First up, I wanted to add an impromtu "steal this pitch" to all you indie filmmakers and fans out there. This week on It's Always Sunny, the gang pitched what could be possibly the best independent film ever. Please make "Crime Stinks: The Smell of Penetration" happen!

Diagnosis Death:
This supernatural horror flick is made up of all our favorite Flight of the Conchords characters, including Murray. It's a mix of shock and laughs, but from the look of this new clip, it's mostly laughs. The DVD will be out December 29th.

Plus Bloody Disgusting has a clip, below, where Murray makes a cameo!

A supernatural force brings together two lost souls undergoing radical treatment at an experimental drug-testing facility, but when the facility is locked down for the weekend and the drugs take effect, the human guinea pigs experience sinister hallucinations pointing to a horrific double murder.

Unsure of where reality stops, the apparitions become more and more threatening until the only way to leave the facility alive is to solve this haunting secret.

Black Lightning:
Timur Bekmambetov's latest trailer for his high flying car adventure movie is geared towards the ladies! Check out this slick new chitty-chitty-bang-bang that helps seduce the womens. Plus a translated older trailer.

And, because I know a few of you were asking, here's the older Black Lightning trailer with subtitles:

Telepathy:
Quiet Earth pointed out Lesley Manning latest endeavor, and just the description gives us chills...

A pair of identical twins are separated by Russian scientists to determine if they can communicate with each other while one is kept on earth and the other is launched into space.

As someone who firmly believed she had a twin and was switched at birth, much to the dismay of her parents, this movie freaks me out. You may remember Manning from the fake series that tricked a few souls titled Ghostwatch. Well she and her Ghostwatch buddy Stephen Volk, came up with this script and it's staring Kevin McKidd as the twins. I'm already sold, enjoy.

IEP:
It wouldn't be a Cult weekend without a child with wings. Check out the full trailer for the Dutch film, IEP, the story about a little baby bird girl who was taken in by a kindly old couple. But when she gets older, she tries to fly South for the winter, oh uh! Do not miss this, the baby bird puppet is hilarious, and the little girl is adorable.

Fresh off his hilarious role as the cheesy epic fantasy writer Ronald Chevalier in Gentlemen Broncos, Clement talked to Sarah Kuhn about what his TV series might have been in an alternate universe.

After being approached by HBO to develop a series, Clement said he and McKenzie were "sick of" singing. He continued:

We'd been playing our live show for a month, like, 30 nights in a row, and we'd been writing the month before that. So we were sick of that, and we were like, "It's going to be science fiction; there's no songs. It's set in 1970." They were like, "Where did the songs go?" [Laughs.] Different people had different ideas-we talked to lots of writers . . . Some ideas other writers pitched to us were, like, "You're a band and you play from town to town and you play those real-life gigs and then you go and save people in the town." Or, one of my favorites was, "Every episode's different. In one episode, you're racecar drivers and it's a musical about racecar drivers. And then the next time, you're astronauts. And the next time, you're dinosaur hunters." I really liked that one.

We really like that one too! Please let the next Clement/McKenzie joint be a swashbuckling musical series set in space with dinosaurs who race cars.

via Backstage

The man behind Ronald is actually Jemaine Clement, who is best known for his work on the hilarious musical show Flight of the Conchords. The movie Gentleman Broncos follows a teen who discovers at a fantasy fest that a prominent author has stolen his idea. Premiering in January, Broncos also features Sam Rockwell and Jennifer Coolidge. And here's one of Chevalier's videos, where he shows us how scifi writers relax. Just remember to grasp your ankles and bring them to your groinal access without threatening your seed.

Make sure to check out his art gallery (I must have Chevalier's painting of a UFO beaming up buffalo "Bisontennial").

[Ronald Chevalier]

As you probably know, options for downloading non-DRM music on the internet are sparse. Wherever possible, I've provided links to YouTube music videos to ease your pain and give you a taste of the sound. Most of these songs should be fairly easy to track down for your personal collection, if you like them enough to spend a bit of money.

Radiohead - Paranoid Android

I never thought it was possible to make a creepy, provocative, and truly genius piece of music that takes its title from a sardonic robot in a classic work of humorous sci-fi. Radiohead showed me that it was. In fact, the body of the song came to Thom Yorke after he spent a horrific night at a bar with a bunch of cokeheads: "The people I saw that night were just like demons from another planet," he revealed in an interview. If that isn't a perfect way to describe alienation, I don't know what is. And nobody knows alienation better than Douglas Adams's magnificent creation Marvin the "Paranoid Android," whose malfunctioning circuits have given him a clinical depression that's second to none. What Radiohead's expressing here is utter bewilderment at reality — the essence of science fiction.

David Bowie - Space Oddity

David Bowie just might be the most talented musician to ever have a sci-fi fixation — and if you don't believe he's got a sci-fi fixation, I urge you to give another listen to "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars." Seriously. (Definitely don't miss "Five Years" — inspired by a doomsday dream of Bowie's, it's a chilling bit of musical soothsaying.) 1969's "Space Oddity" was where it all started; Bowie recorded it such that its release would coincide with the moon landing, and the song shot him to stardom. Now, given that, the fact that he once played The Man Who Fell to Earth, and the fact that he can make dancing look good past the age of sixty ... are we certain he's not an alien?

Eisley - Invasion

When I clicked on the music video for this song, I thought I had accidentally-on-purpose opened an X-Files episode instead. Wide shots of foreboding forests, sinister out-of-focus figures surrounding the screen, handheld shots of an invisible menace — clearly this Texas family band has alien takeover on the brain. When they perform this song in concert, they always tell the audience to go see Invasion of the Body Snatchers; that's what I call true rockstar nerds! This is the closest to pod people music we're ever going to get, and it's fantastic.

The Byrds - Mr. Spaceman

With so much fearmongering about alien invasions, it's nice to get a dosage of good old-fashioned fascination from the people who brought us that charming cover of "Mr. Tambourine Man." After Mr. Tambourine Man came Mr. Spaceman — and just as the Byrds begged the first for a song, they ask the second, "won't you please take me along for a ride?" Anyone who's stayed up all night reading L'Engle or Clarke knows they would do the same if green lights appeared outside. We just can't help ourselves.

Jonathan Coulton - The Future Soon

Cyborgs! Talking dolphins! A robot bride! Jonathan Coulton sure knows exactly what it means to be a hopeless sci-fi geek, and he dreams that in the future "the things that make [him] weak and strange get engineered away." Don't we all. Even though this starts out as a sad story of love for a girl with bionic eyes, ultimately it's about optimism — just like the best sci-fi stories. And I have to give him points for his musical use of robotic beeps and modem sounds; clearly, like a true nerd, he understands their beauty.

Flight of the Conchords - Humans Are Dead

This song actually isn't intended for human listeners, as the New Zealand folk parody duo will point out before its performance. No, "Humans Are Dead" is a victory shanty from the future, sung by androids in robot bars everywhere after they've killed us all. It's a future in which computers are no longer overworked, elephants need have no fear of mistreatment, and, apparently, there are no stairs. You'll have to listen to the song to learn more about it — and as a bonus, you'll get to hear Jemaine Clement's machine voice and Bret McKenzie's solo in binary.

Zager and Evans - In the Year 2525

You might recognize this song from 1992's Alien³, but you probably haven't heard it since then; its predictions of the future were so dark that Clear Channel Communications included it on a list of music banned after September 11, 2001. As ever, though, this bit of forbidden art provides illuminating glimpses about the truth of human society, and it explores quite a few familiar sci-fi danger warnings. In the year 3535, for example, according to Zager and Evans, "Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today." To musicians in the 1960s, this future probably seemed far away — but 2525 looks a lot closer from this side of the millenium.

T-Bone Burnett - Humans from Earth

Here's an interesting twist on the alien contact theme — T-Bone Burnett wrote a song for us Earthlings to play when we conquer other planets. "You have nothing at all to fear," he croons, with more than a hint of menace; "I think we're gonna like it here." The sound of the song is appropriately ominous, too ... exactly what one would imagine invading human rockstars would be like. Let's hope it never comes to that; thanks, T-Bone, for reminding us to try for the status of universal good guys.

Dan Bern - No Missing Link

If you've always thought Charles Darwin didn't give us the full story, Dan Bern knows how you feel. He's provided us all with a satisfying and sufficiently foul-mouthed answer to the question of our existence in this rock ditty of fiber optics, digital remastering, and limited access freeways. Bern has doubtless produced prettier songs — his time-travel ballad "God Said No" will moisten the eyes of even the most heartless cynic — but "No Missing Link" includes a background chorus belting out the words "genetic mutation," so it's a sure choice for any sci-fi mixtape.

Bree Sharp - David Duchovny

We've covered all of the most compelling aspects of science fiction: speculation about our future, the mystery of our own existence, the hope of our own exploration ... but we missed one, and the one we missed is the dizzying exuberance of fandom. Whether or not you've ever experienced any inexplicable lust for Agent Fox Mulder, you'll certainly be able to understand the obsession with the fantastic that lies between the lines of Bree Sharp's lyrics. Maybe we each wonder different things when we look up at the sky, but in the end we're all stargazing. And Bree, I would happily curl up under the covers and watch sci-fi TV with you anytime.

Here endeth the mixtape, at least for now. Thanks to sci-fi music enthusiasts Melissa, Heather, Becca, Stephen, Ellen, Mary, Katie, Jana, Lily, and Ken. Even with their expert help, though, I'm sure I've just scratched the surface. As always, I say: Let me know what I've missed!