00023231 Nommed (Terri)

00023231, or Fed to the Beast. In the corporate records are page after page of technical schematics that Michael Ray Wilson came up with for a company called California Cater-Wilson Hydraulics. This was a construction and farm machinery company, and what the studio would do is build foam rubber monsters around construction equipment, and cut and weld special steel plate templates over the controls so crushing the actors or moving the monster our of proper shape became an impossibility. Then then did primary photography, and came up with some sort of process to matte out the half of the monster that was the machine with footage of a scale replica. It was like they stuck the head of the monster through a green screen (with the tractor on the other side), and then did the compositing in post.

No VFX or CGI here, just some very tricky film-making know-how from the old days.

Now the films themselves are quite strange. You have a lot of the same actresses and costumes in different features getting bred and eaten in so many ways. I think their explanation was in the future Space Force cloned their explorers and colonists, so that became a convenient excuse to reuse everything, including talent, and keep them in their strange orgy of sex, space monster devouring, and breeding scenes.

And yes, Command in Space Force are the ultimate assholes and they keep sending pretty women to terrible fates, so there is this anti-war and anti-authority message that the late 80’s was known for. They also have a lot of lines in these laserdisc films like “society has grown beyond the need to kill things for sustenance” so I am guessing many I the cast were hardcore vegans. This also explains a lot of why the themes of the movies are pretty women being used for breeding and eating, since it is an anti-meat message: you do the same to animals for food, clothing, farm breeding, and entertainment, how would you feel if it happened to you?

But I get the feeling the films became popular for exactly this reason, and the fans were this strange dark corner of laserdisc owners who special ordered these movies for the strange thrills they provided. It is the prime example of a message movie turning into a fetish, and no one exactly knows when, how, or when it happened. Except maybe, the more extreme they got, the more the money rolled in, and then they were trapped in this world, and the message lost.

I swear everyone involved with this production company shared some sort of Lovecraftian madness. No wonder Ren wants me diving through these films, they are unsettling and quite strange. In fact, I go searching for the names of those involved, the places, and the companies, and strangely, many of the paths just stop, end, or mysteriously disappear.

The equipment company disappeared in 1998, and we are still looking for the monster builds.

Or were the monsters real, and the records the story here?

Image ‘a’ for all, b-c for supporters.

-Vex