Tag Archives: Deaf Crocodile Films

They Came from Tugador

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The Yugoslavian film poster for the 1981 science fiction fantasy VISITORS FROM THE ARKANA GALAXY.

I always welcome the opportunity to learn new words and I discovered one today from an unlikely source – Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy (1981), a science fiction fantasy from Yugoslavia. In the movie, an aspiring writer questions a psychiatrist about the possibility of fictional characters from a story becoming real creations through the power of thought. The psychiatrist calls it Tellurgy – a non-existence word – but Tulpa is a noun that has the same meaning and refers to a being or object that is created in the imagination by visualization techniques. There have certainly been other movies to explore this phenomenon – Forbidden Planet (1956), Stranger Than Fiction (2006), Ruby Sparks (2019) – but Visitors of the Arkana Galaxy takes the concept in unexpected directions, employing genre parody, surrealism and a healthy dose of black comedy.

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The Big Bang

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Why would a scientist create a weapon of mass destruction that was capable of destroying the planet and ending life as we know it? J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan project and is known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” would later become guilt-ridden over his invention but his original intention was altogether different. He wanted to create a weapon so powerful and dangerous that it would intimidate all world leaders into putting an end to war but, of course, that idealistic concept ended in failure because human beings are flawed creatures. This same scenario is mirrored in the Czech sci-fi drama, Krakatit (1948), in which an engineer named Prokop (Karel Hoger) creates a powder that can become explosive and release atomic energy when activated by radio signals or other means. Like Oppenheimer, Prokop quickly comes to regret his discovery but a case of amnesia caused by an accidental explosion complicates the engineer’s desperate search for an associate, Jiri Tomes (Miroslav Homola), who stole the formula.

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A Romanian Sci-Fi Adventure

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The Romanian film poster for the 1984 animated science fiction fantasy DELTA SPACE MISSION.

In recent years streaming options for entertainment – movies, TV shows, music – have increased and become more commonplace in the average U.S. household but, at the same time, physical media like Blu-rays and DVD continues to prosper among movie lovers and film collectors. Specialty distributors like Severin Films, Vinegar Syndrome and Kino Lorber are releasing new acquisitions at an astonishing rate and obscure genre films and forgotten art house fare are suddenly available on Blu-ray in presentations that look better now than they did during their original theatrical release such as The Five Days (1973, Severin), cult director Dario Argento’s rare non-horror period piece, Ulli Lommell’s witchcraft thriller The Devonsville Terror (1983, Vinegar Syndrome) and Francois Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid (1969, Kino Lorber). Deaf Crocodile, a distributor based in Los Angeles, stands apart from its competitors for restoring and releasing movies from around the world that many film buffs never even knew existed. Among their recent releases are Zerograd (1988), an absurdist Soviet satire, The Unknown Man of Shandigor (1967) by Swiss filmmaker Jean-Louis Roy and Solomon King, a lost Blaxploitation indie from 1974. The real surprise for me, however, is Misiunea Spatiala Delta (English title: Delta Space Mission), an animated science fiction fantasy from Romania that was released in 1984.  

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