ALIEN / Brandywine Productions, Twentieth Century-Fox - 1979

It's Halloween Countdown Monday with Tabonga, here at The Dungeon!.. This is a movie I saw at the theater in 1979, and, wow, what a broken roller coaster ride it was! It's all about a crew aboard a deep space mineral towing vessel, the Nostromo, on its way back to Earth when an SOS transmission is received from a distant planet. For scientific reasons, they decide to make a detour to the planet to check out the source of the mysterious signal.

Eegah!! sent over a moody musical sound clip from this flick for our earjoyment, sooooo, you can push the big red 'GO' button located there by our cute little Alien egg, NOW, Ralphie The Tarantula!.. Here's a taste of... ALIEN!

The crew takes a shuttle down to the planet to investigate, will they discover alien life?.. Only your hairdresser knows for sure!

They come across a spaceship and strange machinery in a weird giant cave, apparently where the SOS signal originated from.

They find a huge skeleton in the pilot's seat, and, the mystery gets pretty damn weird. Then, crewman Kane is attacked by some unknown creature in another part of the cave and is taken back to the ship for medical attention.

After Kane's helmet is cut off, a creepy spider-like thing is found stuck to his face, YOW!!

When the doctors try and remove the parasite, it tightens its grip. When they try to remove a leg, the cut causes acid to spurt out and it immediately melts its way through the floor and nearly through the hull before it stops!

When checking on Kane's condition, they discover the face hugger has disappeared, so, they have to look for the infernal thing! After some tense moments, they find it dead after it falls onto Ripley's head! I still cannot figure out why they looked for it in the dark when they could have just turned the lights on! Oh, right, it's scarier that way!

M-m-m-m, here's the yummy new Alien Pot Pie being created at Mary Colander's bake shop!

John Hurt plays Kane, he was Caligula in my favorite mini-series I watched on cable in the early eighties, the BBC production of I, CLAUDIUS. Here, Kane has just been victim to giving birth to an ugly little baby Alien!!

Everyone's paranoid after the Alien has deep-sixed a crewman or two, now loose in the gigantic Nostromo vessel, so, time to break out the handy dandy flame throwers!

Ash goes haywire and gets his head knocked off, revealing his robot innards!

A look of the Alien with its metal teeth as it closes in for another kill!

Ripley escapes in a small emergency ship and watches as the Nostromo blows the Hell up!

Sigourney Weaver plays Ripley, here in this scene putting on her spacesuit after discovering the hideous creature hiding in the shadows!

In a tense moment, she opens the air lock and spears it before it gets lodged in the exhaust shield. After more quick thinking, she hits the full throttle button and turns the Alien into a crispy critter!

The next three Monday posts will showcase scary fun flicks from the eighties, you'll want to check those out! Tune in Wednesday as our Halloween Express continues on its trip to Hell!!

SKELETON FROLIC - Ub Iwerks - "A Color Rhapsody" (1937)

As we ease closer to that fateful day, the undead become friskier! Tonight's Columbia short from 1937 features dancing skeletons and skeleton musicians, and it's rightfully called, "Skeleton Frolic!"

Where else could a tale like this begin than in a creepy olde graveyard?

What fantastic imagery from the legendary Ub Iwerks!

 How's that for an iconically classic Halloween black cat?

The sun has gone down and The Skeleton Orchestra is all ready to play!

This cartoon is all about the skeletons, but there was a brief appearance by some bats just to soup it up a bit!

This part actually looks kind of scary!

The trumpet and the bass player get into a bit of a tussle over whose skull is whose!

Then the dance number starts in earnest. Those clouds give you just a feel for how talented Ub really was!! He probably did that in like five minutes!

The frolicking skeletons go through a bunch of different moves somewhat like what's going to be happening to me in the next couple of hours!!

We used to call this The Shimmy, now they call it "Wobble Baby!"

Five A.M starts coming around, and the morning sun just barely starts showing it's light!

When the rooster crows, all the skeletons know they have to head to lower ground! The technicolor in this cartoon is pretty amazing for 1937 in my humble opinion! Wouldn't this make a cool painting?

The party's over until next Wednesday!

Just like nothing ever happened!!

 

 Frolicking skeletons isn't something that just started happening in 1937, there's a long and varied history of these kinds of activities that people have devoted entire books to on the subject! Just as a couple of extra added reference points, here's Michael Wolgemut's "Orchestra Of The Dead (Liber Chronicarum)" from 1493!

From the Richard Harris Collection, here's an example of frolicking skeletons from Kawanabe Kyosai who lived from 1831 to 1889!

And of course, our friends from South of the border have a long tradition and fascination with the Day of the Dead like in this print by Mexican National Hero Jose Guadalupe Posada who lived from 1852 to 1913 entitled "Jarabe Tapatio Dance!"

If you want to see the whole cartoon, there are many postings of it on YouTube and here's a link to just one of them!  SKELETON FROLIC (1937)

THE X FROM OUTER SPACE / Shôchiku Eiga - 1967

Things are finally straight in the still capture department, so, time to put The Tabonga Train back on the tracks, here at The Dungeon!.. We gots another giant rubber monster from Japan the same year I got my great 1967 Volkswagen. This is the same studio that also brought us GAPPA, THE TRIPHIBIAN MONSTER.

Eegah!! sent over a fun little sound clip from this flick for our earjoyment, sooooo, you can push the big red 'GO' button over by our atomic ? from inner space, NOW, Rufus The Gnat!.. Here's a taste of... THE X FROM OUTER SPACE!

The story starts with a trip to the Moon by a small group of Japanese Astronuts in their famous spaceship, AAB-Gamma.

There's fun to be had on the Moon, like, bouncing up and down on the surface in 1/6th gravity!

There's even more fun watching Peggy (THE TERROR BENEATH THE SEA) Neal as Lisa take a shower!

Then, it's time to dance to some Moon Music, as heard in the sound clip.

They take off in AAB-Gamma for a space expedition where they encounter a glowing UFO!

After the UFO buzzes them, they discover some residue on the exhaust shield, Lisa snags a small glowing nodule and takes it back to the ship.

Back at the Earth lab, they find that the specimen has melted through the metal floor, like in ALIEN, and, has disappeared!

Now a giant rubber monster, The X sticks its weird looking head out of a crater and is immediately attacked by tanks and missiles.

I really dig this shot as it tears the crap out of some puny power towers!

The X even has the power to turn into a big glowing heat ball, then, plows into a dam!

A radio active element is found to have a debilitating effect on The X so they feed it to the thing from another world!

Then, they just sit back and watch as the monster starts dissolving back to its original form.

Lisa recaptures the nodule, but, this time they shoot it into outer space from which it came! Tune in tomorrow as we continue our special Halloween Countdown!