I love that this short — created by Harry Partridge and posted a day before the Zack Snyder movie was released — exists. It presents a happier version of the Watchmen, as if they were a Saturday morning cartoon, with a buff Nite Owl, Ozymandias saving the Comedian from falling, Rorschach being an animal-loving comedy character, Silk Spectre being Jem, Dr. Manhattan acting like Turbo Teen and Ozymandias and Bubastis being afraid of ghosts like Shaggy and Scooby-Doo.

There’s also the psychic squid, three Dr. Manhattans in bed and The Comedian being in love with Silk Spectre, who is his daughter. Dave Gibbons said, “The thing is, obviously they’re having fun with it but the way it was done, you know that the person really cared about what they were doing…really knew Watchmen in detail.”

Now I wish that this was an actual show, just like how I wanted the toys in the comic to exist.

You can watch this on YouTube.

One of my favorite things about Watchmen is that in the universe of that story, superheroes are real, so comic books never needed to write about them. Instead, pirate comics became the best sellers. Published by National Comics (the original name for DC Comics in our universe) and written by Max Shea and artists Joe Orlando and Walt Feinberg (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in our world), Tales of the Black Freighter tells the stories of sailors who are damned by their encounters with the phantom pirate ship.

Named from a lyric from the song “Pirate Jenny” in The Threepenny Opera, the Black Freighter collects souls of men who become the crew of its blood stained decks, call at the command of a mysterious and demonic captain. At the time of its publishing in this universe, it was never seen as commercially successful as the EC Comics Piracy and Buccaneers, but as Shea developed in his writing style, his stories soon became dark and moralistic.

This cartoon adapts the story “Marooned,” in which a castaway’s increasingly desperate attempts to return home in time to warn them of the Black Freighter only lead to him being taken by it. As he rides a raft made of his dead crewmates, he fights sharks and kills numerous people, only to realize that he has murdered the very people he wanted to save.

Gerald Butler, the star of Snyder’s 300, is the voice of the man in this. Directed by Daniel DelPurgatorio and Mike Smith and written by Alex Tse and Snyder, it was intended to be part of the Watchmen movie. It’s added in the longer cuts.

Why is this story so important? Because it’s the real story of Adrian Veidt, the villain behind everything. He is using the bodies of his former associates to get closer to the end of his world and fix things, even if he must go insane and compromise his morals.

Directed by Eric Matthies and written by Hans Rodionoff, who was also the writer of the two Lost Boys sequels, this was included on the Tales of the Black Freighter DVD. It’s an in-universe documentary featuring a television interview with Hollis Mason (Stephen McHattie, The People Next Door) the first Nite Owl, about his life.

Despite Ted Friend overacting as Larry Culpepper, this does an amazing job of bring an 80s TV show — complete with commercials — and telling more of the universe of Watchmen. Sure, I still have issues with the casting of the movie — Carla Gugino is way too young for Sally Jupiter — but McHattie is incredible and I enjoyed how William Long (William S. Taylor), the soon-to-be therapist for Rorschach, gets to share his thoughts on superheroes.

I wish that there was a Watchmen supplemental DVD that had more than this and the pirate comics, that gave even more background into the world of the story. But when you look at this part, it seems pretty worthwhile.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Mike Jittlov was a math major at UCLA, but taking an animation course to satisfy his art requirement led to two movies, The Leap and Good Grief, which made it into the professional finals for Academy Award nomination.  With a 16mm camera and a multiplane animation system he built for $200, he became an animator.

By 1978, Jittlov was part of Disney’s Mickey’s 50, with his short film Mouse Mania. It was the first stop-motion Mickey Mouse cartoon, as Jittlov created more than a thousand Disney toys marching around a psychiatrist’s office. His short The Wizard of Speed and Time was shown on another Disney special, Major Effects.

When I was a kid in the early 80s, Jittlov’s ads in Starlog for The Wizard of Speed and Time were in every issue. This was before the internet, in a time and place where I wouldn’t be able to see them. Today, years later, I’m old and I can see them at any time.

The Wizard of Speed and Time (1979): In just over two minutes, The Wizard of Speed and Time (Mike Jittlov) runs through Hollywood — running at high speed, The Wizard gives a hitchhiking woman (Toni Handcock) a ride, then gives golden stars to others — before crash landing into a studio that comes to life with walking cameras and dancing clapboards. This is pretty amazing because so much of it is stop motion and other sections use zooms and simple camera tricks to give the illusion of movement. Even though this is a short, just watching this you can tell that it took forever to make. This is pre-CGI, all magic and something that I have waited to see for decades.

This was $110 when I was a kid if I wanted to buy it. I kept trying to save up and never made it. Now I wish that I had.

The Wizard of Speed and Time (1988): Combining the original short, along with Time Tripper and Animato, two other early movies he made, Mike Jittlov took the story of The Wizard to new heights with this, a movie he spent fourteen years trying to make and three years filming.

Director Lucky Straeker (Steve Brodie) and  producer Harvey Bookman (Richard Kaye) make a bet if special effects artist Jittlov can actually complete his first effects assignment. Bookman does everything in his power to thwart Jittlov, even firing his friends. The script by Jittlov, Kaye and Deven Chierighino is filled with so many jokes, even including thousands of subliminal messages in the effects and poster.

It’s also overstuffed with cameos from Forrest J. Ackerman, Angelique Pettyjohn, Ward Kimball and Will Ryan, plus cops named Mickey (Philip Michael Thomas) and Minnie (Lynda Aldon), as well as their dog Pluto, who in some shops is just Jittlov covered by a brown jacket and using puppeting himself.

Why doesn’t Jittlov shake hands? He’s telepathic.

I waited too long to see this. Don’t make the same mistake that I did.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Three trees, Gerald Benson, Jeremy Chagrin and Julian Chagrin, all get sold and put into people’s houses, only to watch children get the most boring toys of all time and then slowly die. It’s Christmas!

Director, writer and star Julian Chagrin was a mime in Blow-Up and shows up in several of the Cannon Movie Tales fairy tale movies, being the magic mirror in Snow White. I’ve watched this tons of times and never realized that Bryan Brown from Cocktail and F/X chops down the trees. I mean, they have the same name. Could it be?

Also: The female tree has oranges on it to appear as if she has breasts. The men have no sexual organs or anything like that, but get very excited by her and when they are watered. One of the trees, the fancy mustache tree, even gets ornaments put on that look like earrings.

At the end, the trees die, in the streets, and fly off to Heaven. What is in Tree Heaven? Do they have souls? What are we to learn from this, other than British dads give their kids bad gifts and that your tree is alive and always watching you?

Sheer terror, that’s what this movie is all about.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The third disc of Severin’s new Scala!!! Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits blu ray set has several documentaries and some shorts that are worth the entire price of this release. You can buy it from Severin.

The Art of the Calendar (2024): Kier-La Janisse has created this look at the art of film programming and marketing. Starting with the first repertory cinema calendars in California and Chicago in the late 70s and early 80s, this expands to interview several film programmers, including Mike Thomas (founder of Strand Releasing), Kim Jorgensen (founder of Landmark Cinemas), Craig Baldwin, Chicago film historian Adam Carston and Mark Valen (programmer for the Scala).

Thanks to this age of physical media and streaming that we live in, small theaters like the ones featured in this film, are always in danger of going away. More than just a “things were better back then” view, The Art of the Calendar presents a strong reason for you to support the movie houses around you, particularly the non-corporate ones that need you in their audience.

Also: If you love graphic design and the art of selling movies, this is an essential watch.

Splatterfest Exhumed (2024): This documentary covers Splatterfest ’90, the notorious all-night horror festival held at London’s legendary Scala Cinema. Directed by Jasper Sharp with David Gregory as supervising producer, this gets into how this well-remembered weekend was put together by a teenaged Justin Stanley and how it was amazing that it even happened at all.

Splatterfest ’90 was the UK premiere of several movies and the showing of several favorites, including Combat Shock, Evil Dead II, Brain Dead, Rabid Grannies, Within the Woods, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Document of the Dead, The Laughing Dead, The Toxic Avenger 2 and Bride of Re-animator; promo reels for Maniac 2, Horrorshow and Hardware; as well as the opportunity to meet horror icons like John McNaughton, Greg Nicotero, Brian Yuzna, Buddy Giovinazzo, Roy Frumkes and Scott Spiegel.

What emerges is a combination of people extolling the virtues of just how this event brought so many together with the challenges of running just such a massive undertaking. You also get to hear from those who were in the audience, such as Graham Humphries, Sean Hogan and Severin founder David Gregory.

My favorite parts in this concern how in the middle of the night, bootleggers suddenly arrived to sell tapes of banned video nasties and how The Comic was presented as the first film from a “new Hammer,” which stopped when the audience nearly rioted during the movie. It was so bad that the organizers didn’t show Cold Light of Day, another film by director Richard Driscoll.

This is perfect for lovers of horror, as well as movie history. I had a blast with it and am sad that I couldn’t have been in the audience.

Maniac 2: Mr. Robbie (1986): A proof of concept for a sequel to Maniac that never happened, this was directed by Buddy Giovinazzo (Combat Shock) and written by Joe Cirillo and its star Joe Spinell.

Shot in a bar that Spinell frequented and filled with his friends, this was a concept featuring Spinell as Mr. Robbie, a drunken kid show host who is dealing with letter after letter from abused children. The only way that he knows to deal with them is murder. What’s strange is that this is the same plot — and nearly the same name for its protagonist — as An Eye for an Eye/The Psychopath, a movie that finds Mr. Rabbey attacking parents who beat their children.

You only get a few minutes of what may have been, but when I see the craggy face of Joe Spinell, I feel like life could be OK. In some other world, I’ve bought this several times and just got the UHD release of it, having to explain to my wife why I keep buying the same film so many times.

I adore that Giovinazzo did a commentary for this, explaining how it happened and some of the sleazier things that he learned about the cast and where this was filmed.

Horrorshow (1990): Director and writer Paul Hart-Wilden wrote the script for the little-seen — and great — movie Skinner. He also wrote Living Doll, but Dick Randall gave it to George Dugdale and Peter Mackenzie Litten to direct.

It’s got a simple story — a man tries to stay in a room only to learn that it’s still possessed by a demon that has already killed one person — but it has plenty of gore to make it stand out. Its creator is obviously a big horror fan and his commentary on working on this is quite interesting. Hart-Wilden is still working, directing the TV series 31 Days of Halloween.

Cleveland Smith: Bounty Hunter (1982): Directed by Josh Becker, who wrote it with Scott Spiegel, this is a little-watched short that has many of the players of the Evil Dead series, including Bruce Campbell as the hero, Sam Raimi as a Nazi and Robert Tapert as a native.

As you can tell, Cleveland Smith is pretty much Indiana Jones, down to being chased by a bolder, but he also gets caught in quicksand and is nearly killed by a dinosaur. He has a whip, just like Dr. Jones, but he also has a ventriloquist dummy and a special pair of pants known as the Waders of the Lost Park.

This is totally politically incorrect and as dumb as it gets. I mean that in the best of ways.

Mongolitos (1988): Director Stéphane Ambiel made this short that the Scala ad copy claimed “Taking ten minutes to do what John Waters achieved in ten years.” This is great for selling the movie, but it’s nowhere in Waters league. That said, it has something to offend everyone, including shooting up with toilet water, puking up a turd, pushing a transgender woman’s head into the bowl while taking her from behind while a nun teams up on her and then everyone eating feces with crackers. I can only imagine that some people will be horribly upset by this, but it’s made so goofily that you can’t help but laugh at it. Somewhere, staunchly British people are also upset that the French are doing a Monty Python sketch with poo eating.

The Legendary H.G. Lewis Speaks! (1989): Herschell Gordon Lewis is at the center of the Venn diagram of my life, someone who was a leader in my two obsessions: movies and marketing. Just hearing his voice makes me feel good about things, like everything is going to work out alright. When you see his older face and his wry smile, you may almost forget that he once used animal guts dumped in Lysol over and over again in the Florida heat to upset almost everyone before anyone even considered what a gore movie was.

This was filmed on October 4, 1989, when Lewis spoke at the Scala before Gruesome Twosome and Something Weird. Before he went on stage, he asked to be paid in cash. At once a gentleman in a suit and a carny lunatic, at the dual poles of juxtaposition, only he could wax so enthusiastically about fried chicken and trying to figure out how to get Colonel Sanders into one of his movies.

On the bonus discs of Severin’s new Scala!!! Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits release, you’ll find examples of several shorts that played at the theater. You can buy this from Severin.

Divide and Rule – Never! (1978): Made for and by young people, this forty-minute or so film looks at race and how it is viewed in school, at work and by the law. There are also some historic sequences of British imperialism and a discussion of how Germany got to the point that it was pre-World War II, plus plenty of punk rock and reggae. This has many sides represented, from Black and Asian immigrants to ex-National Front members.

Divide and Rule — Never! was distributed by The Other Cinema, a non-profit-making, independent film distribution company in London.

Sadly, so much of this movie — made 45 years ago — are just as relevant today in America. This is movie that doesn’t shy away from incendiary material, but that’s what makes it so powerful. In addition to the interviews, it has some interesting animation and a soundtrack with Steel Pulse, TRB, X-Ray Specs and The Clash.

Dead Cat (1989): Directed and written by Davis Lewis, this has Genesis P-Orridge in the cast and a soundtrack by Psychic TV, which has been released as Kondole/Dead Cat.

A boy (Nick Patrick) has a cat that dies and his grief deposits him into a psychosexual nightmare, including a medicine man (Derek Jarman) and several unhoused people (P-Orridge, Andrew Tiernan).

This was shown at only a few theaters the year it was release — including Scala Cinema — before fading away and almost being lost before Lewis found it. In the program for this film, Scala said “The torture that occurs at the transition of sexuality.” If you liked videos for bands liek Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails, this feels like the inspiration.

The Mark of Lilith (1986): Directed by Bruna Fionda, Polly Gladwin and Zachary Nataf as a project at The London College of Printing, this is all about Zena (Pamela Lofton), who is researching monstrous women. She meets Lillia (Susan Franklyn) a vampire, at a horror movie and the two start a relationship. 

Liliana, trapped with an abusive male partner by the name of Luke (Jeremy Peters) who is what vampires probably would be, scavengers who feed on the weak, dreams of movies in which she is the victim of just such a vampire. She’s often fed on human beings, but has been careful not to be caught or make a mess, unlike her partner. As for Zena, she’s been studying how female gods were once worshipped but now only appear in horror fiction as monstrous creatures.

So much of this movie is as right on now as when it was made, like the speech that Zena gives when Liliana tracks her down: “Have you noticed that horror can be the most progressive popular genre? It brings up everything that our society represses, how the oppressed are turned into a source of fear and anxiety. The horror genre dramatizes the repressed as “the other” in the figure of the monster and normal life is threatened by the monster, by the return of the repressed consciously perceived as ugly, terrible, obscene.”

Her argument is that we can subvert the very notions of horror, making the monsters into heroes that destroy the rules that hold us down.

However, this being a student film, it’s very overly earnest and instead of working these ideas into the narrative as subtext, they take over the entire movie. If you’re willing to overlook this, it’s a pretty fascinating effort.

Relax (1991):  Steve (Philip Rosch) lives with his lover Ned (Grant Oatley), but as he starts to engage in a more domestic relationship, he starts to worry about all of the partners he’s had. After all, the AIDS crisis is happening and he’s never been tested. Ned tells him to relax, but there’s no way that he can.

The wait for the test is just five days but it may as well be forever. This also makes a tie between sex and death, as Steve strips for both Ned and his doctor. And in the middle of this endless period of limbo, he dreams of death and fights with Ned, who just smiles and keeps telling him to relax. But how could anyone during the time of AIDS?

I remember my first blood test and the doctor lecturing me after he gave it, telling me that I should have been a virgin until I married and whatever happened, I brought it on myself. The funny thing was, I had been a virgin, I thought I was getting married and I had no knowledge that my fiance was unfaithful to a level you only see in films. That night, my parents came to visit, leaving their small town to come to the big city and my mother asked, “What is that bandage on your arm?” I could have lied, but I told her it was for a blood test, and I dealt with yet someone else upset with me. My problems were miniscule in the face of the recriminations that gay people had to deal with, a time of Silence=Death, a place seemingly forgotten today other than by the ones who fought the war.

Directed and written by Chris Newby, this is a stark reminder of that time.

Boobs a Lot (1968): Directed by Aggy Read, this is quite simple: many shots of female breasts, all set to The Fugs’ song of the same name. Banned in Australia, this has around three thousand sets of mammaries all in three minutes, the male gaze presented over and over and, yes, over again until it goes past just being sophomoric and becomes mesmerizing in the way that breasts are when you’re starting puberty. I’m ascribing artistic meaning to this but really, at the end of the day, it’s just a lot of sweater meat. Fun bags. Cans, dirty pillows, babylons, what have you. My wife is always amazed at how many dumb names I can come up with for anatomy and I blame years of John Waters and reading Hustler as a kid and yeah, I’m not as proud of the latter than the former. That said, there are a lot of headlights in this one.

Kama Sutra Rides Again (1971): Stanley (Bob Godfrey, who also directed and write this) and Ethel are a married couple looking to keep their love life interesting, so they have been trying out new positions. Things start somewhat simple, but by the end, Ethel is being dropped through trap doors and out of an airplane onto her husband. A trapeze love making attempt ends in injury, leading Ethel to chase Stanley while all wrapped up.

Stanley Kubrick personally selected this film to play before A Clockwork Orange in theaters in the UK. I wonder if this played at Scala before the screening that shut down the theater. More than just a dirty cartoon, this was nominated for an Oscar. Despite being about lovemaking, it’s all rather innocent and remains funny years after it was made.

Coping With Cupid (1991): Directed and co-written by former Slits guitarist Viv Albertine, this finds three blonde alien women — played by Yolande Brener, Fiona Dennison and Melissa Milo — who have come to Earth to learn what love is, under the command of Captain Trulove (the voice of Lorelei King). They meet a man named Peter (Sean Pertwee), who hasn’t found anyone, as well as interview people on the street to try and learn exactly how one person can become enamored of another.

Richard Jobson from Skids and Don Letts from Big Audio Dynamite appear, as does feminist sexologist Shere Hite, at least on a TV set. I love that the three aliens are the ideal of male perfection yet they are lonely, trying to figure out what it takes to make the heart beat. It’s kind of like so many other films that I adore where space women try to understand men, a genre that really needs a better title. See Cat-Women of the Moon, Missile to the Moon, Queen of Outer Space, Fire Maidens from Outer Space, Amazon Women On the Moon, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, El Planeta De Las Mujeres Invasoras and Uçan Daireler Istanbulda.

On Guard (1984): Sydney: Four women — Diana (Jan Cornall), Amelia (Liddy Clark),  Adrienne (Kerry Dwyer) and Georgia (Mystery Carnage) — juggle their lives, careers and even families to destroy the research of the company Utero, who are creating new ways of reproductive engineering. Or, as the sales material says, “Not only are the protagonists politically active women, but the frank depiction of their sexual and emotional lives and the complexity of their domestic responsibilities add new dimensions to the thriller format. The film also raises as a central issue the ethical debate over biotechnology as a potential threat to women and their rights to self-determination.”

One of the women loses the diary that has all of the information on their mission, which leads to everyone getting tense over what they’re about to do. Directed by Susan Lambert, who wrote it with Sarah Gibson, this allows the women to be heroes and not someone to be saved. I like that the advertising promised that this was “A Girls’ Own Adventure” and a heist film, hiding the fact that it has plenty of big ideas inside it.

Today, in vitro fertilisation (IVF) is an accepted way of having children, yet here, it’s presented as something that will take away one of the primary roles of women. Juxtapose that with IVF being one of the women-centric voting topics of the last U.S. election.

In America, when Godzilla was dubbed into Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, Godzilla was a man. Yet in its original Japanese form, Godzilla was an it, an indefinable gender. Minilla seems to be a boy, but was adopted. And there was a Little Godzilla born in Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla II. 

In Cressa Maeve Beer’s short, Little Godzilla and Godzilla are in the midst of a battle when the King of the Monsters notices that the child isn’t happy. When home, Godzilla notices that the child is sullen and just sits in their bedroom, watching Sailor Moon. The two kaiju have a discussion over tea, leading to the parent doing research and presenting Little Godzilla with a sweater in the colors of the trans flag.

Before you become upset about wokeness and this infiltrating your kaiju world, remember what I said above. Since the beginning, in Japan, Godzilla has never had a binary gender. It’s only been here where we’ve assumed that Godzilla is a man.

Does it even matter? I’m so pleased that Godzilla can affirm the child’s identity and help her to find her true identity so that they can get back to doing what they do best. Destroy Tokyo and dropkick other kaiju.

Even better, Toho posted this on their official Twitter on the last day of Pride Month a few years back. Here’s to Godzilla embracing being an open parent in the same way that it loves to shoot Atomic Breath in other creature’s scaly faces.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Thanks to Kazuhiro Nakagawa, Godzilla has had a few busy years, fighting Hedorah, Gigan and Jet Jaguar in a series of short films. The last short ended on a cliffhanger, as Jet Jaguar and Godzilla made up just in time to face off against King Ghidorah.

This is everything you ever wanted when it comes to kaiju fights, as it even has the JSDF dropping Gigan claws for Jet Jaguar to use in the fight against the three-headed dragon. When all seems lost and Godzilla is being lifted into the air by Gravity Beam, those claws return, being thrown right into King Ghidorah’s heart.

Made at Toho Studios 9th Street where the Godzilla films are filmed, this celebrates the 70th anniversary of Godzilla. For the first time in these shorts, human actors appear but luckily we don’t get into of their drama. This is about giant monsters and a heroic robot beating the stuffing out of each other.

I had the best day just watching these one after the other. It reminds me of being in my parent’s TV room, a place that had brown vinyl couches and so many blankets, just lying on the floor and watching monster movies all day. It makes me sad a little, as I’ll never have that time again, but happy that I did at one point.

You can watch this on Facebook.

In the first two shorts by Kazuhiro Nakagawa, Godzilla has battled Hedorah and Gigan, destroying most of Tokyo. To save the human race, a robot named Jet Jaguar is sent to stop Godzilla.

I love the fighting style they gave Jet Jaguar here as he uses Superman punches and acrobatic kicks as well as parkour as he jumps and flips over buildings, using his speed to avoid Godzilla’s attacks.

There’s a fantastic scene where Godzilla dodges a punch and we get a point of view shot of Jaguar’s fist entering the building. He looks upset at the destruction that he’s created and loses Godzilla long enough to get hit with Atomic Breath.

Just as Godzilla is about to deliver the fatal blow, he’s blasted by Gravity Beam, which can only come from Ghidorah. The most evil of all kaiju descends from space, destroying the city, wrecking everything as Jet Jaguar helps Godzilla to his feet and in a reprise of their friendship in Godzilla vs. Megalon, released fifty years before this short, they shake hands.

Five year old Sam loved Jet Jaguar and Godzilla teaming up. Fifty two year old Sam feels exactly the same way, even if my body hurts when I jump up and down.

This leaves only one thing: to be continued. I can’t wait to watch Godzilla Fest 5: Battle of the Monsters.

You can watch this on Facebook.