MST3K Vs. Hypnosis: The Undead

Technically, this is jumping the gun a bit, as “The Undead” has actually been announced for the fall box set. But as with most Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, it’s not tremendously difficult to find it on YouTube while you’re waiting for it to come out. (As always, I encourage you to use your wallet to ethically support talented artists.) But it’s an episode that’s very heavy on hypnosis as a plot device, and actually has a pretty good hypnosis scene, so let’s talk “The Undead”!

“The Undead”, for those of you who’ve not seen the riffed or unriffed versions of the film, is about a psychical researcher (yes, that’s actually what they used to call themselves–the term has fallen so far into disuse that Mike and the bots think it’s a spelling error) with some pretty bizarre ideas about reincarnation. Yep, we’re back on the Bridey Murphy kick again! He picks up a hooker and brings her back to his office to meet a colleague of his, and I really swear this is not the start of one of my stories. He then proceeds to deeply hypnotize her, and I again really swear that this isn’t the start of one of my stories, and regresses her through her past lives until she reaches Ye Olden Times, where she awakens in one of her past bodies where she’s been condemned to death for witchcraft.

But this is where it gets entertainingly crazy–the present version of herself convinces the past version of herself to escape and prove her innocence! She’s been framed for witchcraft by a real witch, who sold her soul to Satan for occult power. Luckily, there’s also a good witch out there who tricked Satan into giving her occult power without selling her soul, who’s made it her business to mess with evil witches. There are all sorts of farcical hijinks, including a point where the present-day hypnotist somehow manages to bodily transmit himself down the reincarnation lifeline and just sort of hang out naked in the past, and can I just remind everyone at this point that I did not write this?

Eventually, they all sit down for a long discussion of what the hell the plot is actually supposed to be, and it turns out that history is on the verge of unraveling thanks to Bozo the Hypnotist and his crazy theories. For the present-self version of the hooker to exist, she has to be reincarnated from the past-self version, and that won’t happen if she doesn’t get executed. (I guess you only get one chance at dying in this cosmology?) But of course, if she dies, she’ll die and miss out on her upcoming life with her dim-witted and gullible boyfriend, who’s been lurching about the plot ineffectually trying to help her and nearly selling his soul to Satan. There’s a long period of shouting, at the end of which the heroine realizes that all her future selves to come deserve their shot on the karmic wheel…because apparently the writer doesn’t really understand the point of reincarnation in the religions where it features prominently…and allows herself to be recaptured and beheaded. Dim boyfriend kills the wicked witch, Bozo the Hypnotist is stranded in the past (because one end of his link is now sans head) and Satan tries to pretend that this was totally his plan all along. Exeunt omnes.

It’s actually a doofily charming movie, but hypnosis is really the mechanism used to get it started and not the focus. If all you want to see is the hypno stuff, watch the first twenty or so minutes (where there is, as I say, a pretty decent hypnosis scene with a kind of interesting induction technique) and skip the rest. If you like cheesy, silly Ye Olden Times movies with Satan and singing hunchbacks and witches of the good and evil/seductive variety (and oh yes, Billy Barty as the evil witch’s familiar/imp), it’s well worth checking out.

Tasty Little Fragments: Fangs of the Living Dead

You ever watch one of those movies (or TV shows, or read one of those books) where mind control is just enough of an element that you find yourself wishing that someone just a little bit kinkier had been writing and directing it? A scene that can’t even truly be called “erotic”, because it flashes past so fast that it doesn’t even have time to tantalize, but that you nonetheless find yourself returning to after the story is over? A little scene, a throwaway moment that only someone who shares your fetish would notice. But we do.

“Fangs of the Living Dead”, also known as “Malenka, the Vampire’s Niece” and “El Nipote del Vampiro” (in its original Italian) features Anita Ekberg as a naive young woman who inherits a castle in a tiny Eastern European country. Of course, it also turns out that there are legendary vampiric curses, secret treasures, madman’s schemes, and at least one twist within a twist that was added by the producers afterwards and renders the movie pretty much incoherent. But there is a very nice, albeit brief scene when Anita first arrives at the castle.

She’s left alone with a servant girl, who promptly menaces her with creepy talk about her uncle and her mother and the sinister secrets of the castle. Just when Anita is really starting to get irritated with the enigmatic hints, the servant girl leans in close (while wearing a low-cut dress that makes her astonishing cleavage impossible to ignore) and tells her, “We’ll talk of this later. For now, it is time to sleep.” And Anita practically sags onto the pillows, her face smoothing out into blank placidity as she says, “Yes…I am so sleepy…”

“Sleep,” the servant girl says. “Sleep, sleep…I will be here with you.” And as Anita flops out onto the pillows, the servant girl proceeds to kiss her shoulder. Anita stirs for a moment, but only for a moment…

And then the spoilsport uncle shows up. And of course, the servant girl was probably planning to bite her. (Except that as you find out later, she’s not a vampire. Okay, maybe this one isn’t so much “I wish someone kinkier was directing this” as “I wish this one was direct-to-video.”) Either way, it’s worth tracking down. And lucky you, it’s on YouTube!

Enjoy…

MST3K Vs. Hypnosis: Invasion USA

Technically, I’m giving away a huge spoiler for the movie “Invasion USA” by including it in this blog, but let’s face it–the fact that it popped up on “Mystery Science Theater 3000” should tell you everything you need to know about whether this movie is the kind of tautly-plotted thriller that deserves to be watched without any details of its brilliant ending getting wrecked by people like me. Yes, this movie involves hypnosis. No, it’s probably not going to turn you on.

But it is present. The film starts with a group of people in a bar arguing about whether the government should have the right to commandeer civilian resources in peacetime, just in case we need to build up a huge army to keep the Commies good and intimidated. Only one person is in favor of it, and just as he’s being sort of vaguely mocked for his super-patriotism (which is odd, because he’s the only person in the movie with a foreign accent…it’s implied that he’s from the Eastern Bloc and escaped to the States…) The Commies attack!

The rest of the movie is a long, slow, joyless march to the death of all the main characters and the defeat of America, and all because we wouldn’t give up our freedoms to the United States Army! Don’t you see? If we don’t give up all our freedoms and turn America into a totalitarian state, the Russians will do it instead! Wouldn’t you much rather be oppressed by good old American men with guns instead of Russkies?

And in the end, of course, it turns out that Vaguely Foreign-Sounding Guy is a hypnotist, and the cast never actually left the bar. The whole thing was a hypnotically induced fantasy designed to shock them into understanding how serious the Communist threat could be, if they were imaginary hallucinations of a paranoid disordered mind and had no weaknesses. Therefore, um…profit?

It’s a lousy movie, but it’s well riffed and contains “A Date With Your Family”, one of the top three shorts MST3K ever produced. (“Father feigns eating, draws Junior out, then disowns him!”) Try some, won’t you?

The God Complex: Almost Sexy

Did anyone else watch last week’s excellently horrifying Doctor Who episode, “The God Complex”, and think, “Ooh! That could almost have been one of the most erotic ‘Doctor Who’ episodes ever!”

For those who don’t care about spoilers…actually, I’ll put in a break just in case.

Top Five Comic-Book Mind Controllers

As I’ve mentioned on occasion, I’m a big fan of comic books and always have been. As I’ve also mentioned on occasion, I’m a firm believer in the notion that a big part of the reason I turned out with the specific fetish I did is because I’m a comic book fan and comics (and sci-fi in general) are absolutely steeped in mind control with sexual connotations. (The corollary to this, BTW, is that a lot more science fiction fans have this fetish than admit to it. This was at least somewhat borne out when my Lady gave a talk on the use of hypnosis to enhance your sex life at an ostensibly straightforward science fiction convention, and the room was absolutely packed.)

But the point is, comics have lotsa mind control. I love mind control. I love comic books. And comic books contain some particularly fine examples of evil mind controllers who do sinister things and plot evil plans…in a way that always seems to imply sex without showing it. So who are the best? Read on!

5. The Mad Hatter. Obviously, he has to make the list. He’s one of the better-known mind controllers, being a solid B-list Batman villain, and there’s something twistedly beautiful about watching someone slip a seemingly innocent hat on their heads and seeing their eyes go into a blank, obedient stare…even though the Mad Hatter never did anything particularly decadent with his victims (which is why he’s only number five; he’s too much a proper Victorian gentleman to ever take advantage of his thralls) he still gets mad props for inspiring that delightful thought, “What could I do with one of those hats?”

4. The Purple Man. For a long time, he could have been much higher on the list. He had mind control powers left, right and center; he appeared in a lot of good stories where blank-eyed people did blank-eyed things at his command; and eventually, he fathered a daughter who became one of the few mind-controlling good guys (the Purple Girl, natch.) But the Brian Michael Bendis decided to write the character’s sexual subtext as actual text, and turned him into a sadistic mind-rapist who deliberately let his victims (such as young superheroine Jessica Jones) know they were being controlled just so that he could enjoy their fear and panic at being helpless. There is a certain strain of MC fetishist who enjoys a controller who’s that sociopathic, but it’s not me. So he’s only Number Four.

3. Poison Ivy. Sure, she’s sexy. Sure, she’s seductive. Sure, she has pheromones that make her irresistible to men (and how come we never see women falling victim to the seductive spell of other women? After all, Everything’s Better With Lesbians!) But there’s this little thing about how everyone she so much as kisses keels over dead. It’s hard to really work up a truly exciting sexual fantasy about a character when all your kinky dreams start with, “And just before I die…” A lot of the mind controllers who didn’t make the list have that same problem (and all the mind controlling vampires, too, although there’s a strong vampkink contingent out there who would no doubt disagree.)

2. Mandrill. On the one hand, he can’t place at the absolute top on this list because I’m a submissive and tend to put myself in the victim’s place in mind control scenarios, and it’s really hard to get interested in the thought of losing my will to a big hairy guy with a blue nose. On the other hand, he’s clearly one of the most overtly sexual mind controllers out there; he always has a harem of beautiful women hanging off his arm, they all talk about how much they love him and want to obey him and are utterly devoted to him, and in recent years it’s been made pretty obvious that his whole “multiple attempts to conquer the world” thing is what he does when he runs out of lube and condoms and needs to kill a little time until he can get to the Walgreen’s. For this alone, he ranks very high on the list, and if I was a hetero top instead of a hetero bottom, he’d rank #1.

1. Enchantress. But I’m a hetero bottom. And the Enchantress is unquestionably the best of the comic book mind controllers. She uses mind control almost exclusively. She enthralls men with her seductive powers and makes them her thralls. And her end goal? Pretty much just to fuck Thor. Sure, she wouldn’t mind unbelievable mystic power and wealth and control of all that which she sees, but that would all be kind of secondary to getting Thor under her power so that she can have as much kinky sex with him as she wants. (Really, when you put it that way, why exactly is Thor working so hard to fight her? These are the kinds of questions that led me to a lifetime of writing mind control fetish porn.)

MST3K vs. Hypnosis: Operation Double 007

This movie is actually one of the more perversely famous films that the MST3K crew tackled over the course of their long career of films (some of which, like this one, dealt with hypnosis and thus caught my attention a little bit more than usual. I’m abandoning the “Volume One, Two, Three”, etc, because they’ve long ago stopped being in chronological order.) It’s a spy film starring Neil Connery, and if you think that was just an accidental bit of synchronicity then you don’t know that the film was also released with the title “Operation Kid Brother”. Several other Bond actors, such as the woman who played Moneypenny, the man who played M, and the villain from ‘Thunderball’ round out the cast…

But you’re understandably more interested in the hypnosis. Hey, who wouldn’t be?

The hero of the film, played by Neil, is a talented surgeon and expert martial artist who also just happens to be an amazingly talented hypnotist. That’s right, this is one of the few films where hypnosis is a tool of the good guys, not the villains. And unfortunately, this means that he rarely takes advantage of his talents for selfish reasons, instead choosing to hypnotize bad guys so he can disarm them and hypnotize young women to help them uncover repressed memories of the bad guys’ plans. But there are some scenes of him hypnotizing young women, if you’re really looking for that sort of thing, and the riffing is excellent (it’s a late Joel episode, where he’d really hit his stride.) This one isn’t out on DVD yet, but it’s not hard to find online.

So feel free to grab some generic cola, some store-brand chips, and enjoy this Bondian-esque-ish film!

A Vaguely Amusing Anecdote

Did you know that there’s a “mind control” powerset in ‘City of Heroes’?

That’s not the whole thing, by the way. It’s just by way of background. There’s a set of abilities that focuses on controlling the minds of your enemies, either to force them to sleep (“Mesmerize” and “Mass Hypnosis”) or to freeze them in place (“Dominate” and “Total Domination”) or to trick them into battling your enemies (“Confuse” and “Mass Confusion”.) The F/X for the powers even involve giant spiral hypnodiscs manifesting from your forehead.

Needless to say, one of my very first characters was a Mind Controller. So was one of my very second. But I had to delete them. Because as much as I naturally associated hypnosis with beautiful women in skimpy outfits using their powers to enthrall people into doing their bidding, I was playing the game with friends, and I didn’t want my hypnosis fetish to come out quite that way. So I actually wound up “officially” making a mind controller very late in my playing history, simply because it took me ages to come up with one that wasn’t sexually charged and kinky.

One of my latest characters, though, is a female mind controller who uses her sinister powers to hollow out the minds of her enemies and turn them into her puppets. Because what can I say, I got a weakness for the classics. 🙂

I Want to Stress…

I was not responsible for this.

I’m not saying I wouldn’t be proud to be responsible for it, I’m not saying I’m not planning to go see it, I’m not even saying I wouldn’t love to help these folks make their next movie. I’m just saying that I can’t take credit for it.

Steampunk dominatrixes. Brilliant.

MST3K Vs. Hypnosis, Volume Six

Last week, I talked about “The She-Creature”, but I didn’t really talk about it, if you get my meaning. I just sort of mentioned in passing. This week, I’ll delve into the whole thing in a bit more depth. But, y’know, not too much more, because this is just a blog entry, after all. It’s not like I’m writing “War and Peace” something.

“The She-Creature” is a movie that’s actually kind of interesting, from a strictly sociological perspective. It captures a particular zeitgeist, of an era when the belief that past lives could be experienced through hypnosis was widely discussed and very popular thanks to the famous case of Bridey Murphy. (Ignore the bits about how the debunking has been debunked. The problem with an encyclopedia that anyone can edit is that, well, anyone can edit it.) Pretty much everyone knew about “past-life regression” back then, and that informed the movie in a big way. As a result, you get a film about a Sinister Hypnotist(tm) attempting to use past-life regression to summon an evil monster, and a heroic parapsychologist (the Roger Corman movie “The Undead” is another film with a heroic parapsychologist, a pretty rare trope as far as film is concerned) who tries to stop him. (Oddly, the parapsychologist is also presented as a skeptic, despite seeming to have full and accurate knowledge of all the same techniques the bad guy is using.) It’s actually kind of cool to see how films of a particular era synthesized the fears and fascinations of that era into fiction, even if they’re not exactly “high art”.

That, plus the hypnokinky elements, are pretty much the only things you’ll find interesting about “The She-Creature”. The script is dull and plodding, everyone on screen should have one of those little “NOT AN ACTOR” subtitles under their names, and the monster…okay, by the standards of the time, the monster’s not bad. Not very “She-Creature”, but not bad. But it’s about the best element of a story that’s too long, too repetitive, and contains about 100% too much Lance Fuller. But there are plenty of hypnosis scenes if you like that sort of thing (but come on, who among my readers would actually like to watch two guys dueling for hypnotic control of a beautiful woman?) and the riffing on this episode is top-notch. The “Lance Fuller School of Not Acting” sketch is worth tracking down the episode for all on its own.

MST3K Vs. Hypnosis, Volume Five

You know, it just occurred to me that in my last MST3K post, I mentioned that there were two hypnosis-themed movies in the last boxset, but I never got around to talking about the other one! I hope I didn’t leave anyone hanging. (You know, anyone with access to the Internet but not any ability to use a search engine.)

In any event, the other episode in question is the Season Eight flick “Devil Doll”, which is a movie that’s pretty heavy on the hypnosis (if light on thrills.) It centers around a sinister stage hypnotist/ventriloquist named “The Great Vorelli”, who manages to combine the two most popular “sinister entertainer” tropes into one neat package. Anyhow, a reporter who wants to write a puff piece on Vorelli’s act (which does involve some hypnosis sequences, surprise surprise) accidentally brings his girlfriend to Vorelli’s attention, and Vorelli decides that she’s a wealthy heiress and he’s an evil hypnotist, and comes to the natural conclusion. He hypnotizes her (in a scene that I have to admit is pretty good…he entrances her with a glass of red wine, and the actress goes blank and glassy pretty convincingly) and insinuates himself into her life. Meanwhile, the reporter is investigating Vorelli’s background and finds out that his dummy has the same name as a former assistant of Vorelli’s. One who died. Oh, and did I mention that the dummy is wandering around killing people?

In the end, the reporter manages to show up at about the same time that the problem is taking care of itself, which I suppose technically makes him the hero, and Vorelli winds up getting some poetic justice. It’s the sort of movie that feels like it would be black-and-white even if it was in color, but there’s some great riffing, a few good hypnosis scenes, and decent sketches. I recommend it.