Hail, hail, the gang’s all here! Well actually they were just hanging around out there already. Fish gazes upon the contented multitude with boundless enthusiasm.

This week’s Video Goodie has something a little different: Animation fiend Cyriak’s newest work Cycles… and the likewise cyclic Tango (1980) by Zbig Rybczynski! They’re featured down below the banners.

Above is an assortment of Fission Chicken-related items that have been spotted all across the land! Oh all right, I made them up with various graphic online generators… you can find many at The Generator Blog.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Fission Chicken animated feature? You can see a short ‘teaser’ for such by clicking the left thumbnail below! The right thumbnail will display the earlier “Squash” bit:

Click here to post a comment below.

Among online-animation fans and lovers of weird stuff in general, Cyriak is a big favorite for his surreal stuff; to me, it looks like Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python bits… taken a few steps further! His new release Cycles sure takes things a few steps further:

Want more? Here’s more, but different: Tango, Zbig Rybczynski’s 1980 work about a lot of people in a small room. A hand-made film, done long before those computerator things would do the work for you:

The Chicken of Wrath converses with Mr. Asslan and finds he is at pains to believe some of the things he’s hearing. Mr. Asslan pulls out some special effects!

For this week’s Video Goodie, we have a swell Roger Corman horror comedy: The Raven (1963), with Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Jack Nicholson! It’s featured down below the banners.

Above is an assortment of Fission Chicken-related items that have been spotted all across the land! Oh all right, I made them up with various graphic online generators… you can find many at The Generator Blog.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Fission Chicken animated feature? You can see a short ‘teaser’ for such by clicking the left thumbnail below! The right thumbnail will display the earlier “Squash” bit:

Click here to post a comment below.

Vincent Price is the good guy in The Raven (1963); he’s a reticent sorcerer (Dr. Erasmus Craven) who is approached by a talking raven who begs him to return him to his human form, Dr. Adolphus Bedlo (Peter Lorre). Craven learns that his supposedly dead wife Lenore (Hazel Court) might actually be alive… and in the thrall of evil sorcerer Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff)! Jack Nicholson plays Bedlo’s inept son Rexford. This is a classic horror-comedy, with all the old pros enjoying themselves. Lorre gets laughs with offhand lines (”Hard place to keep clean, huh?”)… I read somewhere that Karloff was annoyed by Lorre’s ad-libs; he preferred to stick to the script. Film has little to do with Poe, but plenty fun anyway. And you can watch it in nine parts on YouTube!

And here’s the theatrical trailer:

Boy… even when you’re tooling along in your private spacecraft, enjoying the sunrise, you’ve got to watch your step. (In space, no one can hear you drink beer. Well actually under most conditions, nobody would hear you drink beer anyway unless you slurped it noisily.)

There’s a new Video Goodie! Planet Of The Vampires (1965) is director Mario Bava’s atmospheric predecessor to (and perhaps inspiration for) 1979’s Alien. It’s featured down below the banners.

How about “battery hens” as a subject for gag cartoons? You can see some over at cartoonstock.com!

And you can get a good look at the dreaded Chicken Fish over at freakingnews.com!

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Fission Chicken animated feature? You can see a short ‘teaser’ for such by clicking the left thumbnail below! The right thumbnail will display the earlier “Squash” bit:

Click here to post a comment below.

There aren’t actual vampires in 1965’s Planet Of The Vampires (AKA Terrore Nello Spazio, Demon Planet), but these beings are still pretty nasty; they kill off crew members of a spaceship, and take over the corpses! A crew of space explorers (in snappy black leather spacesuits) land their honkin’ big ship (no joke, it is roomy) on a spooky planet… where they find a deserted honkin’ big alien ship with a big alien skeleton. Everyone remembers the scene where the buried crewmen rise from their graves and tear through their plastic shrouds. And you can see Planet Of The Vampires on YouTube in nine parts!

Here’s the exciting trailer for the American release:

And also included, at no extra charge, is a cool old 1953 Popeye cartoon: Popeye, The Ace Of Space. This was originally in 3-D… look at the stuff swung at the viewer, and the scenery designed to show off depth:

Ahh… at last, a new page of Armageddon Creeped Out! While Fission Chicken is yakking it up with that Asslan guy, the staff at Livergut Labs keep trying to help Skip and Monica with their mystery. They’ve gotten some kind of results, anyway.

And there’s a new Video Goodie! Another classic chiller: Eyes Without A Face (1960)! No, nothing to do with the Billy Idol number, this concerns an unbalanced doctor trying to restore his daughter’s face, using mighty unpleasant methods. It’s featured down below the banners.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Fission Chicken animated feature? You can see a short ‘teaser’ for such by clicking the left thumbnail below! The right thumbnail will display the earlier “Squash” bit:

Click here to post a comment below.

And now, let’s look at Eyes Without A Face (1960), or rather LES YEUX SANS VISAGE, since this is the original French version with English subtitles. A mad scientist is killing young women in order to restore the face of his daughter whose face was mangled in an automobile accident. Director Georges Franju often gives a strange sense of beauty to this creepy tale. There’s a gruesome scene where a woman’s face is surgically removed that still packs a wallop. The disfigured daughter is seen mostly in a ghostly-looking mask that reveals only her haunted eyes. You can see this classic on YouTube in eight parts!

Here’s the spooky trailer for the American release, where it was retitled THE HORROR CHAMBER OF DR. FAUSTUS (!) and put on a double-bill with THE MANSTER:

Yow! It’s been a while since the last thrilling chapter of Armageddon Creeped Out, hasn’t it? Well, I’m workin’ up to an update… there were some computer problems a while back, and then some of those ol’ Winter blahs set in… but don’t worry, the Chicken of Wrath will be back to set things to rights.

At least there’s a new Video Goodie! And it truly is a goodie: Not Of This Earth (1957), Roger Corman’s engaging tale of a guy in dark glasses running his own blood drive. No, he’s not a vampire… he’s not even from this planet. It’s featured down below the banners.

They lived dangerously in the 1950s; kidshow host Andy Devine and his fun-filled gang of puppets go on a magic plane ride… and they nosedive right into a nuclear weapon facility! Oh boy! You can read more about this happy comic over at Stupid Comics… and see lots more weird funnies while you’re there!

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Fission Chicken animated feature? You can see a short ‘teaser’ for such by clicking the left thumbnail below! The right thumbnail will display the earlier “Squash” bit:

Click here to post a comment below.

Wow… I hadn’t seen this one for many years! Not Of This Earth is Roger Corman’s 1957 classic about a dour gentleman from planet Davanna, here to check out the blood supply of the natives. He takes off his dark glasses to zap victims, and takes their blood with equipment he carries around in an aluminum case. (He also keeps a head-crunching umbrella-critter in there.) There have been a couple of remakes, but this is the first and the best! With Paul Birch, Beverly Garland, Morgan Jones, Jonathan Haze, Dick Miller. You can see it in six parts on YouTube!

Here’s the chilling trailer:

We’ll be right back with the next page of Armageddon Creeped Out, after this: Jeff Wood’s SnowBuni and HoniBuni are watching the tube, when they suddenly get a visitor from The Outer Limits! It’s the Andromedan from the classic pilot episode, “The Galaxy Being”! See what happens when you fiddle around with the volume?

Addendum: There will be a pause in the current adventure because of technical problems; the artist’s computer is on the fritz.

Video Goodie: After that creepy Cronenberg double feature last post, how about a fun old Bert I. Gordon flick from 1958? Okay… Attack Of The Puppet People is featured down below the banners.

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Yes! Death’s own right-hand man Dead Duck and his cute assistant Zombie Chick meet Fission Chicken! Hotcha! You can read Jay P. Fosgitt’s great comic online! Want more? You can order the new Dead Duck book from Ape Entertainment. Hey wow!! (And below is my rendering of DD & ZC, attending to an alien dead guy.)

(By the way, you can also get The Collected Fission Chicken Volume I at Amazon, too!)

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Fission Chicken animated feature? You can see a short ‘teaser’ for such by clicking the left thumbnail below! The right thumbnail will display the earlier “Squash” bit:

Click here to post a comment below.

Many films by director Bert I. Gordon concerned mis-scaled people or monsters: The Cyclops (giant mutant guy), The Amazing Colossal Man (reversal of The Incredible Shrinking Man), and Beginning of the End (giant grasshoppers) all came out in 1957. In 1958, Gordon continued with Earth vs. the Spider (giant you-know-what), War of the Colossal Beast (sequel to Colossal Man), and today’s feature, Attack of the Puppet People. It’s about a mad dollmaker (John Hoyt) who has developed the scientific know-how to shrink people to doll size. He keeps them in suspended animation in clear tubes, and wakes them up to party on his workbench! He does all this ’cause he’s been so lonely since his wife left him for another guy. But he also has to deal with constant interruptions from his old pal Emil (Michael Mark) (a puppeteer who keeps wanting to talk shop), a little girl who wants her doll repaired, a police detective, and so on. Among the “doll people” (who don’t attack so much as try to find a way out of their screwy predicament) are a couple of secretaries, a mailman, and pushy salesman Bob Westley (John Agar)! There’s a fun review over at Dante’s Inferno. See this movie in nine parts on YouTube!

And here’s the spectacular theatrical trailer:

The Chicken of Wrath gets a little impatient with his reticent hosts, so he makes the first move by unplugging the mysterious hat machine. The boss is thus encouraged to speak up a bit.
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Yes! Death’s own right-hand man Dead Duck and his cute assistant Zombie Chick meet Fission Chicken! Hotcha! You can read Jay P. Fosgitt’s great comic online! Want more? You can order the new Dead Duck book from Ape Entertainment. Hey wow!! (And below is my rendering of DD & ZC, attending to an alien dead guy.)

Video Goodie: How about a David Cronenberg double feature? How about Rabid (1977) and The Brood (1979)? Well, you got it! They’re featured down below the banners.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Fission Chicken animated feature? You can see a short ‘teaser’ for such by clicking the left thumbnail below! The right thumbnail will display the earlier “Squash” bit:

Click here to post a comment below.

David Cronenberg is a great Canadian filmmaker whose movies have that extra special something: strange changes in the characters’ internal landscape… and in their outer landscape, too, as their flesh goes through some distressing alterations. It’s a constant theme seen in his works, such as the two we’re looking at now: Rabid (1977) (With Marilyn Chambers in her first non-porn role) concerns an unfortunate young woman who suffers a bad motorcycle accident, and has the further bad luck to be treated with a “morphologically neutral” tissue transplant that heals her… but also grows a blood-sucking flesh syringe in her armpit! As a sort of vampire, she tries to get along with taking just a little blood from others, but there’s also this nasty disease that… well, the title describes it. And in The Brood (1979), we see some mighty unpleasant results of the pop-psych practice of “Psychoplasmics,” where the patients are encouraged to cause their inner torment to appear as welts and lesions on their bodies. But it’s also causing creepy little humanoids to track down and kill people!! You can see Rabid in nine parts, and The Brood in ten parts on You Tube.

Fission Chicken explores the hideout of the flying armored weird guys, but finds only the eerie hum of unattended machinery. That’s sort of annoying. Where are ya?!
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Yes! Death’s own right-hand man Dead Duck and his cute assistant Zombie Chick meet Fission Chicken! Hotcha! You can read Jay P. Fosgitt’s great comic online! Want more? You can order the new Dead Duck book from Ape Entertainment. Hey wow!! (And below is my rendering of DD & ZC, attending to an alien dead guy.)

Video Goodie: This week we look at the space documentary Angry Red Planet! This 1960 film vividly demonstrates the perils of Mars; it’s inhabited by stuck-up types who don’t want us there. It’s featured down below the banners.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Fission Chicken animated feature? You can see a short ‘teaser’ for such by clicking the left thumbnail below! The right thumbnail will display the earlier “Squash” bit:

Click here to post a comment below.

Angry Red Planet (1960) is, of course, the movie with the giant rat-bat-spider-crab. A US exploratory ship to Mars is brought back to Earth by remote control. Only 2 of the crew of 4 have survived! The lady astronaut, and a guy with green slime eating his arm! Her memory block is overcome with drugs, and we see her memories of a 1950s-style space voyage (with normal gravity, and annoying comic relief guy). The scenes on Mars are depicted in Cinemagic: solarized film tinted red, that actually makes the special effects look better. The bizarre inhabitants of Mars look hallucinogenic and spooky! Giant carnivorous plants, swivel-eyed humongous amoebas and the big rat-bat-spider-crab make things tough for our erstwhile explorers. (Credits at end have jazzy music, like this was a TV series.) And you can watch it all in nine parts on YouTube!

And also here, at no extra charge, is the spectacular trailer!

Skip and Monica are dazzled by the newest project at Livergut Labs! With the help of Dr. Livergut and Crouton, they’ll have things wrapped up in no time.
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Here we see Dead Duck and a new client from off-planet. Dead Duck and Zombie Chick deliver the deceased to J.P. Yorick, better known as the Grim Reaper, while dealing with unruly dead folks, grumpy deities, and historical snafus! You can read Jay P. Fosgitt’s great comic online! Want more? You can order the new Dead Duck book from Ape Entertainment. Hey wow!!

Video Goodie: Ah, Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case! This 1982 tale of brotherly love is one of the gems of independent filmmaking. Two brothers just can’t stand to be apart, so they give a good talking-to to the doctors who separated them! It’s featured down below the banners.

And of course Rod Serling’s immortal TV series The Twilight Zone came into being 50 years ago! So you’re seeing lots of online stuff about it now. Why not visit The Twilight Zone Museum? Do you remember playing the Twilight Zone Pinball Machine? (Scroll down for pics.) And you might be familiar with the various opening titles for TZ… but have you seen the very first version made for the pilot episode (”Where Is Everybody?”)? Serling doesn’t read it; it’s done by Westbrook Van Voorhis, who had narrated The March of Time. Even the logo is much different, done in block letters in 1950s sci-fi movie style! Here it is:

Great editorial alert: Are you weary of the unending flood of brainless movies and TV shows? Are you tired of certain defenders of such stuff who maintain that you could enjoy it by… “turning your brain off”? If it distresses you to see people giving up their basic humanity like that, why not look at this editorial at I-Mockery… about Turning Your Brain Off.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Fission Chicken animated feature? You can see a short ‘teaser’ for such by clicking the left thumbnail below! The right thumbnail will display the earlier “Squash” bit:

Click here to post a comment below.

Basket Case (1982) is one of the great horror films of the 1980s. Young Duane Bradley checks in at a grimy New York City hotel with a rattan basket under his arm. But it doesn’t contain laundry… it contains something alive, something that wolfs down hamburgers and frankfurters with gusto. It’s Duane’s little brother Belial! Well actually he’s his twin brother, but he’s little enough to fit in there. Belial was forcibly removed from Duane’s side years ago, but he survived… and now the brothers Bradley are seeking out the doctors who did them dirty. (They already did away with their misunderstanding dad.) The frustrated hotel manager finds it hard to deal with all the screwy things happening among his tenants. Director/Writer Frank Henenlotter and crew were working on a shoestring, but all the effort they put in really paid off. Swell horror with elements of comedy. WARNING: Gore and nudity and stuff. You can see it in ten parts on YouTube!

And also here, at no extra charge, is the spectacular trailer!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Skip and Monica work on this new mystery of where Fish went. Dimensional vortexes can be a real pain sometimes.

Ahh, just can’t get enough of those rotten science fiction movies, can you? Good—here’s another! Mission Mars (1968) starring (future Kolchak) Darren McGavin and Nick Adams… this is one space voyage that made Star Trek look like hard science! It’s featured down below the banners.

And of course Rod Serling’s immortal TV series The Twilight Zone came into being 50 years ago! So you’re seeing lots of online stuff about it now. Why not visit The Twilight Zone Museum? Do you remember playing the Twilight Zone Pinball Machine? (Scroll down for pics.) And you might be familiar with the various opening titles for TZ… but have you seen the very first version made for the pilot episode (”Where Is Everybody?”)? Serling doesn’t read it; it’s done by Westbrook Van Voorhis, who had narrated The March of Time. Even the logo is much different, done in block letters in 1950s sci-fi movie style! Here it is:

Great editorial alert: Are you weary of the unending flood of brainless movies and TV shows? Are you tired of certain defenders of such stuff who maintain that you could enjoy it by… “turning your brain off”? If it distresses you to see people giving up their basic humanity like that, why not look at this editorial at I-Mockery… about Turning Your Brain Off.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Fission Chicken animated feature? You can see a short ‘teaser’ for such by clicking the left thumbnail below! The right thumbnail will display the earlier “Squash” bit:

Click here to post a comment below.

Mission Mars (1968) is a wobbly movie; the soundtrack is peppered with ‘groovy’ 1960s music (check out the main theme “No More Tears” by The Forum Quorum), but the onscreen action has that stodgy 1950s space-travel feel. Film takes a while to get started, focusing on the astronauts’ relation with their women. Then we get lots and lots of stock NASA footage (sometimes run backwards) to show the rigors of space travel. Then on Mars we see tabletop models of the landscape and a strange alien sphere, and some mighty peculiar (and aggressive) 3-tentacled critters, and a Soviet cosmonaut who was frozen solid so quickly that he’s still standing, but the astros get him back to their ship and he thaws back to life! (Our heroes must be plenty tough… their own spacesuits are just lightweight flight suits with helmets that leave their necks exposed.) There are some eerie bits as they try to deal with the weird spheres and its occupants (robots?)… but this is remarkably clunky considering it was released the same year as 2001: A Space Odyssey! Lucky you, you can see the whole thing in nine parts on YouTube!

And also here, at no extra charge, is the spectacular trailer!