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.