Okay, so Sunday is Meri's science fiction marathon, wherein she has asked me to subject our friends to old sci-fi movies. We actually ended up with a fairly good range, and will be showing them throughout the day. (mostly distopias, because this is old sci-fi and the other option is Sean Connery. Yes, Outland was good, but then you have to watch Zardoz) We'll also have food and drinks, as usual. It should be fun, Hope to see you there.

Here is a schedule that we will pretend to follow. If we all believe hard enough, maybe it will come true.

will be starting things off on a low note (it's all about expectation management). This film has the questionable distinction of being perhaps the most famous sci-fi student film ever made. It has the somewhat less questionable distinction of being a student film as remade by Dan O'Bannon (of Alien fame) and John Carpenter (famous for everything). We've also seen it used at theaters as a form of crowd control (“You settle down right now, or we'll play Dark Star!”).

takes us way back to the future of 1927, which is when Fritz Lang shot it in Weimar Republic Germany. It was immensely influential on many, many viewers, but was mostly destroyed during WWII. Every decade or so since then, another ten minutes of footage seems to turn up, most recently from a museum in Brazil. We're watching that (nearly) fully restored version, not Giorgio Morodor's 1984 pop music remix.

is one of the classic distopian visions and the first in our lineup adapted from a book (by William F. Nolan). There was also a TV show which ran for a single season.

would be distopian, if it weren't already busy being a film by Terry Gilliam (also written by Tom Stoppard, but what else has he ever done?). Fun fact: Gilliam refers to Time Bandits, Brazil, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as a trilogy.

is a horrible film written by man who is (so I hear) horrible. His stories are horrible too. One of them was made into a video game so horrible they had to bring in H.R, Geiger to do the art for it. This film is really the epitome of a Harlan Ellison story.

is people! Well no, in this case it's a movie. If you're somehow only just now emerging from your forty-year hibernation, I'm sorry for that plot spoiler up front. Nonetheless, this is definitely a classic (it says so right on the box), and a great example of why Charlton Heston was so famous.

is about as classic as you can get. Unfortunately, I haven't seen it yet, so all I know is that they had good props (and that Wikipedia says it's Shakespeare in space). They must have, otherwise why would they have kept reusing them in other films? Either way, this is Robby the Robot's debut film.

will round out our evening, because it's just not possible to show science fiction without showing a movie made from a short story by Phillip K. Dick which has been completely rewritten. Also, Dan O'Bannon has a credit here too, so that bookends nicely with Dark Star. Besides, who doesn't love a creepy meditation on the nature of humanity to send us off to sleep?