Which John Cusack Are You?
It Came From the Milpitas Dump
I have now witnessed the glory that is The Milpitas Monster. I’d first heard of this film as a kid (probably 11 or 12) while watching Creature Features with Bob Wilkins on KTVU, Channel 2. I couldn’t tell you what he’d said about the movie but a still from the movie that Wilkins showed his viewing audience burned itself into my memory. It was an image of the Monster as it climbed (or maybe just menaced) a radio tower. Why that picture stuck in my memory I don’t know. I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t impressed by the monster suit. I think the idea that someone in a neighboring Northern California town had made, not just a monster movie, but a giant monster movie is what made that picture important enough to remember over the decades.
Through the miracle of ebay I now own a VHS copy of The Milpitas Monster. This morning, after getting up at 4:30 in order to assist Nizzibet in getting off to a business breakfast, I popped in the tape, the cat and I schlumped on the couch and let the epic unfold before us.
And what an epic it is. Scary seventies’ fashions. George Keister, the “comic relief” drunk. A gang of almost wholesome ne’erdowells. A hero with little screen time and less personality (nicknamed “the Penguin” for reasons I can only begin to guess). Priscilla, the heroine with less screen presence than the hero. A monster, born of garbage and pollution, that changes in appearance depending on whether it’s represented by stop-motion, a suit or a giant monster hand prop. (And whose roar is ripped off from Rodan. I’m annoyed that it took me twenty minutes to recognize it.) Some fairly decent miniature work. Garbage can stealing. Loud protests. Bob Wilkins and the Odorola! Monster menace at the school dance!
Is The Milpitas Monster any good? Well … No. It is ambitious. More ambitious certainly than most original monster movies playing an the SciFi channel. The monster is visualized (mostly) competently by a variety of special effects including suitmation (man-in-a-monster-suit), stop-motion animation and a giant prop hand (that fairly obviously couldn’t move and therefore required the actress to struggle to . And when you consider that the movie was primarily put together by students at the Milpitas High School … Very cool. It hereby ties with The Horror of Party Beach as the cheesy b-movie I’d most like to remake if I had way too much money and too much time on my hands. Or that I’d like to redo as a comic book if I had any time for such a project.
Until then, sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll draw up a re-imagining of the monster for Kaijuphile. And laugh.
Monster Parade
When Toho revived the Godzilla series in the 80’s they mostly played it safe with the Big G’s adversaries. They were generally either revamps of 1960’s monsters or they were creatures that had somehow evolved out of Godzilla himself. Space Godzilla is such a creature. He is somehow born of Godzilla cells that either Biollante or Mothra left in space that got sucked into a black hole and mutated and … I don’t know, became big and crystaline and kinda boring. I have a hard time remembering what happened in the movie. That’s not a good sign.
King Seesar is an ancient guardian monster who awakes to assist Godzilla in his first battle against Mecha-Godzilla in the 70’s movie, Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla.
The 1990’s Gamera trilogy is my favorite series of giant monster movies. Gamera the fire breathing, flying turtle is reinvented from a “Friend to All Children” to an often ruthless “Guardian of the Earth”. This new Gamera is a bioweapon created by ancient civilization to fight other, less friendly monsters also created by said civilization. In the third movie we discover that our Gamera is the last of many Gameras when a Gamera graveyard is found in the sea of Japan. Dammero is my take on a Gamera that decided to change its destiny.
Fan art of fan art. I liked Tygiras’s big green monkey so much I did a version of him myself.
Yay! Tragedy!
LuvSet mentioned it yesterday and since he doesn’t have comments enabled my response shows up here. Brokeback Mountain. Romantic tragedy. Star crossed lovers who can’t stay away from each other but can never be together. Oh the torment. Oh the sadness. Oh, bleah.
I expect that the movie will be well made and beautifully photographed. I’ve seen most of Ang Lee’s other films. And liked them. Even the Hulk Poodles. Even though they’re all at least a little tragic. I may even get around to seeing it eventually on DVD. Cause Heath Ledger is kinda cute. And the movie will be well made and beautifully photographed. But personally? Big Gay Romantic Tragedy? Sigh. Give me Big Gay Monster movie. Big Gay Action comedy. Big Gay scifi flick. That might get me into the theatre on opening weekend.
The City Hasn’t Shut Down Yet
It’s snowing here in Seattle. Nothing is really sticking where my offices are located but I hear it’s doing so up by my apartment. If it’s still coming down tomorrow I may not be coming in to work. We’ll see.
Thanksgiving
Nizzibet is napping. Not from turkey overindulgence. We haven’t gone anywhere yet. We’ll be going to BigSister’s at about seven. I think she has to work today. She’s doing the cooking which may mean that there won’t actually be any turkey on this turkey day. It will be delicious so I’m not terribly worried.
This weekend is going to be spent getting the last of the books out of their boxes. This won’t result in getting them all up on shelves. We don’t have enough shelves for all the books. Once all the books are available to look at the process begins for getting rid of some of them. I’ll be applying three standards as I chose –
1. Do I love this book?
2. Is it useful?
3. If this book vanished from the world would I care?
The first standard is easy. That covers a lot of the fiction I’ve got. Not that I love all the books that this standard will cover but it eliminates the majority of the books that I had to push myself to finish.
The second standard is a little trickier. The internet provides us with so much information that many of these books are redundant. But the internet requires that I have my computer on. If I need an image for reference I need to either print it out or have a screen in front of me. For information a book is far more portable and accessible than the most sophisticated laptop. And a book will provide me with the unexpected in a way that the internet can’t. I have to search the internet for the information I’m seeking. As a compulsive reader I’ll read whatever is in front of me. So having books on Russian history makes me more likely to read about it simply because it’t there.
The third standard covers those books that I might not love and that might not be all that useful to me but that I’d be sad if they were to disappear. My two volume study of the grasses of North America. Ethnographic studies of Chinese farmers. Some of the bad (but not boring) novels I’ve got. Books that seem to me to serve a purpose whether by providing odd specilized information or by being an story that someone had to tell (that didn’t bore the hell out of me – sorry, a well-told boring story takes second place to a lively tale told by an idiot).
Let the sorting begin!
Google Fails
You’d think that somewhere online there’d be a photo of the Milpitas Monster. I mean, the movie is a no-budget classic. Hell, there are images of Wangmagwi on the net and that’s almost a lost film. There’s a photo from King Kong in Edo on the net that I’d link to if I weren’t feeling so damned lazy right now. And that’s definitely a lost film.
Godzilla vs. the Devil
Part of the fun of doing art for the Kaijuphile site is –
A. I get to draw monsters
B. The illustrations get posted
C. I can experiment and play around and they’ll still get posted.
I don’t know how many of my kaiju illustrations would have been accepted at Epilogue.net because (with one exception that did get rejected) I haven’t submitted them. Since I’m drawing for the fun of it and since neither site pays I give my personal amusement illustrations to Kaijuphile. Epilogue gets illustrations that have been commissioned and have seen (or are expected to see) print. And so far as I can remember all my commissioned illustrations have been accepted at Epilogue. Does this mean that the illustrations’ print world acceptance gives them weight in Epilogue’s judging process? I suspect that this is the case but this is only a suspicion.
And so what? Part of Epilogue’s goal is providing a forum for illustrators build their careers. Hopefully it’s doing that for some people. I’ve certainly seen work there that I’d like to see in print or on my wall.
Anyway … there are four new illustrations up at my Kaijuphile gallery. They’re inspired by the proposed but never produced Godzilla vs. the Devil. Go. Laugh at Satan.
Online at the Home Office
Thanks to Nizzibet’s need to have a Mac online so she can test websites for her clients my home computer has internet access again. Now I can post when I’m barely awake, almost asleep, drunk, bored or trying to kill a couple of hours. Aren’t you all just thrilled?
Projects
My latest monster has been posted at Kaijuphile.com.
I’ve begun work on illustrations for The Black Seal #4. This is still not the Viet Nam issue. Work progresses on that but it’s been over a year since #3 came out so the Publisher decided to put together an new issue from the work that was inventoried for the issue after next. He also asked me to provide the cover illustration. Should be fun.
I’ve also begun working on Oz Squad again. Finally.
