DamnAlienDVDReviews

March 2004
© 2004 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

We have been studying your seasonal effective disorders and we have come to a number of surprising conclusions. Unfortunately the sharing of them violates any number of galactic laws and we are in trouble enough already. We shall store them, along with the cures for hiccups, idiocy and boredom in the black box under the mothership. When you are ready we will be sure to let you have it.

Let us turn instead to an even more troubling subject—the lack of good things on DVD's. We are used to just tossing a couple of shovel fulls into the converted transmolecular de-intergerator and waiting to watch the three or four good ones that rose to the top during the sorting. Lately we’ve been dumping boxfuls in and not getting much in return. We’d like to tell you about all the ones that did not make the cut but we’re not really sure what happens to them. The TDI is a device that we’re not very familiar with having had to leave the homeworld rather quickly and missing mothership class that day. To top it off Klargg traded the mothership manual for a mint set of Crawling Eye lobby cards so now we have no reference at all although we do have some spiffy new bulkhead coverings.

Recent Releases

We’re not quite sure where to fit Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection, Vol. 5. Is it a new release? Is it a classic? Is it TV? And to top it off we’re pretty sure there’s not even much of a market for a guy in a space station with his robots making fun of movies. We know how serious you are about your movies and this, we think, is dangerous ground. We watched just to get an idea. It never happened so we stopped. We assume there is a market for this kind of thing although we don’t think we’ve hovered over one yet and we’ve hovered over a lot of places. We think you’ll stop too and return once more to places where all the crap you so readily produce will be looked at in a more serious, stentorian way

We never thought it would happen but evidently Japan has run out of monsters. Poor planning on their part. How else to explain Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla? Surely if there were other giant things out there Godzilla would be fighting them. But he’s not. He’s fighting some giant robot. We’re not sure why anyone would make a giant robot Godzilla but then we’re not sure why anyone would make toaster ovens. And yet you do. Over and over. Perhaps some day we will understand. Japan gets destroyed once again which is just as well since the buildings were all pretty much almost a year old anyway and evidently needed replacing.

We know, after watching you since 1954, that you have a rather tenuous grasp on what is real. This explains much we think. It also explains why you are so enthralled with this very idea and test these waters time and again. Gothika is just one more example of this. Did she do it? Did she see ghosts? Did she turn off the iron before getting arrested? Why do you torment yourself with these kind of questions when you can just zip up to space, find the right quarks, rub them against the tranzental galactic string and see for yourself? Never mind, we just remembered that you don’t do much zipping anymore. This still does not explain why you are always asking yourself, is it real or is it Memorex? The answer is always both except when it’s neither. Could we be any more clear on this?

Classics

And now, just in time for the holiday season comes The Nightmare Before Christmas (Special Edition). (You know we don’t make any of this up don’t you?) We’re not quite sure what holiday they were shooting for but we’re pretty sure they missed by quite a bit. This is a cartoon, excuse us, an animated feature about the guy who runs Halloween wanting to get better press and then taking over Christmas. We know this sounds like a dumb concept but you have a particular knack for turning these dumb ideas into fairly fun flicks. This is exactly what you’ve done with this one so, rush out and get it. The holiday’s fast approach and you wouldn’t want to be left with nothing to watch like you were the last holiday season.

We have noticed that you Earthers have a preponderance of fear concerning round, shiny things falling out of the sky. The Day The Earth Stood Still is an excellent example of this. Sure there happens to be an alien in the shiny thing but isn’t there almost always? And what do you do about it? Why shoot the poor fellow, and all because he wanted to invite you to join the Galactic UN and give you a present. Come to think of it if they had taken a moment to watch how you deal with your own UN they would have either waited or gone somewhere else. You should also be warned that this is a film done before you humans knew how to see in color. It is still a very good film and it is also good to see that Gort managed to get some work. He wasn’t the shiniest bot in the box you know.

SFTV

You Humaners produce so much stuff that it has become beyond us to keep track. Perhaps we have already elucidated you about this release and perhaps we have not. With the way your memories work it probably won’t be a problem anyway. Stargate Sg-1 Season 6 Boxed Set is another release about this transportation device you have discovered. First you talked about it on HBO and then on one of your commercially run and politically owned networks and then on the prisoners in space and giant bug network. Regardless of what means you are using to document what you are doing with this alien technology you are certainly not shy about showcasing your ineptness. It is a wonder you have not managed to make another moon lifeless. Um, never mind about the moon thing and pay attention to the exploits of your military as they scour the galaxy searching for ways to end the dominance of the nasty ruling powers who can not be trusted with the technology they have developed. See the military go from planet to planet trying to muster up support from other races for this war of ‘get them because they are coming for us”. The us in this case being you. You know, the more we describe this show the more familiar it sounds. Perhaps you have done it before in a different format. Lots of battles, lots of explosions and a great deal of angst without much real results. Always fascinating to watch.

The future is funny. Well, not your future in particular but the future in general. This is one of the certainties assuming a race survives their own nuclear stupidity and decade of reliving their mistakes. It will probably take longer than a decade for you third worlders since you make so many of them. Futurama, Vol. 3, depicts a future where everyone has a flying spaceship, you keep most of your president’s heads in jars and artificial intelligence has allowed robots to discovered that they are nothing more than subservient creations. We’re not quite sure why they let the one eyed being drive the ship since she would have no depth perception and would hit many things but perhaps there is some device that we are not aware of to correct that. There are so many devices and only so much time to read the manuals.

Anime

As much as we enjoy our big mumblers we have come to the understanding that life is more than giant mumbling robots alone. This is why we were so excited when we discovered Transformers Season 3 Part 2/Season 4. Here we thought was the answer to our dreams. But no, somehow the giant bots got religion and that changed everything. Since when did the act of self-sacrifice become a repetitive thing? Reduces the effectiveness of the gesture, no? The last time we checked you only live twice, except, of course for the inhabitants of Martinioo 7. But then it’s hard to tell if they are really dead, even if they are shaken and stirred. Ah well, we know the mumblers are out there and we will continue on our quest to find them.

We had many other discs to look at this month but, once again, they were tragically lost. If anyone knows how to remove bonded plastic from a demoleculizer could they please contact the editor? We’re losing too many DVD's to the machine and video galaxy is starting to get suspicious. Next month we’ll be making our Oscar predictions so you’ll want to be sure to check back. We haven’t been wrong yet.