…or Desperate Housewives Twenty Minutes into the Future. Found on this art blog.
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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.
You know, when I started a site called Erotic Mad Science I’m pretty sure I would not have predicted that within seven months of starting there would be at least four posts tagged “washing machine.” Shows how little I know.
As best I can tell, it’s a British commercial for a mobile phone provider in the UK.
Over the past few days I’ve been trying to fix or improve some things here at Erotic Mad Science. You should notice the following.
CSS weirdness now fixed. In the past you might have noticed that whenever two posts containing custom Per-Post CSS (normally posts containing paracinematic or paracomix scripts with their special formatting elements) appeared on the same page, things would get a little screwed up, with the fonts being thrown into Courier and strange messages appearing at the tops of pages. I noted this problem before. I have now fixed it by adopting site-wide CSS standards for these elements. Stupid of me not to have noticed it before, but at least it’s fixed now.
Broken search function fixed. If you tried to search from the box that came up when you got a “Page Not Found” message at Erotic Mad Science, in the past, it would direct a search to Michael Janzen‘s site instead. There’s nothing sinister about that: Michael Janzen is the creator of the clean, neat Basic Simplicity template that Erotic Mad Science uses. But it led to a glitch in the code for the site, which I have now found and fixed.
Parascreenplay font weight changed. If you look at the various scripts found here at Erotic Mad Science, you’ll find that I have thickened the font weight globally. The previous Courier New font had the advantage of being a monospace font (a must for screenplays) and globally supported, but was thin and pale-gray under most browsers. I hope the new font weight is more visually pleasing and readable.
Tag cloud added. I’ve added a tag cloud on the right-hand sidebar.
Tags improved. I am in the process of re-tagging many old posts to allow readers of the site to find thematic threads more readily. If you have any suggestions about tags you would like to see, by all means please let me know either by commenting on this post or by contacting me.
A note on editorial policy: as I go back and improve the tags on old posts I do occasionally spot and correct typos, as well as other editorial mistakes. Sorry I have to do this; I confess to not being the world’s greatest self-editor. As a matter of policy I won’t call attention to corrections of mere errata, but if any substantive updates are made, I shall definitely identify them with test noting the time and nature of the update.
Thank you and now back to regularly-scheduled mad science.
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.
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…
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 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.
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.
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 about it. It’s the work of Marcos “Hogwarts Prefect” Pashias, and found here, along with much of his other interesting art. [Faustus update, May 13, 2018: The original link to the art appears to be broken, but at least one version of Pashias’s page is preserved in the Internet Archive.]
Strange filmmaker Doris Wishman (1912-2002) certainly deserves a place of honor in the pantheon of weird cinema. The unusual fact that she was a woman filmmaker who worked in both sexploitation and hardcore (the latter featuring the transcendent Annie Sprinkle) would get her in the door here. But beyond that, ho would have thought not just to make a nudie-cutie movie, but try to make a sci-fi nudie-cutie movie (really, see Nude on the Moon [1961]). Or not just to cast a voluptuous star, but the cartoonish (as in 73″) Chesty Morgan in not one but two movies. (Really! There’s Deadly Weapons [1973] in which Chesty uses her endowment as a means of assassination, and Double Agent 73 [1974], in which she has a camera installed in, well, you can guess where.)
So obviously it’s worth a look-in to see if there’s some mad science in the œuvre of this unequaled cinéaste. There is, and it’s depicted just above, even if it is a little disappointing.
The Amazing Transplant is the story, told mostly in a curious unravel-the-mystery flashback structure, of one Arthur Barlen, a shy young man who blackmails a surgeon into transplanting his deceased friend Felix’s superior (supposedly, we don’t really get to see) male member onto him.
This little bit of mad-ish science certainly helps Arthur with certain confidence issues. For one, it gives him the strength to proposition his sort-of girlfriend, a young woman who appears to enjoy sitting around playing the zither in the nude.
Unfortunately young Arthur has to live with a cinematic conceit that goes back at least as far as The Hands of Orlac (1924), which is that along with transplanted organs comes transplanted bits of personality, and it turns out that the late Felix was characterized by a rather specific and powerful fetish which poor Arthur is ill-equipped to handle. Things do not go well…
It’s probably best to read this movie as a sort of commentary on the fetishistic nature of male sexuality, at least as perceived by Wishman. It’s also an opportunity to look at some really hideous interior design. The doctor’s office, for example:
I swear, James Lileks could have put together an entire extra chapter of his book on how truly awful interior decoration was in the 1970s just by taking screenshots from this movie.
The mad science quotient is surprisingly low given the movie’s medical-horror premise. We get some very simple operation scenes, and little else.
Probably not a hit unless you’re a Doris Wishman completist or really into movies about penises. Something Weird does offer an edition.
Some of the older readers might recall that back in the 1970s Penthouse magazine ran a adult comics feature called Oh, Wicked Wanda! Scripted by already-famous novelist Frederic Mullally and rather lovingly drawn by comics artist Ron Embleton, Wanda as the story of the utterly depraved and fabulously wealthy Wanda von Kreesus, who lived in a Schloss on Lake Geneva. Together with her blond nymphet-of-all-work Candyfloss she traveled the world having adventures and collecting..specimens to bring back to her castle (and giving Mullally plenty of opportunities to engage in political and cultural satire along the way).
Should we be surprised to find that Wanda has amidst her servants her own mad scientist? Of course not! His name is Homer Sapiens and he’s depicted below, along with another of Wanda’s staff, the soulful jailer J. Hoover Grud.
Homer is preparing to convert the two victims in the background, “Brigitte Bidet,” and the “self-appointed British pornophobe Cyril Bluestocking,” into some sort of living sculpture at the behest of Wanda. Something more for A.S.F.R. fans! And what’s more, there’s also Wanda’s dead father, preserved under green glass to watch for all time the depravity in what was once his Schloss.
Pretty twisted, but I can’t help but wonder if these weird tropes weren’t originally inspired by that key influence on my inner life, The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist. The Moon Squad had a thing for preserving the dead in erotic poses:
Well, as it happened, weird reality got there first. Sometime around 1832, as it happens. Jeremy Bentham, who has as good a claim as any to be the founder of my philosophical order, had himself preserved and mounted post-mortem as an inspiration to the future. He called the result an auto-icon.
That’s the mad science spirit, Jeremy! (Thanks to this blog for the image.)
If you’re ever visiting University College, London, be sure to stop in and say hi.