MARK OF THE ASTRO-ZOMBIES stars the immortal Tura Satana (FASTER PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!), Brinke Stevens (HAUNTING FEAR, SLAVE GIRLS FROM BEYOND INFINITY) and Liz Renay (John Waters's DESPERATE LIVING, BLACKENSTEIN) as well as the disembodied head of John Carradine (you won't believe it)!

The movie is written, produced, directed, photographed and edited by cult movie auteur Ted V. Mikels. For the uninitiated, Ted is the cinema legend behind such drive-in classics as THE CORPSE GRINDERS, BLOOD ORGY OF THE SHE-DEVILS, THE DOLL SQUAD, the original ASTRO-ZOMBIES and GIRL IN GOLD BOOTS (as seen on Mystery Science Theater 3000).

In the early days of the year 2001, The BENTMEN first wrote Mr. Mikels about the possibility of working on the score for MARK OF THE ASTRO-ZOMBIES. There were ultimately 65 other musical artists and entities who also applied for the job, but we were first, or close to it, and Ted -- bless him -- stuck with us.

The BENTMEN wrote over five hours of music for the film without seeing a single frame of footage -- just going by Ted's synopsis, a few stills on his site and our own fetid, feverish and fertile imaginations.

When the band got the final cut, we laid out the primary scenes and characters on a grid and started working in a leitmotif fashion -- mixing and matching the music with the major themes, rather like paint by numbers. The entire score was assembled on a Macintosh G4 Powerbook in Adobe Premiere.

Ted’s primary direction to us was that we leave no dead spots in the movie -- fill it with as much music as possible -- and to treat it as "serious camp," in other words, nothing jokey about the tone.

In fact, the only intentional joke we put in was using the sound of a modem as part of the titular Mark administered by Zekith and the Bad Aliens. Judging from the copious amount of duct tape and styrofoam in their spaceship, we felt it likely these guys were using a dial-up connection!

Additional inspiration came from Des's archives of early ambient music experiments, in particular an album called "Iceland," wherein he played keyboards, percussion, hammered dulcimer and various sound effects and treatments. The whooshing, intricate yet barren soundscape perfectly conjured the coldness of space.

Iceland provided the glue for a lot of the movie. Another track from the album that comes in as a shock cue with Zekith's hoodlamp helmets, as well as the sublime good-alien landing theme are unquestionably among the emotional highlights.

With the exception of the Iceland tracks, all of the music created for the movie was performed live in our rehearsal space at The Sound Museum in Boston and recorded directly to a stereo DAT tape. We took our time getting the sound right at the beginning, but there were no overdubs snd no remixing.

The BENTMEN are known for being a very heavy rock band, and while there is ample proof of that in the film, we also wanted to take the opportunity to branch out into some different musical realms that we don't often get to play in. Accordingly, we approached a number of sessions as "chamber music," with small sub-sections of the group performing.

There was a session with just Crazy Eddie on guitar, Dark Mark playing upright bass with a bow and Frank playing electronic triggers. There was another session with just Mark on upright bass and Frank playing keyboards. Another session had everybody on board except Eddie, with Des singing through a Pod (guitar amp simulator) and occupying the space normally taken by the guitar. The Astro-Zombie chant is Mark utilizing his Tuvan throat singing skills while Frank made real-time adjustments and "treatments" with the pod. The result is some of our most unique and disturbing music to date.

Of course, once we merged the music from our giant misshapen rubber heads with the actual film, the tracks just landed the way they did because of their proximity to one important cue or another. We would align the musical hit with the action, then lengthen the duration at either end to fit as needed and crossfade between the tracks before and after.

This led to some of the most interesting moments for us as a band, which were the accidental collages that result from interpolating two or more pieces together that hadn't been originally conceived that way, but were made so by the necessities of the plot.

One of the densest examples is in the fade from the remote viewing dream sequence into the arrival of the dignitaries. There's something like four different clips from different pieces colliding together within a very short frame of time, and then emptying out into the hand-drum "spy" theme.

Afterwards, there was some digital surgery done to extract loops and key segments that represented the best iterations of the core ideas, and these were re-arranged to make complete pieces. But in terms of the raw materials, what you hear is the unfiltered inspiration of the musicians playing together, responding to each other, in the moment, captured as it happened.

These surprises for us were amplified by the fact that we originally received all the footage completely out of sequence, in two to three minute chunks. This footage was distributed among the members of the group and everyone had a hand in the creative process.

We also did all the sound effects for the movie. Every gunshot, scream, gurgle, zap, door slam, ringing phone, along with ambient background sounds, individual sounds for every type of device in the alien's lab had to be manually inserted and aligned with frame accuracy. This, too, opened up new avenues of creativity for us. We found ourselves using ice pick sounds for machetes chopping into victim's throats and a garage door opener as the sound of the Astro-Zombies life-giving hoodlamp.

It was, frankly, a colossal task from both a logistical and creative perspective, involving more than 20 layers of effects in addition to the music and dialogue tracks for the entire 86-minute duration, and all of it assembled in one final 36-hour marathon editing session.

For all that, we had a blast doing the score for this movie and Ted is a joy to work for. So enjoy this big, loud, bloody, ridiculous, rock 'n' roll comic book of a movie, and as always, stay Bent!