Jones created The Passenger entirely by himself, doing everything from the modeling to the editing to the musical composition solo. He completed the short in 2006, but just put it online and is offering high quality version on DVD.

[The Passenger via Neatorama]

Do you really want to know the backstory on this scene? OK, here goes. This loser in a future New York City, full of acid rain and mutant bugs, sees a hot chick on the subway. Then she disappears, leaving behind a piping-hot tooth. Later, she rents a room in his apartment and starts banging him. Then it turns out she's his long-lost sister, but she keeps banging him, and then her still-hot tooth turns into a mutant insect.

Finally the siblings' mother catches them doing it, and for some reason our hero decides to kill her when she gets upset. And then he has sex with his sister again. That's about when his obnoxious friend comes in, with his augmented reality glasses that take pictures of whatever he's looking at and uploads them to faceblag or twoogle. But you know what? Some things shouldn't be faceblagged - like when you have post-matricide makeup sex with your sister in a world ruled by a mysteriously irrelevant corporation called DNA 21.

If you liked that, Red Cockroaches is the first in a trilogy. So you can enjoy this narrative for a few more hours. Of your life. That you could have spent stabbing your face.

Red Cockroaches via IMDB

[via Wired]

Moore has cited Ah Pook Is Here, the 1970 collaboration of Malcolm McNeill and William S. Burroughs, as a Watchmen primary source (you can see an image from it at right, above). Ah Pook Is Here never made it into the marketplace as a graphic novel, but the comic did appear as The Unspeakable Mr. Hart in Britain's Olympus magazine. The image of the Mayan Death God resembles a certainly godly figure in the Watchmen universe: Dr. Manhattan. The art and tone supplied a mythological depth for the creation of a God. Moore has referenced Burroughs' "idea of repeated symbols laden with meaning" as a feature he wished to embody.

The British psycho-scifi series The Prisoner gets a direct shout-out when Rorschach mutters "Be seeing you" - a recurring line on the show - as he leaves through a window. The production motif pops up in Nite Owl's Owlship, the Archimedes:

The Prisoner's coy tone and mysterious plot twists are found in the dark humor of the original comic - not an area that Snyder is particularly known for. So we may not be seeing much Prisoner in the film version of the movie.

Rorshach's interrogation by a psychologist in Issue 6 is told through the journal of his interrogator. Such a device might be too clunky for film, resulting in something like the opening scene of Blade Runner. The struggles of both interrogator and subject for identity are common themes here, and the lonely Owlship moving through the the city landscape also resonates with the Ridley Scott film.

The second Nite Owl is played by Patrick Wilson in the film. His desperate post-hero plight recalls Travis Bickle's crazed loneliness in 1970s deathtrip classic Taxi Driver. The long pan across Bickle's sad phone call in the film's middle, as though the camera was ashamed to watch, recalls this depiction of Dan Dreiberg in Issue 1:

Snyder's has mentioned the seediness of Taxi Driver and David Fincher's Seven as inspirations for the gritty element of Watchmen, all the better to wear off the superhero gloss.

Tapping into current fears of economic collapse and the vanishing middle class, Fortuna portrays a world of extreme wealth stratification:

Set in 2100, "Fortuna" envisions an Earth where a collapsed economy and climate crises have eliminated the middle class, leaving a few very wealthy and the teeming masses in severe poverty. To give hope and avoid revolt, the elite create Fortuna, a mysterious game where one in a thousand wins a big payday and joins the upper classes. But their hidden goal to "reduce poverty" by 30% over 50 years comes with a deadly price tag.

Freddy Rodriguez and Lost’s Dominic Monaghan will play two of the game’s impoverished players, as will the film’s writer-director Barthelemy Grossmann.

[The Hollywood Reporter]

MacAbre, a.k.a. public radio producer Doug Gordon, got the idea to create All You Need Is Brains, which he describes as “Night of the Living Dead meets Spinal Tap,” from Madison-based band The Gomers.

Recalling The Zombeatles, the Halloween-time alter ego of The Gomers complete with songs like “I Want To Eat Your Hand” and “Hard Day’s Night Of The Living Dead,” he was inspired to bring them together. Gordon thought the respective acts [his and the Zombeatles’] could easily be combined thematically to create a short mockumentary set in a “zomniverse” where the walking dead have evolved, and apparently have staged their own British Invasion.

A report from the set gives us a taste of the film’s musical zombie humor:

At one point during the scene, [Jaw Lennon portrayer Steve] Burke strummed his axe with one dead hand before dropping it to the floor, at which point the zombie audience literally ate it up.

Gordon hopes to have a rough cut of the film done in time for the October 25 Madison Horror Film Festival, but you can get a peek at the Zombeatles’ shtick with their single, “A Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead.”

The Zombeatles and undead fans infest Frequency to shoot mockumentary [The Daily Page]

The Gene Generation is a cultish movie about a dark, crime-ridden future. Think Blade Runner meets Ghost in the Shell. Singaporean movie director Pearry Reginald Teo draws a scenic dystopia, and Bai Ling stars as Michelle, a hot, soulless assassin who just wants to get out of the creepy hell she and her brother live in. But her brother, Jackie, keeps gambling away her hard-earned cash. One day, Jackie buys a weird mutant glove with tentacles ("A Chinese finger trap!") which turns out to be a unidirectional biological transcoder that reconfigures a person's DNA and could potentially end disease—or wipe out mankind. As usual, Michelle has to slaughter many people to get her brother out of trouble. Her performance and hotness are mesmerizing, even if you're just watching her walk around her blue-and-green-hued apartment in her black leather strappy shorts and holster. Michelle was probably born a badass; we don't know anything about her past, and she lives in a totally fictional future world.

The director of The Machine Girl, Noboru Iguchi, is best known for making provocative porn featuring lesbians and skatology. Ami is played by Minase Yachiyo, a swim suit model, and her partner-in-crime, Asami, is played by a well-known porn star with dozens of titles. This movie was made only for a US Release; porn stars in violent B movies don't always make it big back home, but busty Asian women fighting against ninjas and yakuza—well, there is apparently a good market for that kind of stuff here.

Ami, the teenager in The Machine Girl, starts off as an ordinary girl in present-day Japan. She plays basketball at school and, like Michelle, has dedicated her life to caring for her little brother. Even when the local yakuza boss's son throws him off a balcony to his deathbed, she keeps her cool, and tries to solicit apologies from those responsible. But when a family she visits goes psycho on her and turns her left arm into tempura, Ami transforms into a blood-and-guts-loving, vengeance-seeking mean killing machine.

Here's a quick point-to-point comparison of some of the similarities and contrasts between the two films.

Plot:
Gene: Badass older sister kills to pay the bills while her roguish little brother gambles it away and gets in trouble.
Machine: Badass older sister plots to kill everyone who was involved in the bullying death of her little brother.

Parents:
Gene: Murdered after owing too much gambling debt.
Machine: Committed suicide after being falsely accused of murder.

Weapons:
Gene: Handguns and sex appeal.
Machine: Pure vengeance and a machine gun arm made by her auto mechanic friends.

Outfit:
Gene: Sexy black leather everything.
Machine: Like a good Japanese schoolgirl, Ami is always in her uniform.

Nudity:
Gene: Yes, you get to see Bai Ling naked. And having sex.
Machine: Ironically, the pornstar-filled movie has no nudity. Just lots of spilled guts.

Cast and Crew:
Gene: Fight choreographer Jeff Imada (Fight Club, The Crow), producer Kim Winther (Mr. and Mrs. Smith)
Machine: Porn director Noboru Iguchi (Hot Girl on Toilet, Underage Girl on Toilet), actress Asami (Wild Thing x Asami, Let's Virtual Fuck With Asami)

I was fortunate enough to watch both these movies in the past week. What did I think? Honestly, Machine made me want to throw up in my mouth, but I enjoyed the humor and the sheer insaneness of the innocent-looking school girl. And as much as I am not ordinarily a sci-fi movie nut (remember, I'm the io9-er who has never seen Star Wars), I enjoyed Gene Generation. But probably less for the sci-fi and more for the hot Asian girl. What can I say? I prefer dating guys, but I think women are easier on the eyes.

The US premiere of is on June 5, followed by the West Coast premiere of The Machine Girl on June 6, both at the Another Hole in the Head film fest. Images by Another Hole in the Head

These images give us hope that G.I. Joe won't be a complete mess, or at least it'll look pretty while continuing to strip-mine all our childhood memories. We haven't heard if Snake-Eyes will have his wolf Timber in the movie or not, although we don't really think they need to give him a slobbering animal to make him look more intimidating. It's also not clear if he'll talk or if we'll just see his face in the flick. (Thanks ProjectThanatos!)

According to Butler, "It's this descent into madness but explained in such a sane way that you totally feel it yourself." Which doesn't make much sense now, but we'll go along with it. If all future comic book related DVDs received this much attention to detail, it might create a new market and medium for comic books. Just imagine X-Men: Days of Future Past, The DVD. Unfortunatelty, it also means you'll have to double dip at the theater and later on DVD if you want the full experience. [Empire Online]

Unfortunately, the fairly awesome website for the movie, complete with radio transmissions, video, and pieces of a backstory suffered from a lapsed domain last night, so we're only left with scatterings from around the web. Of course they have a MySpace page, but that points you to the now-defunct website.

According to press materials around the web-o-nets:

"Two convicts, held in an orbiting detention facility above a post-apocalyptic earth, are hired by mega-corporation Hunsinger to perform a risky salvage mission down on the planet. They land, and work their way into a gigantic underground industrial complex, following a map to their ultimate destination, to retrieve and salvage... the item. Being prisoners, they are given little info, and are given credit toward early release as payment. They get more than they expected, and things go from bad to evil."

Which, granted, doesn't seem to make too much sense. They get hired and tossed down onto the planet without anything except a map? Do they even know what they're supposed to be down there picking up, except for heartache and death? The trailer unfortunately doesn't tell us much more than "the future makes Earth a pretty rough place," although the visuals look gorgeous. If you pieced together the sandy parts of Star Wars and tossed in doses of Cube, Primer, and Pi for low-budget crunchy goodness, you'd end up with something that looks like The Men Who Fell. Get this film to the States — we're impressed and want to see more!

And no, fannish friends, despite the title the film doesn't seem to have anything in common with David Bowie's 1976 The Man Who Fell To Earth.

[Quiet Earth]

What is it with kids and dimension-hopping portals? The kids in C.S. Lewis' books couldn't stay out of the damn wardrobe that wormholed them to Narnia, and if you haven't read Julie Andrews' The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles about kids who are trained by a professor to flip their minds into an alternate universe, then you're missing out. And of course Lyra in The Golden Compass is on her way to meet her dad — and go with him to another dimension.

It may be jumping on the dimension-hopping bandwagon, but Coraline looks gorgeous, though. We've grown so tired of seeing everything turned into CGI explosion-fests that a film featuring stop-motion animation is a welcome throwback. Henry Selick, who did such a great job with The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach handles the directing, based on Gaiman's novel.

• Close Encounters Of The Third Kind: Spielberg sure knows how to milk it. We've already had a Special Edition of this come out, complete with new footage. However, not content to just swim in pools full of thousand-dollar bills, he's now putting out the 30th Anniversary Collector's Edition. Okay, it's the best the film has looked, and it has all three versions of the movie in the set. Just, enough already. We get it. Don't make us go Richard Dreyfus loco.
• Battlestar Galactica: Razor: This just aired on TV a couple of weeks ago, but you can now own it without the annoying Quiznos commercials, plus there's a frakload of extra features, deleted scenes, and flashbacks on here for you to spend your time with while you hide from Aunt Mildred and her holiday fruitcake. You can also put it under your pillow and rock yourself to sleep at night while you wait for Season Four.
• Battlestar Galactica: Season One: While both the original miniseries and Season One have already been available in DVD sets, this one gives you both in high-definition. Once you make the jump to HD, you'll never go back. So say we all. This newly-available set includes all the extras from the previous editions as well. If you have been waiting on trying this show out, stop waiting and learn to start loving the Cylons.
• Heroes: Season One: This is what started it all, and it's filled with a load of extras. The commentaries on these discs are great, especially the ones with Jack Coleman, Greg Grunberg, and Sendhil Ramamurthy, who basically joke their way through the whole thing. But some of the extras are just plain dorky. There's one where Grunberg "Reads Your Mind." Young kids might find amusing, but why not just dump some of that content from the NBC.com site onto the discs? Okay, enough bitching. The episodes look amazing (especially in the high-def version), and it's a great way to catch up on or try out the show while the writer's strike keeps it off the air.
• Blade Runner: The Final Cut: Warners really scraped the bottom of the tank on this one to make sure they satisfied every Blade Runner fan on the planet. If you go for the briefcase version, you get all of the versions of the film, plus a ton of extra junk, including a scale model of one of the "Spinner" flying police cars, a replica of the origami unicorn that Gaff (Edward James Olmos) makes, and a lenticular motion card featuring Harrison Ford encased in carbonite... crap, we mean lucite. It's not all just fanwank toys either: there's a ton of new material about the movie, including a feature length "Dangerous Days" documentary about the making of the movie. Yes, it includes new interviews with Harrison Ford too.
• X-Files: The Ultimate Collection: This is your ultimate gold-standard fanjob edition that other studios should set the bar by. It features all nine seasons of the show, plus the feature film. It's also housed in a cool black box that has a slide-out drawer on the bottom containing a comic book, a guide to the series, trading cards, a poster, and your dignity. This monster contains over 9,000 minutes of television, so make sure you clear a little room on your holiday calendar. The only thing that makes us sad is that they didn't toss in the complete The Lone Gunmen spinoff series, which only ran for 13 episodes. We're sure they'll release another version of this to bleed dry the remaining fans out there, but until then, have at it.

Even that allegedly friendly year brought only three sci fi-ish films to be screened in competition, including Primer which was critically lauded, but seen by very few viewers. In fact, if you haven't seen it, it's well worth your time.

Sundance has a "Park City at Midnight" category that serves up what the jury thinks of as weird, alternative films, and it tends to serve as a catchall for anything remotely in the scifi vein. Last year Crispin Glover's bizarre It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine screened in this slot, and it's also been host to films like Saw and The Blair Witch Proejct. But why? Science fiction can clearly be as deep (or as shallow) as any other kind of art film.

Marteinn Thorssson, co-director of the 2004 indie sci fi film One Point O put it best:

A science-fiction film doesn't need to be $80 million and use CGI. Science fiction is about human beings interacting with each other and with technology, and technology has become part of who we are today.

Here are the synopses for this year's semi-science fiction films:

• The Broken is a psychological horror project, starring Lena Headey as a woman whose life descends into nightmare after she sees an apparent double of herself driving by in her own car. Granted, it sounds like an episode of The Twilight Zone, and might have little, if any, science fiction in it. At least they're throwing us a bone and it's not just another hack and slash film!
• Timecrimes: A man accidentally gets into a time machine and travels back in time nearly an hour. Finding himself will be the first of a series of disasters of unforeseeable consequences. Again, sounds like a Twilight Zone episode, and based on the thumbnails they both look like they have a high horror potential.

• So where are all the indie science fiction films? If you're trying to seek them out at Sundance, you're going to have a hard time of it, but we recommend checking out the Midnight films, and the Animation Program. In fact, one of the coolest retro science fiction steampunk films we've ever seen, The Mysterious Geographic Expeditions of Jasper Morello, screened as part of the Animation Program in 2005 and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006. Check out part one below.