Fembots!

Question: When someone shouts "Fembots!", what image comes to mind? Is it these attractive but deadly blond ladies of a certain caliber, from Austin Powers:International Man of Mystery?

If so, count yourself among the lucky. For some people, like me, the word conjures up a horrific image from the past, permanently branded into my subconscious as a young man.

Brace yourself for the nightmarish visage I will now reveal below....

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Oh, that wasn't too bad. Looks like a perfectly normal woman. Except for that feathered hair, nothing scary here. Let me try again... scroll down, if you dare!

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Hmmm... she's not scary either. Somethings not right here. Wait, I know--we have to rough-house with them a little bit. Then you'll see what I mean.


There it is! Look! It's dead eyes are staring through my soul!

Jamie Sommers (Lindsay Wagner) aka The Bionic Woman, below, has perfectly visualized my own aghast reaction upon first encountering these creepy Fembot assassins, which predate Austin Powers by 20 years, and have never once go-go danced to These Boots Are Made For Walking.

When I was a kid in the 70s, I wanted to be the bionic man with a six-million dollar price tag, Steve Austin (Lee Majors) (and even had the Kenner doll with the roll-up arm skin and telescopic bionic eye), but I usually ended up watching The Bionic Woman.

I think part of the reason is that macho actor Lee Majors looks like he could beat you up even if he wasn't bionic. Not so with Jamie Sommers. So there was something inherently cooler when she dished out a surprise robotic ass-whooping on unsuspecting baddies. There may have been other reasons I gravitated toward The Bionic Woman instead of The Six-Million Dollar Man, but I can't seem to put my finger on it...

Anywho, in the 1976 episode Kill Oscar (a 3-parter that crossed over between shows, the 1st and 3rd parts belonging to The Bionic Woman, and the 2nd part appearing on The Six-Million Dollar Man), I was introduced to these robotic lady-killers that looked, moved and spoke just like their real life counterparts (that is, until their faces popped off to reveal those cold, staring eyes.)

The Fembots are the brainchild of Dr. Franklin (John Houseman; The Fog, Rollerball), a former scientist for OSI (Office for Scientific Intelligence, the same covert government agency that the bionic couple work for) who now hopes to infiltrate the organization with these robotic spies. As he describes them, Fembots are "the perfect women.. programmable, obedient, and as beautiful or deadly as I choose to make them."

Here he is in his secret lab, uploading his own personal knowledge of the OSI to a newly manufactured Fembot by plugging her head into the 1970s equivalent of a USB port.

Of course, this stage occurs towards the end of the Fembot production process. They actually start out as these simplistic figures that look more like mannequins than the sophisticated robots they'll eventually become.

Once completed, they will not only perfectly mimic an actual living person, but also possess superhuman strength, can transmit live 3-D video information back to base, and walk on heat-sensing feet!

Fembots are also skilled with weapons...

...and can even pilot a helicopter.

The only giveaway that these ladies aren't what they seem is that they weigh about 400 pounds, and their face pops off during horseplay.

Now with a name like Fembot, you might assume that they are all modeled after women. Well get with the times, grandpa. In the enlightened and open-minded 70s, there are male Fembots too, like this one of Oscar Goldman (Richard Anderson), the agent that shut down Dr. Franklin's Fembot research when he was still working for OSI ten years earlier.

Oscar's been good enough to volunteer in a little safety demonstration on how to deactivate a Fembot that is out of control.

First, wrestle it to the ground.

Next, pull the Fembot's wig off to reveal the power supply and socket. The wig may be discarded.

Firmly grip the power supply attached in the back of the skull.

Pull out in a straight motion. Your Fembot has now been safely deactivated.

Both The Six-Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman were popular programs, so its no surprise they spawned a full line of toys and promotional items. But it is kind of unexpected to find that the sinister Fembots were among the characters realized in doll-form, complete with removable wig and exchangeable faces.

The Fembot trilogy, Kill Oscar, can be found on The Bionic Woman-Season 2 DVD set.

The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977)

One evening while channel surfing in the early 1980s (which, back then, involved standing next to the TV and manually turning the mechanical tuner knob to cycle through less then a dozen stations...) I happened upon some show I had never seen before but immediately captured my attention, a spooky mystery set in the dark, fog-draped streets of Victorian London.

Mauled bodies were turning up in the Thames...

...and young girls were disappearing off the streets.

But this wasn't the work of Jack the Ripper. Rather, the mysterious goings-on seem to revolve around the Palace Theater.

There, the popular magician and hypnotist from the Far East, Li H'sen Chang, appears nightly, astounding audiences with an act which includes mesmerizing and levitating a member of the audience.

He is joined on stage by Mr. Sin, a creepy ventriloquist dummy that provides comic relief during the show.

But as entertaining as Chang's stage show is, the real interesting stuff is occurring backstage. Strange noises have been heard coming from under the theater after hours, and one stagehand claims to have seen a ghost.

There's also more to Chang than meets the eye. His powers of hypnosis go beyond those of a typical stage magician, and he can command people to do his bidding with an almost otherworldly persuasiveness.

We soon learn Chang has been using that power to command women to follow him down this hidden backstage trapdoor...

...into the subterranean lair of Weng-Chiang, a mysterious masked figure living in the sewers beneath the theater.

Weng-Chiang has a degenerative condition, requiring a constant diet of young victims to stave off death. He extracts their life essence with this distillation chamber, a high-tech contraption that leaves its victims' bodies shriveled and brittle like dried leaves.

That horrific process may postpone death, but it can't keep the disease from rendering Chiang's face a deformed nightmare behind his mask!

As if he didn't already have enough on his plate, Weng-Chiang has also taken time to populate the adjoining sewer tunnels with giant rats, genetically enlarged to the size of a bear. He feeds them with the bodies of whoever is unfortunate enough to get in his way (or failing that, a nice hunk of butcher's meat laid out on the sewer grate).

When one of the missing girls is traced back to the theater, it attracts the attention of a special investigation team from Scotland Yard.

Known only as "The Doctor", and looking and acting very much like Sherlock Holmes, The Doctor and his assistant Leela, soon learn that Chang's on-stage assistant, Mr. Sin, is no mere ventriloquist dummy, when he (it?) appears in their doorway one evening, brandishing a knife.

Even after Leela, a trained fighter, quickly plunges a knife into the thing's neck, Mr. Sin continues to march forward undaunted, like some murderous automaton.

Of course by now you may have figured out that the program I happened upon was an episode of Dr. Who. I had never heard of the show prior to stumbling upon this rerun of 1977s The Talons of Weng-Chiang, but quickly became a big fan, and when it started airing in the afternoons, I would rush home after school to catch every cliff-hanging minute.

Anyone familiar with the show knows that Dr. Who is a human-looking alien time-traveler, always appearing in different time-periods and on different planets, getting involved with aliens, robots, and monsters. Which makes The Talons of Weng-Chiang a rather unusual first episode for the uninitiated. The Doctor spends the entire 6-episode series in Victorian London, pretending to be a Scotland Yard detective, and there's little to suggest he's anything but that for those not already in the know.

Incidentally, that creepy ventriloquist dummy Mr. Sin is portrayed by none other than cult character actor Deep Roy (Star Trek, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, etc.)

The Talons of Weng-Chiang is available on DVD here (although it's apparently gone out of print as of this writing and is going for some outrageous prices on the second-hand market).

Happy Arbor Day from The Haunted Closet!

Once again, it's that holiday I'm vaguely aware of that has something to do with trees.

I usually observe Arbor Day by not knowing it's Arbor Day. But this year I thought I'd break tradition and venture forth into that spooky old forest growing in the back of this ol' closet to examine some of my favorite arboreal (it's a word!) friends that managed to uproot themselves and branch out into the realm of monsters.

We will dispense with the pleasant-trees (zing!) and get right to "Mel", the mean-spirited specimen from 1973's Tales That Witness Madness, a British-accented anthology film of four spooky tales wrapped in a framing story set in an insane asylum operated by the always pleasant Donald Pleasence. Anyone who's familiar with Amicus' 70s anthology output will feel right at home here, even though this is a World Film Services production.

In the film's third segment, "Mel", couple Brian and Bella Thompson (Michael Jayston and Joan Collins) get into an argument over Brian's latest addition to their modern country home, a section of dead tree with the name "Mel" carved into it. Perhaps going for that primitive-meets-modern effect that causes people to decorate their contemporary living spaces with tribal masks or tiki carvings, Brian displays Mel in the living room after finding her in the neighboring woods. It's shaped vaguely like a women, even more so after Brian sands and prunes it.

Bella isn't impressed with Brian's decorating taste, but she has a good reason to object beyond mere aesthetics, as Mel seems to be alive, gently leaning and shifting position around the room, and emitting a soft heartbeat heard only by the audience.

When Brian steps out for a visit to the pub, Bella leans in too close and gets clawed by Mel's sharp extremities.

When Brian returns, Bella gives him an ultimatum: if he expects her to sleep in this house, the tree has to go. Well, you can guess how that turned out...

Tales That Witness Madness has not found its way to DVD yet, but is available streaming on Netflix as of this writing.

Next up is one of my earliest monster-tree memories, the sour-apple trees from The Wizard of Oz (1939).

Back in Kansas, Dorothy was used to picking apples off of trees. But in Land of Oz, trees pick fruit off of YOU!

In the animated sort-of sequel, Journey Back to Oz (1974), Dorothy (voiced by Liza Minnelli) and some new friends revisit the ferocious forest, where the trees have grown larger and nastier with the help of Mombi the Bad Witch's magic.

They all look like they belong to the same family tree (slide whistle) of the evil trees from Living Island, home of 1969's H.R. PufnStuf.

But going back even further, we have this unpleasant fellow from Walt Disney's first color cartoon, the Silly Symphony Flowers and Trees (1932). His morning yawn reveals a mouthful of bats and a lizard for a tongue.

While trying to burn down the forest, he ends up setting himself on fire instead, leaving behind a semi-disturbing burnt-out corpse.

Flowers and Trees led to Disney's first animated feature, 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which had its own spooky forest of anthropomorphised trees.

Even though these monstrous trees appear to be the product of Snow White's overactive imagination, they can be found occasionally roaming the Disney parks as costumed characters.

Charlie Brown had regular run-ins with a ravenous kite-eating tree, which loudly and visibly devoured any kite that got too close.

It was sometimes depicted with an actual tooth-filled mouth, and in 1969's A Boy Named Charlie Brown, it even leaned menacingly at passers-by.

In 1982's The Last Unicorn, Schmendrick the Magician winds up tied to a tree that is brought to life by magic, transforming into a voluptuous lovesick tree-woman, threatening to smother the poor wizard with her... affections.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) featured a walking, talking hangman's tree...

Moving out of the realm of animation, we have Baranga, from 1957's From Hell It Came. I haven't actually seen this film, about a murdered island prince reincarnated as a murderous walking tree (available on DVD from Warner Archives burn-on-demand store), but the trailer looks like a lot of fun.

Anyone remember when this picture of a young Baranga was taken? I'm stumped.

After classroom chum Veronica plants ideas of witchcraft in her head, the impressionable Flavia has a nightmare that the tree outside her window is scratching to get in, in 1984's Poison For the Fairies (a.k.a. Veneno Paras Las Hadas) (hat tip to Kindertrauma for introducing me to this gem.)

But that tree was a wallflower compared to the one outside the Freeling's house in 1982's Poltergeist, which not only scratched at the window, but busted right through to grab up little Robbie between its massive limbs for a midnight snack.

Why do we always fight on holidays?