The following is an audio transcript of an interview of Admiral Jimothy Moon by Officer Gort
Moon: What is the meaning of this?
Gort: Ah, Admiral Moon, good of you to join us.
Gort? What is going on?
Admiral Moon, I am interviewing you under the authority of the Galactic Alliance Command Interval investigation Unit to confirm your loyalty to the Galactic Alliance.
What?!? I've been a GAC officer for over 400 years! What possible reason do you have to doubt me now?
I have been asked to interview all officers in this sector as a precaution following Commander Walter's actions.
But... you were the one who helped him to switch bodies with your own Commander!
They seem to have forgotten about that...
[Expletive removed]
Now, now, Admiral, there's no need for that kind of language. Do you like your chair, by the way? I designed it myself. It's packed full of tiny instruments for determining the truth.
[Loud yelping]
That, for example, was a drawing pin being jabbed into your arse. So, let's begin, shall we?
State your name, rank and mission.
Admiral Jimothy Moon of the Galactic Alliance Command Cinematic Police Force. My mission is to weed out worlds under the spectre of bland, generic award-bait biopics and films about Nazis. We try to save the worlds by promoting terribly made but entertaining B-movies. If we fail, we destroy the planet to prevent the horrors from spreading.
How do you go about this?
I'm the horror correspondent for Geekplanet Online. I also write reviews, articles and create sundry other nonsense on my own site Hypnogoria. I host the Hypnobobs podcast, which delves into weird fiction of all kinds (available on both the aforementioned sites and, of course, iTunes). Plus, I’m venturing into publishing, with my first tome Seven of Spectres: The First Hypnogoria Book of Uncanny Tales coming out for Kindle very, very soon! I hope this will improve Earth's cinema and literature.
Why have you not disintegrated the Earth for all these Oscar-winning pieces of Argellian Slime Worm dung?
You know this, Gort. Earth has a small culture of fun, low-budget movies that leave its future an ongoing question.
And you enjoy Earth's cult cinema?
I enjoy what I’ll term "outre cinema" - films that deal with the out of the ordinary. Obviously, SF, horror and fantasy comes under that umbrella, but it also can include general exploitation, pop music pics or experimental arthouse romps. Basically, outre cinema is any movie that shows you something you’ve not seen before or does it in a way you’ve not seen before.
Do you have an example?
An evil galactic tyrant is searching from some transmissions of secret plans that rebels plotting his overthrow have pinched... but no, I’m not talking about THAT franchise, which frankly, we all should have stopped worshipping years ago when they brought on the dancing bears!
This movie is 1984’s Hyperspace AKA Gremloids, and the evil interstellar despot is Lord Buckethead, whose troops look suspiciously like Jawas. Rather than Tatooine, he ends up ends up in backwoods America by accident and a hilarious, but extremely cheap, spoof of Star Wars ensues. It's very obscure, but well worth hunting down. Firstly, because it’s light years ahead of Spaceballs and, secondly, their re-enactment of the speeder-bike chase from Jedi, here done in a supermarket on shopping trolleys, needs to be seen to be believed!
[Zap!]
[Screaming]
You're right, I don't believe you. Prove to me that you truly appreciate the B-movies you are charged with protecting.
I love many terrible movies! Well, you have to be able to cherish the truly dire flicks as a film critic, otherwise you will be driven insane very quickly. Far better to make the journey at your leisure and learnt to appreciate movies that the world will say you are mad for loving!
My current darling is a 50’s B-movie, or rather a Z-movie, the infamous Robot Monster! The titular beast from the planet Ro-Man, is hunting down the last surviving humans on planet Earth. A promising scenario you may think, but it is pushed into the realms of the sublimely ridiculous by the fact that the Ro-Man costume is a bear suit coupled with a diving helmet and his futuristic equipment is clearly a World War II army surplus radio and a bubble machine!
Shoddy in every way, but what makes it so special is the lofty ambitions it has to being intelligent, epic SF, ambitions it could never hope to realise in any way, shape or form!
Hmmm... Killer robots, I approve. Now, tell me about an example of a so-called "good" movie you cannot abide.
The ruddy Godfather! Possibly starting with the ultra-extended version that runs for approximately six weeks probably didn’t help... but even so, I was expecting a gangster epic and instead got a lot of inter-family whinging. Not nearly enough tommy guns in violin cases for my liking. Very tellingly, when I saw Goodfellas my overall reaction was: “that’s what I wanted from the God-chuffing-father!”
Good. Now, tell us, who is your B-movie hero?
Mario Bava! An incredible director who made a wide variety of movies in different genres and even INVENTED some along the way (The Girl Who Knew Too Much was the prototype for giallo, and Bay of Blood, the slasher flick). He influenced generations of directors, and not just genre legends like Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci - without Bava’s Planet of the Vampires there’s no Alien and Fellini’s much copied bouncing red ball is actually the master director stealing from Bava’s Operation Paura AKA Kill Baby Kill!
Ah, my favourite part! Let's test your cinematic knowledge. Ruin a successful movie for all our readers by pointing out an unforgivable plot hole. Mwahaha!
My favourite plot hole is a MASSIVE one in a little movie now regarded as an untouchable classic! In Alien, yes, in ALIEN, it’s not even remotely plausible, never mind explained how, the chest burster goes from being a dildo with an attitude problem to a seven-foot nightmare with high dental bills. We see a shed skin, picked up by Brett, but that’s still tiny! For a movie that takes such care to develop its monster as a convincing biological entity, it’s a bona fide GAPING gap, as by the laws of nature, it would take time and indeed several stages - or instars natural history fans - for Terry the Toothy Todger to become full grown Old Double-Decker Dentures! Seriously, it's a whopper of a hole, bigger than most of the alleged plot holes in Prometheus!
Ah, Prometheus. How charming that you humans think the science in that movie is unrealistic. That reminds me, I need to feed my black-goo monster... Anyway, you can't spell Gort without gore, so direct me to the goriest scenes in film history.
Well, now having seen far too many sick flicks for my own good this is a tough choice. You’ll probably never see more blood and guts on screen than at the climax of Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead, in which the hero destroys a horde of zombies with a lawn-mower, but also you’re likely to be laughing.
For sickening violence, Cannibal Holocaust is hard to beat, but it’s more down to the pessimistic and bleak story line and tone that frame it, plus the worst incidents are of real animal cruelty rather than the gore effects crafted by the make-up men.
So, I’m going to aim for the middle on this one with a scene that is both sickening and dementedly over the top. In Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead, we are treated to the bizarre sight of a girl mesmerised by a revenant priest into throwing up her own guts! And yes, it’s as surreal and as revolting as you imagine!
Good. You have done very well, Admiral. Finally, tell me what is the worst sex scene in cinema.
All the sex scenes in The Room, where Tommy Wiseau appears to be humping his lady’s ribcage! Although, honourable mention must go to Nite Owl and the Silk Spectre’s big squishy moment in Watchmen - in fairness though, it’s not the visuals, it's the choice of backing it with Laughing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah!
Wrong. The correct answer is ALL OF THEM. You meat bags and your vile desires to squirt fluids at each other. I'm afraid I will have to torture you now.
[Justin Bieber record begins to play]
[Indiscriminate screaming]