Rotwang art
The great technologist C.A. Rotwang is with little doubt the most interesting character from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). He has the most complex motivation and the deepest backstory of all the characters therein, and unsurprisingly he’s a principle literary hero for this site, celebrated with his own commissioned image. The coming-to-be moment of his creation, the Maschinenmensch, appears at the top of every page here. So I’m delighted to be able to link to a post of Rotwang concept art by Nathan Heigert.
If you’re a fan of this theme, it’s worth checking out the entire post and indeed, Heigert’s entire blog of Metropolis art.
“Sex dominates the world, and now I…”
It might be about as awful as any movie I reference here, but The Curious Dr. Humpp (1967/1969 maybe) at least has the courage to over the top in the Erotic Mad Science category since it is, after all, a mad science movie almost entirely harnessing the power for sex for, well, something anyway. So there are a few good minutes here for the thaumatophile, which it’s my pleasure to cherry-pick for you, dear reader.
Humpp was originally an Argentinian movie called La Venganza del Sexo written and directed by Emilio Vieyra picked up by an American distributor who padded it out with additional softcore footage, dubbed it into English, and retitled it before release. (That release is now available from Something Weird Video.) The result is an often-tedious production (I was fast-forwarding through even more softcore than usual) that has moments of levity when the English-language dubbing conflicts with the film’s manifestly hispanophone setting.
The core plot shouldn’t detain us long (you can get a more complete synopsis here): people engaged in various sex acts are being abducted by grotesque figures. The police are baffled, by an enterprising reporter whom I shall call Journalist Guy has a theory that a mad doctor previously active in Italy is somehow involved.
Journalist Guy tracks his quarry to a hard-to-find estate somewhere outside whatever city this movie is set in. He is captured within about fifteen seconds of doing so and, unsurprisingly, is compelled to participate in weird experiments.
The apparent antagonist here is one Dr. Humpp who, to give credit where do, does maintain a pretty good-looking mad-lab given the film’s obviously small budget.
Humpp is compelling or inducing his victims to have lots and lots of sex and then extracting chemicals from them, some of which he then injects into himself. Humpp’s apparent motivation for this at this stage of the movie is some sort of vampirism: the chemicals keep him alive, young, healthy, etc.
In this experiment, he’s wired Journalist Guy and a Girl Victim up in some sort of apparatus.
Humpp explains that they are about to have virtual sex:
humpp
And now I’m going to conduct a final experiment on electronic control of the male and female libido.
(to Journalist Guy)
Do not resist. You’ll possess that girl. You’ll do everything to her that a man can.
(to Girl Victim)
You’ll respond to him. He will excite you in every way his libidinous imagination cane evoke. He will drive you to climactic frenzy, yet your bodies will never touch.
And they do. Their experience is represented in a not-too-bad visual montage.
The success of this experiment allows Humpp to give us an exultant mad science line, one which no reviewer can resist quoting:
HUMPP
(triumphantly)
Sex dominates the world, and now I dominate sex!
But later on, because he’s our hero and because the plot requires him to, Journalist Guy manges to get out of confinement and find his way into Humpp’s laboratory. Picking up one of Humpp’s notebooks, he finds out that Humpp’s project goes beyond personal vampirism. It’s an entire Promethean enterprise, one explained by Humpp to the audience in a handy voice-over:
humpp (v.o.)
Science will soon be able to harness sex, the most potent force in humanity, to increase the mental and physical prowess of coming generations. The virility of men must be increased and they must be mated with women of insatiable appetites.
(Journalist Guy turns a few pages in the journal and reads further)
Through electronic control of the libido we shall produce females capable of promiscuous and orgiastic encounters of infinite variety, producing nearly continuous concupiscent delights.
Wow! It’s a good thing that Hero Journalist is working to stop this, because it would be just terrible if that were to happen because…because…
Well, I’m sure there’s some reason why it would be just terrible, but I’m afraid I don’t know what it is. Maybe that Leon Kass character knows the answer. Anyway, I shan’t tarry over this deep philosophical problem, because it turns out that Humpp’s notes reveal something even stranger.
humpp (v.o.)
These discoveries were discovered by the brain of Dr. Puttagniello.
(My transcription here might not be entirely accurate as to the ur-scientist’s name, since as far as I can find there is no Italian surname “Putagniello” or close variants. Were they perhaps aiming at something like Dr. Puttaniere and missing? Maybe I’ve over-thinking this.)
Note that the helpful voiceover tells us that the discoveries were made by the brain of Dr. Puttagniello, not Dr. Putagniello. And as Journalist Guy soon finds out, this is not just overheated writing, but rather literal truth because Dr. Putagniello apparently is a literal brain in a jar on Dr. Humpp’s desk.
What self-respecting disembodied brain-in-a-jar mad scientist can be denied a rant of ver own?
brain in a jar
Dr. Humpp is on the verge of a great breakthrough. In his hands sex will dominate the world. Try to stop him and you will die!
But, fortunately for morality and decency, Journalist Guy manges to summon the proper authorities in the end who storm the place. Dr. Humpp, denied his precious fluids promptly rots away. Brain in Jar is predictably outraged.
brain in a jar
What have you done you idiots? Dr. Humpp was my bodily instrument for finding eternal life for all of mankind. Just as I was preserving his life by the use of blood forces of sex, he was preserving my life. We were vital to each other! Idiots! Arrgh!!!
And then for no obvious reason except frustration, Brain in a Jar bursts into flames. I guess this brain has serious anger management issues.
There is of course one final rant:
brain in a jar
Without the powerful forces of sex we discovered, the secret of eternal life for everyone on earth. Now, you have destroyed the dream of mankind forever. You will be mortal!
Oh, so that’s what was at stake here. I guess “try to stop him and you will die” was therefore not a threat but a prediction. Well then, Nice Job Breaking It Hero.
Frankenstein Venus
Awesome blog Wicked Halo has put together this gallery of images of the Bride of the Monster as created by Elsa Lanchester, a subject we’ve broached before here at Erotic Mad Science. All are worthy of your attention, but my personal second favorite was probably this one:
Thematically this falls into a line with one of the very first posts done here.
The hat tip goes to PZ Myers at Pharyngula, whose personal favorite coincides with mine. If you look at the Wicked Halo post I’ll bet you can guess which one that is (but no extra points if you peek at PZ’s post first).
Live-action tube girl…Perfume
With a few exceptions, there aren’t that many live-action as opposed to fantasy-art tube girls, and given how tricky that must be to do as an in-camera effect, I’m not too surprised. But I have found one that’s a real doozy.
It’s from an astonishing movie called Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006). Set in mid-eighteenth century Paris and Grasse, it is the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille a man with a transcendent sense of smell. Unfortunately for the maidens of Grasse, the smell that Jean-Baptiste finds most transcendent is that of a young woman, and this, in turn, leads him to become a serial killer who attempts various means of extracting and preserving the scent of women.
What he’s attempting here is an experiment to extract and preserve the scent of a young woman using a technique actually used by real-world perfumers called enfleurage. Result: tube-girl.
For such an unpleasant subject director Tom Tykwer sure gives us a lot of angles.
Although this particular method does not succeed, Jean-Baptiste eventually does come up with a means of extracting the scent of young women. He often refers to this as their very essence or soul. A familiar notion to readers of the scripts at Erotic Mad Science, I should think.
CORWIN
Yes, Anwei. The beautiful young Anwei, as liquid essence. Liquid girl! Feel..
Corwin tries to press the phial into Nanetta’s hand.
corwin
…she is still warm.
Even the visual image seems right to me. While a lot of critics seemed pretty put out by Perfume, you’d better bet that Dr. Faustus was mesmerized by it.
And when you combine the essences of many girls together, you get perfume just as magical as you do in The Apsinthion Protocol. Though just what the magic is, you’ll have to watch this rather squicky, scary movie to see.
On a sidenote, I have to say that a perfumer’s workshop, at least as created in this movie, is very much in the mad-scientist’s-laboratory, what with all the jar and phials of essential oils and distillation apparatus.
Yes, that is indeed Dustin Hoffman as a perfumer Baldini, giving Jean-Baptiste some of his first lessons. Look later in the film for Alan Rickman in a tense, understated performance as the father of one of Jean-Baptiste’s would-be victims.
Another naughty robot
…or Desperate Housewives Twenty Minutes into the Future. Found on this art blog.
>
She looks like she keeps a remarkably clean kitchen, but I guess that’s easy to do when you have a humanoid service robot, which frees up your time for, well…
Artist Nerijus Čivilis (from Lithuania, I’m pretty sure) not only has the mad science theme down, but what I take is his self-portrait (reproduced on the left) indicates that he even has the mad science look down. That’s really swell.
Sexperiment cover
The title at least would seem to have been a custom job for Erotic Mad Science.
I couldn’t find much about this other than the image, which came from this post at the aptly-named (and very fun) blog “Judge a Book by its Cover.” The book itself appears to be from 1966.
Weird Science pwns me again
What was it over at Weird Science? Did the spirit move Bill Gaines about once a year to shout across the office to Al Feldstein, “Al, we really need another story about a melting woman. Write one up and get Jack Kamen to draw it, stat!”
Well, maybe so. From Weird Science #6 (March/April 1951):
Similar conceit to that of “Something Missing,” down to the agreeable fetishist’s detail of her melting out of her clothes.
Here’s the context, taken from the story “Divide and Conquer.” A middle-aged scientist is working on a technology — in this case, some sort of drug — that causes living organisms to dissolve, divide, and re-form. Consistent with the principle of conservation of mass (Science!) the re-formed organisms will be copies of the original, but half-sized unless they do so in the presence of an appropriate nutritive medium.
Our scientist is married to a beautiful woman and, because he lives in the EC fictional universe, it’s a horrid marriage. She’s cheating on him and plotting murder. She discovers to her considerable sorrow that it’s pretty tough to murder someone who can copy himself, and it’s even tougher when the surviving copy returns to exact retribution with his copying formula.
(Ah, suggestions of comic book nudity. And created by science! And of course entirely-necessary-as-part-of the-plot-nothing-exploitative-here-please-move-along.)
Of course, since there are now two Glorias, this isn’t just the liquid girl fetish in action, but an early example also of personal identity porn. The question of which is the “real” Gloria is just as salient here as the questions of which is the “real” Iris or the “real” Jill in the Gnosis College scripts.
Sometimes, I’m almost afraid that someday I’ll be perusing Weird Science and come across the trope of a whole college full of reckless, oversexed students and a faculty which regards them as experiment fodder…
Continuing the shrinking thought
We’re more in the terrain of Aliens Behaving Badly than Mad Science here (though obviously there’s a lot of overlap between the two), but the image of the shrunken Professor Quartermass from yesterday’s post brought to mind a gender counterflip, involving women shrunken by a collecting alien and placed in strange-looking jars for transport back to the homeworld. The images can be found on the Minimizer’s animation and video page:
The ultimate source here is a movie called Bad Channels (1992). The Minimizer’s review page describes it as “horrid.” Based on my rather hazy memory of having seen it about fifteen years ago, I’m inclined to agree with the assessment. (Sigh. How many intriguing tropes lie immured in terrible movies? Many, many.) Shrinking woman and tube girl tropes are present, although since the captured women hit the sides of the tube and try to escape, or at least emote, A.S.F.R. isn’t.
Tube *guy* for a change
Look around enough and you’ll find a male example of the tube girl meme.
And also a guy caught in his own involuntary A.S.F.R. scenario.
And even a shrinking guy in the same set of frames.
I run it as a Sunday special, but because it involves an animated gif that’s a bit on the large side, I’ll run it below the fold.
Yet another tube girl
Were I sane, I might weary of the theme. But I ain’t, so I don’t.
She appears to be conscious of her fate, and not particularly pleased at it. It’s the work of Marcos “Hogwarts Prefect” Pashias, and found here, along with much of his other interesting art.
