Banter in faux French. Reminds me of my own college days.
(Click on the image for larger size. 
Gnosis Dreamscapes: Chapter Six, Page Four written and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com and drawn by Lon Ryden is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)
One of the many pleasures of running Erotic Mad Science is that I can share fun examples of people who are following their own inspirations, even (no, especially) when they’re a bit odd. And today I have one to share.
Distilling many pop-cultural inspirations, of which perhaps the most central was an outrageous 1966 spy-thriller Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die (very hard to find, though there is a trailer on YouTube), writer John Villalino has been busy creating his own comics series, Pretty Vacant. And it’s a blast!
Gorgeous athletes are disappearing, only to show up in images as astonishingly lifelike mannequins produced by the shady Still Life Corporation. I don’t want to give away spoilers on the plot, except to note that something very A.S.F.R.-ish is going on…
Uh oh. Will an athlete heroine and a heroic accountant (yes, heroic accountant) be able to save their friends from a fate prettier than death? Well, you’ll have to read the comic to find out. You can get in touch with John Villalino via his contact page here.
As for Kiss the Girls… embedded for your convenience.
Barbara Crampton would have earned her membership in the Erotic Mad Science Legion of Honor on the strength of her performance in Re-Animator alone, and I’m pleased to be able to say that she re-earned it all over in another performance in From Beyond, which I just recently re-watched for the first time in many, many years. Below is (I think) a publicity shot, which I found at Terror Titans.
Right in the middle of the movie is a delirious erotic mad science scene with the following set-up. Two scientists, the elder pervert Dr. Edward Pretorious (hmm, a familiar name) and the junior neurotic Dr. Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) are conducting experiments in a dark old attic attempting to stimulate the pineal gland, an alleged source of a sixth sense. They use a machine called the Resonator. Things go disastrously wrong (of course), when creatures from another dimension cross over and (putatively) kill Pretorious, leading to the commitment of Tillinghast to a mental institution.
Enter psychiatrist Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Crampton), who is convinced that research on the pineal gland might hold the key to curing schizophrenia. Tillinghast is released into her custody, and the experiments with the Resonator resume in the old dark house.
Disregarding Tillinghast’s warnings, McMichaels sneaks upstairs one night and…how to put this…caresses the resonator.
One thing leads to another and soon it’s power on!
And Dr. McMichaels soon finds herself standing in a vortex as dimensions are ripped open…but mustn’t stop!
But unfortunately bad old pervert Pretorious isn’t dead, just transformed and extra dimensional and slimy (-er). And like all monsters from the beyond, he wants our women!
So the Pretorious creature sprouts a big mouthy thing from his head and proceeds to “kiss” McMichaels, in a way which should have vore fans squeeing with delight.
It’s a close call as our heroes manage to shut down the Resonator just in time. Next time they wou’t be so lucky, and things will get…sort of ugly.
Definitely a movie that belongs in any thaumatophile‘s collection.
Some of you might have encountered writer and film buff Steve Miller’s 150 Movies to Die before You See, which sure sounds like the sort of thing someone who reads this site should have on his shelf. Well, I am pleased to report that this distinguished reviewer has not just a site, but a whole darn network of sites of reviews and commentary and very tasty imagery well worth your time if you like what goes on here. There’s Terror Titans (horror movies), Watching the Detectives (hard-boiled private eye and spy stuff), Movies to Die Before You See (pretty much self-explanatory), The Universal Horror Archive (lot of horror, including some classic mad science), and Shades of Gray (black and white fantasy art, which should be appealing to those of you who enjoy Lon’s fine black and white work on Tales of Gnosis College). From the last, I can’t resist a swipe of some splendid mad science found there, an illustration by Bruce Timm.
And all this wonderfulness is packaged up for you at Cinema Steve, which now occupies a place of honor over on the blogroll. Do something nice for yourself and surf over to take a look.
A favorite thesis of mine is that we kinky people will always be able to find loads and loads of fetish fuel in popular culture, and that since as kids we began getting kinky but didn’t have access to porny stuff (well, usually) most of our early erotic memories are going to be tied to pop-cultural experiences of the “innocent” material we did have access to.
There are two reasons we can always expect this to be true, having to do with the twin facts that we’re all hypersexual primates and many of us are kinky in some way, so therefore
I wrote the first part of my Thaumatophile Manifesto so that my readers could have a sense of my formative pop-cultural experiences, and naturally when I started corresponding with Dr. Robo I just had to ask whether he could point to a similar class of material in the formation of his own thing for mind control and sexy robots.
Boy, could he ever. Here are some things he was able to point out to me.
He began with an episode of Gilligan’s Island, of all things, in which Ginger gets mind controlled by a mad scientist. I can’t embed the video, but you can see it here. (Well, if you were living on a tropical island with Ginger and Mary Ann, would you fix the damn boat?)
Another example, from the TV series of Wonder Woman, in which a toymaker played by Frank Gorshin builds a life-size duplicate of the heroine.
And another example, the 1982 sci-fi film Android, in which a somewhat mad scientist builds two androids, one of whom is a pretty blonde.
Dr. Robo pointed to some influences he has in common with me, such as Robotrix and The Bride of Frankenstein and also Weird Science, although actually had something in mind from the 1990’s television series rather than the 1985 movie which so influenced me. In the version pointed to by Dr. Robo, a mad scientist tries to drain created woman Lisa’s energy to power his own “bride.” Again, I can’t embed, but you can see the episode on Hulu here. And there’s also a scene in Superman III in which a henchwoman gets sucked into a machine and cyborgized.
But the best overlap we had was Metropolis. You know the scene. Everybody knows the scene.
Can’t see it too many times, and that thought will take us to tomorrow’s post…
Update: Some of the video embeds in this post were crushed by WordPress for the first few hours it was up. I hope it’s fixed now.
Following up a lead at i09.com (source of all sorts of awesomeness) I took a look at the first volume of the anime Angel Core, an example of erotic mad science at work. A very literal example thereof, for the most part.
The first episode is some thirty minutes, but I must confess I extracted the purchase price in the first sixty seconds or so. An evil “United Empire” is drafting pretty girls into a very sinister scheme. I mean, it must be sinister, because they all dress like Nazis, which shows that perhaps this anime has a strong Nazisploitation pedigree:
Yes, mad science is making people into weapons for a nasty military regime. Perhaps not an unfamiliar theme if you’ve read Fullmetal Alchemist. This is a bit different, however. Fullmetal Altchemist has a vast cast of richly-realized characters embedded in a web of deep, complex human relationships in a highly-detailed fictional world. Angel Core has lots of gratuitous nudity and sex. Also tube girls, of course.
The aim of all this tubey naked stuff is to extract some sort of glowey blue sphere which is used (I think) to power/animate giant killer robots.
The maturation of the sphere requires the girls to have lots and lots and lots of sex. Because that’s the way things like that always work, no?
It is a measure of my own perversion that after the sixty feverish seconds of mad science exposition at the start that I found myself fast-forwarding — yet again! — past lots of sex scenes that didn’t really interest me that much. At least we got confirmation that our heroines are girls in peril with the glowey blue sphere thingy inside of them.
Please, animators, more mad science! (You can at least catch some video over at io9.)
In my unending pursuit of cinematic mad science I recently unearthed a little flick with the provocative English-language title of Deep Contact (1998). It turns out to be a late pink eiga, that is to say, Japanese softcore/sexplotiation movie. (It’s distributed by a company imaginatively named Pink Eiga.)
The premise is this. A cynical, burned-out loser named Wataru is abducted and finds himself in a very strange sort of hospital. (Wataru is on the far left of the screenshot below.)
The head of the hospital, a Dr. Ohora (yes, they do make the obvious pun at some point) explains that Wataru is desparately needed for an experiment. The earth is being threatened with destruction by a comet, and only the force of psychokinesis can divert the comet sufficiently to save the world.
Fortunately they actually have a means of generating the necessary psycokinetic energy — they have a group of psychics whose power is released by…well, no points for guessing on this blog. And the most powerful of them is one Ikuko, a hot lady sexual scientist. Ohora arranges a masturbation-driven demonstration of her prowess for Wataru.
Ikuko, whose abilities began to manifest at menarche, has been abstaining from intercourse all her life for fear of the destruction she might wreck if she had “real” sex. But it has been determined (somehow) that Wataru is the man for her, who can release her energies so as to divert the comet and save the world. “She is fantasizing about you,” Ohora tells Wataru as they watch her work her way toward climax. (A sex partner who comes pre-seduced! It would do for sex what the TV dinner does for cuisine!) It sort of leads me to wonder whether the strategic deployment of a Hitachi Magic Wand might not be a cheaper and more hygienic means of saving humanity, but obviously no one consulted me on the script.
I guess considered strictly as erotic mad science Deep Contact is rather disappointing. There isn’t really that much in the way of lab settings. The sex is merely competent softcore. Ohora isn’t really a mad scientist; he’s just an ordinary scientist working from a bizarre premise for the banal goal of saving the world from destruction. (A really mad scientist would, by way of contrast, be trying to destroy the world, perhaps with an eye to repopulating it with a race of atomic supermen, or something.) But for all that I can’t say the movie lacks entertainment value, but it features all sorts of utterly lunatic dialog, and I write as an expert lunatic. Now to be sure I don’t speak Japanese and am compelled to rely on the subtitles, and perhaps the movie as lost (or gained?) something in translation. But really. The subtitles in the screencaps above certainly hint at the spirit of the proceedings. And you do get lines like “Nurses in this hospital are not allowed to wear panties” and “Now we fuck to save the world!” which you wouldn’t normally expect to hear from the likes of say, Judi Dench or Anthony Hopkins. (Not that it wouldn’t be entertaining if we did.)
And then there’s things like this:
Yep. It’s not enough that smokin’ hot lady scientist is being offered to you on a plate. We have to bring the authority of the United Nations into the game. Sweet Zombie Jesus! Was there a Security Council resolution?
The shape of the building in the background of this shot seems not to have been an accident, also.
I think I need to go lie down now…
So Cambrian reaches the culmination of its plot when Hot Lady Scientist, having had enough of being molested by sex machines and otherwise subject to abuse, transforms herself into some sort of spiky blond valkyrie-demon, breaks out of her bonds, slays Junior Mad Scientist, forces Bad Girl to flee into a conveniently-large airshaft, and then liberates Nerdy Assistant, who had been chained up and subjected to abuse by Bad Girl for some reason.
There is then a meeting of the minds.
Hot lady scientist
This is what I am. Can you still love me?
Nerdy Assistant stands up, then kneels down, grasping the spike growing out of Hot Lady Scientist’s crotch. He points the spike at his own throat, and speaks.
Nerdy Assistant
If it’s destined….
The surprisingly understated scene that follows is an exterior view of what we know (from its having been established earlier) of Hot Lady Scientist’s laboratory building. It would seem that we are being invited to write our own ending in our imaginations here, but at the same time it seems like a moment of acceptance, of embracing what you are (or someone else is) even if that seems monstrous.
And that, dear readers, is what puts Cambrian just a little bit beyond just another tits ‘n tentacles story, at least for me.
So the plot of Cambrian rolls forward something like this: Hot Lady Scientist answers a summons from her former boss Senior Mad Scientist, who has been kicked out by the scientific establishment for human cloning experiments. Hot Lady Scientist arrives at Senior Mad Scientist’s isolated laboratory to find that he has been involved in experiments “accelerating” evolution, promptly finds herself stripped and bound by Senior Mad Scientist, who then transforms into your standard-issue tentacle beast and…well people who read this blog don’t really need to be told what happens next.
Hot Lady Scientist escapes from Senior Mad Scientist’s laboratory (carried by Nerdy Assistant, who is desperately in love with her). The “Cambrian” transformation spreads by sexual contact, from Hot Lady Scientist to her boyfriend Junior Mad Scientist, and thence to Bad Girl. Unsurprisingly, both Junior Mad Scientist and Bad Girl are thrilled at their new posthuman status, and are soon in cahoots.
Eventually Hot Lady Scientist ends up being abducted by Junior Mad Scientist and tormented with sex machines, which makes for some decent mad-lab images. This…
and this…
…and this.
Not too bad, although the idiosyncratic reason for me to actually like this anime comes tomorrow.
I’ve reeived via my trusty courier the two episodes of a curious anime series called Cambrian, acquired by me because there was alleged to be some sort of mad science going on in there. It was put out in mid-decade by Milky Animation, an outfit whose website is I think here. Anyone out there with real Japanese literacy skills is of course welcome to correct me on this if I’ve got it wrong.
Yes, some. On the surface this appears to be just a standard tits ‘n tentacles story, albeit a fairly compressed one containing only five characters of any consequence: Senior Mad Scientist, Hot Lady Scientist, Junior Mad Scientist, Bad Girl, and Nerdy Assistant. The opening scene has some appeal. As best I understand it, Senior Mad Scientist has figured out some means of “speeding up” evolution through “radiation waves.” Obviously evolution does not work the same in anime world as it does in the real world. In the real world, evolution is a process through with there is differential success of replicators (genes, in the case of biological evolution), a blind, goal-free process which nonetheless results in various kinds of exquisite design. In the anime world, by way of contrast, evolution is a goal-directed process. And the τέλος at which this process is aimed is turning all creatures great and small into things very muscular, tentacular, and rapey. (Ol’ Aristotle would have been so proud to see this philosophical development.)
So anyway we open with a pretty good lab scene. Senior Mad Scientist has speeded up evolution and has a lab full of tubes of…well, I’m not really sure.
He analogizes his (rather questionable) achievement to the “Cambrian Explosion,” all the while addressing what appears to be a female experimental victim inside the lab.
Unsurprisingly nude female victim will be writhing in ecstasy within a few frame. And slain within a few frames more. Genre!