Albert Pyun

Welcome to Captain's Log -- your round-up of sci-fi randomness from around the web. Here's what's happening:

Is the obsession with bacon, or rather BaCoN, elemental? Geekologie spots a barium, cobalt, and nitrogen-based bacon shirt.

Ian Scoones, visual and special effects designer who worked on old-school Doctor Who, has passed away. [Total Sci-Fi Online]

Albert Pyun, the director of the '80s crap classic Cyborg, has a new website, according to Quiet Earth, and he is gearing up for a return to post-nuclear action with the help of writers Kitty Chalmers, Rebecca Charles, and Cynthia Curnan.

Walter Koenig -- aka Chekov on Star Trek -- talks to MSNBC about his missing son, Andrew Koenig (Boner from Growing Pains). [SciFi Wire]

Topless Robot dares to discern the 8 Greatest Minor Characters in The Venture Bros.

District 9 scribe Terri Tatchell says she's now working on a sci-fi short film called Terminus, according to her interview with io9.

BoingBoing finds a human furniture collection. Too bad these aren't robotic legs that could bring the bookshelf to you.

Quiet Earth has new images of Albert Pyun's latest, Bulletface. Pyun has nearly 50 films on his resume, but many are straight to DVD, and sequels and other franchise films (Cyborg, Nemesis III, Left for Dead). I haven't watched any of Pyun's films that I can recall, but you never know.

Reports indicate the sci-fi script involves a DEA agent imprisoned in a Tijuana penal colony after trying to help her brother. Being a south of the border prison, corruption is rampant to the extent prison officials harvest organs from the inmates. But when a new DNA based drug starts altering addicts, the agent gets a temporary furlough to help bring the drug lord behind it down.

Victoria Maurette (Left for Dead) stars as Dara, the agent, along with Steven Bauer (Scarface), Scott Paulin (Infection), Morgan Weisser (Space: Above and Beyond), Jenny Dare Paulin, and Eddie Velez. Several of the actors have worked with Pyun on prior projects. The is from Randall Fontana's script and his third venture with Pyun.

Bulletface is due out in January.

How many times have you re-visited a movie or television show that you loved as a kid, only to discover that it didn't hold up to your older, wiser adult eyes? Sometimes the pull of nostalgia is so strong, we'll go out of our way to ignore the flaws of something that we know totally stinks, just because it made a big impression on us when we were kids. Other times, those flaws are impossible to ignore.

I watched The Never-Ending Story quite a bit growing up in the 1980's, and when the title hit DVD for the first time in 2001, I snapped it up on the day of release. At age nine, the movie was wondrous and magical. What I discovered seventeen years later was a movie that barely made a lick of sense, with wildly inconsistent special effects. What I'd long considered as one of my favorite movies ended up being disappointingly mediocre. In a way, I wish I'd never seen it again. I'd rather have kept my nostalgia for The Never-Ending Story, than be faced with the cold, hard reality that it wasn't really all that good.

But what about re-visiting a movie that you hated as a kid? Would you discover the opposite effect -- that a movie you'd dismissed as a child would turn out to be a masterpiece to your adult self? I decided to put this to the test with a movie that I found unbearably annoying when I was young, Alien from L.A.

If I would've looked around online a bit before I sat down to watch Alien from L.A., I would've discovered that it's widely considered awful. I had no idea the film was the target of a 1993 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and it wasn't until I pushed play on the DVD player and saw the credit "Directed by Albert Pyun" that I suspected I might be in serious trouble.