I think we can all agree that the real hero of the story was the floral centrepiece. It provided the backbone to the plot, and was solid all the way through.
Ah - Patricia Neal starts us off.
Here's her obituary. She left us in 2010 it appears, after a long career, but somehow I assume her role in "Stranger from Venus" wasn't featured in the obit text
https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-patricia-neal-20100810-story.html
lol, love the Stranger's Anti-Police field
venusian man running after that car like he's Terminator 2
Well, that was a fruitful business trip for our Venusian friend. Travelled all that way on a matter of urgent importance for the solar system, and mostly ended up getting a smooch, a bit of free water, and he's gone.
Going to be tough expense report.
"We will burn off your atmosphere. We will incinerate the ground below. We will sign you up for the Columbia record club, and share your email address with every prince in Nigeria."
hahahahahahahahahaha; venusian mansplainer asked to speak to the united nations but only got brits and totally calle them out on that. the script knows how to deal with their casting shortcomings.
the geometry of the actor's placement on the stage is so out of the theater
#monsterdon Lol okay it ended and that was boring as hell guys
my mans the venusian disappeared just like the Virgin of Lourdes in that creepy Catholic movie. coincidence? i think not!
#Monsterdon #StrangerFromVenus Having stolen the communication frisbee, the army people have a brief discussion about whether they're doing the right thing or not, then just kind of shrug. The doctor guy prescribes rest for a hypochondriac patient, which is a nice touch.
We finally get a spaceship as a flying saucer noisily appears, and the government guys argue again about whether they should trap it or not.
we came in peace... with friendly intentions... but we're gonna burn down this joint if you fuck around with us
"Our leaders wish to discuss.....crypto...with your world. Let me explain what that is..." begins vaping aggressively
WAIT! Susan has a guy?!?! so she was gonna petri dish the stranger behind her guy's back?!?!
@Taweret@octodon.social A lot of the people on this island are that dull. It's authentic. #monsterdon
#Monsterdon “Noobdy is ever misunderstood.” The look of impossible-to-hide mistresses are summed up in that single scene.
#Monsterdon If you’re from Venus, how do you cope with 800 bars of pressure and temperatures high enough to melt lead? Your hair is splendid for being made of asbestos. Here comes a Mesothelioma ambulance chaser. Oooh-wooo!
They went full dramatic chipmunk on that reveal. #monsterdon #StrangerFromVenus
#Monsterdon Thanks for calling the Ministry of War. Due to higher than expected call volume, wait times may be longer than expected. Please know that your colonial upstarts or small brown people needing suppression is very important to the Ministry of War. Someone will be with you shortly…
@floatybirb it's pretty spartan for a pub, but there was rationing still. #monsterdon
So, switch gets thrown early and the Venusians back off, then our visitor dies Yoda style (which he *did* mention in one of those interminable pond scenes)?
And... then nothing changed? The humans can't figure out Venusian tech? The Venusians don't return? No clever cold war commentary even?
am proud of your man Susan.... oooooh cuckhold fetish activated
#monsterdon What truly disappointing is the lack of tea time.
LMAO the venusian stranger is a total liberal saying he doesn't mind the 'peaceful' use of atomic energy. fucking pussy.
guys don't shut the fuck up in these brit movies. that's yet another thing Monty Python totally nailed about the ridiculousness of brit culture
Everybody is too trusting of this guy's story, that's some incredible white male privilege he's got there.
"Oh I'm from Outer Space, obviously." and the whole country just believes him.
Man is just pulling some Doctor Who type shit on simple locals.
what's with the obsession with cuckoo clocks during this era. even my grand parents in Puerto Rico had a cuckoo clock.
uh-oh... our throaty heroine took the stranger from venus on a walk thru a meadow. she's totally into performing lo-fi experiments with his DNA
#Monsterdon “My diplomatic charm is my dump stat!”
So the movie is progressing along, and I'm on the edge of my seat about that floral centrepiece. Did they do a big switcheroo? Is it an alien centrepiece now? Let's watch and find out.
funny how all these venusian and martian types are always of a certain skin hue
#Monsterdon #StrangerFromVenus since the Obvious Alien says that he has never paid taxes, I am going to assume that Venus in this movie is ancap utopia where everyone reads preachy novels about how selfishness is good and altruism is bad and the only labor that is significant is that of wealthy businesspeople (who are also talking venus flytraps).
Also, their space program is entirely supported by adverts and runs on the blockchain, somehow.
am digging how the director is trying hard to conceal the stranger's face with shadows and staging.
"Well I'm afraid from the look of the wreckage, your fiancé is likely now a zombie. Here's a pamphlet"
*So You're going to marry a Zombie*
BTW the director's last name is Balaban. does that mean that Bob Balaban, who was the translator in Close Encounter of the Third Kind, is an OG Hollywood nepobaby?
The Stranger sounds like one of those 'Freeman of the Land' cranks who go on about 'legal names' and how they don't have to pay tax
Like a Billionaire but penniless and alone
funny how strangers for Venus also seem to know how sell their labor, have no name or what taxes are.
PRINCESS PICTURES!
BY RICH & RICH!
STRANGER FROM VENUS!
I'm British and I don't know what he's doing to that pint either #monsterdon
#Monsterdon #StrangerFromVenus begins with an extremely unhinged whiny noise that is probably what a theremin mated with an orchestral string section sounds like. As this noise is paired with footage of something flying over a British landscape, I guess it is from a UFO. We get closeups of random people, and a scene where air traffic people listen to a guy who thought he saw a weird thing in the sky, like a spaceship, or a Chinese weather balloon.
@ricci @Zerofactorial @CactuarJoe more things happen in this simple meme than that whole movie #monsterdon
There was no alien from Venus. Susan manipulates people's minds to get what she needs, and what she needed most at that moment in time was a strong magnetic field to grab her by her hair and fling her into the air, howling and cackling to the gods as she drew power from Venus. It was she who planted the thought in their heads. She's an alien from a rogue planet who spotted Earth as she passed by. Beware of Susan! Alien from somewhere!
I like my plot better.
#Monsterdon Found this nugget: “Balaban was the stepson of Barney Balaban, the longtime President of Paramount Pictures.” nepobaby FTW.
this is gonna be one of those movies where i few months from now im asking you guys if we ever watched it or not because i will have no memory of it
More things could have happened in that movie
The was it? They ran out of budget, right? #Monsterdon #StrangerFromVenus
#Monsterdon #StrangerFromVenus An hour into this movie and we get some drama, as the Politician Guy steals the Obvious Alien's communication frisbee, so he can I guess capture his superior's spaceship in an Ingenious Magnet Trap and Britain can reverse engineer it and spread Terf Island to the stars.
This is obviously a stupid plan, but in case you didn't realize that already, the Obvious Alien explains that they'll do an orbital bombardment if their emissary shuttle gets captured.
lol, British army building a rugby field by the looks of it.
They're going to Sport the alien to death
i too pass out after a long jog. just give me a quick sprint and i'll be fine.
#Monsterdon #StrangerFromVenus The Orchestra of Romance starts up again as Obvious Alien goes to meet with Car Crash lady, who now likes him back I guess, so they smooch.
From what I remember of the Day the Earth Stood Still, I think the alien-earthling romance worked better because... it seemed like there was more reason to like both of the characters, but maybe I am remembering that movie wrong?
"You're not ready for it! Space travel secrets are for closers. No secrets for you bunch of #*%@# #((&$ "
"Visitor from Venus" becomes the "Glengarry Glenross" sequel
"he's not so hot", says the old man. tell that to Susan.
Venus guy: "You can't handle the truth!!"
#Monsterdon #StrangerFromVenus Despite not having a pulse, this movie continues to plod forward, eventually bumbling into a scene where a bunch of government dudes meet with the Obvious Alien in a pub for a first contact conference. Obvious Alien explains that he's a herald and some "higher officers" from his planet will arrive soon to talk to them, and also that in the Solar System Earth is sort of a juvenile delinquent, so I guess they're going to wag fingers at us.
Lol, it wasn't the nukes that killed earth, it was the fossil fuels.
Losers.
The astute viewer will notice the floral centrepiece is still in the view, behind the row of tables.
Plots within plots, so many twists.
Wow, a high security government briefing in this random pub. Toast and marmalade for everyone!
There's a Doctor, a Politician, and two Police Officers in a pub.....sounds like some boundaries are going to be broken and then everyone 'forgets' about it the morning after
Ladies, run.
#Monsterdon after the boring romance scene, which, like most romance scenes, would be better if we already liked the characters, the government guys play cards and fart around for a little bit, then the bald guy sits down to talk to the Obvious Alien again.
The #StrangerFromVenus learns that there is a news boycott around him, and then explains that magnets make his spaceship fly, which both makes Venusian technology incomprehensible to the common Jugalo and probably making @nyrath mad.
#Monsterdon … and I think you’d look lovely stuffed and taxidermied on my study wall, my Earthling sweetheart…
COFFEE!
#monsterdon #StrangerFromVenus
our stranger from venus is better than Google Translate. that ain't AI he's pulling off his venusian ass
#Monsterdon #StrangerFromVenus Not sure if the Obvious Alien has a human-like form on his home planet and just had to adapt to our atmosphere, or if he has a clearly non-human form in his natural state (like a giant Venus Fly Trap, Obviously!) and has just taken a human shape for our convenience.
The later would be a smarter and cooler answer, so its probably the boring, former answer. Sigh.
#Monsterdon #StrangerFromVenus Also, obvious alien helpfully explains that during the spaceflight he had to undergo special treatment to be able to breathe Earth's air for a 4-day period, after which he will have to return to space or die.
I don't think Venus was established as a world with a carbon dioxide atmosphere and lead-melting temperatures on its surface when this movie was made, but they at least knew that its atmosphere had higher pressure.
Aha - IMDB says the Venusian is Helmut Dantine - born in Vienna, Austria on October 7, 1917.
A little hint o' Arnold.
Ah HAH!
Caught out by contemporary knowledge of Venus. Well done Pipe man
Don't accept his 'conditioning' nonsense, he'd need to be some kind of balloon creature to live in those clouds at the least worst layer of atmosphere.
Blow the pipe smoke in his lying alien face
so, the opening woo-woo music and the stranger's mock turtleneck totally influenced Star Trek, right?!?!
#Monsterdon #StrangerFromVenus after the Obvious Alien acts weird in a pub for a while, they go out to her car and can't find the car lady, then they find that she seems to have been healed. I guess the Obvious Alien crashed into her because he was drunk driving, but then healed her with his spyware-laden medical tricorder.
#Monsterdon Not all the hospitals. Nobody checked in with Our Lady of the Worthless Miracle! All the shambling accident victims are there!
#Monsterdon #StrangerFromVenus We cut to what I assume is a typical British pub, except it looks a lot bigger and plainer than the ones in the murder mystery TV shows, so maybe this is an atypical British pub. Anyway, the Brunette Pubmaid is answering a phone call about her missing girlfriend, who I guess is the driving lady, when an Obvious Alien walks in, says he has no name and then makes some autistic conversation, making everyone suspicious! Also, he has no pulse, so maybe he's a zombie.
#Monsterdon We cut to a lady getting a "UFO SIGHTED!" announcement on her car radio as she drives across the Britains; It seems a little weird to me that the radio announcer cares that someone spotted a UFO, as people see weird things in the sky all the time, like Chinese weather balloons, but whatever, that's dramatic convenience I guess?
Anyway, then the Theremin-Violin goes into overdrive and the driving lady is stopped by... I daresay... a #StrangerFromVenus ??!!!!
GOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGO
#monsterdon
I...I think someone forgot to add seasoning to this movie. #Monsterdon
@Zerofactorial @moira @srol breakout characters #monsterdon
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I'm not sure this film even registered 0.5 on the Richter scale of anything, let alone sci-fi.
@moira @srol I thought the towers were super relatable in their big scene #monsterdon
@ricci @Zerofactorial @CactuarJoe "I'm a real doctor you know, I am!" everyone looks concerned.. #monsterdon
@Taweret @apLundell Fortunately the day they chose to fry England with a space magnifying glass the weather was dreary #monsterdon
@srol some scaffolding towers fell over then a desk lamp started to come down from space and then Venusian Guy got his space walkman back and the lamp finished calibrating I guess and went back up into space the end
I missed 5 minutes towards the end of the movie when I was trying to remember how image layers worked in Gnu IMP to make that edited New Yorker cartoon, so I think I missed the part of the movie where something happened. #Monsterdon
The Man From Venus was super bad at his job.
His job was to convince all leaders of the world to convene an emergency meeting in four days.
He spent his first day gardening to work off his pub tab.
One the second day he delivered his important message to exactly one person from the government.
And then he considered his job done, and he just hung around for the rest of the time.
I know this film was supposed to have a "Humans are the real monsters" moral, but come on, the Man From Venus barely even tried.
We were promised a pretty sharp jacket/dickey combination and the film fell short.
@CactuarJoe his whole mission on Earth was to sniff some panties. There is your monster folks.
@ricci That's an interesting question actually, can you in fact spoil a movie in which nothing happens? #Monsterdon
My mom, as the movie ends: "I don't know about you guys, but I was rooting for them all to get vaporized!"
@CactuarJoe "Mr LaForge, detach the Saucer section!" #monsterdon
#Monsterdon #StrangerFromVenus As typical, having a conscience failed to stop the government guys from doing a stupid thing, and they tried to stop the spaceship. However, the Obvious Alien got the communication frisbee just in time and told them not to land, so they buzz away just as noisly.
military scientists looking directly at the sun as a foreshadow of how smart they are
Welcome to Earth, the mugging center of the universe
Patricia Neal was going to get a big monologue there but they just cut her off.
Patriarchy
if y'all so advanced why did you have a puny little communication rectangle to talk back to your venusian hommies?!?
I like how the British lorries only have 1 light bulb in the front
First viral and bacterial high-load contact
#monsterdon
"Paint me like one of your French Venusians."
lol, that's not what atom bombs can do dude, you're a charlatan down here on a grift
#Monsterdon this pub is becoming an interplanetary sausage fest!