Our Heroines in New Contexts

This week's new Panty and Stocking was kind of brilliantly weird. It featured only two stories, presented by Garterbelt, wearing a suit and somberly addressing the viewer like Rod Serling.

The first story is ostensibly a parody of John Carpenter's The Thing, with a nod to The Thing from Another World in its title, "The Sex from Another World", but the title image is a clear reference to the Carpenter version.

The story itself, however, bears much more resemblance to Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce or even 2013's Under the Skin (with several visual nods to Aliens). In this story, Panty is a succubus alien who drains the men she has sex with of their lifeforce, leaving them withered husks. Once again, the makers of the show make a point of portraying nudity, even pubic hair, again reminiscent of Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce. It wasn't necessarily funny but kind of fascinating, like a real weird tale in its own right.

The second story, though, was just a pure, bizarre delight. The title is "Lord of the Kokan the Great" which seems to be a mashup of Lord of the Rings and Conan the Barbarian (which is known as Konan the Great in Japan). But it seems less like a parody of either one but more like the artist's dim memory of watching an incomprehensible foreign sword and sorcery film late at night some time in the 80s.

The whole thing is shown with scan lines and slightly blurry low resolution, emulating a crappy VHS. All the characters speak in an unintelligible gibberish while subtitles helpfully supply us with only another bizarre, incomprehensible string of symbols. In this one, Panty is a child in a mediaeval fantasy world who, after witnessing the death of someone important to her, grows up to be a massive, hulking hermaphrodite bent on revenge and perhaps world domination. I guess their purple and pink dinosaur steed is meant to be Stocking.

It really captures that feeling of stumbling across some late night import on an obscure cable channel and marvelling at what you see even as you strain to decipher just what the hell could be going on.

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.