Saturday, December 15, 2012

The Martian Drive In Podcast #9 - The Island of Lost Black Sabbath Souls




For the last Martian Drive In Podcast of 2012, I'm looking at 1932's The Island Of Lost Souls starring Charles Laughton and Bela Lugosi. (What is the law!) and the 1963 Mario Bava portmanteau movie, Black Sabbath starring Boris Karloff and Mark Damon. Have safe holidays.
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Sunday, November 18, 2012

The Martian Drive-In Podcast #8 - Just Imagine The Year Of The Sex Olympics



This time I take a look at Nigel Kneale's 1968 television play The Year Of The Sex Olympics, which predicted reality television 30 years before it happened and the 1930 science fiction musical comedy Just Imagine. (By the way, episodes of the TV series Doomwatch are available on Youtube.) There's also feedback.

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Sunday, October 21, 2012

Martian Drive In Podcast #7 - The EXistenZ of The UFO Doomwatch


For number 7 I look at David Cronenberg's 1999 body horror science fiction virtual reality movie with the best tooth-shooting bone gun in science fiction history... EXistenZ and shoot the breeze about the Brit SF TV series Doomwatch and UFO. And there is feedback.  Voicemail can be sent to (206) 203 3299 and emails to kultguru@gmail.com.


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Monster Movie Kid - Richard In Wichita's blog

Saturday, September 29, 2012

The Martian Drive In Yahoo Discussion Group


Thanks to the efforts of Nick Sauer, MDIP now has a discussion group. The link is right here. I'm posting a couple of discussion points today, so have at it.

Friday, September 21, 2012

Friday, August 24, 2012

The Martian Drive In Podcast #5 - FAQ About Time Travel- Primer - Remip - Levart EmiT Touba QAF


In number five, Ian Mond from The Writer And The Critic and Shooting The Poo podcasts joins me in the Man Cave for a talk about the Curiosity Rover on Mars, a discussion on whether we should support homophobic Science Fiction writers when their stories get made into blockbuster movies and we chat two movies about time travel: FAQ About Time Travel (2009) starring Chris O'Dowd and Anna Faris and a challenging low budget movie from 2004, Primer which will do your head in with confused timelines and minimal exposition. We also have feedback!
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Monday, August 13, 2012

Saturday, July 28, 2012

The Martian Drive In Podcast #4 - The Man From Cypher


For the fourth MDIP, Grant Watson and Sonia Marcon from Bad Film Diaries Podcast join me to discuss Vincenzo Natali's 2002 science fiction thriller Cypher starring Jeremy Northam and Lucy Liu and the 2007 science fiction flick The Man From Earth. We also talk porn slapping, botox and the nature of cinema a bit.
As The Martian Drive In Podcast how has its own RSS feed, please copy the RSS link below into your podcatching software.

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Friday, July 27, 2012

MDIP Banner

Thanks for Richard Palmer in Maryland for the new Martian Drive In Podcast banner. Feeling the love, people.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

The Martian Drive In Podcast Has Its Own RSS Feed!

The podcast now has its own feed, meaning that you can subscribe to MDIP separately from Paleo-Cinema Podcast. The Feed is Here (right click and copy.) If you subscribe via iTunes go into iTunes, Advanced Options, Subscribe To Podcast and paste the link.  

Thursday, July 19, 2012

A Martian Drive In Podcast Logo by Ghadi in Beirut

A listener, Ghadi who lives in Beirut, Lebanon supplied this groovy logo for the Podcast. I love it.


Sunday, July 1, 2012

The Martian Drive In Podcast #3 The 4D Idiocracy


In this one, Paul Poulton and myself chew the fat about the 1959 science fiction thriller The 4D Man starring Robert Lansing and Lee Merewether and the 2006 political science fiction satire, Idiocracy starring Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph.Also, I've sent a shout out to designers to assist with a Martian Drive In Logo. Prize is a box of DVDs and Blu-Rayz. Voicemail can be sent to (206) 203 3299 and emails or mp3 voicemails to kultguru@gmail.com.  iTunes reviews are welcome.
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Sunday, June 3, 2012

The Martian Drive-In Podcast #2 The Triangle of Privilege


For the second MDIP, Rob Jan from Zero G at 3RRR Community Radio joins me to talk about Peter Watkins' 1967 science fiction film Privilege and an interesting time-travel/horror/character piece from 2009, Christopher Smith's Triangle.
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Sunday, May 6, 2012

The Martian Drive In Podcast #1 The Power/ First Men In The Moon

For the first of the new podcasts, I look at the 1964 Steampunkesque "First Men In the Moon" starring Edward Judd, Lionel Jeffries and Martha Hyer and the 1968 George Pal produced movie "The Power" starring George Hamilton, Suzanne Pleshette and Michael Rennie.


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Saturday, May 5, 2012

24 Hours To The First Episode of The Martian Drive In Podcast.


The first episode of The Martian Drive In Podcast will feature 1968's The Power & 1964's First Men In The Moon. Out in less than 24 hrs.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

From Metaluna To Melbourne

The first science fiction movie I can recall seeing was This Island Earth.

In the early 1960s, back when Ming The Merciless was Prime Minister of Australia, my Uncle, Roy took me see that classic 1955 SF movie in The Crescent Theatre in Fairfield New South Wales.(see picture above: The Crescent in 1942).

It was the early sixties and even then The Crescent was run down. It dated back to the silent movie days and was one of the first cinemas in the area to show sound films. It stopped being a cinema in the 1970s and morphed into a carpet warehouse.

That's a common story for old cinemas in Australian cities. From the 1920s to the 1970s in Australia, the most elegant places that most people regularly visited, apart from churches, were cinemas. Even the shabbiest of fleapits had a certain charm. The logos above the doors of the mens' rooms were top hats and canes – for the women, parasols. The fittings were wood not moulded plastic and stainless steel. Carpets were old but quality, the light fittings aspired to elegance and classicism. Lobby cards for the current and upcoming movies were displayed in glass cases. They had a sense of history about them, even if it was measured in only a few decades.

I was five or six at the time and I had already visited lovelier fleapits in Sydney city, but this visit was special enough for me to remember it almost half a century later.

It was very exciting for a few reasons. Firstly, we went at night. When you're a child, night-time is exciting and mysterious. Secondly, we got popcorn and in the bottom of the popcorn box was a plastic cowboy. In all the years since, I haven't seen that again and yet to this day I still believe that cinema popcorn should have toys.

Multiple screens? Pah! I grew up when you had to hunt down which cinema a movie was showing at and work out how to get there. Give me the days when I had haul my teenaged arse 50 kilometres from my monstrously unhappy home in the outer 'burbs to see The Final Programme (a.k.a. The Last Days Of Man On Earth) at the Rose Bay Wintergarden just because it was based on a Michael Moorcock novel that I had read and not entirely understood.

So there I am hanging with my uncle, and the movie starts. Weird and exciting things happen.

The scientist gets alien technology from a catalogue that lets him build a Skype Machine with a triangular screen that shoots lasers. It turns out that the construction of the machine is a job interview.

He flirts with an actress who used to be Howard Hughes' girlfriend.

Aliens with big foreheads pick up the flirting couple in a flying saucer by tractor beaming their Cessna into a cargo hold.

The aliens take the two humans to an alien planet undergoing catastrophic renovation, show them a monster and go “Oh dear, too late for you to help us unfuck up our planet” and drive them back to Earth.

Can there be anything more marvellous for a kid?

Well, I did get a bit freaked out when the humans were put into giant test tubes full of a green gas that turns them slowly transparent so you can see their viscera and skeleton. The scrotum-headed Metaluna mutant didn't worry me too much.

But here's what I got from the movie at that young, impressionable age:

Science fiction movies are an escape from the real world.

Scientists work hard. Building an interocitor from packaged components takes time, careful work and coffee.

Don't trust blond men with bulging foreheads. They're only out for themselves.

Science fiction movies are extremely cool.

Which brings us today. Science Fiction movies are still cool. But only some of them. The ones that are more than a frenetic computer generated sound and light show. The ones that respect the genre and its conventions. The ones made with passion and imagination and rigorous internal logic. The ones that acknowledge and respect the other works that inspired their creation rather than ripping them off.

So I'm doing a monthly science fiction movie podcast as a companion piece to the venerable Paleo-Cinema Podcast. Unlike Paleo-Cinema, I'll be looking at recent as well as older films. Like Paleo-Cinema, I hope to have a lot of fun and explore some groovy films in doing it.

The first episode of The Martian Drive-In Podcast will be unleashed at the end of April, 2012.