Just how lovely are these illustrations? The films of the wonderful Studio Ghibli re-imagined as if they had been old school Penguin paperback editions. Smile inducing work by Jason K, who is selling them as postcard sets on Etsy. (via Live For Films)

Matt Wagner’s Grendel – a fan film teaser trailer from Michael C. Poole on Vimeo.

12 Drawings a Day – 12 Dessins par Jour from Denis Chapon on Vimeo.

O’Bannon introduces a fun cast, including a pair of hapless heroes who are slowly becoming zombified after inhaling the toxic chemicals from a spilled canister (from the traditional secret military experiment), the doctor unable to find a pulse or respiration and declaring them medically dead even though they are still walking and talking, which, it has to be said, they find a little, er, upsetting. O’Bannon even has his besieged crew attempt to interrogate one captured zombie, trying to find out why the undead want to eat their brains.

It’s colossal fun and rightly become a cult hit with horror fans. Now with the shiny new release on disc coming on June 4th from Second Sight we’ve got three copies of the movie looking for some viewers who delight in their exquisite bad taste for 80s gross out horror-comedy. Just email joe(dot)gordon(at)forbiddenplanet(dot)co(dot)uk with your name and details and the answer to the question what delicacy do our hungry zombies most crave to be in with a chance of winning. Closing date June 4th.

Click here to play!

To celebrate the realise of The Darkest Hour on Blu-ray and DVD on the 21st May 2012, the folks at 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment UK are giving Forbidden Planet International blog readers an exclusive opportunity to play promotional game DESTROY YOUR FRIENDS via Facebook. Click on the image above to begin playing now.

Sound sinister? It should! Just connect via Facebook, select a photo of one your nearest and dearest from the menu and unleash your wrath. Then, just because you can, share their untimely demise with them on their Facebook or Twitter timeline.

Be sure to stop back on Friday for a special The Darkest Hour competition. In the mean-time, read more about the movie, directed by Chris Gorak and featuring special effects from Timur Bekmanbetov (of Wanted, Night Watch and Day Watch fame) below:

“THE DARKEST HOUR follows software designers Sean (Emile Hirsch, Milk, Speed Racer) and Ben (Max Minghella, The Social Network) on a journey to Moscow where they hope to sell a new social networking concept to the Russian market. When their business plans turn sour they commiserate in the company of the beautiful Anne (Rachel Taylor) and Natalie (Olivia Thirlby), before noticing strange apparitions in the sky. Wonder turns to horror, however, when the city is suddenly overrun by invisible forces that disintegrate any life form on approach!

Fighting to survive, the group soon learns that electrical devices activate when an alien is near. Can they outsmart their extraterrestrial attackers and become the first of the human kind to survive the darkest hour?

This electrifying take on an unexplained global disaster makes for an exhilarating home entertainment experience. The 3D Blu-ray release of The Darkest Hour includes a copy of the film on traditional Blu-ray and on DVD with digital copy. Special features include a selection of deleted and extended scenes.”

THE EAGLEMAN STAG from Mikey Please on Vimeo.

I should also draw your attention to a new project by Mikey, Martyn Miller, a sculptor who finds no-one pays attention until he starts deliberately deforming his creations. Suddenly people are interested, so he applies this don’t-care attitude to other aspects of his life and finds more success in relationships and elsewhere – except with one side effect, he appears to be shrinking… Mikey has some funding secured but requires more to complete the film; all animation is time-consuming and therefore quite expensive, but working in stop-motion is especially laborious (although personally I love the results from stop-motion, as well as the fact when you watch it you know everything you see on screen was made by hand, touched and moved by hand). He has an Indie GoGo fundraiser running right now to try and get enough money to complete the work, so lend one of our gifted young (and award winning) animators some help if you can and spread the link around too.

Panel Borders: European adventure comics, Sunday 13th of May at 8pm on Resonance FM, podcast on Panel Borders afterwards

Continuing our trio of shows looking at international comics we have interviews with a couple of European adventure comics creators. In an interview recorded at last year’s BD & Comics Passion festival at the Institut Français, Dickon Harris talks to Yves Sente, one of the current authors of the classic Franco-Belgian strip Blake and Mortimer, who has penned stories set in the current chronology of the comic as well as flashback tales that depict the characters in their youth. Also, in a pair of interviews recorded at Gosh! comics and Laydeez do comics, Alex Fitch talks to Uli Oesterle about his graphic novel Hector Umbra, a surrealist detective story which follows the travails of a painter who investigates the underworld of modern day Munich.

recent podcasts

Reality Check: Dystopian TV and film

In a pair of Q & As recorded at SCI-FI-LONDON, the London International Festival of Fantastic and Science-Fiction Film, Alex Fitch talks to Ilana Rein (director: We are all Cylons), Andrew Mark Sewell (producer: Blake’s 7 audio) and Ben Aaronovich (writer: Blake’s 7 audio / Doctor Who) about dystopian TV from The Time Tunnel to Battlestar Galactica; and to Elizabeth Karr (producer) and John Alan Simon (writer / director) of new Philip K. Dick adaptation Radio Free Albemuth.

The Pod Delusion episode 134

This week we find out why geeks need to get more political by speaking to Mark Henderson, author of the ‘Geek Manifesto’, speak to Professor Jim Al-Khalili about his new book on paradoxes in science, discover why FRAND is no friend of free software, and go down the Ancestor’s Trail. Also, Alex Fitch looks at protest voting in Bradford and London and Peter English investigates the Biobank…

Directed by James Huth

Starring Jean Dujardin, Michael Youn, Sylvie Testud, Daniel Prevost, Alexandra Lamy

Lucky Luke, the lonesome cowboy who can drawn and shoot faster than his shadow has been around for a long time – 1946, in fact, since the great Morris first drew his Wild West hero. Over the decades he’s remained popular, being translated into many languages (including, now, a good array of BD albums from Cinebook in the UK) and into other media. Previous filmic outings have never proven as good as the long-running comic though – until now. I actually first saw this live action take on Lucky Luke a couple of years ago at my annual pilgrimage to the Edinburgh International Film Festival. I’d decided to go but didn’t have high expectations – to be honest I was thinking it was likely to be around the level of the live action Asterix films from France, that is to say passable but not especially good. I was pleasantly surprised – my friends and I at that Film Festival screening laughed continually throughout the film and spent a good while in the pub discussing it afterwards. All of us agreed it was so choc-full of details it demanded another viewing on DVD at home.

And then a couple of years passed and for some reason it simply never got a UK release, which infuriated me – terrible to see a great film at a festival, tell everyone about it but they can’t see it… I’m delighted to say that now that is being rectified with a DVD release at the end of this month. I was lucky enough to get an advance disc and re-watching the film I found it even funnier than the first time around. In fact it’s one of the funniest films I’ve seen in years (puns and jokes abound even in the closing credits although it might stretch your French a little to get them!). The film is loaded with humour, from jokey dialogue and characters through to more subtle jokes in the background or in the wonderfully detailed sets, which are as close as a live-action can get to re-creating the look of a comic, all the buildings looking like they have been sketched freehand without a ruler, giving Luke’s world an appropriately cartoony appearance while still remaining very Western. Visually it draws on the comics but also from a rich tradition of American Westerns, from the iconic landscapes of a John Ford flick to the Spaghetti Westerns of the great Sergio Leone (with, I think a tip of the hat to Mel Brook’s magnificent Blazing Saddles).

In fact the opening flashback of young Luke witnessing the murder of his parents by desperadoes is heavily indebted stylistically to Sergio Leone (no bad thing in my book). Flash forward again and we have our cowboy hero meeting the President in a special railroad car (comically wreathed in cigar smoke, a jokey nod to the fact our once smoking cowboy now just has a blade of grass in his lips instead of ciggies – better example for the kids!), in a scene that borrows from Leone’s operatic Once Upon a Time in the West. The railroad is coming to unite both side of the United States and make it into a full nation. But before he can drive in the golden rail spike to unite the lines to the coasts Luke’s old stomping ground of Daisy Town has to be sorted out. Once a peaceful haven it is now a riot of outlaws under the leadership of gambler and conjurer Poker; the President asks Luke to clean up the town and so our hero rides in alone to the viper’s nest. He may be outnumbered and out-gunned but Luke, with his trusty steed Jolly Jumper, is in a class of his own and the jail is soon full of villains. All seems well until Poker forces a proper, old school Western showdown in the street. Needless to say he can’t outdraw Luke, and as the shot rings out he falls dead… Luke is mortified, he uses his guns but never kills, and thinking he’s taken a life could destroy him faster than any gang of bandidos…

And I won’t tell you anymore of the plot because I don’t want to spoil it for you. But the story is only one half of the tremendous fun on offer here. The film is quickfire gags and some brilliant characters (Calamity Jane, toughest gal gun in the West, but with a girly crush on Luke under that hard as nails exterior, Jesse James constantly quoting Shakespeare like a true ham, James and Billy the Kid trying to light one of Luke’s blades of grass to smoke it and getting wasted), the cowering locals in Daisy Town will only venture outdoors in barrels for protection, the details in sets and even clothes are just perfect. It’s full of enough humour so that the younger readers the the comics are aimed at will be kept laughing, but it also has plenty of little asides aimed at the adult audiences, not to mention the plethora of references to other classic Western film that will reward the adult viewer. It’s pure, wonderfully played, wonderfully detailed fun throughout and Dujardin, here in a pre The Artist role, is perfect as a live action Luke, although of course when the French cast talk to him he sounds more like Looky Luke! But the French language in such an American genre as a Western actually adds to the good natured humour of the whole film. Unmissable fun and one of the funniest flicks I have seen in years.

Win Lucky Luke!!!

Lucky Luke (in French with English subtitles) is released on DVD on May 28th – and in more good new we have three copies up for grabs. To be in with a chance of bagging one, just drop us a line at joe(dot)gordon(at)forbiddenplanet(dot)co(dot)uk with your name and contact details and the answer to the question: Lucky Luke is so fast he can out-draw even his own what?

Okay, peeps and fellow geeks, listen up, because we have a remarkable “money can’t buy it” type of prize up for grabs thanks to our friends arranging the screenings of Sir Ridley Scott’s much-anticipated ‘Alien sort-of prequel’ (Sir Ridley notes it started that way but ‘evolved into another universe’)  Prometheus, starring Girl With a Dragon Tattoo’s superb Noomi Rapace, Idris Elba (anything with Idris is good in our books!), Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce and Michael Fassbender.The film marks the triumphant return to the science fiction genre of one of our best directors who made such a huge impact on the film incarnation of SF with his early masterpieces Blade Runner and Alien, yet hasn’t returned to the genre for decades:

“Over the past few decades, we’ve been ‘action filmed-out’ and ‘monster filmed-out’ and almost ‘science fiction filmed-out,. So the baseline question is: how original are you going to be? The reason I haven’t made another sci-fi film in so many years, apart from the fact I’ve been busy making other films and exploring different genres, is because frankly I haven’t come across anything worthwhile for me to do with enough truth, originality and strength.  Prometheus has all three,” Sir Ridley Scott on why he was away from the genre he has a fondness for and what drew him back to it after so long. He went on to explain the iconic ‘Space Jockey’ – the gigantic alien skeleton in the pilot’s seat of the derelict in Alien – has remained in his mind since he made that film: “Something that had stayed with me ever since Alien, was the mystery behind it  Who was he?  Where was he from?   What was his mission? What kind of technology would his kind possess?  I thought those questions could provide a springboard for even larger ideas… Out of the creative process in developing the picture energed a new, grand mythology, in which this original story takes place.  The keen fan will recognize strands of Alien’s DNA, so to speak, but the ideas tackled in this film are unique, far-reaching and provocative.  Prometheus is the singular genre tale I’d been searching for.”

Prometheus opens in the UK on the 1st of June, but thanks to our film chums we have an exceptional prize for one lucky fan – two tickets to the premiere of Prometheus at London’s Leicester Square on Thursday May 31st. The package includes return rail travel to London from anywhere in the country and a night’s bed and breakfast in a top London hotel. Of course the winner has to be able to travel to London on the 31st of May and return on June 1st; the film has not had its final rating yet so the winner must be over 15 and at least one of the two people using the ticket must be over 18. In order to be in with a chance to bag this fabulous prize answer this simple question: who is the director of Prometheus? Email your answers to joe(dot)gordon(at)forbiddenplanet(dot)co(dot)uk, please mark emails Prometheus Competition and include your full contact details including a phone number, please, as arrangements for travel will have to be made very quickly for the lucky winners! Closing date for entries is Sunday 27th of May – best of luck! And if you do win, make sure you take a photo at the premiere and send it to us to post up!

I’m eagerly looking forward to the film myself and quite jealous of whoever gets to the premiere! You can learn more about the film on the official website here and naturally there are Facebook, YouTube and Twitter streams to follow for more information too.

“It’s an incredibly simple little tale. Yet it’s one of my favourite comics all year. This tale of a lonely little badger living all alone in his London flat is heartbreakingly, tearjerkingly sad. I sat there after reading it and was struggling to hold back the tears. It’s very easy to describe, but very difficult to get over the complete sense of sadness that saturates every page.”

The guys are looking to raise $5000 by 22nd June on IndieGoGo, with much of the work done (it has now moved into post production phase where the live footage, voice-overs and art are being brought together by animators and editors). I think given how much we’ve adored Howard’s Badger I’d recommend this for your support if you can just as a simple documentary on a fine Indy comics artist creating interesting work. But Annie and Helen have higher aims than just producing an interesting short documentary – given the way the comic addresses mental illness and how to get on with life despite those hurdles they are keen to bring the documentary to a wider audience, online, at film festivals and for relevant mental health groups and charities to have access to screening it, which I have to say is an idea I like a lot, not just documenting the creative comics process but using it and the subject matter to try and help others. From the description:

“So far, we’ve made the film with in-kind support through our colleagues and friends. To finish the film in the way we envision, we are currently fund-raising so we can pay for the post-production, animation and music.

We are eager to bring Badger’s story to audiences around the world. Apart from festivals and online distribution we are working with mental health organisations, local boroughs, and schools to organise screenings, talks and offer the film as a resource. If you are interested in the above, please contact us to find out more.

We are seeking to raise $5,000 by 22 June 2012 . We know that’s not a small amount, but we have wonderful friends (you!) and trust that the aim of our project is something you can get behind to spread the word.”

(art from Badger Now and Then by and (c) Howard Hardiman)

As I said I think it is a lovely idea to not only cover the work of a fine independent comics creator but to use his work and that documentary to create more awareness of mental health issues in an enjoyable, accessible form and make it available to groups to use as a resource. A very nice idea and one well worthy of your support, so if you can offer them up some help and, of course, please help spread the word.