From Planet Of The Female Invaders (1966), a Mexican film in which stunningly beautiful space women come to Earth to kidnap some fat, jug-eared blokes in order to further the plan to quit their own planet, which is bathed in burning daylight all the time. None of it makes much sense, but it's hugely entertaining, which is very much a win, or la victoria, as they say en Espanol.
George Maciunas was the founder of the 'anti-art, pro-chance' Fluxus Movement, and Artype is a simple but mesmeric short film from 1966, one of many made by him and his associates as an accompaniment to the numerous parties, shows, happenings and freakouts organised, attended and no doubt thoroughly enjoyed by the cream of the 1960s American Avant Garde.
The Bible contains a lot of finger wagging, not surprisingly given that it is a control manual more than anything else. In it, we read that the people of Sodom were decadent and ungodly, so they needed to be destroyed (a common Old Testament theme - God makes an awful lot of mistakes for an omniscient, omnipotent being).
Good old Lot and his family, being righteous and reverent, were spared, but only on the condition that they didn't watch the destruction of their former home. Lot's wife (Ado, Idit, or Ildith, according to your source) couldn't resist a last glance so, for her disobedience, was turned instantly into a pillar of salt.
There is some evidence of a 'cosmic airburst event' in the southern Jordan Valley around 1650 BCE. This violent and sudden explosion devastated the ancient city of Tall el-Hammam and made that area largely uninhabitable for over 500 years. Theories include (in order of wackiness) the Tunguska-style airborne detonation of a meteoroid, a nuclear explosion following a spaceship crash, and alien invasion. Any of these could, apparently, have turned a human being into a column of minerals (I can't say I'm convinced, but this sort of extrapolation is interesting in what it says about the human obsession with sense making).
Whatever the cause, whatever the outcome, the Bible uses this garbled and unknowable story to reinforce its own underlying message, especially when it comes to wives: do what you are told. No wonder it's such a popular book with bigots. We'll come back to this tale, I have a thing for it.
Screenshots taken from John Huston's 1966 epic The Bible: In The Beginning, which takes three hours and a cast of thousands to recount the first 22 chapters of the good book to half-brilliant, half-boring effect.
The idea of adapting Edgar Allen Poe's short story 'The Black Cat' has occurred to a great many film makers, but very few of them set it in Texas with a cast of amateurs and a budget that was probably less than most movies lunch bills. The results are pretty poor, although some of the more frenetic elements did remind me of the pleasures and pains of an amphetamine based diet.
In the best scene, some youngish people become reasonably animated while listening to the worlds whitest band play a frat boy version of 'Bo Diddley' that doesn't come close to punching the gut and jerking the limbs like the superlative original.
