It's Not Easy Being a Saucer-Man

Invasion of the Saucer Men has been part of my life since I was old enough to crawl. It's tattooed onto my psyche. And will remain there, I'm sure, until the day (or night) I die.

Like The Man From Planet X, these guys get my sympathy rather than my outrage.  Although they appear to be bent on invading the world and, more importantly, enslaving women, I was never convinced that they were fair dinkum about it. Not with looks like that. Even if they could get a woman into the sack, do you really think she'd juice up for them? -- for such puny, sickly looking jokers with faces full of veins and skin a permanent shade of jaundice? Not likely. If they were rich, maybe... but my sources assure me that these dudes don't have two dimes to rub together. 

Aliens like this can only be rapists, I suppose. They're destined to spend their nights applying lube to places they're not exactly welcome to enter, and employing bowie knives as instruments of foreplay. Even lube dries up eventually, and a guy's gotta get tired of constantly re-applying it. And what about chaffing? Pushing your extraterrestrial johnson into an earth woman's dry, unyielding vagina, lube or no lube, is going to take its toll eventually. When you insist on raping outside your species, you do pay a steep price. Ask any zoophile!

  

This great still has always been a favorite of mine. It tells us that these guys are no fans of human romance. They're no suckers for the Valentine's Day bullshit that every man dreads each year. In fact, when these intergalactic yahoos see examples of  it, they want to fuck it up. And who can blame them!? In this documentary image, it's hard to tell if that clawed hand with the pointy fingers is getting ready for a grope, or itching to strangle the stuffing out of the bloke because he's wearing a suit and tie at the drive-in (surely a hangable offense in anybody's book). Aliens are definitely jealous bastards. They can't stand it when earth men (in suits!) dare to snuggle with earth women (in next to nothing). It really gets their goat. Unleashes the Green-Eyed Monster. Come to think of it, the original Green-Eyed Monster was probably an alien, and that's where the expression came from.

This little green pervert is really taking his chances, though. What if he gropes the bloke instead of the dame? How can he see where that hand's going? Does it have its own set of built-in eyes? Well, yeah, it does, but I'm not so sure the view was clear. I reckon the guy's a gambler, and he knows his odds are even. He's getting off on not knowing whether he's about to become a fiend or a fag.

   

Speaking of fags...

I've always had my suspicions about the Liberace lookalike above -- he's wearing black lipstick by Crikey! He's very well dressed, too, and his Dracula hairstyle looks a little too camped for my liking. Sir Christopher Lee was never this poofy.

So why then is Saucer-Face strangling him? Do Saucer-Men hate fags? According to a certain Baptist church in the South, God hates fags, but is it fair to assume that because God hates them, aliens do, too? Is our tall, green friend strangling Liberace with the intention of killing him, or is he strangling the late, great piano player in order to help him achieve orgasm? If the latter is the case, aliens are clearly attuned to the needs of fags, and ought to be acknowledged for the contribution they're making to queer culture.

 

Finally, let's address the issue of the name 'Saucer-Men'. If you were an invader from space with a penchant for the orifices of both sexes, a homicidal contempt for romance, and a psychotic desire for the destruction of entire planets, would you be cool with being called a 'Saucer-Man'? It's not the most masculine name, is it? It doesn't grab you by the throat and make you shit your pants.

Saucer. Man. 

Oh, let's give the little green man his saucer and milk, children. 

Hey mom, look at that cute little flyer saucer and the funny green man inside it. 

Speaking for these aliens, I wouldn't be too happy with the name. It definitely demeans my ambitions. How can I be expected to instil fear in Earth women when my name makes them think of something you place a cup of tea on?

How can I rape with a mean spirit when my crib is a fucking saucer? A saucer!!! At least call it a spaceship. A spacecraft. A star destroyer! I like that one. Invasion of the Men From The Star Destroyer. Yes, that carries weight! It creates a picture of fearsome beings traveling with big guns.

Some alien invaders get the good names. Xtro, for example.  If an Earth woman were to receive an email telling her that "Xtro is Coming", she'd be locking the doors and windows and calling the police. On the other hand, if she got word that a visit from a Saucer-Man was imminent, she'd stay in her chair for a while, get up slowly, then open the window to let him in for a laugh. 

No woman (or man) calls 911 when a Saucer-Man's at the door.

If you do, however, you're a goddamned Saucer-Pussy (Yes, you, too, ladies!)

The True Horror of Silence

 This movie -- Silenced (Do-ga-ni/; Korean, 2010) -- is really something else. The one current imdb review gives it high praise and pretty much parallels my take on it. It opened last week at a very limited amount of cinemas, is UNRATED for very good reason, and is a major dose of heart-wrenching bleakness. That it is based on a true story that ended tragically makes watching it almost unbearable.

The story involves a school for the deaf where very young students (pre-teen boys and girls) are being beaten, raped, and intimidated by senior faculty members and their immediate family members.  If it weren't true, it would sound outrageously improbable. In his LA Times review last Friday, critic Kenneth Turan attacked the film for sensationalizing the sexual crimes. I disagree that the graphic depictions of child abuse are included for the sake of sensationalism. They are included because they need to be. We need to see and feel what these children went through in order to fully comprehend how barbarically they were treated by their carers at the school and by the corrupt Korean court system. Not surprisingly, "important" and influential men were protected by the court as their victims were denied justice.

 At the center of the film is a young male teacher (Gong Yoo) who suspects the children are being abused almost immediately after beginning employment there. When he witnesses a shockingly brutal beating of a young male student by a colleague, his desire to intervene is natural and strong, but he encounters opposition driven by different agendas from the school's principal and his own mother. It's a human rights worker who provides him the courage to fight a very broken system.

The first half of Silenced (the literal Korean title is Crucible) involves the teacher's discovery of the school's dirty secrets.  The second half focuses on a court case in which the children take the witness stand in front of their abusers. Some crimes are recreated. All recreations are beyond what you'd see in an American or British film, although works such as Tim Roth's The War Zone and Angelica Huston's Bastard Out of Carolina carry some of the same dramatic weight.

 Silenced is obligatory viewing for many reasons, but the primary one is its courage. When Kenneth Turan criticizes the film for its "sensationalism", he's taking an easy swing at it. How should the film's horrors be conveyed, Kenneth? Should they be less shocking? More palatable to you as a viewer? Suitable for the average American viewer? Sanitized enough for a PG rating?

Fuck that! I can't help but reflect on stories we hear often about politicians who give their support to controversial laws -- stem cell research, for example -- after the life of a family member is saved. These changes of heart sicken me because they are the disgraceful folly of men with narrow, insular visions who are unable to empathize with the struggles of people (voters!) outside their immediate circles. Only when these idiots come face to face with the real possibility of loss do they do what they should have done long ago. The recreations of ugly, intimidating sex crimes against children do need to be graphic because graphic hits home. But it's not the sex that bruises the viewer of Silenced -- it's the violent intimidation that accompanies it. We see, in a way never conveyed so bluntly and brilliantly before, that the most heinous aspect of rape (of children and adults) is the intimidation of the victim by the cowardly rapist. The physical aspect of the rape ends, but the intimidation is maintained by the rapist, his family, the general public, and the courts. It's an endless nightmare.

 Aspects of Silenced reminded me of Dr. Lamb because, from a photographic point of view, the recreations are rich and moody. The film's grim tone echoes Blood and Bone, The War Zone, and Run and Kill. It's not a horror film in any traditional genre sense (there are no Freddy Krugers here), but it certainly explores horrific material, material more deeply disturbing than the recent Serbian Movie because the intimidation scenes accompanying the sexual abuse make the drama real.

Highly recommended for those not irritated by the sticky grit of truth.

The Rape After

Any film that is big on scabs, sores, scorched flesh, and tragic mutations is for me. The Rape After is no exception. With a title like that, you couldn't be faulted for expecting an orgy of angry vagina violence in the glorious I Spit On Your Grave tradition, but you would be wrong.

Meng Hua Ho and Moon-Tong Lau's '86 flick has more in common with Seeding of a Ghost, Boxer's Omen, and Shaw's Black Magic flicks than other Hong Kong obscuros like The Rapist, Bloody Beast, or Devil of Rape.

Admittedly, it's a more modestly budgeted effort than the Shaw films, and nobody turns in what you'd call a praiseworthy performance.

Still, it's well worth catching if scabs, sores, third degree burns, pus, and reanimated corpses rock your boat.

It's important to make it clear from the get-go that the plot makes little sense. In order for the film to justify its unrelenting onslaught of weirdness, the storyline chops and changes and does impossible somersaults that will leave you slack-jawed and reeling from the implausibilities.That aside, there is plenty of enjoyment to be had for the adventurous viewer.



Melvin Wong, a super-sleazy photographer, lives to bed as many gullible women as possible. Not surprisingly, one gets pregnant.

But being a card-carrying gentleman...

... Mr. Wong arranges for a late night abortion at a spooky house (as you do) for the unfortunate lass. The abortion goes haywire when the unborn asserts its right to life. All hell, naturally, breaks loose.

So does the semi-aborted baby with its umbilical cord in hand.

Still in character, Wong steals a rare statue from a spooky gallery, takes it home, and finds himself cursed.

The rest of the movie is a wild, gory ride that teaches us not to steal old statues of scary looking critters.

Although the opening sequence has little to do with the rest of the movie, it's a ripper.

A woman goes to visit a classroom of deformed, freaky, sore-infested children. The emphasis on scabs and sores in this scene is beyond affection. More a celebration of corrupted flesh.

One pus-faced freak is a relative -- not mine, unfortunately, hers! I was hoping to God that these very special characters, who look like extras from Horrors of Malformed Men, would play major roles in the film.

Unfortunately, they're only there for their good looks, not their infinite storyline potential.

Like other flicks of its moist, bloody ilk, the tone of this is hysterical and unrelenting. Old superstitions win out, of course...

... and every supernatural encounter is an excuse to show zombies, running ghosts, melting faces, monsters groping humans... and more sores and lesions.


For my money, any film that ends on a freeze frame like this one deserves respect.

Shuffle, don't walk, to see The Rape After. And bring a used condom.