Friday, July 28, 2006

The Amazing Screw-on Head

I just watched the pilot for a work of genius. The Amazing Screw-on Head is an animated pilot that may or may not be used on the scifi channel. The animation is a little clumsy, but the ideas presented and the performances and the writing were all freakin' crazy hilarious.

Screw-on Head is a mechanical head that works for President Lincoln to discover strange and unusual phenonmena (like a vaguely Lovecraftian and Steampunk comic X-Files). The show starts with a voice-over by Abraham Lincoln telling us that there are two histories; the public one, and the other one (the one with all the strange stuff that Screw-on Head investigates). At the end of the show, they hint at old civilizations across the North American continent with strange and unusual technology, and Abraham Lincoln signs the Homestead Act (to disguise the exploration to the Confederates). In any case, Paul Giamatti voices Screw-on Head, and David Hyde Pierce does a fantastic job voicing Screw-on Head's arch-nemesis, Emporer Zombie. Screw-on Head has his companions: Mr. Groin (his faithful manservant) and Mr. Dog (who seems to be a dog who's sole purpose is to distract the bag guys, die, and then come back again). Emporer Zombie has his companions: two unnamed old ladies, a machine-gun toting monkey, and the vampire ex-lover of Screw-on Head (whose name escapes me).

This show has some of the oddest and most unusual twists I've ever seen. Emporer Zombie needs to know the information that someone he captured has, so he smokes him in a giant hookah. The evil Cthulhoid demigod who intends to devastate the world has been imprisoned for thousands of years in a turnip. All of these seem to be OK and could be handled well or poorly, but because the dialogue is so witty and brilliant, it ends up being a quirky work of genius.

See it online, fill out the survey, and pray that it gets picked up fo broadcast.

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