Richard Corben’s The Dark Planet

Okay, so I had absolutely never heard of this.  Someone on Facebook mentioned Philippe Druillet’s Nosferatu comic (which is awesome by the way, my song “10,004” is about that comic) & I Googled it for nostalgia & it brought up a trailer of animated version on YouTube & then a related video was Richard Corben’s The Dark Planet.  Now Richard Corben did Den of Earth which was one of the segments from Heavy Metal The Motion Picture & I’ve always thought of myself as a fan of his even if I didn’t own much of his work.

So this movie is bizarre.  It’s kind of a huge mess of “what the fuck is going on?”  It starts off with a bunch of stop motion animation stuff that I’m sure took some time & then when it gets into live action it gets even more bizarre.  I feel like this movie might be the kind of thing that would happen if I grabbed three of my semi-arty buddies & we went to stay at a cabin for a weekend & said, “Hey, let’s make a movie so we have something to do besides exclusively drinking.”  “What’s the plot gonna be?”  “We don’t need a plot, let’s just do some shit that looks kinda cool & the plot will take care of itself!”  “What are we going to use for props?”  “We can get some shit at the dollar store!”  All that said, there is something undeniably interesting about this movie.  I couldn’t look away from it.  It feels like a dream in the way there are random juxtapositions.  It is probably also worth noting that all the sound is dubbed in & there are no decipherable spoken parts & there is some not particularly sexy nudity.  I’d actually recommend this to some people.  If you are a fan of student films that became cult hits like Dark Star, Bad Taste, & Eraserhead then I’d recommend this.