UFO Truth Magazine will be holding its first conference on November 16, 2013, in Holmfirth, West Yorkshire. I'll be speaking there along with the magazine's editor, Gary Heseltine, Richard D. Hall, and Anthony Beckett...
Check out the first trailer for Last Days on Mars...
The feature film debut of helmer Ruairi Robinson (an Academy Award-nominated director of sci-fi shorts and animations), The Last Days on Mars stars Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai, Olivia Williams and Tom Cullen. Its official blurb reads as follows:
“On the last day of the first manned mission to Mars, a crew member of Tantalus Base believes he has made an astounding discovery – fossilized evidence of bacterial life. Unwilling to let the relief crew claim all the glory, he disobeys orders to pack up and goes out on an unauthorized expedition to collect further samples. But a routine excavation turns to disaster when the porous ground collapses, and he falls into a deep crevice and near certain death. His devastated colleagues attempt to recover his body. However, when another vanishes they start to suspect that the life-form they have discovered is not yet dead. As the group begins to fall apart it seems their only hope is the imminent arrival of the relief ship Aurora.”
The film was screened to poor reviews at the Cannes Film Festival back in May. It is scheduled to open in the UK on September 19, ahead of an Ultra VOD release.
1984 saw the release of The Brother from Another Planet – a low-budget, independent social commentary piece from director John Sayles. In the movie, a UFO crashes near Ellis Island Immigration Centre and its human-looking, black skinned occupant emerges dazed and confused into the strange and unwelcoming landscape of ‘80s New York City – just another lost soul trying to find his way in the world.
We soon learn that The Brother has ESP abilities and, by touching any given object, he can ‘hear’ its history. He also has healing powers like so many other screen aliens of the 1980s. But The Brother from Another Planet is perhaps most notable for being the first film ever to feature the Men in Black of UFO lore. While a number of UFO movies in previous decades had featured besuited government spooks investigating saucer sightings, it was not until The Brother from Another Planet that the Men in Black were depicted precisely as described in UFO literature dating back to the late-1940s. In numerous accounts over the decades, MIBs have been described as being threatening in their intent and almost ‘alien’ in their actions and appearance, often speaking and moving robotically and appearing distinctly out of place in any Earthly environment.
Enter the MIBs: David Strathairn and John Sayles in The Brother from Another Planet (1984)
In The Brother from Another Planet, the MIBs (played by John Sayles and David Strathairn) are gaunt, pale-faced figures clad entirely in black whose behaviour is threatening, robotic, and bizarre; and with good reason: they’re aliens – bounty hunters in search of The Brother. In the film’s closing credits they are even credited as “Men in Black.”
Sayles wrote his film in the early 1980s after having worked on the script for Spielberg’s aborted alien horror movie Night Skies, elements of which would ultimately be used in the Spielberg productions E.T. The Extraterrestrial(1982), Poltergeist (1982), and Gremlins (1984). Evidently, Sayles had at some point familiarized himself with the details of MIB lore, likely during his research for Night Skies, which itself was directly inspired by the 1953 Kelly-Hopkinsville Incident – one of the most famous cases of alleged alien contact in UFO literature.
In The Brother from Another Planet, Sayles paid close attention to the bizarre physical motion of his MIBs. In order to convey their otherworldliness, the director filmed their entrance and exit scenes entirely in reverse and with the camera upside down. The effect is subtle, but creepy. The MIBs make their entrance at counter reading 0:35:27 in the video below...
Thirteen years after The Brother from Another Planet opened in theatres, the “Men in Black” term would explode into the very heart of pop culture with the release of a certain 1997 Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones vehicle. The line between documented UFOlogical fact and speculative pop-cultural fiction had always been blurry, but it disappeared in spectacular fashion with the release of the hugely successful Men in Black, which was executive produced by Steven Spielberg.
While Sayles’ 1984 movie accurately depicted MIBs as being imposing and otherworldly, Spielberg’s 1997 production (based on the comic book by Lowell Cunningham) re-spun MIB-lore in favour of the Men in Black themselves and of government secrecy surrounding the UFO phenomenon. It was a message encapsulated by Will Smith’s Grammy Award-winning title rap for the movie’s soundtrack:
The good guys dress in black, remember that,
Just in case we ever face to face and make contact...
We’re your first, last and only line of defense
Against the worst scum of the universe
So don’t fear us, cheer us
If you ever get near us don’t jeer us
We’re fearless...
Let me tell you this in closin' I know we might seem imposin' But trust me, if we ever show in your section Believe me, it's for your own protection Cuz we see things that you need not see And we be places that you need not be So go with your life, forget that Roswell crap Show love to the black suit, cuz That's the Men in That's the Men in...
And, well, you know the rest.
In the minds of the many unfamiliar with UFOlogy, Men in Black would now and forever be associated exclusively with a movie and a song of the same name – with science fiction cinema (and Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones) rather than reported historical encounters. Moreover, MIBs went from being sinister witness-harassers to heroic “galaxy-defenders.” Such is the power of entertainment. But for a faithful big screen rendering of the Men in Black – one of UFOlogy’s most enduring enigmas – give Smith and Jones a miss. Sayles and Strathairn are where it’s at.
Scarlett Johansson plays a man-eating alien in Under the Skin. Silver ScreenSaucershas been following the movie’s slow crawl to the big screen since 2011 when plot details and onset images first emerged. Now, finally, Under the Skin has premiered to widespread acclaim at European and American film festivals, and we’ve been presented with a head-scratcher of a teaser trailer.
The official plot synopsis for Under the Skin states that Johansson plays“an alien on earth, disguised as the perfect aesthetic form of a mesmerizing woman. She scours remote highways and desolate scenery looking to use her greatest weapon to snare human prey -- her voracious sexuality. She is deadly efficient, but over time becomes drawn to and changed by the complexity of life on earth. With this new found humanity and weakening alien resolve, she finds herself on a collision course with her own kind.”
“The first man she picks up is distracted by her perfect breasts, but he also notices her 'big knobbly elbows . . . knobbly wrists too, and big hands.' The lenses of her glasses are so thick her eyes look 'twice normal size,' and she is described as 'half 'Baywatch' babe, half little old lady.'"
Actually, Isserley is a great deal stranger than that. She has been surgically altered to look human, and she comes from a place much farther away than the reader might at first imagine. Her intentions for the men she picks up are not sexual — they're culinary. Once she's decided a hitchhiker is appropriate prey, she drugs him and takes him to an abattoir hidden beneath a run-down farm, where, in horrifying fashion, he is prepared for shipment to Isserley's home world.
Apparently the story is told from Johansson's point of view, and slowly her character begins to have qualms about shipping so many men off to her home planet.
Critics’ reviews so far have been overwhelmingly positive. Time Out’s Dave Calhoun calls Under the Skin “An intoxicating marvel, strange and sublime”; the Daily Telegraph’s Robbie Collin says “If my legs hadn't been so wobbly and my mouth so dry, I would have climbed up on my seat and cheered”; Screen Daily’s Lee Marshall compares the film to the works of director Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris, Stalker), while Film Blather’s Eugene Novikov and The Playlist’s Chris Willman draw comparisons with the back-catalogues of David Cronenberg and Nicolas Roeg, respectively.
According to The Daily Mail, Under the Skin uses vérité filmmaking techniques in an attempt to make onscreen interactions feel more genuine:
“Scarlett, for one, drove around in a van outfitted with hidden cameras and lured actual non-actor men into the vehicle. It was only afterward that participants were notified of the fact that they were on a movie shoot.”
The movie’s director, Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast), told the Los Angeles Times: “The key thing for me — the way I understood it would work — was to shoot her [Johansson] in disguise and use the idea of dropping her into the world and shooting her in a way, with the hidden cameras, that wasn't calling attention to itself, so we are really photographing behaviour.”
This approach, Glazer told the LA Times, is part of an attempt to put the viewer in the shoes of an alien being on Earth: “The core of the story that I was clearly interested in was her journey — and looking at our world as an alien planet through her eyes.”
Under the Skin is currently looking for a theatrical distributor, but is expected to hit cinemas later this year or early in 2014.
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