Planet Mirth Movie Review
“There is a legend that sf and humor do not mix, but it is false,” conclusively declares Peter Nicholls’ Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Even casual video viewers recognize genre spoofs like Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs and Woody Allen's Hugo Award-winning Sleeper. The Hound would like to spotlight some shorter sci-fi parodies and futuristic satires for the true connoisseur:
HARDWARE WARS. “You'll laugh! You'll cry! You'll kiss three bucks goodbye!” Actually this is the most successful short parody on record, a hilarious Star Wars goof with an emphasis on common household appliances (R2D2 is a vacuum cleaner), cranked out cheaply in 1978 by actor/sound editor Ernie Fosselius. What the Wookie Monster's many fans don't know is that the title is available on tape, part of a one-hour compilation of Fosseliusizations entitled Hardware Wars and Other Film Farces, with a bonus inclusion of Marv Newland's notorious cartoon snippet Bambi Meets Godzilla.
FUTUROPOLIS. A brave but fatality-prone team of “Space Rangers” go up against evil Lord Egghead in this 1984 short done in Richmond, Virginia, that claims to be the biggest low-budget movie ever. It's crammed with genre gags and nonstop cheapo f/x of every variety, stumbling the gamut from stop-motion pixillation to computer graphics (on a Commodore 64, natch) to drawing directly on the film emulsion with a magic marker. Beware the Chamber of Nameless Dread!
ARISE! Anarchic recruitment video of the Church of the SubGenius, a Dallas-based gag flying-saucer cult that's even funnier than Scientology and wields the technique of “media barrage” to get incomprehensible doctrines across. This means a mind-breaking collage of clips culled from vintage sci-fi, monster, religious, and instructional films, all pushing New Age mantras of personal growth and alien-borne doom on July 5, 1998, for all who have not paid their SubGenius membership dues.
THE FIRESIGN THEATRE. Future-shock sf and cyberpunk themes dominate the cosmology of this freeform West Coast audio comedy troupe. Their few videos include Nick Danger and the Case of the Missing Yolks, that pits America's Only Detective against an automated house holding hillbillies hostage, while Eat or Be Eaten details the deeds of a voracious plant. Their Hot Shorts compilation includes farcical redubs of the vintage TV sci-fi Commander Cody. The Firesigners made a movie out of their UFO pseudo-science parody album Everything You Know Is Wrong but thus far refuse to release it.
THE STARSHIP PIDDLEY-SHITS. Disgusted by jargon-laden space operas, Clevelander Jason Lukianowicz made this dirt-cheap trilogy of black-and-white spoofs (images from which wound up in Pink Floyd's concert show) centering on a couple of galactic pizza-delivery buttheads and their adventures with flatulent aliens, an Evil Factory, and molecular instability. The unexpurgated climax of episode three is one of the cinema's great moments of scatology and should not be viewed by anyone under any circumstances whatsoever.