The Shining

I am not a Stanley Kubrick fan. Period. And I understand that from a film fan’s point of view, a nice way to put it would be "ignorant," and from a film critic's point of view, I'd better have a damn good reason for it. 

Well, I'm not here to defend my reasoning (I'll say it right here though: the man was in SERIOUS need of an EDITOR). Rather, I'm going to discuss "The Shining," the film that proves, in my opinion, that maybe everybody else is on to something when they say that Kubrick knew what he was directing about. 

It's a bit unfair perhaps to use "The Shining" as my crutch for Kubrick, since it is a horror flick, and because of my fondness for Stephen King and Jack Nicholson. But hey, a film is supposed to be greater than the sum of its actors, and despite taking the story from King, the final product had very little to do with the novel anyway. Besides, "2001: A Space Odyssey" is considered a classic of science fiction, another genre that I have a soft spot for, and I hated its guts. So let's dive in. 

The Shining is a movie that's almost guaranteed to cause controversy from day one. Mr. Kubrick's working relationship with Mr. King could be described as rancid at best. The two men never saw eye to eye about the project; not sure why. Could have something to do with the fact that Kubrick basically junked everything but the names of the characters and the fact that it took place in a hotel before shooting the movie. 

Even on set, Kubrick was supposed to have played the part of a monster. His attitude during the shoot is the stuff of cinematic legend, or nightmares; he encouraged Nicholson to overact and purposefully bullied Shelley Duvall into a whimpering, sniveling mess. Kubrick defended his motives, stating that Duvall was a prima donna who had to be put in her place. As for Nicholson...how hard is it really to get him to overact? The truth may never be known.  

  The jury's still out on Nicholson's acting...  

But there's more to it than that. Beyond production, the film itself has too many anomalies to avoid critiquing. For one thing, it tends to piss off King fans who claim it deviates too far from the book. Others have noted what seem to be glaring errors in the script and set design. The hotel's too big, the maze disappears, windows and doors appear at will. Not to mention the whole Charles/Delbert Grady fiasco...

Who ARE you?!?

But Kubrick was notorious for being anal about filmmaking, like all the greats really. So those mistakes? They can't REALLY be mistakes. There's something more going on here, something we're missing...

As a result, various film analysts and internet nutters have made claims about the apparent depth and meaning of the film. Theories range from "intriguingly plausible" (the film isn't a haunted house story at all, but rather psychological horror; a sort of late 70s "Turn of the Screw") to "stretching it" (the idea that the film is really about the massacre of Red Indiansat the hands of United States manifest destiny types) to "they've got to be kidding, right?" (the infamous "Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing for NASA, and now they're out to get him" theory, which spills into most, if not all, of Kubrick's films, "The Shining" being no exception).  

Were I a trained film analyst, I myself could launch into some kind of fancy pants bit of theory where I could, say...suggest that how Kubrick frames other every shot in the picture to show symmetrical figures in pairs (the two girls, Jack's cigarettes and ashtray perfectly bordering his typewriter, the two ghosts in the hotel room having a "good time"), and his liberal use of mirrors as props, all suggest a dual nature of reality. Then, I might apply a conservative knowledge of...oh, Cartesian philosophy (just to prove that I went to college), and say that it all syncs up with the script's depiction of Jack Torrence as someone who is pulled between two worlds—the Overlook Hotel of 1980 and the Overlook Hotel of 1921—which appear to exist, simultaneously and impossibly, alongside each other. 

Nothing...

is...

REAL.

But I'm not that smart. 

All I can say for sure is that Kubrick had a couple of things going for him. He knew how to set up a shot. And he knew how to set up a movie. Everything you need to know about "The Shining" you are told before the Torrence family settles into the hotel for a peaceful winter of '79. Namely, the two themes that no theory about the film can ignore: isolation and survival. 

Survival is a subtle theme that is introduced when Jack and the gang are driving to the hotel, and the Donner Party is referenced. If you don't know who they are, we can have Jack explain it to you in person: 

Kubrick changed the book from a pure ghost story to a psychological study. Each of the people in that car represents a character type that will have to survive the winter, a season that is mythically as much a natural force as it is a supernatural one. Duval’s character is, for example, is almost painfully childlike throughout the film. She only gets worse as events progress.

By the looks of things though, Jack's gonna be just fine.

The isolation theme is even more obvious. It's mentioned boldfaced in Jack's interview with the hotel staff. The Overlook is a place where people tend to...well, go a little crazy and hack each other to bits. No one mentions hazard pay. 

But even before that, in that simply gorgeous, kinda Ridley Scott-esque, opening shot, we see miles and miles of empty, cold natural void surrounding one tiny little car. That car is the hotel in the winter as much as it's the Torrences in the hotel as much as it is a vehicle on a road. In short, it's the entire movie wrapped up in a single shot, and it’s an idea that will be visually repeated over and over again throughout the course of the film. Small people in the middle. Big open spaces all around. And it's that vision that makes the movie so effective. 

There's a car in there...somewhere...

Of course, it's important to mash all that other stuff I mentioned earlier into the equation too. The spatial mistakes, along with the chilling, vast emptiness of the environment, all make for scenes where something just ain't right, but you as a viewer can't put your finger on it. Which adds to the ambiguity. Which allows for those theories about what the movie's really "all about." 

Except of course for the fact that everybody "knows" what the movie's all about. It's a coming of age dramedy about finding yourself. 

But you already knew that, right?

A Five Second Mystery: Inspector Griffith Park and the Case of the Old Dead Lady

“Phew,” the dashing mustachioed Inspector Griffith Park exhaled as he stepped into the cramped, messy kitchen on a routine call, “What's that awful smell?” 

“Sorry sir,” Constable Hammond said, fanning the air. “I had one of those breakfast burritos this morning. Always ties my stomach into knots.”

“No,” Inspector Park said, squinting. “It smells like murder.”

The elderly Mr. Martin Smithwick was seated at his breakfast table, staring morbidly at a copy of Cheeses of the World Monthly. “It's funny you should mention that, because my wife was murdered three days ago today.” 

Hammond’s eyes bulged in shock and he spat out his coffee, which was odd, because he wasn't drinking coffee. “Why didn't you call us sooner?”

“The place was a mess. I didn't find her body until yesterday afternoon. I tried to call the police as soon as I could, but it took me all night before I realized I was dialing a fish.” 

“Ah.”

“It is a bit of a mess in here,” Park noted, glancing around the room. Smtihwick was obviously a packrat. Stacks of magazines, dishes, blankets and bed sheets, towered over the kitchen table, dwarfing their humble owner in the process. Also, it was kind of dusty.

“The body’s over here gentlemen.” Smithwick stood, pushing aside a chair filled with towels to make a path. A bald eagle, which had made its nest in the towels, shrieked in despair and flew into a wall. Park and Hammond followed Smithwick around plastic model of the Taj Mahal cradled on top of some cardboard boxes, and saw the body. The late Mrs. Smithwick’s head had been sawed brutally off and was missing; a sticky trail of blood dripped into the adjoining room. 

“You don't,” Hammond ventured, “You don't suppose it was a suicide sir?” 

Park glanced down at the body, glanced up at Hammond, back to the body. He scratched his head and cleared his throat. “No,” he said softly, “That would be stupid.”

“Well I thought,” exclaimed Smithwick suddenly, “That some of these boxes might have fallen on her head, cut it clean off. A pure accident.”

Park closed one eye, stuck out his tongue, and blew a raspberry. “Yes,” he said finally. “That seems a most sensible solution.”

Suddenly, a sharply dressed, hawk nosed man entered the room. “Will you be taking any breakfast this morning sir?” All eyes turned to him.

“Who's that?” Constable Hammond asked. 

“That's my butler, Rawlings,” answered Smithwick. 

“No gentlemen,” Inspector Park exclaimed, pointing a guilty finger at the servant. “That's the murderer!” 

How did Inspector Park know that Rawlings killed Mrs. Smithwick?

Solution: When Rawlings entered he was carrying Mrs. Smithwick’s severed head in a plastic bag and a bloody butcher knife. As soon as Inspector Park pointed at him, he sheepishly looked around before backing slowly out of the room.

The First International Zombie Games!

It's the last weekend of November, and the Thanksgiving gravy is still sticky on our chins. It's only natural then that thoughts should turn back to food...in this case, the food would happen to be brains. I am, of course, talking about zombies, an unnatural phenomena that has often struck as odd. 

Odd, that is, in the case of its popularity. I have never pretended like I've understood what has made "zombie" such a household name since the...shoot, I don't even know when exactly. I don't THINK that the viewing public went too overboard immediately following the George Romero pictures (Romero, of course, being the man who changed all the rules in the zombie handbook). And yet, somewhere, somehow, the zombie menace snuck up on us, and to this day, films, games and even costumed parades are gallivanting around the respective towns of Christendom. Personally, I blame the Resident Evil games...

What mystique is there about the zombie that is so capable of inspiring this horror counter culture? I have nothing against it, you understand...but why zombies when there are other, just as deserving creatures out there, like hobgoblins, gremlins or Lithuanians? It really is a subculture; there are entire chapters of otherwise normal people, who just happen to be locked within zombie-fandom, scattered across the country.

If zombies were sexy, perhaps I'd understand it. But the zombie does not hold the sex appeal, literal or figurative, of another undead creature that has caught the public attention recently for an undeserved amount of time (I've still got my fingers crossed that the vampire fetish will be resting in peace sometime soon). True enough, the original zombie wasn't quite the tumbling bag of flesh that it is now, but zombies were never the prettiest reanimated corpses on the block. 

Zombies...the original sex symbol.

I bet that in the end it will turn out to have something to do with the fact that "zombie" starts with the letter "z," a mysterious letter that has always caught the attention of mysterious minded humans. After all, there's no monster out there that starts with an "x," so you make due with what you got. That's the best I can come up with right now at least.

But then again, maybe I am missing out on something...

Oh well. There's a paper in there somewhere, but it's not what I'm writing today. You see, as I said, I have nothing against the zombie in its function in media per se. I just feel that the zombie, itself twisted out of its original packaging and turned into a mindless gore monkey, has become something of a generic stand in for "canon fodder bad guy." This is particularly prevalent in the video game industry, where zombies, along with Nazis, ninjas and turtles, are THE BAD GUY SUPREME when it comes to lower level, disposable, enemies.

The zombie must break out of its humble shell! And Halloween is, if nothing else, a time for miracles...and Halloween is also over. But nevertheless, over the past couple of months, I've hand selected a couple of zombie themed games that break the mold. Kind of.

None of the games I discovered (via my highly untrained network of "based on nothing") presented any kind of evolution of "zombie" itself. In each game, the zombies were, as I said, nameless, faceless, characterless goons begging for destruction. No, the innovation (as it were) was in placing said faceless goons in situations that were ever so slightly beyond the standard "you have a gun, there are some zombies" scenario that is ever so common in video games (once again, I blame Resident Evil). Case in point:

1) Rolling Fall

Not about a waterfall.

Rolling Fall is a physics game. In this case, it's fancy talk for you click a couple of things (in this case, mostly chains) and you sit back and watch the Rube Goldberg-esque chain reaction as something (in this case, mostly wrecking balls) destroys something else (in this case, mostly zombies). 

I think you get the idea. 

I've seen this kind of thing before. Sometimes it's fun. In this case...not so much. The reactions that I set into motion were never much more exciting than the image above suggests, and the graphics were fairly restrained. The zombies resembled inanimate dolls, and they just kind of tipped over when struck. They could have been replaced with sandbags, and the game would not have changed (they wouldn't even have had to change the name). 

I mean, I know I'm just pointing and clicking, but if it doesn't feel like what I'm doing is worth watching, then there's really no point. Not to mention the fact that you cut chains with nothing more than a butcher knife (I mean, c'mon...I'm willing to believe that stationary zombies have infested a construction site, but even I can ONLY TAKE SO MUCH!). 

2) All We Need Is Brain

Daww...lookit the lil' fella!

All We Need Is Brain is basically Rolling Rock with a cuter outlook on life. This time though, instead of cutting chains with kitchenware, we've stepped up to luring these sorrily adorable undead with their one true weakness: a thirst for knowledge, er, brains. Usually into acid pits.

I'd give him a 4.0.

The rules were changed up a little bit; brain placement (a limited number at that) was the key to victory, and you had the added option of occasionally shooting the lil' bastards in the head instead of just convincing them to crawl very unmenacingly over mines and into acidic pools. Add to that the style (which I did appreciate) and a Mortal Kombat-esque announcer telling you "WELL DONE" (seriously, I kept expecting him to say "EXCELLENT," or at least "FINISH HIM!") now and then. 

Strange then, despite the seemingly pumped up options for zombie dispatch, that the puzzles themselves ran the gauntlet from "unimaginative" to "industry standard" in design. The wide variety of tools at your disposal led to a fairly unvaried experience. And in any game, when game experience fails...so must eventually the game itself, no matter how cute it looks. This leaves All We Need a pleasant distraction at best.

3) The Outbreak

Jon Carpenter's The Fog called; it wants its poster back.

Leaving physics platformers behind, The Outbreak presents us with an interesting...bit of experimentation. I don't feel quite comfortable calling it a video game, as it's not, at least not by modern comprehension. Although lately, games have been becoming less and less user interaction necessary... 

The Outbreak is an interactive film. It has a certain charm all of its own, thanks largely due to the over the top, butcher store special effects, bare bones script, and community theater style acting (the girl was particularly irritating) In a way, it reminded me an awful lot of the student productions I used to partake in at the cable access studio in my TV 46 class. In other words, this is probably the ideal game to play slightly drunk, with like some friends who have a grisly sense of humor, in a Mystery Science Theater kinda way. Just to see what'll happen. 

Cra-a-ap! It's like my TV Production class all over again...

Basically, you are presented with a series of one or two minute clips, showcasing some kind of zombie attack, and must make a choice for "hapless white guy number one" to guide him through his evening (actually, I found the character quite relatable). There are multiple endings. Most of them are bad. This is what happens when the Sci Fi channel has a one night stand with those Choose Your Own Adventure books. The results are...surprisingly amusing (once again, I have a skewed sense of humor), and worth a look, although I doubt it'll top anyone's list. 

4) Road Of The Dead 

Subtitled: A Pretty Normal Traffic Day in Los Angeles

I have never been a fan of driving games. Okay, that's not exactly true...I have never been a fan of driving games the way one is supposed to be a fan of driving games. It has never been my goal, when playing a driving game, to win a race. It has always been my goal to cause as much random destruction as possible, be it to my own vehicle, or whatever decides to get in my way. Road of the Dead doesn't reward wanton destruction, but it DOES reward running over stray zombies and turning them into loose piles of guts. 

Plus, the hero's pretty bad ass.

Basically, there's a road, a car, a bunch of zombies (and invariably, the military), and you. In theory, all you're meant to do is escape a quarantined city, but hey, if you happen to flatten some of the hordes of undead along the way, who's gonna miss 'em? 

Oh, there are also some fleeing survivors, but you're not supposed to hit those. Naturally, that makes flattening them much more fun. 

There's an element of upgrading your car to better enhance your escape, but the game is mainly about driving away from, or into, your enemies; but believe it or not, there IS actually a script floating behind the game. Not the greatest script in the world perhaps, but it gets the job done, and seems to have a lot of fun at doing it. The graphics are cartoony, but surprisingly un-tame. You literally splatter your way through some of your foes (bonus points!). It's not going to terrify you, but it might just make you gasp at how stupidly awesome (awesomely stupid?) this game is underneath. 

And I realize that, in the long run, this is basically the same game I was lamenting at the beginning of this article: a lone hero fending off hordes of rampaging zombies in a plot half explained and fully stolen from at least twelve different movies. But hey, you're in a car this time around! If you're going to do the same thing as everyone else, at least do it differently. 

Horror...Comedy? Pt. 2

Well...we took down the Halloween decorations today. For me, that's a big step in some direction somewhere, and not an easy one...it's a bit like when we had to unplug grandpa, only less fun. Except it turned out that we'd just unplugged the vending machine, and I'd already popped in a dollar for a Snickers bar....in hindsight, the experience wasn't actually that much fun, so yes, I suppose it WAS a bit like when we unplugged grandpa.

Damn. I should visit the old man.

Wait...where was I?

Ah yes, the genre of "horror comedy."

Specifically, for the moment, the genre of The Pumpkin Karver. I think I left off before spoiling the ending. As you recall, murders were going on at the old Old Farmer Creeply farm, and Child X (Jonathan), despite his long history of being blamed for pumpkin slashings, was not being blamed for these particular ones. Why not? Because he keeps seeing things.

Things kind of like this. 

So you can imagine he's under a lot of stress. The picture kind of tries to set it up like it's ambiguous: either the kid is crazy, or people are being possessed by the demonic ghost of Dick Boyfriend 1, or Jonathan himself is being possessed by the demonic space bat, and you'd have the best of both worlds.

In the end, the situation resolves itself completely. By which I mean, I have no idea how the movie ended. It set up a lot of possible endings, but then seemed to want to have all of them at once (and still leave room for a sequel), so suffice to say that Jonathan is both dead AND possessed by the Dickmonic Ghost. In short, the movie's efforts at psychological depth and horror failed.

But then again, so did most of its attempts at (intentional) humor.

 When all's said and done though, Pumpkin Karver ended up being a thoroughly watchable movie, as long as you're not expecting Psycho or something. Not so much with another film we have to discuss, a film which was definitely NOT Pumpkin Karver or Psycho...

Neither Psycho nor Pumpkin Karver.

The Slaughter (2006) is, simply put, a dreadful movie that lacks any of the charm of Pumpkin Karver, or any of the wit of my retarded nephew. It's also poorly photographed, unevenly paced, the sound is often bad, and the script and acting are rarely good. The plot, if memory serves, starts off with a bunch of naked chicks trying to summon Cthulhu in a Victorian mansion. Okay, that sounds pretty good so far, right? Well, they're all dead in two minutes, so don't get your hopes up. 

Although this happens later in the picture, if you go in for that sorta thing...

A hundred years later (rough estimate), an evil businessman, so evil he never stops smoking an evil, evil cigar, hires six whacky teens (read: stereotypes) to start renovating the same house where the previously mentioned arcane experiment took place. 

If you've seen enough of these movies, you know how this one's going to turn out. Someone (the stoner) is going to unleash the evil, and it will be up to someone else (the nerd girl) to save us all, but not before some people are turned into flesh eating zombies (pretty much everyone else), and some people are killed gruesomely (...yeah, pretty much everyone else). 

From the start, the movie was...okay actually. Besides the naked chicks summoning Cthulhu. Seeing the old house, and just making out figures in the shadows or reflected in the windows for the first half hour or so of the movie did a fair job of building suspense. But of course, this movie wasn't in it for the suspsense. Oh no. It was in it for the horror. The horror COMEDY. And it fell on its fat face. 

For starters, EVERYONE in the movie is a stereotype of some form. 

A stereotypical zmobie.

Now, you might be thinking, if you're doing a movie of this sort and want to keep it "fresh" and "hip," why NOT mock some stereotypes of horror movies? Alright, then explain to me WHERE they got these stereotypes from? The "evil businessman" I suppose I can buy, that was a common enough stereotype twenty, thirty years ago (how's that for fresh?), and the "stoner" has been a mainstay in horror films since Friday the Thirteenth, but what about the "nerd girl?" That's very teen movie of you, The Slaughter. And even if I let that one by, what about the "anarchist boy?" Since when has that every been a stereotype of anything resembling horror? 

Keep in mind, when I say stereotypes, I mean it. Everybody's dialogue could be extended by adding the line, "Remember, I'm just a stereotypical stoner/nerd girl/evil businessman/anarchist/black guy/slut/person who doesn't realize how bad this movie is/person who's wishing they'd never tried acting/raging alcoholic."

Secondly, and most importantly, this supposed "humor" only manifests itself at the end. My theory? Has anyone seen Little Shop of Horrors? The original? Rumor has it, the movie started out as a serious crime story, and then morphed over time into a horror comedy involving a talking plant once Roger Corman and the gang started to realize that there was no way in hell anyone was going to take the movie they were planning to make seriously. 

Definitely not The Slaughter.

  

My theory is that The Slaughter had the same kind of history, the major differences being that the decision to turn pure horror, or even sardonic horror, into a pure horror comedy, happened on the set after half the movie had been shot. Remember how I said that the first half hour of the movie was kind of hopeful, or at least workable? After the suspense stops and the gorefest begins, the movie blunders on for a bit, and then bad jokes start popping up for no real reason at all. 

That's right, the movie BECOMES a comedy halfway through. Why? Because the filmmakers thought, first, this movie has become too stupid to take seriously. It must become a full blown comedy. There's already a sarcastic sense of humor on set, why not go all the way? That's the only way for us to save our artistic integrity! Secondly, if we're just trying to make a comedy, we don't have to try as hard! NO ONE expects real suspense from a comedy...

So, once most of the cast is dead and no one can leave the house, rather than hiding tensely from zombies, our mismatched heroes are attacking them with kitchen appliances and spitting one-liners faster than watermelon seeds. And of course, there's some nonsensical ending in which evil inexplicably survives, in the hope that enough DVDs will be sold to make a sequel. 

Unless...unless of course the movie honestly WAS shooting for being a comedy the whole way through. Which would mean that the filmmakers weren't just bad at writing scripts, directing actors and shooting film, they were also just really, really bad at understanding how you are supposed to make a horror movie. Or a comedy. Or, hell, any kind of cohesive story AT ALL. But I would prefer not to believe that. To believe that there are people out there THAT clueless would honestly be the most frightening thing I could possibly imagine...

Well...ALMOST the most frightening...

Terror of the Crystal Skull Mummy...with Vodka

This is a week late, but it should be worth it. You'll understand. 

It's been wet in Los Angeles these days...not raining, not cold, but wet. The ocean looks like a gray mirror, unquietly rippling under its own glass, that runs all the way up to the Pacific Coast Highway, swallowing the beach and the sky as one. 

And my lower back felt like it was wrapped in barbwire all of last weekend, so, that was fun.

I am well versed in back pain at this point; this was not the pain which cripples you with thunderbolt spasms so that it feels like you're giving birth through your spine, merely a jovial state in which stabs of liquid electricity trickle from your lower back into your upper thighs, making the occasional pitstop at the groin to grab a couple packs of Cheetos and a Slurpee for the trip. Ethereal really. Nothing that a ton of asprin and some alcohol can't fix.

Which brings me to my point; my point that cannot be ignored for the moment. And it is this: yes Virginia, there IS Crystal Skull Vodka.

Crystal Head Vodka: Look on its works, ye mighty, and despair!

 I myself did not believe this amazing combination of two of my favorite things (alcohol and skulls), and yet, there it was, large as life. And the best part? It's endorsed by Dan Aykroyd.

Told you so. One wonders how such a thing could get better? Well, try adding some ice, a dash of orange juice and some mummy movies, and you pretty much have something I call "Friday night."

It seems that Turner Classic Movies is playing films from the British studio Hammer, which was infamous for their horror films (although they did make other movies, it's just that nobody cares these days) every Friday night in October (thus dating this article!).

It seems that I missed the first film of the night, The Mummy (1959), and thus missed out on the classic performances of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, both of whom were mysteriously absent for the rest of the night's festivities (as was director Terence Fisher, which means the "Big Three" of Hammer Horror were nowhere to be found).

So what I got to see instead was the tail end of Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964), which culminated in a sewer battle.

This can't be sanitary...

Quite ancient Egyptian that...the only thing of note, and perhaps this was only because it was late in the picture, but damn if the folks at Scotland Yard weren't taking mummy attacks in such good spirits. One would imagine that stout men with Victorian sensibilities would be shocked, or filled with laughter, when ancient Egyptian sightings started turning up all over London, but nope, they showed up with a giant net to snag the monster. 

The vodka helped me to better appreciate these films, of course. Why was it that no one could escape the wrath of a practically prehistoric pharaoh who moved at a top speed of negative three miles an hour? How was tossing a net over the mummy and then just standing there going to stop him exactly? Damned if I knew, but this vodka is delicious!

Memory grows a little dim here, but the next movie was  The Mummy's Shroud (1967), whose focus seemed to around gypsies that were controlling the mummy. 

Clothes must be hard to come by in Egypt.

Gypsies, who were essentially Arabs (neither of which, you'll notice, are Egyptians) controlling the undead corpse of a slave that looks like he was bound in free medical tape was fun, but beyond that, the movie wasn't a THAT much fun...and besides, the TV was starting to trip out. The color was changing frequently, and the pixels were scattering, creating a visual representation of physical reality finally breaking down. At first I thought it was the vodka, but it was just the cable breaking up.  

One thing that was not the vodka, however, was this amazing thing, which I did NOT imagine, but actually experienced, in my living room: 

Oh shit, it's a mummy with an axe!

 Hell yes. Ancient Egyptian magic meets modern know-how in one of the deadliest combinations the world has ever seen! Let that sink into your brain...now let a couple shots of vodka sink into your brain...terrifying, no?  

Anyway, the only movie of the night that was honestly worth talking about was Blood From the Mummy's Tomb (1971): 

And there's more to the movie than Valerie Leon...

In addition to the very buxom performance of Miss Valerie Leon (who is famous from the English "Carry On" films, which carries a world of meaning if you know what the movies are), Blood From the Mummy's Tomb was actually a decent picture.

A bizarre, almost Arthur Machen-style plot (well duh...rather than another rehash, this one was based on a novel by Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars) involving cosmic reincarnation and the sexual allure of evil. It also had a couple of jolts (the madhouse scene was not bad at all, and actually left me wondering why some people have trouble building suspense in low budget horror), and some of the finest talent of Hammer's "other boys," most notably Andrew Keir, who was in the excellent Quatermass and the Pit (1967). 

Besides, how can you hate a movie with a marketing campaign like this? 

Okay, so maybe I'm slightly biased. The point is, Blood was best mummy movie I'd seen all night, and Crystal Head Vodka may not have been the smoothest vodka on earth (and it has an odd sweetness at the back of it, but maybe you'll appreciate that more than me, dear reader), but the skull makes a fun keepsake, and helped keep the evening of mummies fun. Sorry I can't go into more depth about said movies, but as I said, somewhere between a bad back, the cable going out, and a sweet gift from Dan Aykroyd, it was hard to keep everything in my head that evening. 

Except for this, as it will haunt my nightmares. Forever.

 

Horror...Comedy?

Oh dear. Halloween is drifting closer, so my natural inclination is to drift closer to all that scary media I love so much. With an emphasis on the bad perhaps, but isn't it so much more fun to write about BAD things rather than good? I think so at least...

My initial hope was to plunge right into the world of H.P. Lovecraft, who might be, by default, my favorite author. He certainly might be my favorite American author; for a pulp writer, the man is fully worthy of any number of essays on my part (how Lovecraft's literary weaknesses were his strengths, how he fashioned a truly unique style that can't ever quite be replicated, why his Cthulhu mythos are the perfect way to create a fictional set of myths). But that's for another day. You'll have to tide yourselves over with this limerick I composed earlier this evening:
 

There once was a man named HP

Who was deathly afraid of the sea

Wrote cosmic horror dreams

Ate all kinds of ice creams

And hated each ethnicity.

That was the man in a nutshell.

But then...oh then...I saw The Pumpkin Karver (2006). And my plans changed.

Boo!

You can tell it's going to be a good movie when there's no one's name on the cover...and the monster on the cover isn't even in the film...

There are way too many amazing things in this film to even bother talking about. Amazing, by the way, means shitty. There is the:

• Dick boyfriend who is clearly a 30 year old playing an 18 to 19 year old who "scores a [single] beer" for a Halloween party. 
• The OTHER dick boyfriend dressed as a sulky pirate.  
• The fat kid dressed as the Hulk...because that's exactly what he'd dress as even if he wasn't in a shitty movie. 
• Tons of chicks using Halloween as an excuse to dress and act like sluts (dig the zany "touch me, no, just take pictures" scene!), as well as spout some of the most childish dialogue ever written (dig the Charlie's Angels scene).
• The "I can carve a pumpkin in the amount of time it takes most people to blow their nose" scene.
• And more bad acting than you shake a stick at. 

Suffice to say that the only characters I ended up caring about throughout the entire movie were two highly irritating stoner kids in togas...mainly because they seemed like the only type of people in the whole movie I'd consider hanging out with. Actually, the pair kind of reminded me of me and my friend Johnny when we'd get drunk in alleyways...

Anyway, the basic plot seems to revolve around this kid who's just really, really into carving pumpkins. He lives with his sister, and no parents. One must imagine that he's replaced the lack of parental love with pumpkin carving, because, as I said, he's really, REALLY into it. There is foreshadowing, and there is more-shadowing, and this movie is guilty of it all.

Dick boyfriend number one shows up on Halloween to prank the sister but good, acting out a long "I'm a slasher" kind of prank...you know, just an innocent prank. The kind you carry on with a knife, a girl in a bathrobe, a locked garage, and ten free minutes on your hands. The lil' bro (whom IMDB informs me is named "Jonathan")  comes in and saves her by STABBING THE BOYFRIEND REPEATED IN THE FACE WITH A CARVING KNIFE. Hmm...that might be important.

One year later, sister (Lynne) has absolutely forgotten ole what's-his-face, but Jonathan hasn't. She tries to cheer him up by taking him to a Halloween party on a farm, which happens to be a pumpkin farm, full of people they don't really seem to know. The owner of the farm is some kind of crazy old man, who needs special mention:

Giving a new meaning to "old man smell."

He honestly does need special mention, because all of dialogue is extremely overwritten "beatnik philosopher" meets "insane dairy farmer" hash. The most glowing example I can recall is: "The evil sticks in your mind like jowels full of taffy," or something like that. 

Naturally, when people start showing up being STABBED REPEATEDLY IN THE FACE WITH CARVING KNIVES...in a PUMPKIN PATCH, everyone assumes its the old man instead of the kid who has already proven that he's strangely attracted to both stabbings and pumpkins. Hilarity ensues.

Oh yes, I quite mean that. Hilarity ensues. See, this is what I've meant to be talking about all along; there seems to be a trend in the horror movie industry to create low budget "horror comedies." An odd, paradoxical breed perhaps, but a breed that has been with the film industry since the start. Hell, it's been a part of the horror genre since the genre was actually codified (Poe, arguably THE codifier of American horror, wrote parodies of his own style far more often than most people realize).

So what's so bad about horror comedies? Nothing perhaps. In fact, I can talk about a halfway decent horror comedy I saw not that long ago...but first, I'll have to bring up the movie that started me thinking about this subject to begin with. But this thing's too long already, and attention spans tend to be sadly short. I feel a part two coming on...

Dear Boss...

Well, for the longest time everyone was telling me that I should have a blog. Well, not EVERYONE, but some people have asked if I have voluntarily kept a blog at some point or another (it seems that some people, very misguided people I might add, have gotten it into their heads that I'm "funny" or "smart" or something, and that my writings might be worthwhile...conversely, some people have suggested that I should stick my head in a toilet and never stop flushing, but why bring up my adventures in the dating game?).

Anyway, still figuring out how to...do stuff with the thing here. Pictures and the like. In the meantime, suffice to say that I'll try and pop in with something interesting to say concerning my all encompassing life's goal, the pursuit of the bizarre. Or at least I'll drop in a review for some shitty horror movie I've seen lately (there's lots of those...) at least once a week. We'll see.