struts like a dinosaur in a museum!

I also called him a singing cowboy, which he is – there are several songs, including one in which he tries to explain to Gamma and Beta what ‘love’ means. The songs have pleasant but forgettable Mexican pop melodies, and none of the lyrics make a whole lot of sense. Being translated over-literally from Spanish probably didn’t do them any favours (my own Spanish tops out at yo no tengo dinero), but I still can’t imagine that the What Is Love song clarified anything.

Laureano himself comes across as kind of a fool, but he’s not actually a full-on idiot, which is quite important. If he were the kind of one-dimensional ‘comedic nitwit’ embodied in characters like Dropo, or the janitor from Reptilicus, he’d be insufferable. Laureano is no genius, but he’s got personality traits besides being stupid – he cares deeply for his little brother Chuy and for his animals, and he doesn’t treat Gamma and Beta’s appearance as two women for the price of one. Very quickly he decides that Gamma is the one he loves, and he sticks to that, doing his best to let Beta down gently even when she offers to make him a king. He’s also smart enough to trick Beta into dancing with him so he can steal the device she uses to control the rocket and Tor, and to listen to Gamma when she tells him about the various monsters’ weaknesses.

Gamma and Beta, on the other hand, don’t have a lot to them besides the basic fact that Gamma is the Nice One and Beta is Evil. Gamma starts out in the story with a strong sense of duty, and it’s a bit disappointing to see her abandon that because of Tru Luv. I would have liked the ending better if she’d taken Laureano home with her so that the two of them could be the Adam and Eve of the new Venusian race. Meanwhile, Beta shows no sign of any loyalty except to herself and her own ambition. Her original mission, to secure Earth as a blood supply for the Uranians, falls by the wayside as she decides she’s going to conquer and rule the planet herself.

So The Ship of Monsters isn’t exactly a feminist manifesto, but neither is it complete misogynistic garbage like Project Moon Base. The whole premise, after all, rests on a planet of women being able to develop space travel all on their own! This is a fairly surprising plot point, because in many ‘planet of women’ movies like Fire Maidens of Outer Space or Cat Women of the Moon, the ladies need the virile Earth Men to come to them.

There’s also a little bit of actual science peeking out of the cracks. The moment for launch of the rocket from Venus is determined by when ‘the elliptical orbits coincide’. Launch timing is, indeed, a delicate art depending very much on what’s orbiting where. There’s also the moment when, trying to land on Earth, Gamma and Beta worry that the friction, combined with our oxygen-rich atmosphere, will set their ship on fire. This stuff is pretty impressive coming from a time when the moon landing was still nearly a decade away. There are even a couple of scenes in zero gravity that honestly aren’t totally terrible. I mean, I’ve seen better, but I’ve also seen much, much worse.

There’s also one weirdly prescient moment when Laureano, telling one of his silly stories in the pub, describes being surrounded by dinosaurs – only to get a laugh a moment later when he mentions that they had beautiful plumage. I’m not sure whether this is meant to be a joke in that Laureano is exaggerating an actual encounter with an angry bird into something more fearsome (I think we’re to assume that the whole story is totally made up), or whether it’s just supposed to be funny that Laureano thinks dinosaurs had feathers instead of scales. Either way, it’s the equivalent of the moon Fornax in Menace from Outer Space being so reminiscent of Io. There’s no way the writers could have known that, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

The Ship of Monsters is very cheap and very dumb, but it’s good fun for those of us who like crummy old alien invasion movies, and I recommend it to anybody in that demographic. As for actual life on Venus… I feel like a lot of the people getting excited are too young to remember when Bill Clinton told the world that we had totally found life on Mars. Humans have been discovering life on other planets for about two hundred years and every single one of those ‘discoveries’ has turned out to be either a mistake or an outright lie. We have plenty enough to panic about this year without a Venusian invasion.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #the ship of monsters #cows in fridges #60s #tobor is robot spelled backwards

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thebibliomancer · 5 years

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50 More Days of Comics! 24/50: Arak: Son of Thunder Annual #1 (1984)

“ARAK: IN THE LAIR OF THE SERPENT LORD”

Pretty great title.

I am pretty sure I had never heard of this character until I saw this cover! Probably! He might have been in one of the weirder Justice League Unlimited issues. I think in JLU it turns out that the world is hollow and that there’s a fantasy world inside it for some reason? Or maybe that was an episode of Superman?

Anyway, Arak (Son of Thunder) is an interesting sort.

He was a relatively respectful Native American character for his time which meant that he did not have broken speech or stereotypical powers like super-tracking (looking at you nearly every X-Men Native American character).

And he has a pretty bonkers backstory for a guy that was initially a Conan the Barbarian ripoff.

(Roy Thomas explicitly says in the letters column in the back of this issue that he came up with Arak because Conan Properties wouldn’t let him write a Conan novel. So. Y’know. Make of that what it is.)

See, Star-of-Dawn of the Quontauka Native tribe was fleeing from an amorous evil serpent god and was rescued by the thunder god He-No. She married He-No out of gratitude for saving her from an evil horny snake god but wasn’t really in love with him and missed her people so he returned her home.

And then she gave birth to a demigod, Bright-Sky-After-Storm.

Later, in a one-two punch the serpent god attached He-No while a tribe that worshipped evil snakes attacked the Quontauka. While thunder has a type advantage against snakes, He-No sacrificed himself to save his son and send him floating out into the sea where he was out of reach.

Where he was found by Vikings, as ya do.

One of the Vikings raised him and named him Eric, which became Arak due to the young boy’s mispronunciation.

He joins their raids until a sorceress sends a sea serpent after the Vikings. The serpent kills all but Arak who throws a cross like a Castlevania and impales the serpent through the brain.

A nearby monk says that god has delivered them which makes Arak wonder if it was the monk’s god or his own god. And so he sets off to have adventures and becomes a good friend of Charlemagne and gets romantically involved with a paladin called Valda the Iron Maiden.

So basically Arak has an awesome life, give or take being serially orphaned.

Aside from being set in a real historical period, Arak tends to interact with real mythological nonsense rather than Conan’s sword and sorcery type deal.

And that’s the need to know for this annual. Oh, that and he at some point found the flaming sword of Gabriel, which drove the first humans out of Eden and which can command Christian, Jew, and Muslim. That is a thing that exists and that Arak has and that the bad guy wants.

And as this annual starts, Arak and his good pal Satyricus (…… a satyr, obviously) are on their way to the titular lair of the serpent lord to exchange the Sword of Gabriel for boy-prince Alsind and his cousin Sharizad, friends of Arak’s that the Serpent Lord took hostage.

They are briefly waylaid by desert bandits who get the best of Arak by taking Satyricus the Satyr hostage but the Sword of Gabriel is the real sword of evil’s bane and when the bandit leader unveils it, it burns out his eyes.

Between this and Indiana Jones, god stuff is just really user unfriendly, isn’t it?

The bandits flee in terror of the eye melting sword and Arak has to reswaddle the thing.

No easy task as it wants to rocket to heaven and also its on fire.

Through some weird ritual that Arak himself doesn’t quite understand, he… iunno, wipes the fire into the hilt? so he can rewrap the blade.

Satyricus has some misgivings about turning over the Sword of Gabriel to the Serpent Lord who either works for or is the same snake god that tried to boink Arak’s mom and wiped out his tribe. But Arak gotta do what Arak gotta do.

Then a giant, unnatural cyclone comes at them. Satyricus promises to stick to Arak like his shadow but he’s just so small. He gets blown away by the winds. And as the cyclone blasts Arak with sand he swears he’ll find his friend.

But for some reason, being buffeted by winds makes Arak start contemplating his life backwards, thinking of Valda, the paladin. Thinking of the sea serpent who killed the Vikings who adopted him. Thinking of the good times he had raiding and pillaging with them.

And when the winds subside he finds himself in a familiar forest, the very forest of his long lost birthplace!

Tornados are surprisingly good transportation in fiction.

Satyricus finds himself in quite a different locale though. The tornado somehow blew him into a cave. A cave with a Cerberus in it. Aw hell, he’s in Hades!

The dogs don’t bork which means he’s dead and belongs so he passes by them and meets the ferryman Charon who offers Satyricus a ride across the river Styx.

Satryicus has no coin and also doesn’t want to be dead yet. He has so much to live for. “For love, Charon! Love of green fields, sunshine, sweet fruits, and tender women. Aye, and for love of a friend – one I’ve sworn to protect as he searches the world for his homeland!”

And then a dead friend of Satyricus’ pops up and sasses him.

Khiron: “Just like you, Satyricus, to die without a Grecian obol to your name!”

And then he tells Satyricus to just wade across the river. Pssh what? Its going to kill the dead? Yeah right! What even is the point of Charon here? For ghosts afraid to get their feet wet?

Because he does it! Satyricus just wades across. And he’s short!

Satyricus and Khiron catch up before Satyricus decides actually fuck being dead and decides to spring Khiron. The centaur protests he’s too weak to jail break out of Hades and Charon is like come on dude I’mma have to scythe you if you try to leave.

But Satyricus kicks a hole in Charon’s boat, which tips the skeleton into the drink when it capsizes. The satyr steals Charon’s scythe and thus the scyther becomes the one who is scythed.

He stabs Charon.

Actually pretty crafty, Satyricus. Granted, you look sinister af due to cultural biases against short hairy men with goat legs, goatees, and horns but well played.

He also stabs Cerberus. And I understand that it had to be done to escape but it still fills me with sadness. That poor doggo.

Satyricus and Khiron find themselves emerging into the green glades of ancient Greece. And together they vow that the last centaur and the last satyr will drive the barbarians out of the land and restore its glory. I’m not up on my relative time periods so I’m not sure which barbarians were occupying Greece during the time of Charlemagne but its probably a good thing for a satyr and centaur to start a populous movement.

Elsewhere in America perhaps, Arak ponders his situation. The witch-queen Angelica once used magic to show him that some Quontauka were still alive and offered to transport him to them. But since she was quite evil, he didn’t agree. But maybe a similar magic was in that ol’ tornado.

He doesn’t have much time to ponder because the snake tribe is attacking the Quontauka again! He rushes in and starts cutting and scalding people.

He sees a snake tribesman about to split open an old woman’s skull as his mother’s was years ago but this time he has a sword that is on fire! And he throws it at the dude and burns him. The burned guy flees.

To his surprise, Arak discovers that not only is this situation reminiscent to what happened to his mother its actually his actual supposedly dead mother that he saved!

Arak’s grandfather White-Snow Owl arrives and asks him to take up the fire sword as the Quontauka’s warchief and put the fear in all other tribes.

Arak protests that he did not return to lead them against tribes that have no quarrel with them. Besides, his journey isn’t done. The hostages of the serpent lord will die unless he exchanges the sword for them.

Arak: “One of those I must save is but a child – another a young woman!”

White-Snow Owl: “I do not care.”

And then White-Snow Owl demands that Arak give him the sword. Ahh but see. Arak is the name the Vikings gave him. His tribesmen have been calling him their name for him, Bright-Sky-After-Storm. Why would White-Snow Owl know his Viking name?

So Arak stabs his grandfather.

A lot of stabbing in this sword and sorcery.

And it turns out that his grandfather was a snake and also not his grandfather.

It turns out everyone was snakes. So Arak burns it all down.

And finds himself in a Grecian glade where Satyrnicus and Khiron are hanging out.

Satyrnicus is thrilled to see him and wants to tell him how his once-meek goat-legged friend broke out of Hades but Arak has figured out the score.

This is all illusion. A very convincing illusion. One that knows your memories and knows what you want to see. But Arak won’t be fooled.

He stabs Khiron with the sword of Gabriel which apparently only destroys the wicked and false and reveals that the centaur was actually a man-snake and is now also dead. From the stabs.

Satyrnicus is aghast that he beat Hades all by himself only to lead a monster to his nice home.

No, no. You didn’t get a cool victory or get to go home to a nice green glade. You’re still in the sandy wasteland, Arak says.

Poor Satyrnicus doesn’t get to have anything nice like overthrowing Hades. Oh boo.

Arak waves the sword around until the illusion gives up. That’s probably how dispelling illusions works.

And then the titular Lair of the Serpent Lord finally shows its snake head themed entrance, emerging from under the sand only 32 pages into this 40 page story.

The Serpent Lord almost pulls off the aesthetic. He’s green and scaly and has snake men minions and a snake draped around his hands like a boa but he has horns and I’ve never seen a snake with horns.

Anyway, the Serpent Lord cheekily laments that Arak didn’t fall for the temptations of the whirlwind. Then he would have had the hostages and the sword.

Alsind and Sharizad beg Arak not to give the sword of Gabriel to the Serpent Lord but he ignores their pleas and swears on He-No’s name that after the two hostages are released, he’ll throw the sword to the steps of Serpent Lord’s throne.

Since Arak is an honorable sort where his words are his bond and especially vows on his father and all, Serpent Lord agrees.

He releases the hostages and Arak throws the sword.

Satyrnicus suggests that they amscray but Arak says not yet but for his group to cover their eyes.

Arak: “Guard your eyes, and pray to all your several gods – for I suspect a weapon forged in Heaven will not abide for long a demon’s hand.”

And when one of Serpent Lord’s snake dudes goes to bring it to him the sword angrily flares, incinerating all the snake dudes to ash and bone on the spot.

Arak, Satyrnicus, Alsind and Sharizad are protected by Arak’s shaman aura. And the Serpent Lord by his own sorcery. And then the flare dims, that wily ol’ Serpent Lord is running to grab the sword.

So Arak runs and they both grab it at the same time. And wrassle over it .

The Serpent Lord questions Arak’s oath to turn the sword over but Arak points out that he only swore to deliver it to the Serpent Lord’s throne and did not say what he would do after that.

I always sort of wonder what the point of having such a sense of honor that you must abide by your word, even if it was under duress, when you are also willing to wriggle out through dumb baby word games?

I mean, yes, good thinking on Arak’s part to phrase it in an exploitable way but if you’re doing that are you actually an honorable person?

You’ll build a loophole into a promise but god help you if you lie?

Honor is weird.

The Serpent Lord is actually Arak’s match in muscle so they go all over the place tugging the sword until Arak has an idea.

He beseeches the fire spirits which rest within the sword to flee evil’s grasp by abandoning their metal home. And then he just kind of… pulls away with a sword-shaped fire in his hands.

Serpent Lord decides that he can still use the metal of the blade to kill Arak and you’d think that a metal blade would go right through a fire. But guess what. This is angelic fire or something.

Serpent Lord swings his metal sword and it strikes the fire sword and the metal sword melts all over Serpent Lord’s hands.

Which has to be somewhere up there in terms of things that hurt a whole hell of a lot.

And then Arak stabs him.

There’s a lot of stabbing etc etc.

And then Arak tells the sword it can go home and releases it and the fire flies into the sky, going home.

Arak: “So go you forth, mighty sword! Fly upward to the abode of angels – nevermore to be raised anew against the works of man unless a god decrees!”

You’re a cool guy, Arak.

Now, nearly exhausted Arak still has to run because the Serpent Lord was one of those load bearing bosses and his snakehead lair is collapsing.

And he notices tracks of blood leading out into the desert. The Serpent Lord isn’t dead.

Arak decides not to chase after him. As wounded as he is it will be a long time before he can menace other men. And whatever else, he has been forever denied the Sword of Gabriel because it flew home.

And the Serpent Lord’s anger at being thwarted is a problem for another day.

I actually quite enjoyed this.

As mentioned, Arak is a pretty cool dude. With cool friends (although I kept wanting to call Satyrnicus Phil because it’d be easier to type). And this was a pretty cool adventure.

Arak: Son of Thunder apparently only got 50 issues and this annual and a scant few other appearances. And then recentlyish reappared having been mind controlled into being Braniac’s minion in Convergence. Which… is a choice.

But this issue was good.

Tangentially, it very much felt like you could get a dnd module out of this.

#50 More Days of Comics!#Arak Son of Thunder #Arak #good job arak

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