Jackson Free Press

Scattered across the desolate solar system exist the bleary-eyed mining men of Jupiter who know nothing of women and the sexually frustrated, all-female (Southern Belle no less) population of Venus. The surrealist noir B-movie landscape of a 1950s-style, campy black-and-white sci-fi odyssey "The American Astronaut" will be presented by director Cory McAbee—who also stars in, scored and wrote the film that began six years ago at a Sundance Writer's Lab workshop.

The Homeric adventures of interplanetary trader Samuel Curtis (McAbee) journeys the vastness of space much like an explorer of the Old West, peddling found wares to the uninitiated. Curtis' journey begins with the whimsical delivery of a cat to an isolated asteroid saloon where he meets his former dance partner, and renowned interplanetary fruit thief, the Blueberry Pirate. As payment for the cat, Curtis is given a homemade cloning device already in the process of creating a creature of legend on outpost Jupiter: a Real Live Girl.

The film's perversely silly and twisted Dali-esque dreamscapes provide a lethal aesthetic of David Lynch's "Eraserhead" meets Webb Wilder's "Corn Flicks." McAbee's band, The Billy Nayer Show, adds an offbeat, almost post-punk rock-opera weirdness to the B-movie's "so bad, it's good" low-budget effects and sensibility. "Astronaut" is a visceral drug of silly minimalist, intentionally camp and over-the-top chaotic ranting, bred on the music of The Stranglers, early Roxy Music, The Damned, They Might Be Giants and Devo.

The lighthearted will find "The American Astronaut" to be a wildly weird hootenanny of gritty light and dark, while the serious "normal" analyst may find it ridiculously stupid and contrived. Suspend your disbelief, and go for the ride. The true film obscurest is about the journey and not the arrival. He laughs like a sinister madman at the masses that leave moaning and scratching their heads in nonsense.

"The American Astronaut" will screen at the Crossroads Film Festival, on Saturday night, Screen 1 - Parkway Place Theatre, 7 p.m. A Question & Answer discussion with the filmmaker follows.
The star, writer, director, and soundtrack maker Cory McAbee (aka: The Billy Nayer Show) will perform Saturday, following the Award Ceremony at 9:30 p.m. in the big room of Hal & Mal's. Questions in Dialect, Antler will open.