Slime and Mutants

I have been stuffing my face with candy since late September and I couldn't be happier. Every day the leafs get a bit darker, the air a bit colder, and you can feel the remnants of Summer dying with every moment. It makes me feel alive. 

There's all sorts of stuff to talk about; new Halloween candy, the new Carvel/Hocus Pocus promotion going on, the fact that I am going to NYCC this weekend, but that's all for another day I think. 

Recently I took a trip to Lot-Less, where all toy lines go to die, and I picked up some Flush Force and Ready2Robot toys. Loads of fun. 

I've gotten Flush Force before. I feel like they're inspired by the Ghoulies poster where the little fish Ghoulie is sticking out of the toilet. These are brightly colored little mutants who live in a toilet and exist to gross out humans and I love them. Funny enough, my favorite one from this pack was the angry little pink bar of soap; truly the outsider among his Flush Force brethren. 

The Flush Force cartoon has a Robot Chicken feel to it. 

These Ready2Robot guys are pretty interesting too. Smaller than the Flush Force mutants, they come in these slime capsules and are meant to be pilots for robots toys that I have never seen. Very anime inspired. Reminds me of the pilots in Evangelion or Outlaw Star. Each figure is wholly unique, and is normally some sort of monster or robot or robot, but my favorite is of course the weird little nerd apparantly named "Homework".

The slime in the capsules is super watery and oozy. I can't imagine there's too much play value to it, but it was definitely fun for a bit. I don't really get what the slime has to do with the toys tho. It looks like the capsules don't get loaded into the robots, and the toys don't shoot or ooze slime. I mean it's great they have it, and I'm sure kids can find something useful for the slime but I'm personally at a loss. Guess I'm not that creative. 

The robots looks rad as hell though, and have that slight anime aesthetic I mentioned. And like Flush Force, there is a Ready2Robot cartoon on YouTube. It's done a cel-shaded, CGI animation style. Humorous enough. Definitely would have kept my attention if I were a kid. 

In other news, in my attempt to watch messed up and spooky movies this season I've been watching old Full Moon/Charles Band films. 

I hadn't seen From Beyond in decades. It's still great though and I loved every moment of it. Real fucked up shit in this movie that I just could not recall watching when I was a kid. I must have seen an edited version or something. There's something totally unnerving going on the entire time and the effects are just terrific and absolutely hold up. It was probably cutting edge at the time. 

And I do know there's supposed to be a spiritual sequel to From Beyond with the movie The Resonator: Miskatonic U, and it looks pretty good. 

This was my first time seeing Shadowzone though, and it was totally by accident.  I watched it on autoplay right after I was done with Creepozoids. Shadowzone was shockingly compelling. Everyone involved was such a distinct character it was easy to keep up with all of their stories. It has the same sort of feel as From Beyond as well, like they were cut from the same cloth. That whole Lovecraft-cosmic horror twinkle to it. James Hong is just wonderful as Dr. Fleet as well, I thought he really brought a tangible realness to his part. The creature, "John Doe", was interesting as well. Definitely reminiscent to The Thing (like the poster implies). 

Creepozoids was fun and schlocky but it was also distractingly inspired by Alien. I still loved it of course, and I loved that the backdrop of the story was probably a bigger story but we're just witnessing this one little nugget of the world where these characters exist in. So after a nuclear apocalypse, and a still active world war, a handful of deserters hide from toxic rain in an abandoned laboratory where there's some sort of mutant monster hiding. The intentions of the monster are never really made clear, or what it's purpose is, but it makes for a fun monster movie. But it is without question a microbudget Alien for sure. 

Anyway, hope you all are enjoying your October so far. Until next time.