Weirdhouse Cinema: Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the absurd sci-fi fantasy film “Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy,” a 1981 Yugoslav-Czech co-production full of intergalactic aliens and surreal monstrosities. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and
today we are going to be talking about the nineteen
eighty one science fiction film Visitors from the Arcana Galaxy. Rob.
I just finished watching this one moments before we sat
down to record here, and wow, this is in our
It's got to be on the top ten list of

(00:37):
weirdest movies we have ever done on the show.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yeah, this one was a real pleasure. This one's a
real treat. This one's worth hunting down. And I have
to say also thanks to listener Eric for recommending this
one to us. He pointed out some months ago that
the excellent restoration label Deaf Crocodile was going to be
putting this one out, and I looked at the cover art,
I looked at some of the stills from the film,

(01:00):
and I was like, Okay, I think I need to
buy this one. So I put in the pre order,
set it aside during Halloween with the intention of coming
back to it in November, and here we are.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
Yes, thank you for the recommendation. So Rob, this was
your pick. I really didn't know anything at all about
it going in, except you handed the disc off to
me said here's what we're watching. I put it in,
and wow, this is the movie where you really do
not know where this is going. Some of the weird
movies we talk about have a weird texture to them,
but they might be kind of formulaic in terms of

(01:33):
plot structure. A lot of the you know, horror movies
we look at or like that you can kind of
tell where they're going to go. This one, I had
no idea where it was going, and it felt at
times like a child, you know, trying to make up
a story as they go along, adding in just bizarre
details like I really didn't expect there was going to
be a major subplot where the main character of this

(01:55):
movie's girlfriend is turned into a metalic cube. And I
also did not expect, especially given how some earlier parts
of the movie feel very broad and whimsical and almost childlikes,
like they might be intended for like a younger audience.
I really did not expect that later in this movie

(02:17):
there would just be a gory monster rampage carried out
by like the Axis Bold as Love cover version of
like a cross between Alf and Mickey Mouse.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah, mumu the monster. It's gonna be fun to talk about. Yeah,
this is a move. It's like so many films, like
you're saying, they're on the tracks of genre, they're on
the tracks of formula, and this one, with this film,
it may seem at first like it's going to be
on the tracks, but no, the train lifts off the
tracks and then you're flying off to who knows where,

(02:52):
And we'll get into some of the reasons for that,
like the different elements and inspirations that came together the
alchemy of this picture. So this movie was a nineteen
eighty one co production of Yugoslav and Czechoslovakian cinema involving
four different studios. Zagreb Film which is now in Croatia,

(03:13):
Jadrun Film also now in Croatia, Kenny Montografi Zagreb which
is also now in Croatia, and then film Ski Studio Barrandov,
now in the Czech Republic.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
An international co production.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
An international co production of two countries that no longer
exist in the form they existed in at the time
of this film's release. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. In particular.

Speaker 3 (03:39):
I don't know exactly where this was shot, but I
would guess it was along the Croatian coastline because the
movie has a much more I don't know, it's just
kind of scenic Mediterranean feel than I was expecting as well.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, it's my understanding that this was filmed in Croatia,
and yeah, you do have that texture of these like
Oatian vacation towns, and they touch on that more than once.
It's an important part of the background setting for the
whole picture. And I was reading some of the background
material for this particular film. The Deaf Crocodile release has

(04:17):
a nice little booklet with information about the picture and
the filmmakers by film professor Jennifer Lynde Barker, and she
points out that a lot of the locations used from
this film might look familiar to people who watch Game
of Thrones because a lot of scenes from Game of
Thrones were filmed in the exact same locations.

Speaker 3 (04:35):
Oh yeah, that would make sense.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
I think King's Landing. I'm not sure I'm remembering that correctly,
but I think the King's Landing scenes were filmed in Croatia.
But I could have that mixed around in my head,
and it's another place in the Game of Thrones TV
show that was filmed in Croatia.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
You absolutely on Game of Thrones. I think we'll see
multiple locations that are, you know, coastal areas on the Adriatic.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
Yeah, all right, Well, my elevator pitch for this movie is,
if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss
will physically manifest, move into your flat and turn your
girlfriend into a cube.

Speaker 3 (05:08):
I think that's dead on that. Yeah, that's exactly how
I describe it. You know, I haven't had as much
time to process this one as I sometimes do when
we watch these movies, because I just now finished watching it.
But I was trying to think, so, this is a
story about a writer and a dreamer, a creative person.
Of course, a lot of writers end up writing stories
that are about writing. It's kind of it's a very

(05:30):
tempting subject if you know, to write about what you
are doing right now, which is writing, if you're writing.
But I was wondering to what extent the themes of this
movie are supposed to be about writing specifically, or if
it's incidental that the main character is a sort of
dreamy science fiction storyteller, and really it's supposed to be

(05:53):
more about relationships or just obsession or whatever. The main
character often describes his own problem not so much in
direct terms of like creativity or writing, but as an obsession.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think multiple reads on it
are of course valid, but yeah, it is fascinating that
it is. It's not alone in being a picture about
sort of the conflict between a creative obsession and the
responsibilities of real life, and just sort of the texture
and nature of real life versus fantasy and what happens

(06:29):
when these two worlds come into conflict. But as we'll discuss,
like one of the interesting things about Robert, the main
character in this, the writer, is he doesn't seem to
get a lot of writing accomplished. There's this strong sense
that the book is nowhere near any state of completion,
and it, like physically manifests later on, is a blank book.

(06:50):
So it's almost really more about the conflict between the
inner world of imagination and the outer world, you know,
something that's been tackled in some and he works, including
the never Ending Story. I mean, that's part of the
whole scenario there, except with this whole childhood versus adult
sort of scenario cobbled into it as well.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
That's a very good point. I think I was gonna
say something right along those lines that the writing in
this movie is there's never any indication that it involves
language at all. Like you don't see him crafting sentences
or paragraphs or like working on his his fiction. It's
purely about coming up with ideas. And you can tell

(07:32):
it because he likes to talk them into a handheld
tape recorder. He's got like a cassette based voice memo thing,
and so it and this is I think we will
all recognize. In fact, I think most writers will recognize
some part of themselves that is like this, that likes
to just come up with ideas for things.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Yeah, And part of the whole conflict in the story too,
is that when he dreams up things, when there are
things that he wants, he has this peculiar paranormal ability
to manifest them in reality, which that's kind of makes one,
I guess, a crappy writer in the end, because you
don't have to write it down right, because it's already
so you're already making it real through some supernatural ability.

(08:16):
And I think you could compare that to sort of
like the pure idea dreamscape of creative endeavor. Like you know,
you can set around and create whole worlds in your head,
and you know that can be the end of it,
and there's nothing wrong with that. You don't have to,
you know, to bring your rich inner life, you know,
into a literary creation. You don't have to share it

(08:37):
with the world. You don't have to market it and
get a price tag slapped on it and so forth
and try and fill out some sort of you know,
a capitalist dream of what you should be. But but,
but but Robert in the film, like he still wants
to be a writer, and he still has this this
aspiration that that is what he's going to be in
reality as well.

Speaker 3 (08:58):
Yeah, but it's all like to level dreamy, dream based.
It's all just the pure imagination point. And that is
an interesting comment on writing, because I think it's very
much the case, at least in my opinion, that almost
always part of the magic of good writing arises from
the conflict between like your initial imagine imagination of a

(09:19):
story and then the process of putting that into language
and getting it on the page, which fights back against
your original imagination and makes you change things, often for
the better.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
Yeah, all right, well we'll continue this thread as we
discussed the movie further here, but let's go ahead and
here a little bit of audio from the film. I
could not find a video clip of like an original
trailer for the film, so we're gonna hear just a
little bit from the Deaf Crocodile Restoration trailer. So just

(09:50):
a little bit of this JJ if you would planet.

Speaker 3 (10:10):
Erstigli.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
All right, well, if you want to watch Visitors from
the Arcana Galaxy before continuing on with this episode. Currently,
the main way to see it is to buy the
excellent restoration from Deaf Crocodile. You can look them up
at Deaf Crocodile dot com, but there the disc is
also sold through various other online retailers like Vinegar Syndrome

(10:51):
and so forth, wherever you can get it. I recommend
picking it up if this is the sort of film
that interests you. As far as I know, it's not
available like streaming wise anywhere else right now, but a
lot of these releases often wind up like that later on,
so I don't keep an eye open for it just
in case, But def Crocodile's put off the likes of
films like The Sun of the Stars, Sampo and Delta

(11:14):
Space Mission. Their Blu ray releases look awesome, and this
one in particular has a number of cool extras on it,
which we'll get into. Any Atlanta locals out there, you
should be advised that Videodrome does have a copy. I
checked with them, so they do have a copy of
this movie for rent.

Speaker 3 (11:30):
But the first one to get there gets it, that's right.

Speaker 2 (11:32):
And then you gotta wait. Tell them you know how
it works. You know a video rent works. If you don't,
just ask them, go in and ask them how does
this work?

Speaker 3 (11:39):
They'll tell you. Two film geeks enter, one film geek leaves. Yes.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
All right, let's get into the people behind this film.
Let's start right at the top with the director and
one of two writers on this Dusan Vukotic born nineteen
twenty seven died nineteen ninety eight born in what is
now Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to Jennifer Lynne Barker in
the excellent booklet that came with the Deaf Crocodile release,

(12:05):
he started off as a political and satirical cartoonist in
the nineteen forties, but then became involved in film during
the fifties, right as animation was beginning to thrive in
Croatia for the first time, so he was one of
the early innovators there. In addition to animated shorts, he
also did advertisements for Jardin Film before founding Zagreb Film

(12:27):
Studio his animation where it continued through the nineteen sixties.
And I have to stress too, this disc is also
awesome the Deaf Crocodile release in that it has a
number of his animated shorts included in excellent quality and
these were really fun to check out as well to see, well,
what was his animated work like before he turned to

(12:48):
live action.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
I would say this is a live action film where
the set pieces in costumes and makeup effects and all
that are very reminist scent of animation. Somehow, there are
not really animated elements. I mean, I guess there's sort
of like some laser effects on the screen, but there's
not any straight animation. It's all. It's all live to film,

(13:11):
but it does kind of look like a cartoon similar
to I'm trying to think of another movie we've done
that was like, this Return to Oz kind of has
this quality.

Speaker 2 (13:19):
Yeah, this kind of sense that even though it is
live action, there is a basic animation absurdity to things.
And I feel like you also see you see this
element in other filmmakers as well, like Tim Burton, I
think is an example of this. Like many of Tim
Burton's live action films, they still have that kind of

(13:40):
animated cartoon energy in them.

Speaker 3 (13:43):
There, but it's also just there are certain visual qualities
that seem similar to animation to me, like a lot
of bold lines and costume designs that just feel drawn
as opposed to put together out of cloth, you know.

Speaker 2 (13:58):
Yeah, Well, he started doing live action stuff, I believe
in the nineteen eighties, and like through the nineteen eighties,
did a mix of animation and live action. He was
also a professor and film theorist. According to Barker, he
also co founded the second oldest animation film festival in
the world, currently known as anomy Fest Zagreb. His animation

(14:21):
style on its own in these shorts that are included
on this disc are wonderful. They're absurd, They're full of
abstract shapes and possessed of a perky energy. But also
like a genuine comedy like these are not like crazy
experimental Film Board of Canada sort of fair where it's
not to say that you know that all Film Board

(14:41):
of Canada animation shorts are the same, but you know
it's not like super serious stuff. It's about, obviously about
making people laugh. And I feel like you see this
kind of energy reflected in some of the retro animation
projects you've seen in recent decades, such as the Pixar
short Day and Night from twenty ten, the videos from

(15:02):
the Fallout games. Also the MCU Loki series has a
little video about the time variance authority that I mean,
I have no idea if they were inspired by Vukotic,
but I feel like there's a lot of comparisons to
be made here between the two works. Barker also describes
his animation style as being bouncy, and the animation is

(15:26):
certainly bouncy. But he was a big success with these.
The nineteen sixty one short Surrogat won the Academy Award
for Short Subjects Cartoons the following year in nineteen sixty two.
This is one about a guy who goes to the beach.
He's kind of like, I guess if you were a
real person who would be kind of like a rotunda fella.
But everything's made out of abstract shapes, so he's kind

(15:48):
of a triangle. And he gets there to the beach
and he starts blowing up things like he blows up
a float, but then he's blowing up things like a
table and food, and then he blows up a female
to hang out with him, and the first one he
doesn't like, so he deflates her, and then he blows
up another one. But then it just escalates from there

(16:09):
and just gets ridiculous.

Speaker 3 (16:10):
Okay, is she also a triangle?

Speaker 2 (16:13):
She's very Yeah, they're all everybody's very geometric. This one
is available. You can find it on YouTube. If you
search for surro got s u r O g At
you'll find the shorts. It's pretty fun. So Barker points
out that Vukatak and his colleagues were initially influenced by
Western animation like Looney Tunes. She mentions this specifically, but

(16:34):
they were also influenced by Czech animation and they steadily
developed their own styles and then as far as this
film goes, Barker cites several key influences. So, first of all,
international sci fi and horror films of the sixties and seventies,
which I think we see that here. Like I think
she mentions Children of the Damned as having an influence.

(16:57):
Can't help but compare it to other sort of practical
affects monsters of the nineteen eighties, like the Thing, but
also he was influenced by nineteen sixties camp by Check,
new wave absurdity, by magical realism. And then also just
in sort of the visual texture of the film especially,
there's this sense of like the banal, everyday world versus

(17:20):
the colorful, explosive world of fantasy. It's pointed out that
we see Robert he's almost always wearing like really drab tones.
Most of the settings have kind of a drab, not
I wouldn't say cheerless, but a very lived in kind
of feel like it's comfortable, but it is every day,
whereas the world of his imagination is like glowing lights

(17:44):
and strange textures and so forth.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yes, a theme obviously that he wanted to hit over
and over in this movie is just the fantastical versus
the mundane, sometimes literally like the fantastic fighting the mundane. Yes.

Speaker 2 (18:00):
Now, the other writer on the piece is Milos Maccorik,
who lived nineteen twenty six through two thousand and two,
a check writer who wrote, I believe mostly children's books,
but also screenplays, comics and so forth. Now getting into

(18:21):
the cast playing Robert, we have Zarko Potoznak who lived
nineteen forty six through twenty twenty one. As always, my
apologies if I screw up any of these names here,
but he was a Croatian actor of stage, screen and TV.
He has a small part in the nineteen seventy six
movie The Rat Savior, credited as participant in the Rat Party.

(18:45):
This is a movie that you and I've been interested
in for a while, but if memory serves, it's hard
to find right now.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
Yeah, I haven't seen it, but it's on the list
due to its premise, which has something to do with
the man discovering I think he can communicate with like
a culture of sentient rats.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
Yeah. So the actor here, I think this. I think
this is his most well known film, both internationally and
in Croatian sentiment and so forth. But I have to
say he's very enjoyable as this kind of bumbling head
in the clouds. Would be sci fi writer with this

(19:22):
amazing supernatural gift. It's quite a fun and funny performance,
but you also you also feel for him, you know,
like you can't help it but sympathize with this character.

Speaker 3 (19:33):
I have no idea why I think this, truly, I
don't know what was bringing this to mind, but I
kept seeing him in scenes in the movie as a
lost extra member of the crew of the Nostromo from Alien.
He just looked like a hapless mechanic who would be
working alongside you know, Harry Dean Stanton in Alien and

(19:55):
like wander off and get cocooned. And I don't know
why it brought to and maybe it's like his clothes
kind of seemed sort of like a sci fi jumpsuit
from the Nostromo. I really don't know what it was,
but that just kept coming to mind.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
He's very mild mannered, and there's a sense that he's
just doing his job. He's doing the bare minimum. He
would rather not be here. He's not going to put
a lot of effort into things that have to do
with this world, because there is another world inside his
head and that's where most of his focus is.

Speaker 3 (20:25):
Yeah, I do think there's an interesting tension in his performance,
which is the fact that the whole movie is about
his creativity. Like he the whole premise is that he
is willing troublesome circumstances into reality with his imagination, and
yet he seems almost completely hapless. You know, he has

(20:45):
extremely little will or volition, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:50):
Over things in this world or the imagined world as
we'll see.

Speaker 3 (20:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:54):
Now, Robert has a girlfriend, and this is Beebe, played
by Lucy Zolova born nineteen fifty two, checkborn actress whose
credits include nineteen seventy five's Darling, Are We a Good Match?
And How To Drown Mister Marassek The Lawyer. These are
not films I'm familiar with that I don't, but but
she's very good in this so I think it's a

(21:15):
solid performance as his loving but almost done with it girlfriend.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
Yes, she has very little patience for his initial even
for his writing career, when he's just like talking into
a tape recorder about his ideas for novels. Much less
so when Aliens starts showing up and turning her into
a cube and she's an interesting foil to his Like
I was just saying, very a drift and non agentic personality.

(21:45):
She is very like forceful and willful and has a
strong personality and is the one who's like pushing back
against all of this like fantastical stuff from the Arcanic
Galaxy invading their world.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
So these are like our two main human real world characters.
But we also have one of Robert's friends who has
a minor but fun role. This is photo Tony Photo Tony.

Speaker 3 (22:12):
Yeah, so I think, wait, his name's just Tony, right,
but he's a photographer, so his door is a partner.
The door says photo Tony. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
Yeah. So my wife watched part of the film with me,
and she got to see she's a photographer. So I
was like, you got to come see there's a photographer
in this.

Speaker 3 (22:30):
Movie, and oh yeah, what was her rating?

Speaker 2 (22:34):
She had some thoughts about it. Well, she was like,
he's not gonna get a good shot trying to shoot
through a window at night and so forth. But I
was like, you know, I don't think photo Tony is
necessarily at the top of his game here either. He's
just more ambitious than Robert.

Speaker 3 (22:49):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, photo Tony seems strange in that his
ambition seems to be to break through from like tourism
photography into journalism. Is that how you understood it?

Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yes, but he wants to take that shortcut to the
top of journalism by getting that one picture that's going
to change the world, namely of aliens visiting the Earth.

Speaker 3 (23:10):
Exactly. Yes, so I think he hangs out around this
beach resort taking photos of people for money, but he
thinks if he can just snap a picture of an alien,
then he'll be the most famous photo journalist in the world. Yes.

Speaker 2 (23:24):
So, Photo Tony is played by Lubashaw Samardzik who lived
nineteen thirty six through twenty seventeen. Actually a pretty famous
Serbian actor I read, also a director and a producer.
He was very popular during the nineteen sixties in various films.
He was a popular TV actor in the nineteen eighties,

(23:45):
and he directed the internationally acclaimed two thousand film Skyhook.
So it's a fun supporting role, but it's definitely one
of these cases where you can see how this guy
might go on to have a great deal of success.
Like if this were a traditional genre film, this would
be our hero. Photo Tony would be the one to
stand up and save the girl and so forth.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
Yeah, in the same way that Biba is contrasted to
Robert because she has more will and agency. I would
say that photo Tony also has more concrete will and
agency than Robert, like he's got a goal. Well you know, actually, though,
I guess Robert does have a goal, but it's just
not a concrete goal. He just wants to live in
his imagination. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
Also worth noting that Lubashaw was on a twenty nineteen
Serbian stamp. I included an image of it here for you.
Joe looks great, great looking stamp, but I would add
just about anything from this movie belongs on a stamp
in any country.

Speaker 3 (24:43):
He looks like Kirk Douglas.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we see him like earlier in life
and then later in life. He does have kind of
a Kirk Douglas kind of a vibe, all right. This
movie notably has a female android in it by the
name of Andre. If you've seen any like covers for
this film, any posters, or certainly any footage, you've probably
seen a glimpse of this entity. And this entity is

(25:08):
played by the actor Cassinia Prohaska born nineteen fifty three,
Croatian born actress who also pops up in some American films.
She played a mummy. I don't know if it's the Mummy,
but she played a mummy in the I guess kind of.
I don't know. It's infamous. It's definitely said to be bad.
But the nineteen eighty five film Transylvania six five thousand,

(25:32):
a movie that's mostly known for being a film project
funded by Dow Chemical because Dow Chemical had money in
Yugoslavia that they could not get out, and so they
instead said, well, let's make a movie. Then let's funnel
those funds into a film project, and Transylvania six five
thousand was that film project that has a pretty good cast,

(25:53):
but nothing. I've never heard anything nice said about it.

Speaker 3 (25:57):
Have you seen it?

Speaker 2 (25:58):
I have not seen it, of you.

Speaker 3 (26:00):
I tried to watch it one time and did not
get to the end. It has a very low energy,
improvised sketch comedy feel.

Speaker 2 (26:12):
Oh yeah, which is a shame because again, fun cast,
it's got Let's see who's an Ed Begley Junior?

Speaker 3 (26:19):
Is that Jeff Goldblum? I think Jeff Goldblum.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
Gina Davis, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (26:24):
Well, I don't know. Maybe it gets really good in
the second half. I remember, I remember something about the
first few minutes kind of drew me in. I was like, oh, okay,
yeah sure, but then it just it got incredibly tedious.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
Reviews I was looking at seemed to indicate it does
not get good. But if listeners have different thoughts, right in,
we'd love to hear from you. Prohaska also plays Marlene
Dietrich and Barry Levinson's Bugsy in nineteen ninety one. I
have not seen Bugsy, but I assume this is like
maybe a small background kind.

Speaker 3 (26:54):
Of a role.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
So anyway, hard to comment too much on her acting
ability this because his performance is again an android, a
female android, but it is a memorable presence. So I'm
just gonna go ahead and say she's great in it.

Speaker 3 (27:08):
Yeah, totally. Well, she doesn't have to do much acting.
She just like says a few lines in a robot voice.
The costume and the makeup do do more of the work.
Thinking about this this character design, I was wondering, is
the bored Queen based on this character here? I don't know.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
Oh yeah, I mean, yeah, you look at this, this character,
and yeah, it makes you think of like the board Queen.
I thought of cinnabytes a bit as well, because there
is this mixture of sexuality and like dominant female power,
but on the other hand, like clearly an uncanny inhuman
quality to the being as well.

Speaker 3 (27:46):
Yeah, I mean it's a cool character design, and I
think she looks great. She looks creepy, which is funny
because a lot of the characters are like commenting on
how beautiful she is. Yes, and of course she was
to make of that.

Speaker 2 (28:00):
She is frequently accompanied by two Space children who also
have like gold space jumpsuits on bright blonde hair that
is cut in kind of like a medieval night haircut,
you know, kind of a medieval bowl cut going on there.

Speaker 3 (28:16):
Yeah, that's kind of gray and Nigel tough mel hair.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
Yeah, these children, one of them is played by a
child actor by the name of Jasminka Alec. But this
is one of those cases where this is our only credit,
so presumably she was in nothing else. But the other one, Targo,
we'll mention, was played by Renee Bittora Jack born nineteen

(28:40):
seventy two, Croatian actor of note, seen here in his
very first role, so he's worked rather extensively in Croatian
and Bosnian projects. I believe he was one of the
stars of two thousand and one's No Man's Land, a
film about the Bosnian War that won an Oscar for
Best Foreign Language Film in two thousand and two.

Speaker 3 (28:59):
I would say so about the kids, it's hard to
comment much on their performance because they're not doing a
lot of human style acting. They're just like standing there
and saying weird lines.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
Yeah, and like you said that, with the Android, the
makeup is key. And I did note that the makeup
artist on this, or one of the two makeup artists,
is Yuri Kurrich born nineteen thirty two, a Czech makeup
artist who also worked on nineteen seventy eighth Beauty and
the Beast, which we previously discussed on Weird House.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
No.

Speaker 2 (29:30):
One had some great Avian Beast makeup, Yes, totally, so
I'm assuming he had a hand in the Android effects here.
But there's also someone else. Evo Strongmuler born nineteen fifty
four is also credited on makeup, and he worked on
some big productions later on as well, including the two
thousand dooon mini series Alien Versus Predator in two thousand
and four and The Chronicles of Narnia Prince Caspian in

(29:52):
two thousand and eight as a prosthetic makeup artist.

Speaker 3 (29:56):
Hmmm, oh wait, but you didn't mention Faarab, did you. Oh?

Speaker 2 (30:01):
No, I didn't mention fat Vampire. That's another one that
he worked on, a film that we haven't seen, but
we've mentioned before because it's come up in connections on
particularly check films. This is like the vampire car movie, right.

Speaker 3 (30:14):
Yeah. I don't know if there's a good way to
watch this one. Last time I checked, I didn't find
one but it and it may not be good at all.
Some of the reviews are pretty middling, but the premise
is it's a vampire car, so I kind of have
to see it even if it's bad.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
Now we've mentioned that this movie has a monster in it.
The monster's name is Mumu, and we'll spend a fair
amount of time discussing him. But the really fun thing
here is that the monster designer here, the person who
created Mumu and helped bring him to life, is none
other than Yons funk Meyer born nineteen thirty four. So
this is the check Stop motion animation master himself.

Speaker 3 (30:52):
I think while I was out on parental leave last year,
you and Seth covered a Yan's funk Meyer film, didn't you.

Speaker 2 (31:00):
We did. We talked about nineteen eighty eight's Alice, So
if you want to hear more about spunk Meyer, go
back and listen to that episode, because we spend a
lot of time talking about the man in his work
and how influential he was and still is in the
world of stop motion animation. But I'll sum it all
up by stressing that he's just a master of the
medium and if he has anything to do with the

(31:21):
look of a film, you're probably.

Speaker 3 (31:24):
In good hands.

Speaker 2 (31:24):
And indeed, Mumu is just insane.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
It's amazing. Yeah, it is one of the weirdest things
I've ever seen on film.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
Yeah, I should stress like spunk Meyers is part of
huge part of that world of like strange stop motion animation,
perhaps creepy stop motion animation that some of you might
not be that familiar with, but it's out there, it's
waiting for you. And then finally, the music for this
film is really good too. I really enjoyed it. It

(31:55):
is a score by a Croatian born composer by the
name of Thomas of Simovic who lived nineteen thirty one
through twenty fourteen. He worked on multiple films and shorts
for Fukatk, including sixty one's The Substitute, seventy three's Man
the Polluter, and seventy seven's Operation Stadium. Other films of

(32:15):
note include sixty seven's The Fourth Companion and sixty eight
So I Have Two Mothers and Two Fathers.

Speaker 3 (32:21):
I agree with your assessment. Really good music in this one.

Speaker 2 (32:24):
Yeah. It's full of like cascading synth and all the
sort of sci fi motifs you'd expect from a movie
like this. And I'm happy to say that it is available.
It was put out by the Croatian label Fox and
his Friends, and it's actually available to stream in all
the usual places. Just look up Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy.

Speaker 3 (32:43):
I don't know if this makes any sense, but the
music that plays over the opening credits. I was listening
with headphones while I watched the movie, and the music
created a sensation, like a kind of bubble of heat
expanding through the inside of my cranium. Just soft, strange,
enveloping sonic texture, a very strong mood. Really really good.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's this kind of I mean today
we would would think of it as this kind of
like retro electronic sound, and I guess at the time
it was maybe slightly retro but also sounded like the future.
And it still sounds like the future as far as
I'm concerned.

Speaker 3 (33:21):
Also, I love the visuals that went with it. In
the opening credits, there's this nice mix of concrete and
abstract imagery. So like, while that music is playing, you
see something abstract that looks like these blooming flowers of
blue paint, but represented on what looks like an ultrasound display. Ye,
And then there are also these slow pans over physical objects.

(33:44):
One thing looks like the bolts around the glass face
plate of an EVA helmet. And then you just see
you know, space imagery, like these blue rivers flowing through
space into a green sun, and droplets that look like
the you know, the bits of splatter flying out of
a lava lake. But that's like going just passing between
the stars.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
Yeah, yeah, I mean this is this is a film
that portrays space as being a place of color and
wonder and mystery. It's not a dark void of death
and in emptiness.

Speaker 3 (34:16):
And so maybe we should get right into the plot then.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're already here. Let's keep going.

Speaker 3 (34:21):
Okay, So we begin with some narration after we see
you know space and the credits. The narrator says, one
of the rare populated planets in the cold, uninviting universe
is the small planet Tugador. Not the most elegant sounding
planet name I've ever heard, but Tugador located in the
depths of the Arkonic Galaxy. Its inhabitants look a lot

(34:43):
like humans, but their abilities are almost godlike. Their spaceships
move at such speed that they can travel and explore
even the most remote galaxies. It was one of those
journeys that Targo and Ulu embarked on, followed by Andra,
and the whole time this narration is going on, we're
watching stars flashing in space, and then we cut to

(35:05):
a totally different scene. A voice mimo recorder with like
a cassette tape in it, held in a man's hand.
He's talking into the microphone and the narration continues. The
inhabitants of Tugador had perfect maps of space. They knew
all of the other inhabited planets. And now we see
on the screen that the man speaking, Robert, is wearing

(35:28):
what appears to be a space helmet, and he goes
on talking, he says, and Earth, a planet revolving around
a great shining star, has peaked their interest since the
dawn of time. Andra, the she Robot, Targo, and Ulu
are now approaching the surface of this unknown and mysterious planet.

(35:48):
And then suddenly this is interrupted when a woman's hand
just like wraps on the faceplate of the space helmet,
and a woman's voice says, Robert, your coffee is ready,
and so we're not in space at all. Robert is
just a regular guy in his apartment. He is sitting
at his desk narrating his own science fiction story into

(36:09):
a voice recorder, and his office. In his office, we
see all these like books on shelves, presumably a lot
of science fiction books, kind of gadgets and sci fi
toys and gizmos, posters scattered all around of NASA and
you know, the moon landings and things like that. And
the woman who was wrapping on his face plate is

(36:30):
his girlfriend, Biba, who clearly has very little patience for
his writing or his astronomical obsessions.

Speaker 2 (36:38):
It's a great saying because yeah, the whole like writing
environment is very convincing and cozy, and there's nothing, Yeah,
there's nothing too weird about it, but yeah, his insistence
on setting there, dictating his notes while wearing the space
helmet really drives on this comic understanding that yeah, he's
maybe not getting that much done and it's more about

(37:00):
shutting himself off from the rest of the world and
living in fantasy.

Speaker 3 (37:04):
Yeah, yeah, she says, clearly annoyed. She says, are you
gonna sit around all day with this bucket on your head?
And then the narrator the narration goes on. Robert says
time didn't matter for the three Space visitors. They manage
their time like we handle water faucets. And then Biba
is like, we don't handle water fasces, we turn them.

Speaker 2 (37:27):
Like Robert, that's not even good writing.

Speaker 3 (37:29):
But like I was saying earlier, the writing as as
writing does not seem to be the point. Robert is
not in love with language. He is not a wordsmith.
He is an ideas.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
Guy, absolutely, So it's more like if he could write,
then it would balance things out. But it's all it's
all like trapped in there, right.

Speaker 3 (37:49):
Yeah, But we see Robert has a very frustrated life
because he wants to be just spending his days wrapped
up in I guess talking this story into his tape recorder.
But Biba does not like him spending his time that way.
She gets annoyed with him. Also, his neighbors bother him,
Like his neighbors come over and start having conflict. So

(38:10):
his neighbor is Photo Tony and photo Tony's mother's dog, Vicky,
keeps causing problems and they're trying to get Robert to
sort this out for some reason. It is a cute dog,
by the way, But they bring the dog over and
they put it on Robert's desk and it peas on
his manuscript.

Speaker 2 (38:26):
At first, I thought Robert was maybe like the super
or something, but I think it's just like the supposed
to give us an idea of the close knit community
of this particular apartment building.

Speaker 3 (38:35):
Yeah, yeah, for some reason, they want Robert to solve
their problems. But I don't know why they'd be going to.
Robert displays throughout the film no ability whatsoever to mediate
or solve other people's problems. That not that I can remember.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
He's just so checked out. He seems neutral, like yeah,
I guess so, yeah, like Robert doesn't have a bone
to pick, let him solve this problem.

Speaker 3 (38:56):
That's a good point. Yes, it's like he's a disinterested party. Yeah,
so he just wants time to write, but he can
never have a moment's piece. No one respects his ambitions.
And also, this was really funny. He just keeps trying
to put the space helmet back on while everybody's bothering him.
But so we see that Biba is actually jealous of

(39:19):
Robert's characters. She's literally like, if you care about this
she robot Andra so much, why don't you marry her
instead of me? And we'll come back to that theme. Yeah,
So they go to visit Biba's family. I think it,
did you understand it the same way that Biba's sister
is getting married, and so her whole family is there

(39:40):
in the house trying to get ready for the wedding. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:43):
Yeah, there's a big wedding coming up. And I believe
the individual that Robert ends up talking to next is
the fiance the groom.

Speaker 3 (39:53):
Yes, yeah, so yeah, Robert goes along with Biba to
the house she's meeting with her family. Her family, he
seems to look down on Robert. They're like, I don't
know what you're doing with this guy, and Robert he's
just there to he obviously he wants to talk to
the fiance of the sister about science fiction novels. They're like, oh, boy,

(40:14):
you know, did you read this one. It's about a
monster from space. And so this other guy is like, look,
you can't call it Visitors from the Arcanic Galaxy. That's
what Robert wants to call his novel. He says, you've
got to call it the monster from our cana Galaxy.
And Robert says, there's no monster in the story. But
the other guy's like, look, you're not writing Hansel and Gretel. Here.
He explains that you've got to have a monster, and

(40:35):
he talks about another sci fi novel that has a
monster that bites off people's heads. Hey, yeah, sounds good.
So the quote is, he says, you gotta a quote.
You have to scare people. That's the secret to success.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
I love how he brings up Hansel and Gretel as
if Hansel and Gretel does not have horrifying elements to
it and it's purest telling.

Speaker 3 (40:55):
I think it's interesting that he's giving Robert these very
mercenary kind of pieces of advice about what the reading
public wants. About like what makes a book marketable. But
Robert doesn't seem to have written anything yet. It's not
like he has a manuscript that's been rejected by a
bunch of publishers. It's like he's he's like, I'm going
to write a novel right.

Speaker 2 (41:17):
In fact, it's so unformed that he basically is like, oh, yeah, okay,
I can add a monster. It really doesn't wrack anything
at all because nothing has been written yet.

Speaker 3 (41:27):
Apparently that's right. So Robert ultimately decides his monster should
be a toy belonging to the children in the story.
And he also briefly says, you know what, I'm gonna
cut out Targo, the boy from space or else. That'll
just be too many characters. So four characters would be
too many if he as the monster, He's got to
get rid of Targo. And so he goes back home,

(41:49):
gets back to writing, and now the tone of the
story is a little bit different. He talks into his
tape recorder and he says Andra and Ulu, visitors with
power from the Arcanic Galaxy, are a menace to human life,
and they are approaching the Earth and they're not alone.
The Monster of the Arcana galaxy is with them? Are
we ready for that encounter? But while he's talking, we

(42:12):
see out the window behind Robert and he lives in
an apartment building that's like right on the water. It's
on the coast looking out over I guess the Adriatic.
We see a bright object fall from the sky and
land on an island across the water. Oh and by
the way, yes, he is wearing his space helmet in
this scene. But he goes to the kitchen to get

(42:33):
a glass of milk, when suddenly his voice memo recorder
starts talking back to him. It's a woman's voice, very
tiney and robotic, saying, Robert, we have arrived. This is Andra,
come find us on the island, and he gets very,
very freaked out. He checks the tape to see if
their voices were recorded, but there's only the hiss of static.

(42:55):
The tape is blank after he stopped talking into it,
so he doesn't know what to think. But Robert borrows
a boat from photo Tony photo Tony's got a boat.
Photo Tony's doing okay, and he motors out to the
island in photo Tony's boat. He docks, climbs ashore and
he goes wandering through the forest and then whoa, suddenly

(43:16):
they are here. So he like follows a flashing blue
light through the courtyard of this building. I think the
building is part of a like a tourist resort area
on the island. And then he goes through the trees
and then over this rocky landscape and down a ravine
until he meets the three alien beings. And when he
meets them, one of the two children starts trying to

(43:38):
zap him with eye lasers.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
I love the eye lasers. They're they're quite destructive, as
we'll see later on.

Speaker 3 (43:46):
That's Targo who tries to eye laser him, but Andress
stops him. So again, they introduce themselves. There, Andra, Ulu
and Targo and Rob. How would you describe exactly what
you what they look like. They're wearing like gold suits,
and I guess you already mentioned they're like the children
having the long white hair, metal band hair that Andra

(44:08):
kind of has these gold ridges along her large pale head.
I don't know what else there is to say. I mean,
they look strange.

Speaker 2 (44:18):
Yeah, their gold space suits could also be robot bodies,
especially in the case of Andre And Yeah, she has
this big head like a like a like a heightened
forehead situation going on, which is of course used a
lot of times, especially with you know, aliens of like
fifties and sixties science fiction. But here it is it's

(44:39):
done so well. Like it doesn't it doesn't look fake
it it's just it just looks exceptional. I loved it.

Speaker 3 (44:47):
Yeah. Is there a Missus Exeter maybe maybe right here?

Speaker 2 (44:52):
And they must have I mean, this makeup job must
have been really taxed the artist behind it, because she
has these tubes as well that come out of the
side of her head and go into her jawline. Yeah,
And granted she's not doing a lot of like emoting
with her face, but she is speaking lines and like
you never see a shot where it looks like anything's

(45:14):
cracking or coming apart. It looks great every time he's
on the screen.

Speaker 3 (45:18):
When we first meet the kids, Targo says to Robert,
you wanted to remove me from the story, but you
were unsuccessful. There's something so threatening about that.

Speaker 2 (45:28):
Yeah, already we see that he doesn't have control over
what he's creating. He doesn't have control over his imagination.
He tried to prune it a little bit, and his
imagined world rejected the.

Speaker 3 (45:41):
Change, that's right, and Targo, seemingly upset by this, he
throws out his toy, a little toy he has with him,
which grows to a giant size. And this is moumoo
the monster. But at this moment we only get a glimpse,
so maybe we won't fully describe it yet.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
Yeah, at this point we can just tell that it's
roughly by peedle, has kind of a snout or a
trunk going on. But you don't really get much more
than that.

Speaker 3 (46:05):
Right, So Robert is chased by the monster. He runs away.
Then he's chased by what looks like a glowing blue
Christmas ornament that floats in the air. It's like a
sky blue ball with these greebles on it. He gets
in the boat, he tries to drive away. He wields
it I think a beer bottle and self defense against

(46:25):
the thing, and the ship just keeps chasing him. He
jumps out of the boat somehow, I don't know. Somehow
he ends up back back home.

Speaker 2 (46:35):
Yeah, yeah, rather freaked out by the whole encounter.

Speaker 3 (46:38):
Right, So the next day Robert goes to speak to
a professor. It's just a character, just called the professor
about whether he is having a psychotic episode. He's like, yeah,
here's what I saw, doc. And the doctor is like,
do you use drugs? And he says no, and he's like, oh, well,
it seems all right then. But he explains a bit
about his personal history. Robert says that sadly, his mother

(47:02):
died when he was born, but when he was a baby,
he wanted milk, and he psychically made his father grow
breasts so that his dad could breastfeed him. That's the story.

Speaker 2 (47:14):
You might ask, well, how would he remember that, Well,
he probably he would not remember that. I think if
you go back to some of our stuff to blow
your mind episodes on this. But luckily the movie depicts
this entire scene. We see his father grow breast and
then breastfeed the young baby Robert. And already, you know,

(47:35):
there's been plenty of weird stuff already in the film,
but this was a scene that really lets you know like, Okay,
this movie is going to continue to take some sharp
turns that you were not anticipating.

Speaker 3 (47:45):
Yes, psychic powers making yeah, yeah, So the professor listens
to this story kind of nods, He's like, oh yeah, yeah,
that's called tellergy, he said. The professor says, this concept
is not yet proven, but it's under intense study in
parapsycholic and it's a condition where a person of intense
willpower can make their desires manifest as physical reality. And

(48:08):
Robert's like, oh cool. And the professor is like, do
you have a problem or an obsession that is bothering you?
And of course Robert does. It's the book he wants
to write. But you know, he's like, it's always on
his mind, but he's being bothered all the time. He's
not really able to write it. And while they're sitting there,
Robert psychically manifests a book on the professor's desk. It

(48:29):
just like appears out of thin air. And the Professor's like, oh,
that's interesting. You just made a book appear. So he's like, okay,
I'm going to write you a prescription for chilling out.
You need to relax, and Robert says, okay. This is
a good scene. And then after this, Robert he picks
up the book that he psychically manifested in the desk

(48:51):
and he takes it to his sci fi buddy from earlier,
who I think he's working at a bookstore, and when
going into the store, the guy is talking to another
customer and he's like, ah, yes, it's an alien beast
from another galaxy. It you know, it eats everyone. And
Robert interrupts him to be like, hey, I just made
this book appear. Do you have another copy of it?

(49:13):
I think, is what he asks, and the guy's like, no,
this book says it's by you, and Robert says that's right.
And then the owner of the shop, I think, comes
in and looks at the book and says, all the
pages are blank. This isn't a book, you know, come
back when when it's got words in it. So we

(49:36):
get some a little more seeing into Robert's mundane day
to day life. He's doing a pretty crummy job at work.
His day job is he's a desk clerk at like
a hotel or resort on the coast here, and he
gets in trouble with his boss for having a beard.
His boss is like, shave that thing off.

Speaker 2 (49:55):
Yeah, it doesn't look like a great work environment. His
boss does seem like a bit of a meanie, but
Robert's could have clearly not putting a lot.

Speaker 3 (50:04):
Of effort into the whole endeavor yeah, it is bad
on every end. I think his boss would be mean
even if he was a good employee. But he's not
really trying. No. But later that night, the voice contacts
Robert again through the recorder, and Andrew is there. She
tells him that she and the space aliens, all three

(50:24):
of them, belong to him because he created them, and
he's got to come back to the island. Oh but
before he goes back to the island, it shows more
relationship problems between Robert and Biba. Her family is mad
at him for acting strangely and being a bad boyfriend.
But Robert knows how to fix it. He's going to
take Biba out to the island and show her that

(50:45):
his alien robot characters have physically manifested and come to life,
which is the perfect way to save any relationship that's
on the rocks. That's right, totally the right move. So
they go out, they explore the island. They see the
giant glowing blue Christmas ornament going inside a cave. And
you know what, I'm surprised here because what I expected
to happen would be that he could see them and

(51:06):
she couldn't. You know, that seems like what would happen
in another movie, but no, she immediately sees it too,
and so it's like totally physically externally real for her
as well. And she sees Andra and Targo and Ulu
and they are having quote an anatomy class where they
have captured a guard from the resort on the island

(51:26):
and they are dissecting him and removing his heart.

Speaker 2 (51:30):
Yes, which then this scene I have to stress it
is not anywhere near as graphic as that may sound,
but it is like one hundred percent weirder than we
made it sound too, because it's like floating and they've
like bloodlessly removed his heart and he's and also the
guard is seemingly like a wake during the whole process.
He's just kind of like, uh, and it's wonderful.

Speaker 3 (51:53):
So Robert then sees the blue sphere floating around and
he's like, I'm gonna touch it. I want to touch
the blue sphere. So he reaches out, he touches it,
and this destroys it. It like it explodes and disappears.
And then Andra is furious with him. She says, you know,
this is our ship. How are we going to get
home now? But she has a solution. She says, in

(52:15):
situations like this, the only thing to do is to
go back in time. So Andra opens up her torso
and shows us her mechanical guts and then winds back
the clock to the time before Robert touched the ship,
and this time she interrupts him before he does it.

Speaker 2 (52:31):
This insight into the inner workings of Android are very
well done as well. It's varies glowing and mechanical, and
in a later scene we see I believe Robert like
look through from the other side, which reminded me specifically
of a scene in Tobor the Great.

Speaker 3 (52:49):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (52:50):
Yeah, so I wonder if that was inspiration or if
this was like maybe a common trope of sort of
old robot movies that inspired it.

Speaker 3 (52:57):
Wow, if this movie was inspired by Towbor, that that
would be something. Why not that I would mean two
degrees of separation from the Christmas Carol sponsored by the
Magnavox Corporation to visitors from the Arcanic Galaxy.

Speaker 2 (53:14):
Now, this is a lot for Biba to take in here, Yes,
and I think we should not be shocked to see
that she freaks out a little bit.

Speaker 3 (53:22):
That's right, She gets scared and tries to run away
Andre says she cannot escape, and then zaps her with
some kind of energy beam which transforms Biba into a cube.
It like shrinks her into a metallic cube, first, a
larger I don't know, like maybe foot cube, metallic cube
with a hand sticking out of it, and then they

(53:42):
shrink her into an even smaller cube that can fit
into the palm of Robert's hand.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
Yes, I think one of the children initially zaps her,
and then Andre has to finish it, and she says,
so you can't do that yet. Yeah, you haven't worked
out the art.

Speaker 3 (53:56):
Your skill at shrinking people into metallic cubes is not
yet perfected. This is another classic way to heal a
struggling relationship. One of you at least has to temporarily
transform into a cube. That's right. And the aliens start
talking to Robert. They're like, are you a mammal? And
he says yeah, and they're like gross. And the children

(54:17):
marvel at the fact of how primitive an undeveloped Robert
is and the paradox that he created them. They are
the much more advanced beings with all this technology and
intelligence and everything, and they were created by this being
that is far less complex than they are, which is
kind of an interesting theme. Like Targo, as this character

(54:40):
from a sci fi planet, knows about ways that he
could have been imagined that Robert doesn't know about. So
Targo is like, if our creator had been more advanced,
we could have had para lasers in our eyes. They
don't specify how para lasers are better or more advanced
than the regular eye lasers Targo already has, but that's
to be understood. And so the kids are kind of like,

(55:04):
they're kind of bummed out. They're like, if only Robert
had been from a more advanced planet, then we could
have been imagined with more advanced capabilities of our own.

Speaker 2 (55:15):
Yeah, and Targo, I think, still has a grudge about
the whole attempted pruning from the Fantastic narrative.

Speaker 3 (55:22):
That's right, Targo never really gets over it. He's got
a chip on his shoulder the whole time.

Speaker 2 (55:27):
Yeah, you tried to cut me from the story, and
I refuse to go.

Speaker 3 (55:32):
But Andra is more interested in what Robert has imagined
for their future. She's like, what's in the next chapter
of the story. And Robert doesn't really have an answer
for that, because you know, he's not very he's not
really into the details the plot mechanics. He's a big
ideas guy. Yeah. Oh. But then in one of the
funniest scenes in the movie, even though it does involve

(55:53):
corporal punishment of children, not usually funny, but funny in
this case, Andre disciplines the children after they eye laser
her fingers off. So I think Targo shoots her fingers
off with beams of light from his eyes, and then
she whips the children with a lightsaber.

Speaker 2 (56:11):
Yeah, she grows the missing finger back and then yeah,
one of her fingers extends into a lightsaber and you're like, oh,
what's gonna happen next? Just she starts spanking the knuckles,
lashing the knuckles of the children and they're like oh wow, which, again,
normally maybe wouldn't be funny, but in this scene is hilarious.

Speaker 3 (56:28):
Yeah. Great. So back on land, Robert has to explain
to Biba's sister that she has been transformed into a cube,
and Beba's sister she doesn't like. She gets mad, she
knocks the cube into the water and then he's like,
oh no, she's down to the water. So they have
to get a diver to find the cube.

Speaker 2 (56:46):
They taste great because Beba's sister too, is like, she
doesn't outright say I think he killed my sister, but
it's heavily implied, like what on earth has happened here?
But then he keeps going on about this cube, and
she's like, okay, I get saw listened to.

Speaker 3 (57:00):
Him, yes, and then but well, actually, Biba's got multiple sisters,
so Biba's I think her older sister is the one
who's skeptical. Biba's little sister seems to believe it, but
she's like, Okay, we got to cut the cube open
to get her out, but Robert has to explain no, no, no,
she's not in the cube. She is the cube, so
you can't cut it. Eventually, the cube spontaneously transforms back

(57:21):
into Beiba, proving him right.

Speaker 2 (57:23):
Yeah, and I think the children or Andre had said
that it was only temporary, so it's well timed before
anyone could freak out any longer, or anyone could be
charged with murder.

Speaker 3 (57:34):
If you thought things were weird so far, it is
going to get so much stranger on the island. There's
a sequence of events where like a tourist child no no, no,
the child of the cook in the resort there finds
the severed Andra finger, so like the severed alien robot finger,
and takes it into the restaurant kitchen at the resort

(57:57):
and is like, Dad, look a finger. And he's holding
it right there next to a meat grinder, and all
these tourists come into the kitchen, including photo Tony who's
standing there with his camera, and they're all watching as
they're holding this finger over the meat grinder. The finger
falls in, it gets ground up with the other meat,
which they do. They do explain what the meat is

(58:18):
gonna be used for. It's gonna be to make stuffed peppers,
and then the finger gets ground into a metallic powder.
And there is a large man with a red beard
who just keeps appearing and sort of like issuing authoritative statements.
I don't know who this guy is or where he
comes from. The big guy with the beard, he just
looks at the bowl of ground meat. He says, that's

(58:41):
not a human finger.

Speaker 2 (58:43):
This guy, I think must I think he's the town crackpot.
I think we glimpse him earlier in the sci fi bookstore.
I'm not sure. Oh, and I think the actor who
plays him, who I looked him up in it. He's
rather tall. I think he plays Frankenstein in the Transylvania
film we were talking about earlier.

Speaker 3 (59:01):
Oh that's funny.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
Yeah, but it's like he's the town crackpot and now
it is his time to shine. And I love how
people start listening to him.

Speaker 3 (59:09):
Yeah. Wait a minute, when you say he played he
plays Victor Frankenstein replays the creature.

Speaker 2 (59:14):
Oh, well, you know I Frankenstein the monster.

Speaker 3 (59:17):
Yes, Oh okay, I'm not trying to be pedantic. I
just didn't know for sure.

Speaker 2 (59:22):
Is Victor Frankenstein in They had Bagley Junior translating idea.

Speaker 3 (59:26):
I don't remember.

Speaker 2 (59:28):
There is some sort of Frankenstein's monster in it, and
I believe this is the gentleman who also plays it.

Speaker 3 (59:34):
So everybody on this island now it's full of tourists.
They all been hanging out of the beach and I
guess they're bored and they want to see aliens. Now
They're like, all right, that wasn't a human finger, so
there must be aliens on the island. So they start
like running all around trying to find the aliens. There
are dudes in wetsuits with spear guns who say they're
gonna hunt the aliens, and they go to the cave

(59:54):
where the aliens are hanging out and shoot spear guns
at them, and there's like a laser battle where the
aliens are shooting you know, cyclops I beams at them
and Ulu Zapp's one of the spear gun men on
the butt with a laser.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
Oh. This seems great because it's like they're trying to
make this aquatic landing. It's like the Battle of the
the Alien Cave, and the eye beams are just causing
enormous explosions in the water, which I guess it's due
to like like the rapid thermal heating.

Speaker 3 (01:00:22):
Of the of the water.

Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
That probably, Yeah, the effect is explosives in the water.

Speaker 3 (01:00:28):
But it's great.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
It's like wow, it's like this is this is it.
It's like the children are artillery in a battle.

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
It's wonderful. Yeah, And so this causes tourists from the
beach now they know the aliens are in the caves,
so like hundreds of tourists flood into the caves to
find the aliens. And I don't even know where this
comes from, a bunch of them start yelling and they're
like come out and meet us, and they decide to
get naked to prove to the aliens they are harmless.

(01:00:56):
So a bunch of the tourists just like take all
their clothes off, except they've still got shoes on, and
they're running around in the cave naked but with shoes.
And then the big guy with the beard is there
and he's like, if you see them, don't make any
sudden moves. Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:01:10):
They then say something about just smile, just smile and
look peaceful or something.

Speaker 3 (01:01:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:16):
I love this. Barker in her notes points out that
it's like this inversion of the Frankenstein scenario where the
villagers instead of grabbing pitchforks and going up there and like,
let's get him. Though I guess we do see that
initially with the first phase of the assault, but here
with the villagers, it's more of like, no, let's just
take all our clothes off so they know that we're

(01:01:37):
just soft and harmless. Yeah, and we don't wish them
any harm, though we are still rapidly invading their space.

Speaker 3 (01:01:44):
Yeah, maximum disarmament of just getting completely naked. Yeah, But
they go looking around in the caves, they don't find him.
It's like where are they? It turns out the aliens
have moved into Robert's apartment. So he comes. Yeah, Robert
comes home and he finds Andra operating her own hand
as a magical vacuum cleaner on the floors and she's

(01:02:04):
like vacuuming. He drops his groceries when he sees her,
and her vacuum cleaner sucks up objects as large as
an apple and a baguette.

Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
Yeah, some nice stop motion work here, and yeah, I
love that her arm is extended into a vacuum cleaner.
And when she's done with it, like it glows and
then shrinks back down to a normal hand again.

Speaker 3 (01:02:24):
So he says he's hungry, and she offers to cook
for him. She's like, you know, what do you want?
And he says, you know what, I would like a
steak Pomfrey and a salad. And so she makes him
a steak, Pomfrey and a salad out of her this
like weird magnet in her guts. But it's tiny, it's
like a little tiny plate. It's one bite of each thing.

(01:02:45):
He says, it pills like in Santa versus the Martians.
That's right. He says that it's the best beef steak
he's ever had, but portions are kind of small, and
she's like, no, no, no, you don't need any more
than this. Oh, and then it just Andrew starts demanding
that Robert touch her. She's like, touch me, and he
wants to, but he's very afraid. And then Targo interrupts

(01:03:09):
by he comes into the room, the kid, and he
has his little monster toy with him, Mumu, and he
like makes it turn into a big monster and sends
it after Robert. And so for a moment it's menacing,
but Andrew shows him how to defend himself by pressing
a button on this little remote control.

Speaker 2 (01:03:27):
Now we only get a really a quick look at
the full size Mumou here, but already we can see
that this is an incredible creation. I have to say,
Mumu is unlike anything I've ever seen before in a
monster film. The basic concept I think does remind me
a bit of what we talked about in Terror Vision,
which of course came later, the idea that you wanted

(01:03:49):
to create a practical effects monster that was at once
incredibly terrifying if the context was right, but also looked
really dumb. So Mumu's an absurd monstrosity with parts of
him seem to be He seems to be cobbled together
from oversized and misplaced bits of human anatomy, Like a
lot of him, Like he seems to have sort of

(01:04:11):
wing like appendages or features that that seem to be
big human ears that are part of his body.

Speaker 3 (01:04:18):
Yeah, but they're also kind of they're kind of mouse
ears at a distance, but they're also a curled up
appendage making it look like a rams horn.

Speaker 2 (01:04:28):
Yeah. Oh, oh, you're talking about on his head, Yeah,
he does.

Speaker 3 (01:04:31):
I'm sorry, I'm sorry I misheard you.

Speaker 2 (01:04:33):
Then no, yeah, because on his head he has these
things that are like ears or horns but are also
like tentacles. But then on his torso it's like he
has giant human ear lows as part of him.

Speaker 3 (01:04:46):
Yeah, so you're right, it's really weird, like the outer
fleshy part of a of a human ear on as
as wings. Almost.

Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
Yeah, and yeah, we'll see a lot more from Mumu.
And there's never any way did scene with move and
move's terrific. It's because it's either you're getting like a
bumbling rubber monster suit kind of an effect in all
the best ways and it's you know, it certainly allows
you to lean into the comedy and the absurdity, but
also he's like legitimately terrifying and scenes as well, especially

(01:05:17):
given the context of the film and the sort of
thematic ambiguity of the film, where at least for me anyway,
watching it as someone who's you know, not there as
part of its original time period and original release audience, like,
I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know
what to expect of this movie, and therefore the monster's
a little more dangerous because of it.

Speaker 3 (01:05:36):
Yeah, you know what, I would actually compare it to though,
This design is one hundred times weirder and more interesting
and better. But it has a similar dual nature and
appearance to Trumpy from Pod People.

Speaker 2 (01:05:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, similar morphology. This is like the nightmare version,
like the extra nightmare version of it. And of course
later on we see stop motion and puppetry effects added
into the overall moomoo effect and it just works wonderfully.

Speaker 3 (01:06:16):
All right. So, after this next thing that happens is
Biba comes home to Robert's apartment only to catch Robert
caressing Andra, the alien android, and Biba is very angry
about this. Robert tries to defend himself by saying, but Biba,
every part of her body makes a different beeping noise
when you touch it. She is perfection. And Biba is

(01:06:37):
not swayed by this, like this doesn't make her less angry.

Speaker 2 (01:06:41):
Yeah, this scene is great because on the one hand,
this is very much a trope, you know, the whole.
You know, one character catches the other two in the
act and there's a confrontation. But it's all the more
ridiculous here. It's not even the first time this has
been done with a human in a robot being caught
by another human, or the last time. But it's just
it has such absurdity to it, like the whole, like

(01:07:03):
like her body makes a different beba you know, wherever
you touch it, and Biba's like, I bet it dies.

Speaker 3 (01:07:08):
Yeah. Yeah, So Biba gets very angry. She directs a
lot of her anger at Andra. She calls her an
erotic bucket of bolts and compares her to a laundry machine.
And then at one point, Andra shocks Biba with blue
light to like, I don't know, I guess in reaction
to her touching her, and Biba then begs Robert to

(01:07:32):
send them back to the Arcana galaxy. She says, make
them go away forever. If She's like, if you love me,
make them disappear. And he tries. He you know, he
cares about Biba, so he does want to do that.
He tries to make them disappear, but he is unable to.
He doesn't know how to get rid of them. Mentally,
They're just stuck here now. So Biba storms out and somehow,

(01:07:54):
I think, does Targo put the Moomu doll in EBA's purse?
Is that what happens?

Speaker 2 (01:08:02):
Yeah, he does that, mean spirited little scamp. He puts
that Moomu doll right into her purse.

Speaker 3 (01:08:08):
And so she goes back to her family's house, where
I think she was coming to get Robert to go
to her sister's wedding. So the wedding celebration is going on.
I don't know if it's like a rehearsal dinner the
night before or if it's the wedding itself. I don't know.
There are a bunch of people at the house, gathered
for a big meal. She goes back to the house,
takes the Mumoo doll with her and Unfortunately, it transforms

(01:08:31):
back at her family's house into its full size mode
and just it just goes wild. It starts attacking people.
Somebody cuts off it's like weird snout snake tongue thing
anteater tongue, and it sprays green blood all over everybody,
ruins the wedding. There is this giant scene that goes

(01:08:52):
on forever of Mumu, just like attacking the wedding and
ruining the feast and like shooting weird tentacles everywhere and
maybe being defeated, like oh, Dad gets it, like shoots
the monster and then it falls down, but then it
gets back up. And then the professor is there at
the wedding for some reason, and he's like, you are
witnesses to the first ever visitor from another galaxy. And

(01:09:14):
he goes and tries to touch the thing. No this
he later goes and tries to touch it after he
decides instead that it's a collective hallucination, and it bites
his hand off. It twists the grandpa's head off. This
other grandpa is playing accordion wedding music the entire time.
It like attacks some family member with this puff of

(01:09:34):
green gash and then at the end, the monster's alf
trunk turns into a flame thrower and is just like
torching everything, and it spits out a glowing hot fork
into a slice of cake and the cake hisses, which
is a nice touch.

Speaker 2 (01:09:50):
This is a lot to try and handle, I realize,
especially if you haven't if you haven't seen the film
and you're just hearing all this, because it's like, on
one hand, like the flamethrower is terrifying. It's a lot
of these fire effects more day, more nowadays than ever.
I'm just like, oh my god, it's just terrifying. It's
real flame. This is not a computer effect. The head

(01:10:11):
ripping off, and I think a leg gets ripped off
as well. These are not bloody scenes. It's more of
like a surrealistic, like absurd dismembering where he pulls people apart,
like their dolls. Like when he pulls the head off
and he throws it lands in the punch bowl, and
then there in the poet punch bowl, the head is

(01:10:31):
bobbing around and still speaking.

Speaker 3 (01:10:34):
Yeah, it keeps talking. Yeah. And the effect they did
on that is great. There's a cartoonishness, kind of non
reality to it. And Robert arrives just in time to
save Biba by pressing the button on the remote to
make the monster disappear.

Speaker 2 (01:10:49):
Oh wait, before the monster disappears, I also have to
mention this is pure synchronicity. But the monster also manifests
a belly mouth and nipple eyes.

Speaker 3 (01:10:59):
Yes, catch, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:11:01):
Which we just finished talking about on our core stuff
to blow your mind episodes. But yes, swank Meyer didn't
hold back. This monster Mumu is just a buffet of
just absurd monstrosity.

Speaker 3 (01:11:14):
So Robert goes back and complains to Andra. He's like,
this monster from your planet attacked Biba's family's wedding guests,
and Andre says, you can't be mad at a toy.
She's like weirdly unsympathetic at first, but then she says,
you know what, we can go back in time and
fix it. So she rewinds the clock on reality goes

(01:11:34):
back to before Biba walked in on them earlier, and
so now Biba comes into the apartment and does not
find Robert caressing Andra, but instead she finds the blue
ball floating around the apartment, the alien spaceship, and from
here Andra Targo Ulu Mumu, and Robert all fly away

(01:11:55):
together in the spaceship into space to go back to
the Arcanic galaxy. And then there's an interesting twist in space.
He's like sitting there sort of at a desk, just
floating in space. It's like their spaceship doesn't have really
like a metal interior hull. It's just like they're floating
through the stars and he's sitting at his desk and

(01:12:16):
Andra comes up to him and says, your coffee's on
the table, which is what Biba said to him at
the very beginning of the movie when interrupting his writing
and not letting him concentrate. So it kind of makes
you wonder that in a way, he's like, oh, have
I been freed from all of these distractions now? Can
I just like dream and imagine forever because I'm floating

(01:12:38):
off to this other galaxy with my alien friends. Maybe
not really, maybe they're just going to keep interrupting him.

Speaker 2 (01:12:44):
Now. This is also a callback to when Andre pours
in coffee to go with his meal. I don't know
if we mentioned this or not, but she pours coffee
out of her fingertip and then and then pours cream
out of the other fingertip. She's just like a swim
this army knife of gadgets and features.

Speaker 3 (01:13:03):
I wonder what you made of the ending, rob Is
it a more straightforward, sentimental, happy ending where Robert is
finally getting to live the life of the imagination now
that the people are back on earth unharmed, Like you know,
they wound back the clock so the monster didn't actually
hurt anybody. Everybody's okay, and now he just gets to
you know, dream and imagine forever. Or is it a

(01:13:25):
more satirical thing where it's kind of like Robert's problems
are not solved.

Speaker 2 (01:13:30):
Yeah, I guess it's kind of both, right, because yeah,
I mean it comes back to that confrontation earlier, like
where Baba walks in and there's the you know, a
big argument and you know, this is like like the
final straw of your fantasy versus your reality. You have
to choose, and of course he's not really able to

(01:13:52):
muster enough will to choose, and it leads to this
whole catastrophic set of events with Mumu the monster rampaging
and killing people. But then they solve it by just
turning back the clock and removing that point of confrontation
by just going ahead and removing any choice from him,

(01:14:12):
and so he just gets whisked away into that world
of fantasy. But at the same time he seems happy.
I guess he's happy, And I mean an argument could
be made that everyone off else is better off without him,
especially if he's just gonna manifest rampaging monsters if left
to his own designs.

Speaker 3 (01:14:29):
I don't know if it's consciously getting at this, but
I wonder if another thing is, well, these are the
creatures that he is imagining, so in some way he
is kind of responsible for what they do. So I
wonder if the whole thing of her now saying you know, Robert,
your coffee is on the table and interrupting him while
he's trying to dream on the ship is a way

(01:14:51):
of showing that he's like creating the situations where he
is constantly being interrupted to sort of like prevent himself
from ever having to follow through on the full creative work.
You know, I think we all know creative people, or
probably in some sense creative people know a part of
yourself that's like this, where like you can you know

(01:15:12):
if you fear that you're not going to be able
to create the thing you want to create in the
way that you want to create it, you might sometimes
subconsciously put obstacles in your own path that kind of
obviate that that problem, like that prevent you from ever
failing on your own terms.

Speaker 2 (01:15:30):
Honestly, Yeah, I mean, especially if you like you have
you haven't sort of embraced the reality that that any
creative endeavor is going to kind of have those two phases,
right or more or certainly more than one phase. You're
gonna have that initial phase of sort of free form creativity.
But then you have to make the stuff work. You
have to you have to to turn it into language,
you have to turn it into cinema, you have to

(01:15:51):
break it down into a script, et cetera. And a
lot of times you are going to lose stuff and
you're gonna have to, Like, the dream is not going
to come willingly into reality, you know, coming back to
the whole idea of reality and fantasy budding heads. And
you know, Robert I guess is just fundamentally unable to

(01:16:12):
deal with this transference. You know, he's not able to
muster the will to control the fantasy or to like
control its possible entry into reality in either a fantastic
sense or a realistic sense, like writing the book.

Speaker 3 (01:16:27):
How much of it do you think he ever actually
did write. We see some of a manuscript at the beginning,
like with the dog peas on some pages. At another
part we see him wad up some pages and throw
them in the trash. So he's writing something, but I
never get the feeling that he's getting very far.

Speaker 2 (01:16:43):
I'm assuming he has a bunch of notes, like sort
of D and D setting notes about characters and factions
and planets, though again not more than four characters, because
that's plenty. And then he probably has like five to
ten pages that he is just constantly rewriting and tinkering with,
but never getting much much further than five or ten pages.

Speaker 3 (01:17:04):
Oh my god, this dude's drawing maps, you know what
I mean. Yeah, he's drawing maps.

Speaker 2 (01:17:09):
Yeah, Trugidour that's the planet, right, Trugador is fully mapped,
all the continents everything.

Speaker 3 (01:17:15):
All right? Should we call it there? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:17:17):
We should go and call it here. We could keep
talking about this movie. Yeah, it's a great one. Highly
recommend it. Check it out wherever you can get it
rented at video. Drone by it from deaf crocodile. Just
see it if you can. Just a reminder that Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast with
core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you want to

(01:17:39):
see a list of all the movies we've covered on
Weird House Cinema, well, you can go to letterboxed dot com.
This's l E T T E r bo x D
dot com. We are Weird House on there, and we
have a list of all the movies we've covered over
the years, sometimes a glimpse ahead at what's coming up next.
I also blog about these films at some immutomusic dot com.
Don't always put a lot on those blog posts, but
on this one I'll make sure to throw some of

(01:18:00):
those short films and also some of the music so
you can check those out as well, and also some
links to where you can obtain the picture.

Speaker 3 (01:18:07):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello.
You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:18:27):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.