Trailer for My New Feature 'FERTISLE'

Blog posts have been spotty this year due to the fact that I've been working on two features and an epic documentary.

All three are finally taking shape as tangible entities and here is the trailer for the first one, Fertisle.

A man at war with himself, washed up on a strange South Pacific island, becomes its unwanted guest, and the target of a native woman who wants nothing but to be left alone.

The film is the first feature of US-, Japan-, and Australia-based production company, Cinenature, an outfit specializing in strong genre material for the international market.

My cinematic obsessions -- male/female relationships, dolls, islands, the ocean, the grotesque, and the beautiful -- are given full voice here.

 

Magazine Wars

This striking premier issue of Incredible Science Fiction, sporting a very handsome publicity shot of The Creature (From The Black Lagoon) grabbed my attention back in '78.

The magazine industry was jumping on the sci-fi bandwagon in an attempt to cash in on the hysterica surrounding the success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

As a long-time collector of monster mags, I appreciated the slightly retro appearance of this new contender in the market and and its uncluttered design. If there was a second issue, I never saw it.

The same Chicago-based company was simultaneously publishing Science Fantasy Film Classics.


Although its mightiest competitor was New York-based Starlog, which was already three years old by the time the fantasy wave hit, another Chicago-based enterprise, Frederick Clark's Cinefantastique, the most excellent of all English-language mags, may have been in this company's sights also.


Despite the straightforward design, topical focus, and pull-out poster, Science Fantasy Film Classics offered nothing content-wise to distinguish it from its competition.

Skewing towards an older demographic than Famous Monsters and a younger demo than Cinefantastique, it was a curious combination of Starlog and their sister publication, the long defunct, hard science fiction-focused Future magazine.


For my money, nothing came close to the almost scholarly perspective on the genre of Cinefantastique (an unofficial grandchild of the French midi/minuit Fantastique).




Science Fantasy Film Classics and Incredible Science Fiction were as serious as a car crash about making money, but their love for the genre seemed opportunistic and pandering.

They faded quickly.