Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy
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Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema Rewind. This is Rob Lamb. We have a fun one here for you today. This is our 11-10-2023 episode on the 1981 Yugoslav Czech co-production Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy. Fabulous film. I urge you to see it if you can find it somewhere. And I hope you enjoy this episode in which we discuss it. ♪

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick. And today we are going to be talking about the 1981 science fiction film Visitors from the Arcana Galaxy. Rob, I just finished watching this one moments before we sat down to record here. And while this is in our it's got to be on like the top 10 list for

of weirdest movies we have ever done on the show. Yeah, this one was a real pleasure. This one's a real treat. This one's worth hunting down. And I have to say also, thanks to listener Eric for recommending this one to us. He pointed out some months ago that the excellent restoration label, Deaf Crocodile, was going to be putting this one out. And I looked at the cover art. I looked at some of the stills from the film, and I was like, okay,

I think I need to buy this one. So I put in the preorder, set it aside during Halloween with the intention of coming back to it in November. And here we are. Yes. Thank you for the recommendation. So, Rob, this was your pick. I really didn't know anything at all about it going in, except you handed the disc off to me, said, here's what we're watching. I put it in and wow, was I...

This is the movie where you really do not know where this is going. Some of the weird movies we talk about have a weird texture to them, but they might be kind of formulaic in terms of plot structure. A lot of the horror movies we look at are like that. You can kind of tell where they're going to go. This one, I had no idea where it was going and it felt...

at times like a child trying to make up a story as they go along, adding in just bizarre details. I really didn't expect there was going to be

a major subplot where the main character of this movie's girlfriend is turned into a metallic cube. Yeah. Um, and I also did not expect, especially given how some earlier parts of the movie feel very, uh, broad and whimsical and almost childlike. So like they might be intended for like a younger audience. Uh, I really did not expect that later in this movie, there would just be a, a gory monster rampage, uh,

carried out by like the, the axis bold as love cover version of like a cross between Alf and Mickey mouse. Yeah.

Yeah, Moo Moo the Monster. It's going to be fun to talk about. Yeah, this is a movie, like so many films, like you're saying, they're on the tracks of genre. They're on the tracks of formula. And this one, with this film, it may seem at first like it's going to be on the tracks, but no, the train lifts off the tracks and then you're flying off to who knows where. And we'll get into some of the reasons for that, like the different elements and inspirations that came together, the alchemy of this picture.

So this movie was a 1981 co-production of Yugoslav and Czechoslovakian cinema involving four different studios. Zagreb Film, which is now in Croatia, Jadrun Film, also now in Croatia, Kinematografi Zagreb, which is also now in Croatia, and then Filmsky Studio Barandov, now in the Czech Republic.

An international co-production. An international co-production of two countries that no longer exist in the form they existed in at the time of this film's release, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in particular. I don't know exactly where this was shot, but I would guess it was along the Croatian coastline because the movie has a much more, I don't know, just kind of scenic Mediterranean feel than I was expecting as well.

Yeah, it's my understanding that this was filmed in Croatia. And yeah, you do have that texture of these like Croatian vacation towns. And they touch on that more than once. It's an important part of the background setting for the whole picture. And I was reading some of the background material for this particular film. The Deaf Crocodile release has a nice little booklet about

with information about the picture and the filmmakers by film professor Jennifer Lind Barker. And she points out that a lot of the locations used in this film might look familiar to people who watch Game of Thrones because a lot of scenes from Game of Thrones were filmed in the exact same locations. Oh, yeah, that would make sense. I think King's Landing. I'm not sure if I'm remembering that correctly, but I think the King's Landing scenes were filmed in Croatia, but I could have that mixed around my head. And it's another place in the Game of Thrones scene

TV show that was filmed in Croatia. You absolutely on Game of Thrones. I think we'll see multiple locations that are, you know, coastal areas on the Adriatic. Yeah. All right. Well, my elevator pitch for this movie is if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will physically manifest, move into your flat and turn your girlfriend into a cube.

I think that's dead on that. Yeah, that's exactly how I would describe it. You know, I haven't had as much time to process this one as I sometimes do when we watch these movies because I just now finished watching it. But I was trying to think. So this is a story about a writer and a dreamer, a creative person. Of course, a lot of writers end up writing stories that are about writing. It's kind of it's a very tempting subject if you know, to write about what you are doing right now, which is writing if you're writing.

But I was wondering to what extent...

The themes of this movie are supposed to be about writing specifically, or if it's incidental that the main character is a, a sort of dreamy science fiction storyteller. And really it's supposed to be more about relationships or just obsession or, or whatever. The, the main character often describes his own problem, not so much in direct terms of like creativity or writing, but as an obsession. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think multiple reads on it are, of course, valid. But yeah, it is fascinating that it is. It's not alone in being a picture about sort of the conflict between a creative obsession and the responsibilities of real life and just sort of the texture and nature of real life versus fantasy and what happens when these two worlds come into conflict.

But as we'll discuss, like one of the interesting things about Robert, the main character in this, the writer, is he doesn't seem to get a lot of writing accomplished. There's this strong sense that the book is nowhere near any state of completion and it like physically manifests later on as a blank book.

So it's almost really more about the conflict between the inner world of imagination and the outer world. You know, it's something that's been tackled in so many works, including The NeverEnding Story. I mean, that's part of the whole scenario there, except with this whole like childhood versus adult sort of scenario cobbled into it as well. That's a very good point. I think I was going to say something right along those lines that

The writing in this movie is there's never any indication that it involves language at all. Like you don't see him crafting sentences or paragraphs or like working on his his phrases.

fiction, his it's, it's purely about coming up with ideas and you can tell it because he, he likes to talk them into a handheld tape recorder. He's got like a cassette based voice memo thing. And so it, and, and this is, I think we will all recognize. In fact, I think most writers will recognize some part of themselves that is like this, that likes to just come up with ideas for things. Yeah.

Yeah, and part of the whole conflict in the story, too, is that when he dreams up things, when there are things that he wants...

He has this peculiar paranormal ability to manifest them in reality, which that's kind of makes one, I guess, a crappy writer in the end because you don't have to write it down. Right. Because it's already so you're already making it real through some supernatural ability. And I think you could compare that to sort of like the pure idea dreamscape of creative endeavor. Like, you know, you can sit around and create whole worlds in your head and create

You know, that can be the end of it. And there's nothing wrong with that. You don't have to, you know, to bring your rich inner life, you know, into a literary creation. You don't have to share it with the world. You don't have to market it and get a price tag slapped on it and so forth and try and fill out some sort of, you know, capitalist dream of what you should be. But, yeah.

But Robert in the film, like he still wants to be a writer and he still has this aspiration that that is what he's going to be in reality as well. Yeah, but it's all like top level dream based. It's all just the pure imagination point. And that is an interesting comment on writing because I think

It's very much the case, at least in my opinion, that almost always part of the magic of good writing arises from the conflict between like your initial imagine imagination of a story and then the process of putting that into language and getting it on the page, which fights back against your original imagination and makes you change things often for the better.

Yeah. All right. Well, we'll continue this thread as we discuss the movie further here. But let's go ahead and hear a little bit of audio from the film. I could not find a video clip of like an original trailer for the film. So we're going to hear just a little bit from the deaf crocodile restoration trailer. So just a little bit of this, JJ, if you would.

All right, well, if you want to watch...

visitors from the Arcana Galaxy before continuing on with this episode. Currently, the main way to see it is to buy the excellent restoration from Def Crocodile. You can look them up at defcrocodile.com, but the disc is also sold through various other online retailers like Vinegar Syndrome and so forth.

So wherever you can get it, I recommend picking it up if this is the sort of film that interests you. As far as I know, it's not available streaming-wise anywhere else right now, but a lot of these releases often wind up like that later on. So keep an eye open for it, just in case.

But Def Crocodile's put out the likes of films like The Son of the Stars, Sampo, and Delta Space Mission. Their Blu-ray releases look awesome. And this one in particular has a number of cool extras on it, which we'll get into. Any Atlanta locals out there, you should be advised that Videodrome does have a copy. I checked with them, so they do have a copy of this movie for rent. But the first one to get there gets it.

That's right. And then you got to wait until them, you know how it works. You know how video rental works. If you don't just ask them, go in and ask them, how does this work? They'll tell you. Two film geeks enter one film geek leaves. Yes.

All right, let's get into the people behind this film. Let's start right at the top with the director and one of two writers on this, Dusan Vukotic, born 1927, died 1998, born in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to Jennifer Lind Barker in the excellent booklet that came with the Death Crocodile release, he started off as a political and satirical cartoonist in the 1940s,

but then became involved in film during the 50s, right as animation was beginning to thrive in Croatia for the first time. So he was one of the early innovators there.

In addition to animated shorts, he also did advertisements for Jarden Film before founding Zagreb Film Studio. His animation work continued through the 1960s. And I have to stress, too, this disc is also awesome, the Deaf Crocodile release, in that it has a number of his animated shorts included in excellent quality. And these were really fun to check out as well to see, like, well, what was his animated work like before he turned to live action?

I would say this is a live action film where the set pieces and costumes and makeup effects and all that are...

very reminiscent of animation somehow there, there are not really animated elements. I mean, I guess there's sort of like some laser effects on the screen, but there's not any straight animation. It's all, it's all live to film, but it does kind of look like a cartoon similar to, I'm trying to think of another movie we've done that was like this return to Oz kind of has this quality.

Yeah, this kind of sense that even though it is live action, there is a basic animation absurdity to things. And I feel like you also see this element in other filmmakers as well. Like Tim Burton, I think, is an example of this. Like many of Tim Burton's live action films, they still have that kind of animated cartoon energy in them.

But it's also just there are certain visual qualities that seem similar to animation to me, like a lot of bold lines and costume designs that just feel drawn as opposed to put together out of cloth, you know? Yeah. Right.

Well, he started doing live action stuff, I believe, in the 1980s and through the 1980s did a mix of animation and live action. He was also a professor and film theorist. According to Barker, he also co-founded the second oldest animation film festival in the world, currently known as Animia Fest Zagreb.

His animation style on its own in these shorts that are included on this disc are wonderful. They're absurd. They're full of abstract shapes and possessed of a perky energy, but also like a genuine comedy. Like these are not like crazy experimental Film Board of Canada sort of fair where it's not to say that, you know, that all Film Board of Canada animation shorts are the same. But, you know, it's not it's not like super serious stuff. It's about obviously about making people laugh.

And I feel like you see this kind of energy reflected in some of the retro animation projects you've seen in recent decades, such as the Pixar short Day and Night from 2010, the videos from the Fallout games. Also, the MCU Loki series has a little video about the Time Variance Authority that, I mean, I have no idea if they were inspired by Vukotic, but I feel like there's a lot of comparisons to be made here between the two works.

Barker also describes his animation style as being bouncy. Yeah. Yeah.

And the animation is certainly bouncy. But he was a big success with these. The 1961 short Surrogat won the Academy Award for short subjects, cartoons, the following year in 1962. This is one about a guy who goes to the beach. He's kind of like, I guess if you were a real person, he would be kind of like a rotund fella. But everything's made out of abstract shapes. So he's kind of a triangle character.

And he gets there to the beach and he starts blowing up things like he blows up a float. But then he's blowing up things like a table and food. And then he blows up a female to hang out with him. And the first one he doesn't like. So he deflates her and then he blows up another one. But then it just escalates from there and just gets ridiculous. OK.

Is she also a triangle? She's very, yeah, they're all, everybody's very geometric. This one is available. You can find it on like YouTube. If you search for surrogat, S-U-R-O-G-A-T, you'll find the short. It's pretty fun.

So Barker points out that Vukotic and his colleagues were initially influenced by Western animation, like Looney Tunes, she mentions specifically. But they were also influenced by Czech animation, and they steadily developed their own styles. And then as far as this film goes, Barker cites several key influences. So first of all, international sci-fi and horror films of the 60s and 70s, which I think we see that here. Like I think she mentions Children of the Damned.

um, is having an influence. Can't help but compare it to other sort of, uh, practical effects monsters of the 1980s, like The Thing, um,

But also he was influenced by 1960s camp, by Czech new wave absurdity, by magical realism. And then also just in sort of the visual texture of the film, especially, there's this sense of like the banal everyday world versus the colorful, explosive world of fantasy. It's pointed out that we see Robert, he's almost always wearing like really drab tones. Most of the settings have kind of a

A drab, not I wouldn't say cheerless, but a very lived in kind of feel like like it's comfortable, but it is every day, whereas his the world of his imagination is like glowing lights and strange textures and so forth. Yes. A theme, obviously, that that he wanted to hit over and over in this movie is just the fantastical versus the mundane, sometimes literally like the fantastic fighting the mundane. Yes, absolutely.

Now the other writer on the piece is Milos Makorek, who lived 1926 through 2002, a Czech writer who wrote, I believe, mostly children's books, but also screenplays, comics, and so forth.

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who lived 1946 through 2021. As always, my apologies if I screw up any of these names here, but he was a Croatian actor of stage screen and TV. He has a small part in the 1976 movie The Rat Savior, credited as participant in the rat party. This is a movie that you and I have been interested in for a while, but if memory serves, it's hard to find right now.

Yeah, I haven't seen it, but it's on the list due to its premise, which has something to do with the man discovering, I think, he can communicate with like a culture of sentient rats. Yeah, exactly.

So the actor here, I think this I think this is his most well-known film, both internationally and in like Croatian cinema and so forth. But I have to say he's very enjoyable as this kind of bumbling head in the clouds would be sci fi writer with this amazing supernatural gift. It's quite a fun and funny performance. But you also you also feel for him, you know, like you can't help but but sympathize with this character.

I have no idea why I think this truly, I don't know what, what was bringing this to mind, but I kept seeing him in scenes in the movie as a, uh, lost extra member of the crew of the Nostromo from alien. He just looked like a hapless, uh, mechanic who would be working alongside, you know, Harry Dean Stanton in, in alien and like wander off and get cocooned. Uh, and I don't know why it brought him. And maybe it's like his clothes kind of seemed like,

Sort of like a sci-fi jumpsuit from the Nostromo. I really don't know what it was, but that just kept coming to mind. He's very mild-mannered, and there's a sense that he's just doing his job. He's doing the bare minimum. He would rather not be here. He's not going to put a lot of effort into things that have to do with this world, because there is another world inside his head, and that's where most of his focus is.

Yeah, I do think there's an interesting tension in his performance, which is the fact that the whole movie is about his creativity. Like he the whole premise is that he is willing troublesome circumstances into reality with his imagination. And yet he seems almost completely hapless. You know, he has extremely little will or volition. Yeah. And over things in this world or the imagined world, as we'll see. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, Robert has a girlfriend, and this is Bebe, played by Lucy Zolova, born 1952, Czech-born actress whose credits include 1975's Darling, Are We a Good Match? and How to Drown Mr. Mrasek, the Lawyer. These are not films I'm familiar with, but she's very good in this. I think it's a solid performance as his wife.

loving but almost done with it girlfriend yes she has very little patience for his initial even for his writing career uh when he's just like talking into a tape recorder about his ideas for novels much less so when aliens start showing up and turning her into a cube and she's an interesting uh foil to his uh like i was just saying very uh

adrift and non-agentic personality. She is very like forceful and willful and has a strong personality and is the one who's like pushing back against all of this like fantastical stuff from the Arcana Galaxy invading their world. So these are like our two main human real world characters. But we also have one of Robert's friends who has a minor but fun role. This is Photo Tony.

Photo Tony. So I think, wait, his name's just Tony, right? But he's a photographer. So his door, his apartment door says Photo Tony. Yeah, yeah. So my wife watched part of the film with me and she still got to see, she's a photographer. So I was like, you got to come see this. There's a photographer in this movie. Oh yeah, what was her rating?

She had some thoughts about it. Well, she was like, he's not going to get a good shot trying to shoot through a window at night and so forth. But I was like, you know, I don't think Photo Tony is necessarily at the top of his game here either. He's just more ambitious than Robert. Yeah, yeah. Well, Photo Tony seems strange in that

His ambition seems to be to break through from like tourism photography into journalism. Is that how you understood it? Yes, but he wants to take that shortcut to the top of journalism by getting that one picture that's going to change the world, namely of aliens visiting the Earth.

Exactly. Yeah. So I think he like hangs out around this this beach resort taking photos of people for money. But he thinks if he can just snap a picture of an alien, then he'll be the most famous photojournalist in the world. Yes. So Photo Tony is played by Lubashar Samardzik.

who lived 1936 through 2017, actually a pretty famous Serbian actor, I read, also a director and a producer. He was very popular during the 1960s in various films. He was a popular TV actor in the 1980s, and he directed the internationally acclaimed 2000 film Skyhook.

So it's a fun supporting role, but it's definitely one of these cases where you can see how this guy might go on to have a great deal of success. Like if this were a traditional genre film, this would be our hero. Photo Tony would be the one to stand up and save the girl and so forth.

Yeah. And the same way that Biba is contrasted to Robert because she has more will and agency. I would say that photo Tony also has more concrete will and agency than Robert. Like he's he's got a goal. Well, you know, actually, though, I guess Robert does have a goal, but it's just not a concrete goal. He just wants to live in his imagination. Yeah.

Also worth noting that Lubashe was on a 2019 Serbian stamp. I included an image of it here for you, Joe. Looks great. Great looking stamp. But I would add just about anything from this movie belongs on a stamp in any country. He looks like Kirk Douglas. Yeah, yeah. We see him like earlier in life and then later in life he does have kind of a Kirk Douglas kind of a vibe.

All right. This movie notably has a female android in it by the name of Andra. If you've seen any covers for this film, any posters or certainly any footage, you've probably seen a glimpse of this entity. And this entity is played by the actor Ksenia Prohaska, born 1953, a Croatian-born actress who also pops up in some American films.

She played a mummy. I don't know if it's the mummy, but she played a mummy in the, I guess, kind of, I don't know if it's infamous. It's definitely said to be bad. But the 1985 film Transylvania 65,000, a movie that's mostly known for being a film project funded by Dow Chemical because Dow Chemical had money in Yugoslavia that they could not get out. And

And so they instead said, well, let's make a movie then. Let's funnel those funds into a film project. And Transylvania 6-5000 was that film project that has a pretty good cast, but nothing... I've never heard anything nice said about it. Have you seen it? I have not seen it. Have you? I tried to watch it one time and did not get to the end. It has a very...

low energy improvised sketch comedy feel. Oh yeah. It, which is a shame because again, fun cast, it's got, let's see who's in it. Ed Begley Jr. Is in it. Jeff Goldblum, I think. Jeff Goldblum, Gina Davis. Yeah. Yeah. I, well, I don't know. Maybe it gets really good in the second half. I remember, I remember something about the first few minutes kind of drew me in. I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, sure. But then it just, it got incredibly tedious. Yeah.

Reviews I was looking at seem to indicate it does not get good. If listeners have differing thoughts, write in. We'd love to hear from you. Prohaska also plays Marlene Dietrich in Barry Levinson's Bugsy in 1991. I have not seen Bugsy, but I assume this is like maybe a small background kind of a role.

So anyway, hard to comment too much on her acting ability, but this because this performance is, again, an android, a female android. But it is a memorable presence. So I'm just going to go ahead and say she's great. Yeah, totally. Well, she doesn't have to do much acting. She just like says a few lines in a robot voice. The costume and the makeup do do more of the work.

Thinking about this character design, I was wondering, is the Borg Queen based on this character here? I don't know. Oh, yeah. I mean...

Yeah, you look at this character and it makes you think of like the Borg Queen. I thought of Cenobites a bit as well because there is this mixture of sexuality and like dominant female power. But on the other hand, like clearly an uncanny inhuman quality to the being as well. Yeah, I mean, it's a cool character design. I think she looks great. She looks crazy.

creepy, which is funny because a lot of the characters are like commenting on how beautiful she is. Yes.

Not sure what to make of that. She is frequently accompanied by two space children who also have gold space jumpsuits on, bright blonde hair that is cut in kind of like a medieval knight haircut, kind of a medieval bowl cut going on there. Yeah, it's kind of gray Nigel Tufnell hair. Yeah. These children, one of them is played by a child actor by the name of Jasminka Alec.

But this is one of those cases where this is her only credit. So presumably she was in nothing else. But the other one, Targo, who I'll mention, was played by Rene Bitorajac, born 1972, Croatian actor of note seen here in his very first role. So he's worked rather extensively in Croatian and Bosnian projects, I believe.

He was one of the stars of 2001's No Man's Land, a film about the Bosnian War that won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002. I would say also about the kids, it's hard to comment much on their performance because they're not doing a lot of human style acting. They're just like standing there and saying weird lines. Yeah.

And like you say, with the android, the makeup is key. And I did note that the makeup artist on this, or one of the two makeup artists, is Yuri Hurik, born 1932, a Czech makeup artist who also worked on 1978's Beauty and the Beast, which we previously discussed on Weird House. That one had some great avian beast makeup. Yes, totally. So I'm assuming he had a hand in the android effects here, but there's also someone else...

Ivo Strangmuller, born 1954, is also credited on makeup. And he worked on some big productions later on as well, including the 2000 Dune miniseries, Alien vs. Predator in 2004, and The Chronicles of Narnia, Prince Caspian in 2008 as a prosthetic makeup artist.

Oh, wait, but you didn't mention fair out vampire. Did you? Oh no, I didn't mention fair out vampire. That's another one that he worked on a film that we haven't seen, but we've mentioned before because it's coming up, come up in connections on particularly Czech films. This is like the vampire car movie, right? Yeah. I don't know if there's a good way to watch this one. Last time I checked, I didn't find one, but, uh, it, and it may not be good at all. Some of the reviews are pretty middling, but, uh,

The premise is it's a vampire car, so I kind of have to see it, even if it's bad. Now, we've mentioned that this movie has a monster in it. The monster's name is Moo Moo, and we'll spend a fair amount of time discussing him. But the really fun thing here is that the monster designer here, the person who created Moo Moo and helped bring him to life, is none other than Jan Svankmajer, born 1934. So this is the Czech stop-motion animation master himself.

I think while I was, uh, out on parental leave last year, you and Seth covered a Jan Svankmajer film, didn't you? We did. We talked about 1988's Alice. So if you want to hear more about Svankmajer, go back and listen to that episode. Uh, cause we, we spent a lot of time talking about the man and his work and how influential, uh, he, he was and still is, uh, in the world of stop motion animation. Uh,

But I'll sum it all up by stressing that he's just a master of the medium. And if he has anything to do with the look of a film, you're probably in good hands. And indeed, Moo Moo is just

It's amazing. Yeah, it is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen on film. Yeah, I should stress like Svankmajer is part of a huge part of that world of like strange stop motion animation, perhaps creepy stop motion animation that some of you might not be that familiar with. But but it's out there. It's waiting for you.

And then finally, the music for this film is really good, too. I really enjoyed it. It is a score by a Croatian-born composer by the name of Tomislav Simovic, who lived 1931 through 2014. He worked on multiple films and shorts for Vukotic, including 61's The Substitute, 73's Man, The Polluter, and 77's Operation Stadium.

Other films of note include 67's The Fourth Companion and 68's I Have Two Mothers and Two Fathers. I agree with your assessment. Really good music in this one. Yeah, it's full of like cascading synth and all the sort of sci-fi motifs you'd expect from a movie like this. And I'm happy to say that it is available. It was put out by the Croatian label Fox and His Friends, and it's actually available to stream in all the usual places. Just look up Visitors from the Arcana Galaxy.

I don't know if this makes any sense, but the music that plays over the opening credits, I was listening with headphones while I watched the movie and the music created a sensation like a kind of bubble of heat expanding through the inside of my cranium. Just soft, strange, enveloping sonic texture, a very strong mood. Really, really good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's this kind of, I mean, today we would think of it as this kind of like retro electronic sound. And I guess at the time it was maybe slightly retro, but also sounded like the future. And it still sounds like the future as far as I'm concerned. Also, I love the visuals that went with it in the opening credits. There's this nice mix of concrete and abstract imagery. So like,

Yeah.

And then you just see, you know, space imagery like these blue rivers flowing through space into a green sun and droplets that look like the, you know, the bits of splatter flying out of a lava lake, but that's like going just passing between the stars.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is a film that portrays space as being a place of color and wonder and mystery. It's not a dark void of death and emptiness. And maybe, so maybe we should get right into the plot then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're already here. Let's keep going. Okay, so we begin with some narration after we see, you know, space in the credits. The narrator says, one of the rare populated planets in the cold, uninviting universe is the small planet Tugador.

Not the most elegant sounding planet name I've ever heard, but Tugador, located in the depths of the Arcana Galaxy. Its inhabitants look a lot like humans, but their abilities are almost godlike. Their spaceships move at such speed that they can travel and explore even the most remote galaxies. It was one of those journeys that Targo and Ulu embarked on, followed by Andra.

And the whole time that this narration is going on, we're watching stars flashing in space. And then we cut to a totally different scene, a voice memo recorder with like a cassette tape in it held in a man's hand. He's talking into the microphone and the narration continues. The inhabitants of Tukador had perfect maps of maps of space. They knew all of the other inhabited planets, uh,

And now we see on the screen that the man speaking, Robert, is wearing what appears to be a space helmet. And he goes on talking. He says,

And then suddenly this is interrupted when a woman's hand just like wraps on the face plate of the space helmet. And a woman's voice says, Robert, your coffee is ready. And so we're not in space at all. Robert is just a regular guy in his apartment. He is sitting at his desk narrating his own science fiction story into a voice recorder. And his office in his office, we see all these like books on shelves, presumably a lot of science fiction books and,

kind of gadgets and sci-fi toys and gizmos, posters scattered all around of NASA and, you know, the moon landings and things like that. And the woman who was rapping on his faceplate is his girlfriend, Biba, who clearly has very little patience for his writing or his astronomical obsessions. Yeah.

It's a great scene because, yeah, the whole writing environment is very convincing and cozy and there's nothing too weird about it. But, yeah, his insistence on sitting there dictating his notes while wearing the space helmet really drives home this comic understanding that, yeah, he's maybe not getting that much done and it's more about shutting himself off from the rest of the world and living in fantasy.

Yeah, yeah. She says, clearly annoyed, she says, are you going to sit around all day with this bucket on your head? And then the narrator, the narration goes on. Robert says, time didn't matter for the three space visitors. They manage their time like we handle water faucets. And then Biba is like, we don't handle water faucets. We turn them. Yeah.

She's like, Robert, that's not even good writing. But like I was saying earlier, the writing as as writing does not seem to be the point. Robert is not in love with language. He is not a wordsmith. He is an ideas guy. Absolutely. It's more like if he could write.

It would balance things out. But it's all it's all like trapped in there. Right. Yeah. But we see Robert. Robert has a very frustrated life because he wants to be just spending his days wrapped up in, I guess, talking this story into his tape recorder. But but Biba does not like him spending his time that way. She gets annoyed with him. Also, his neighbors bother him like his neighbors come over and start having conflict.

So his neighbor is Photo Tony, and Photo Tony's mother's dog, Vicky, keeps causing problems, and they're trying to get Robert to sort this out for some reason. It is a cute dog, by the way. But they bring the dog over, and they put it on Robert's desk, and it pees on his manuscript. At first, I thought Robert was maybe like the super or something, but I think it's just supposed to give us an idea of the close-knit community of this particular apartment building. Yeah, yeah. For some reason, they want Robert to solve their problems. Yeah.

But I don't know why they'd be going to Robert. Robert displays throughout the film no ability whatsoever to mediate or solve other people's problems. Not that I can remember. He's just so checked out, he seems neutral. Yeah, I guess so, yeah. Like, Robert doesn't have a bone to pick. Let him solve this problem. That's a good point, yes. It's like he's a disinterested party, yeah.

So he just wants time to write, but he can never have a moment's peace. No one respects his ambitions. And also, this was really funny. He just keeps trying to put the space helmet back on while everybody's bothering him. But so we see that Biba is actually jealous of Robert's character. She's literally like, if you care about this she-robot Andra so much, why don't you marry her instead of me? And we'll come back to that theme. Yeah. Yeah.

So they go to visit Biba's family. I think, did you understand it the same way that Biba's sister is getting married and so her whole family is there in the house trying to get ready for the wedding? Yeah, yeah. There's a big wedding coming up. And I believe the individual that Robert ends up talking to next is the fiancé. The groom, yes. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

So, yeah, Robert goes along with Biba to the house. She's meeting with her family. Her family seems to look down on Robert. They're like, I don't know what you're doing with this guy. And Robert, he's just there to he obviously he wants to talk to the fiance of the sister about science fiction novels.

They're like, oh boy, you know, did you read this one? It's about a monster from space. And so this other guy is like, look, you can't call it visitors from the arcana galaxy. That's what Robert wants to call his novel. He says, you've got to call it the monster from arcana galaxy. Yeah.

And Raworth says there's no monster in the story. But the other guy's like, look, you're not writing Hansel and Gretel here. He explains that you've got to have a monster. And he talks about another sci-fi novel that has a monster that bites off people's heads. Yeah, sounds good. So the quote is, he says, you've got to, quote, you have to scare people. That's the secret to success.

I love how he brings up Hansel and Gretel as if Hansel and Gretel does not have horrifying elements to it in its purest telling. I think it's interesting that he's giving Robert these very, uh,

mercenary kind of uh pieces of advice about what the reading public wants about like what makes a book marketable but robert doesn't seem to have written anything yet it's not like he has a manuscript that's been rejected by a bunch of publishers it's like he's he's like i'm going to write a novel right in fact it's so unformed that he basically is like oh yeah okay i can add a monster yeah it really doesn't wreck anything at all because nothing has been written yet apparently the

That's right. So Robert ultimately decides his monster should be a toy belonging to the children in the story. And he also briefly says, you know what, I'm going to cut out Targo, the boy from space, or else that'll just be too many characters. So four characters would be too many. If he adds the monster, he's got to get rid of Targo.

So he goes back home, gets back to writing. And now the tone of the story is a little bit different. He talks into his tape recorder and he says, Andra and Ulu, visitors with power from the Arcana Galaxy, are a menace to human life and they are approaching the Earth. And they're not alone. The monster of the Arcana Galaxy is with them. Are we ready for that encounter? But

But while he's talking, we see out the window behind Robert and he lives in an apartment building that's like right on the water. It's on the coast looking out over, I guess, the Adriatic. We see a bright object fall from the sky and land on an island across the water. Oh, and by the way, yes, he is wearing his space helmet in this scene.

I mean, he goes to the kitchen to get a glass of milk when suddenly his voice memo recorder starts talking back to him. It's a woman's voice, very tinny and robotic saying, Robert, we have arrived. This is Andra. Come find us on the island. And.

And he gets very, very freaked out. He checks the tape to see if their voices were recorded, but there's only the hiss of static. The tape is blank after he stopped talking into it. So he doesn't know what to think. But Robert borrows a boat from photo. Tony photo. Tony's got a boat photo. Tony's doing okay. And he motors out to the Island in photo. Tony's boat. He docks climbs ashore and he goes wandering through the forest and

And then, whoa, suddenly they are here. So he like follows a flashing blue light through the courtyard of this building. I think the building is part of a, like a tourist resort area on the Island. And then he goes through the trees and then over this Rocky landscape and down a ravine until he meets the three alien beings. And when he, he meets them, one of the two children starts trying to zap him with eye lasers and,

I love the eye lasers. They're quite destructive, as we'll see later on. That's Targo who tries to eye laser him, but Andra stops him. So again, they introduce themselves. They're Andra, Ulu, and Targo.

And Rob, how would you describe exactly what you what they look like? They're wearing like gold suits. And I guess you already mentioned they're like the children having the long white hair metal band hair that Andra kind of has these gold ridges along her large pale head. I don't know what else there is to say. I mean, they look strange. Yeah.

Yeah, their gold spacesuits could also be robot bodies, especially in the case of Andra. And yeah, she has this big head, like a heightened forehead situation going on, which is, of course, used a lot of times, especially with aliens of like 50s and 60s science fiction. But here it is. It's done so well. Like it doesn't it doesn't look fake. It's just it it it just looks exceptional. I loved it.

Yeah. Is there a Mrs. Exeter? Maybe, maybe we're seeing her right here. And they must have, I mean, this makeup job must have really taxed the artist behind it because she like has these tubes as well that come out of the side of her head and go into her jawline.

And granted, she's not doing a lot of like emoting with her face, but she is speaking lines. And like I never you never see a shot where it looks like anything's cracking or coming apart. It looks great every time it's on the screen. When we first meet the kids, Targo says to Robert, you wanted to remove me from the story, but you were unsuccessful. There's something so threatening about that.

Yeah, already we see that he doesn't have control over what he's creating. He doesn't have control over his imagination. He tried to prune it a little bit and his imagined world rejected the change.

That's right. And Targo, seemingly upset by this, he throws out his toy, a little toy he has with him, which grows to a giant size. And this is Moo Moo the monster. But at this moment, we only get a glimpse. So maybe we won't fully describe it yet. Yeah. At this point, we can just tell that it's roughly bipedal, has kind of a snout or a trunk going on. But you don't really get much more than that. Right. So Robert is...

chased by the monster. He runs away. Then he is chased by what looks like a glowing blue Christmas ornament that floats in the air. It's like a sky blue ball with these greebles on it. He gets in the boat. He tries to drive away. He wields, I think, a beer bottle in self-defense against the thing. And the ship just keeps chasing him. He jumps out of the boat somehow. I don't know. Somehow he ends up back back home. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Rather freaked out by the whole encounter. Right. So he, the next day, Robert goes to speak to a professor. This is just a character just called the professor about whether he is having a psychotic episode. He's like, yeah, here's what I saw a doc. And the doctor is like, do you use drugs? And he says no. And he's like, oh, well, it seems all right then. Um,

But he explains a bit about his personal history. Robert says that sadly, his mother died when he was born. But when he was a baby, he wanted milk and he psychically made his father grow breasts so that his dad could breastfeed him.

That's the story. You might ask, well, how would he remember that? Uh, well, he probably, he would not remember that. I think if you go back to some of our stuff to blow your mind episodes on this, but luckily the movie depicts this entire scene. We see his father grow breasts and then breastfeed the young baby Robert. And already, you know,

There's been plenty of weird stuff already in the film, but this was a scene that really let you know, like, OK, this movie is going to continue to take some sharp turns that you were not anticipating. Yes. Psychic powers make it. Yeah. Yeah. So the professor listens to the story, kind of nods. He's like, oh, yeah, yeah. That's called tellergy.

He says, the professor says, this concept is not yet proven, but it's under intense study in parapsychology. And it's a condition where a person of intense willpower can make their desires manifest as physical reality. And Robert's like, oh, cool.

And the professor's like, do you have a problem or an obsession that is bothering you? And of course, Robert does. It's the book he wants to write. But, you know, he's like it's always on his mind, but he's being bothered all the time. He's not really able to write it. And while they're sitting there, Robert psychically manifests a book on the professor's desk. It just like appears out of out of thin air.

And the professor is like, oh, that's interesting. You just made a book appear. So he's like, OK, I'm going to write you a prescription for chilling out. You need to relax. And Robert says, OK, this is a good scene. It is. And then after this, Robert, he picks up the book that he psychically manifested on the desk and he takes it to his sci fi buddy from earlier who I think is working at a bookstore and

And when going into the store, the guy is talking to another customer and he's like, ah, yes, it's an alien beast from another galaxy. It, you know, it eats everyone. And Robert interrupts him to be like, hey, I just made this book appear. Do you have another copy of it? I think is what he asks.

And the guy's like, no, this book says it's by you. And Robert says, that's right. And then the owner of the shop, I think, comes in and looks at the book and says, all the pages are blank. This isn't a book. You know, come back when when it's got words in it.

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So we get a little more seeing into Robert's mundane day-to-day life. He's doing a pretty crummy job at work. His day job is he's a desk clerk at like a hotel or resort on the coast here. And he gets in trouble with his boss for having a beard. His boss is like, shave that thing off. Yeah. It doesn't look like a great work environment. His boss does seem like a bit of a meanie, but...

Robert's clearly not putting a lot of effort into the whole endeavor. It is bad on every end. I think his boss would be mean even if he was a good employee, but he's not really trying. No.

But later that night, the voice contacts Robert again through the recorder and Andra is there. She tells him that she and the space aliens, all three of them, belong to him because he created them and he's got to come back to the island. Oh, but before he goes back to the island, it shows more relationship problems between Robert and Biba. Her family is mad at him for acting strangely and being a bad boyfriend, but Robert knows how to fix it.

He's going to take Biba out to the island and show her that his alien robot characters have physically manifested and come to life, which is the perfect way to save any relationship that's on the rocks. That's right. Totally the right move. Yeah.

So they go out, they explore the island. They see the giant glowing blue Christmas ornament going inside a cave. And you know what? I was surprised here because what I expected to happen would be that he could see them and she couldn't. You know, that seems like what would happen in another movie. But no, she immediately sees it, too. And so it's like totally physically externally real for her as well.

And she sees Andra and Targo and Ulu, and they are having, quote, an anatomy class where they have captured a guard from the resort on the island and they are dissecting him and removing his heart. Yes, which then this scene, I have to stress, it is not anywhere near as graphic as that may sound, but it is like 100 percent weirder than we've seen.

Then we made it sound too, because it's like floating and they've like bloodlessly removed his heart. And he's in. And also the guard is seemingly like awake during the whole process. He just kind of like, oh, and it's wonderful. So Robert then sees the blue sphere floating around and he's like, I'm going to touch it. I want to touch the blue sphere. So he reaches out, he touches it and this destroys it.

It like explodes and disappears. And then Andra is furious with him. She says, you know, this is our ship. How are we going to get home now? But she has a solution. She says in situations like this, the only thing to do is to go back in time. So Andra opens up her torso and shows us her mechanical guts and then winds back the clock to the time before Robert touched the ship. And this time she interrupts him before he does it.

This insight into the inner workings of the android are very well done as well. It's glowing and mechanical. And in a later scene, we see, I believe, Robert look through from the other side, which reminded me specifically of a scene in Tobor the Great. Yes!

Yeah. So I wonder if that was inspiration or if this was like maybe a common trope of sort of old robot movies that inspired it. Wow. If this movie was inspired by Tobor, that would be something. Why not? That would mean two degrees of separation from The Christmas Carol, sponsored by the Magnavox Corporation, to Visitors from the Arcana Galaxy. Yeah.

Now, this is a lot for Biba to take in here. And I think we should not be shocked to see that she freaks out a little bit. That's right. She gets scared, tries to run away. Andra says she cannot escape and then zaps her with some kind of energy beam, which transforms Biba into a cube. It like shrinks her into a metallic cube. First, a larger cube.

I don't know, like maybe foot cube, metallic cube with a hand sticking out of it. And then they shrink her into an even smaller cube that can like fit into the palm of Robert's hand. Yes. I think one of the children initially zaps her and then Andra has to finish it. And she says, you can't do that yet. You haven't worked out the art. Your skill at shrinking people into metallic cubes is not yet perfected. Yeah.

This is another classic way to heal a struggling relationship. One of you at least has to temporarily transform into a cube. That's right.

And the aliens start talking to Robert. They're like, are you a mammal? And he says, yeah. And they're like, gross. And the children marvel at the fact of how primitive and undeveloped Robert is and the paradox that he created them. They are the much more advanced beings with all this technology and intelligence and everything. Yeah.

And they were created by this being that is far less complex than they are, which is kind of an interesting theme. Like Targo, as this character from a sci-fi planet, knows about ways that he could have been imagined that Robert doesn't know about. So Targo is like, if our creator had been more advanced, we could have had para lasers in our eyes. Right.

They don't specify how paralasers are better or more advanced than the regular eye lasers Targo already has, but that's to be understood. And so the kids are kind of like, they're kind of bummed out. They're like, if only Robert had been from a more advanced planet, then we could have been imagined with more advanced capabilities of our own. Yeah. Yeah.

And Targo, I think, still has a grudge about the whole attempted pruning from the fantastic narrative. That's right. Targo never really gets over it. He's got a chip on his shoulder the whole time. Yeah, you tried to cut me from the story, and I refuse to go. But Andra is more interested in what Robert has imagined for their future. She's like, what's in the next chapter of the story? Yeah.

And Robert doesn't really have an answer for that because, you know, he's not very, he's not really into the details, the plot mechanics. He's a big ideas guy. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, but then in one of the funniest scenes in the movie, even though it does involve corporal punishment of children, not usually funny, but funny in this case, Andra disciplines the children after they eye laser her fingers off. So I think Targo shoots her fingers off with beams of light from his eyes. And then she,

whips the children with a lightsaber. Yeah, she grows the missing finger back and then, yeah, one of her fingers extends into a lightsaber and you're like, oh, what's going to happen next? She starts spanking the knuckles, lashing the knuckles of the children and they're like, ow, ow, ow.

Which, again, normally maybe wouldn't be funny, but in this scene is hilarious. Yeah, great. So back on land, Robert has to explain to Biba's sister that she's been transformed into a cube. And Biba's sister, she gets mad. She knocks the cube into the water. And then he's like, oh, no, she's down in the water. So they have to get a diver to find the cube.

It's great because Biba's sister, too, is like she doesn't outright say, I think you killed my sister. But it's heavily implied, like what on earth has happened here? But then he keeps going on about this cube and she's like, OK, I guess I'll listen to him.

Yes. And then, but we'll actually, Biba's got multiple sisters. So Biba's, I think her older sister is the one who's skeptical. Biba's little sister seems to believe it, but she's like, okay, we got to cut the cube open to get her out. But Robert has to explain, no, no, no, she's not in the cube. She is the cube. So you can't cut it. Eventually the cube spontaneously transforms back into Biba, proving him right.

Yeah. And I think the children or Andra had said that it was only temporary. So it's well-timed before anyone could freak out any longer or anyone could be charged with murder. Now, if you thought things were weird so far, it is going to get so much stranger. On the island, there's a sequence of events where like a tourist child or no, no, no. The child of the cook in the resort there finds the stranger.

the severed Andra finger. So like the severed alien robot finger and takes it into the restaurant kitchen at the resort. And it's like, dad, look a finger. And he's holding it right there next to a meat grinder. And all these tourists come into the kitchen, including photo Tony, who's standing there with his camera. And they're all watching as they're holding this finger over the meat grinder, the meat,

falls in, it gets ground up with the other meat, which they do. They do explain what the meat's going to be used for. It's going to be to make stuffed peppers. Uh, and then the finger gets ground into a metallic powder. And there is a large man with a red beard who just keeps appearing and sort of like issuing authoritative statements. I don't know who this guy is or where he comes from. The big guy with the beard. And he just looks at the, the,

the bowl of ground meat. He says, that's not a human finger.

This guy, I think, I think he's the town crackpot. I think we glimpsed him earlier in the sci-fi bookstore. I'm not sure. Oh. And I think the actor who plays him, who I looked him up and he's rather tall. I think he plays Frankenstein in the Transylvania film we were talking about earlier. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. But it's like he's the town crackpot and now it is his time to shine. And I love how people start listening to him. Yeah.

Wait a minute. When you say he plays Victor Frankenstein or he plays the creature? Oh, well, you know, Frankenstein, the monster. Yes. Oh, OK. I'm not trying to be pedantic. I just didn't know for sure. Is Victor Frankenstein in the Ed Begley Jr. Transylvania film? I have no idea. I don't remember. There is some sort of Frankenstein's monster in it. And I believe this is the gentleman who also plays it.

So everybody on this island now, it's full of tourists. They all been hanging out at the beach and I guess they're bored and they want to see aliens now. They're like, all right, that wasn't a human finger. So there must be aliens on the island. So they start like running all around trying to find the aliens. There are dudes in wetsuits with spear guns who say they're going to hunt the aliens and they go to the cave where the aliens are hanging out.

and shoot spear guns at them. And there's like a laser battle where the aliens are shooting, you know, Cyclops eye beams at them. And Ulu zaps one of the spear gun men on the butt with a laser. Oh, this seems great. Cause it's like, they're trying to make this aquatic landing. It's like the battle of the, the, the alien cave and the eye beams are just causing enormous explosions in the water, which I guess it's due to like, like, like the rapid thermal heating of the, of the water.

Though probably, you know, the effect is explosives in the water. But but it's great. It's like, wow, it's like this is this is it's like the children are artillery in a battle. It's wonderful.

Yeah. And so this causes tourists from the beach. Now they know the aliens are in the caves. So like hundreds of tourists flood into the caves to find the aliens. And I don't even know where this comes from. A bunch of them start yelling and they're like, come out and meet us. And they decide to get naked to prove to the aliens they are harmless. So a bunch of the tourists just like take all their clothes off, except they've still got shoes on and they're running around in the cave naked, but with shoes and

And then the big guy with the beard is there and he's like, if you see them, don't make any sudden moves. Yes. They say something about just smile, just smile and look peaceful or something. Yeah. I love this Barker in her notes.

points out that it's like this inversion of the Frankenstein scenario where the villagers, instead of grabbing pitchforks and going up there and like, let's get him. Though I guess we do see that initially with the first phase of the assault. But here with the villagers, it's more of like, no, let's just take all our clothes off so they know that we're just soft and harmless. Yeah. And we don't wish them any harm, though we are still rapidly invading their space. Yeah. Maximum disarmament of just getting completely naked. Yeah. Yeah.

But they go looking around in the caves. They don't find him. It's like, where are they? It turns out the aliens have moved into Robert's apartment. So he comes. Yeah. Robert comes home and he finds Andra operating her own hand as a magical vacuum cleaner on the floors. And she's like vacuuming. He drops his groceries when he sees her and her vacuum cleaner sucks up objects as large as an apple in a baguette.

Yeah, some nice stop motion work here. And yeah, I love that her arm is extended into a vacuum cleaner. And when she's done with it, like it glows and then shrinks back down to a normal hand again. So he says he's hungry and she offers to cook for him. She's like, what do you want? And he says, you know what, I would like a steak, pommes frites and a salad.

And so she makes him a steak, pommes frites and a salad out of her, this like weird magnet in her guts. But it's tiny. It's like a little tiny plate. It's one bite of each thing. It's like food pills, like in Santa versus the Martians. That's right. He says that it's the best beef steak he's ever had, but portions are kind of small. And she's like, no, no, no, you don't need any more than this.

Oh, and then it just, Andra starts demanding that Robert touch her. She's like, touch me. And he wants to, but he's very afraid. And then Targo interrupts by, he comes into the room, the kid, and he has his little monster toy with him, Moo Moo. And he like makes it turn into a big monster and sends it after Robert. And so for a moment it's menacing, but Andra shows him how to defend himself by pressing a button on this little remote control.

Now, we only get a really a quick look at the full size Mumu here, but already we can see that this is an incredible creation. I have to say Mumu is

is unlike anything I've ever seen before in a monster film. The basic concept, I think, does remind me a bit of what we talked about in Terror Vision, which, of course, came later. The idea that you wanted to create a practical effects monster that was at once incredibly terrifying, if the context was right, but also looked really dumb.

So, Mumu is an absurd monstrosity with parts of him seem to be, he seems to be cobbled together from oversized and misplaced bits of human anatomy. Like, a lot of him, like, he seems to have sort of wing-like appendages or features that seem to be big human ears that are part of his body. Yeah, but they're also kind of, they're kind of mouse ears at a distance, but they're also a curled up appendage making it look like a ram's horn. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, you're talking about on his head. Yeah, he does. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I misheard you then. No. Yeah. Because on his head, he has these things that are like ears or horns, but are also like tentacles. But then on his torso, it's like he has giant human ear lobes as part of him. Yes, you're right. It's really weird. Like the outer fleshy part of a of a human ear on as as wings almost.

Yeah. And yeah, we'll see a lot, a lot more from Mumu. Um, and there's never any wasted scene with Mumu. Mumu is terrific. It's because, and it's either you're getting like a bumbling rubber monster suit kind of an effect in the, in all the best ways. Um,

And it's you know, it certainly allows you to lean into the comedy and the absurdity. But also he's like legitimately terrifying in scenes as well, especially given the context of the film and the sort of thematic ambiguity of the film where at least for me anyway, watching it as someone who's not there as part of its original time period and original release audience. Like, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what to expect of this movie. And therefore, the monster is a little more dangerous because of it.

Yeah. You know what I would actually compare it to, though? This design is a hundred times weirder and more interesting and better, but it has a similar dual nature and appearance to Trumpy from Pod People. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Similar morphology. This is like the the nightmare version, like the extra nightmare version of it.

And of course, later on, we see stop motion and puppetry effects added into the overall Moo Moo effect. And it just works wonderfully.

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All right. So after this, next thing that happens is Biba comes home to Robert's apartment only to catch Robert caressing Andra, the alien android. And Biba is very angry about this. Robert tries to defend himself by saying, but Biba, every part of her body makes a different beeping noise when you touch it. She is perfection. And Biba is not swayed by this. Like, this doesn't make her less angry. No.

Yeah, this scene is great because on one hand, this is very much a trope. You know, the whole, you know, one character catches the other two in the act and there's a confrontation. But it's all the more ridiculous here. It's not even the first time this has been done with a human and a robot being caught by another human or the last time. But it's just, it has such absurdity to it. Like the whole, like, like her body makes a different beep, you know, wherever you touch it. And Beep is like, I bet it dies. Yeah.

Yeah. So Biba gets very angry. She directs a lot of her anger at Andra. She calls her an erotic bucket of bolts and compares her to a laundry machine. And then at one point, Andra shocks Biba with blue light to like, I don't know, I guess in reaction to her touching her. And Biba then begs Robert to send them back to the Arcana Galaxy. She says, make them go away forever. She's like, if you love me, make them disappear. Yeah.

And he tries. He, you know, he cares about Biba. So he does want to do that. He tries to make them disappear, but he is unable to. He doesn't know how to get rid of them mentally. They're just stuck here now. Yeah. So Biba storms out. And somehow, I think, does Targo put the Moo Moo doll in Biba's purse? Is that what happens? Yeah, he does. That mean-spirited little scamp. He puts that Moo Moo doll right into her purse.

And so she goes back to her family's house where I think she was coming to get Robert to go to her sister's wedding. So the wedding celebration is going on. I don't know if it's like a rehearsal dinner the night before or if it's the wedding itself. I don't know. There are a bunch of people at the house gathered for a big meal. She goes back to the house, takes the Moo Moo doll with her. And unfortunately, it transforms back at her family's house.

into its full-size mode and just, it just goes wild. It starts attacking people. Somebody cuts off. It's like weird snout snake tongue thing, anteater tongue. And it sprays green blood all over. Everybody ruins the wedding. There is this giant scene that goes on forever of Moo Moo, just like attacking the wedding and ruining the feast and

And like shooting weird tentacles everywhere and maybe being defeated. Like, oh, dad gets like shoots the monster and then it falls down, but then it gets back up. And then the professor is there at the wedding for some reason. And he's like, we are witnesses to the first ever visitor from another galaxy. And he goes and tries to touch the thing. No, this, he later goes and tries to touch it after he decides instead that it's a collective hallucination.

And it bites his hand off. It twists the grandpa's head off. This other grandpa is playing accordion wedding music the entire time. It like attacks some family member with this puff of green gas. And then at the end, the monster's elf trunk turns into a flamethrower and is just like torching everything. And like spits out a glowing hot fork into a slice of cake and the cake hisses, which is a nice touch.

This is a lot to try and handle, I realize, especially if you haven't seen the film and you're just hearing all this. Because it's like, on one hand, like the flamethrower is terrifying. It's like a lot of these fire effects, more nowadays than ever, I'm just like, oh, my God, it's just terrifying. It's real flame. This is not a computer effect. Yeah.

The head ripping off, and I think a leg gets ripped off as well. These are not bloody scenes. It's more of like a surrealistic, like absurd dismembering where he pulls people apart like they're dolls. Yes. Like when he pulls the head off and he throws it, it lands in the punch bowl. And then there in the punch bowl, the head is bobbing around and still speaking. Yeah, it keeps talking. Yeah. Yeah.

And the effect they did on that is great. There's a cartoonishness, a kind of non-reality to it.

And Robert arrives just in time to save Biba by pressing the button on the remote to make the monster disappear. Oh, wait, before the monster disappears, I also have to mention this is pure synchronicity, but the monster also manifests a belly mouth and nipple eyes. Yes, it does. Yeah. Yeah. Which we just finished talking about on our core stuff to blow your mind episodes. But yes, Swankmire didn't hold back. This monster, Moo Moo, is just a...

a buffet of just absurd monstrosity. So Robert goes back and complains to Andra. He's like, this monster from your planet attacked Biba's family's wedding guests. And Andra says, you can't be mad at a toy. She's like weirdly unsympathetic at first. But then she says, you know what? We can go back in time and fix it. So she rewinds the clock on reality, goes back to before Biba walked in on them earlier and

And so now Biba comes into the apartment and does not find Robert caressing Andra, but instead she finds the blue ball floating around the apartment, the alien spaceship.

And from here, Andra, Targo, Ulu, Mumu, and Robert all fly away together in the spaceship into space to go back to the Arcana Galaxy. And then there's an interesting twist in space. He's like sitting there sort of at a desk and just floating in space. It's like their spaceship doesn't have space.

really like a metal interior hull. It's just like they're floating through the stars. And he's sitting at his desk and Andra comes up to him and says, your coffee's on the table, which is what Biba said to him at the very beginning of the movie when interrupting his writing and not letting him concentrate. So it kind of makes you wonder that like,

In a way, he's like, oh, have I been freed from all of these distractions? Now can I just like dream and imagine forever because I'm floating off to this other galaxy with my alien friends? Maybe not really. Maybe they're just going to keep interrupting him now. Yeah.

This is also a callback to when Andra pours him coffee to go with his meal. I don't know if we mentioned this or not, but she pours coffee out of her fingertip and then pours cream out of the other fingertip. She's just like a Swiss army knife of gadgets and features.

I wonder what you made of the ending, Rob. Is it a more straightforward, sentimental, happy ending where Robert is finally getting to live the life of the imagination now that the people are back on Earth unharmed? Like, you know, they wound back the clock so the monster didn't actually hurt anybody. Everybody's okay. And now he just gets to, you know, dream and imagine forever. Or is it a more satirical thing where it's kind of like Robert's problems are not solved? Yeah.

Yeah, I guess it's kind of both, right? Because, yeah, I mean, it comes back to that confrontation earlier, like where Biba walks in and there's a big argument. And, you know, this is like the final straw of your fantasy versus your reality. You have to choose. And

And of course, he's not really able to muster enough will to choose. And it leads to this whole catastrophic set of events with Mumu the monster rampaging and killing people. But then they solve it by just turning back the clock and removing that point of confrontation by just going ahead and removing any choice from him.

And, and so he just gets whisked away into that world of fantasy. But at the same time, he seems happy. I guess he's happy. And I mean, an argument could be made that everyone else is better off without him, especially if he's just going to manifest rampaging monsters if left to his own designs. I want, I don't know if it's consciously getting at this, but I wonder if another thing is, well, these are the creatures that he is imagining. So in some way he is kind of responsible for what they do and,

So I wonder if the whole thing of her now saying, you know, Robert, your coffee is on the table and interrupting him while he's trying to dream on the ship is a way of showing that he's like creating the situations where he is constantly being interrupted to sort of like prevent himself from ever having to follow through on the full creative work. You know, I think we all know creative people or probably in some sense, creative people know a part of yourself that's like this, where like you can, you know,

You know, if you fear that you're not going to be able to create the thing you want to create in the way that you want to create it, you might sometimes subconsciously put obstacles in your own path that kind of obviate that that problem like that prevent you from ever creating.

failing on your own terms, honestly. Yeah, I mean, especially if you haven't sort of embraced the reality that any creative endeavor is going to have those two phases, right? Or certainly more than one phase. You're going to have that initial phase of sort of free-form creativity, but then you have to make stuff work.

You have to turn it into language. You have to turn it into cinema. You have to break it down into a script, etc. And a lot of times you are going to lose stuff and you're going to have to like the dream is not going to come willingly into reality. You know, coming back to that, the whole idea of reality and fantasy butting heads. And Robert, I guess, is just fundamentally unable to

to deal with this transference. He's not able to muster the will to control the fantasy or to control its possible entry into reality in either a fantastic sense or a realistic sense like writing the book.

How much of it do you think he ever actually did right? We see some of a manuscript at the beginning, like with the dog peas on some pages. At another part, we see him wad up some pages and throw them in the trash. So he's writing something, but I never get the feeling that he's getting very far. I'm assuming he has a bunch of notes, like sort of D&D setting notes about characters and factions and planets. Though, again, not more than four characters because that's plenty.

And then he probably has like five to 10 pages that he is just constantly rewriting and tinkering with, but never getting much, much further than five or 10 pages. Oh my God. This dude's drawn maps. You know what I mean? He's drawing maps.

Yeah, Trugador. That's the planet, right? Trugador is fully mapped. All the continents, everything. All right, should we call it there? Yeah, we should go and call it here. We could keep talking about this movie. It's a great one. Highly recommend it. Check it out wherever you can get it. Rent it at Videodrome. Buy it from Def Crocodile. Just see it if you can.

Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you want to see a list of all the movies we've covered on Weird House Cinema, you can go to Letterboxd.com. That's L-E-T-T-E-R-B-O-X-D.com. We are Weird House on there, and we have a list of all the movies we've covered over the years. Sometimes a glimpse ahead.

at what's coming up next. I also blog about these films at some mutamusic.com. Don't always put a lot on those blog posts, but on this one, I'll make sure to throw in some of those short films and also some of the music so you can check those out as well as and also some links to where you can obtain the picture.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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