upcoming

Sci-FI Pint & Pizza Night

What:

Science Fiction Pint and Pizza Night featuring Devil Girl From Mars (1954), The Beast From Yucca Flats (1961) and other psychotronic weirdness, trailers, short films and strange giveaways Wednesday, June 9, at Arcata Theatre Lounge, 1036 G St. in Arcata. Doors open from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., cost is free with $5 minimum purchase of food or beverage and is all ages. Sponsored by La Dolce Video,  Daisy Drygoods, Vintage Avenger,  Tin Can Mailman, The Clothing Dock and more!

Invasion from Outer Space!…Sights too weird to imagine! Destruction too monstrous to escape!

Devil Girl from Mars (1954) is a black and white British science fiction film directed by David MacDonald (which, not surprisingly, has gained a cult following). Nyah (Patricia Laffan), a statuesque, leather-clad woman from another world, lands near a small Scottish town with her trusty robot in tow. It seems that Mars has recently seen a dramatic drop in their male population, and if the Martian species is to survive, healthy men are needed to serve as husbands on the red planet. Nyah has been sent forth to bring Earth men back with her, but the local Scotsmen aren’t so interested in going and their women aren’t about to give them up without a fight. The supporting cast includes horror fan favorite Hazel Court and Hugh McDermott. The film is notable as the first science fiction film Gerry Anderson (Thunderbirds, UFO, Space: 1999) edited, and as the film that inspired Octavia Butler to begin writing science fiction, although her reasons were not flattering with respect to the movie. “I was writing my own little stories and when I was 12, I was watching a bad science fiction movie called Devil Girl from Mars,” Butler told the journal Black Scholar, “and decided that I could write a better story than that. And I turned off the TV and proceeded to try, and I’ve been writing science fiction ever since.”

Commies made him an atomic mutant!

The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961) is a B horror film starring Swedish former wrestler Tor Johnson and was both written and directed by “auteur” Coleman Francis involving the scenario (one couldn’t exactly call it a ’story’) of a tubby Soviet scientist (Johnson — who else?) who is pursued by nefarious agents into a nuclear testing area, whereupon an A-bomb blast infuses him with enough radiation to power a small Midwestern town. Supposedly transformed into a rampaging monster, Tor looks exactly the same, albeit with tattered clothing and a constipated expression. In the fine tradition of The Creeping Terror and Coleman Francis’s own Red Zone Cuba (starring the director himself, who resembles Tor’s scrappy older brother), this is shot with virtually no dialogue and overlaid with hilariously pretentious and obtuse narration… the phrase “a flag on the moon” pops up so often it could be used in a drinking game.

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