DamnAlienDVDReviews

February 2004
© 2003 Ernest Lilley / SFRevu
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Damnaliens DVD Review by the Damnaliens
Want a second opinion? We suggest www.imdb.com - Ernest

Recent Releases / Classics / SFTV / Anime

As you know, we did not win the election, though we urged you to vote for us as often as possible in the last column (See Last Column). We’ve analyzed the results and after spending hours and hours studying successful campaigns we have found the fault in our efforts. Evidently we did not give enough pigs away. We can rectify this but we understand that you Earthers, while being pretty willy nilly about everything else, are incredibly rigid about your elections. So, without further delay we promise that the next time we run, everyone who votes for us will get a piggy. We look forward to ruling you. In the mean time you can practice your obsequiousness.

Recent Releases

Time after time after time we see you Earthers tinkering with nature and then wondering why things are not right. This is partially due to your inability to do anything in a small way and partially due to your opposable thumbs. Deep Blue Sea is exactly this conundrum in a 90-minute exercise. This is a story about a model who becomes a scientist and about the good looking crew she hires to help her get some kind of fluid out of the brains of Mako sharks. The problem is these shark brains don’t make enough fluid so she needs to make the brains larger. She does this and then starts cutting them open and poking them with things. We have advice for you. If you are going to torture something, do it before you make it smarter. So, this ex-model scientist, along with her dive buddy (who spends a lot of time in tight rubber costumes), the obligatory rapper turned cook and the token actor are in for bad times. The sharks show once again why you Earthers really should stay out of the water, especially after discarding your exoskeletons.

Classics

We were talking to some monkeys about the sorry state of what’s new on DVD's when they turned us on to a real eye opener. Planet of the Apes, 35^th Anniversary edition. Finally, you Earthers envision a future that is not dystopian. Okay, you do put a couple of disgruntled humans in the movie but we figured that was just tokenism. This is a beautiful film about a distant future when humans are being brought to task for all of the bad things they did when they overran the planet. Now granted, simians are not the greatest of actors but we found we were able to overlook this due to the overwhelming positiveness of the message. The subplot, about the humans trying to understand what’s going on was a bit distracting but we understand that if you took the humans out no Earther would really want to see it. We understand making a small sacrifice for art. So, rush out today and get your stinking hands on a copy.

Finally, we discover something that we can consider to be the Rosetta stone to understanding your civilization. Greatest Sci-Fi Cartoons Of All Times has all the answers we need. We have already spent many hours perusing the various entries and we have been enlightened. We would imagine that you would be too, although the little blue flying guy is not like any alien species we’ve seen to date.

SFTV

The only thing more incomprehensible than your eating habits are the British. Red Dwarf Series 3 & 4 is a British television series. We would say it is an English television series but we did that once in Canada and learned our lesson. This series is about imbeciles in space. Now, we have certainly run across our share of this kind of thing, the Qqeeg for example, but these twelve episodes take the cake. We’re not sure why so much revolves around curry but it does. We’re sure this series will appeal to a certain element among you and we think you should take this opportunity to find out who they are and do some planet cleaning.

Despite the fact that you Earthers are incredibly contradictory, or at least seem to enjoy things that are very misnamed, you do produce the occasional thing that is fun to watch. Angel Season Three is interesting in a number of ways, and you don’t have to wallow in minutia to enjoy it. Sure it might make it more interesting to know that the toe ring that Cordelia wears in episode 9 was the same ring that flew off the finger of the foul wraith that Buffy offed in episode 6 season 4 of her show, or that the chicken sandwich in episode 2 was nothing more than an homage to Bucket of Clucks which did the emergency catering for show 5 of the second season, but you really don’t need to know these things to enjoy. So, stop looking for reason and enjoy.

Swoosh, clang, whap (We’ve added sound effects to our writings because we’ve found out how much you enjoyed them). We learned this by watching Xena Warrior Princess - Season Three. Bagong. Weng. Swoosh (we like the swoosh one.) Sheesh (not a sound effect) while we really liked the sound effects we’re not sure how you manage to get so many other things wrong. It is, after all, your own history. We feel somewhat obligated to point them out to you but we really don’t have the space. Besides some things are better if you learn them yourselves. Ka-ching. Swoosh. Swoosh. We actually duplicated some of the clothing and made Klaarn squeeze into it just to see how well he could fight in it. Well, okay, we’re not really fighters so we just sent Klaarn out for snacks. He reported great difficulty in a number of areas, not the least of which was refueling the mothership at the Sunoco. Swoosh.

We understand that some of your dvd’s depict events that, as you say, stretch reality. But really, aliens attending high school? Roswell - Season 1 is entirely incredulous. First of all, who really believes in aliens? And who would believe that aliens would ever even want to land in New Mexico? If they wanted desert they would land in the Sahara or Antarctica, which is, after all, really just a very cold desert. If they wanted sunsets they would simply hover near that ozone hole you’ve created. If they wanted to mingle with teenagers they would have picked Washington, DC which is full of them, and of people acting like them. So, right from the get go we have a credibility problem. And it just gets worse. Trust us. We know about such things. Aliens would never act the way they act in this series. Aliens are, by definition, a superior species, a fact you seem to forget over and over and over again. You have a lot to learn about aliens.

Anime

We truly hate when titles give everything away. For example, we give you Witch Hunter Robin - Inquisition (Vol. 3) which is about Robin, who is a Witch Hunter. The entire volume, which is the third one, takes place during something called an Inquisition. Why did we bother to watch this? We could have just looked at the pretty box on the shelf and have been done with it. We did like the story, even though we pretty much knew all the major story arcs before starting. Next time we may send Klaarg who’s pretty forgetful because he’s our navigator and his upper membranes are full of star stuff, and have him bring DVD's back to the ship in plain brown wrappers.

Well, we can tell from the smoke rising from the transmolecular locator (which we use as a DVD player) that we’ve pretty much come to an end. Assuming we can pry the crusted remains of those last 3 discs out we’ll return next month. We regret, noting the condition of those discs, that we won’t be doing the Kevin Costner theme column we had planned. Well, we hear that the Baldwin brothers do a lot of fantasy work so maybe we’ll investigate that.

In an unrelated area we have been receiving cartons of tomes purporting to contain the results of intelligence. Why are you sending these to us? We looked at a few of them, just because we are curious, and found them to be dry, dull and pedantic. We believe these things fall into the class of writing that you term academic. Why anyone would want to write, never mind read, a 1200 page book on Edgar Allen Poe is beyond us.

To make matters worse, many of these writers are trying to claim that there is significance in the works they are deconstructing. Please, stop. There is no significance in any of your writings. We have looked. It’s not there. Perhaps you are not capable of it. You are entertaining however and we believe you should stick to that. This poking and prodding and producing of previously written material is futile. It is like trying to learn anatomy from something that has been squashed by a mothership landing. Not only that but you can’t get rid of the things. (The tomes, not the squished things). We tried tossing some into the ram scoop and the ship was in the shop for two weeks. We even tried disintegrating a few but it left such an oily residue that we gave up that effort as well. We tossed a few into the sun but they made these big black spots so we stopped because we were afraid that too many would shut it off. Stop searching for meaning in the words of dead humans and start searching for meaning with your neighbors.

(Actually, all "dry, dull, and pedantic works should be sent to SFRevu's Academic and Reference reviewer, Edward Carmien, whose I2 column can be found elsewhere in this issue. Though the aliens might find it hard to believe, he manages to rehydrate some of these tomes enough to make a pleasant libation for the reference librarians among us. - the editor)