MICROBUDGET MASSACRE 13:
A Look at Recent Indy Sci-Fi

BACTERIUM is a sci-fi feature about a giant bacteria run amok, made by Brett Piper, the effects guy that made SHOCK-O-RAMA, which we have reviewed elsewhere on this site. It begins with a pretty good scene of a helicopter chasing a car until the car crashes into a tree. (More impressive if you watch the special features and see how difficult it was to pull off, and the cheats they used.) The guy inside has the skin on his face turning all droopy with slimy gelatin, and a haz-mat suited guy takes a vial of some mysterious liquid from his dead ass.
At the same time, some paintballers are frolicking in the woods and stumble across a mysterious house which appears to be abandoned, but is actually a top-secret government project, and a crazy scientist shoots one and brings the other into his lab after delousing her and burning her clothes. (Boobies alert!) Cool nightmare scene.
She escapes, and she and her friends find out this lab-created virus has unexpectedly mutated, and the doc escaped with samples to work on a cure, The undercover government troops outside in the woods have orders to contain the virus (read: kill all that leave).
The thing in a test tube breaks out and becomes like a large bacteria, a blob of sorts, that moves around and kills people within its slimy blob body, and keeps growing in size. They are actually pretty cool looking. The world is in trouble, because the beastie keeps reproducing by splitting itself into new organisms, like an amoeba might do.
Considering the rapid growth of the things, the military proposes using an experimental weapon called the Tanguska Project, sort of limited black hole that would destroy everything in an 11 or 12 mile radius. The tough guy calls his biker buddies, and there’s a climactic battle between the bikers and the feds.
It’s a sci-fi monster movie plot, but most of it takes place in this creepy old building, incorporating elements of the old dark house mystery. Bacterium is low budget but inventive fast moving and fun. A crisp 80 minutes keeps it short and sweet.
The doc overacts a bit, but he is supposed to be a hysterical mad scientist. The rest of the cast is not great either, but good enough, and considering this is an homage to the monster movies of the 50s and 60s, it works just fine. The smaller roles like the war room GIs, are stocked with Shock-O-Rama employees. The effects – explosions, guys on fire, miniatures, the monster itself, make-up and helicopter sequences are all impressive for a no-budget flick like this and make it look bigger budgeted than it is. Piper is a master with improvising cheap practical effects out of stuff like soap bubbles and cardboard and the commentary is instructive to filmmakers looking to create cheap special FX. Maybe Piper should do a SFX book or video. In my opinion the fog machine was a little over-used, but I understand, if the alternative was showing the deficiencies of the sets. Surprisingly got a PG-13 rating, even with the boobs, I guess because a lot of the violence is science fictional. Shot on new High-Def video camera, with no CGI.
Includes the usual extras, like bloopers, commentaries and a making-of featurette. Available from www.Shock-O-Rama.com.

ATOMIK CIRCUS is a peculiar genre-blending French sci-fi film based on an incomplete comic book. The beginning is a blur of information as they set-up the film. A small French village of Skotlet celebrates its’ annual Beef pie festival with bands, and a stuntman James Battle jumping shit on his motorcycle. He falls in love with the town patriarch’s daughter, Concia, a beautiful girl who is also a talented singer (played by Vanessa Paradis, a real-life singer and wife of Johnny Depp.) He flubs the stunt and totals the bar, presumably killing some people. The town’s little Caesar, Bosco, takes the opportunity to get him away from his daughter, and gets him sent to prison for 133 years (his cousin’s the judge.) And this is all in the first five minutes! It’s filthy with purple prose narration, with line like, “her breasts, a promise of caress.”
There’s a meteor crash, which is of course an alien ship. The aliens are War of The Worlds-looking tentacled flying creatures, who sometimes decapitate folk, or suck peoples’ faces off (Chief Brody self-cauterizes his, because he can’t miss his chance at the talent show.) Battle escapes from prison, and so the bodies that start piling up get blamed on him instead of the aliens. They also emit little flying discs, which fly around like buzzsaws, slicing up people and squirting CG blood all about.
The best character is a slimy music agent Mr. Shitz, (finely played by Benoit Poelvoorde from MAN BITES DOG), who has designs on Concia. His fancy sports car breaks down in this jerkwater town, just in time for this year’s beef pie festival, in the rebuilt bar. He gets stuck in the ass with a barb from the end of an alien tentacle, and eventually transforms into something even more unpleasant than his earthly personality.
There’s plenty of CG, and practical effects, too. But the film really relies on its’ oddball cast of characters. There’s a crazy villager Battle runs into, who lives with his dead granny’s stuffed corpse. When Battle bumps into Granny and knocks her over, the hick takes after him with a shotgun, saying he’s killed Granny. The two motorcycle cops eager to avoid danger are pretty funny, too, and have a nice decapitation scene. Chief Brody is a kook who has a dog with its’ teeth pulled out (actually a puppet). There’s also a hermit who everybody assumed was crazy, who turns out to have been the Sentinel, waiting for this to happen, and lends Battle his jetpack to fight them.
He refers to them as the Shub Niggurat, which is an attempt to tie-in some Lovecraft lore to the film (very popular to do that these days.) If they are allowed to procreate, they’ll open the gates of hell. The aliens, not Battle and Concia.
It leads to the final denouement, where the aliens invade the bar’s talent show, sending the flying discs in to cause havoc, and pulling people out with their tentacles. There’s also a big final conflict between Battle and the mutated Mr. Shitz, which goes on for much longer than possible, considering alien-Shitz’ tentacles and superior strength.
Enough story for several movies, none of them well-developed, but that’s better than the mainstream movies’ tendency to over-explain everything, as if the audience are idiots.
Moves along swiftly, is offbeat and weird but enjoyable, but seems not quite sure what kind of movie it wants to be. With showy modern camerawork, fancy dissolves and other technical trickery, lots of blood and gooey explosions, and the lovely Ms. Paradis, it’s easy to see why this is a sought after cult item. Unfortunately, it’s also all over the place and seems unfinished. The abrupt ending does not do much to resolve the very things the movie spent 90 minutes setting up.
It is very offbeat but suffers from poor pacing. Paradis has several songs that don’t really advance the plot. We don’t see the couple together that much, so maybe that’s why, but I didn’t feel much chemistry between the leads. The whole thing seems very French to me. I’m sure there was some things I didn’t get, but overall, it’s a compellingly weird take on sci-fi invasion theme, with lots of smoking. I don’t speak French, but even I could tell the translation was often shitty, like lines like “Why do you angry?” But it’s forgivable, as this was a bootleg. I guess there has been no official Region One release. Worth a look, if you can find it.

BEER DRINKERS IN SPACE is a very silly movie shot as a side project for a bunch of drunken Disney employees in Florida in 1983. Captain Slosh, Navigator Tank and Pilot Tipsy have a mission to deliver their cargo of beer to Nebula 7/11. “Keep drinking, men” Captain Slosh tells his crew. The Prohbes, mean aliens who don’t like beer or fun, and want to destroy this beer, too, destroyed the last beer tanker. Their ancestors drank beer and “drove through space all crooked.” They’re also menaced by some goofy alien hand puppets called Leshinboons, who crawl into the ship vents and cause havoc. Whenever things get really bad, the Captain, doing an over-the-top sorta-Shatner impression, declares Condition Red, which means everyone has to drink. Seems like there is a drinking game waiting to happen here. Pilot Tipsy is a flaming queen, and makes reference to Crisco and says things like “Don’t touch my knobs.” This version has been pared down from 90 minutes to 60, removing old cultural references and making it more watchable. A few still slip by, like references to Christie Brinkley and Ryan O’Neal.
As I often find, the hour-long documentary shot on the making of the film is more entertaining than the film itself, which was made to amuse themselves and their friends. Shot 23 years later, it shows the principals having gained an amusing and self-deprecating perspective on their earlier adventures. Shot in a rented house, the spaceship interiors filled the living room and garage. It’s really fairly fascinating that these guys could do such a good-looking job on the sets with Styrofoam, cardboard, and sparklers. They were obvious Star Trek and Star Wars fans; even the models are mash-ups of various Star Wars model kits (but look pretty good for that).
Unfortunately, the film was shot on VHS tape in long play mode and then transferred to ¾ tape and then again to the final tape, and they admit they really were learning their way along, so what we see is a grainy 3rd generation quality picture, with really fuzzy resolution and washed-out colors. That degradation mutes the film’s watchability, but it’s still an interesting time capsule of the pre-digital fan film scene, if you will.
As they explain, they were able to cut loose and do things that the button-down Disney people wouldn’t let them do. The film was shot while drinking beer, and sometimes you can tell that remembering the lines or reading them off cards was hampered (or helped, depending on your definition) by their enthusiastic drinking. The acting is decidedly amateur, and the first halfway decent take was used. All of which combines to create a rare treat for badfilm lovers. Those intolerant of dumb jokes and muddy picture quality should stay away. But fans of elaborate homespun no-budget schlock may enjoy it, but remember to please drink irresponsibly while watching.
Get it from www.tempevideo.com.

MILLENIUM CRISIS is the name of a recent low-budget sci-fi movie. It looks like something made for the Sci-Fi Channel, but done on a very thin shoestring. The first 20 minutes or so, You can detect all kinds of influences at work here; the heroine Aurora looks like the replicant from Blade Runner, takes place on a desert planet with lots of alien species doing political intrigue like Dune, and blah blah blah. I’m sure the filmmakers would be glad to hear that, although it really is an awkward, having all the characters have to spout off to explain the storylines.
To be short: In the future, there are giant cities and flying cars. Aurora appears to be some sort of mutant - a great mimic, but never has been sure what race she belongs to, and I guess in the future they don’t have DNA testing. They do have a lot of matte paintings, however, in the future, and it was cool to see that return to old school mixed with (crappy) CGI. An evil race called the Kluduthu, who if I followed the cluttered storyline correctly, are some sort of vampires, realizes Aurora is the last of the Bloodmask, a race that can adapt itself to mimic any species. They plan to use her as an assassin to destroy the Terran ambassador, but she has other plans. She is offered a job transporting to a faraway planet a robot that doesn’t seem to need protection, as it can (and does) kill people with its’ scorpion-like tail. Crash landing on a desert planet, she comes across Ted Raimi who provides some needed humanity and comic relief, as some sort of scientist who tries to help her.
And that’s about it. Just when I thought the story had explained itself enough and some sort of dramatic climax would happen, it ended. It was over, and the good guys won. Slightly underwhelming. A couple of effects, a laser blast, killer robots that look like people, a couple composite shots, and Ted Raimi for two days, and I imagine, that was their budget shot right there.
Editing was at times showy and annoying, with whoosh sounds and flashes of light that seemed to serve no purpose. Interior shots are claustrophobic, be they on-ship or on-planet, and seem small and perhaps even the same room dressed different ways. You can see the plastic coverings on the walls on one set, but it’s OK, it’s a space station under construction.
I realize that even considering to do sci-fi of the usual sort one sees at the cinema is a crazily massive undertaking for filmmakers without much of a budget to attempt, and give them big ups for that. Unfortunately, keeping all the stories and names and different races and their capabilities clear was too much work. It’s all pretty confusing and for me, not worth it. But it’s nice to note that in the future, women still dress like sluts.
From www.Shock-O-Rama.com.

-Hysteric Eric