"Pastor Z's Horror Blog" - 5 new articles
All Hallows Palooza 2009Episode 8 of Tales from The Other Side kicks off with a first in the history of the show (and possibly in the history of horror hosting). Instead of showing a lousy, public domain horror movie we're showing a new movie made up of bits and pieces of 5 other lousy, public domain movies. Brace yourself for Night of the Last Carnival on Earth, aka: Yucca! There's a Gila in My Soup!
 Phantom from SpaceIt was the 1950's, and the Cold War was a chilling threat to patriotic Americans. The fear of a possible nuclear attack led to an illogical distrust of anyone culturally different from us. This distrust was a continuation of culturally-induced fears seen a few years earlier when we placed Asian Americans (keyword AMERICANS) in concentration camps because, we reasoned, they might be spying for the Japanese. This was also the pre-Civil Rights era: Racism was strong throughout the land and Jim Crow laws were violently enforced in both the North and the South. Out of this troubled era arose the Science Fiction B-movie, so many of which had a social or political moral embedded into an otherwise mediocre screenplay. One such film is Phantom from Space.  Like many SciFi movies of the 50's, the plot of Phantom from Space revolves around a UFO landing on earth and the resulting reactions of the public, police, scientists and the news media. The initial eyewitness reports are sketchy and frightening. Two men were attacked, one was killed, an oil plant was vandalized and others were just plain scared-off by an odd-looking creature in a deep-sea diving suit. Under these circumstances, it's natural to fear the alien as a hostile invader --- however, if you shoot first and ask questions later you'll never get any answers. Well, they don't shoot our visitor from space (they shoot at him but they miss). Eventually, the alien comes face to face and attempts to communicate with the Earthlings. Before we can figure out what he's telling us, he runs out of gas (literally!) and we, the audience, come to realize he never meant to harm anybody. He was just trying to survive. End of plot, beginning of moral lesson. Whether consciously intentional or not; movies like Phantom from Space addressed the issue of our fear of the unknown - a local unknown which dwelt amongst all of us. Whether it was fear of a different skin color, religion or nationality; that fear was palpable and often resulted in evil. Evil perpetrated against the innocent, because too many of us thought it prudent to shoot first and ask questions later. From the outset, this movie attempts to instill fear in the audience. All initial reports tell us the alien is bad and wants to harm us. We wait with growing anxiety to see what new evil this monster will perpetrate against our neighbors, our co-workers, our family and our nation and in the end, we find that the true evil was really inside of each of us... I'm actually going a little too far for this particular movie. In Phantom from Space, the alien ran out of gas. He wasn't actually killed by the Earthlings. He died before they could save him and they would have saved him if they had the opportunity. However, the moral issues are still there as we see the alien attacked, chased, shot at and treated with fear and suspicion. Perhaps we could have saved him if he hadn't wasted all his gas running from us. The movie doesn't go there, so I guess we'll never know. Phantom from Space seems content to leave us with the simple moral that not everyone we fear needs to be feared, not everyone we hate needs to be hated and that in the end we're really not all that different from each other - whether the alien we're talking about is legal, illegal or from outer space. Check out Phantom from Space as hosted by our own favorite alien HYBRID. Now playing at www.tftos.com.  iTunes PodcastsHey - our videos are available for download to your iPod. What a perfect way to watch Tales from the Other Side!  Hercules Against the MoonmenHercules battling aliens? Can it get any weirder than that?
Watch Hercules Against the Moonmen online at http://www.tftos.com/. Hosted by Nonek, the Barber of Crimenya, this is a low-budget fantasy flick sure to keep you in stitches!  The Brain Machine
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